The Link

by Richard Matheson

  “In point of fact, the so-called ‘occult explosion’ we hear so much about today is nothing more than a massive breakthrough of psychological repressions in a period of social stress.

  “What are called psychics are little more than psychiatric borderline cases, belong to the lunatic fringe of society.”

  Robert is moving to turn off the set when Westheimer manages to segue his remarks into a comment on the presence, (representing the Extended Sensory Perception Association, no less) at an “ostensibly” scientific convention, of a “certain lightweight ‘popular’ author” named Robert Allright who comes from a family “admittedly stained” by Spiritualist dogma and superstition.

  “Son of a bitch!” Robert shouts, hurling a shoe at the set. He is enraged at Westheimer, trembling as the psychologist talks about Robert’s “séance medium” mother, aunt and grandmother, his spiritualist minister sister.

  “Are we expected to believe that such a man is objective on the subject of psychic phenomena?” sneers Westheimer. “Not to mention the potential sales of his series of ill-advised books on the subject. This is precisely the sort of individual who—”

  Robert turns off the set and paces restlessly, a sense of murderous fury toward Westheimer apparently twisting his insides into knots.

  He tries to use the bio-feedback control to reduce his tension. It doesn’t work. Steadily, an iron-hard cramp extends across his diaphragm just beneath the rib cage.

  He walks ceaselessly, back and forth, rubbing his solar plexus. He takes a Valium. “Relax, relax,” he tells himself. “He isn’t that important.” He still thinks it’s his reaction to Westheimer.

  It keeps getting worse. Is it appendicitis? It occurs to him. No. The rigidity lies across his entire abdomen and, in spite of the pain, he can breathe without distress, his pulse rate is normal, he is not perspiring, not nauseous. The situation is maddening. No symptoms whatever except for the locked-in-place hardness of a band of muscles across his upper abdomen.

  A montage of passing hours, Robert pacing; almost phoning for a doctor, changing his mind; almost calling John, then hanging up, it’s past four a.m.; pacing, pacing, rubbing his stomach. Wondering what in God’s name is happening.

  Finally, exhausted, he falls across the bed. CAMERA MOVES IN SLOWLY on him.

  He begins to shake. His entire body vibrates. He is helpless in the grip of some irresistible force, held in its vise.

  Visions spill across his mind. His father. His mother. Ruth. John. Ann. The house in Brooklyn. Bart. Cathy. Peter. The crystal.

  And a temple wall, a strange symbol cut into it.

  Robert is convulsed as though by an electric current. He can see the room but also the tumbling visions. A roaring fills his ears.

  Bit by bit, the effect slows down, then, at long last, stops. He sighs in gratitude. The tension in his diaphragm has gone, the pain. Slowly, his legs straighten out. He rolls onto his left side and falls instantly asleep.

  He opens his eyes. It might be an hour later or a second. CAMERA VERY CLOSE ON him.

  He is aware of something pressing at his right shoulder. Curious, he reaches back to feel what it is.

  Smooth wall.

  Still half asleep, he moves his hand along the wall as far as he can reach.

  Nothing but wall, unbroken and continuous. He tries to turn to see where he is. He is lying against the wall with his shoulder.

  He stares groggily at it. There is something wrong. The wall has no windows, no doors, no furniture against it. It could not be the wall of his hotel room. Still, it looks familiar.

  Suddenly, it comes to him, and CAMERA FLIES BACK TO REVEAL that it is not the wall.

  He is floating against the ceiling

  Startled, he rolls over, bouncing, looks down. Below him is the bed.

  And, on the bed, him.

  “Oh, God, I’m dying,” he whispers. The stomach tension and vibrations have destroyed him. He makes tiny, frightened noises. “I don’t want to die,” he says.

  “I won’t!” he cries.

  Abruptly, he is swooping down to his body on the bed and “diving” into it.

  He shudders, opens his eyes and wakes. He stares at the ceiling with unblinking eyes.

  He has just had his first out-of-the-body experience.

  It will not be his last.

  The jarring phone bell startles him awake. Barely conscious, he reaches for the receiver.

  “Rob?”

  “Uh.” He struggles to wake.

  “We waited for you at breakfast,” Cathy says. She hesitates. “We have to leave now.”

  “Leave?” He pushes up on an elbow, dazedly.

  “I’ll call when you get back to New York.”

  He wants desperately to wake up, say the right things but he can’t.

  “Goodbye, love,” Cathy says.

  The phone receiver buzzes in his hand. Robert stares at it, then closes his eyes.

  “Cathy,” he whispers.

  As Robert is checking out of the hotel, he sees Westheimer and Stafford talking on the other side of the lobby.

  Confronting them, he excoriates Westheimer for his character assassination on the talk show and tells him he’s fortunate that Robert is not the suing kind or he’d have a court case on his hands.

  “If there’s a next time though,” he says, “I may just break your jaw.”

  He looks at Stafford coldly. “You choose strange friends, Doctor,” he says. “I trust it doesn’t mean you’re at ESPA as his hatchet man.”

  Stafford bristles at this. “I am my own man, Mr. Allright,” he replies.

  “Glad to hear it,” Robert says. He glares at Westheimer. “Go to hell, Donald,” he snaps and walks away, trying to ignore Westheimer’s burst of scornful laughter.

  A limousine is waiting in front of the hotel courtesy of the man whose daughter lives in the Tahoe house.

  En route to picking up the medium, Robert sits inside the lavish, leather-smelling interior, muttering to himself about the strange and uncontrollable things happening to him.

  “An OOBE, for God’s sake,” he says. “Who needs that?”

  “Sir?” says the driver.

  “Nothing, I’m just talking to myself,” Robert tells him.

  “Yes, sir,” says the driver.

  She is waiting at a corner, sitting on a bus stop bench, a small, worn overnight case beside her, a copy of a National Enquirer-type newspaper in her hands. She is in her late twenties, plain, a little overweight.

  “Hello,” says Robert as she gets in, introducing himself. He has to ask for her name. It is ROSALYN HUTCHINSON and she is awed by the limousine.

  “Are we going to a rich man’s house?” she asks.

  Robert says he isn’t sure exactly who owns the house, some country-western singer. Rosalyn catches her breath. “It must be Scotty Winston,” she says, awed again. “He’s the only country western singer I know who has a house at Lake Tahoe.”

  “Oh?” He’s never heard of Scotty Winston.

  “You never heard of him?” she asks, incredulous. “He’s a Big Star.” She runs her hand over the seat. “This is real leather,” she says, eyes widening.

  “I guess,” he nods.

  “Are you a psychic too?” she asks.

  He hesitates, then shakes his head. He doesn’t feel like getting into it. “No,” he says.

  She looks at him curiously, Robert tensing. Can she tell like Teddie?

  Then she looks away.

  “Tell me about yourself,” he asks her to change the subject.

  It is a grim tale Rosalyn tells—one which stirs up disturbing thoughts about his own family background and especially what Ann has been going through.

  The story of a psychic child misunderstood by everyone. (We see it dramatized.)

  A child punished for saying anything about her visions.

  A child who suffered actual pain if anyone so much as stroked her hair or touched her face—but who was punished for saying so by
her aunt with whom she lived; her parents were killed in an automobile accident when she was a baby.

  Incidents.

  In an art class in grade school, she draws a charcoal sketch of a young woman. Her aunt, seeing it, whips her, accusing her of “stealing” a photograph from her bedroom bureau—a photograph of Rosalyn’s mother.

  The drawing is a perfect copy of it.

  She tells her aunt that her own daughter is going to die if she isn’t taken to a hospital soon. When her cousin dies of a ruptured spleen, her aunt, hysterical, whips Rosalyn with a belt and locks her in her room for two days without food and water.

  Her aunt has chickens in the backyard and, once, when there are seven chicks, Rosalyn drowns them for revenge, horrified by what she’s done until she sees, rising from each limp body, a grey smoke-like substance. Her fear gives way to amazement and she tries to tell her aunt that the baby chicks are all right.

  It does not spare her from another crazed beating, another imprisonment in her room.

  When she is nine, she sees another aunt on the front porch. She opens the front door to let her in. There is no one there.

  Later, the message comes that the aunt she saw on the porch has died exactly at the time she saw her on the porch.

  When her aunt died of a heart attack, Rosalyn completes her story, she was put into a series of foster homes where she was overworked, punished, chained in the cellar in one house, raped in two others.

  She speaks so flatly and unemotionally of these things that Robert wonders if they’re true.

  Then, looking at her, he “sees” her—at thirteen—being assaulted by a huge, drunken laborer while his wife is out of the house.

  He cuts off the vision and looks ahead with a tired sigh.

  “Being psychic can be a drag, can’t it?” he says.

  “Sometimes I hate it,” Rosalyn answers. “But I have to make a living and I don’t like working in stores because the people bother me.”

  Robert nods. “I understand.” He does.

  Rosalyn is newly awed at the airport. A private jet is waiting for them, property of the studio owner.

  “I’ve never been inside a private plane,” Rosalyn says. She shakes her head. “And we’re going to Scotty Winston’s house. I can’t believe it.”

  “Right,” says Robert.

  He is nervous as they fly to Tahoe. His psychic ability seems to be expanding very fast now, faster than he wants. What if the Tahoe house really is infested with some psychic energy? Will he be able to handle it?

  In spite of his uneasiness, his almost total lack of sleep the night before catches up to him and he falls asleep in the middle of a sentence spoken by Rosalyn as she tells him about a haunted house in San Francisco she was recently called it to help with.

  He is too tired to notice that Rosalyn already has a crush on him.

  Tahoe. They are picked up at the airport and driven to the elaborate home of Scotty Winston perched high on a South Shore slope with a spectacular view of the lake and mountains, the hotels and casinos in the distance.

  Winston isn’t there; he is on tour and Robert gets the definite impression that, if he were there, they wouldn’t be. They are greeted by his wife ELAINE, a refined looking woman in her mid-twenties.

  She tries to be polite to Rosalyn’s endless questions about her husband and all the notables in photographs with him on every available wall. “You know Frank Sinatra?” she asks. “Dolly Parton? Burt Reynolds?” Robert does what he can to quiet her since Elaine Winston is obviously disturbed.

  They are shown to their rooms and Robert, returning immediately to the living room, asks Elaine if this is something she really wants or has it been forced on her?

  “I don’t know what I want,” she says. “I just know I can’t go on living in this house if something isn’t done.”

  When Rosalyn joins them, Elaine takes them to the head of a staircase and points down. “The master bedroom is down there,” she says. “That’s… where it is,” she finishes awkwardly.

  “You don’t have to go down with us,” Rosalyn tells her.

  “Believe me, I have no intention of going down there,” says Elaine Winston. “I haven’t been down there since it happened.”

  “What happened?” asks Robert.

  “Tell us nothing,” Rosalyn says importantly, she is in her world now, taking charge. “Let me see what I get on my own.”

  Elaine points down the steps, a humorless smile on her lips. “Be my guest,” she says.

  Rosalyn starts down the steps slowly. Robert draws in an uneven breath and exchanges a look with Winston’s wife. “Well—” he says. Obviously, she expects him to go down too. Swallowing, he begins to descend.

  Halfway down the steps, Rosalyn jars to a halt, saying, “Wait.”

  Robert freezes, braced against something happening. Clearly, he is in no mood to experience ghostly manifestations. He looks back up the staircase. Elaine Winston has gone.

  “I may be joining you at any moment,” he mutters.

  “Shhhh!” orders Rosalyn.

  He turns around. Rosalyn’s expression reminds him of Ruth’s—a look of supreme conceit. “What is it?” he asks.

  “Something I heard,” she answers casually.

  They continue to the base of the stairs and enter the bedroom. It seems innocuous enough—ornate and with a dazzling view of the lake but apparently innocent.

  Still, Robert holds himself as though fearing that the least relaxation of vigilance will make him vulnerable to some unexpected occurrence. He looks around the huge room, his expression uneasy as Rosalyn walks around like an estimating realtor, clucking, nodding and saying, over and over, “Mm-hmm.”

  “Mm-hmm, what?” he finally asks.

  She looks at him in surprise. “Oh, nothing,” she says. “Just picking up—ah!” She turns toward the bathroom. “Now,” she says.

  She moves there and enters. Robert waits.

  When she does not reappear, he says. “Are you all right?”

  No answer. Robert’s breath wavers. “Oh, for God’s sake,” he mutters. He starts to speak again, then walks to the bathroom and looks inside.

  Rosalyn is nowhere to be seen.

  He backs off, gulping. Then, forcing himself, he steps into the bathroom and looks behind the door.

  Nothing.

  “Good God,” he says.

  “Shh!” he hears Rosalyn’s voice.

  He looks around in bafflement, then, reaching out, opens the shower stall door.

  She is standing inside it, eyes closed.

  Her eyes open and meet his.

  “It happened in here,” she says.

  At supper, Elaine Winston describes (and we see dramatized) what happened to her.

  She had been sitting in the living room all night, reading, her cat on her lap. Her husband had left on tour the night before.

  About eleven o’clock, she started downstairs, carrying the cat.

  She had only gone a few steps when the cat, with a sudden hiss, twisted out of her arms and ran back toward the living room.

  “She won’t even come in the house now,” her voice says.

  Elaine is startled but doesn’t realize what’s happening. Wincing at the scratch on her hand made by the cat, she starts downstairs again.

  She is almost to the bottom when a woman’s voice whispers nearby, sounding fiercely angry. “Scotty!”

  Elaine gasps and twitches, looking around. She sees nothing; stands immobile, unable to move.

  Abruptly, she twists around in time to see a young woman wearing Scotty’s yellow terrycloth robe go into the bathroom.

  The sight is over in a moment but so realistic that it never occurs to Elaine that she has seen anything but a real person. She hesitates, not knowing what to do. “If I had thought about it for a second,” says her voice, “I’d have realized that there was no way anyone could have gotten downstairs without me seeing them.”

  At that moment, the shower is turne
d on.

  Elaine moves slowly, cautiously, across the bedroom carpeting.

  As she reaches the dark bathroom she feels inside with her hand and switches on the light, jumps back.

  The shower has stopped. She braces herself and lunges across the bathroom, yanking open the stall shower door.

  The instant she does, it is to see that the stall is empty and to have her nostrils assailed by a pungent, eye-burning odor.

  Rosalyn nods and looks at Robert with a faint smile.

  “I knew it was in there,” she says.

  Later, much to Robert’s disconcertion, Rosalyn insists that he sit in the bedroom with her.

  His eyes moving around furtively as though he expects to see the young woman at any second, Robert talks with Rosalyn who sits on the bed, the yellow terry cloth robe on her lap; she has taken it from the hook behind the bathroom door.

  It is a rather unnerving experience for Robert. Every sound—and there are many—makes him start. Rosalyn seems calm. She’s done this sort of thing before, she reassures him. If he wants to sit beside her, she’ll protect him.

  Robert’s smile is wan. “That’s all right.”

  She tells him that the situation seems “clear enough”; some young woman died in the shower. Elaine Winston has no idea where this young woman might have come from. Rosalyn had asked her if she knew anything about former residents. Elaine had replied that there were none, Winston having built this house for himself three years ago. Further, she has lived in the house for almost two years since marrying Winston and there have been no such incidents before. You’ve never left the house in all that time? Rosalyn had asked her. Only for a month to visit my father in Jamaica, Elaine had told her.

  The incident had taken place about a week after she’d returned from that trip.

  “Which would make one assume that, whatever happened, it happened during that month she was gone,” Robert suggests.

  “I think it did,” Rosalyn says. “I’m getting a bad feeling about Scotty Winston, I’m sorry to say.”

  “Like what?” he asks.

  “I’m not sure yet,” she says. “It’s just that—ah!” She looks toward the bathroom.

  Robert’s head jerks around. He sees nothing. “What?” he asks.