Superstition

by David Ambrose

  Tragedy had almost shattered their lives ten years ago when their only child, a daughter, had been killed in a road accident at the age of eleven. Barry had been almost destroyed by his grief and claimed that only Drew's strength had pulled him through. Nonetheless, he remained an agnostic in contrast to her devout Catholicism. It did not seem to be a source of friction between them. They were there, Barry said in conclusion, because he had read something about Sam's work in a magazine and had written in for more information.

  Roger Fullerton described himself modestly as a physics teacher who already knew that the universe was irrational, but wasn't yet sure how deep the problem went and hoped all this might help him find out.

  Pete Daniels, who was awestruck even to be sitting at the same table as Roger Fullerton, said that he was twenty-four, born in Kentucky, and had studied physics at Caltech. He claimed that a chronically low boredom threshold had kept him from going into industry or doing anything either profitable or practical with his skills, which was how he'd wound up working with Sam. (Sam had already told Joanna that Pete had the soul of a pure researcher and was worth his weight in gold, despite being paid in peanuts.) He was funny in a naive-smart kind of way, and Joanna sensed that the whole group felt an immediate affection for him.

  Finally Ward Riley managed to say even less about himself than Joanna had learned from the thumbnail sketch that Sam had given her. “A retired businessman with a lifelong interest in all forms of paranormal phenomena,” was all they got out of him. Curiously, however, nobody seemed to want or need more; there was about him a quality-oddly indefinable, Joanna thought-that disposed people to accept him at face value and demand no more than he chose to volunteer.

  That left only her. Since they already knew who she was and why she was there, she invited them to put any questions they might have to her. Barry Hearst asked whether, in view of her revelations about Camp Starburst, she had any belief whatsoever in the supernatural. She said that she supposed she had as much belief as any of them present; certainly, the material she had read describing previous experiments of the kind they were embarking on was pretty convincing, but she wouldn't really know for sure what she thought until she saw with her own eyes the table they were sitting around move or, better still, float in the air.

  Roger smiled and said that such an occurrence would pretty much take care of his misgivings too. After that the session broke up into a series of casual chats over coffee. Sam moved happily among his little group, obviously satisfied that the atmosphere he had hoped to create was evolving successfully. When he felt that they had accomplished as much as could be expected on this first occasion, he unobtrusively brought the proceedings to a close. They were to meet again in three days.

  “At which time,” he said, “we'll start to invent our ghost. And then, to paraphrase Bette Davis, fasten your seat belts-because with any luck, we'll be in for a bumpy ride.”

  14

  What is it?” Joanna peered at the pale blue liquid in the metal container. It was warm, viscous, and odorless.

  “Paraffin wax. Watch.”

  Sam pulled back his sleeve and dipped his hand in it up to the wrist. When he withdrew it, it was evenly coated with what looked like a tight-fitting, partially transparent glove. “It dries almost immediately and comes off easily,” he said, pulling a strip from the back of his hand. “And look, you can see every mark of the skin, even tiny hairs, perfectly imprinted.”

  “This is very interesting. I assume there's a point.”

  They were in a back room of the lab that housed some photographic developing equipment, a gas stove, and a few shelves of chemicals. He finished cleaning the stuff off his hand as he explained. “Sometime in the twenties there was a Polish banker called Franek Kluski, who discovered at the age of forty-five that he was a prodigiously gifted physical medium. According to people who were there, he held seances in which he produced mysterious creatures out of nowhere-human forms, semihuman, animal, semianimal. The only problem was that at the end of the seance they disappeared, so there was never any tangible proof that they'd been there, even though people had seen them and touched them. So one of the researchers investigating him came up with this idea of asking these spirits if they wouldn't mind dipping their hands into a bowl of paraffin wax, so that when they dematerialized they could leave the wax casts behind. Very obligingly, the spirits agreed-and at the end of every seance after that there'd be these empty wax casts lying on the floor. All the researchers had to do was fill them with plaster to get a perfect cast of…whatever it was that had been in the room.”

  Joanna stared at him. “You have to be making this up.”

  He made an open, noncommittal gesture with his now wax-free hand. “There's a set of plaster casts in Paris at the Institute Metapsychique. They call them ‘phantom hands,’ and they were reportedly created in the way I've just described.”

  “I've got to see Roger's face when he hears this.”

  Sam laughed. “I'd rather see it when someone dumps a wax cast in his lap and tells him to explain that away.”

  “You know,” she said thoughtfully, “you were so right to want Roger in the group. As you said, if he buys into this, it's going to be very hard for the skeptics to dismiss it.”

  “Believe me, it won't stop them from trying.”

  “All the same, if he'll let me use his name, I'd like to do a special interview with him-once before we start, and again later if something happens.”

  “Steady there-your interview technique is what got us on first name terms.”

  “What's the matter? Jealous of an old professor?”

  “Of that old professor, yes. He's been married four times, and I wouldn't put it past him to try a couple more before he's through.”

  “ Four times?”

  “He's a scientist-repeatability is the essence of any good experiment.”

  “I think you just cured me of a dangerous crush.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He pulled her to him and kissed her.

  “Do you think they know?” she asked in a soft voice.

  “Does who know what?”

  “The others in the group. About us.”

  He shrugged. “They've probably made an educated guess. Anyway, it's no secret-is it?”

  “No.” She ran her hand through the thick hair on the back of his head and pulled his lips to hers once again. “Absolutely not.”

  Inventing the ghost proved to be a slow process fraught with unanticipated pitfalls. Under Sam's guidance they applied what logic to it they could. The first question was should it be a male or female ghost? Roger suggested that tossing a coin might be the fairest and fastest solution. Everyone agreed, so Roger spun a quarter. The ghost was male.

  The next question was what period should their ghost have lived in? Everyone waited for everyone else to make a suggestion, before Sam said why didn't they all give their opinions one at a time, starting on his left with Maggie. Somewhat diffidently, claiming she knew little history and would defer to those who did, she suggested mid-eighteenth-century Scotland, the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite uprising. There was a brief silence while everybody wondered whether to comment on that idea right away, or hear other suggestions. Sam suggested they carry on around the table with their own suggestions, then go around again for comments.

  Riley suggested the Hermetic period in ancient Egypt. Drew picked Renaissance Florence. Barry picked the American War of Independence. Joanna picked the French empire under Napoleon. Roger said that anywhere in Europe, at any time in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries-the “Age of Reason”-would be fine with him. Pete Daniels said he would have picked Renaissance Italy, but since that had already gone he thought he'd “run classical Greece up the flagpole and see if anyone saluted.” Sam said he thought that was quite enough to be starting off with and he would be happy with whatever the group chose. He invited Maggie to start the round of comments.

  “It seems to me,” she began hesitan
tly, as though apologizing for stating the obvious, “that it would be a help if we invented someone whose language we all spoke. And I have to admit that French, Italian, Ancient Egyptian, and Greek are a bit, well, double Dutch to me.”

  “It's a good point,” Roger said at once. “There's no point in complicating things unnecessarily. I suggest, if we all agree, that we choose an English-speaking ghost.”

  Everyone agreed, after which the discussion grew freer. Sam invited those who had chosen “foreign” ghosts to make new choices in their native tongue. Drew opted for Victorian England; Roger said the ghost could, of course, be an English-speaking traveler anywhere in the world; Riley suggested the Russian Revolution, where it was a matter of historical fact that there had been several English-speaking observers; using the same excuse, Joanna stuck with the French empire.

  Going around the table again, Maggie endorsed France-“the auld alliance,” in any period-as a second choice. Drew said she hadn't read enough history to be able to imagine any particular period in much detail, but it might be interesting to pick a time when something was happening other than war and bloodshed. She liked Roger's idea of the Age of Enlightenment, when cultures were flourishing and new ideas exploding everywhere.

  Barry said that the elements of war and cultural evolution had always overlapped throughout history, and the American Revolution was a perfect example. He was sticking with that.

  Joanna suggested that, as several revolutions had been proposed so far, perhaps it might be an idea to go in that direction. Riley conceded that the Age of Enlightenment was perhaps a more attractive choice than the Soviet Experiment, by which time reason had grown overconfident of its ability to solve everything, thereby provoking disaster. During the French and American Revolutions, however, things were still more finely balanced.

  Roger agreed. It was, he said, a time when people believed in the scientific process but didn't take its products for granted as they did today. After all, the late twentieth century had televisions and refrigerators and rockets to the moon as proof that science worked. Two hundred years ago, its achievements weren't so obvious. They were ideas more than achievements: an approach, not an answer.

  Sam said that if it came to a choice between the American and French Revolutions, then Maggie's point about language should probably be the deciding factor.

  “English was spoken in Paris,” Drew said. “Jefferson was in Paris then. And Benjamin Franklin. And what about Lafayette?”

  Roger admitted to being no military historian, an ignorance which Joanna doubted because she had seen him notice the brief look of unease on Maggie's face as she realized that she knew next to nothing about Lafayette. Roger, she surmised, was merely being gallant-and Wondered vaguely whether there was any truth in Sam's joke about him looking for a fifth wife.

  Barry volunteered a brief sketch of Lafayette's life. Born into an immensely rich aristocratic French family in 1757, he had been a courtier of Louis XVI, but in 1777 had gone of his own accord to America to fight against the British in the American Revolution. He was appointed a major general, struck up a lasting friendship with George Washington, and distinguished himself at the Battle of Brandywine in Pennsylvania. In 1779 he returned to France and persuaded the government to send a six thousand?man expeditionary force to help the colonists. He was central to the Americans‚ decisive victory over the British at Yorktown in 1781. A hero now in both countries, he returned to France and there became leader of the liberal aristocrats, championing religious toleration and campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade. In 1789 he was one of the first leaders of the French Revolution, but found his essentially reformist instincts outstripped by the revolutionary zeal of Robespierre and others. After failing to save the monarchy, he fled to Austria in 1792. He returned to France under Napoleon in 1799, and lived more than another thirty years as a gentleman farmer and member of the Chamber of Deputies. His popularity in America had never dimmed, and when he paid a visit in 1824-25 he was received with wild adulation and given every conceivable honor.

  “It's a good story,” Sam said, “but we can't use him because he's a real person.”

  “But we could easily invent an American who went back to France with him,” Barry countered. “Some hero-worshiping kid from New England who gets idealistically involved in the Revolution and winds up on the guillotine.”

  Murmurs of approval greeted the idea all around the table, the general feeling being summed up by Maggie McBride.

  “I think that's a very good idea, I really do. An American in Paris. Very nice.”

  15

  His mother's eyes were red from having cried all night. He wanted to put his arms around her and promise her that everything would be all right, that they would see each other again one day. But that was not how things were done in their family. He could no more tell her that he loved her and would weep for missing her than she could tell him how bitter was the sense of her impending loss. Her only son was going to France with the great General Lafayette, and in some part of herself she knew with certainty that she would never see him again. Yet when he'd asked her why her eyes were red, she'd brushed him aside with an impatient answer. The dust was troubling her. She had a sensitivity to the grass and flowers in the summer, and to the fine white powder that hung like a mist in the air of the grain mill. “Eat up, now,” was all she said. “You have a day's ride before you and you cannot journey on an empty stomach.”

  She busied herself with unnecessary tasks, frowning sternly through the noise and clatter that she made with pots and pans and crockery while her son ate his final breakfast in her kitchen. Through the window she could see her husband, Joseph, saddling up the horses with Edward, the young groom. He started toward the house, moving with his habitual solemn gait, and she knew the moment was upon them. She took a deep breath and prepared herself for parting.

  They embraced stiffly, mother and son, unused to such contact. He gripped the Bible she had pressed into his hand and promised he would treasure it. She watched from the yard as they rode together down the track and toward the trees. He turned back once and raised his hand. She raised hers, too far away for him to see it tremble. As they disappeared beneath the dense green foliage, she turned quickly and walked back into her kitchen.

  Adam Wyatt felt a weight fall gradually from his shoulders as he rode beside his silent father down the Hudson River toward New York. The lack of contact between them that had been at first oppressive ceased to trouble him, and his thoughts turned toward the great adventure that was opening up before him. It was pure chance that had brought him to the notice of the great Frenchman, an unthinking deed that passed for bravery in the crucible of war. A horse had broken loose and would have betrayed the position of Lafayette's troops as they dug in to lay final siege, under General Washington's command, to the British at Yorktown. It mattered little whether Adam's bold action in preventing the animal's escape had made one jot of difference to the outcome of the engagement; General Lafayette himself had witnessed the incident and had the young man brought to him for commendation. He had taken a liking to the young American and had him transferred to his command. Adam's intelligent and questioning nature-about everything from political theory to science and philosophy-had further recommended him to the sophisticated and good-hearted Frenchman. He had even arranged for the boy to have lessons in the French language when he showed interest in it. Now here he was, not two years on and just turned twenty years of age, heading for France as one of the general's personal staff. He would see and learn things he had so far never dreamed of; and of course he would be seen as something of an ambassador for his new and vigorous young country with its commitment to equality and freedom, ideals that were fast gaining currency in Europe.

  He shook his father's solemnly proffered hand on the outskirts of New York, then Joseph Wyatt turned to head for home. His only reason for making the journey had been to take back the horse that Adam had ridden, and he had no wish to linger amid the fest
ive crowds still celebrating George Washington's triumphant return to the city. Adam wandered happily for several hours, drinking in the sights and sounds of celebration, then presented himself at the appointed dock for embarkation on the great sailing ship that would set forth at first tide on the five-week voyage to Bordeaux in France.

  The sickness of the first few days (it was the first time he had been to sea) soon passed, and he found himself invigorated by the salty cleanness of the wind that gusted them briskly on their way. He didn't see a great deal of the general on the trip-or “Marquis,” as he was instructed to call him henceforth; the war was over and military titles could be set aside. He was given daily lessons in French, and instructed on protocol in readiness for his arrival. The Marquis de Lafayette, for all his commitment to libertarian politics and the dignity of man, remained an aristocrat who moved in the highest court and diplomatic circles, and those who moved with him were expected to behave appropriately. During those five weeks at sea Adam learned how to speak, move, and even think more like a nobleman than the farmer he had always been. The food onboard was simple, but he grew accustomed to having it served to him by deferential crew members, who also filled his glass with wines of an astounding subtlety and richness of taste the like of which he had never known. The Adam Wyatt who finally set foot on French soil in the port of Bordeaux was no longer the same Adam Wyatt who had embarked in New York.