The Wrong Way Down (7 page)

Simpson, who sat leaning forward with his hands clasped, looking at the floor, remarked that it wasn't such a funny story.

“The poor kid,” remarked Mrs. Spiker, who seemed much more at ease than the rest of the party, “was brought up on spooks from the day she was born. And what she did, she did to please the folks.”

Gamadge was watching Miss Higgs. She sat with her shoulder turned to Gamadge, her eyes on the fire. Detached and silent, she seemed to have excluded herself from the group and from the conversation.

“I was a wretchedly precocious child,” said Iris Vance. “I was deceitful. I still am. I thought it would be such fun to let you come here and have a séance—make a fool of you. My friends—when they dropped in I told them about the joke, and they rather reluctantly agreed to sit in on it. Put on a show with all the trimmings. If I'd known why you were coming—but that's no use. As for Miss Paxton, well, she
is
a nice old lady, but when I came on Sunday she evidently had such a horror of me—from what she'd been told by the Ashburys—that I couldn't resist playing up. The Ashburys were stuffy, you know, very stuffy. If I'd told Uncle Lawson the whole truth he would have thought it much worse than what he'd thought about me before.

“Well, I've had my second warning. I won't tempt the spirits again.”

“Warning?” asked Gamadge.

“You'll hear. As for this one, I quite see it. If Miss Paxton hadn't thought I was a professional cheat she never would have suspected me of stealing a picture, and neither would you. I should just have been a nice hard-working young commercial artist, making a Sunday call on a distant relative—by invitation.”

“Pretty quick thinking,” said Simpson ironically, “for you to dope out the whole picture business that afternoon.”

“But they'll tell you,” Miss Vance smiled at him, “that mediums have to be quick thinkers. They do. I'm out of practice now,” she went on to Gamadge, “I stopped ten years ago. But I began young; I couldn't have been more than seven or eight when I produced my first effect at home for my parents' benefit. A modest effect, but I'd seen what the professionals did, and I was clever. I did it as a kind of game.”

“They took you to séances—at that age?” asked Gamadge wonderingly.

“You don't understand—it was their religion; it was all beautiful to them.”

“But what could you do—at that age?”

“If you'll read up on spiritualism, Mr. Gamadge”—she smiled at him—“you'll find that where there are poltergeists there are often children—sometimes young children. And you must remember that my parents wouldn't question the validity of the phenomena—they wouldn't question me. They weren't psychics—they couldn't produce effects, and they would have died rather than pretend to. They never dreamed that I'd pretend to. And I—well, I never explained that it wasn't the spirits, it was only me.”

“Kids like to be important,” said Mrs. Spiker.

“I can only say that I went on producing phenomena, better and better ones. My father and mother wanted to be deluded, but before long I could delude almost anybody. We never made a penny out of it, of course, but I was taken about and shown off to believers.”

“Bad medicine for a kid,” remarked Bowles, and drained his glass. He went to the side table and refilled it.

“Well, in a way it made very little impression on me,” said Iris Vance. “You must remember that I was a skeptic from the first, and that on the whole I had a normal life. I went to school, I played with other children, and my father was teaching me to draw and paint.

“By the time I was ten, I had developed a technique in other things than art. I practised regularly. I had my own methods. Once I performed in the presence of a very well-known professional, in broad daylight. I shall never forget the expression on her face as she watched me—she was on! Afterwards she got me into a corner; a big, rather frightening woman she was, with a great European renown. She said: ‘My leetle wan, remember this: remember it the first time they catch you. It will not matter to you to be caught, because it will not matter to those who matter to
you
.'

“She got caught, and she went to jail. But she came out, and she went right on with her profession. Never lost a client.”

Bowles came back to his place, and put his glass down on the mantel shelf. “Big money in it,” he said.

“If you materialize. But that's risky.”

Gamadge said: “The faithful always understand that when inspiration fails, the medium hates to let the audience down.”

“Yes,” said Iris Vance. “The one thing they can't face is to lose faith themselves.”

“Did the Ashburys catch you?”

“Certainly not!” She assumed a look of deep offense. “The Ashburys! I'd better tell you about that. We paid that fatal call, and I must explain that we were only tolerated on the understanding that spiritualism must never be mentioned. My father and mother amiably conformed to that prejudice. They'd never dared to say that I was gifted. They'd told me not to talk about my gift to Great-uncle Lawson and Great-aunt Marietta, but as usual I was too clever for my own good, and so swollen by vanity that I thought a demonstration would bring Uncle and Aunt shouting into the fold. I'd brought my favorite tackle along with me, my reel of shoe-thread, weighted at one end with a padded dress weight; in case you never saw one, they're little perforated discs made of lead. I found mine in my mother's old workbox.

“The drawing room was crowded with furniture and bric-a-brac. Aunt and Uncle and my father and mother sat in a circle in front of the gas fire. After tea I was allowed to wander about behind them, looking at things. I never broke anything.

“Great-uncle was in one of those high-backed upholstered chairs, and I can see the yellow satin now and feel it. I stood behind it with my left hand on the round back.”

“I think,” said Gamadge, “that I saw it this afternoon.”

“Did you see a little table, a sort of étagére on wheels? It used to stand between the windows, laden with knickknacks.”

“No, I didn't see it.”

“Well,
I
saw it; and I saw that it was standing on a six-foot space of bare hardwood floor. I couldn't resist—it was too much for me. Something”—she smiled—“got into me. Anyway, I took my little lariat out of my pocket, got it ready—all with one hand, I never took the other off the back of the chair—and swung it. The weighted end coiled round a leg of the little table on wheels, and I pulled. The table came rolling along as if it had the devil in it.”

Mrs. Spiker burst into her loud laugh. “Wish I'd been there.”

“Oh, it was awful. Uncle saw it first, got half up, and choked out something. Aunt Marietta looked round and gave a scream. I rushed forward, put both hands on the table—of course it began to rock like mad—and called out: ‘It came right to me!' Things fell off it, and I got down and began to pick them up—and to uncoil my weight, and reel up my black thread.

“Aunt Marietta fainted. She was in bed for a week. We never entered the house again.

“And my poor parents were prouder of me than ever, though they had great expectations from the Ashburys, and we were quite poor.”

There was a silence. Then Miss Vance asked in a matter-of-fact tone: “Well, Mr. Gamadge, do you think the Lawson Ashburys or Miss Paxton would have liked this version better than the other one?”

“I'm afraid not. That was your first warning, Miss Vance, to leave the spirits alone?”

“Oh, no! I practised for five years more, until I was fifteen. When my first warning came I was as much frightened as poor Great-aunt Marietta had been.”

Miss Higgs slowly turned her head and looked at Iris Vance. She said: “I never heard of that.”

“No, I don't talk about it, but this seems to be an occasion for frankness. I was so frightened that I never pretended to be a medium again, I never even went to a séance. I think my parents explained it by some quirk of adolescence—my losing my gift. They were grieved when I lost it—and my interest—but they didn't reproach me or argue. They never did.”

Mrs. Spiker asked: “For Heaven's sake what happened?”

“You may not think much of it. It was at a dark séance that some friends of ours had requested, and there were a good many people there. I was in a trance, and my control was talking. I had a control, of course, by that time, a very nice sympathetic one named Ozima. She had a slight foreign accent, which of course was understandable, since she was an ancient Aztec. She talked as I should talk if I had a slight cold in my head and a gumdrop in both cheeks.”

Simpson moved his feet and coughed.

“Not very nice, is it?” She smiled at him. “Not very nice for the real spirits—if there should happen to be any. At any rate, I felt a tap on my shoulder.”

“What?” Miss Higgs stared at her.

“Something or somebody tapped me hard on the shoulder. A call to order—that's what it felt like. Well, I suppose I must have been a neurotic child after all; it had a frightful effect on me.”

Bowles said after a moment: “Somebody playing a joke on
you
, for a change.”

“Perhaps. Whoever it was moved very quietly and fast.”

“Somebody smuggled a skeptic in.”

“I hoped so. I'd often heard or read of skeptics who once—just once—while they were investigating frauds, you know, happened on something they couldn't explain. I was a skeptic, and I know what they meant…Or was I a skeptic after all? I wonder.”

Gamadge said: “I always thought it only meant that for once the investigator ran up against somebody that was too clever even for him.”

“I thought of that. But it's different when it happens.”

Mrs. Spiker said loudly: “The whole business had you a nervous wreck. It was a crime. Fifteen years old—heading for a crash.”

Miss Vance looked up at the crystal globe on the mantel. “I've pretended to see things in that globe many times. I keep it as a reminder not to look again. I haven't. Tonight I thought it would be a good joke to pretend to, but Mr. Gamadge tapped me on the shoulder.”

“Well,” said Gamadge, “I'm flesh and blood anyhow.”

“You take the whole thing too seriously,” said Mr. Simpson. “Forget it. Doesn't amount to anything. I don't know why you told that story, Iris. Damned if I know.”

Miss Higgs smiled. “I know. Iris told the story, the whole story, because she thinks Mr. Gamadge may be persuaded to believe that that thing”—she nodded towards the engraving that lay, with its top and bottom edges curled, on the far table—“really is haunted.”

There was a curious pause. Nobody protested, and she went on: “She thinks that will settle it. She thinks he'll go back and tell Miss Paxton that it's the original picture, treated by ghosts; or that the original picture had that inscription on it, faded out, and then for some occult reason changed back again. That is, of course, if he believed the story.”

“I believe every word of it,” said Gamadge.

“So do I. But it won't make you think that the spirits brought out writing on the picture.” She glanced at Iris, a curious glance. “Have you no sense of character? He'll keep at it and keep at it, unless you simply tell him you did take the picture, and that you'll give it back.”

Simpson shouted at her: “How do you think she's going to give it back when she never had it? You don't find the things growing on bushes, Gamadge said so himself.”

“You know I never took it,” said Iris.

“Well, then.” Miss Higgs shrugged and turned her face towards the fire once more.

Again that curious pause, as if they were all holding their breath. Gamadge rose and glanced from face to face; not one of them was looking at him.

He went over to the table, rolled the aquatint in the brown paper, left the newspapers, and crossed to the door. Miss Vance was there before him. She stood silent while he put on his coat.

“Well,” he said, looking down at her gravely, “I'm very sorry I can't subscribe to the ghost theory. Did you really expect me to?”

“I hoped you would.”

“Less bother, of course. Miss Paxton couldn't very well put it in the inventory, though, could she?”

“Do you still think I'd steal a picture?”

“Certainly not for the value of it in money. I don't know what to think, and that's a fact.”

“Then can't you drop the whole thing? Miss Paxton would if you advised her to.”

“I'm acting for her, Miss Vance. How can I drop it?”

She made a resigned gesture with both hands. “It's all my fault. I made a bad impression on you. If I hadn't been a fool I'd have seen you alone.”

Gamadge smiled and shook his head. She opened the outer door, and he went out and down the stairs.