Superstition

by David Ambrose

  Roger stroked his mustache and looked down at the floor. Pete sat with his hands between his knees. Ward Riley sat with legs crossed and arms folded, his gaze searching the ceiling.

  “I suppose the question in front of us,” Ward said eventually, breaking a silence that was becoming charged with awkwardness, “is whether we feel we should do something or not?”

  “Such as?” Sam asked.

  “Should we at least say something-to Drew and Barry's family? The police? Or this priest even? About what's been happening in the group?”

  Once again nobody spoke. Then Sam said, “We can't be sure that what happened in the group was what they were going to see this Father Caplan about.”

  Roger gave a grunt of bleak amusement.” Why don't we just assume it was?”

  “All right,” Sam said after a moment, “let's assume that we all know why they were going to see the priest. There's nothing we can say or do that would change the situation, or throw any light on it-at least not what most people would call light.”

  “Can I say something?” Pete's voice was tight and trembled slightly, his chin still thrust down on his chest. “There's something I can't get out of my mind. I have to say it.” He glanced up briefly. “I'm sorry, Sam.”

  “Say anything you like, Pete. That's what we're here for.”

  “A few years ago I met a woman, it wasn't a relationship or anything, just somebody I knew. She claimed she'd been a witch when she was younger, but wasn't anymore. She said never underestimate the power of witchcraft. They can kill you just as easily as look at you. No one ever suspects, because it always seems like an accident. You fall down the stairs. Or your horse bolts. Or your car just goes off the road for no reason. What they do is make you see things that aren't there. You follow a road that looks normal, but it takes you over a cliff, or into a wall. Whatever. That's how they do it.”

  He fell silent, hunched like a child in defiance of the chastisement he knew was coming. Sam walked behind the sofa and laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “It's okay, Pete. We all feel the same way.”

  “Do you?” Joanna didn't know that she was going to ask the question until it came from her lips almost as an accusation.

  Sam looked at her in mild surprise but without resentment. “I think there'd be something wrong with any of us if we didn't. It's natural that we're looking for reasons for Drew and Barry's death, and Maggie's. And of course, in view of what's been happening, we're looking in the obvious places. I think it's inevitable. But I think it's mistaken.”

  “You think their deaths were just accidents?” Roger asked him. There was a rhetorical edge to the question, challenging Sam to show them just how far he was prepared to press his rationalism in the face of what was happening.

  “I think it's clear,” Sam said, “that Maggie's death was from natural causes, arguably precipitated by stress. But it's the coincidence of these other deaths that makes us look for a connection. And frankly I don't see the evidence for one.”

  Joanna felt her patience snap. “For God's sake, Sam, you're in denial about this.”

  He looked at her with a flash of real concern. She felt guilty suddenly, as though she'd betrayed him. “No,” he said, “I'm just trying to look at it calmly and rationally. It's my job to look at things like this calmly and rationally. That's the whole point of this experiment.”

  “Damn the experiment!” Her anger slipped out of her control only for an instant before she pulled it back. “I'm sorry. All of this is as much my fault as anybody's-more.”

  “It's nobody's fault,” Sam said.

  “Whatever. Let's just agree we're going to abandon the experiment.”

  Sam turned his hands up in a gesture of surrender. “I've always said, that's up to each of us individually.” He looked around at them. “Personally, I still intend to go on-with all of you, or some of you, or with different groups of volunteers. I think we've achieved an extraordinary breakthrough, and I'm reluctant to abandon it easily.”

  “I don't think any of us is abandoning it easily,” Roger said quietly.

  “But you are abandoning it?”

  Now it was Sam pressing Roger to define where he stood.

  Roger pushed himself up from the sofa and paced the few steps to the window where Joanna sat. The rain was beating hard and a faint mist of condensation had formed on the inside. He gazed out toward the vaguely discernible lights along the river.

  “Do you remember what I said last time we had this discussion?” he asked, his back to the room. “I said that whatever this phenomenon was that we'd started, the best thing we could do was stop it.” He turned. “I feel that even more strongly now.”

  “Aren't you curious about how this ‘phenomenon’ works?” Sam asked.

  “As a matter of fact, not very. I got involved in this thing for a number of reasons, some frivolous, some less so.” He crossed the room to where a jug of water and some tumblers stood on a tray, and poured himself a drink. “You probably thought that my main aim was to prove you wrong and crow over your failure to produce any phenomena at all. On the contrary, I was fairly confident that we'd produce something. I was equally confident that it wouldn't make any sense, and that we wouldn't know how we were doing it. All of which is consistent with my view of the fundamental laws of nature-or, more precisely, the lack of them. Because I don't believe there are any fundamental laws, or any final theory. I think the only laws we'll ever find are the ones we impose on nature by the way we look at it.”

  “The participatory universe,” Sam said, folding his arms and regarding his old teacher with a measure of ironic detachment. “We make it up as we go along.”

  Roger acknowledged with a nod. “In a nutshell, yes. I believe that to be the role of consciousness in the universe.”

  “This is all very interesting, but perhaps a little academic under the circumstances.” There was an icy sharpness in Joanna's voice that reflected the anger she suddenly felt toward both of them at that moment, and that she made no effort to conceal. “What we need now is not some alternative theory of life, death, the universe, and everything. What we need is to find out whether this ‘thing’ we've created, or raised from wherever, whatever it is, had anything to do with these deaths.”

  Pete cleared his throat. “Why don't we ask it?”

  Joanna looked at him. “Are you serious?”

  “If anybody's got a better idea…”

  He looked around, inviting offers. There was none.

  “The problem is,” Roger said, “how would we know whether it was telling the truth or not?”

  Pete acknowledged with a shrug that he had no answer. “It's just a starting point. I would like to ask Adam, ‘Did you or did you not play any part in those deaths?’”

  A sound like a hammer blow came from somewhere in the bookshelves behind where Pete sat. He sprang to his feet and whipped around. Everyone was looking at the same spot, but there was nothing to see.

  For some moments they didn't breathe or move. Then Pete, almost inaudibly, said the thing they were all thinking, “One rap for yes.”

  Sam turned on him angrily. “For God's sake, Pete, you of all people can't take this seriously. It's nonsense-just a reflection of our own fears.”

  Ward held up a hand. “No-let's go on with it.”

  “Do you really expect to find out anything like this?” The idea seemed to shock Sam more than anything had shocked him in a long time.

  “Perhaps.”

  Sam hesitated, then held up his hands to signal that he was backing off from any confrontation. “All right, if that's how you all feel…”

  Joanna aimed her question in the general direction of the bookshelves and the space around them. “Who are you? Are you Cagliostro?”

  Two sharp raps came from the same place as before.

  “So you're Adam?”

  One rap.

  Sam turned away, dismissing the whole performance with a contemptuous scything of the air.

 
“Adam,” Joanna continued, ignoring Sam's disapproval, “did you cause the deaths of Barry and Drew this morning?”

  One rap-sharp, clear, unambiguous.

  Shaken, but determined to go on, Joanna asked simply and directly, “Why?”

  She realized at once that she had put a question not answerable by yes or no, and started to rephrase it. But Pete had already pulled a few blank pages from a shelf.

  “We'll need a board,” he said, “I'll write out an alphabet, we can improvise. Unless, that is, Sam happens to have-”

  “I have nothing here.” Sam saw Pete hesitate, intimidated by the harshness of his tone. “All right,” he added, “go ahead, get on with it. Let's just do it.”

  “I don't think that will be necessary.”

  Something in the way Roger had spoken made them all turn to follow his gaze. He was looking at the window before which he had been standing a short time ago, and where Joanna had been seated until she'd jumped up and crossed the room with the rest of them.

  The silvery gray film of condensation on it now bore the imprint of three words written as though by an unseen finger in a forward-sloping, well-formed script, and followed by an exclamation point.

  “Joie de vivre!”

  32

  Her first impulse had been to run, to put as much distance as she could between herself and those taunting, somehow unspeakably evil words.

  But distance, she realized, offered no escape. Physics spoke of a curved space-time continuum, but the thought had been a mere abstraction until now. Suddenly it described a trap, surreal, inescapable, and singular, that she and all of them were in.

  She looked around at the three men with her. Pete was white and standing with his arms pressed hard against his stomach, looking as though he might pitch forward any second in a faint. Ward Riley stood erect and preternaturally still, scarcely breathing as he gazed in grim silence at the ominous scrawl on the window. Roger Fullerton's shoulders had a slope to them that she had never seen before, reflecting, it seemed to her, a passivity made up in equal parts of shock and resignation, as though things had reached a point where further comment was impossible.

  Only Sam reacted with what might, in more normal circumstances, have been called presence of mind. He had crossed the room and grabbed a camera almost before she realized he had moved, and was already clicking off shot after shot of the scrawled message, hopping from one side of the window to the other, moving in and out and shifting focus like some paparazzo ambushing his subject in a restaurant door.

  Joanna felt her anger rise again. She wanted to scream at him, accuse him of all the things she had accused him of earlier-only more violently, because it was worse now. The thing was actually in the room with them, turning their lives and everything they believed in upside down-and all he could do was take photographs, like some fool on a day out at the beach.

  She felt a gentle pressure on her arm. Roger Fullerton had come to her side, and she saw concern in his eyes. She thought how odd it was, funny almost, that a moment ago she had been watching him, and now she found him watching her. She opened her mouth, wanting to say something, make some joke about it, but all that emerged from her throat was a shuddering sound that ended in a sob. She didn't resist as Roger guided her to the sofa and settled her onto it. She looked at him and nodded mutely in thanks for his kindness. He reached out to brush a lock of hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear, a gesture of such tenderness that she felt her eyes sting with tears.

  Then Sam was on his knees before her, looking up anxiously into her face. He took her hands in his.

  “You all right…?”

  “I'm fine.”

  The words came out clearly, cleanly, their sound somehow filling the void inside her into which for a second she had been afraid she might implode. The worst had passed. Reality, or something approaching it, was beginning to return.

  Her gaze moved to the camera that still hung around Sam's neck. He gave a faint smile, sheepish and apologetic. “I had to get pictures. It's not something you see every day.”

  She wanted to laugh, but she didn't trust herself: she was afraid that something else might come out. So she just shook her head and held on to his hands a little tighter.

  “Don't be afraid,” he said, “it's nothing that can hurt us.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. The anger she had felt earlier welled up in her again. She snatched her hands from his. “How can you say that? It's already killed Maggie, and Drew and Barry…!”

  “We don't know that. We don't know it, and I don't believe it.”

  The others were looking at them, but she felt no embarrassment. They were all in this together, and there was nothing that any of them could say that didn't affect them all.

  “Then just what do you believe, Sam? Would you like to tell us what's going on?”

  “ We are doing it. Maggie died of a heart attack, Drew and Barry died in an accident. We are looking for reasons.” He pointed to the words on the window. “ We did that.”

  She sat back in impatience and closed her eyes, too weary and frustrated to argue, and too unsure of her ground. Besides, what difference did it make? Things happened; understanding why they happened didn't change them.

  There was a silence in the room, broken by Ward.

  “‘Joie de vivre,’” he murmured. “It's an everyday French phrase for which there's no equivalent in English. We don't say ‘joy of living,’ we use the French. ‘Joie de vivre.’”

  Pete too looked over at the window, where the words were still visible, although the condensation was beginning to evaporate. “You'd have to be pretty much a psycho to use ‘joie de vivre’ as a reason for killing somebody.”

  Sam was on his feet again, moving in close to the window for a few last shots, using flash this time.

  “Unless in some twisted way,” Joanna began, taking up Pete's remark, “he saw his ‘joy of living’ as somehow incompatible with that of his victims.”

  Pete looked at her. “Why would that be?”

  “Other worlds.”

  The remark had come from Roger, murmured more to himself than in response to Pete's question. He was sitting in an armchair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, and gazing at his clasped hands.

  Joanna said, “Sorry, Roger?”

  He straightened up and looked at them all. “The world in which Adam exists cannot include a future in which there are people who will invent him. As Joanna says, it's a problem of compatibility.”

  Sam turned from the window, removing the finished roll of film from his camera. “Aren't we getting a little speculative here, Roger? Even by what you used to call the ‘liberal standards of paranormal research’?”

  Roger smiled thinly. “I was merely offering an idea.”

  “One that sounds uncomfortably plausible,” Ward said quietly, “and all the more reason why we have to terminate this thing.”

  “But what are you saying ‘this thing’ is?” Sam persisted, joining them.

  “Basically, I share your view,” Ward said. “Adam is something we've created. A thought-form. Whether he's responsible for these deaths, I don't know. How would we prove it either way? But I do know that he or ‘it’-this ‘force’-is now beyond our control, and I think we need help if we're going to do something about that.”

  Sam looked at him differently. “Help?” An edge of suspicion had entered his voice. “What kind of help exactly?”

  Ward hesitated, tipping his head noncommittally. “I'd like to talk to some people.”

  “May we know who?” The question wasn't put aggressively, but it implied what they were all thinking: that they were in this together and had a right to know who else he proposed involving.

  Ward understood, and replied willingly. “It's really just one person. I suppose you'd call him a guru, or a kind of one.” He gave a slight laugh. “Although I don't know how many kinds there are. I've known him twenty years. He doesn't have a cult or a following-at least not o
ne where the members know each other. I know a couple of people he's taught, one of whom passed him on to me. I don't know where he's from or where he lives. He travels all the time, can be anywhere in the world, but if you need him you'll always track him down with a few phone calls.”

  “What does he do for an encore-sing a duet with himself, or perform a rain dance?” The question came from Roger, and the uncharacteristic sarcasm was jarring.

  But Ward took no offense and looked over at him with a kind of dry amusement. “In view of what we've all been through recently, I'm not about to apologize for anything I say that might sound marginally superstitious. Frankly, I'd have thought we were all beyond embarrassment on that score.” As he spoke his eyes flickered to the window, where the writing was still visible, though drops of condensation were running down the glass now, making dark lines through and underneath the words.

  “Like it or not,” Ward said, “something has taken root in our lives. It makes no rational sense, but we all know it's happened. Whether it killed Maggie, or Drew and Barry, I don't know. Whether it wants to kill all of us, or why…I don't know that, either. But I want to talk about it to this man, because he's the only person I can think of who'll maybe make sense of it.”

  He crossed to where his overcoat lay on the back of a chair. Nobody spoke as he began to put it on.

  “By the way,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “he cured me of pancreatic cancer twelve years ago-solely through diet and meditation. Of course the medical profession says that's nonsense, it was a spontaneous remission that would have happened anyway, as they do in a small percentage of cases.” He shrugged. “Who can say? I know what I believe.”

  He took a step toward the door, then turned again. “I'll be in touch in a couple of days, Sam. Three at the most.”

  Roger started to follow him. “I'll walk out with you, we can share a cab.”

  He paused to say good night to Joanna, planting a kiss on her cheek, then carried on after Ward.

  “Look, I didn't mean to belittle the idea. On the contrary, the way things are going in physics, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody discovered a new particle called ‘superstition’ any day now…”