Superstition

30

Drew was alarmed when she awoke to discover that Barry's side of the bed was empty. There was no light visible beneath the bathroom door, which meant he must be downstairs, unable to sleep.

She got up and peered over the landing. She could see no light below. Then a draft of cold air hit her. She realized it was coming from above. She shivered, pulling her robe tighter, and started up the narrow stairs from where a chill breeze blew. On a level that gave access to the loft, she found a window open. It was just large enough for a full-grown man to get through, giving onto a flat roof over a rear bedroom that had been added sometime after the house was built but before they bought it. She stepped carefully through the window and called Barry's name.

There was no response, and it took her eyes several moments to adjust to the dark. Then she saw a shape on the very edge of the low copestone that enclosed the area. The stone could not have been more than a foot in width, and yet Barry was kneeling on it at one corner, hunched as though in prayer and rocking back and forth with a motion that threatened any second to pitch him headfirst to the concrete yard below.

She cried out in alarm and ran to him, clasping him in her slender arms and pulling him back from danger with all her strength. He offered no resistance, just fell onto the sandpapery tar that covered the roof. She held him there for some moments, breathless more from shock than from effort.

He moaned faintly as though in pain or barely conscious. Half-remembered warnings against too violently waking sleepwalkers ran through her head, but she had no reason to assume he had been sleepwalking. He'd never done it before, so why should he start now?

Eventually she took his arm, whispering encouragement as though to a sleepy child or someone old and very sick. He allowed her to lead him back in through the window and down to their bedroom. By the time they got there he was more or less himself, and he remembered every moment since he woke in bed.

“It was like a waking dream. I haven't had them often, but often enough to know what they are. You know that you're dreaming. It's like waking into the dream and saying, I'm asleep and dreaming now’ just as surely as you'd say, I'm awake now, it's the morning and I've got to go to work.’ I was dreaming about Adam. He'd come into the bedroom and beckoned me to follow him. I knew it was a dream, so there was no reason not to. I wasn't afraid. I told myself it was perfectly natural that he should appear in my dreams after all the time we've spent talking and thinking about him. Actually I felt kind of pleased about it. I thought it could only clarify my thoughts and feelings about what was going on.

“He led me up onto the roof where you found me. He was trying to make me jump. I was fighting him, but I was losing. If you hadn't come when you did, he would have won.”

They got back into bed and Drew held him in her arms for a long time, painfully conscious of how close she had come to losing him.

“I don't understand,” he whispered. “Why would I dream that Adam was trying to kill me?”

“It wasn't a dream,” she said with quiet conviction. “It was a spell.”

Joanna replaced the phone and didn't move. She had been at her desk in the Around Town office all morning, polishing a draft of events so far. There was going to be no trouble getting a four-parter out of this, maybe more, which she knew Taylor Freestone would like.

In her narrative she had hidden nothing and invented nothing. As evidence she offered such video and sound recordings as they had, frankly admitting that some people would always choose to believe that trickery was involved. She repeated Roger's quotation of David Hume on miracles, that it was “more rational to suspect knavery and folly than to discount, at a stroke, everything that past experience has taught me about the way things actually work.”

She also pointed out that Roger Fullerton himself, one of the most distinguished theoretical physicists in the world, was prepared to vouch for the authenticity of what she was describing. Next to this, the fact that she was putting her own credibility as a journalist on the line was of minor significance; nonetheless, both she and Roger accepted that in some quarters they would be called gullible at best and corrupt at worse. Such accusations, she wrote, would merely convince them further of the extraordinary nature of the events in which they had participated.

At this point she felt she was straying into rhetoric a little further than she wished, and pulled back, toning down her protestations, and especially those she found herself imputing to Roger. She reminded herself to stick to the five-point reporter's rule: who, what, where, when, and why. That was how these articles would work best: as straightforward factual reports.

Then her phone had rung. It was Sam.

“I'm afraid I've got some terrible news. Drew and Barry have been killed in a car accident. It happened this morning, about eight-thirty. Apparently they were heading out on the Schuykill and their car went out of control and hit a bridge. They were both killed instantly.”

She felt strangely paralyzed by his words, more precisely by the effort to hold back the flood of questions and implications that lay behind them, and by her reaction to them, which threatened to overwhelm her.

“Joanna? Are you there?”

“Yes, I'm here,” she murmured. “Oh, God.”

“I'm sorry. It's a terrible shock.”

“Do you know where they were going?” she asked.

“I didn't ask. I just got this call from a secretary in Barry's office. She's working through his diary, informing everybody.”

“Can you give me her number?”

“Sure, wait a second…I don't know if she can tell you any more than I can…” He found the number and gave it to her. “Why do you want to know where they were going?”

“I'm not sure. I'll tell you later.”

She put down the phone and covered her face with her hands. After a few moments she sensed a presence and looked up. Taylor Freestone was standing in the door of her office looking down at her, concerned.

“Something wrong?”

She nodded, conscious of a stinging wetness in her eyes. “Two of our group, Barry and Drew, were just killed in a car crash.”

“Oh, my God…!” He took a step in, closed the door behind him. “I'm sorry, truly sorry.” He paused, then added, as though the real significance of what she had just said had only just occurred to him, “Does that mean you'll have to stop the experiment?”

She thought for a moment she was going to throw something at him, but her voice came out flat and resigned. “I don't know. It's too soon to think about that. If you'll excuse me, Taylor, I have to make some calls.”

“Of course. This is awful. Just awful.”

He went out. She took a deep breath, reached for the box of tissues in one of her drawers and wiped her eyes and nose, then picked up the phone.