Superstition

41

Is this going to take long?” Roger asked. He was subdued, more so than Joanna had ever seen him.

“Not much more than an hour, I would think,” Ward said.

They were in Adam's room in the basement of the lab, all of them except Pete, who had not yet returned from his apartment-hunting. He had promised to be there by six, but it was now ten after.

Roger had listened to the story of the grave, sitting impassively on the old sofa with his arms stretched out along the back. He made no comment apart from a nod of acknowledgment. Nor did the coda about the empty house provoke a response. He seemed resigned to any and whatever fresh absurdities were presented by the situation they were in.

“So now we try exorcism,” he said, and gave a loud sniff-whether out of disapproval or the beginnings of a cold was hard to tell, but he produced a green and white spotted handkerchief and blew his nose loudly.

“Do you remember what you said when Drew talked about exorcism?” Joanna asked him. “You said something about complementarity-two ways of describing the same thing.”

“Yes, I do remember,” Roger said quietly, tucking the handkerchief back in the breast pocket of his old but immaculate tweed suit. “I remember very well-though I'm beginning to think that limiting ourselves to only two ways of describing what's happening here may be unduly modest.”

Sam looked at his watch. “Time Pete was here. He swore he wouldn't be late.” He walked over to where new video and audio equipment had been set up-paid for, Joanna reflected, by Around Town magazine-and began to check it over.

“By the way,” he said, almost as an afterthought, “I'm proposing to record this-it's still a legitimate part of the experiment. Ward has no objections. I trust neither of you has.”

Roger waved a hand indifferently. Joanna said of course she hadn't. She watched Sam as he bent over plugs and switches and control units with tiny flickering lights. There was a hunch to his shoulders, a concentrated smallness in his movements, like a man driven in on himself by circumstances but determined to fight back. She felt a sudden surge of tenderness for him, an impulse to put her arms around him, to tell him she believed in him, and loved him. But she held back. It wasn't the time.

Sam looked at his watch again. “Almost twenty past. Where the hell's Pete?”

A phone rang harshly, close enough to where Joanna stood to startle her. It was an old-style wall phone that had always been there, but which she had never seen used. As she was the person closest to it, she instinctively reached out to answer it. Then, equally instinctively, she checked herself and looked over toward Sam in case he preferred to answer it himself. When he made no move, she picked up the handset and said hello.

There was bad static on the line with a voice behind it that she couldn't make out.

“I'm sorry,” she said, “I can't hear you. Maybe you should call back.”

The static cleared slightly. She thought she recognized Pete's voice, but couldn't make out what he was saying.

“Pete? Is that you? Where are you?”

She glanced at the others in the room, all watching her, and gestured that she still couldn't hear.

“What?” she said into the mouthpiece. “Say it again.”

His words came more slowly now, carefully formed, deliberate. Yet still she couldn't understand them.

“My what…?” she said, then repeating what she heard, “My…a tarn…can…I'm sorry, Pete, I just can't…”

Suddenly Sam was at her side, taking the phone from her. In his other hand he held a small cassette recorder like the one she used for interviews.

“Pete, this is Sam. Just say it, Pete. Say what you're trying to say.”

He started the recorder and held it to the earpiece as he listened. The others watched with an odd fascination, sensing that something strange was happening but having no idea what. Even Joanna, though she was almost as close to the phone as Sam, couldn't hear anything beyond an incoherent murmur coming through the static.

Sam kept the phone and the recorder close to his ear until it seemed that what he had been listening to had ended.

“Pete…?” he said. “Pete, are you still there…?”

He waited a moment more, then switched off the recorder and hung up the phone.

“What did he say?” Roger demanded when Sam didn't move or speak. “Where is he?”

Sam rewound the tape. They all heard the high-pitched twittering of a voice in fast reverse. When it came to a stop he pressed play, and turned up the volume.

The static was still there, all but drowning out the voice. But it was undeniably Pete's voice, or one very like it. And the words were clear, though ostensibly nonsense.

“Maya…tan…kee…noh…maya…tan…kee…noh…maya…tan…”

Joanna saw Ward Riley's face grow tense and the color drain from it as he listened. It seemed as though an understanding of what he was hearing was slowly dawning on him-not certainty, perhaps, but a terrible suspicion. His hand went to his pocket and was visibly unsteady as he withdrew the envelope he'd shown them at lunch.

While Pete's thin and tinny voice continued to chant out the strange sounds from the tape recorder, Ward tore open the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper it contained.

His eyes ran over the lines written on it several times. Then he swayed slightly. Joanna thought he was about to faint, but he got a grip on himself, took a deep, unsteady breath, crumpled the piece of paper he was holding, and let it fall to the floor.

Without a word he started for the stairs, walking like a man-it was the only comparison that came into Joanna's mind-who had just received a sentence of death.

“Ward…?”

He paid no attention to Sam's voice.

“Ward, what is it…?”

This time he paused, turning to look back at the three of them. He threw out his arms slightly and let them fall back to his sides. It was a gesture of despair.

“There's no point,” he said, “not now. It's over. I'm sorry.”

He turned away and continued up the stairs. No one called him back or tried to stop him. There was a terrible finality in the moment.

Sam picked up the crumpled piece of paper. Roger moved across and peered over his arm at it.

“What does it say?” Joanna asked.

Sam read the words woodenly, without expression. They made no sense and she didn't know how they were spelled. All she knew was they were the same words that Pete had spoken over the phone.

“Not even Ward knew what was written on that paper,” she murmured. “How did Pete know that?”

In reply, Sam picked up the wall phone and handed it to her. “Listen,” he said.

Puzzled, she put it to her ear. There was no dial tone. The line was dead.

“To my knowledge that phone's been disconnected for two years,” Sam said. “It just stayed on the wall because…well, because nobody bothered to take it off.”

It took only an instant for the terrible suspicion that had already seized Sam to strike its chilling logic into Roger's and Joanna's minds.

Pete was dead.

The next few minutes, when she tried to sort them out later, remained a blur. She couldn't be sure in what order things had happened. Whether she'd heard Peggy's voice calling down. Or seen the faint reflection of blue light sweeping the cellar walls. Or simply guessed, then known intuitively and for sure what had happened.

Sam was the first up the stairs. She followed. And then Roger. They could hear the chatter of a police radio now, coming from the patrol car parked outside the window. The flashing blue light gave a sickly, stroboscopic pallor to everybody in the room. Peggy's hands went to her face, horrified at what she'd just been told. The movement had an unreal, silent-movie quality about it. Next to her Tania Phillips and Brad Bucklehurst stood rooted where they were, in shock.

Sam was talking to two men in NYPD uniforms. One of them, Joanna noticed, wore a hat, the other did not. It was an unimportant detail and she had no idea why she'd registered it-unless perhaps to distance herself from the words she could hear being spoken in that flat, emotionless, follow-the-regulations tone of a cop.

“The body was discovered at ten after five, in an alley off Pike Street near Cherry. All he had to identify him was a campus ID card, which is why we're here. Cash, credit cards, if he'd been carrying any, were all gone. Likewise watch and any jewelry he might have had. Multiple stab wounds-we'll have to wait for the coroner's report for an exact cause of death. Meanwhile I'll have to ask you to accompany me to the morgue for a formal identification.”