Superstition

22

Clifton Webb was sitting in his bath, typing up some vitriolic review, and Joanna was telling herself how much he reminded her of Ward Riley. Or was it that Ward Riley reminded her of Clifton Webb? He was younger than the actor and less mannered, but she could imagine him perfectly as the waspish Waldo Lydecker in Laura, which she was watching on cable for the fourth or fifth time and enjoying as much as ever.

The sound that exploded in the room made her think that somebody had fired a gun and a bullet had hit the wall. She knew the sound couldn't have come from the television. It had been too real and was still echoing in her ears. Besides, she knew the film and nobody fired anything in that scene.

It happened again. This time she sprang out of bed, tripped on her robe, and stumbled to the safety of a corner where she would not be a target for any idiot firing shots from the street. But she could see, peering cautiously from her window, that there was nobody out there, and no hole where a bullet had pierced the glass.

Shaken, she crossed to where the impact had seemed to come from. There was no mark on the plaster, nothing to explain what had happened.

A hammer blow at the door of her apartment made her spin with a gasp of alarm. She stood perfectly still, waiting for what would happen next, expecting to hear the door burst open. But there was only silence.

She edged around her bedroom door and down the narrow corridor into the tiny hall, where she peered through the peephole. The landing was deserted. If anyone had been there, they had gone.

But she knew that no one had been there, at least not in the normal sense. Some instinct told her that she had just had a visit from Adam.

She noted with interest that the thought left her strangely calm and with none of the alarm that she had initially felt.

Sam was there by nine-fifteen. She'd left a message on the machine in his office, and he'd picked it up after the session. He'd called her at once and said he was coming right over with the tape.

It was time coded in one corner, and she watched the figures flashing by as he fast-forwarded to the point which she already knew was going to synchronize precisely with the time at which she had heard the sounds in her apartment.

“Here it is.” He pressed the remote control and the images on screen assumed normal speed. The group, minus Joanna, were seated as usual around the table, using the Ouija board and pointer, which moved around quickly, pulling them by the touch of their fingertips this way and that.

“‘Where…is…Joanna?’” She heard Sam's voice reading the message as it was spelled out letter by letter.

“Joanna's home sick,” he replied. “But I'm sure she'll be back next time. Do you have any message for her?”

The pointer drew their outstretched arms to the word “Yes.”

“What message do you have for her?” Sam prompted. But there was no further movement.

“Stop!” Joanna reached for the remote control and froze the image on the screen, including the time code in the top right-hand corner. It was 7:43 p.m. “That's exactly when it happened,” she said. “I leapt out of bed and stood over there in the corner, thinking somebody must be shooting out in the street. I don't know why, but I looked over at the clock, and it was 7:43. Then there was a crash at the door.”

“Looks like you guessed right,” Sam said. “It was Adam saying ‘Hi!’”

“You know the weirdest part of this?” she said after a moment. “It's the way I'm just taking it all for granted. If you'd told me six months ago that I'd react to some disembodied banging on the wall with, ‘Oh, that's just Adam, some ghost we made up,’ I'd have told you to your face that you were nuts. Now that's exactly what I'm doing, and I don't know why. What's happened to me?”

“Your horizons have broadened a little, that's all. You had a mind-set that said everything claiming to be paranormal had to be by definition phony. Now you've seen that it isn't. On the contrary, it's really kind of ordinary.”

“I still think there's something weird about it all somewhere. In fact I'm beginning to get confused about what I really think.”

“You're not the only one.” She sensed an unaccustomed tiredness in his voice as he reached for the remote and pressed play.

“I don't think he has any message to give us for Joanna.” It was Sam's voice again, from the TV speaker this time.

“I'm sure he'd rather deliver it to her personally,” Roger said with a chuckle, “like any sensible fellow.”

Joanna and Sam exchanged a look, but neither made a comment.

“All right, Adam,” the on-screen Sam was saying, “you're starting to repeat all your old tricks and we're starting to get bored. Wouldn't you like to try something new?”

The pointer moved again, tugging their fingers around to spell out “SUCH AS?”

“Well, for instance,” Sam said, “we're hoping to see you at some point. Can you manifest yourself to us?”

There was a pause. Then the pointer slid firmly across to “No.”

“Is there any particular reason why not?”

The question came from Ward Riley. The pointer pulled back just far enough to take another stab at “No.”

“Is there anything you can do to impress us?” Barry asked with good-natured impatience, and flashed a look of amused anticipation around the table.

The pointer moved with stately slowness back to the center of the table, and there remained still. They waited. Joanna could sense that they were wondering whether to stay as they were or sit back or say something, or take it as a sign that the session was over, or whatever.

As the indecision lengthened, there was a sudden bump from underneath the table as though someone crouching there had tried to stand up. It jolted them. They drew back sharply, and the table moved again. Nobody was touching it as, very slowly and steadily, it began to rise from the floor.

Joanna's eyes didn't leave the screen as the table rose, the upturned faces of the group following it. Impressive though the image was, she couldn't help thinking of remarks that both Sam and Roger had made at different times-about how nothing on film or tape could ever look wholly convincing. Decades of cinematic special effects had made people blase. Everything was possible because nothing was real. She thought of the faded sepia photographs from around the turn of the century that she'd seen, usually showing a trance medium surrounded by “spirit faces” and even fairies. To a modern eye the pictures were such patent frauds as to be laughable. Now, paradoxically, only the truth was laughable. True miracles had been rendered impossible by technology. Only the people sitting around the table she could see on screen, and she watching them, would ever believe that what was happening was real. It was an impasse from which there was no escape. Suddenly she realized with utter clarity that whatever she wrote about the Adam experiment would amount to no more than another curiosity, a footnote amid the endless chatter about the great unsolved, and probably unsolvable, mysteries of existence.

She glanced sideways at Sam, and saw the weariness she had detected in his voice reflected in his face. She knew that he was thinking at that moment the same thing she was thinking. And it wasn't telepathy that told her that. There was no need of it. It was too obvious.

Meanwhile the table rose until its feet were level with the heads of those around it. Then it revolved slowly in the air-a full hundred eighty degrees, until it was totally inverted.

As though of one mind, everyone around the table pushed back their chairs and got to their feet-not just because what was happening was so breathtaking, but because the heavy Ouija board and pointer were still on the table and must surely fall.

But nothing fell. The Ouija board stayed where it was, as though glued in place, as the table continued to rise until its four feet were planted firmly on the ceiling in a grotesque and surreal defiance of gravity.

No one spoke, no one moved-until Maggie, out of some impulse that she herself perhaps neither understood nor anticipated any more than she could control, made the sign of the cross over herself.

As though a magnetic current had been turned off, the Ouija board and pointer fell from the tabletop and hit the floor with a clatter. The table itself followed. But it didn't fall. It shot down, as though pushed by some violent force, and smashed into the floor and shattered into fragments. The last image was of the members of the group leaping to safety and turning their backs against a lacerating spray of wood splinters. Then the screen abruptly went blank.

“A chunk hit the camera,” Sam explained, stopping the video. “We'll have to replace it. Luckily nobody was hurt. Spectacular, hmm?” He looked at her and waited for a reply. She realized that his question was more than rhetorical; he needed to know what she thought.

“What do you think happened?” she asked.

“Oh,” he made a sweeping, open gesture with his hand, a gesture almost of self-parody, “I think it's obvious what happened. We lost our collective nerve. We made the damn thing float up to the ceiling and turn upside down, and suddenly the rational side of ourselves said, ‘This is physically impossible, it can't be happening,’ and so it stopped.”

“What about Maggie making the sign of the cross like that?”

He shrugged. “We talked afterwards. She couldn't explain it, said it just came out of her.” He paused, looked grave. “She also says we ought to discontinue the experiment. She can't explain why she feels that way, either, but she says it's been building for a while. She says she won't come to any more sessions unless their purpose is to dematerialize Adam and start again. She thinks he's evil.”

Joanna looked at him steadily. “What do you think?”

He hesitated, like a man who has thought about some problem for a while and has made a carefully balanced decision, but one that he has not yet announced to anyone else and isn't sure how it will be received.

“I think,” he said, “that Maggie was a bad choice for this experiment. It may be better if she goes.”