Superstition (5 page)

“We lost everything because of you.” Ellie spoke as though Joanna hadn't even opened her mouth, dismissing her protest. “Six more months and we'd have been out of that place with a small fortune in the bank. Now it's unsellable, except for its real estate value—which is nil. You fucked us over good, young lady, and you're going to pay.”

“Let me go!” Joanna tried to shake the little woman off, but the grip on her arm tightened so sharply that she gasped in pain.

“When I'm ready. I'm stronger than you—and don't you forget it.”

“If you don't stop this at once, I'll call the police and have you arrested.”

The older woman's eyes bore up into hers with a feverish concentration. They were dark ringed, as though she hadn't slept in several days.

“He started three nights ago, chest pains. I called an ambulance but he died before they reached the hospital. His last words were, ‘Fix her, Ellie. Fix that bitch.’ And I promised him I would.”

Suddenly Joanna didn't want to struggle anymore, or even protest. It wasn't that she was afraid, just that she was transfixed by an awful, morbid fascination. She felt oddly passive in the face of it, the way you were supposed to feel in an accident when time slows down and stretches toward infinity. She knew she had to let the moment play out to its natural conclusion, accepting the torrent of abuse in the knowledge that it would then be over. Somehow she knew she wouldn't see this woman again.

There was the twitch of a bitter smile at the corner of Ellie's mouth, almost as though she had read Joanna's thoughts.

“Don't worry, you won't see me again. This moment is all I need. You're going to remember it. And before you die, you're going to wish you'd never been born.”

She paused, enjoying the feel of having her victim hooked. “You think I'm a fake, do you? A phony. You'll find out.”

Her face took on the rapturous look of a fanatic entering the hallowed presence of the supreme power.

“It's done,” she whispered. “There's only the nightmare now.”

Joanna shivered. It was a silly, empty threat uttered by an angry and bitter old woman. But the moment had been charged with such emotion that a cocoon of silence seemed to have descended on the two of them, isolating them in a strange and loathsome intimacy. The people pushing past them on the side walk could have been a million miles away or on another planet.

Then, abruptly, it was over. The circulation-blocking pressure on Joanna's arm was lifted, and the woman who had filled her field of vision for the past few moments was just a short and unimposing figure scurrying off amid the shoppers and office workers on their way to lunch.

A shudder ran through Joanna, stronger than before, as though her body was shaking off the memory of the old woman's repugnant touch. She took a deep breath, and felt her heart beating fast. A delayed reaction of anger welled up in her.

And fear. There was no denying the fear.

She started walking north toward the park, telling herself that the exercise would calm her. But two blocks on she felt no better. The anger she now felt was less with the dreadful little woman who had buttonholed her and more with herself for being so easily shaken.

“Miss Cross?”

She jumped. The voice had come from just behind her as she waited to cross the street. She turned and saw Sam Towne.

His smile immediately faded as he saw the look on her face.

“I'm sorry,” he said, “I didn't mean to startle you.”

“No, you…” she stammered, “it's all right, I…I…”

“Is something wrong?” he asked, concerned now.

She didn't mean to tell him anything. It was too absurd, and she felt she would only make herself look foolish by talking about it. She would just say yes of course she was all right, perfectly all right. They would have a polite, brief conversation, and then part.

But instead she heard herself saying, “Something really horrible just happened…”

4

T
hey sat down and he looked across the table at her. His face still wore an expression of concern.

“Feeling better?”

“Thanks—I'm fine.”

“What would you like? Water, wine, coffee?”

“A little water to begin with.”

Sam signaled the waiter. He had suggested they go somewhere, maybe have lunch if she had time. He told her that Mario's was one of his favorite haunts, then apologized for the unintended pun. She laughed, and it released some of the tension in her.

“Seriously, don't feel bad about getting spooked,” he said. “Those people are professionals. They know exactly what buttons to push to trigger all your superstitions.”

“But I'm not normally a superstitious person.”

“Everybody's superstitious, even those who say they aren't. We're rational beings, so we have no choice.”

One of her eyebrows twitched slightly, the way it always did when she reacted to something with skepticism.

“Wait a minute—are you saying that superstition is a rational thing?”

“Absolutely.”

She looked at him slightly sideways and with the faintest narrowing of her eyes. “Could you just run that by me again?”

He shifted his weight a little and leaned forward. “Opposites define each other—black/white, vice/virtue, order/disorder, and so on—including rationality and irrationality. One can't exist without the other. And somewhere in the middle there's a gray area where you can't be sure which is which—a no-man's-land where anything can happen.”

“This sounds like the opening to
The Twilight Zone
.”

He laughed. “You should know—from what you say you've just been there.”

True, she thought. For a while she had been genuinely afraid. But it was over now, the memory fading with each moment that passed. She ordered a salad and the special fettuccine that Sam said she should trust him about. She even had a glass of Chianti, although she normally never drank at lunch. Today, she thought, she had an excuse.

“The thing that really shook me up,” she said, putting her glass down after a first welcome sip, “was when she told me that her husband had died. Without that, I don't think she would have gotten to me.”

“There's no way you can blame yourself for that man's death,” Sam told her firmly. “It's obvious that he must have had a heart condition already. Anything could have triggered it.”

“I know,” she said, “but that's the rational me talking. And as you've just pointed out, there's an irrational me, too.”

“Acknowledging its existence doesn't mean we have to give it the upper hand,” he said.

As he spoke, he gave her a smile that was somehow so understanding and sympathetic that it took her by surprise.

“I'll try,” was all she could think of in response. They were silent for a few moments as their lunch was served. She made noises about the excellent fettuccine and how right he'd been to recommend it, then she asked him to tell her something about his work. He gave a shrug as though wondering where to begin.

“What would you like to know?”

She thought a moment, then said, “There's one question I'd like to ask you as a scientist. It sounds kind of rude, but it isn't meant that way.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why do so many scientists that I've talked to think that any kind of investigation into the paranormal is a waste of time?”

“Well,” he said, not remotely discomposed by the question, “there are two answers to that. One is that scientists, when they poke their noses outside their own narrow specialist field, are as prejudiced and dumb as anybody else—only worse, because they
think
they're so smart.”

He forked some more pasta into his mouth and dabbed his lips with a linen napkin.

“And the other?” she prompted.

He smiled again, this time with a hint of resignation. “The other answer,” he said, “is that maybe they're right.”

“Presumably, that's a view you don't share.”

Again he gave a small shrug, as though not sure how to answer. “All I know is I've seen some pretty strange things. I'm not sure what they add up to or what conceptual framework they fit into, but I can't ignore them any more than I can explain them.”

“Give me an example.”

“I'm not talking ghosts and banshees and messages from beyond. I'm talking about anomalies. Things that just don't fit into anything we understand.”

“Such as…?”

He described to her the experiment in which the chickens were persuaded to adopt a machine as their mother. She laughed at first, then grew serious as she understood its significance.

“We've had cats in boxes with a heat source controlled by the same kind of random event generator. The cats, of course, liked the warmth—and we found the heat source would be on significantly longer when there was a cat in the box than when there wasn't.”

“If that's true, it's amazing.”

“Oh, it's true.”

“Can people do it too?”

“Come to the lab sometime and try some of our tests. I promise we won't lock you in a box or anything.”

“I'll talk to my editor. Maybe we should do something—kind of a ‘mind over matter’ piece.”

She shivered suddenly and convulsively.

“What is it?” he asked, concerned.

“I don't know,” she said, genuinely puzzled. “When I said ‘mind over matter’ I suddenly had a picture of that horrible old woman and the way she looked at me.”

He thought for a second that he was going to reach out and take her hand where it lay on the table, but then checked the impulse. “Remember what I told you,” he said, his eyes focused searchingly on hers. “Those people are clever. They plant a fear and hope you'll worry yourself sick over it. Don't let them scam you that way.”

“I won't,” she said. “I'm fine, really. Thanks.”

Over coffee she told him that she'd be seeing her editor that afternoon and would suggest writing something on scientific parapsychology. “I'll call you if he bites,” she said.

Sam scribbled down his work number on a crumpled receipt culled from one of his pockets.

“Call me anyway,” he said, handing it to her.

5

T
aylor Freestone took himself and the job of editing
Around Town
very seriously indeed. Joanna watched as he crossed his elegantly tailored legs, placed his fingertips together, and leaned back thoughtfully in his suede-upholstered editorial chair.

“Might it not seem a little odd,” he asked, looking at her from beneath a delicately furrowed brow, “to have just done an exposé of the whole business, then to be saying maybe there's something in it after all?”

“Two totally different things,” she shot back, knowing full well that he was going to agree, but only after they had completed this little ritual dance of petition and assent in deference to his authority. “Sam Towne's work is genuine research, and some of it's pretty mind bending. All we did with Camp Starburst was expose a scam, but we didn't say there was nothing to the paranormal.”

He thought a moment, alternately pursing and stretching his lips as though tasting a questionable wine. She hadn't told him about her encounter with Ellie Ray, though she had mentioned that Murray had died. The news made little impression on Taylor, who had a curious way of not connecting with the human reality behind any of the stories that he published. His life was bounded by the fashionable cocktail circuit of the Upper East Side, although the magazine he edited with such conspicuous success took its stories from wherever in the world they might occur. Taylor's skill, Joanna knew, was in sensing what the sort of people who bought his magazine had been talking about at their fashionable health clubs, or may have seen on public television recently, and now wanted to go into slightly more deeply. It was a skill she admired and which she knew was far from being as simple as it sounded. Nonetheless, the man's fey posturings irritated her unreasonably, and she had to force herself to remain still and silent until his deliberations were over.

“Do a little groundwork,” he said eventually. “Sketch something up for me next week. We'll see where we go from there.”

The apparatus was attached to the wall of a small room in the lab. It resembled a huge pinball machine—which in a sense, Sam said, it was.

“There are nine thousand of these polystyrene balls,” he said, pointing to a compartment at the top, “which are dropped one by one in the center of this first row of pegs. Watch…”

He turned the machine on. Balls starting dropping and bouncing down through about twenty rows of plastic pins, ending up in a row of collection bins at the bottom.

“The pins are set in a quincunx arrangement—like theater seats, where you're always looking between two heads in front of you instead of sitting directly behind somebody. You can see that, as the balls drop, each hits one pin in every row, bounces one way or the other, and hits another pin in the next. The further they drop, the more they tend to cascade out to one side or the other. But most of them, as you would expect, tend to stay more or less in the middle, with only a few bouncing all the way out to one side or the other. So you wind up with the balls distributed through these collection bins at the bottom in the form of a Gaussian curve…”

“Er…?”

“Bell curved—tapering equally on both sides towards a central summit. That's the normal pattern of random distribution. The point of the experiment is to try to influence the balls to fall more towards the right or more towards the left, so that you wind up with the summit of the pile off center, more towards one side or the other.”

“And you do this just by thinking?”

“Sure. You sit here,” he indicated a sofa about eight feet from the display, “watching the balls drop through the system, and willing them to go in one direction or the other.”

“And it works?”

He smiled at the incredulity in her voice.

“Over several runs, the deviations from pure chance are millions to one against. So to that extent, we have to say it works.”

“But how?”

“We don't know—yet. Come on, I'll show you some more.”

They continued their tour of the lab, which was housed in a collection of semibasement rooms abandoned by the engineering faculty when they moved to better premises. Joanna was shown a kind of clockface with lights in place of numbers. The lights flashed on and off in a random pattern, and the point of the experiment was to try to “will” them into moving consistently clockwise or counterclockwise.