The Link

by Richard Matheson

  Robert’s smile is sad. “What would you have done? Let him die without that?”

  “He didn’t ask me to do it,” John says.

  Robert glances at him, hearing the hurt beneath the anger. “He would have if you’d been here instead of me,” he says.

  “The hell he would have,” John replies. “The old bastard.”

  At the airport, John asks him if he wants to join him for a few drinks, he has forty minutes before his flight.

  “I can’t,” says Robert. “I’ve got to get home.”

  “Right,” says John. He opens the car door and gets out. “If you ever get to the coast—” he says. He raises his hand in a casual departing gesture. “See you, Bobby,” he says and shuts the door.

  “Oh, Christ, I should have gone with him,” Robert mutters to himself as he drives away from the terminal curb.

  Arriving home, he greets and takes care of Bart, then phones his sister. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk, he tells her. She invites him to her house for Sunday dinner. His up-cast glance of mock anguish indicates his reaction. “Sure, I’d like that,” he says pleasantly.

  He and Bart take a walk in the woods, Robert still talking to himself. “Well, what should I have done, said no, forget it, die without a hope?”

  He curses aloud, startling the Lab. “I’m sorry, pal,” he says, stopping to pet the dog’s head. “How you doing?”

  He wakes up late that night to hear a heavy, wheezing breath nearby. Disoriented, his sub-conscious still gripped by the funeral, he visualizes his father standing in the darkness by the bed, breathing laboredly, looking down at him in accusation.

  He rejects the vision, turns on the lamp and sees that it is Bart again. He sits on the floor and holds the dog’s head on his lap.

  “What’s the matter, Bartie?” he asks. He strokes the dog’s neck and shoulders. “We’d better take you to Amelia.”

  He is trying to work the next afternoon when the telephone rings.

  It is a lawyer named Williker calling to tell him that he is his father’s heir. What about my brother and sister? Robert asks. Nothing, says the lawyer.

  “Forget it then,” Robert says, suddenly resentful. “Give it to some charity, I don’t want it.”

  Shutting down his processor after the call, he drives to Amelia’s office where he learns that Bart has cancer.

  The news is jolting to him, his reaction even stronger than it might be normally; a reaction we will understand later.

  “Dear God,” he says, faintly. “Is he in pain?”

  “Hard to tell,” Amelia says.

  He groans. He seems so happy most of the time, he tells her. I’m sure he is, she replies; he’s with you and he loves you.

  “I love him too,” Robert says. He hesitates. “You don’t think… I should—” He cannot get the words out.

  That’s up to you, she says. She can give him pills to ease the pain right now. He doesn’t have to make his mind up right away. Why not wait a while?

  Robert drives Bart home, the dog’s head on his lap.

  We see a quick, almost subliminal shot of some woman saying, “Cancer.”

  The random vision confuses and disturbs him.

  He drives to his father’s apartment building, taking Bart along; it is a day or so later. Norman Konrad has told him that he’s “closing down” the apartment and, if Robert wants any of his father’s belongings, now is the time to come and get them.

  An evocative scene as Robert is admitted into the apartment by Norman and looks around, recalling various moments from his life and what his father looked like.

  We see photographs of the Allright family on the wall. One shows Robert, three, beside his brother and sister. Another shows him standing beside his mother. We also see a full-face photograph of Robert’s mother; she was very beautiful.

  It is the face we saw on Palladino’s body in Robert’s vision.

  While he is in the apartment, he tells Norman that he’s turned down his father’s “legacy”—money to continue the Arizona dig, nothing if he does not continue it, the money going, instead, to the Archeology Department of Columbia University.

  Does Norman have any idea what his father was working on? Not that anything he hears will convince him to drop everything he’s doing and head for Arizona with a pick and shovel. (Don’t blame you, Norman says.) But he would like to know.

  “Not much I can tell you,” Norman answers. “Your father was a tight-lipped man. Some secret project. As best I could gather, it had to do with human advent in that area further back in time than any accredited archeologist (including himself) would care to accept.

  “He said something about a link,” says Norman. He smiles. “I don’t believe he meant the missing link however; he was too sensible for that.”

  Robert stares at him. “That’s it?” he says. After all the urging and mysterioso, it is a distinct let-down to him. Back-dating human existence in Arizona is hardly his idea of something to do.

  “And why should you?” Norman agrees.

  “Maybe you’d care to try it,” Robert says. “I’m sure I could get the money for you if—”

  He breaks off as Norman raises his right hand in a traffic cop gesture to stop. “Not me,” says Norman. “I’m too old for that sort of thing—and really not interested.”

  The entire time Robert is in the apartment, we keep CUTTING to the crystal on the desk. Robert passes it half a dozen times, ignoring it.

  Only when he is about to leave, does he pick it up, apparently on a spontaneous impulse, and drop it into his jacket pocket.

  He drives through Manhattan, talking to himself.

  Why did his father make such a big deal of Arizona? It sounds completely boring to him. Probing for ancient skulls in the desert? “Forget it,” he mutters. He wishes that his father had offered it to John. After all, John was the one who went on digs with him when he was a boy. John was—probably still is—the one who has a feeling for their father; respect—admiration. No matter what he says. Really, it was thoughtless, even cruel of their father not to ask John.

  Waiting for a traffic jam to break, he reaches into his pocket for his bio-feedback control, frowns. “Did I forget it?” he mutters.

  He finds, instead, the crystal, holds it up and gazes at it.

  Sunlight refracts across his face, the seven colors of the spectrum playing on his cheeks. He grunts, staring at the crystal. He starts as the driver behind him honks impatiently for him to move on. He blinks and shakes his head like a man awakening. Then, driving off, he drops the crystal back into his pocket. “Wake up, Allright,” he tells himself.

  He turns on his cassette player and listens to Mahler as he turns right toward the east side highway.

  CLOSE UP on the sign outside a church called THE TEMPLE OF ETERNAL SPIRIT. Sunday Healing and Devotional: 11:00 a.m.; Wed. Eve. Services: 7:30 p.m.; Message Meetings: Twice a month as announced: 6:30 p.m.; Open Séance: 1st Friday every month: 7:30 p.m.; Pastor: Rev. Ruth E. Allright.

  CAMERA PANS TO show Robert parking in the driveway of a cottage adjoining the small church. He approaches the board and looks at it, his expression bleak.

  He looks toward the church. A service is taking place inside, Ruth’s VOICE faintly heard, the responding murmur of her congregation.

  Robert has a momentary flashback to another church in Brooklyn, him five years old, sitting beside his mother and Aunt Grace.

  Turning from the board, he walks toward Ruth’s cottage.

  He is sitting on a wicker chair on the covered porch after the last of Ruth’s congregation has departed.

  “Why didn’t you come in the church?” she asks.

  His smile is his reply; does she really expect an answer to that?

  Ruth pats him on the arm, her smile complacent. “You’ll come back to it,” she says.

  He casts his eyes skyward as she moves to unlock the front door, his expression saying: it’s going to be a long day. He asks if Bart can come insid
e, he didn’t want to leave him home.

  Of course, she says.

  As he brings Bart in, Ruth asks what’s wrong with the dog.

  Robert is briefly startled, then decides it is Bart’s obvious breathing that Ruth has noticed. He tells her and she says she’ll pray for him; if Robert wants, she’ll try to heal the Lab. Her “Spirit Doctors” have helped heal many animals. “They are most receptive.”

  “It would be very nice if you prayed for him,” he says, not responding to the rest of it.

  Ruth runs her hands along the length of Bart’s body about an inch above his fur. “I can see the problem in his aura,” she says casually. “Darkness in the lung area.”

  Robert sighs.

  “This may not work,” she tells him. If it is intended that the dog “pass on”, healing work would be “of limited efficacy.”

  Robert frowns a little. “Come on, Ruth,” he says.

  She smiles and shakes her head.

  They talk over dinner—a small pot roast, a few over-boiled potatoes, some over-cooked frozen peas. She asks him how Ann is and he lies to her; “She’s doing fine.” To change the subject, he mentions their father’s Arizona project legacy.

  At the mention of him, Ruth’s benign smile fades; it is clear that her attitude toward his memory is definitely unchristian. “That’s no surprise,” she says. “He never gave the family anything without strings attached.” Is Robert going to accept the legacy?

  When he says he isn’t, she is unable to repress a look of pleasure. “It was typically selfish of him to assume that you would drop your entire career on his behalf,” she says.

  This evokes a comment from her on how difficult it was for their mother to function as a Spiritualist married to a man of “gross material nature.” It is not inconceivable, she says, that seeing what their mother endured kept her from marriage.

  “Not that I regret, for a moment, being wed to Spiritualism,” she adds firmly.

  She apologizes, then, for being “mean” to their father’s memory. It is hardly fitting for someone in her position to behave that way. It’s simply that, being the oldest and a female, she saw, the most, how unhappy their mother had been made by her husband’s harsh belittling of her beliefs.

  At any rate, it is not up to her to judge him; whatever judgement is due is already taking place “as they know”.

  Robert does not reply.

  “To seek old bones instead of new inspiration,” Ruth observes. “It seems to say it all about his inability to understand her.”

  Robert hesitates, then mentions his dream. Does Ruth have any idea why it recurs so regularly?

  Ruth looks uncomfortable. “Well,” she says, “the hallway is where she fell, of course; you remember that.”

  He says he doesn’t.

  It was too much of a shock for you, she says; you’ve repressed the memory. “Pray that the dream be taken from you.”

  He persists and, reluctantly, she repeats what she has told him before—that he came back from a neighbor’s house when he was six and she wouldn’t let him in because their mother had fallen down the stairs and “passed” immediately into Spirit.

  “Surely, you remember Aunt Grace coming to take you to her house,” she says.

  He nods; that he remembers.

  “You’re better off without the rest of it,” she tells him. “Seek instead the consciousness of God.”

  This leads her to remind him that the Allrights are a “gifted” family. (John excluded since he has “rejected” it so totally.) “It’s in you though, Robert,” she says. “Your legacy from God.”

  He shakes his head. “You’re wrong,” he tells her.

  “No, no, you forget,” she says with smiling negation.

  Abruptly, she rises and gets an old 78 RPM record. “You remember this?” she asks. He shakes his head and she reminds him that, when he was three, this was his favorite record. Mother would put it in a pile of other records where he always found it by running his “little fingers” down the edge of the stack.

  “Probably nicked,” he says.

  She smiles. “Oh, no.”

  Robert tries to talk her out of playing it but Ruth goes to her phonograph.

  The record starts to play: a man blowing on a trumpet, a woman laughing at him, the man’s playing becoming increasingly spluttering until, as overwhelmed as the woman, he bursts into a seizure of wild laughter with her.

  It should be very funny; the record is ludicrous, engaging. Robert has to smile at Bart’s reaction to it.

  But memories flood over him; him sitting in the living room, a small boy, laughing with his mother. The living room of his dream. A distorted recollection. The laughter of his mother somehow frenetic and disturbing.

  Abruptly, the record snaps on the turntable, pieces of it flung to the floor, making Robert twitch in shock.

  “Oh, well,” says Ruth, unmoved. “It was very old.”

  Robert arrives home, settles Bart in, then begins to pace the living room.

  The visit to Ruth has unsettled him. He keeps flashing to moments in the past with his mother, his father, Ruth, John, Aunt Grace, a man we will come to see later, Uncle Jack. His nervousness increases as though something dark is closing in on him. He recalls Ruth saying, “It’s in you though, Robert. Your legacy from God.” And has to do something to occupy himself. Moving swiftly to his office, he switches on the processor and begins to work.

  “In the latter part of the 19th Century,” he dictates and the processor writes, “the emphasis on physical mediums like Home and Palladino began to diminish to be replaced by a study of what came to be known as mental mediums.”

  CAMERA MOVES IN ON the processor screen. “Two of the greatest of this new variety of psychic were Mrs. Lenore Piper and Mrs. Gladys Leonard (called “the British Mrs. Piper”) whose spectacular careers were, in many ways, alike from childhood on.”

  We see eight-year-old LENORE EVELINA SIMONDS playing by herself in a garden, busily engaged in pushing acorns through a hole in one of the garden chairs.

  “Lenore Evelina Simonds had her first experience when she was eight, on a warm spring afternoon in the year 1867, the place New Hampshire.”

  The young girl is shocked as, suddenly, she feels a sharp blow on her right ear accompanied by a prolonged sibilant sound which becomes the letter S. As she holds her ear, eyes wide with dread, she hears a woman’s voice saying, “Aunt Sara, not dead but with you still.”

  The terrified girl runs, sobbing, to the house and tells her mother. “Something hit me on the ear and Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but ‘with you still’.”

  Robert’s voice breaks in to say that, at the very moment of the little girl’s experience, her Aunt Sara had died unexpectedly.

  We see another eight-year-old girl sitting in her nursery, smiling as she watches something o.s. “Gladys Osborne, born in 1882, showed equal evidence of being psychic at an early age. Unlike Lenore Simonds, however, her experience, at first, was pleasant.”

  We see what the girl is looking at. Where the nursery wall should be there is, instead, a dazzling vista: valleys, slopes, trees, flowers of every shape and hue, the landscape extending for miles. Walking about on velvety grass are couples and groups attired in flowing robes, looking radiantly happy. INTERCUT BETWEEN the young girl in her nursery and what she sees.

  “It is not reported whether Lenore Simonds had trouble with her mother over what she said but Gladys Osborne definitely did,” Robert narrates.

  Young Gladys, clad in a dressing gown, sits with her father, sharing breakfast and seeing another view of the lovely vista where the dining room wall should be.

  “Dada, isn’t that a specially beautiful place we’re seeing this morning?” she says.

  Her father frowns. “What place?”

  “That place,” she says, pointing at the dining room wall which is, to her father’s eyes, bare except for a couple of hanging guns.

  “What are you talking about?” her fat
her demands.

  Gladys tries explaining and her father’s expression darkens.

  We see, next, the entire family gathered around her in a state of annoyance and anxiety as the young girl, becoming frightened, tries to describe her vision. We hear Robert’s voice narrating.

  “At first, they thought young Gladys was making it up. Then, when she persisted and described her vision so minutely, they became alarmed and Gladys was forbidden sternly to ever see or look for what she called her ‘happy valley’.”

  CUT TO Lenore Simonds, now 22 years of age, seated in a circle of people, her father-in-law beside her, in a modest parlor.

  “When Lenore Simonds was 22, she married William Piper of Boston and, at the urging of her father-in-law, because she was suffering from the effects of an accident some years previously, was persuaded to attend a healing session of Dr. J. R. Coche, a blind clairvoyant.”

  The clairvoyant reaches Lenore and puts his hands on her head. Abruptly, she shivers as a chill floods through her and she sees, in front of her, a blaze of light in which strange faces hover.

  Then a hand begins to pass to and fro before her face and she rises from her chair and walks to a table in the center of the room on which writing materials have been placed. Picking up a pencil, she begins to write rapidly on a piece of paper.

  CUT TO several minutes later. She puts down the pencil, hands the written page to an elderly man in the circle, then returns to her seat.

  Everyone stares at her, the elderly man reading the paper with mounting amazement. Lenore Piper blinks and looks around in surprise. “Is something wrong?” she asks.

  “Young woman,” says the elderly man, “I have been a spiritualist for over thirty years but the message you have just given me is the most remarkable I have ever received.” His voice breaks as he finishes. “It gives me fresh courage to go on for I know now that my boy lives.”

  Lenore Piper stares at him, incredulous.

  CUT TO Gladys Osborne Leonard and TWO WOMEN descending a steep, narrow staircase, above them a chaos of backstage NOISES. As the sounds fade, Robert’s voice is heard.

  “When Gladys Osborne was 24, she married Frederick Leonard, an actor. One winter, when she and her husband were engaged in London, Gladys shared a dressing room with two sisters interested in Spiritualism.”