Shamanka (11 page)

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.

S
am 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.”

“Really?”

“That's what Aunt Candy told me. Not that I trust her. She's one of the reasons I ran away. Now I'm homeless and I have to find my father. Do you know where he went?”

“No, but perhaps I can find out. Do you have anything of his that I could hold?”

There are the articles in the witch doctor's pouch, but Mrs Reafy thinks they'd give a false reading. The item must belong exclusively to him. A photo doesn't count, so there's nothing she can use to find him via psychometry.

“You can't trace Lola either? Not even through her monkey?”

No, she'd tried, but for some reason she could only see Lola's past, not her present.

“I could try the pendulum,” announces Mrs Reafy. “But I'm only accurate as far as the British Isles. If your father's left the country, we're stuffed. But we might find the orang-utan.”

She fetches an atlas, lays it on the table and smoothes it flat. “How odd. Look at that. It's covered in red dots.”

“There's jam on your glasses,” says Sam.

The psychometrist removes her spectacles and rubs them on her cardigan sleeve. She takes a pendulum out of her handbag and holds it over the map of Great Britain. Nothing happens.

“Wait…”

The pendulum begins to move, slowly at first – over the north of England – but then it swings in ever increasing circles. The circle grows wider and wider until it is whirling above Mrs Reafy's head, like a lasso.

“Look out!” The pendulum whips out of her hand, flies across the room and cracks the window pane.

“That,” pants Mrs Reafy, “means he's gone abroad.”

“And Lola?”

Mrs Reafy doesn't reply. The experience has exhausted her; she's fallen into a deep, deep sleep. Sam picks up the pendulum and examines it. It's a wedding ring threaded on a length of fishing line; that's all there is to it. So how does it work? For all she knows, Mrs Reafy just swung it round her head and let go for dramatic effect. She prods the sleeping woman gently. “Can you tell me how this pendulum works, please?”

Rudely interrupted from her slumber, Mrs Reafy's eyes dart wildly about the room as she struggles to compose herself. “Wah… What?”

“How does the pendulum work?”

“It's to do with electricity. We're full of the stuff. Some of us more than others.”

She tries again in vain to smooth her hair down, but it bristles and sparks like fuse wire. “A good pendulum swinger like myself produces over a hundred millivolts. In fact, I'm so electric I can illuminate a light bulb just by holding it.”

She removes the bulb from her desk lamp and holds it in her hand. “Let there be light!”

The bulb flickers and glows. Sam wants to try. With a faint smirk, Mrs Reafy hands over the bulb – nothing will happen. Sam grasps it by the neck. There's a bright flash and it shatters. For a moment they stare in shock at the jagged shards, then Mrs Reafy breaks the silence.

“You
squeezed
it, silly girl!”

Sam knew she hadn't. Maybe the bulb was old and would have blown anyway. She offers to clear away the glass but Mrs Reafy has already grabbed a dustpan and is sweeping the floor furiously. The friction of her tights and the nylon brush against the synthetic carpet causes a streak of lightning to shoot through her armpit hair; she drops the dustpan and groans.

“
You
should stick to fairy lights.”

The fact that Mrs Reafy is highly electric still doesn't fully explain the mysteries of the pendulum though.

When she finally stops sparking, Sam asks again, “But
why
does the pendulum swing?”

“None of your business. It works like dowsing except that pendulums are vertical instruments.”

Sam had heard of dowsing. As you may know, it's a method of finding water using a stick called a divining rod. Mrs Reafy has one hanging on the wall made from a willow crotch. She takes it down from its hook and gives it to Sam.

“Test it out in the garden. See if you can locate the sewers while I try to find your ape.”

“I'd rather stay here.”

“I'd rather you didn't. You are putting me off.”

Mrs Reafy's garden is completely overgrown. The branches on the right have joined hands with the branches on the left, forming an arched roof. It is festooned with creepers, which droop like post-Christmas paper chains. The sky is only visible through a few open chinks.

Half-heartedly, Sam holds the divining rod in front of her and walks forward, stepping over twisted roots thicker than her arms. It's drizzling and, because it's a warm day, the foliage sweats and the perfume of rank blossom struggles to escape through the tree canopy above.

There is something so familiar about that smell; and the
drip, drip, drip
of the rolling rain splashing against the leaves is like the noise of oars cutting through the slow waters of the Sepik River. Now she hears the
ark, ark, ark
of the Torresian crow. But there is no crow; it's Mrs Reafy calling, “
Arkley!
”

Lola is in Arkley.

While it's possible to say most of the alphabet without moving your lips, to be a good ventriloquist, you need to master the letter
B
. Here's how:

1. Relax your mouth.

2. Pronounce the sound
DER
but only use the tip of your tongue, as in
LER
. Only allow brief contact with the tip of your tongue behind your teeth.

3. Think
B
, not
D
.

4. Whisper it.