The Link (15 page)

The Squire slams the book down. “What kind of nonsense is this?” he roars. “You knew that lesson all the time! You knew the whole blessed book!”

Edgar tries to explain what happened but his father smacks him to the floor again. “Go to bed!” he cries, “before I lose my temper!”

CUT TO 23-year old Edgar Cayce entering a hotel room, looking ill.

“In March of 1900,” says Robert’s voice, “Edgar Cayce, salesman and insurance agent, began to suffer from severe headaches while on the road.”

Cayce takes a paper container of white powder and empties it into a glass of water, drinks it and lies down, Robert saying, “One evening, returning to his hotel room, he took a sedative a doctor had prescribed for him, then lay down to sleep.” HOLD.

CUT to Cayce in his bedroom at home as he opens his eyes. There are two doctors with him. “When he regained consciousness,” Robert’s voice continues, “he found himself at home.”

“How are you?” asks one of the doctors.

Edgar tries to answer but his voice is no louder than a painful whisper.

CUT TO the parlor of his house, Edgar Cayce lying on a horsehair sofa, eyes shut. Sitting by him is a lean man named AL LAYNE. Squire Cayce and his wife are watching worriedly. Robert’s voice narrates.

“Edgar Cayce became aware, in the months that followed, that he was a man who would never again be able to speak above a whisper. No longer able to be a salesman, he had become a photographer’s apprentice. He was nervous, fretful, high-strung. Desperate, he turned to hypnosis for help. But every time he reached a certain level of hypnosis, something in him held back.

“Until the afternoon of March 31, 1901.”

The hypnotist tells Squire and Mrs. Cayce that he’s going to try something different that day. He instructs Edgar to “see” inside his own throat, diagnose the problem personally. “And speak to us in a normal tone of voice,” he adds.

Edgar Cayce begins to mumble. He clears his throat. Then speaks in a clear, unafflicted voice.

“Yes,” he says. “We can see the body.”

Everyone stares at him as he continues.

“In the normal state,” he continues, “this body is unable to speak due to a partial paralysis of the inferior muscles of the vocal cords produced by nerve strain. This is a psychological condition producing a physical effect. This may be removed by increasing the circulation to the affected parts by suggestion while in this unconscious condition.”

The awed hypnotist hesitates, then says, “The circulation to the affected parts will now increase and the condition will be removed.”

Edgar is silent. They loosen his shirt.

Then, as they watch, incredulous, the upper part of his chest, then his throat, turns pink. The pink deepens to rose, the rose to a violent red. Cayce’s mother winces at the sight.

“The redness continued for twenty minutes,” says Robert’s voice.

CUT TO Edgar Cayce clearing his throat. “It is all right now,” he says. “The condition is removed. Make the suggestion that the circulation return to normal and that, after that, the body awaken.”

Layne does as he is told and they see the red fade back through rose to pink to normal color. Edgar Cayce opens his eyes and sits up. He takes out his handkerchief, coughs and spits up a small amount of blood. Then he looks at them. “Hello,” he says.

He grins. “Hey!” he cries. “I can talk! I’m all right!”

His mother weeps, his father seizes his hand, Layne looks dazed as Robert’s voice says, “So began the life of Edgar Cayce—healer.”

A SHOT of Cayce lying on his sofa, eyes shut, speaking. “Yes, we have the body,” he says.

“And, with these words, a physical reading by Edgar Cayce would take place,” says Robert’s voice.

CAMERA MOVES IN QUICKLY ON Cayce’s closed eyes, then THROUGH and we see the
interior
of a body suffering from intestinal fever as we hear Cayce’s voice continue speaking.

“We find the stomach is affected or the duodenum. The greater distress is in the upper portion of jejunum or in those cords that connect the intestines themselves through the lymph and emunctory circulation of same.

“These are infectious forces and, unless there is an allying, peritonitis must come and the inflammations that arise from same—and disintegration.”

CUT TO ALTERATE SHOTS of Cayce and various PEOPLE he treated. Robert’s voice goes on.

“For more than forty years, this simple Kentucky man with no medical training whatsoever or much education of any kind would diagnose the nature of every patient’s ailment, then recommend treatment.

“In this manner, Edgar Cayce healed
thousands
of men, women and children: of appendicitis, arthritis, tuberculosis, intestinal fever, hypertension, hay fever, polio, diabetes and hundreds of other illnesses and injuries.

“Edgar Cayce gave 14,256 psychic readings yielding 49,135 transcript pages over a period of 43 years.

“Not once did he contradict himself.”

Cut to close-up of Edgar Cayce, eyes shut, speaking MOS as Robert says:

“In addition to his physical readings, Cayce also gave readings in which he discussed the history of man, earth and civilization.”

Cayce stops talking. A man’s voice says, “
Describe the earth’s appearance at the period of the appearance of man.”

“The extreme northern portions were then the southern portions,” Cayce answers. “The polar regions occupied more of the tropical and semi-tropical regions.”

CAMERA MOVES IN ON his lips as he continues speaking. “The Nile River entered into the Atlantic Ocean. The Sahara Desert was inhabited and very fertile. What is now the Mississippi basin was, then, all in the ocean.”

His lips fill the screen now as he says, “Only the plateau was existent, the regions that are now portions of Nevada, Utah and Arizona.”

CUT TO processor screen, CLOSE ON the words, “
Describe the earth’s surface at the period of the appearance of man.”

CUT TO the name
Arizona
filling our vision. CAMERA HOLDS ON it, then:

CUT TO the Arizona desert. A sand storm rages. CAMERA MOVES IN ON the temple ruins, on a wall. Closer. Closer.

The wind uncovers a strange glyph carved into the wall: what looks like a four-bladed scythe, a circle in its center, other odd lines. The curve of the blades indicate movement from west to east.

We will see the glyph again.

In Manhattan, after seeing his agent, Robert drops in on ESPA to deliver some outline pages and to say hello to Cathy and Peter. Little more is exchanged between him and Cathy. After their momentary lapse in Los Angeles, they are keeping their respective distances.

Briefly, they discuss Edgar Cayce. Cathy, to no one’s surprise, believes the healer’s work to be a “prime example” of clairvoyance.

“What about the cures?” Peter asks her. “Surely you don’t believe the man was capable of picking the brains of doctors by telepathy.”

“Considering the alternatives, of course I believe it,” she replies.

Peter clucks in wonderment, then tells Robert that, in a few weeks, ESPA is commencing an investigation into psychic healing. He is welcome to attend. For that matter, does he know of any local healers they might contact? They want a complete representation.

Robert gets a momentary vision of his sister doing “healing work” with her parishioners. He shakes his head. “No, I don’t know of a single one,” he answers.

He learns that Cathy is flying to England to visit her husband and will miss the healing seminar.

Acting as though the news is of slight interest to him, Robert returns to comment on his outline. He is getting so far into the twentieth century now, he says, that the next phase might, logically, be current work in psi; especially since Alan Bremer has vetoed the dramatization of Rhine’s work.

“Yes, Cathy told me,” Peter says. “And I must say it strikes me as incredible. The man was an absolute giant in the field.”

He smiles. “Maybe Bremer would change his mind if you reminded him that the Rhines established all those scientific procedures to investigate survival after death which was their major interest.”

“Maybe,” Robert says.

He is invited to observe another test that afternoon by Teddie Berger. “Since you’re here,” says Peter. “It promises to be a wild one.”

Robert hesitates, Cathy more aware of it than Peter. Then he smiles. “I’d like that,” he says. “What’s he been up to lately?”

Peter describes—and we see—an amusing incident in which, sitting in the testing room, (“Puffing on his foul cigar as usual,” says Cathy) he was asked to “see” the contents of twelve closed wooden boxes in another room.

“We only told him there was ‘something’ in each one of them,” Peter says.

As a joke, a slip of paper is placed in one of the boxes, on it the word “something”.

Teddie describes the contents of each box precisely—except for the box with the slip. Scowling, he says, “I’m sorry, I get ‘something quarts’,” he insists.

When they open the box (a former milk container) they discover that its interior was inadequately painted.

Still visible is the abbreviated word
Qts
.

Before Teddie’s arrival, they retire to the conference room for “another dose of St. Elmo’s fire” as Peter describes it.

Stafford is, if anything, more prolix than ever.

“Kogam’s definitive assertion that wavelengths in the range of three hundred to one thousand kilometers or frequency in the range of three hundred to one thousand cycles per second—frequency and wavelength inversely proportional to each other as stated—result leads one to the inevitable presumption that telepathic communication—or, as I have called it,
telecom
—might well exist if its carrier or mode of medium is the electromagnetic field of extra-long waves excited by biocurrents.”

During this something-short-of gibberish, Robert and Cathy, trying not to, are increasingly aware of one another and, at one point, look directly at each other, her expression half surrender to her obvious attraction to him, half an appeal that they not allow the attraction to exist much less increase.

“We have, accordingly, reached a current point of impasse,” Stafford says, his words accurately reflecting their feelings. “Distance perception and telepathic communication have evidence in their support but, none-the-less, absolutely contradict the understanding of modern science. How to reconcile these contradictions?”

“Essentially quisquillous,” Peter mutters when the speech is done. As Robert looks at him, he translates. “Made of rubbish.” He is by way of being a buff of esoteric words.

When they join him, Teddie Berger, minus Carla, is sitting with some ESPA secretaries, holding forth; evoking gasps and laughter as he describes the places they live. “My God, those stockings hanging in the bathroom,” he tells one woman. “And that shower curtain! All those pukey looking lily pods.”

“That’s right, they’re there!” the woman cries. “Lily pods!”

“Tell Peter about
his
house,” a secretary says.

Teddie looks inquiringly at Peter. “Go ahead,” says Peter, smiling.

Teddie blows out cigar smoke, making Cathy cough. Shortly afterward, he describes Peter’s house. He looks at Peter warily. “I see your wife in bed,” he says.

“Ho
-ho,”
says one of the secretaries.

Peter’s smile is slightly pained. “She isn’t feeling well,” he explains. He clucks. “That is remarkable,” he says.

“What about Robert?” Cathy asks, making Robert start a little.

Teddie looks at Robert.
Into
Robert, it seems.

“This one is something more unusual,” he says. “He lives in two houses at the same time.”

As they move toward the testing room later, Cathy asks Robert, “What did that mean?”

“I have no idea,” says Robert, smiling. But the failing of his smile as Cathy turns away reveals that he may understand Teddie’s answer. He looks around uneasily, considering departure. He even starts to suggest it but Peter cuts him off. “Oh, you’ve got to see this,” says Peter.

Robert avoids Teddie’s piercing eyes, made uncomfortable by what the older man seems to know about him.