Superstition (10 page)

“All I meant,” her mother said in a conciliatory tone, “was it's an unusual job, and it must take an unusual person to do it. That doesn't mean he isn't very nice, I already said he was. Now come along, or the poor man will be wondering what we're saying about him.”

Joanna followed her mother through the leather-upholstered door at the top of the stairs and across the restaurant to their table. She felt a curious unease. Something in her mother's words, more particularly in the unspoken misgivings behind them that she couldn't quite identify, had brought back the image of Ellie Ray's face, twisted with black rage and pushed into hers that morning on Sixth Avenue.

But the feeling passed as they sat down. For the rest of the evening they talked of shows to see and events to catch in the coming season.

All the same, when the two couples said their good nights outside the restaurant before going their separate ways, Joanna sensed her mother's continued reserve. It both irritated and troubled her. She knew about her mother's instincts, and for most of her life had trusted them—often, as things turned out, with good reason. But this was different. This time her mother was simply mistaken. That was all there was to it.

She slipped her arm through Sam's and enjoyed the feeling of their closeness. He dipped his face to hers and kissed her lightly on the mouth as they walked into the wintry, glistening Manhattan night.

13

T
he first meeting of the group was on a Tuesday evening, just after seven. They were in a basement room beneath Sam's main lab. Until now it had been used for storage—mainly junk that he'd been glad to throw out finally. High on one wall two small windows opened to ventilate the place, but a metal grille on the outside meant that they let in almost no light. Whenever the room was in use, even in bright daylight, the overhead strip lighting had to be kept on. It reflected with a clinical coldness off the white-painted brick walls from which the odor of fresh paint had not yet quite evaporated.

In the center of the room was a square wooden table around which were eight straight-backed chairs. An old leather sofa was pushed against one wall, next to it was a card table on which stood a coffee machine and paper cups, and next to that was a small refrigerator containing cold drinks. Video cameras on tripods stood in adjacent corners, and four small microphones hung from the ceiling with cables leading to a bulky transformer and a power outlet on the wall.

Joanna sat on the left of a married couple in their early forties who had been introduced to her as Drew and Barry Hearst. Barry was a heavyset man around forty with a dark beard trimmed short and a taste for open-necked Hawaiian shirts even in the middle of winter. He was a plumber, Joanna knew, running a successful business out of Queens and employing nearly thirty people. His wife, Drew, sat next to him, slim and fragile looking, but with a stillness that suggested a wiry strength and considerable determination.

Next to Drew was Maggie McBride, a soft spoken, motherly woman in her sixties whose voice still carried a lilting trace of the Scottish Highlands where she had been born.

On Maggie's right was an austere-looking man in his fifties who wore an expensive and well-cut business suit and introduced himself as Ward Riley. All that Joanna knew about him so far (the idea was that they should get to know each other better in the course of their twice-weekly sessions) was that he was a lawyer turned investment banker who had made a great deal of money and retired ten years ago. According to Sam he was a man full of fascinating contradictions: a successful businessman drawn to eastern mysticism and paranormal research; a lifelong bachelor and an intensely private man who funded, anonymously, a string of scholarships for young artists and musicians he would never meet, as well as sponsoring a small poetry magazine and occasionally contributing generously to Sam's research.

The rest of the group comprised Sam; his assistant, Pete Daniels; Roger Fullerton; and Joanna herself. Sam inevitably acted as chairman of the proceedings, while making an effort to keep everything as informal as possible.

“As you know,” he said in the course of his general introduction, “Joanna Cross is here to write about this whole thing for
Around Town
magazine. By mutual agreement she isn't going to use any of your actual names or otherwise identify you in print—unless of course,” he added with a smile, “you want her to, in which case I'm sure she'll oblige. Obviously I too will be writing something, for one of the professional journals, but the same rules apply—no names without your permission.”

After that he went around the table, inviting everyone in turn to say a few words about themselves. Maggie McBride was coaxed, reluctantly, into going first, but it quickly became obvious that her natural shyness covered a canny intelligence and a strong sense of who she was.

Maggie had been born in Elgin, Scotland, from where she had emigrated with her parents to Vancouver, Canada, at the age of twelve. There she had met and married fellow Scot Joseph McBride. They had worked as cook and chauffeur to a wealthy businessman, eventually moving with him to New York. Maggie's interest in things psychic had been kindled by her employer's wife, who was a devout spiritualist. Maggie originally “played along,” as she put it, “as part of the job, but never really believed there was much to it.” She and Joe had two children, of whom they were deeply proud: a son, an industrial chemist, married with one child; and a daughter, unmarried, who was an investment analyst on Wall Street. When Joe died of cancer five years ago, Maggie had stayed on as housekeeper to her now elderly employers. A couple of years ago she had come across an appeal for volunteers in a copy of the Parapsychology Association newsletter and had applied out of curiosity. She had worked with Sam on some of the experiments that Joanna had seen demonstrated. Her results had been good within normal limits. She had never had any kind of psychic experience, and suspected that most such claims were phony, though she kept an open mind.

Barry Hearst spoke for himself and Drew, but deferred to her unquestioningly whenever she corrected him on some point of emphasis or detail, which was not often. They came from the same part of Queens and had known each other since childhood. Both came from working-class families. As a teenager Drew had contemplated becoming a nun, while Barry had been constantly in trouble with the law. They were vague about how they had come to get married (Joanna suspected an accidental pregnancy), but the union had been beneficial to both. Barry had channeled his rebelliousness and was now, at the age of forty-one, the owner of a flourishing plumbing supplies business. His claims to be uneducated were flatly contradicted by Drew, who said that he had his nose in a book every spare minute and was widely read in history and philosophy. He also had, she added with barely disguised pride, a large collection of classical recordings and often whistled Mozart at work. Barry admitted, under pressure, that he supposed he was “something of a success story—at least in the neighborhood.”

Tragedy had almost shattered their lives ten years ago when their only child, a daughter, had been killed in a road accident at the age of eleven. Barry had been almost destroyed by his grief and claimed that only Drew's strength had pulled him through. Nonetheless, he remained an agnostic in contrast to her devout Catholicism. It did not seem to be a source of friction between them. They were there, Barry said in conclusion, because he had read something about Sam's work in a magazine and had written in for more information.

Roger Fullerton described himself modestly as a physics teacher who already knew that the universe was irrational, but wasn't yet sure how deep the problem went and hoped all this might help him find out.

Pete Daniels, who was awestruck even to be sitting at the same table as Roger Fullerton, said that he was twenty-four, born in Kentucky, and had studied physics at Caltech. He claimed that a chronically low boredom threshold had kept him from going into industry or doing anything either profitable or practical with his skills, which was how he'd wound up working with Sam. (Sam had already told Joanna that Pete had the soul of a pure researcher and was worth his weight in gold, despite being paid in peanuts.) He was funny in a naive-smart kind of way, and Joanna sensed that the whole group felt an immediate affection for him.

Finally Ward Riley managed to say even less about himself than Joanna had learned from the thumbnail sketch that Sam had given her. “A retired businessman with a lifelong interest in all forms of paranormal phenomena,” was all they got out of him. Curiously, however, nobody seemed to want or need more; there was about him a quality—oddly indefinable, Joanna thought—that disposed people to accept him at face value and demand no more than he chose to volunteer.

That left only her. Since they already knew who she was and why she was there, she invited them to put any questions they might have to her. Barry Hearst asked whether, in view of her revelations about Camp Starburst, she had any belief whatsoever in the supernatural. She said that she supposed she had as much belief as any of them present; certainly, the material she had read describing previous experiments of the kind they were embarking on was pretty convincing, but she wouldn't really know for sure what she thought until she saw with her own eyes the table they were sitting around move or, better still, float in the air.

Roger smiled and said that such an occurrence would pretty much take care of his misgivings too. After that the session broke up into a series of casual chats over coffee. Sam moved happily among his little group, obviously satisfied that the atmosphere he had hoped to create was evolving successfully. When he felt that they had accomplished as much as could be expected on this first occasion, he unobtrusively brought the proceedings to a close. They were to meet again in three days.

“At which time,” he said, “we'll start to invent our ghost. And then, to paraphrase Bette Davis, fasten your seat belts—because with any luck, we'll be in for a bumpy ride.”

14

W
hat is it?” Joanna peered at the pale blue liquid in the metal container. It was warm, viscous, and odorless.

“Paraffin wax. Watch.”

Sam pulled back his sleeve and dipped his hand in it up to the wrist. When he withdrew it, it was evenly coated with what looked like a tight-fitting, partially transparent glove. “It dries almost immediately and comes off easily,” he said, pulling a strip from the back of his hand. “And look, you can see every mark of the skin, even tiny hairs, perfectly imprinted.”

“This is very interesting. I assume there's a point.”

They were in a back room of the lab that housed some photographic developing equipment, a gas stove, and a few shelves of chemicals. He finished cleaning the stuff off his hand as he explained. “Sometime in the twenties there was a Polish banker called Franek Kluski, who discovered at the age of forty-five that he was a prodigiously gifted physical medium. According to people who were there, he held séances in which he produced mysterious creatures out of nowhere—human forms, semihuman, animal, semianimal. The only problem was that at the end of the séance they disappeared, so there was never any tangible proof that they'd been there, even though people had seen them and touched them. So one of the researchers investigating him came up with this idea of asking these spirits if they wouldn't mind dipping their hands into a bowl of paraffin wax, so that when they dematerialized they could leave the wax casts behind. Very obligingly, the spirits agreed—and at the end of every séance after that there'd be these empty wax casts lying on the floor. All the researchers had to do was fill them with plaster to get a perfect cast of…whatever it was that had been in the room.”

Joanna stared at him. “You have to be making this up.”

He made an open, noncommittal gesture with his now wax-free hand. “There's a set of plaster casts in Paris at the Institute Metapsychique. They call them ‘phantom hands,’ and they were reportedly created in the way I've just described.”

“I've got to see Roger's face when he hears this.”

Sam laughed. “I'd rather see it when someone dumps a wax cast in his lap and tells him to explain that away.”

“You know,” she said thoughtfully, “you were so right to want Roger in the group. As you said, if he buys into this, it's going to be very hard for the skeptics to dismiss it.”

“Believe me, it won't stop them from trying.”

“All the same, if he'll let me use his name, I'd like to do a special interview with him—once before we start, and again later if something happens.”

“Steady there—your interview technique is what got us on first name terms.”

“What's the matter? Jealous of an old professor?”

“Of
that
old professor, yes. He's been married four times, and I wouldn't put it past him to try a couple more before he's through.”

“
Four
times?”

“He's a scientist—repeatability is the essence of any good experiment.”

“I think you just cured me of a dangerous crush.”

“Glad to hear it.” He pulled her to him and kissed her.

“Do you think they know?” she asked in a soft voice.

“Does who know what?”

“The others in the group. About us.”

He shrugged. “They've probably made an educated guess. Anyway, it's no secret—is it?”

“No.” She ran her hand through the thick hair on the back of his head and pulled his lips to hers once again. “Absolutely not.”

Inventing the ghost proved to be a slow process fraught with unanticipated pitfalls. Under Sam's guidance they applied what logic to it they could. The first question was should it be a male or female ghost? Roger suggested that tossing a coin might be the fairest and fastest solution. Everyone agreed, so Roger spun a quarter. The ghost was male.

The next question was what period should their ghost have lived in? Everyone waited for everyone else to make a suggestion, before Sam said why didn't they all give their opinions one at a time, starting on his left with Maggie. Somewhat diffidently, claiming she knew little history and would defer to those who did, she suggested mid-eighteenth-century Scotland, the time of Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobite uprising. There was a brief silence while everybody wondered whether to comment on that idea right away, or hear other suggestions. Sam suggested they carry on around the table with their own suggestions, then go around again for comments.