“I know I will.” She gave me a long look and I found out she could do other tricks with her eyes besides the blinking act.
“I’ve invited Mr. Roberts to accompany us as an observer this evening.” The Professor hesitated. “If you don’t mind.”
“That’s fine with me. But I don’t know if Mrs. Hubbard will approve. I hear she’s very particular about strangers.”
“More than likely.” The Professor led us outside and slid behind the wheel of the car. Lorna Lewis followed and I edged into the front seat beside her. The peach-colored slacks pressed against my thigh. I pressed back. Maybe I wasn’t allowed to talk, but I managed to make an impression.
The Professor was doing most of the talking as he nosed the Jaguar south, then east. “Your Mrs. Hubbard probably doesn’t care for outsiders a bit. I wouldn’t, either, if I was working a nice soft racket—preying on motion picture people with phony spiritualism.”
Lorna Lewis tossed her head. Jungle-storm.
“You’ll see! Mrs. Hubbard is different. She doesn’t try to fool anyone with tricks or hocus-pocus.”
“No ectoplasm or apparitions? What about rope escapes and raps? Does she produce apports?”
“You’re making fun of me.” Her fingers caressed a silver cigarette case. “Mr. Roberts?”
“Mr. Roberts does not smoke,” snapped the Professor.
That was news to me. I wondered if I also did not drink. Probably I fasted a lot, too. Certainly I had nothing to do with women. Eyeing Lorna Lewis, I decided that was one rule which would be changed in a hurry.
“My dear Miss Lewis,” purred the Professor, “I am by nature a skeptic and by profession a psychologist. As such I have devoted much time to the investigation of so-called psychic phenomena. I am sorry to report that I have never seen a genuine medium.”
“But Mrs. Hubbard doesn’t put on a show,” the girl protested. “Why, I’ve only been there once before, and it was just like sitting down for a visit. The lights were on and everything. But the things she told me, the things she knew about me, it was simply uncanny!
“She knew my name—my real name, that is—and my age, and where I lived, and who my folks were, and what my next picture would be and who would direct it. She even told me I’d get Lester Vance opposite me, and I didn’t hear about it from the studio until three days later!”
The Professor chuckled. “You’re in pictures, my child. Such information is virtually public property.”
“But my real name, and my real age—”
“It’s all listed somewhere. Your birth certificate is surely available by mail. And certainly an unscrupulous woman would be willing to spend a few dollars on investigation. She probably has a line into the studio, paying someone to feed her advance tips on activities. She hopes to make you a regular client and attract others. Didn’t you say your hairdresser told you to go there in the first place? It’s all very obvious.”
I realized, suddenly, that he was talking to me more than he was to her—trying to tell me the angles. I listened carefully.
“If you are gullible enough, I predict that sooner or later your little ten-dollar readings won’t satisfy Mrs. Hubbard. She’ll give you some good advice about the future, and some even more intimate information about yourself; feed it to you bit by bit, just to keep you coming back for more. Sooner or later she will find out that you too have mystic powers, that you’re clairvoyant, clairaudient, a natural medium. She’ll give you slate-writing and then the old psychic force routine.”
“Psychic force?”
“Moving inanimate objects without touching them. Waving her hand over fruit, walnuts, coins. They’ll obey her, move and follow her hand. Psychic force. I’ll show you how it’s done, sometime.”
“Tell me.”
“Simple. She wears a magnetized ring. There’s another magnet planted inside the walnut or fruit or fake coin. Naturally, it moves. By varying the weight of the object she can produce anything from a stir to a jump. It sounds simple and stupid and obvious, but wait until she gives you the buildup—in the dim, quiet room with her voice pitched low and the spirits abroad.”
Lorna Lewis shook her head. “Mrs. Hubbard isn’t like that at all. You’ll see.”
“Very well. But remember, I’m here to protect you. Just introduce us as friends. I promise not to interfere in any way, but I want to observe what happens.”
“That’s right, Professor,” said Lorna Lewis, with the roguish smile that endeared her to millions. “Just hold your water.”
We turned into a street that looked like the butt-end of Tobacco Road. Lawns of brown weeds and sand, withered palmettoes decorated by the dogs, houses sagging behind rusted iron fences.
It was a hot night. On paint-peeled porches, unlovely women rocked and fanned futilely. Towheaded brats peered from behind phlegm-green window shades. Street lights lent a wavering distortion to the flight of myriad flies, but did nothing to cut the stench of shrivelled vegetation, rotting wood, sweat, garbage, and the frying odor of food.
“Here we are.” Lorna Lewis indicated a house. She might have been psychic at that; I couldn’t have distinguished this particular shack from any of the others. It was a wide two-story house which might once have been painted yellow. The shades were drawn, the door was shut, and the only sign of occupancy was a smear of cat droppings across the broken boards of the porch.
We parked, then swerved across the sidewalk in single file. I stumbled over a battered blue coaster wagon which lay on its side near the fence. Right then and there I almost forgot my vow of silence.
I fancied I saw the shades move slightly in a window to the left of the porch, but I was more interested in the movement of Lorna Lewis’s peach-colored slacks. We followed her up the porch steps.
She pressed the buzzer and a sour whine echoed from within the house. A sallow-faced Mexican girl opened the door. She brushed the perspiration from her mustache, wiped her hand on her stringy hair and said, “Yes, please?”
“We’ve come to see Mrs. Hubbard. We have an appointment.”
“I tell her. Wait here.”
She ushered us into the hallway and left us there.
The hall was dark and narrow, like a closet. And like a closet, it smelled of mothballs and mustiness. There were doors on either side of the hallway, and the girl departed through one at our right. Nothing supernatural about that—she opened the door before entering.
We settled down in wicker chairs and waited. My chair was next to a wicker end table piled high with tattered magazines. I picked one up. It was a copy of Film Fun for January, 1933.
Lorna Lewis found another cigarette. The Professor polished his monocle. I looked at “gag” still-shots of such forgotten cinema zanies as Harry Langdon, Jimmy Finlayson, Andy Clyde and Edgar Kennedy.
The silence was emphatic. The air was hotter, mustier. The hall became an oversized coffin. Time passed, but what’s time when you’re inside a coffin? Lorna Lewis stepped on her cigarette. The Professor adjusted his monocle. I sat there listening to the worms bore through the woodwork.
Then the door opened, and we jumped, and the Mexican girl said, “In here, please.”
Beyond the door was an ordinary parlor—“sitting room” in the day when this house was built—filled with the usual scrolled oak furniture, upholstered by a contemporary of Queen Anne. The wallpaper was Paris green, obscured in many places by large chromos of the Saviour in meditation, exaltation and agony.