The Supernatural Enhancements

by Edgar Cantero

  (Breakfast at Gordon’s.)

  —So? What do you make of it?

  —Did you sleep at all?

  —Couple hours.

  —You can’t go on this way.

  —Can we focus on the letters?

  (… I can’t.)

  —Look, I gather Dr. Belknap is a therapist. He has nothing to do with the sect or whatever. So, Knox.

  —Ambrose trusted him, but not quite.

  —He transmitted his last will to him, but saved the baton, as you put it, for Caleb. “The Secretary.”

  —& ciphered it.

  (We check the cipher.)

  —So what is this optical illusion?

  —It’s not like the Aeschylus note—too long.

  —Strückner said Caleb’s father was in the war with Ambrose’s father; maybe they’re both into cryptography. This might be a more advanced level. What’s more advanced than a substitution code?

  —Everything.

  —Yup. I feared that. Okay. I’ll look into it.

  —I will. You go to sleep.

  NOVEMBER 20 (EVENING)

  DREAM JOURNAL

  * * *

  I’m sleeping in the park and the policemen come and speak to me and prod me with their truncheons. I can’t understand them. Suddenly I stop a truncheon going for my arm. I foresee the other truncheon’s due trajectory. I duck and kick the aggressor in advance.

  I knock them out in under five seconds. I look at their bodies on the snow, astonished. I look at my hands.

  I look at my hand. There’s a Rubik’s cube.

  I look at my hand. There’s a grenade, and the pin’s off.

  I look at my hand. I hold two fives.

  I look at my hand: It pines for the window, fingers clutch the sunrays, but they fail. I fall. And the monster thrusts the pitchfork through me and I wake with the sound of my splintered ribs.

  EXCERPT FROM JOHN LEEK’S GHOSTS OF GHOSTS

  * * *

  The main challenge we face on “resetting parapsychology,” as Bach put it, is how not to repeat the same mistakes. We have agreed on a new tool, the scientific method. But this new cement will soon degrade if contaminated by two of the most hazardous agents to science: egotism and its bigger brother, anthropocentrism. […] Quoting Ernest Bach again (10), “The legitimate questions for parapsychology to attempt an answer are: Do ghosts exist?, which is due to challenge any open mind, and, What are they?, which is bound to interest any real scientist. The wrong question is, What do ghosts want with us? […]”

  Not even I think myself ready to claim not to be taking this ghost business personally. Here’s a piece of why. During the years-long process of writing this book, many colleagues have been kind enough to read the manuscript and share their feelings. A strong majority complained that my ten points on what we know about ghosts are too scant, the result of too severe a purge. However, one valuable piece of feedback came from a late good friend of mine whom we will call Jonathan—a pure psychologist, a “para-free” one, who took interest in the supernatural only at an amateur level. On reading those ten pivotal statements, this genuinely scientific man immediately signaled the fifth item (“[ghosts] speak, and are therefore assumed to have human intelligence”), and remarked, “This is a logical fallacy. Parrots speak, and they do not have human intelligence.”

  What a beautiful way to exemplify how anthropocentrism leads to speculation! We don’t know what ghosts are, but given a clean slate, we compare them to ourselves. We hear voices: We assume they’re human. We see shapes: We try to outline a person out of them. (Of course, the outline looks more like a blot, and that’s why we made up that ghosts wear loose gowns or blankets.) Surely the use of aseptic terminology such as paranormal phenomena is meant to dehumanize ghosts, but as soon as we lower our guard, we are humanizing them again. We are tainted by the old notion of ghosts as lost souls, rejections from hell, but this is not part of our selected evidence: It is folklore and religion, a different corpus of knowledge that scientists must put aside.

  Others might think of Jonathan’s input as destructive. Personally, I thank him for it. I owe him my growing skepticism and puzzlement, which are not bad things; gullibility is. Jonathan was not prejudiced, and knowledge found him at rest: He never chased ghosts, but toward the end of his life, he saw one. He told me the day after, and he was perfectly at peace with it. One week later he died of cardiac arrest caused by pancreatic cancer.

  VIDEO RECORDING

  * * *

  BATHROOM MON NOV-20-1995 15:33:03

  [Light is switched on, and for a couple of seconds it throbs and ebbs and eddies inside the left lightbulb over the sink like a disoriented glowworm. A. looks up, waiting for it to stabilize. A gentle drone settles in.]

  [A. turns on the faucet and rinses his face. He lets his wet face drip, arms on each side of the sink, water running. He looks to his left, toward the bathtub. His breathing stops.]

  [The clock keeps counting empty seconds.]

  [His eyes anchored somewhere between him and the tub curtain, he feels the faucet and turns off the water.]

  [He checks the camera. Then back at the nothing before him.]

  A.: You don’t care much for hiding anymore, do you?

  A.’S DIARY

  * * *

  Niamh’s forecast was right: After the storm washed away, it left a new sky and a new earth behind. The former is silver-gray at its brightest, and cawing; the latter is just cold. The woods are petrified. Tall, balding birches stand Strückneresquely, mimicking the Gothic style of the house, just as the house used to mimic the environment. The grounds are yet snowless, but also … everythingless. Bare naked.

  November has settled.

  It’s funny how as night falls and Axton House darkens into a black lifeless silhouette that would cause Shaggy and Scooby-Doo to poop their pants and flee, we inside find it glowing with a welcoming scent of lit fireplaces and yellow wood. It feels like home under this new light—a light born of the very house to shelter us from winter. It feels cozy and protecting and soft, like a Russian dacha or a bungalow in the Alps. There is warmth in the paneling and the thick carpets. There is warmth in Niamh sitting by the fire, chin propped on her knees, cheeks ripening like peaches, brittle body inside an undershirt in a T-shirt in a flannel shirt in a cardigan, slowly peeling off layers as the heat sinks in, and you always wish to be somewhere there, between two layers, never in the core, but close.

  VIDEO RECORDING

  * * *

  LIBRARY MON NOV-20-1995 17:43:43

  NIAMH and A. at the paper-ridden desk. She is skimming through a red notebook. He is examining a rather large, four-sided key in his hand.

  A.: Okay, so we have the key to the archives, but not the lock. [Flips the key in his hand.] The keyhole must look like a cross. That’s not easy to miss.

  [They swap the objects.]

  A.: [Riffling the notebook.] And this is cool, but it doesn’t give us the code names. So we have a list of names and a list of code names, but no way to link them. Except for the three we have. What were the initials in the Prometheus letter?

  NIAMH: [Lounging with her feet on the table, she scribbles three letters on a Post-it.]

  A.: [Reads.] “S.W.L.” [Turns some pages.] That’s Silas W. Long, from someplace called … [Frowning.] “Butt, Montana?” [Wondering, he shows her the page.]

  NIAMH: [Amused, lips a word for him.]

  A.: Butte. Butte, Montana. Thanks. Oh, and we now know that Curtis Knox is Socrates. That makes four solved. Four out of twenty. That’s some progress. I think.

  NIAMH: [Starts writing on her own pad.]

  A.: [Reading the letter in his hands.] “Socrates don’t travel much.” What does that mean?

  NIAMH: [Shows pad.]

  A.: [After reading, standing up.] I don’t know. [Searches through the desk.] Where’s the ledger page with the code names?

  [Niamh retrieves it from the paper underbrush and hands it to him.]

  Tha
nks. [Checks. Leans on the table.] Well, I didn’t have much of a classical education, but … Leonidas was a hero of the Battle of Thermopylae against the Persians. And Hector is the guy defending Troy in the Iliad. Then Archimedes, Sophocles, those are pretty obvious.

  NIAMH: [She just shrugs.]

  A.: [Staring at her.] You don’t know who Archimedes was?

  NIAMH: [She scribbles for a few seconds, punctuates, then shows.]

  A.: [Reading.] “Guy who ran naked crying eureka.” Yes, that’d be him. He had discovered something important, hence the streaking outburst.

  NIAMH: [Bends in a silent laugh.]

  A.: [Oblivious.] So he was a physicist of sorts. And Sophocles was a playwright. Now he is some guy named Edward Cutler, the one in that telegram from Ibiza. Then Zosimos … This I looked up the other day in the Britannica; he must be Zosimos of Panopolis, an alchemist, but that’s way after the classical period. Socrates, aka Curtis Knox, is a philosopher, of course … And then we enter a dark area, because I don’t know what these are. Dioskuri, Anchises, Elpenor … Phoenix rings a bell … This Alexandros could mean Alexander the Great … The last ones make some sense again, but they’re from mythology, not history: Chronos, Prometheus … Actually, this last part looks like a ranking: Chronos is … well, he’s time, a notion, a primordial figure; Prometheus is a titan; Heracles is a demigod; and Zeus is a god. THE god. The king of gods.

  NIAMH: [Writing.]

  A.: [Still on the ledger page.] That’s funny, because if they’re ranked in ascending order, Ambrose, as Leonidas, was right at the bottom.

  NIAMH: [Shows notepad.]

  A.: [After reading.] Yeah, I have that effect on women. [Sighs. Props himself on the desk.] Doing research with you is incredibly tiring, you know? I have to do all the talking and you’re like the funny sidekick.

  [Tosses the ledger page back into the chaos.]

  Well, I think that’s all we can get from the letters, so … should we post them?

  NIAMH: [Shakes her head.]

  A.: Yeah. Thought so. So much for granting a dead man’s wishes.

  Ultimately we decided not to post any of them. The cipher is evidently the most important, but its intended recipient is absent and there is no way to contact him. So there is no harm in holding on to it awhile longer.

  The one for Knox we could post, I guess, but we don’t like him very much.

  And then there’s Dr. Belknap.

  AUDIO RECORDING

  * * *

  MAN: Dr. Belknap’s office.

  A.: Hello?

  MAN: Hello, sir.

  A.: Oh, hi. Sorry, I wasn’t receiving you well. I’d like to make an appointment.

  MAN: Could I have your name, sir?

  A.: Uh … Wells.

  MAN: Is this your first visit, Mr. Wells?

  A.: Yes, Dr. Belknap has been highly recommended.

  MAN: Good to hear. May I have your address and phone number?

  A.: Number one Axton Road, Point Bless, Ponopah, two-six-nine-six-nine. Phone number seven-five-five, nine-six-three, four thousand.

  MAN: [Keying in the background.] Okay, let’s see … Does Wednesday the thirteenth suit you?

  A.: Well, it’s kind of an emergency. I’d hoped to see him sooner.

  MAN: Her.

  A.: What?

  MAN: Dr. Vanessa Belknap is a woman, sir.

  A.: Oh.

  MAN: You know, if you have an emergency, maybe this is not the first place to call. Who recommended us to you?

  A.: Well, Wells. Ambrose Wells.

  MAN: Oh, Mr. Wells! How is he doing?

  A.: He’s dead.

  [An abrupt blip of silence.]

  I fear I’ve got the same thing. That’s why it’s an emergency.

  MAN: Could you hold on for a minute, please?

  [Button press. Baroque chamber music.]

  A.: Niamh? Niamh, are you on the phone?

  NIAMH: [Short whistle in F.]

  A.: Are you recording this?

  NIAMH: [Short whistle in F.]

  A.: In the name of the lost eighteen minutes of the Watergate tapes, could you tell me why?

  NIAMH: [Two notes, dropping.]

  A.: No, of course you couldn’t.

  In the end they squeezed me in for tomorrow at three.

  EXCERPT FROM JOHN LEEK’S GHOSTS OF GHOSTS

  * * *

  Ironic as it may sound, if we are to relinquish any preconceived ideas on the nature of ghosts, anthropocentrism might not be completely off topic. Many critical parapsychologists (a seldom used denomination that grants the bearer the disdain of both parapsychologists and everybody else) do justify the human nature of ghosts, although differing from spiritualists on one crucial point: They don’t treat ghosts as once living humans, but as human creations. […]

  M. Cassel (16) is regarded as the champion of this theory, which states that what we call supernatural phenomena could altogether be a general misperception, a trick of our mind, which does not make them less real phenomena (just as conscience, dreams or déjà vus are real occurrences whose objectivity relies only on the agreement that we all subjectively experience them). […] Leon Karnach (17) does not discard the physical evidence (neither does Cassel), but favors the scenario of observers being the triggers. In his words, “Assuming that the reach of the human mind is still unknown, a man causing lights to flicker with his mind, even unconsciously, is still more plausible than a deceased man’s mind causing the same effect.” In the end, parapsychology derives from psychology, which in turn comes from the Greek word ψυχή (psyche), meaning soul or, in modern times, mind. The subjective nature of our field of study seems undeniable. […]

  All of the above taken into account, ghosts as a subjective experience—i.e., human perception of real supernatural phenomena—may be summarized in another set of few, tentative statements. I will not number these; numbers tend to make statements look falsely irrevocable.

  First of all, accounts show that ghosts have been perceived in a haunted area by unbiased observers not knowing an iota about the existing folklore. Their testimony is logically deemed more conclusive than that of people who knew the legend before perceiving the ghost, and thus expected to perceive it. Their perception, however, may still be triggered by the presence of aesthetic conditioners or topoi, from whose influence virtually nobody is free. For instance, an old, desolated castle predisposes the visitor to be aware of moving shadows.

  On the other hand, the legend of a haunting always predates the haunting. Folklore always relates ghosts to specific people who were in life, to say the least, remarkable. This, according to Karnach (17), reaffirms the subjective theory: In absence of anyone else, it is the living who judge whether someone was remarkable or not.5 We notice the ghosts because we noticed the living first.

  Also, once you notice, they notice that you notice. (18, 19). […]

  Health effects are inconclusive, but reports are consistent enough to grant them some significance. Exposition to several haunted spots (Heck House, Vine House, Chillingham, Provnorsk) has been associated by independent sources with acute migraine, hallucination, epilepsy, eye/ear/nose hemorrhage, and at least two cases of intracranial hemorrhage. (20, 21)

  People who are about to die seem more prone to notice. (22, 23)

  * * *

  5 The emphasized passage was underscored in pencil in Axton House’s copy.

  NOVEMBER 21

  DREAM JOURNAL

  * * *

  In the stone-barked grove, the blindfolded girl in the turquoise dress stands listening. Her blindfoldless twin is watching from a short distance. They were playing hide-and-seek when the hiding sister was assaulted, a scream snatched out of her mouth by the coarse hand of the hideous man who holds her captive. None of the three dares to utter another sound. The whole forest lies still.

  The blindfolded seeker has noticed. She’s already alert. She staggers toward them, or in their general direction, not in a straight line, but in a long ar
c, away from her twin at first, turning, spinning, arms radaring the environment, turquoise dress waltzing around her. Her footfalls are the only sound in the world. And now she’s approaching.

  She orbits toward them like a silent planet.

  The hideous man is paralyzed. The hider does not attempt a further sound.

  Nor does the seeker.

  Her stretched fingers just miss them for a couple of inches.

  The hideous man wishes he could stop giving off smell, or heat, or whatever.

  Then the seeker stops spinning, facing slightly off their way.

  She kneels down. She grabs a stone. As big as her fist. She throws it and breaks the hideous man’s nose.

  The hobo in the park knocks down the policemen.

  A hotel blows up in the horizon of ramshackle rooftops beyond the handshake.

  The gas tank in the desert explodes.

  Puma shoes hit the island, cracking the cement.

  The grenade throbs in my hand. People scampering away. I throw the thing over the cars. Over the bridge. Into the river. And it all ends in a humble splish.

  I lay a long word on the Scrabble board. Greek letters on the tiles.

  Pull the tubes out of my arm.

  Kiss the redhead under the blanket.

  Her lips caress the red poppy.

  And I figure out how to finish the Rubik’s cube in five movements. I execute the vision. The white side is sorted. Everything is sorted. I look up at the girl in lingerie and magenta blush, and she smiles at me.

  EXCERPT FROM UMBERTO BIANCHI: “WHAT DREAMS ARE MADE OF,” MIND & BEYOND, JUNE 1968