The Link (49 page)

When Robert is unable to engross himself in the conversation, Cathy, aggravated, asks him what’s the matter.

He confesses that he just can’t “get into” either the search for Edith Gage
or
Peter’s research. God knows he hopes the little girl is alive as Buster seems to think. And he hopes that Peter achieves results in his investigation.

It’s just that he’s unable to get involved. Something odd is still happening to him. He mentions the drawing he made without knowing it. It seems to be a part of what’s happening but what part he can’t tell. He apologizes for his lack of interest (he’s already apologized to Peter) but he just can’t help it. He feels certain that he’s being “taken” somewhere. He still doesn’t know where that somewhere is though—and, obviously, he has no control over it.

Cathy tries to be understanding and sympathetic but clearly she is upset by his vagueness and his lack of interest in working with her on psychic crime detection. He tries to reassure her, repeating that he loves her, wants to marry her as soon as her divorce is final and live out his life with her.

“Where?” she asks, almost plaintively. “Never-never land?”

Robert wakes and picks up the telephone receiver. “Yeah?” he mutters.

“Hey, man, it didn’t even ring yet!” Buster tells him on the other end of the line.

“Telepathy,” says Robert, yawning. “Prime example. What’s up?”

Buster says he thinks he’s got an approximate location for Edith Gage. Do they want to help him look?

They meet him in the city. Barney has managed to get two patrolmen to accompany them and the five move through the neighborhood where Buster thinks he has a “fix” on Edith—the East Side below Seventeenth Street.

“The East Side,” Cathy murmurs with a faint smile, looking at the two patrolmen. “Now we know how those patrolmen felt when Lees was leading them through the East Side of London.”

As they walk, Buster keeps a running commentary on his impressions. He still thinks Edith is alive, now more than ever. In a “dirty set of rooms” somewhere around here. There’s a woman with her. “Kind o’ spooky woman too, don’t like her.” A dangerous woman.

“And those carrots,” Buster says. “Always those damn carrots.”

He looks at Robert with a snicker. “Yeah!” he says.

Cathy looks confused.

“Your man here was thinking maybe she’s been kidnapped by Bugs Bunny,” Buster says. He punches Robert on the arm.

The search is, ultimately, a failure. A number of times Buster seems to be “getting hot” but, every time, he loses hold of it.

Late that afternoon, when the patrolmen have left them, Robert suggests they go to Edith’s parents and describe the woman to them. Maybe she’s someone they know.

Buster points at him. “That’s a good idea!” he says. “How come I didn’t think of it? Don’t you be more psychic than me now, Bobbie!”

They drive to the Gage apartment, unannounced, interrupting supper. When Buster tells them of the area where he thinks Edith is, Mrs. Gage comments on the “coincidence” that it is the section of Manhattan where her husband works.

Seeing her husband’s reaction to this, Robert asks Buster to describe the woman he “saw”.

When he does, Robert, to his startlement, abruptly sees a flaring glow around the body of Edith’s father.

Red.

“What kind of work do you do?” he asks Mr. Gage.

Gage is agitated and refuses to answer. “Listen, we’re trying to have some supper here!” he snarls.

Mrs. Gage looks at her husband strangely, then, infuriating him, tells them that Gage works for a diamond cutting business.

Immediately, Cathy says, “Carats.”

“What’s the address?” Buster demands.

Gage tries to keep his wife from answering but she tells them. Buster tenses. “Let’s go,” he mutters.

Ignoring Gage’s angry threats, they leave the apartment and hurry down to the street. Taking a moment to telephone Barney and tell him where they’re going, they jump in Robert’s car and drive to the old building where Gage works. Barney isn’t there yet.

Buster moves into an alley next to the building. “Shouldn’t we wait?” asks Cathy.

“No time,” Buster mutters.

Re-using an old skill, Buster breaks into the building through a side window and they start up a staircase. Light is fading, the silent halls deep with shadows.

Before they reach the top floor, a fast-running Buster has left them behind.

Robert and Cathy come across an area where Edith has been kept—a mattress on the floor, a white bureau, some hanging clothes, a portable t-v set, a grotesque attempt to create a “little girl” environment.

No Edith though. Cathy starts to call for Buster but Robert stops her.

She watches as he moves around the area where Edith Gage had obviously been living. It is almost sunset. In the distance, they hear Buster’s running footsteps.

Then Robert stops and stares. Cathy comes up behind him. “What?” she whispers.

He is gazing at a three-part standing screen against the wall.

After a few moments, he moves to it and lifts it aside. Behind it is a closed door.

A closet.

As though impelled by something other than his own volition, he takes Cathy back across the room, tells her to be absolutely quiet, then moves toward the closed door.

The move is made in overlays of time.

One second, he is moving toward the door of the office building closet.

The next, he is in his mother’s room, moving toward the closed door of her closet, rain outside, the 1950 song playing.

He has to struggle to retain the present. With an intense effort of will, he moves to the closed door and stops in front of it.

Heavy silence. He braces himself.

Jerks open the door.

Sights and sounds in simultaneous flurry. Cathy crying out. His own dry gasp. The woman standing in the closet, pointing a shotgun at him, behind her the cowering figure of Edith Gage.

Something unexpected and bizarre takes place. As the woman thrusts the shotgun forward to fire at Robert, his features stiffen.

And, suddenly, the shotgun is yanked from her grip by a violent, unseen force, flies past Robert’s side and clatters across the floor.

The woman recoils with a cry of dread.

Robert stares at her. He doesn’t know it but his rigid expression is terrifying.

“Come out now, Edith,” he says. His eyes never leave those of the frightened, staring woman.

Barney shows up moments later and Buster returns from his fruitless search for the woman.

Robert cannot tell them what happened. The double trauma of reliving his dream in a waking state and having so much telekinetic power drained from him so instantly has left him in a weakened, shaken state.

Cathy drives him home and puts him to bed. He is asleep in seconds.

Into the dream.

This time it seems to go on endlessly. The rain, the music, the dim-lit living room, the movement, then the rush into the hallway, up the stairs, his shrieking, demented mother dragging him across the floor to her room, flinging him inside, slamming and locking the door, the music playing louder, louder, the rain spattering hard against the window, his sobbing terror.

Then his movement toward the closed closet door.

As he passes a mirror on the wall, he looks at his reflection.

Instead of himself, he sees a six-year-old boy.

“No!” he screams.

He has jolted up in bed, crying out the word.

Cathy, shocked awake, stares at him in trembling alarm. Then, turning on the lamp and seeing his sweat-streaked, panicked face, she makes a sound of loving sympathy and puts her arms around him.

Robert clings to her, shivering uncontrollably, unable to speak except to whisper, “Why? Why? Why?”

Cathy thinks he should consult a therapist immediately. He says he’s not against the idea but first he wants to drive to Brooklyn and discover if the house is still there, find out if seeing it does anything to help.

They drive to his old neighborhood in Flatbush: Bedford Avenue near Albermarle Road. It is a depressing sight to him. Everything is different, run-down. Stores and gas stations have replaced houses, office buildings have replaced apartment houses. Half of everything is closed down, boarded up with
No Trespassing
signs.

But the house is still there, wedged between an unused office building and a Jewish synagogue.

They park in front of it and Robert stares at his old home.

He has a momentary vision of his young self standing on the porch, turned away, knocking on the front door. It is raining.

He forces himself to get out of the car and take a closer look. Cathy tries to stop him but he has to do it.

The front gate is almost wedged shut. As he throws his weight against it, it opens with a hideous, grating noise.

He talks to Cathy quietly, nervously, as they walk onto the front porch. The door, as expected, is locked with a No Trespassing sign nailed to the wood.

Robert walks along the porch and sees the curtains in the windows, the curtains from his dream. One of the windows is broken, a piece of plywood nailed over it on the inside. Robert nears the other window.

“If I look inside and see my mother looking back at me,” he says, “have my remains cremated.”

“Robert, don’t,” she begs.

He moves to the window and, gritting his teeth, looks in.

The shade is drawn; he sees nothing. “Thank God for that,” he whispers.

They walk along the side of the house, stepping over piles of trash, old lumber and debris. He almost trips and falls, looking upward at a second story window. “My mother’s room,” he tells her. “That is to say… what
was
her room.”

Another groaning gate opens on the backyard. Robert has a fleeting vision of John and himself (him four) painting the gate. The backyard is a filthy mess. “Beautiful,” he mutters. Cathy waits by the gate as he enters the yard.

He steps over piles of junk and peers into the kitchen through a back window; one of its panes is broken, covered with plywood.

It is dark and shadowy inside but he can see that it still looks the same as he remembers, the furnishings unchanged. A memory flicks across his mind: his mother baking, him, at five, “helping” her, a lovely looking boy, happy, smiling.

His gaze moves further and he manages to see a part of the dining room. For an instant, he recalls the family at the table, Father, Mother, John, Ruth and himself.

He turns away and looks at the backyard. A large cardboard carton sits nearby. He kicks it idly.

And almost comes out of his skin as, with a horrific yowl, a stray cat leaps out and scrabbles across the backyard debris, fleeing.

He covers his eyes with a palsied hand. “I’m not up to this,” he mumbles.