Superstition (16 page)

Tomorrow, she told herself, she would start looking for answers. This had to be resolved before she could go any further with the story. She checked the back of the postcard once again for the name of the collection. She would make inquiries, find out everything that was known about this picture—including the names, if they were recorded, of the people portrayed in it.

She drifted at last into a fitful sleep, comforting herself with the thought that she was a journalist and her job was to find answers. There were always answers if you looked hard enough.

Always.

When she awoke at four
a.m
., she knew at once what was happening. Perspiring and shivering, with an aching head, she had obviously picked up the flu that had been going around her office for the past two weeks. After making her way groggily to the bathroom and taking two aspirin, she dozed uncomfortably until dawn, then fell heavily asleep until almost nine.

She accepted the fact that she was going to feel like this for at least forty-eight hours regardless of any medication she might take. The only thing to do was stay in bed and drink endless cups of herbal tea. Luckily she had a good supply in the apartment. She called her office and told them to forget about her for the next few days. Then she called Sam and told him that she would have to miss that evening's meeting of the group.

Normally when someone missed a session, which had inevitably happened from time to time, the others carried on without them. However, as the whole thing had been set up originally for Joanna to write about, he suggested they should cancel and wait until she was better. She hesitated. She wanted to tell him about the postcard, but would rather show him than try to describe it over the phone. Almost as though reading her thoughts, he said he would come by at lunchtime. She warned him about catching her bug, but he laughed and said he never caught anything, adding that if she thought of something she wanted him to bring she should call him at the lab.

She slept again until the phone rang. It was the doorman to say that Sam was downstairs. Joanna quickly tried to repair the unattractive image she saw in her bathroom mirror. When the bell rang she hurried to the door and let him take her in his arms, almost crushing the flowers and the carrier bag containing lunch that he had brought.

Before they ate or did anything else, Joanna went to the desk in the annex of her living room where she had left the postcard. She clearly remembered leaving it on her computer keyboard, but now it wasn't there. Nor was it anywhere among the papers on her desk. The rest of her mail was there, including the still unread letter from Australia. But not the postcard.

Feeling annoyed and a little bit strange, she went through to the kitchen where Sam was preparing a salad. She found him standing with the postcard in his hand, flipping from the picture to the message on the back.

“Where did you find that?” The question came out more sharply than she had intended, almost an accusation.

“I'm sorry, I didn't mean to pry. It was just propped up here and caught my eye.”

She looked at the shelf he nodded toward and frowned. “I don't remember putting it there. I was trying to find it to show you. Isn't it amazing?”

He looked at her as though he didn't know what she meant. “Isn't what amazing?”

“The picture. Look!” She pointed to the figure on the left. “It's Adam—exactly the way Drew drew him.”

Sam stared harder at the picture. “I suppose there's
some
similarity,” he conceded grudgingly, “but I can't say I'd have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out.”

She almost snatched the postcard away from him in disbelief. “For heaven's sake, it's absolutely obvious!” But then she stopped. In all honesty, it wasn't as obvious as it had seemed last night.

He watched her, his concern growing as he saw the puzzlement in her face. “What's all this about?”

She looked from the card to him and back to the card. “I looked at this when I got in last night. I was so bowled over that I almost called you. It was Adam to the life!”

“And now it isn't?”

“Well, obviously it isn't. There's a similarity, as you say, but no more.” She put the card back on the shelf where he said he'd found it. “Is that where it was?”

He moved it slightly to the left. “Right there.”

“That's really odd.”

“I guess this is where I'm supposed to say it can't have gotten there by itself.” He laughed gently as he put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her to him. “Listen, I think you're getting a little spooked about this. When you got home last night you must have been already starting to run a temperature. Your responses were a little off. You saw this, and after what we'd been talking about all day…!”

“I know what I saw.”

“I'm not saying you didn't. But you just admitted you don't see it now. This picture happens to be in one of the books about the revolution that we have at the lab. Even if you don't remember seeing it, you must have. Next thing, you get this card from your parents and realize there's something strangely familiar about it. Which is where the mind starts to play tricks—especially when there's a flu virus messing with it.”

“That's very rational. I just wish it sounded more convincing.”

“What's not convincing?”

“For one thing, it's quite an odd coincidence that my parents should send this particular card.”

“I don't see why. They know that what we're doing involves Lafayette, they find themselves in some museum…”

“All right, all right!” She held up her hands in surrender. “Let's forget it. ‘Hysterical Woman Gets Flu and Sees Ghost.’ Enough.”

“Seeing a ghost is what we're hoping to do—one that we've created just as you created one in this picture by projecting your mind's-eye view of Adam onto it.”

“I said I'm not arguing, okay? I quit.”

“Sorry, I didn't mean to be a bore…”

She held her hands up further, then made a zipping motion over her lips to indicate that the conversation was at an end. He laughed again. “Go sit down and I'll bring you some lunch.”

A few minutes later they were sitting by the window with plates on their knees. “By the way,” he said, “I've been thinking about it, and if it's all right with you I think I'd like to go ahead with tonight's session.”

“Sure,” she said, “it's fine with me.”

“After all, we'll have it all on tape, so you won't miss anything. And we've got such a good momentum going I don't want to lose it.”

“You're right. I'll be okay for the next one.”

He reached for the salad bowl as she finished her plate. “Can I give you some more?”

“Isn't there some rule about feed a cold and starve a fever?” she asked as he served her.

“Old wives’ tale,” he said with a dismissive grin. “Don't believe a word of it. Worst kind of superstition.”

22

C
lifton 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 blasé. 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.