Superstition

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.”

He paused to let his words sink in, then gave another apologetically self-conscious shrug. “Whichever way you look at it, this was an extraordinary man. I don't think I want to go up against him.”

Joanna looked again at the book in her hand. It showed a head and shoulders engraving of Cagliostro-a plump face with heavy features, slightly bulging eyes and full lips. His hair was either white or very fair, swept back and shoulder length. He looked barrel chested, physically strong, probably not tall.

“Are you saying that what we conjured up wasn't Adam at all, but this man Cagliostro?”

“I don't know what we conjured up,” Barry said. “All I know is we built a bridge back to a strange place-and I'm getting scared about what's coming over it.”

Drew returned with coffee and three delicate porcelain cups on a tray. “We both feel bad about letting Sam down,” she said, placing the tray carefully in the center of a rectangular table in front of the sofa. “But we talked for a long time last night, and we don't see what else we could do.” She straightened up and fixed Joanna with a direct, unblinking gaze. Her voice was flat and toneless, like somebody in shock and still coming to terms with the event that had caused it. “This isn't something we've created. We've raised something evil. I beg you to believe me, Joanna. You have to warn the others.”

“If you think this,” Joanna asked, “why don't you and Barry warn them yourselves?”

The answer was without hesitation. “They wouldn't believe us.”

“Why not?”

Drew and Barry exchanged a look, as though agreeing which of them should answer this. It was Barry who spoke.

“We know Sam, and he'd never accept this. He'd find a million reasons to explain it away. That's because he's an intellectual. I mean no disrespect, but people like Sam analyze everything till they can't see the forest for the trees anymore. Me, I'm just a plumber who's read a few books, but I know when I'm up against something I can't fight. And that's where I am now. And that's why we're out.”