Superstition

by David Ambrose

  Ralph had taken a bunch of keys from his pocket, but kept them in his fist for the time being. “I don't know whether I should be giving you the keys to my house, or calling Bellevue and having you put under restraint,” he said. “But after last night, I guess I have to give you the benefit of the doubt.”

  He held out the keys. Sam took them.

  “Thanks,” he said. “If you move out of the hotel, let me know where I can find you.”

  60

  It took him several hours to write down the whole story. He wrote in longhand, sitting at the desk in the music room where Ralph composed his operas, which were mostly unperformed, although several orchestral pieces had been recorded on CDs that Sam found in a rack on the wall. He played a couple, and found them interesting but too obviously influenced by other composers to be memorable. He reflected, ungenerously perhaps, that it was the work of someone wealthy enough to indulge his passion, though not talented enough to earn a living from it. But he made no comment on the music in what he wrote, seeing no cause to offend the man who would most likely be the one to find and read the document.

  It was only when that thought crossed his mind that Sam asked himself whether the words he was writing were in anticipation of his own death, a kind of valediction. He realized that they were. Although he did not assume that he was going to die (he no longer assumed anything), he did not see how he could continue to exist in his present state indefinitely. Six of the group were dead, and Joanna- his Joanna-had entered some strange limbo on the margins of a changed world in which he now found himself.

  He did not speculate further upon his personal fate, merely wrote down the story in all the detail that he could recall, starting with his reading in Around Town of Joanna's expose of Camp Starburst and the cynical manipulations of Ellie and Murray Ray. He wrote of his first meeting with Joanna in a television studio, and then later on Sixth Avenue after her unnerving confrontation with Ellie. He wrote of how the idea of the experiment had been born, and how his relationship with Joanna had grown with it. In swift and simple prose he set down all that had happened from that time until the time of writing almost twelve months later, and a universe apart.

  What does that mean, a universe apart? Am I speaking of parallel worlds? And if so, what does that mean? It's just an idea, a way, one of many, of describing the strangeness of nature when we examine her closely. We know that in truth there is only one world: the one we are in. We know too that concepts like space and time are merely constructs of our consciousness, not things “out there” existing independently of us.

  Physicists, it is said, have paid a high price for their understanding of nature: they have lost their hold on reality. Of course, that was “reality” as defined by common sense-a transaction between “out there,” where the world was, and “in here,” where we were. Now that distinction has disappeared; the common sense that took it for granted has been proven an untrustworthy ally. There is nothing to lose our hold on anymore. That which holds and that which is held are one and the same; observer and observed are merely parts of a spectrum, neither one existing independently of the other.

  In physics we have had to learn a language that reflects both the precision of our knowledge and the ambiguity revealed by it. An electron, for example, is not a particle or wave; it is both. It exists in a “superposition of states”-until we want it, for the purposes of measurement, to be one or the other. Then it will oblige us.

  The universe in which we live is as much conceived by us as we are by it. Obvious simple rules like cause and effect have lost their power. Niels Bohr defined causality as no more than a method by which we reduce our sense impressions to some kind of order.

  No one disputes the reality of this strangeness on the microscopic level. The only question has been whether it could carry over into the macroscopic world of our daily lives. There is increasing, indeed by now overwhelming, evidence that it can.

  I myself, sitting here, am living proof.

  He set aside his pen and leaned back to look up at the ceiling. It was barely visible beyond the penumbra of the lamp on the desk. Night had fallen while he wrote. He searched for a summing up, a final phrase that would crystallize and give shape to what he was trying to say.

  It was of course a hopeless task. There was no such thing as a last word.

  “Living proof,” he read, and picked up his pen, but wrote no more.

  Because in that moment he had heard her voice. Quite distinctly though not loudly. Nor was he sure where it had come from.

  He stood up silently, as though the least sound he made might frighten her off and he would lose her, perhaps this time for good.

  “Joanna?” he called out softly.

  There was no response. Only then did he realize that, although he'd heard her voice, he had no idea what she'd said. Had he really heard her? Or was his mind playing tricks?

  He stepped out onto the landing and listened in the darkness. The house was silent except for the muffled sound of traffic in the street. He called her name again.

  “Joanna…?”

  Still no response. Then, somewhere above, he heard a faint, brief sound, as though someone had passed quickly and lightly over a loose floorboard.

  The darkness around him grew deeper and more dense as he turned a corner on the stairs, losing the last reflected light from the music room below. He paused and spoke again, in barely a whisper.

  “Joanna, are you there…?”

  Again he heard her voice, closer this time, and in a whisper like his own. There could be no doubt it was her voice, but still he couldn't understand what she was saying.

  “Joanna…? Where are you…?”

  He groped in the darkness for a light switch, and cried out in shock as his hand connected with the feel of warm, firm flesh. Her unseen fingers interlaced themselves with his, and held him tight.

  “I'm here,” she said. Her voice was clear now, so close to him that he could feel her breath on his. Her body pressed against him, soft and warm. He held her naked in his arms, and in the dark her lips found his.

  He felt a movement of her hand against his chest and realized she was unbuttoning his shirt. Brushing her fingers aside, he tore off his clothes in what seemed like a single unbroken movement. He didn't try to speak, he knew he couldn't. The beating of his heart was like a hammer in his chest as she led him blindly through the dark until he felt the bed against his legs.

  They tumbled onto it, devouring one another with a violence and a passion that seemed inexhaustible and endless. The only sounds they made were cries and gasps of need, desire, and satisfaction, until, sated at last, they lay entwined in silence.

  “I'm so happy,” she whispered. “I knew you'd come. There's nothing to be afraid of anymore.”

  He pulled her to him, feeling the swell of her breasts, the curve of her stomach and thighs, and the film of perspiration covering her skin as it pressed against his own. He could feel her, but he could not see her. He knew that the dancing lines and contours he fancied he had glimpsed from time to time as they made love were simply his imagination creating mental images from the sensual contact of their bodies.

  “I want to see you,” he said. “I have to.”

  “Yes, I know.” There was a softness in her voice, as though the words came through a smile of tenderness. Her hand traced the contours of his face. “It's all right. You can put on the light.”

  He reached out to where he remembered seeing a bedside lamp, his fingers feeling for the switch. He found it-but, for some reason he did not fully understand, he hesitated.

  “Don't be afraid,” she said.

  He pressed.

  There was a searing flash of light, like an explosion. Worse even than the pain that scorched his eyes was the blistering, asphyxiating sound-like the roar of an inferno, all around him, all consuming, burning through his brain.

  He didn't know how long it lasted, but as the blinding whiteness faded and the silence gradually returned, there
came too a strange emptiness and an absence of all feeling.

  Somewhere he heard a howl of pain and fear. It was his voice, he knew, but it no longer seemed to be a part of him.

  She spoke again, calm, reassuring, in control, as though she had known all this would happen and was here to guide him through it.

  “It's all right, my darling…don't be afraid…you're safe now…”

  He cried out in startled rage, “I can't see…where am I…?”

  Feeling returned abruptly, as it does after an injury when the body has been momentarily anesthetized by shock. But it was not pain he felt now, merely the sensation of being on his feet, stumbling forward like a blind man, arms outstretched in search of unseen obstacles.

  Her voice came again-so close now that it seemed to be inside his head.

  “Come…come with me…”

  He felt her hand on his, its touch so light as to be barely there at all. He took a few more steps, and then the ground beneath his feet seemed suddenly to fall away.

  But he himself did not fall. It was as though the house, the city, and the world around it were opening into endless space. He felt that he was flying, borne aloft by a mysterious, all-powerful and all-embracing force. He knew that she was with him, but he was not sure how he knew.

  Then the thought came to him that she was not with him, but was now in some way part of him. The idea seemed so obviously and inevitably true that he did not question it, or wonder how it could be so, or where it was that they were going.

  He just relaxed and let what was happening take its course, until it seemed it would go on forever…

  61

  Ralph Cazaubon had tried to call the house all afternoon, without success. The first day he had left Sam Towne to his strange vigil undisturbed, but on the second had found himself wondering so much what was going on that it became hard to concentrate on anything else.

  All the same, he'd waited until after lunch to call. The morning had been spent looking at apartments to rent. So far he'd found nothing that seemed ideal for Joanna and himself, but there was no hurry: she was happy with her parents, and he'd promised to drive out to join her that night. Perhaps they'd take a vacation, he'd suggested, fly off to the sun where they could put the nightmare behind them. She had liked the idea. They said they'd talk about where over dinner.

  So the afternoon was his last chance to find out what was happening with Sam Towne, preferably before dark. Although he disliked admitting it even to himself, he had no wish to be in that house-his house-after dark. He had already made up his mind that he was going to sell it. Even if the events of two nights ago never happened again, he couldn't bring himself to live there any longer. Above all, he couldn't let Joanna take that risk. He hoped only that Sam would somehow find a way of ending the possession that had so mysteriously entered the place; a house in the grip of such a thing would not be easy to sell, not even in that neighborhood and at a bargain price.

  He rang the bell for several minutes before taking the duplicate keys from his pocket and inserting them in the door's two main locks. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves, and entered.

  The coat stand was still where it had been two days ago, so he couldn't push the door all the way back but had to slide through sideways. He saw Sam Towne the moment he was through.

  His naked body lay facedown at the foot of the stairs. His arms were out, as though he'd tried to break his fall, and his head was twisted at an angle that left no doubt that he was dead. His eyes were open as though staring in shock at the pool of his own blood that had congealed on the floor into a patch of dark and lusterless vermilion, almost black in the fading light of the late Manhattan afternoon.

  EPILOGUE

  If I don't go back,” she said, “this thing will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I refuse to accept that. I have to walk through the house just once, and then it will be over. Exorcised.”

  Ralph tried to talk her out of it, but she was adamant. It had been ten days since Sam Towne's death. Ralph had met one of Sam's brothers, who had come down from Boston to arrange for the body to be shipped to Cape Cod for a family funeral. The death had been classified as accidental, with no suspicion of foul play: the fact that the deceased had fallen down the stairs while attempting to establish whether or not the house in which he'd died was haunted was of no great interest to the city authorities. Even if the presumption was that he'd been pushed, the law made no provision for the criminal prosecution of ghosts or other disembodied spirits.

  The only real problem Ralph had had was what to do with the manuscript that he'd found on his desk in the music room. He hadn't discovered it until after the body had been removed. He'd taken it back to the hotel and read it there, after calling Joanna with the tragic news. He read it through twice, and then a third time, before facing up to the fact that he was going to have to make a decision. Even then he'd put it off, slipping the handwritten pages into an envelope that he'd placed in the hotel safe.

  There it had remained for several days, until all the legalities had been taken care of. Even when one of Sam's colleagues from the university, Peggy O'Donovan, had come over to see the place where he had died, Ralph didn't mention its existence. With each day that passed, during which time there was no evidence of any renewed unnatural activity in the house, he grew less inclined to do so.

  He had workmen come in and clean the place up. The mirror in the bathroom was replaced. Nobody reported feeling anything strange or noticing anything out of the ordinary. Even Ralph himself began to feel as much at ease in the house as he had in the past, though he still did not spend a night there, and formally put it in the hands of a real estate agent after a week.

  The more he thought about Sam's manuscript, the less inclined he was to let anyone else see it. Legally and morally, he supposed, it was the property of Sam Towne's family. Or perhaps his colleagues at the university. But the fact that Sam had left no written instruction, no indication whatsoever as to whom he was actually addressing in the document, gave him surely, Ralph thought, some leeway in his choice of what to do with it.

  The night before leaving the hotel and moving into the comfortable apartment he had found on Madison and Sixty-fourth, he took it from the hotel safe and burned it, page by page, in the metal wastepaper basket in his suite. The act made him feel that the whole episode was now over and a line drawn under it. What Sam Towne had written was something that no normal person could accept as any kind of literal truth. It was fantasy at best, the invention of an unbalanced mind. Characters like Ellie and Murray Ray were figures from cheap fiction, not real life. The Joanna Cross to whom the whole unlikely story was supposed to have happened had never existed. The whole thing was best ignored, and if possible forgotten. There was no point in causing needless trouble for himself or, above all, for Joanna. Sam Towne's story was the kind of superstitious nonsense, neither provable nor disprovable, that got printed in the tabloid rags you found on sale at supermarket checkouts. It could blight their lives forever if some sensational rumor of this kind got into circulation. He felt no remorse as he took the blackened ashes to the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet.

  After that he had thought his troubles were over, until Joanna began to insist on returning to the house. Just once, she said. An exorcism. Not of the house but of herself, of her fear that she had been touched by something alien and unnatural that she could only leave behind by making this one last ritual visit.

  Ralph didn't know why he felt such apprehension at the prospect, but he did.

  “All right,” he said, “I can't stop you, but I can at least come with you. You aren't going to complain about that, I hope.”

  “Of course you can come with me.” She slipped her arm through his and kissed him. “We'll go together, then leave it all behind.”

  The following day was bright and clear, with a frosty sun that gave the city a sharp-edged clarity. They entered the house just after ten, descending first to the kitchen, then back u
p to the drawing room where the whole thing had begun. The damaged furniture had been removed, the carpets and light fittings put back in order, and a new mirror installed above the fireplace.

  They went upstairs, into the music room, the guest rooms, and the small room at the back that Ralph had made his library. Finally they went upstairs to their bedroom and adjoining bathroom, and stood for some moments in silence as the sun streamed brightly through the windows.

  “You know,” she said, “I'm beginning to regret we said we'd sell it.”

  “I know,” he said, “me too. But I still think we should, don't you?”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I suppose so. It couldn't ever be the same, could it?”

  They started down the stairs again. They were halfway down when they heard the front door open and shut. They stopped and looked at each other. They both felt a momentary unease, but then he gave her a slightly shamefaced, reassuring grin.

  “I forgot,” he said. “Madge Rheinhart called from the real estate office. She said she was bringing some people to see the house. She thinks they're serious. It's exactly what they're looking for, and they have the money. Let's go down and say hello.”

  As they reached the hall, Joanna frowned. She didn't know what it was, but something about the short, elderly couple with the tall and elegant Miss Rheinhart seemed oddly familiar. The woman was wearing an expensive-looking fur coat, the man a camel-hair coat and a black fur hat. But when they turned as she and Ralph approached, she realized that she had never seen them before.

  “Oh, Mr. and Mrs. Cazaubon,” Madge Rheinhart said, all charm and studied poise, “I didn't know if you'd still be here. I think we've just sold your house. Let me introduce you to Mr. and Mrs. Ray.”

  “Murray,” said the old man, removing his hat respectfully. “And this is my wife, Ellie.”

  “All right, Adam,”Sam said.