Superstition

by David Ambrose

  “Well, you're not far from the truth,” Riley told him. “They were magicians in a sense, though not a double act. They were adventurers, charlatans, and quite possibly geniuses. Both claimed to have occult powers and to belong to secret societies going back to the dawn of time. Interestingly, there is evidence that they were responsible for a number of remarkable cures, not to mention good old standby miracles like turning base metal into gold.”

  “Alchemists!” Roger said with a snort of disdain.

  “Yes, alchemists. But there was more to it than telling fortunes and deluding the gullible.”

  “They believed in astrology.”

  “And numerology. And so did Jung, who said that the ten years he spent studying alchemy were some of the most important of his life.”

  “All psychoanalysts are mad. I wouldn't send my dog to one.”

  “I'm with Ward on this,” Barry said. “You can't just dismiss all of that stuff out of hand. I'm sorry, Roger, I know you're a smart guy and all, but that's just narrow minded and arrogant. There's too much evidence. You may not like it, but it's there.”

  “I stand corrected,” Roger said amiably, holding up his hands in surrender. “By all means, write them in if you want to.”

  “The only problem,” Barry continued, turning to Ward, “is that from what I've read Cagliostro left Paris just before the revolution, and Saint-Germain had died.”

  “Cagliostro was at the height of his fame when Adam arrived in Paris. They could well have met in fashionable salons. Then in 1785 he got mixed up in a financial scandal involving some woman friend of Marie Antoinette's and a devious cardinal. He was thrown into the Bastille for a spell-along with the Marquis de Sade, incidentally-then banished from France. He died in Italy in 1795.”

  Maggie had given a little shiver of distaste at the mention of the Marquis de Sade. “I don't think we want to get mixed up with all that, do we?”

  “I'm not suggesting we do,” Ward said. “But the fact is these people were around. And whatever else you may think of them, they were remarkable men. Adam could easily have met Cagliostro or de Sade in the circles he moved in in Paris. Saint-Germain died in 1786, but the legend was that he'd lived many times before and has been reborn since. Witnesses claim to have seen him in Paris in 1789 trying to warn the king of revolution. Since then he's been seen in the Himalayas as a monk, and even in Chicago, of all places, in 1930.”

  There was a murmur of amusement around the table at this last reference. “Shit, let's have him over to supper,” Pete said. “Oh, excuse my French, Maggie.”

  “That's all right,” Maggie said. “But I'm not sure that I like all this talk at all. Our Adam was a nice, clean-living young man and we're getting him involved with some very strange people. I don't know why, but it makes me uneasy.”

  “We're not getting him involved with anyone unless we all agree,” Sam said.

  “I think it's too late for that,” Drew said quietly, oddly thoughtful. “We've talked about them, so they're in our minds now, just as much as Adam is.” Her tone of voice suggested that she shared Maggie's misgivings.

  “I wouldn't worry about it,” Sam said. “When you think how many bogeymen we already have in our heads who haven't done us any harm so far…”

  “I wasn't thinking about us,” Drew interrupted him, not contradicting him but clarifying what she meant. “I was worried about Adam.”

  There was a silence in the room. Then Drew spoke the thought that they were all thinking.

  “Did you hear that? I talked about him as though he was real.”

  17

  Taylor Freestone sniffed in the haughty way that he thought befitted a member of the East Coast establishment, of which he considered himself a prominent member. Joanna's latest memo had not impressed him. Its bottom line was that the group had still made no progress in conjuring up its ghost, and the three-week deadline had been passed. He mentioned a couple of stories that he said he'd like her to start thinking about. One was about the private lives of UN delegates in New York; another involved new whispers of scandal in the endless Kennedy saga. Naturally, if the ghost story became live, as he put it with no intended irony, he would put her back on it full time. He still knew that if this thing worked out it was a cover story.

  Boredom was the main problem facing the group, especially someone like Roger Fullerton, who simply wasn't used to it. The idea of meeting regularly with the same people, however agreeable, for unstructured sessions of talk, speculation, and occasional jokes was beginning to wear thin. Sam confided to Joanna that they were going to lose him if something didn't happen soon.

  “We're going to have to try something new,” he said to her one night in her apartment, late.

  “I thought we just did.”

  He laughed and shifted on the bed so that his body covered hers in a gentle, sensual embrace. She could feel him hard and urgent, ready to enter her again, and gave a little moan of pleasure. “What exactly did you have in mind?” she whispered.

  “Tell you later,” he mumbled, teasing the lobe of her ear with his teeth, his excitem

  “A Ouija board!”

  The protest came from Barry, who seemed to regard the suggestion as almost an insult.

  “Jesus, Sam! I thought this was supposed to be a scientific experiment, not a board game.”

  “The Ouija board, or an equivalent, was used in China and Greece from at least the sixth century b.c. The Romans used it in the third century a.d., and the Mongols in the thirteenth. Europe discovered it in the 1850s. Native Americans had their own version of it, which they used to find missing objects and persons and talk with the dead. It didn't become a ‘game’ until some smart American slapped a patent on it about a hundred years ago and started marketing it commercially.”

  “Okay, okay. But I still think it's a weird idea.”

  “How does everybody else feel about it?” Sam looked around the table. “Remember, we don't do anything unless we all agree, or unless we all agree to a majority vote.”

  Ward Riley observed that Ouija boards were widely used in Victorian seances. It obviously served to externalize physically something in their collective consciousness. “I think we should try it,” he said.

  Maggie said she had heard it described as a “dangerous toy,” but had tried it once as a young girl without ill effects-or, for that matter, any positive results either.

  Drew had no objection. Pete said maybe it would help them break through whatever was blocking them right now.

  Roger didn't have an opinion either way and was happy to go along with the majority.

  Joanna had tried it at school, like Maggie without results, but had no objection to trying it again. Barry said what the hell, let's do it.

  The device that Sam brought down from his office was something that he hadn't used since his earliest experiments with the paranormal. The large hand-painted board bore all the letters of the alphabet, numbers 0 through 9, and the words “Yes.” and “No” standing opposite each other. The pointer was heart shaped and stood on three small felt-tipped legs. It was large enough for all eight of them to place a fingertip on it-so lightly, Sam told them, as to be barely touching it.

  Although they got into the procedure without fanfare or ceremony, there was undeniably a new sense of drama in the air. The physical coordination required of them-all leaning forward at the same angle, arms extended, forefingers resting on the pointer head like leads emerging from a battery-gave a focus to what had so far been an abstract intellectual exercise. They were keyed up, alert, ready for something to happen.

  “Is anybody there?” Sam asked in a normal conversational tone.

  There was a silence. They waited. Nothing happened.

  Sam asked the question again. “Is there somebody who wishes to talk to us?”

  Again nothing happened. Joanna found herself involuntarily holding her breath. She quickly glanced at the others and saw that most of them were doing the same. Her finger was resting so l
ightly on the felt top of the pointer that she could barely feel the contact, but suddenly she became acutely conscious of it, like an irritation or an itch that you have to do something about before it drives you crazy. But she couldn't, because she knew that her finger must stay where it was as long as the others kept theirs there, all waiting intently for something to happen.

  Then it did. She gave a little gasp. There were murmurs of surprise, curiosity, suppressed excitement from the others. The thing had distinctly moved about an inch. However much she rationalized it in the terms that Sam had explained to her, she felt her heart beating faster.

  “Is somebody there?” Sam asked again, his voice steady. “Please indicate yes or no.”

  A brief pause. Then, in a single, straight movement, the pointer slid to “Yes.”

  “Somebody's pushing,” growled Barry.

  “Nobody's pushing,” Sam said. “Keep your fingers in place. Will whoever is there please spell out your name for us?”

  Gradually, almost hesitantly, the pointer moved back to the center of the board, described a circle as though getting its bearings, then headed for the letter “A.” It barely paused before looping out again, all of them leaning and swaying to follow it, moving in unison like some kind of precision dancing team. It went to “D” and back to “A,” then across to “M,” after which it came to rest once again in the center of the board.

  “He's not going to spell out his last name,” Joanna heard herself saying. As though in response, the pointer started to move again and all of them with it. “W-Y-A-T-T.”

  “I'm telling you, somebody's pushing it!” Barry's voice was high with incredulity.

  “If that's what you think, try it,” Sam told him. “Ask it a question to which only you know the answer, then try and push it to spell it out.”

  Maggie had removed her finger, but Sam said quickly, “No, Maggie. Everybody keep your finger there. Don't resist Barry, just try to follow him. Okay, ask it a question.”

  Barry frowned a moment, then asked, “What's my cousin Matthew's middle name?”

  The pointer didn't even get to the first letter. It was obvious that Barry was pushing, and equally obvious that the others were not resisting; yet he couldn't even get it to move in a straight line. He conceded with a grudging, “Okay, I guess I'm wrong.”

  “Let's carry on,” Sam said. “Does anybody have a question they want to ask Adam?”

  Roger said he did. “I'd like to know whether Adam thinks he's real, or knows that he's just a projection of our thoughts?”

  The pointer didn't move. “Which is it, Adam?” Sam said. “Are you real or not?”

  Once again the movement began. “I-A-M-A-D-A-M-W-Y-A-T-T.”

  “‘I am Adam Wyatt,’” Roger repeated. “Well, that's nicely inconclusive.”

  “If we're not pushing it, which we're not, is there any reason why this thing couldn't move by itself?” Joanna asked.

  “Psychokinesis? Let's try,” Sam replied.

  They all removed their fingers.

  “All right, Adam,” Sam said, “can you move the pointer by yourself without our touching it?”

  It seemed an age as they sat motionless, watching, though in fact it was barely a minute.

  “Maybe it's a little soon for that,” Sam said finally. “Back to the old method.”

  They all replaced their fingers on the pointer's felt top.

  “Anybody else got a question?” Sam asked.

  Pete said, “Why don't we ask him why he can't move this thing by himself?”

  With a swiftness that startled them, the pointer started moving around the board until it spelled out “I CANNOT.”

  “ Why not?” Barry repeated.

  This time there was no response. The thing remained as dead as it had been when they weren't touching it.

  “According to the theory, if I understand it correctly,” Ward Riley said after a while, “what we're learning now is that we don't believe in Adam enough to give him a life of his own. Isn't that so, Sam?”

  “According to the theory, that's right,” Sam said.

  “Why don't we ask him if he can do anything to prove that he's real?” Drew said.

  With a suddenness that made them all recoil in shock, a sound came from the table that was unlike anything they had heard before. It was a sharp rap, but more like a detonation than a knock, something that came from within the fibers of the wood itself rather than from the collision of two hard surfaces.

  Joanna had felt the vibration run up her arm. She could see that the others had too.

  “I think that's him,” Sam said. There was a note of quiet triumph in his voice.

  Joanna's heart was beating fast.

  18

  On reflection, Joanna decided to say nothing to her editor about what she had initially regarded as a breakthrough. A single rap, even though captured on tape, as was the reaction of the group on video, was far from conclusive proof that anything out of the ordinary had taken place. So she diligently started to research her story on the UN delegates in New York, while remaining privately convinced that she would soon be back on the Adam story full time.

  She had seen her parents only once since their evening with Sam. On their last visit to the city he had been in Chicago taking part in some weekend-long symposium, and since then Bob and Elizabeth Cross had been in Europe. They were spending three months between London, Paris, and Rome. Her father had managed to swing it with the company as part work, part vacation: a kind of dry run for retirement, he called it. They had traveled increasingly in recent years. Her father's job with the airline provided them with almost unlimited free travel and offered major discounts at some of the world's best hotels. As her mother said, it was the best part of growing old-being no longer too poor or too busy to travel, and still young enough to enjoy it. Of course grandchildren would be nice, but she didn't want Joanna to feel any pressure on the subject.

  A couple of nights after the first rap, and before the excitement had quite worn off, Joanna stopped by the lab around six to pick up Sam. They had planned to catch an off-off-Broadway theater group, then have dinner at a new Thai restaurant they'd heard about. When she got there, he and Pete had something to show her that they were very excited about. A friend of Pete's in the engineering department had analyzed the table rap that they'd gotten on tape. It had proved to be as radically different from any ordinary kind of knock as it had sounded. She pored over graphs and printouts that meant little to her aside from the obvious differences that Pete pointed to.

  “In an ordinary rap,” he said, “if I hit the same table with my knuckles or a hammer or any hard object, the sound starts with maximum amplitude and dies away. This rap, on the other hand, builds up gradually and ends with maximum amplitude. It's exactly the opposite of normal.”

  “They found the same thing in Ontario with the ‘Philip’ experiment,” Sam added triumphantly. “We're on our way.”

  The theater show was interesting enough to keep them in their seats until the end, and the restaurant was worth waiting for. It was way up on the West Side, so they decided to spend the night at Sam's place. On the cab ride back he fell silent and she sensed a change in his mood. He was unaware of her watching him as he gazed out into the passing night. It was one of those moments of distraction she had learned to accept in him. It couldn't have lasted more than a minute, but when he turned to her it was with the look of somebody waking from sleep to find a loved one watching over them. He took her hand.

  “Well…?” she said softly.

  He shrugged. “Just the usual question. What does it all add up to? And if it doesn't add up to anything, why is it there?”

  “I thought science didn't ask why. Just how.”

  “I know. But as Roger likes to point out, his end of it has built the microchip and the Teflon frying pan, while we're no closer to understanding the paranormal than William James was in 1910. He wrote something that I've never had to memorize, because ever since I read it
I haven't been able to get it out of my head.”

  He paused a moment, his gaze going out again to the Manhattan night.

  “‘I confess,’” he began quoting softly, “‘that at times I have been tempted to believe that the Creator has eternally intended this department of nature to remain baffling, to prompt our curiosities and hopes and suspicions all in equal measure, so that although ghosts and clairvoyances, and raps and messages from spirits, are always seeming to exist and can never be fully explained away, they also can never be susceptible to full corroboration.’”

  “Good quote. I'll use it in the article.”

  “You can add,” he said, with some of the usual vigor returning to his voice, “that it didn't stop him trying.”

  She increased the pressure of her hand on his. “Can I tell you something?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  She leaned over and kissed him. “I love you.”

  He looked deeply into her eyes.

  “Funny,” he said, “I've been thinking the same thing.”

  “Telepathy?”

  “No, I don't think so.” They kissed again. “Just coincidence.”

  The tub of warm paraffin wax excited much interest at the start of the group's next session. Sam repeated the story he'd told Joanna about the phantom hands in Paris.

  “Now that's funny,” Maggie said pensively when he'd finished. “That's Paris three times.”

  “How do you mean, Maggie?” Sam asked.

  “These plaster casts you're talking about are in Paris. We put Adam in Paris. And Joanna was just telling me that her parents are on holiday in Paris.”

  Sam thought about it, raised his eyebrows, then he laughed. “You're right. I wonder what it means.”

  “The point of synchronicity,” Roger said, taking his usual place around the table, “is that it has no point.”

  “Except insofar as it points to what Jung called ‘a unifying principle behind meaningful coincidences,’” Ward Riley demurred.

  “The logic of that argument is flawed,” Roger responded, happy to have found someone he could argue with almost as vigorously as he did with Sam. “It rests on the assumption that coincidences are meaningful, for which there is no evidence. To say that a meaningful coincidence has meaning is to say nothing.”