Superstition

by David Ambrose

  26

  They had moved upstairs to the central waiting area of the deserted lab. Barry perched on the arm of the chair in which Drew huddled, pulling her coat tightly and protectively around her. He offered her a paper cup filled with water from the cooler, but she shook her head without looking at it.

  Roger was slumped on a couch along the wall, balancing a glass of whiskey on his stomach. Joanna walked across and stood over him. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  “Better.” He pushed himself up into a sitting position. “Where's Sam?”

  “Through there.” She pointed to a closed door in back of the lab. “He and Pete are making a plaster cast from the wax impression.”

  There was the sound of a toilet flushing, and a moment later Ward Riley emerged from the small bathroom pulling on his jacket. Joanna asked if she could get him anything.

  “No thanks.” He nodded toward the door in back. “How's it going in there?”

  “Pete said it wouldn't take long-if it worked.”

  Ward settled into an ancient armchair across from Roger, obviously intending to wait for the results. Roger was staring down at his feet stretched out in front of him, turning his whiskey glass in his hand. “So,” he said reflectively, “was it something coming from us, or coming through us? And is there a difference?”

  Ward thought for a moment. “Hard to say.”

  “It's hard to say anything that makes sense under the circumstances.” Roger looked up at Joanna. “Though Joanna's going to have to. What are you going to say about it when you write your piece?”

  “Maybe I won't say anything. Just describe it.”

  “Probably a wise choice.”

  They turned as the door behind them opened and Sam emerged, carrying something. Ward and Roger got to their feet and followed Joanna to get a closer look at the white plaster cast that he now held out to them. “It came out pretty good,” he said.

  Drew and Barry joined them, he supporting her with an arm around her shoulder. One by one, with the unconscious veneration of believers reaching out to touch a holy relic, they ran their fingers over the smooth and still slightly warm surface of the plaster.

  “It's incredible,” Joanna murmured.

  Sam's expression was faintly sardonic. “That's just what most people will call it.”

  She knew what he meant. “I guess you're right.”

  “There's absolutely no way we can prove that this thing isn't a fake. I can't even prove to you that Pete and I didn't cook this thing up back there just now. Or that I didn't plant that wax mold downstairs.”

  “I think we're resigned to being called crackpots or liars, or both,” Roger said with a sigh. “The issue is no longer what people think of us, but what we think of what's happening.”

  Ward bent forward to get a closer look. “Is it holding something?”

  “Yes, but I'm not sure what.” Sam turned the cast over and sought out a brighter patch of the not very powerful overhead light. “The detail isn't perfect. You can see these ridges between the fingers that look like the links of a chain attached to this thing in the palm of the hand-an amulet or talisman, or something similar.”

  “Talisman more likely,” Ward said. “An amulet is traditionally for protection, a talisman confers occult powers on its possessor. I didn't get the feeling that that thing down there was in much need of protection.”

  “I don't know,” Sam laughed softly. “Maybe we scared it as much as it scared us.”

  Drew shivered. “I find that hard to believe,” she said in an unsteady voice, but into which she nonetheless managed to inject a note of humor. Barry tightened his arm around her shoulder.

  Ward took the cast from Sam and peered more closely at the design on the thing that it was holding. “There's some kind of pattern on it-sweeping lines overlaying what look like more lines.”

  “Isn't that a triangle?” Joanna asked, pointing.

  “Or a compass,” Roger said. “Which could make it some kind of Freemasonic sign-not that I'm an expert.”

  “I'll have Peggy look at it tomorrow,” Sam said. “She's pretty good on that kind of thing.”

  It was after eleven when Sam locked the cast in his office safe for the night. No one had given a thought to dinner, and now they found they weren't hungry. They stood for a moment in a little group on the sidewalk just off the campus. They decided that they would all talk with Sam on the phone in the next few days and decide whether or not to go ahead with their next group meeting, which was scheduled for the beginning of next week. Then they went their separate ways.

  Joanna and Sam took a cab to Riverside Drive. Neither spoke. She looked out at the familiar lights and landmarks flashing by in the night. Somehow they seemed slightly less familiar than before. Something had changed. Whether it was in the world or in her she wasn't sure, but there had been some underlying shift in her sense of reality. Perhaps it was just a delayed reaction to shock, an adjustment to the weeks of strangeness which had culminated in the extraordinary evening she had just experienced. The only thing she knew with any certainty, and she sensed it in her deepest being, was that something irrevocable had happened that meant her life would never be quite the same.

  She reached out for the comforting touch of Sam's hand in the darkness, and felt his fingers interlace with hers.

  “What do you think we should do?” she asked.

  He sighed and looked at her. “We began the evening by trying to get rid of it, but somehow I don't think that hand we produced was waving good-bye.”

  “I notice you say we produced. You're still sure that's what happened tonight?”

  He looked at her in the darkness of the cab. “It's still more feasible than any other explanation.”

  “I wonder.”

  “What exactly do you wonder?”

  Her gaze went back out to the city. “If it was something we created, why would it attack us that way? Why would we attack ourselves?”

  He took a moment to reply, as though preparing himself to hear aloud the thoughts that were turning in his mind.

  “I suspect that what attacked us was the part of ourselves that knows it would be a shame and a crime to abandon this experiment now. So it made its disapproval known when we attempted to do so-and left a tantalizing hint of what we might achieve if we go on.”

  She turned to him again. “That's what you want? To go on?”

  “Yes,” he answered simply. “As I said, I'll go on with another group if this one folds.” He paused. “What about you?”

  She too thought a moment, then spoke as if disappointed by her own answer. “I don't know.”

  He nodded and gave her a faint smile of reassurance. It was the answer he'd expected and he didn't blame her for it.

  “At least,” he said, “you can't say you aren't getting a story.”

  27

  Peggy's office, though even smaller than Sam's, was considerably tidier. She had shifted everything off her desk and onto the window ledge in order to make room for the stack of reference books that she had spent the morning going through. In the midst of them, carefully wedged between a couple of paperweights, was the plaster cast of the arm, turned so that the thing it held faced upward. She peered through a magnifying glass at the barely discernible detail on it.

  What had at first appeared to be sweeping lines began to look more like one continuous spiral that coiled into some kind of double vortex pattern. She still wasn't sure what the straight lines running through them represented, if anything, partly because the point at which two of them appeared to join was obscured by the fingertips curled over it. She turned several pages of the largest of the books open on her desk, and reluctantly conceded defeat. Nothing in there even remotely resembled the design on the plaster cast she was examining.

  She went to the basement-Adam's room-where Sam was going through the previous night's wreckage with Pete and Bryan Meade, the engineer. Joanna was with them, taking notes in shorthand to back up what she was
getting on tape; she no longer relied on technology as much as she had, especially in this place. Peggy caught Joanna's eye as she entered. The two women liked each other, and it took only the faintest shake of Peggy's head for Joanna to understand that she'd drawn a blank with her research. “What have they found down here?” she asked.

  Joanna told her that according to Bryan there was nothing unusual about the damage to the furniture or electrical equipment. They had been trashed by straightforward physical strength-but strength on a human not a superhuman scale. Nothing had been crushed or bent or broken to any degree that a normal man or woman couldn't accomplish. Nobody examining the debris would have reason to suspect the intervention of any paranormal force. The only inference any reasonable outsider could draw would be that the group members had inflicted the damage themselves in some kind of frenzy.

  “Which according to Sam's theory,” Peggy said, “is exactly what happened.”

  “What do you make of all this, Peggy?” Joanna asked. “Just between us?”

  Peggy's hands were clasped in front of her as she lifted her shoulders in a gesture of incomprehension and unease. “It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever been this close to. I've told Sam I think it's a mistake to go on-at least until we can figure out some safeguards against this happening again. What about the rest of you?”

  Before Joanna could answer, Sam looked over and called out, “Any luck yet, Peggy?”

  Peggy shook her head again. Sam came toward them, frowning. “There's got to be something that'll tell us what that design means.”

  “Why must it mean anything?” Joanna asked. “Do you think it's important?”

  For the first time he looked genuinely surprised by what she had said. “Of course it's important. Nothing that's happening here is happening by chance. Believe me, it's important.”

  Drew and Barry were planning to catch the six o'clock screening of a movie, then have dinner at their favorite Chinese restaurant. The traffic had been light and they'd arrived early, bought their tickets, and found they had twenty minutes to kill. There was a bar next to the theater, but neither of them felt like a drink, so they took a stroll around the block to look at the shops.

  Barry headed straight for a secondhand bookshop that he knew well. Drew was already absorbed in a display in the window of a fabric shop a couple of doors along, but she saw Barry signaling to her that he was going into the bookshop, and she nodded.

  The interior was dark and seemed to stretch way back, with book stacks from floor to ceiling everywhere, barely leaving room for two people to pass between them. Barry wandered through in search of anything that might pique his curiosity. Subjects were divided into sections that were labeled with faded signs handwritten in ink. He spent a few minutes scanning the “Military History” shelves, but found nothing of great interest. He went on alphabetically, skipping “New Age” without even a glance, and barely pausing at “Occult” he'd had enough of that for the time being. Philosophy looked more promising. There was a complete set of Bertrand Russell's autobiography that looked almost new. He checked inside the cover; it was a first edition.

  He began to read and became engrossed. A couple of times he had to step back or press up against a book stack to let somebody pass, but the response was automatic and didn't break his concentration. What did was the sound of books tumbling onto the floor as he backed into a pile of them. He looked down and saw an assistant crouched where he had been refilling one of the lower shelves. Apologizing profusely, Barry bent down to help him clear up the mess.

  The assistant was a young man with a wispy beard and gentle manner who told him not to worry, it happened all the time. But Barry was already only half listening. He straightened up slowly, gazing at the book he had picked up, open at the page where it had fallen.

  He recognized the design at once.

  When he began to read the text accompanying it, he felt the blood drain from his face.

  28

  Barry had made the call to Sam's office just before ten the following morning. He was subdued and apologetic, but unshakable: he and Drew were quitting the group and would play no further part in the experiment. Sam had asked for a face-to-face meeting, but Barry had hedged awkwardly, saying there was no point.

  Joanna had been at the magazine when she got the news from Sam. She had called Drew and Barry immediately and asked if she could talk to them-“just to help me round off this part of the story. I'm not going to try to change your minds.”

  There had been a whispered conversation at the other end of the line, then they had invited her to come by after lunch. They would talk to her-still on the condition that their names would not be mentioned.

  She took a cab out to the quiet tree-lined street in Queens where they lived. It was a prosperous middle-class neighborhood with houses that would have won no architectural prizes but which were large, detached, and comfortable-looking. She walked up a redstone path past an impeccably tended lawn and flower beds and rang the doorbell. Barry let her in. He was friendly, but subdued. She could sense his underlying tension.

  Drew appeared in the living room door. The brightness of her white trousers and floral blouse only emphasized the tiredness in her face. She looked as though she had slept little, if at all. They took Joanna into a good-sized rectangular living room and invited her to sit in one of the two brocade-upholstered armchairs placed at precise angles alongside a matching sofa. The whole room was arranged with jarring symmetry, every object in a space of its own with no sense of an integrated whole. It was, Joanna reflected, with an immediate sense of guilt at her own snobbery, a home typical of a working-class couple who had made money but never acquired the patina of sophistication that would have moved them up the social ladder. Barry and Drew were what they were, without pretense. They weren't the kind of people she would have spent much time with, if any, outside of their group meetings, but she had liked them and instinctively respected them from the outset.

  “Thank you for seeing me,” Joanna said. “I know you're still pretty shaken up after the other night. So are we all.”

  The couple exchanged a look, as though for mutual reassurance. Joanna decided to leave the small tape recorder in her bag and not turn an informal conversation into an interview. She sensed that Drew and Barry wanted to talk, but could easily lose their nerve. They needed encouraging, not intimidating.

  “I was just making some coffee, if you'd like some,” Drew said.

  Joanna sensed it was an excuse to leave her alone with Barry. “Thank you, that would be nice.”

  As Drew left the room, Barry picked up a book from a table by his chair. It had no dust jacket, its spine was split, and whatever color it had been had long since faded to a murky brown. “I came across this last night by chance in a secondhand bookshop.” He thumbed through in search of a particular page. “When I say by chance, I mean it literally. It fell off the shelf open…right here.”

  He handed it to her. She found herself looking at a plain black-and-white drawing or engraving of some kind. It was circular and contained a long, artfully designed spiral that doubled back on itself to give a strangely three-dimensional effect. There could be no doubt that it was the same design as on the object in the plaster-cast hand. The various straight lines and their relationships to one anther were now clearly visible.

  “They're alchemical symbols,” Barry told her. “Some of it's Egyptian, but the spiral is closer to a Tibetan mandala. It's all in the text.”

  She flipped to the front of the book. Only one word was inscribed on the title page:“Magick.” She turned back to the diagram. “What is it?” she asked.

  He inhaled before answering. There was a ragged edge to his breathing, as though he was making an effort to hide his nervousness. “It's something that's supposed to give its possessor the power to place a death curse on his enemies.”

  Joanna looked at him. “A what?”

  “If you look upon this and the gaze of its possessor simultaneously,
your life is in that person's power.” He shrugged, as if to excuse himself for the absurdity of what he'd said, and also for being tempted to believe it.

  Joanna looked down at the book in her hand, skimmed a few paragraphs, turned a page. “It says this thing belonged to Cagliostro.” She looked at Barry again. “Wasn't that…”

  “The guy Ward mentioned,” he finished for her. “And Adam later confirmed that he'd known him in Paris.”

  They were both silent a moment.

  “How much do we know about this Cagliostro?” she asked.

  Barry walked across the room, passing an impressive-looking sound system with expensive speakers. He reached a wall entirely covered with bookshelves on which rows of volumes were arranged with fastidious care. He ran a finger along them until he found the one he wanted. It was a hardback that was almost as worn as the one he had just shown her. He returned thumbing through the pages in search of something, then handed it to her in silence. She saw that it was open at a chapter headed “Cagliostro, Count Alessandro di (1743–1795).”

  “Whether he was a charlatan or not, nobody knows,” Barry said. “But there's a report of a meeting he had in 1785 with the highest-ranking Freemasons in Paris, who demanded proof of the magical powers he claimed to have. He demonstrated a system of numerology derived from the letters in people's names. That day he predicted a revolution in France in four years’ time, and the execution of the royal family and various other people, all precisely named and with the dates on which it would happen. And it did, exactly as he said. He also predicted the rise of Napoleon, and his eventual exile in Elba. All this before an audience of at least a hundred highly educated, respected, powerful men.”

  “Did they believe him?”

  “Apparently not enough. The following year he was arrested over some financial scandal and was thrown in the Bastille for nine months on the orders of the king, then exiled from the country. He died in another jail in Rome ten years later-by which time almost everything he'd predicted had come true, and the rest came true soon afterwards.”