Superstition

by David Ambrose

  “All right, all right, I know you've heard me before on the subject. All I'm saying is we should look at other explanations before jumping on a bandwagon that is already so full of crooks and phonies that there's very little room left on it anyway.”

  “You know as well as I do, Roger,” Sam continued, “that Bell's Theorem leaves the door wide open to nonlocal causality.”

  Roger sniffed disdainfully. “I know that a facile interpretation of Bell might. But as to what he actually said…”

  Joanna was about to ask for an explanation, but instead let them fight it out uninterrupted, in the knowledge that she could play back her tape later and pose any questions she needed to.

  Sam was arguing that certain experiments had proven that communication faster than the speed of light was a reality; Roger insisted that such a view was simply a misinterpretation of what had actually happened.

  “The price you have to pay for a naive and simplistic interpretation of Bell,” he said, summing up and giving his adjectives the bite of an actor playing in a Coward revival, “is that the universe is woven together in a fabric that makes absolutely no sense in terms of anything we have so far discovered or even conceived. Once you've accepted that, you've opened the floodgates to every kind of nonsense from astrology to numerology and all the rest of it. Sheer intellectual anarchy.”

  They paused for a moment as the waiter brought their appetizers. Sam forked up a mouthful of delicate, lobster-filled ravioli. “You know, Roger, any minute now you're going to start denying that that table actually moved the other day.”

  “Sam, that's unfair,” Joanna protested. “Roger has volunteered to go public with this and put his credibility on the line.”

  “Thank you, Joanna,” Roger said, beaming her his most winning smile.

  “You're right. I'm sorry, Roger,” Sam conceded. “And I'm not saying that just because you're buying lunch-honest.”

  Roger ignored the cheerfully backhanded apology. “I'm merely saying that our assumptions as to how this effect works must be as circumspect as our observation that it does.”

  “The only assumption I'm working on,” Sam said, “is that the effect is a mental one and the source is ourselves. I take it we're agreed on that.”

  “Demons or the dead would make a lot more sense than some of the ideas you've been hawking.”

  “Roger, Joanna's getting this on tape. Now tell her you're not serious.”

  Roger twirled a forkful of spaghetti and seafood, then held it suspended in the air as he delivered his final word on the subject. “On the contrary, I would give precedence to the impossible over the merely unintelligible every time.”

  It was just after midnight when Joanna let herself into her apartment. She'd spent the evening with Sam but had taken a cab home because she wanted to make an early start on her story. She switched on the light, slipped out of her coat, and started to flip through the mail that she'd picked up from her box in the hallway. It was mostly the usual bills and circulars. There was an invitation to a wedding, which she'd been expecting for some time; a letter from a girlfriend working for a bank in Sydney, which she decided she would read in the morning; and a postcard from her parents in Paris.

  She read the message, a hastily scribbled list of where they'd been and what they'd done, written by her mother and with a kiss from her father squeezed in at the bottom. Then she turned it over to look at the picture.

  It was a reproduction of what must have been a large oil painting. She thought for a moment that she'd seen it before. It reminded her of some of the illustrations in the books she'd been researching on the French Revolution and looked as though it came from the same period. It had an artificially staged quality, the kind of formal portrait that captured some significant event in which its subject played a central role. She thought she recognized the languid figure in the uniform and cockaded hat, and sure enough, when she turned the card over and read the details printed in one corner, she saw that it was Lafayette taking his oath to the Constitution in Paris, 1790.

  She turned the card again to study the picture in more detail. She knew now that she hadn't seen it before, but at the same time something in it tugged at her memory. She looked at Lafayette and at the carefully posed figures surrounding him. Some of them were classically idealized with an almost religious purity glowing from their faces; others were grotesque and clownlike, the exultant, celebrating mob.

  Suddenly, with a shock that made her catch her breath, she saw what her mind must already have registered unconsciously but which her eyes only now brought into focus.

  Standing on one side of the picture, almost as resplendently uniformed as Lafayette himself and waving his hat on the tip of his sword, was Adam Wyatt.

  21

  She went into the kitchen, boiled some water, and poured it over a sachet of vervain tea. Then she sat nursing her cup and looking at the postcard and debating whether to call Sam and tell him about it. In the end she decided not to; it would be pointless without showing him the picture. She would do it tomorrow.

  Although she had been pleasantly tired when she arrived home, her mind was racing now and all thought of sleep abandoned. She rummaged through her desk in search of the magnifying glass she knew was there somewhere.

  Enlarged, the face in the painting was even more unmistakably the same as the one sketched by Drew Hearst that hung on the wall of Sam's lab, in the basement that they now called Adam's room. The expression wasn't the same. Here he was animated, caught up in the excitement of the moment, cheering on his hero. But it was the same man.

  The most likely explanation, she told herself, was that Drew had seen the picture somewhere and unconsciously reproduced the face when she made her drawing. Yet the drawing had been a committee project. They had all made their suggestions as to how Adam should look, the length of his hair, the color of his eyes, and so forth. Like a police artist, Drew had sketched the person they were trying to describe from the picture they had formed of him in their imaginations. It was impossibly unlikely that they had all seen this particular painting or a copy of it and remembered it unconsciously. Certainly, Joanna was sure that she hadn't. And the notion that they had come up purely by accident with a face in a picture they had never seen was too improbable even to consider.

  Tomorrow, she told herself, she would start looking for answers. This had to be resolved before she could go any further with the story. She checked the back of the postcard once again for the name of the collection. She would make inquiries, find out everything that was known about this picture-including the names, if they were recorded, of the people portrayed in it.

  She drifted at last into a fitful sleep, comforting herself with the thought that she was a journalist and her job was to find answers. There were always answers if you looked hard enough.

  Always.

  When she awoke at four a.m., she knew at once what was happening. Perspiring and shivering, with an aching head, she had obviously picked up the flu that had been going around her office for the past two weeks. After making her way groggily to the bathroom and taking two aspirin, she dozed uncomfortably until dawn, then fell heavily asleep until almost nine.

  She accepted the fact that she was going to feel like this for at least forty-eight hours regardless of any medication she might take. The only thing to do was stay in bed and drink endless cups of herbal tea. Luckily she had a good supply in the apartment. She called her office and told them to forget about her for the next few days. Then she called Sam and told him that she would have to miss that evening's meeting of the group.

  Normally when someone missed a session, which had inevitably happened from time to time, the others carried on without them. However, as the whole thing had been set up originally for Joanna to write about, he suggested they should cancel and wait until she was better. She hesitated. She wanted to tell him about the postcard, but would rather show him than try to describe it over the phone. Almost as though reading her thoughts, he said he wo
uld come by at lunchtime. She warned him about catching her bug, but he laughed and said he never caught anything, adding that if she thought of something she wanted him to bring she should call him at the lab.

  She slept again until the phone rang. It was the doorman to say that Sam was downstairs. Joanna quickly tried to repair the unattractive image she saw in her bathroom mirror. When the bell rang she hurried to the door and let him take her in his arms, almost crushing the flowers and the carrier bag containing lunch that he had brought.

  Before they ate or did anything else, Joanna went to the desk in the annex of her living room where she had left the postcard. She clearly remembered leaving it on her computer keyboard, but now it wasn't there. Nor was it anywhere among the papers on her desk. The rest of her mail was there, including the still unread letter from Australia. But not the postcard.

  Feeling annoyed and a little bit strange, she went through to the kitchen where Sam was preparing a salad. She found him standing with the postcard in his hand, flipping from the picture to the message on the back.

  “Where did you find that?” The question came out more sharply than she had intended, almost an accusation.

  “I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry. It was just propped up here and caught my eye.”

  She looked at the shelf he nodded toward and frowned. “I don't remember putting it there. I was trying to find it to show you. Isn't it amazing?”

  He looked at her as though he didn't know what she meant. “Isn't what amazing?”

  “The picture. Look!” She pointed to the figure on the left. “It's Adam-exactly the way Drew drew him.”

  Sam stared harder at the picture. “I suppose there's some similarity,” he conceded grudgingly, “but I can't say I'd have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out.”

  She almost snatched the postcard away from him in disbelief. “For heaven's sake, it's absolutely obvious!” But then she stopped. In all honesty, it wasn't as obvious as it had seemed last night.

  He watched her, his concern growing as he saw the puzzlement in her face. “What's all this about?”

  She looked from the card to him and back to the card. “I looked at this when I got in last night. I was so bowled over that I almost called you. It was Adam to the life!”

  “And now it isn't?”

  “Well, obviously it isn't. There's a similarity, as you say, but no more.” She put the card back on the shelf where he said he'd found it. “Is that where it was?”

  He moved it slightly to the left. “Right there.”

  “That's really odd.”

  “I guess this is where I'm supposed to say it can't have gotten there by itself.” He laughed gently as he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. “Listen, I think you're getting a little spooked about this. When you got home last night you must have been already starting to run a temperature. Your responses were a little off. You saw this, and after what we'd been talking about all day…!”

  “I know what I saw.”

  “I'm not saying you didn't. But you just admitted you don't see it now. This picture happens to be in one of the books about the revolution that we have at the lab. Even if you don't remember seeing it, you must have. Next thing, you get this card from your parents and realize there's something strangely familiar about it. Which is where the mind starts to play tricks-especially when there's a flu virus messing with it.”

  “That's very rational. I just wish it sounded more convincing.”

  “What's not convincing?”

  “For one thing, it's quite an odd coincidence that my parents should send this particular card.”

  “I don't see why. They know that what we're doing involves Lafayette, they find themselves in some museum…”

  “All right, all right!” She held up her hands in surrender. “Let's forget it. ‘Hysterical Woman Gets Flu and Sees Ghost.’ Enough.”

  “Seeing a ghost is what we're hoping to do-one that we've created just as you created one in this picture by projecting your mind's-eye view of Adam onto it.”

  “I said I'm not arguing, okay? I quit.”

  “Sorry, I didn't mean to be a bore…”

  She held her hands up further, then made a zipping motion over her lips to indicate that the conversation was at an end. He laughed again. “Go sit down and I'll bring you some lunch.”

  A few minutes later they were sitting by the window with plates on their knees. “By the way,” he said, “I've been thinking about it, and if it's all right with you I think I'd like to go ahead with tonight's session.”

  “Sure,” she said, “it's fine with me.”

  “After all, we'll have it all on tape, so you won't miss anything. And we've got such a good momentum going I don't want to lose it.”

  “You're right. I'll be okay for the next one.”

  He reached for the salad bowl as she finished her plate. “Can I give you some more?”

  “Isn't there some rule about feed a cold and starve a fever?” she asked as he served her.

  “Old wives’ tale,” he said with a dismissive grin. “Don't believe a word of it. Worst kind of superstition.”

  22

  Clifton Webb was sitting in his bath, typing up some vitriolic review, and Joanna was telling herself how much he reminded her of Ward Riley. Or was it that Ward Riley reminded her of Clifton Webb? He was younger than the actor and less mannered, but she could imagine him perfectly as the waspish Waldo Lydecker in Laura, which she was watching on cable for the fourth or fifth time and enjoying as much as ever.

  The sound that exploded in the room made her think that somebody had fired a gun and a bullet had hit the wall. She knew the sound couldn't have come from the television. It had been too real and was still echoing in her ears. Besides, she knew the film and nobody fired anything in that scene.

  It happened again. This time she sprang out of bed, tripped on her robe, and stumbled to the safety of a corner where she would not be a target for any idiot firing shots from the street. But she could see, peering cautiously from her window, that there was nobody out there, and no hole where a bullet had pierced the glass.

  Shaken, she crossed to where the impact had seemed to come from. There was no mark on the plaster, nothing to explain what had happened.

  A hammer blow at the door of her apartment made her spin with a gasp of alarm. She stood perfectly still, waiting for what would happen next, expecting to hear the door burst open. But there was only silence.

  She edged around her bedroom door and down the narrow corridor into the tiny hall, where she peered through the peephole. The landing was deserted. If anyone had been there, they had gone.

  But she knew that no one had been there, at least not in the normal sense. Some instinct told her that she had just had a visit from Adam.

  She noted with interest that the thought left her strangely calm and with none of the alarm that she had initially felt.

  Sam was there by nine-fifteen. She'd left a message on the machine in his office, and he'd picked it up after the session. He'd called her at once and said he was coming right over with the tape.

  It was time coded in one corner, and she watched the figures flashing by as he fast-forwarded to the point which she already knew was going to synchronize precisely with the time at which she had heard the sounds in her apartment.

  “Here it is.” He pressed the remote control and the images on screen assumed normal speed. The group, minus Joanna, were seated as usual around the table, using the Ouija board and pointer, which moved around quickly, pulling them by the touch of their fingertips this way and that.

  “‘Where…is…Joanna?’” She heard Sam's voice reading the message as it was spelled out letter by letter.

  “Joanna's home sick,” he replied. “But I'm sure she'll be back next time. Do you have any message for her?”

  The pointer drew their outstretched arms to the word “Yes.”

  “What message do you have for her?” Sam prompted. But there was no
further movement.

  “Stop!” Joanna reached for the remote control and froze the image on the screen, including the time code in the top right-hand corner. It was 7:43 p.m. “That's exactly when it happened,” she said. “I leapt out of bed and stood over there in the corner, thinking somebody must be shooting out in the street. I don't know why, but I looked over at the clock, and it was 7:43. Then there was a crash at the door.”

  “Looks like you guessed right,” Sam said. “It was Adam saying ‘Hi!’”

  “You know the weirdest part of this?” she said after a moment. “It's the way I'm just taking it all for granted. If you'd told me six months ago that I'd react to some disembodied banging on the wall with, ‘Oh, that's just Adam, some ghost we made up,’ I'd have told you to your face that you were nuts. Now that's exactly what I'm doing, and I don't know why. What's happened to me?”

  “Your horizons have broadened a little, that's all. You had a mind-set that said everything claiming to be paranormal had to be by definition phony. Now you've seen that it isn't. On the contrary, it's really kind of ordinary.”

  “I still think there's something weird about it all somewhere. In fact I'm beginning to get confused about what I really think.”

  “You're not the only one.” She sensed an unaccustomed tiredness in his voice as he reached for the remote and pressed play.

  “I don't think he has any message to give us for Joanna.” It was Sam's voice again, from the TV speaker this time.

  “I'm sure he'd rather deliver it to her personally,” Roger said with a chuckle, “like any sensible fellow.”

  Joanna and Sam exchanged a look, but neither made a comment.

  “All right, Adam,” the on-screen Sam was saying, “you're starting to repeat all your old tricks and we're starting to get bored. Wouldn't you like to try something new?”

  The pointer moved again, tugging their fingers around to spell out “SUCH AS?”

  “Well, for instance,” Sam said, “we're hoping to see you at some point. Can you manifest yourself to us?”