The Link (11 page)

Cathy doesn’t realize that she is treading on Robert’s emotional toes. He tries, politely, to avoid a confrontation. That these phenomena occur is enough for him, he tells her. He doesn’t feel a need to explain them.

“Things without explanation,” she says.

He nods.

“No. I just don’t understand it,” she says. Peter tries to get her off the subject but she persists. “Sooner or later, Robert,” she lectures, “you are going to have to reach a point of commitment.”

“Like you?” he asks, a betraying edge in his voice.

“Yes, like me,” she agrees, not understanding.

“And if your commitment happens to be unjustifiable?” he says.

“What do you mean?”

With precise economy, Robert presents the case
against
psi.

One:
Everything about it contradicts prevailing science, phenomena which defy all laws of causality, time and space.

Two:
Evidence gathered is primarily spontaneous and undependable, a far cry from the disciplined procedures of the lab.

Three
: The bulk of psi can never be tested at all: insights, dreams, unrecorded premonitions. These can neither be repeated nor measured on any known instrument.

Four:
Psychics, tested under lab conditions, turn off more often than not, producing poor or no results.

Five:
The matter of fraud has surfaced even in the lab. Many of the so-called “greats” of psi have resorted to trickery.

“In brief,” he concludes, “if there
is
such a thing as psi, it’s evasive and transient, impossible to measure properly, impossible to pin down or to replicate. Even those who’ve worked in the field for years admit they don’t know what it is or how it works.”

“
On the contrary
,” Cathy says, her expression hard. “The fact of psi has been established by hundreds of bonafide experiments is ESP. The evidence of telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition is as well-founded as the evidence for physics. Dr. Rhine spent fifty years at Duke University compiling statistical evidence. Thousands of people, by their own report, use psi in their daily lives for practical purposes. And what you choose to call ‘undependable evidence’ consists of thousands of years of psi occurrences in every culture and religion.”

Peter tries to lighten the mood but Robert, tense, withdrawn, leaves ESPA and goes home. Taking care of Bart, he retires to his office and begins to work.

“It is appropriate, at this time,” he dictates grimly, “to bring up the subject of fraud in psi.

“As the decades passed in the 19
^th
, then the 20
^th
century, deceptions were increasingly revealed until a cloud of suspicion hung above the entire subject of psychic phenomena.

“Of the Fox Sisters, Houdini had the following to say—”

CLOSE UP of Harry Houdini as he scornfully says, “The Fox Sisters used Spiritualism as a means to ‘get while the getting was good’. Fortunately for the general public, Spiritualism received a severe jolt in the confession of Margaret Fox.”

“Of D.D. Home, Houdini said—” says Robert’s voice.

“His active career, his various escapades and the direct cause of his death all indicate that he lived the life of a hypocrite of the deepest dye,” Houdini says.

“Of Palladino—” Robert’s voice says.

“My opinion is that Palladino, in her crafty prime, may have possessed the agility and abundant skill in misdirection together with sufficient energy and nerve to bamboozle her scientific and otherwise astute observers,” Houdini says.

BACK TO Robert, on a sardonic roll now, CAMERA MOVING IN ON the processor screen as he speaks. “The field of psychic mediumship is crowded with examples of fraudulent behavior in the séance room.”

“An odorless wood alcohol rubbed across an envelope made it instantly transparent,” says Robert’s voice. “The alcohol evaporating seconds later restored the paper to its original condition.”

We hear the male medium’s sepulchral voice declaring, “Your Uncle Stanton, no
Stanley
, sends his love and says—yes, yes—seek out the kingdom of the Lord, not gain from mortal legacy, does that make sense to you?”

The sitter replies, “Yes.”

The medium says, “God bless you. Next envelope, please.”

The medium leans over, concentrating. “This message comes from your…
father
, yes, your father. Believe, he says. Be thou a believer. Not like me, you understand?”

“Yes,” says the sitter.

“Repeating the action from another viewpoint,” says Robert’s voice.

CUT BACK to the sitter handing the folded slip of paper to the medium. Now we see things from the medium’s point of view. There is already a similar folded piece inside the envelope, glued in place opposite a two-inch slit in the envelope face through which the sitter’s folded note is pushed and held. The envelope is burned. Then, palmed, the sitters message is read:
Am I a skeptic like my father?

CAMERA MOVES IN ON the medium to reveal him under a large black hood, using a small flashlight to read a message through a sealed envelope which reads:
Brother Harry, did you suffer much when you were washed overboard and drowned?

“I see a storm raging on the ocean and I get the influence of a man, a blood relation, a father, no, a brother, a brother. He speaks the name Ha… Ha…Harry.”

“Yes,” says the woman sitter, sobbing.

Later. The medium quickly replaces the hood and flashlight under his shirt and his associate turns on the lights, the medium still “in trance”.

“As you can see,” says the associate, returning the envelope, “it is still completely sealed.”

“Yes, of course,” the sitter says. “Even if it weren’t, who could read it in the dark but—?”

“Yes
,” intones the associate. “Exactly.”

There is a mantel behind the associate and sitter. As the fourth slate is being cleaned by the sitter, the associate retrieves another slate from a hiding place on the mantel, using his right hand, unobtrusively, behind the sitter’s back.

As he takes the cleaned slate from the sitter with his left hand, he instantaneously switches the two slates and, without missing a beat, adds the prepared slate to the pile on the table and places the cleaned slate in the mantel hiding place.

The medium then puts a thick rubber band around the pile of slates. “You are certain, are you,” she enjoins, “that you have thoroughly cleaned each and every slate back and front?”

“I am,” the sitter answers solemnly.

Later. The prepared slate is “come upon” and handed to the sitter. On it is the message
I greet you from the Life Beyond—send you my devotion. Mother
.

“Oh!” cries the sitter. “Praise the Lord!”

CAMERA MOVES INSIDE the cabinet to show the medium using a tiny hole in the curtain to spray an atomizer on the back of the canvas.

BACK TO the sitters as a face begins appearing on the canvas, that of a little girl.

A woman sobs. “It’s Penelope!” she says. “Yes, yes,” someone else says. “It
is!”
says someone else.
“Hallelujah
,” says a man.

“Sulphocyanide of potassium for red,” says Robert’s voice flatly. “Ferrocyanide of potassium for blue and tannin for black, the chemicals remained invisible until sprayed with a weak solution of tincture of iron.”

“We must all sit very still now,” she says.

She picks up the trumpet from the table and begins to swing it around, then puts it to her lips and hisses into it, grunts, moans and, finally, murmurs, “Hel-lo-o-o.”

“Hello,” the sitters respond obediently.

“Among the most absurdly simple ploys—” says Robert’s voice.

CAMERA MOVES TO the cabinet to show the medium’s hand slipped out between the curtains, removing, from beneath the tail of her associate’s coat, a veritable carload of luminous silk forms, faces, hands, costumes and reaching rods.

“Be it understood,” declares the associate, “Madame Olga has nothing in this cabinet with her save her spirit friends.” “An even more obvious ploy—” says Robert’s voice.

“—down which,” says Robert’s voice as we see it happening, “descended a veritable legion of spirits performing their ethereal roles.”

CUT TO Robert sitting in his office, the only sound the hum of his processor. He has gotten the tension out of his system and feels guilty now.

He sighs. “On the other hand,” he says, trying to be fair, “some accusations of fraud were, to say the least, questionable.”

“Among the most famous of these occurred in Boston is July, 1924.”

A darkened hotel room. Sitting in a wooden cabinet is the medium, only her head and hands sticking out of special openings.

“Locked into a solid wood cabinet—built to order for the most suspicious sitter in the group—was Mrs. Mina Crandon, known to the psychic world as Margery. Only her hands and head protruded from the box and her hands were being held.”

CAMERA DRAWS BACK TO SHOW the two men holding her hands, Dr. Goddard Crandon and Dr. Walter Franklin Prince, THEN TO the small man sitting on the opposite side of a table set in front of the cabinet. On the table top is a bell box, an electric light wired to a telegraph key.

“Now ring the bell,” challenges the small man. We see him almost glaring toward the medium.

“Incensed when he read in the newspapers that Margery had baffled all investigators including himself,” says Robert’s voice, “Harry Houdini cancelled his stage tour to attend this sitting—his first—with Mrs. Crandon.”

“Ring the bell if you can,” demands Houdini. “Let me hear the bell ring.”

CAMERA ZOOMS IN ON the bell as it rings. CLOSE UP on Houdini as his look of smug assurance vanishes.

A bitter argument ensuing later—Houdini and the committee members: Professor William McDougall, Dr. Daniel Frost Comstock, Dr. Prince, Hereward Carrington and Malcolm Bird, the committee’s secretary and the special target of Houdini’s ire.

“It is immaterial to me that the bell rang!” he rages, putting down the incident to “obvious fraud”. When Bird points out that the conditions in the séance room—even to the construction of the cabinet—were Houdini’s own, the splenetic magician says that the conditions were
not
his and further accuses the secretary of being “untrustworthy” and “forbids” him from being present in the séance room any longer.

Bird, infuriated and insulted, resigns as secretary, storming from the room.

Houdini smiles. “Now we will have an
honest
test,” he says.

The following night. Mina Crandon, attired in dressing gown, silk stockings and slippers, is helped into the cabinet by her husband. Houdini carefully shuts and locks the cabinet. Tonight, he says, Dr. Crandon will not hold his wife’s right hand, Professor McDougall will.

There is a brief discussion of this until Dr. Crandon accedes to Houdini’s demand. Dr. Prince will, as usual, hold the medium’s left hand.

Before the lights are extinguished, Houdini says he wants to make one final check on the cabinet, unlocks and opens it and looks inside, aided by his assistant.

Apparently satisfied, he re-locks the cabinet, the sitters take their places and the lights are put out.

Margery’s “control”, Walter (ostensibly her deceased brother), comes through immediately. His voice is furious as he accuses Houdini of having hidden a collapsible ruler under the cushion beneath the medium’s feet. He refuses to continue with the sitting and the lights are turned on, the cabinet unlocked and opened.

Under the foot cushion, the collapsible ruler is found.

The room erupts with angry voices, fading as Robert’s voice comes in.

“Houdini accused Mrs. Crandon of having concealed the ruler. Mrs. Crandon and her husband countered that the cabinet had been completely checked by the magician and his assistant before the séance and no ruler found, accusing Houdini of placing the ruler in the cabinet just prior to the sitting in order to discredit Mrs. Crandon.”

BACK TO Robert. “The mystery was never resolved,” he says. He hesitates, then stands and searches through his bookshelves, coming down with a book. Opening it, he finds an entry and dictates again.

“Interestingly enough,” he says, “although Houdini always stated that he’d never witnessed a single genuine psychic manifestation in his life, he once told Hereward Carrington that during an engagement in Berlin—”

We see Houdini walking onto stage to begin his show.

As he moves, his eyes are drawn to the opposite wing and he reacts in shock as he sees his mother, wearing a shawl over her head, smiling at him.