The Link

by Richard Matheson

  “But only Dr. Keighley saw the man,” says Robert.

  “There’s the interesting part,” says Cathy. “A man who claims there’s nothing going on here is personal witness to most of it.”

  “We mustn’t forget the others felt the cold and heard the noises,” Peter says. “We can’t assume that the case can be reduced to a psychoanalytical exploration of the doctor’s mind.”

  “What I find odd,” Robert thinks aloud, “is that a ghost apparently from the Middle Ages never shows itself until now.”

  “Again, Dr. Keighley,” Cathy says. “We mustn’t forget that he’s experienced the bulk of the phenomena.”

  Hours later; Peter and Cathy lying on their beds, asleep. Robert, nodding in a chair, jerks up his head as the sound of loud footsteps is heard in the corridor.

  “Well, either that’s a member of the family or a new phenomenon,” he says.

  He has barely completed the sentence when the bolted door flies open, (the bolt unbroken) crashing against the wall, making Robert recoil in his chair and Peter and Cathy jolt awake.

  Suddenly, the room is flooded with an icy coldness which makes them shiver convulsively.

  As, across the floor, audible to each of them, footsteps thump.

  They stare at the path where it seems as though an invisible man is walking.

  Incredibly, the footsteps now move upward toward the ceiling as though the unseen phantom is ascending a staircase.

  The footsteps fade above them, cease.

  “Well,” says Peter, smiling faintly.

  They all twitch, gasping, as a man comes rushing into the room.

  It is Teddie. “I heard the footsteps,” he says. “You saw him?”

  No, they say, telling him what happened. As they do, Dr. Keighley enters. He, too, has heard the footsteps. Yes, they are a new phenomenon. He looks a little pale, acts not as harshly as he did at supper.

  “Was there ever a staircase in here?” Peter asks him.

  Not that he knows of, Keighley says. Is there any way of getting to the attic without breaking through a ceiling? Peter asks. I don’t believe so, says the doctor.

  Peter nods. He smiles at Robert and Cathy. “So,” he says. “The game’s afoot.”

  In the morning, Peter interviews the three members of the Keighley family in order to begin preparing a psycho-profile on the case. Robert and Cathy hear Dr. Keighley telling Peter, in no uncertain terms, that his physical and mental health are fine and that he has never, in his life, suffered from hallucinations.

  Robert and Cathy take a walk. She says that she’s convinced that the phenomena have been caused, in some way, by Dr. Keighley.

  “A prime example of telekinesis?” Robert asks drily.

  “More or less.” She doesn’t smile.

  “Cathy, do you always make up your mind first?” he asks. “Don’t you ever just wait and see?”

  She’s waited for and seen enough things, she replies, to feel qualified to make up her mind about certain points.

  Robert shrugs and lets it go. He doesn’t want to argue with her.

  They discuss Teddie’s behavior and Cathy says she hopes he doesn’t behave like that in Russia. That could be catastrophic.

  “He’s strange, all right,” Robert agrees. “But this thing with Keighley is something else, I think.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He says he doesn’t know; it’s just a feeling.

  They are walking through a lovely wooded glade when they get caught in a chilling downpour and have to take cover in a small gazebo overlooking a pond. They sit on a bench inside and, when Cathy shivers, Robert, after hesitating, puts an arm around her.

  Finally, both arms.

  It is not too long before, gazing at each other, their lips meet, then hold, their embrace tightening.

  “Oh, God, not again,” she laments.

  “You want me to apologize?” he asks, his tone close to anger.

  “No.” She clings to him. “No, I’m the one to apologize. I’m the one who’s making all the trouble.”

  “Cathy, I want to marry you,” he says. “You have to make up your mind. Do you love me or not?”

  “Yes, I love you, Rob. That never stopped. Please believe me. Whatever else I did was—cowardice or call it anything you want. But I never stopped loving you.”

  He has to ask. “Are you sure you’re not just saying these things because we’re away from your family? Out of sight, out of influence?”

  Her smile is sad. “You do know me, don’t you?” she says.

  She promises that, this time, she will really tell Harry and her parents, really get divorced and marry Robert. “Really, Rob, I will. I swear. As soon as we get back from Russia.” She kisses him tenderly. “I love you so,” she whispers.

  When the rain squall lets up and they return to the house, Peter is with Teddie, telling him about his interview with Mrs. Keighley.

  “She’s seen the ghost to,” he says. “The night her husband saw it, he came to her room.”

  We see the incident dramatized. Dr. Keighley, trying to maintain control, is, none-the-less, pale and shaken, barely able to speak as he tells his wife what happened. Mrs. Keighley decides he must have some brandy and leaves to run to the servant’s bedroom where the keys of the wine cellar are kept.

  She is about to start up a few steps to a higher landing, her gaze down because the corridor is so dimly lit, when she sees, in front of her, a man’s legs garbed in coarse leggings. She jars to a halt.

  Shaking uncontrollably, she raises her eyes to see the small, ugly man looking down at her.

  He has on an old smock, Elizabethan leggings, boots covered with dried mud. There is a stained blue handkerchief around his neck. His face is red, his eyes malevolent.

  Trying not to faint on the spot, Mrs. Keighley backs off slowly, whirls and runs back toward her bedroom.

  When she glances back, the man is gone.

  “Why didn’t she tell us?” Robert asks; we are back to the four.

  “She said that, after her husband denied he’d seen anything—despite having told her that he had—she was afraid to tell him she’d seen the same thing. Afraid to mention it at the supper table as well.

  “There’s something odd going on between them,” Peter says. “When we find out what it is—”

  “Obviously, they have to be the cause of everything that’s going on,” Cathy says.

  “Or the lure,” says Robert impulsively. They look at him and he makes a discarding gesture. “I don’t know why I said that,” he tells them.

  “You may be on to something—” Peter breaks off as the sound of an approaching car is heard outside. He moves to the window. “Ah,” he says. “Perhaps we’ll get some answers now.”

  Mrs. Warrenton has arrived.

  BERTHA WARRENTON is 56, a tall, powerful looking woman with a dominating personality. As soon as she enters the house, she tells them they must have a sitting right away. She has to move on before dark to a nearby city for another “task.”

  She holds forth as they start upstairs for Dr. Keighley’s room; the family does not choose to go with them. She tells them that it is her assumption that their presence at Harrowgate indicates a genuine phenomenon in the house.

  “We must, of course,” she warns, “be ever vigilant against the possibility that we will be mis-led by old houses creaking, the chittering of birds in chimneys, the scampering of squirrels in attics.

  “The babbling of nuts in manor houses,” Teddie mutters.

  “Stop it, Teddie,” Cathy whispers.

  Mrs. Warrenton seems to sniff the air as they reach the haunted wing. “Oh, yes, oh, yes,” she says.

  She starts to talk about houses being “impregnated” with the actions, thoughts and emotions of former tenants. Cathy asks her if she means surviving energies or personalities. “Both,” says Mrs. Warrenton.

  “I don’t believe in life after death,” Cathy tells her.

  “Nor do I,”
says Mrs. Warrenton. Cathy looks surprised until the medium adds, “There is no such thing as death. All is continuity.” She keeps looking around. “Of course,” she says distractedly, “we must not allow our fascination with the ‘other world’ to become a substitute for living in this world.”

  “I always say that,” Teddie remarks.

  “I may want you out of the room when we sit,” she responds casually. “I try not to waste my time with negative people.”

  Peter laughs softly. “Touché?” he asks Teddie.

  “Pigslop,” Teddie mutters.

  They enter the room and Mrs. Warrenton paces it, the others watching. “Which way is north?” she asks.

  They fumble, then establish it. Mrs. Warrenton requests they place her chair with its back to the north. “In this way I am polarized,” she says.

  Robert shows interest in that. “What do you mean by polarized?” he asks.

  “Let me describe it this way,” she tells him. “Sitting with my back to the north places my entire ‘antennae system’, as it were, in a position where I can more easily scan whatever information might be ‘riding’, shall we say, the earth’s magnetic lines of force.”

  They all show some interest in her answer but especially Robert; he doesn’t know why.

  The sitting begins, Mrs. Warrenton going into trance immediately, her head thrown back, her feet thrust out, eyes rolling back in their sockets. She has not demanded that Teddie leave but has warned him that he can ruin the sitting if he doesn’t cooperate.

  It is an eerie scene, the room barely light because the afternoon is so overcast, the windows of the room so small. They watch quietly as the female medium starts breathing in short gasps, then, moments later, begins to utter low moans. Her eyes are closed but the lids flicker constantly. They watch her, waiting. It is just past four p.m. on March 1.

  They react as she sits up straight in her chair, crosses her arms and begins to sway back and forth, her eyes still closed.

  Startlingly, when she speaks it is in a low masculine voice. “I bring you greetings,” she says. “It is I, Blue Feather.”

  “Blue Feather?” Teddie says aloud. Peter backhands him on the arm, his expression stern. Teddie looks at him in surprise, then closes down abruptly, features like stone.

  “I say this,” says the deep-voiced medium. “I say there is bad sorrow in this house. I say that someone comes because a place is made for him. A place of memory where he re-lives his suffering. It is an echo from the past.”

  She sighs heavily. “Your phantom lives a life he borrows from the people in this house.”

  She grunts. Nods. Grunts again.

  “He is here,” she says.

  None of them are prepared for what happens next: the sudden alteration in Mrs. Warrenton’s posture. It is as though, through some incredible necromancy, she shrinks in size, her face contorting to a glaring, hating mask.

  “That could be the man they saw,” says Peter quietly.

  The medium spews out a torrent of words, her voice now harsh and growling, Germanic—not unlike Teddie’s.

  “I carried food for the kitchens, to the huts, a giant kitchen, white, immaculate, the cooks in uniform with white caps, pistols sticking from their holsters, it was winter and our feet were numb, the floor was smooth and polished and the tea urns weighed a hundred pounds, we carried them across the kitchen, hup-hup-hup-hup, hup-hup-hup-hup, and my brother, sixteen, slipped and fell and tea was spilled and two cooks picked him up and plunged him head down in another urn of boiling tea.”

  No one has noticed Teddie staring at the medium as though he is about to leap at her throat.

  “I had to carry him or die, a mile to the huts with his body floating, head down, in the urn and had to make believe I didn’t see him or they would put me in another urn and drown me in the boiling tea—”

  They look around in shock as, with a sound somewhere between a growl of fury and a sob of anguish, Teddie lunges up and rushes to the door, yanks it open and runs out. In the sudden silence, Peter, Robert and Cathy exchange confused looks.

  Then Robert stands and hurries after Teddie.

  He finds him on the balcony outside his room, staring across the countryside. “Are you all right?” he asks.

  “No, you are Allright, I am Berger,” Teddie mutters distractedly. He is having difficulty with his breath.

  “What happened?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Teddie answers. “The damn woman was filching from my brain.”

  He tells Robert that he was a bearer at Dachau. He didn’t have a sixteen year old brother but he’d seen men drowned in boiling tea.

  “I couldn’t stay and listen to her any longer,” he says. “God knows what garbage she would have dredged from my psyche.”

  He shivers violently. “It’s cold out, Teddie, come inside,” Robert tells him quietly.

  He leads the shaken man into the room and seats him. Teddie’s teeth are clenched, his breathing heavy.

  “Seventeen,” he says. “I was seventeen.” He looks at Robert with haunted eyes. “It was not a brick wall, it was marble, in Gestapo headquarters. They marched us in and lined us up in front of the officers and we stood at attention.”

  As though time has suddenly re-claimed him, Teddie jumps up and assumes a pose of stiff attention, speaking between gritted teeth. “And we stood there at strict attention, wondering if we would die or live.”

  Suddenly, he is sitting on the chair again, his face a mask of casual cruelty. “And the officer at the desk said—” His voice becomes a frightening sound. “These are Jews and they never exercise. All they do is steal our money and perform abortions on Gentile girls because they want to kill off all the Gentiles. We must help them exercise. We will make them strong and vigorous.”

  Teddie is up, then down, doing push-ups on the floor. “Down we went,” he mutters. “‘One-two-one-two-one-two!’ the officer barked at us. ‘One-two-one-two-one-two!’”

  Robert stares at Teddie, wordless.

  Teddie is on his knees now. “It was simple for me,” he says. “I was young, I was strong. It was no effort. But the old people. The old, the very old. They could not do it. Old men fell.”

  Again, he is doing a push-up, now collapsing, gasping, acting out the awful memory. “His arms gave out,” he says laboredly, “and he fell and lay there on the marble floor, huffing and puffing for breath.”

  Robert starts as Teddie leaps up and moves with casual steps, the officer’s face printed on his again, the thin smile of cruelty. “And the officer came out from behind his desk and moved to the old man and said, in a very gentle, very kindly voice—”

  The voice makes Robert shudder as Teddie enacts the officer saying, “Oh. You are having trouble, my old Jewish friend. Here. Let me help you with your exercise.”

  Robert twitches as Teddie sweeps down and, from memory, enacts the officer grabbing the old man by the hair with rigid, talon-curled fingers, starting to jolt him down and up, down and up.

  “And the officer,” he says, “started to count. ‘One-two-one-two-one-two-one-two-one-two!’” His voice is rabid now. “And on eve-ry count of one he smashed the old man’s face against the floor!”

  He stands up, panting. “And the old man’s face was crushed,” he says. “His skull broke open and his brains spilled out across the marble floor.”

  He stares at Robert, chest rising and falling heavily. Abruptly, then, he makes a half-turn and looks up strangely. Automatically, Robert does the same, then looks back at Teddie who is still peering upward, now pointing, smiling.

  “And up there on the balcony, standing with their cigarettes in their pretty little fingers were the young Nazi girls, watching.” His face contorts. “Giggling.”

  Robert shudders again as Teddie imitates their giggles. “Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh; isn’t that funny?”

  Teddie looks back at Robert. “Their fine young boy-friend Nazi officers were showing off to them, you see. Beating out men’s brains a
nd eyes against the marble floor in order to impress their girls.”

  He swallows hard. “It was there I made the mistake of looking disturbed at this because the old man was my grandfather. So, naturally offended by my bad taste, they threw me, head-first, against a wall.” His smile is terrible to see. “And I was blessed from that day forth with E.S.P.—Extra-Sickening-Perception.”

  He slumps back into the chair, looking exhausted.

  “I have told you nothing, nothing,” he says. “It is children’s play I have described to you. Can you imagine—possibly imagine?—how it was to be clairvoyant in a death camp and be able to see into the shower rooms and watch the people being gassed—the men, the women, the children, the suckling babes? See them? Watch them? Hear them? Yet I am told that what I have is a gift from God!”

  He looks darkly amused.

  “Once it was a gift,” he says. “A moment I shall treasure to my grave. When I killed a Nazi officer. A fat man with a bad heart. He woke up in his room one night and there I was—this dirty, scruffy little Jewish boy in rags, staring at him. What do you call it, an OOBE? Yes, that is what I had. Except that fat swine thought I was a ghost and had a heart attack and dropped dead on the floor.”

  Teddie’s laugh makes Robert’s flesh crawl. “I told my friends the next day what I’d done but they thought I was crazy. I was crazy. But I had killed him, nonetheless.” He closes his eyes. “And other than that, being psychic has been nothing but—”

  A piercing scream is heard below.

  All of them rush down. Dr. Keighley is lying unconscious on the library floor, his wife and daughter bending over him.

  “He said he saw the man again,” she tells them in a trembling voice. “Down here. Down here now!”

  Robert, Cathy and Peter have supper together in the Breakfast Room.

  Teddie has left, returning to London by train. He’ll meet them at the airport when they leave for Russia. He’s apologized for disrupting the sitting, told them that Robert would explain what happened.

  Mrs. Warrenton has also gone. It seems as though the Harrowgate Hobgoblin (as Teddie has called it) may never be explained.

  Cathy accepts what has happened as perfectly explicable. Teddie’s buried memories of Dachau were picked up by Mrs. Warrenton while she was in trance.