Shamanka Part 7

"See for yourself."

The witch beckons her into the circle. Sam walks around it anti-clockwise Ruth throws her hands up in the air.

"No, not widdershins! Clockwise! Sit in the centre!"

Sam sits and waits and waits, then a voice which she knows to be Ruth's but which sounds much further away murmurs in her ear.

"Close your eyes. Sink slowly down, down, to the centre of the Earth..."

Sam melts through the floorboards, through the floury foundations of the waiting room, through the layers of grey clay veined with pale tubes. At first she thinks they're worms, but these are the roots of Yggdrasil, the Tree of Life.

She falls further, past the layer of tilth sieved by moles, past seams of prehistoric silt, past mausoleums of prehistoric creatures, until she is beneath the taproot of the tree.

Here is a chamber beneath the arc of roots; an organic cathedral. There's a table with a sheet of paper on it. Write your name down, Sam Tabuh. Knock three times on the table. To your left there is a doorway covered by a blue veil. Ask your spirit guide to appear.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Sam watches and waits for the veil to twitch. There's no breeze, yet the corner is lifting slightly. Someone's coming. She hears the faint pounding of the drum, or is it the molten thump of the Earth's heart?

"My name is Freya."

It's a woman's voice, but no one's there. Did Sam blink or is she invisible? Open your eyes. Sam is back in the waiting room staring into the candle flame that represents Earth. For the first time, she understands what she's made from; just as cakes are made from flour, sugar, eggs and b.u.t.ter, she is made from earth, water, fire and air. She is stardust and seawater. These are the basic ingredients needed to make every creature from hippos to humans, but what is the magic ingredient that makes her Sam is that spirit? Is Freya her spirit guide?

Ruth stares pointedly at Sam's locket. "The Norse G.o.ddess of love was called Freya. Her symbol was a sh.e.l.l."

Armed with her witch's cord, protective oil and the possibility of a kindly spirit watching over her, Sam is pointed in the direction of West India Quay. As she leaves the waiting room, she feels a rare urge to fling her arms around Ruth Abafey but she doesn't. She's been starved of human touch for so long, the idea makes her feel peculiar. Even so, she's grown fond of this lady. No one has ever looked after her so carefully apart from Lola and while it's wonderful to be loved by an ape, it's not the same as being loved by one of your own species.

"I wonder if we'll ever see each other again, Ruth?"

"Sure, sure. In some form or another." The witch presses a twenty pound note into Sam's hand as if she were her favourite grandchild and sends her on her way.

The journey to St Albans pa.s.ses without event. If Sam hadn't had to wait so long for a bus from the station, she'd have been standing outside Mrs Reafy's ages ago. She'd found her address in a public phone book easily enough and has an excellent sense of direction.

She knocks. She hears someone slamming a pan down on a stove, then slippered footsteps. The door opens and there's Mrs Reafy clutching a wooden spoon coated in hot jam, her hair bristling with static as if she'd recently shoved her finger in a socket.

"Burnt!" she snaps. "The saucepan's ruined. What do you want? Lost your tongue?"

"No, I've lost my orang-utan."

Sam had learnt after years of dealing with Aunt Candy that if a person is in a rage, the best way to diffuse the situation is to say something unexpected.

"Lost your orang-utan?"

"Yes. And my father."

Mrs Reafy pushes her raspberry-spattered spectacles back up her nose and sniffs. "That was careless, wasn't it? You're sure they didn't run off together?"

Sam frowns. This is no joking matter and she explains that although she doesn't have an appointment, it is an emergency.

"Where did you find me, Yellow Pages?"

The pages in the witch doctor's notebook are rather yellow, so she nods and Mrs Reafy lets her in.

The smell of burnt sugar is overpowering. It looks as if there's been a ma.s.sacre in the kitchen. There are thick clots all over the floor, red smears on the windows and what look like b.l.o.o.d.y fingerprints on the tea towels. It's only jam, but it's amazing how far it can spread once it gets out of control.

"I blame this oven," says Mrs Reafy. "We don't get along at all." After a short while in her company, Sam realizes that Mrs Reafy refers to every object in the house as if it has a personality. She even refers to her kettle as the son of the devil and scolds it when it blows a fuse.

"He hates me! He's showing off because you're here." She raps the kettle on the lid then spends the next five minutes scrubbing the sticky spoon as if it's a sulky child with jam round its face. Sam wonders if she behaves like this because she's lonely, but it soon becomes clear that Mrs Reafy does get a reaction from everything she touches. It's this she tells Sam that gives her the paranormal ability to contact missing persons.

She takes Sam into the living room and explains that certain objects absorb the emotions of the people they belong to. She can read these emotions; if she holds something belonging to a missing person, she often receives a mental snapshot of where they are. Sam is fascinated.

"How do you do it? Is it magic?" She pulls a coin out from behind Mrs Reafy's ear, wraps it in kitchen paper and tears it in half. It's a good trick but her audience is not impressed.

"Magic? Oh, please. Psychometry isn't a cheap trick. It's a rare gift, a talent I was born with. Either you have it or you don't."

Sam's not convinced. "If it's not magic, there must be some scientific explanation, surely?"

"Must there?" huffs Mrs Reafy. "I disagree. Magic is a swear word used by idiots to describe things science cannot explain. I find it offensive and so does my spoon."

"But how can a spoon have feelings?"

"It's made from wood, wood has a heart," says Mrs Reafy. "The wood in this spoon came from an eaglewood tree in which there lived a crow. One day, the crow's eggs were broken and the cry of the crow and the yolk from her broken eggs seeped into the wood. When the wood was carved into this spoon, the crow's cry remained in every fibre, right down to the handle."

"Poor spoon," says Sam.

"Not poor spoon, poor crow!" insists Mrs Reafy. "She was the one who had her eggs broken, and what does this spoon do for a living? It breaks eggs! It offends the spirit of the crow. See how everything connects? In respect for the crow, I have demoted this spoon to jam-stirring duties only. I won't let it near an egg and that's why it's cross with me. The cooker felt sorry for the spoon and between them, they cooked up a plot to burn my jam." She raps the spoon loudly on the table as if to punish it. "This missing orang-utan of yours what does it look like?"

It's tempting to say "Just like you!" because Mrs Reafy's stomach protrudes, her hair is bright orange and her arms are surprisingly hairy. The features that make an orang-utan beautiful are not those most woman aspire to the whims of fashion are cruel.

"Lola is a redhead with brown eyes and a charming smile," says Sam. "She likes working with children and she can do magic tricks. Does that help?"

"What I need," says Mrs Reafy, "is something that belongs to her."

Sam gives her Lola's toy monkey. Mrs Reafy examines its gla.s.s eyes and checks its stuffing. Having done so, she sits it on her lap, holds it under the armpits and closes her eyes. After a moment, she's full of inspiration.

"Lola is a much loved pet. She came from far away ... from a rainforest ... Borneo ... or is it Sumatra?"

Sam groans inwardly. This is nothing more than educated guesswork. Orang-utans only come from Borneo and Sumatra; the revelation is hardly psychic. But what she says next makes the hairs on Sam's neck stand up.

"Lola was orphaned ... rescued as a baby by a woman studying tribespeople. Lola travelled with her across a stretch of water ... to a different forest. I am not certain of its name... I am not getting anything else."

"Please try!" says Sam. "Do you see a little boy with her at all?"

Mrs Reafy blinks rapidly. "Wait! I see a sharp object ... a dart? A boy is crying..."

"That's him! Is he wearing a bush hat?" asks Sam, unable to contain herself.

Mrs Reafy opens her eyes and glares at her. "You've interrupted my flow. It'll take ages to get back to where I was. I need silence. Go to the kitchen and wipe up the jam."

Reluctantly, Sam leaves the room.

HOW TO USE A PENDULUM.

Pendulums can be used to detect water, divine the s.e.x of unborn babies, diagnose illness and find lost objects or people.

1. To make a pendulum tie a finger ring onto a fine thread about 3045 cm long.

2. Hold the end lightly between the thumb and first two fingers of one hand at shoulder height.

3. Tell the pendulum to move back and forth do not try to make it swing by using your hand.

4. You'll find that it moves as directed, slightly at first, then with increasing speed.

5. Focus your mind. Tell the pendulum to stop. The swing should quickly reduce until the pendulum is still.

6. Try telling it to move in different ways left to right, diagonally, clockwise, etc.

7. Practise until you understand how it moves and the effects your mental intentions have on it.

EXPERIMENT.

Get three cups and turn them upside down on a table. Ask a friend to hide a coin under one of them. Now hold a pendulum over each cup and see if you can tell where the coin is. The pendulum isn't magic; the movements are caused by unconscious muscle movements in the body, arm and hand. But if you found the coin, there might be something magical about you; the movements might be produced by your strange, super-sensory awareness.

THE PENDULUM SWINGS.

Sam is on her hands and knees scrubbing jam off the lino when the psychometrist comes in, looking agitated. Her hair looks as if she's been rubbing it with a balloon.

"What's wrong, Mrs Reafy?" asks Sam. "Am I using the wrong cloth? Do its fibres contain the tears of a lamb that has lost its mother?"

Mrs Reafy slumps down on a chair, her ape-like arms dangling by her sides, her eyes staring ahead. Sam drops the cloth in dismay.

"Is it Lola? Please don't tell me she's dead."

"Not dead, no ... but she has known death."

Well, yes. Lola's mother had died. Is that what Mrs Reafy is referring to? Seemingly not, for she begins to mutter about poisonous darts and a man in a headdress chanting, and how the orang-utan had known death but beyond all fathoming had come ... back ... to ... life.

"I've done the most terrible thing!" she wails. "I'm an ignorant, silly woman."

"You're not that silly."

Mrs Reafy lowers her eyes and fumbles with the woolly monkey.

"But I am! I once told a desperate man that I had it on the utmost authority that the dead couldn't be brought to life, but now I'm not sure. Not after what I've just seen."

"What have you seen?"

It had been a flashback of Lola's resurrection so vivid that Mrs Reafy had gone into shock. Sam shakes her by the shoulders. "Is Lola still alive? Do you know where she is?"

Mrs Reafy just wrings her hands and wails, "Oh, what have I done? If I'd believed in resurrection I'd never have set the police on that poor man, but he would keep asking me such alarming questions about death!"

You don't need telling who that man was and nor does Sam, but Mrs Reafy has to be told.

"That man was my father!"

Mrs Reafy is in no state to explain what happened, so allow me, the Masked Magician, to put you in the picture. John Tabuh came to see if Mrs Reafy could use her paranormal gifts to locate Kitty. Although she was on his father's list, he suspected she might be a fraud. Being a magician, he knew the tricks of the trade and suspected that her method of finding people had little to do with psychic power and lots to do with manipulating the person looking for them.

It's surprisingly easy to extract information from people without them realizing. You then recount the facts and they're astounded by your accuracy, astonished as to how you know so much about them; it must be magic! It's not; it's a fortune-teller's trick.

John's logical mind told him that any success Mrs Reafy had in finding Kitty would be achieved by using the fortune-teller's technique along with a bit of secretive research. Foolishly, he never gave her a chance to prove him wrong. While it's a good idea to find out if a person is genuine or not, the way John went about it was a particularly bad one.

He'd arrived at her house after dark with an elaborately painted box the size of a coffin which he'd pushed from the station on a trolley. To avoid attention, he'd covered the box with a cloth and, having found the right address, he parked it on the drive and introduced himself.

Bowled over by John Tabuh's handsome face and magnificent, flowing mane, Mrs Reafy had become positively girlish and leapt at the chance to help him. The mood didn't change until he suddenly remembered the three questions. But, instead of just asking Mrs Reafy if she knew what was magic, what was real and what was illusion, he decided to find out another way.

Out of nowhere John produced a pink silk glove. He asked if she could tell him the location of the lady it belonged to, adding that she'd been brutally murdered by someone he knew. If she could prove herself by doing this he would pay her handsomely to find Kitty.

Somewhat taken aback, Mrs Reafy dutifully sat down in the side room, pink glove in hand, and closed her eyes. What she saw filled her with dread. In her mind (or did she spot it through the curtains?), she thought she saw a coffin on her drive; inside it lay a woman's body. Shaking with fright, she opened her eyes a fraction. Now she saw John Tabuh in a very different light; he'd fooled her into thinking that because he was beautiful, he was good. Yet he'd left a corpse on her drive!

When John asked her if she had the power to bring someone back from the dead, Mrs Reafy convinced herself he was trying to get away with murder and called the police. John Tabuh was mortified.

"I've done nothing wrong! All I'm guilty of is grieving for my daughter."

Mrs Reafy put two and two together, made five and decided that he'd probably murdered his daughter too. She began to scream. John Tabuh had no choice but to run away with his box on wheels before the law arrived.

If only he'd given Mrs Reafy the silver rattle to hold instead of the pink glove. Maybe she could have told him where Sam was and they would have been reunited years ago. Sam heaves a great sigh.

"Who was the woman in the box, Mrs Reafy? Any ideas?"

"Whoever it was, she had good hair." She pats her electrified fringe until it crackles; but it won't stay down. "I don't know who she was, Sam. Now I'm thinking maybe the coffin wasn't a coffin; just a trunk for his luggage. Maybe the dead woman was just a tailor's dummy is anyone in your family a dressmaker?"

"I don't know. My mother might have been but she died when I was a baby."