The Link

by Richard Matheson

  He stares into his clouded memory, then looks at her. “Don’t tell Alan,” he asks her.

  “No, of course I won’t,” she says.

  Back in the hotel room, he phones Amelia to see if Bart is all right. “He’s doing okay,” she says. “How are you doing, you sound odd.”

  He exhales heavily. “I feel odd,” he says, then tries to lighten his tone. “I’ll tell you about it when I get back,” he says.

  Robert catches his breath as she opens the door of her room. “Oh, dear,” he murmurs.

  Cathy’s smile is curious. “What?” she asks.

  He shakes his head a little. “You look wonderful,” he says.

  She does, wearing an off-the-shoulder evening dress, her hair up.

  As they head for the elevator, Cathy asks him how he is.

  “Fine,” he tells her. “I apologize for the melodrama before.”

  She squeezes his hand. “Don’t be silly,” he says, then asks him why he said, “Oh, dear.”

  He sighs, then chuckles. “Well,” he confesses, “when you opened the door, I thought: How am I supposed to think of her as nothing but a fellow psi investigator when she looks like that?”

  She laughs softly. The remark has not displeased her.

  The limo again (“I’ll never be able to take a bus again,” Cathy “laments”.), a short ride to Brentwood and Alan’s house; a dinner party. There they meet Alan’s lovely wife DIANE and try to stay together in a mass of cocktailing guests. It is not easy as Alan, ever on the move, introduces them to one person after another.

  A high-placed agent who tells them that he “lives on hunches”; “ESPower, my friends, ESPower,” he declares, prodding Robert’s chest. “I believe it,” Robert says.

  A composer who tells Robert (Cathy, by now, has been kidnapped from him) that he doesn’t write his scores, he only transcribes them. “I hear the music and I write it down. Someone else composes it and has the kindness to relay it to my brain; I’m very fortunate.” Robert nods and smiles. “You are,” he agrees.

  A professional baseball pitcher who describes how one team he played for had no “overall win expectation” and almost always lost, another team he played for “believed in victory” to a man and won two pennants despite mass predictions against it happening. “Would you call that ESP?” the pitcher asks. “Might very well be,” Robert says.

  Dinner begins, Robert and Cathy still separated; the best they can manage is an exchange of smiles now and then. She is flanked by two admiring males, Robert by an aging actress and a bee behaviorist.

  The meal is faintly Kafkaesque for Robert as he turns his head from one to the other, the actress espousing sundry astrological views, the bee handler describing how he gets “a thousand buzzers” to land on him on cue by dabbing “the essence of queen bees” on himself and attracting swarms of them already disoriented by smoke. (“Then, of course, I don’t exhale on them,” he says. “They hate that.”)

  “What’s your birthday, darling?” asks the actress.

  “March 12,” Robert replies.

  She hums and nods and smiles a knowing smile. “One of those,” she comments drolly.

  “You won’t tell anyone,” he murmurs, looking “alarmed”.

  “Our secret to the grave, my dear,” she assures him.

  “Now I can eat,” he says, smiling.

  The bee man is telling him how bees have super sensory systems, seeing in color as well as black and white, when Alan quiets everyone and asks Robert to tell the gathering the “fantastic” story from his book about the “woman and the boat”. (“You know which one,” he says, not wanting to reveal the punch line.)

  Robert does and starts, “It happened on the Isle of Wight off England.”

  We see the JACK MARSHALL family standing on the roof of their house, waving handkerchiefs at passengers aboard a liner steaming out into the Atlantic.

  Suddenly, the CAMERA MOVES IN FAST ON Mrs. Marshall as her smile is wiped off by a look of terror. Mindlessly, she grabs her husband’s arm and cries, “It’s going to sink! That ship is going to sink before it reaches America!”

  Her family tries to calm her down. “Take it easy, love,” her husband says, concerned.

  She will not be calmed. Hysterical, she says she “sees the passengers dying in the Atlantic.” She clutches at her husband in horror. “Don’t stand there staring at me!” she shrieks. “Do something! I see hundreds of people struggling in the icy water! Are you so blind that you’re going to let them go down?!”

  She looks at the receding ship, her voice a sound of agony as she cries, “Save them! Save them!”

  “The Titanic, of course,” says Robert. Murmurs from the party guests. “In 1898,” he continues, “a man named Morgan Robertson wrote a novel entitled THE WRECK OF THE TITAN in which he described his fictional ship as follows: The largest craft afloat—spacious cabins—decks like promenades—unsinkable—carrying as few lifeboats as would satisfy the law—rushing through the fog at a rate of fifty feet a second—hurling itself at an iceberg.” He pauses for effect. “Nearly three thousand voices raised in agonized screams.”

  “The Titanic—as described—hit the iceberg and sank fourteen years later.”

  More murmured comments from the dinner guests. They stare at Robert.

  “More,” says Alan.

  “Well,” says Robert, “I’ll tell you another story about the Titanic. One that was edited out of my book.”

  1979—DORIS WILLIAMS, a psychiatric nurse in Los Angeles, is visiting a friend who lives on the ocean. They are having coffee and chatting when Doris tells her friend how she fears deep water; just talking about it makes her shiver.

  “You really are scared, aren’t you?” says her friend, a LAURIE YOUNG. “Maybe when you were young, one of your brothers or sisters held your head under the water. Why don’t you let me hypnotize you and regress you and we’ll find out what happened?”

  She places Doris under hypnosis and goes back through each year of her life with no result. She even tries to discover if anything occurred in the womb which might account for Doris’ inexplicable dread of deep water. The questioning is in vain.

  On impulse, then, she tells Doris, “Now you’re in the first life previous to this life.”

  Doris starts abruptly. “Oh,” she says.

  “What is it?” Laurie asks. “Where are you?”

  “On the ship,” Doris says as though her questioner should know.

  “What ship?” Laurie asks.

  “Why, the Titanic, of course.”

  We see a young man on a listing deck, struggling to reach a life raft. Above the screams of the passengers, we hear the VOICES continue. “What’s happening?” asks Laurie.

  “I’m halfway in the ship,” says Doris. “The ship is listing. The life raft I’m hoping to get into is on my right.”

  “What is your name?” asks Laurie.

  E.C.U. of Doris Williams’ face. “Stephen Worth Blackwell,” she answers.

  “Doris Williams had never read a book or seen a film about the Titanic,” Robert tells his rapt listeners. “Nor did she believe, for a moment, that she’d actually been aboard the Titanic in a former life.”

  We see her entering a library and speaking to a librarian. “Her curiosity aroused, however,” Robert’s voice goes on, “she went to the Burbank library and acquired the book by Walter Lord entitled A Night to Remember.”

  Sitting in a reading room, she checks the index of the book and sees Passenger List, 185. She turns to page 185 and looks down at the list.

  CAMERA IN SHARPLY ON one particular name as Robert’s voice concludes, “There, out of two thousand, two hundred and seven passengers, was the name Stephen Worth Blackwell.”

  CUT TO Doris Williams, dressed for the evening, crossing the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel. “Some time later, she received an invitation to speak of her experience at an affair commemorating the sinking of the Titanic. Before the dinner, a huge replica of the ill-fated sh
ip was run in on a gurney.”

  Seeing it, Doris Williams becomes ill. She stares at it in horror, unable to eat, “unable to speak about her hypnotic regression”. A woman at a nearby table comes over and speaks to her. “Intrigued by Doris Williams’ reaction to the sight of the Titanic replica, a woman at the party named Zelda Suplee spoke to Doris and asked her permission to regress her through hypnosis again. Doris was hesitant but finally agreed.”

  CUT TO Doris Williams, hypnotized, answering Zelda Suplee’s question as to whom she is; again her tone is that of someone who assumes the questioner already knows the answer. “Stephen Worth Blackwell,” she says.

  “And your address?”

  “One sixty-seven, West State Street, Trenton, New Jersey.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Brown, Shipley and Company. I’m a shipping executive.”

  “Where are you on the night of April 14, 1912?”

  Doris’ hands begin to tremble, her voice shakes as she answers—and we see what she describes: Stephen Worth Blackwell on the Titanic.

  “The ship is listing. The water is coming up. I’m watching lifeboats being lowered. There is so much confusion. People are crying. The ship is lunging up. I am being thrown forward. Oh! My hands and wrists are broken!”

  Back to the party, everyone listening intently. “Later,” Robert tells them, “Charles Sachs, an authority on the Titanic, went to Washington—”

  We see Sachs as Robert’s voice continues. “—to check the records of a Senate sub-committee report on the Titanic incident. A report the details of which were never printed in any book.”

  Sachs looks at the report, reacting. CAMERA MOVES DOWN AND ACROSS the page and we see these printed words as we hear Doris Williams’ VOICE again, saying, “Stephen Worth Blackwell. One sixty seven, West State Street, Trenton, New Jersey.”

  “Where do you work?” asks Zelda Suplee’s voice.

  We see the final printed words as Doris Williams answers, “Brown, Shipley and Company. I’m a shipping executive.”

  Being driven back to the hotel, Cathy asks, smiling, “Is there anything you don’t know about?”

  “Yes,” he nods looking at her.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know how you feel about me.”

  She looks away. “I thought we’d—made an agreement,” she falters.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, instantly repentant. “That was a thoughtless thing to say.”

  They ride the elevator in silence and he walks her to her room. There, they look at one another, wordless. Then he leans forward and kisses her lightly on the lips. She doesn’t move.

  They look at each other for several moments. Then another kiss, their arms sliding around each other.

  Abruptly, Cathy pulls back. “No. No, no,” she murmurs. Her smile is pained. “What’s the matter with us? Can’t we be trusted?” She looks at him in distress, then goes inside her room after fumbling with the door lock.

  Robert returns to his room and stands at the window, staring out. “You can’t trust me, at any rate,” he mumbles.

  In the morning, when he wakes, he telephones Cathy’s room. To his surprise, he’s told that she’s checked out. He hangs up, rises, sees the note slipped underneath his door.

  Sorry again. My turn to be thoughtless. Very selfish of me to return your kiss. We both know what’s happening, we both know how to stop it. C.

  FOUR

  CAMERA MOVING THROUGH a lovely wooded glade as Robert’s voice narrates.

  “Edgar Cayce was born in western Kentucky on March 18, 1877.”

  We see a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in front of a streamside lean-to built from saplings, fir branches, moss, bark and reeds. He is reading the Bible.

  “Before he was thirteen years old, Cayce had read the Bible through a dozen time,” Robert’s voice continues. “He had built himself a lean-to in the woods near his home, a retreat where he could read, uninterrupted.”

  “Sitting there, one afternoon in May, he had a vision.”

  We are CLOSE on Cayce now. He becomes aware of a presence and looks up; reacts.

  A woman stands before him, the sun behind her making the sight of her unclear.

  She speaks in a soft but audible voice.

  “Tell me what you would like most of all,” she says, “so that I may give it to you.”

  The boy is frightened. But the woman smiles and stands unthreateningly. We may or may not see something that makes shadows behind her shaped like wings.

  Cayce swallows dryly, then manages to speak. “Most of all, I’d like to be helpful to others, especially to children when they’re sick.”

  He blinks. The woman is gone.

  Cayce catches his breath, then runs home to tell his mother, finds her in the kitchen. When he’s finished his blurted account, he adds, “Do you think I’ve been reading the Bible too much? It makes some people go crazy, doesn’t it?”

  She smiles and puts her arms around him. “You’re a good boy, you want to help others,” she says. “Why shouldn’t your prayers be heard?”

  SHOCK CUT TO Cayce flying to the floor and sprawling there. His father, Squire Cayce, hauls him to his feet and sets him down hard on a parlor chair, snatches a book from the floor and slaps it onto Cayce lap.

  “You will not disgrace the family,” he says sternly. “You will stay up all night if need be but you will learn to spell the words in that book. I will not have a stupid son.”

  He points at the cowering boy. “Now get to business,” he orders. “I’ll be back again in another half hour.”

  He storms from the room and the groggy Cayce opens the book as Robert’s voice narrates.

  “It had been a long evening. Every time Squire Cayce had asked his son to spell the words from his spelling lesson, the boy had failed.”

  CUT TO clock face; it is half past ten. Squire Cayce enters the parlor and grabs the book. He reads aloud the first words of the spelling lesson. Young Cayce gets them wrong. His father, totally exasperated, smacks him on the head again and sends him flying.

  “I am going to the kitchen for a few minutes,” he says. “When I come back, I’m going to ask you that lesson once more. It’s your last chance.”

  He is gone again. The tired, sleepy boy, ears ringing, tries not to cry.

  Then he hears a woman’s voice—the voice he heard in the woods—saying, “If you can sleep a little, we can help you.”

  The boy closes his spelling book, puts it under his head and falls asleep.

  “Squire Cayce returned in several minutes,” Robert’s voice says.

  CUT TO the spelling book being yanked out from beneath Edgar’s head, causing his head to thump on the floor, waking him up. “All right,” his father says threateningly. He grabs his son and sets him on the chair again.

  This time Edgar spells the words perfectly. Squire Cayce’s eyes narrow suspiciously. He asks the words in the next lesson. They are spelled correctly by the boy.

  “Ask me anything in the book,” says Edgar then.

  The Squire skips through the speller at random, asking the hardest words he can find. As he asks one particular word—which Edgar spells correctly—the boy adds, “There’s a picture of a silo on that page. The word ‘synthesis’ is under it. S-y-n-t-h-e-s-i-s.”

  The Squire slams the book down. “What kind of nonsense is this?” he roars. “You knew that lesson all the time! You knew the whole blessed book!”

  Edgar tries to explain what happened but his father smacks him to the floor again. “Go to bed!” he cries, “before I lose my temper!”

  CUT TO 23-year old Edgar Cayce entering a hotel room, looking ill.

  “In March of 1900,” says Robert’s voice, “Edgar Cayce, salesman and insurance agent, began to suffer from severe headaches while on the road.”

  Cayce takes a paper container of white powder and empties it into a glass of water, drinks it and lies down, Robert saying, “One evening, returning to his hotel room, he
took a sedative a doctor had prescribed for him, then lay down to sleep.” HOLD.

  CUT to Cayce in his bedroom at home as he opens his eyes. There are two doctors with him. “When he regained consciousness,” Robert’s voice continues, “he found himself at home.”

  “How are you?” asks one of the doctors.

  Edgar tries to answer but his voice is no louder than a painful whisper.

  CUT TO the parlor of his house, Edgar Cayce lying on a horsehair sofa, eyes shut. Sitting by him is a lean man named AL LAYNE. Squire Cayce and his wife are watching worriedly. Robert’s voice narrates.

  “Edgar Cayce became aware, in the months that followed, that he was a man who would never again be able to speak above a whisper. No longer able to be a salesman, he had become a photographer’s apprentice. He was nervous, fretful, high-strung. Desperate, he turned to hypnosis for help. But every time he reached a certain level of hypnosis, something in him held back.

  “Until the afternoon of March 31, 1901.”

  The hypnotist tells Squire and Mrs. Cayce that he’s going to try something different that day. He instructs Edgar to “see” inside his own throat, diagnose the problem personally. “And speak to us in a normal tone of voice,” he adds.

  Edgar Cayce begins to mumble. He clears his throat. Then speaks in a clear, unafflicted voice.

  “Yes,” he says. “We can see the body.”

  Everyone stares at him as he continues.

  “In the normal state,” he continues, “this body is unable to speak due to a partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cords produced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition producing a physical effect. This may be removed by increasing the circulation to the affected parts by suggestion while in this unconscious condition.”

  The awed hypnotist hesitates, then says, “The circulation to the affected parts will now increase and the condition will be removed.”

  Edgar is silent. They loosen his shirt.

  Then, as they watch, incredulous, the upper part of his chest, then his throat, turns pink. The pink deepens to rose, the rose to a violent red. Cayce’s mother winces at the sight.