The Link

by Richard Matheson

  “But this is bloody marvelous!” enthuses Jack, his English accent still well evident. “I’m just about to tape my midnight show! You must sit in with me!”

  Robert and Ann are trapped into agreement. John demurs as, obviously, does Norman.

  As they move into Jack’s office, it is to see a wonderland of tributes to Jack created by Jack—enormous photos on the wall of him hobnobbing with celebrities most of whose tenures on stardom ended in the sixties, letters of ecstatic commendation from local listeners, pseudo-religious paintings and objects manufactured by J.L. Products.

  “Inspiring,” mutters John. He just loves this; it is, in one wrapped package, a validation of his every judgement on their family. “I wish I could stay here forever.”

  Robert only gives him a look.

  He and Ann sit down with Jack. On the cluttered desk is a colorful appointment book calendar with photos of a beaming Jack on front and back. On the cover is the message, in gold script, Make a date with Spirit! Use your ESP each day of the year! Dr. Jack.

  “Dr. Jack,” says John, straight-faced. “It has a ring.”

  “Cynic, cynic,” chortles Jack, not in the least offended. “They never bother me. They know not of what they rant.”

  John points at him. “Touché, Doctor Jack,” he says.

  Jack does a little bit of everything on his midnight show, he tells them. His noon show is, “of course” mostly for predictions—weather, stocks, politics, personalities. “America is in for a change.” He gives a for instance.

  “Shouldn’t wonder,” John observes.

  “I have a feeling you’re in trouble, nephew,” Jack replies. “Am I right or wrong?”

  “Wrong,” says John, a tightening around his eyes revealing his reaction. “I’m in the pink, Jack.”

  “Did I mention health?” asks Jack. He pats John on the shoulder. “Well, I hope so, John,” he says. “I really do.”

  The taping takes place. As advertised, a little bit of everything.

  After introducing Robert and Ann, Jack spends some time finding lost objects. People phone in. “Dr. Jack, my diamond ring is gone,” a woman says.

  “Love, I see it in a drawer with something blue on top of it. Call me back and let me know what happens. Yes, sir.”

  “Dr. Jack, I wanted to let you know you said I’d have the money to travel as I wanted to and I have it now because my mother died and left it to me.”

  “Passed on, friend, not died,” says Jack. “The Spirit taketh and the Spirit giveth. Yes, Ma’am.”

  “Dr. Jack, I’m looking for an earring that’s been missing for a week. It’s jade.

  “All right,” says Jack. “I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to let my nephew and his daughter see if they can find it, they’re our visitors tonight. They’re very psychic. Maybe not as much as Dr. Jack but that’s another story.”

  Jack looks at them. “Impressions?” he inquires.

  They stare at him blankly.

  “Concentrate,” he says. “Jade earring. What’s your name, ma’am?”

  “Mrs. Anna Clauser, 2015 Maple Drive.”

  Jack repeats her name and address. “Anything at all,” he tells Robert and Ann.

  Silence. Robert tries to indicate that he and Ann are not able to function under such circumstances.

  Then Ann says, “Underneath the dryer.”

  Robert looks at her in startlement as Jack says, “Underneath the dryer, love. Ordinarily, I’d ask you to call back but, since my nephew and his daughter are moving on, we’ll leave the line open. While we’re waiting, we’ll have a message from our sponsor.”

  He switches off the outgoing signal, points at Robert. “Something coming through,” he says.

  “What?” Robert has been looking at Ann. He turns back to his uncle. “Something—?”

  The woman’s voice comes through the line, excitedly. “It was there! I found it! The earring! Lord in Heaven!”

  “Oh, my God,” mutters John, scowling.

  Robert bursts out laughing and kisses Ann on the cheek. “It’s in the family, folks!” says Uncle Jack. “The Leicester Legacy! Thank you, love. Before I take the next call, I have a message for my nephew that I want to check out. Just came through. I don’t know what it means. Maybe he can tell me. Here it is. He rubs the pearls across his teeth Does that mean anything to you, Robert?”

  Robert smiles embarrassedly. “I don’t—” Then he catches his breath. “Oh,” he says as though he’s just been kicked.

  “It does mean something, I can see that,” Uncle Jack says. “Share it with us, Robert.”

  Robert falters. “It was… a question I… I asked a….gentleman.”

  “Yes?” says Uncle Jack. “This is from The Other Side, you know. You understand that.”

  Robert swallows, nods once. “Yes, I….” He draws in a shaking breath. “Yes, he is,” he says, not knowing what to say.

  “And the question?” Jack asks.

  “Uh… how does a burglar know which pearls are worth stealing?”

  “Ah-ha!” cries Jack. “Of course! The good ones are—what, smooth, rough?”

  “Slightly rough,” says Robert, slightly dazed.

  “There we have it!” says Dr. Jack. “Proof positive!”

  When the taping is concluded, John feigns disgust. “Every time I try to laugh at our family, something spoils it,” he says.

  “John, my boy,” says Uncle Jack. “The Truth will come out!” He leans over close to Robert. “Even though that pearl thing might have been telepathy,” he whispers.

  He looks at Robert intently then, eyes narrowing. “This place you’re going,” he says.

  “Yes?” Robert looks newly startled. Uncle Jack has a way about him.

  Jack grimaces and shakes his head. “Sorry,” he says. “It’s not the right one.”

  August 14. They drive nineteen miles off the highway to the site of his father’s dig.

  Robert looks around in dismay. No hill. No tower. Nothing that looks familiar at all.

  “It is the wrong place,” he says incredulously. “How could he know?”

  “The Leicester Legacy?” says Ann, trying to make a tiny joke of it.

  John laughs. Robert tries to smile but it is a crushing disappointment to him. Ann sees this immediately and puts her arms around him. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she apologizes.

  “Not your fault, sweetie,” he says, his smile pained. He pats her back. “I just can’t believe it.”

  “With all due respect to the ‘Leicester Legacy’,” Norman says, “who says it’s the wrong place? This is where your father was digging. This is where those objects were found.”

  Robert nods. “I know,” he says. But what he really knows is that Uncle Jack was correct.

  This isn’t the right place.

  They make supper and eat, Robert trying to be cheerful but having difficulty doing so. Ann squeezes his hand.

  “We’ll find the right place, Dad,” she says.

  Norman groans softly.

  Later that night, when the others are asleep, Robert leaves the motor home and walks into the desert.

  Finally, he stops and sits, his back against a boulder. The desert has a silver cast across it from the moonlight.

  After a while, he takes the crystal from his pocket and holds it in his palm. He stares at it. It seems to glimmer in the moonlight.

  “Help me, somebody,” he murmurs.

  CAMERA HOLDS ON him. Then SUDDEN CUT TO his eyes. It is later. He is standing on the desert sand, rocking back and forth. He looks around.

  To see, behind him, connected to him by the silver cord, his sleeping self.

  He starts to walk across the desert, his strides lengthening until the land rushes by him with a blur.

  Then he is walking normally. The terrain he moves across is rocky now, the entire area spotted with huge boulders. He is in the high desert, a hilly landscape with pine tree stands scattered about, their dark green a sharp cont
rast to the sandstone cliffs which range in color from yellow to almost red.

  He is walking down a hillside when, suddenly, he jumps atop a boulder with the movement of an astronaut leaping on the Moon.

  He points at a dry creek bed below. “That’s it!” he shouts. “That’s the place!”

  He leaps from the boulder and rushes down to the creek bed. He dances in the moonlight, an eerie figure. “We have to undercut the creek!” he cries. “This is where it is! The link!”

  He jerks his head up, waking.

  Scrambling to his feet, he rushes to the motor home and bursts in, tearing open cupboard doors, looking for a geological map of the area.

  “Hey, tone it down,” mumbles John in back.

  Robert finds the map and sits at the table, looking at it, trying to find the place he saw.

  It could be any of a hundred places.

  As he is staring at the map, Ann sits in the booth across from him. He tells her what happened. “I know I found it,” he says. He smiles with stricken amusement. “But where is it?” he says.

  They look at each other in silence.

  “Don’t dowsers work from maps?” she says.

  Another silence. Finally, he sighs. “Well, why not?” he says. “This has been a crazy year. Why go sane now?”

  He starts to look for something to make a pendulum with, then realizes that the perfect thing is in his pocket.

  He attaches a piece of twine to the crystal.

  “Help me, babe,” he says to Ann.

  An odd scene, father and daughter holding onto the string, the crystal hovering above the map, all this illuminated by the small light over the booth.

  “Come on Leicester Legacy,” says Ann after nothing happens for a while.

  In a few moments, as though she understands the need for it, she links her fingers with Robert as they stare at the crystal.

  It begins to move. Starts swaying back and forth.

  They adjust their arms. The crystal jerks. They re-adjust. Inch by inch, they move their arms until the crystal begins to turn in circles. They make more adjusting movements and the circle gets smaller and smaller. The crystal finally stops above a spot on the map.

  “That has to be it,” says Robert. He marks the point with a pencil. “It has to be.”

  He looks at it. “Here’s a road going in,” he says. He winces. “Doesn’t go in all the way though.”

  “What’s going on now?” says Norman’s voice.

  They turn toward where he stands in his pajamas, eying them apprehensively.

  Robert tries not to smile but can’t help it. The expression on Norman’s face—“say it isn’t so”—tickles him.

  “Norman—” he beings.

  “Don’t tell me,” Norman cuts him off.

  Robert and Ann splutter, trying to control their reaction to Norman’s lugubrious expression.

  “I’m sorry, Norman,” Robert says. He holds up the map. “We’re about twenty-seven miles off course.”

  “Oh, God,” moans Norman softly. “How did I get into this?”

  CUT TO speeding motor home, Robert driving. John wakes up in back. “Hey, what the hell is going on?” he calls.

  “We’re moving,” Norman tells him gloomily.

  “Hell, you don’t have to tell me we’re moving,” John says. “I can see we’re moving. What I want to know is why?”

  “Don’t ask,” says Norman.

  It is close to dawn when Robert turns the motor home into the desert and drives as far as he can before the road ends. From there, he hikes in, Ann beside him. The elevation has been rising as he drove. They are in higher country now.

  Finally, they cross a ridge and see, in front of them, a rocky terrain and, in the distance, hills with pine tree stands, sandstone cliffs ranging in color from yellow to almost red.

  “I think we’re almost there,” he tells them.

  They hurry on. Then Robert sees the boulder and rushes forward to jump on it as he did in his OOBE. He has the good sense to stop at the last instant, realizing that he’ll break his neck if he doesn’t. Grinning to himself, he clambers onto the boulder, then reaches down to pull up Ann beside him, points.

  “Down there,” he says. “On the—”

  He breaks off, both of them gasping.

  As he has spoken, a shaft of light has shot down as though to point out the very spot where he must dig.

  Ann turns first. “Dad,” she says.

  He turns to experience the most thrilling moment of his life.

  On a distant hilltop are the ruins of a temple. The sun, just appearing above a far-off ridge, is shining through an aperture in the temple wall, the narrow beam of light pointed down at the creek bed.

  “This is it,” he murmurs, in a shaky voice, putting an arm around Ann. She is shivering. “Are you cold?” he asks.

  “No, I’m excited,” she tells him faintly.

  “Me too, darling, me too,” Robert says.

  Jumping off the boulder, they run down to the creek bed and make a pyramid of rocks to mark the place.

  Then they climb up to the hilltop and look at the temple ruins.

  “I’ve been here,” he tells her. “This is it. I’m sure.”

  Ann whirls suddenly, her fingers digging into his arm. Robert twists around to see a tall figure standing in the shadows.

  Neither of them speaks. Ann clutches at his arm as the figure steps out from the shadows.

  “Good morning,” he says.

  It is the Indian we have seen from the start of our story.

  His wait is over.

  Over coffee at their campsite, they learn that the Indian’s name is JOSEPH LOMAH (short for Lamahquahu). He has a permit to dig this area which he will share with them. There is a road coming in from the east which will permit them to park the motor home within a few hundred yards of the site.

  “How deep have you gone?” asks Robert uneasily because he knows where he must dig.

  “I haven’t begun yet,” says Joseph. “I didn’t know where to start.”

  Robert doesn’t say anything but his expression asks the question: And now you do?

  Norman, despite his relatively good-natured acceptance of Robert’s (to him) weird behavior, puts his back up now. Is there any indication whatsoever that this area has archeological promise?

  “We’ll find cutting tools below ten feet,” says Joseph. “Choppers. Scrapers. Hammerstones.”

  “How do you know that?” Norman demands.

  “Wait,” says Joseph. “See. There were people living here.”

  “How long ago?” asks Norman with a bored tone. He doesn’t believe a word the Indian is telling him.

  “Half a million years,” says Joseph.

  Norman explodes. “That is utterly absurd!” he cries, letting it all out at once.

  Later, he takes Robert aside and tells him that he’s making a terrible mistake to leave the promising site his father had in order to come here. “You don’t really believe this man, do you?” he asks incredulously.

  “I believe this is the place to dig,” Robert answers.

  Norman blows out heavy, probably disgusted breath. “Well, I can’t promise that I’ll stay with you to the bitter end,” he says.

  Joseph magically shows up with a four-man crew and the dig begins, shovels and picks biting into the creek bed where the pyramid of rocks had been built. As they dig, the soil is placed on screen tables to be sifted.

  “Nothing important in the first ten feet,” Joseph tells them again but Norman, obdurate, refuses to deviate from accepted practice and insists that every shovelful be screened.

  When they run across some man-made stone flakes at six feet, he is justified and stunned at the same time. It proves that ancient man made tools here. Norman has to surrender his objection to this site—and on the first day.

  “I presume,” he grumbles, “that, at twenty feet, we’ll uncover a wooly mammoth or something.” Like Robert’s father, having a lifetime of
carefully assembled facts undercut is not pleasant for him.

  The digging is hardly all excitement. Most of it is drudgery. As the excavation deepens, they have to attach a boom arrangement to a nearby tree, the boom lowering a bucket into the hole. The bucket, filled with soil, is winched up and swung over the screen tables. They also begin to shore-in the hole to keep the sides from caving in. Little by little, it takes on the look of a bona-fide shaft.

  They keep finding what they take to be man-made objects only to have Norman shoot them down, not without some perverse pleasure. “Genuine artifacts do not appear quite so easily,” he is happy to tell them, tossing aside what is usually no more than a hunk of rock.

  By the end of the fourth day, muscles are sore, backs ache, skins are sunburned and bitten by insects. Robert fills a bottle half with milk, half with ice, adds two tablespoons of salt and shakes it up.

  He is applying it to Ann’s back as she lies in bed the fourth night when she sighs.

  “Having a rough time, babe?” he asks, concerned.

  “I’m having a wonderful time,” she tells him, exhausted but happy.

  He smiles and kisses her shoulder. “Good,” he says. “I’m glad.”

  He cannot sleep, walks to the shaft and finds Joseph there. He sits with the tall Indian and asks him why he said that there were people living in this area half a million years ago.

  Joseph tells him of the legends of his people, the Hopis. Legends that civilizations of people occupied this land before the cliff dwellers or the present Indians; that the cliff dwellers and red Indians may actually be descendents of these people.

  “You know,” he says, “that it is only within the past fifty years that the true form of the dinosaur known as the Tyrannosaurus became known.”

  “Yes?” says Robert, wondering what the Indian is getting at.

  CUT TO what Joseph speaks of as he says, “Yet in the Hava Supai Canyon here in Arizona, there is, drawn and carved on a rock, a true depiction of this creature.”

  BACK TO Joseph as he finishes. “This picture was made more than twelve thousand years ago,” he said.