The Link (4 page)

Early morning. Robert getting up. His aching back, the left arm. Lousy water pressure in the bathroom. Stretching exercises. Running with Bart who wheezes on their return. Robert sitting by the dog, his arm around him. “What’s the matter, pal? You getting old?
You?
Not you, Bart. You’re a young guy. Sure you are.” The thumping tail, the black face nuzzling his.

Later. Robert at his desk, dictating, CAMERA MOVING IN ON the words appearing on the processor screen.

“Following the events at Hydesville, physical phenomena began to sweep the country.”

We see it as his voice narrates. “Table tiltings. Séance rooms replete with rappings, thumpings, even spirit voices. By 1853, it was estimated that there were 40,000 spiritualists in New York alone.

“But it was not professional mediums who popularized the cause at first. Table turning at home became the rage in all parts of the country as well as in England and on the Continent. Tables would rotate and make other movements without visible control, all the movements accepted as the answering of questions from ‘Beyond’.

“A wave of fascination spread across the western world, the number of adherents to the new faith mounting to more than ten million.

“The first great psychic to appear upon this active scene was Daniel Dunglas Home.”

We see Home sitting with various notables, a young man of striking appearance, face shaven except for a mustache, hair bushy and curly.

“Among those who had sittings with the young Scotch medium were William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Alexander Dumas and most of the crowned heads of Europe including Napoleon the Third.

“What makes this man unique in the history of psychic phenomena is the volume of testimony regarding his feats over a period of some forty years. Despite extreme hostility by critics, he was not once shown to be fraudulent.”

The exterior of a London townhouse. “A gathering at the home of Lord Adare including Mr. Charles Wynne, Mr. Saal, Mr. Hurt and Mr. and Mrs. Jencken. The most famous of D.D. Home’s many demonstrations.”

CUT IN. Four men around a grand piano, pushing down on it with all their strength; nearby, D.D. Home, arms raised.

The piano floats two inches from the floor.

“Push it down,” says Home. They try in unison. The piano rises higher. “Try,” says Home. They do as much as possible. In vain. The piano rises steadily until it hovers above their heads.

Then, as Home lowers his arms, the piano sinks to the floor without a sound.

The drawing room is not brightly lit but it is not at all dark. A fire burns in the grate. Several lamps cast soft illumination.

Home does something now which is, by any physical standard, impossible.

He grows.

He is a man five foot ten inches in height. Yet, standing beside Mr. Jencken who is noticeably taller, he begins to rise. His feet remain planted on the floor but, with audible crackling noises, Home
extends
himself.

Soon the top of his head is higher than that of Mr. Jencken. Before the incredulous gaze of the sitters, Home keeps growing until he is six foot, six inches tall.

“Daniel, will you show how it is?” asks Lord Adare.

Home unbuttons his coat to reveal a space of six inches between his waistcoat bottom and the waistband of his trousers. Moreover, he has grown in breadth as well, a veritable giant.

He then diminishes, regaining normal height and breadth.

He is weakened. It is a feat which drains him; he feels nauseous. He sits, the others watching in silence.

He regains himself and moves to the fire, picking up the poker from its rack. He jabs the end of it into the coals, causing them to flare. He then puts down the poker, draws in a deep breath and reaches into the fire.

He lifts out a red-hot ember twice the size of an orange.

Carrying it to the amazed group, he shows it to them. They wince, drawing back from its heat. He returns the ember to the flames, comes back to display his hand. No burns. It is un-scorched, not blackened in the least.

Returning to the fire, he stirs the embers into flame again—
this time with his hands
—and, kneeling, places his face among the burning coals, moving it about as though bathing in comfortable water.

He straightens then, picks up the same large burning coal he previously handled and returns to the group, blowing on the coal to make it brighter.

“I want to see which of you will be the best subject,” he says. “Ah! Adare will be the easiest because he has been the most with Dan.” (It is Home’s “control” who presumably speaks through this sitting.)

“Put it in mine,” says Jencken.

“No, no, touch it and see,” Home tells him.

Jencken does and gasps, burning the tip of his finger. Home then holds the coal within four inches of Mr. Saal’s and Mr. Hurt’s hands. They cannot endure the heat and pull their hands away.

Home turns to Lord Adare and says, “If you are not afraid, hold out your hand.”

Adare does so and Home makes two rapid passes over the hand, then puts the burning coal in it.

“Good Lord,” murmurs Adare. The others stare at him. “It feels scarcely warm,” he says.

Home laughs and takes the coal away, returning it to the fireplace.

He whispers then that, “the spirits are arranging something special; do not be afraid and, on no account, leave your places.”

He moves to the window and opens it wide, then leaves and walks into the adjoining room where they hear the window being opened there. Several moments pass.

Abruptly then, Home is standing
upright
outside the window of the room in which the group is sitting.

“Oh, my,” says Mrs. Jenckens as Home “walks” into the room quite calmly, sits and laughs. “If a policeman had been passing, imagine his astonishment if he had looked up to see Dan turning round and round along the outside wall of the house,” he says. He thanks them for not having moved.

Lord Adare walks into the other room and finds the window raised scarcely a foot. Returning to the sitters, he comments on this and Home rises. “Come and see,” he says.

Adare accompanies him and Home re-opens the window the same amount of space.

Then, before Adare’s eyes, in the clearest of illumination, Home is suddenly lying on his side
in the air
. His body almost shoots out through the window opening, apparently rigid. For several moments, it hovers outside, then comes back in, still entirely horizontal. Home resumes his footing.

“Shall we return to the others?” he inquires casually.

Robert drives to the house where his ex-wife lives with her new lawyer husband. Ann is in school, Barbara tells him irritably.

“I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “I wasn’t thinking. I should have called ahead.”

Barbara is a lovely woman but it only takes moments to see the disparity between her personality and Robert’s; clearly, their mutual good looks was responsible for their early marriage more than any kind of intellectual or emotional rapport.

Robert says he’ll leave and come back later but Barbara keeps him there. Sitting over coffee in the kitchen of the attractive Long Island home, she tells him, once again, of her concern for Ann.

It emerges more as aggravation. “She is
saying
things,” she tells him. “The kind of things I associate with your family background.”

Robert tenses. “Barbara, please don’t
do
this to her,” he says. “Don’t associate her with the past.”

“It’s not the past,” she says. “This is
happening.”

He restrains his anger. “Look,” he tells her. “She’s in a new environment: a new father, two new sisters, her mother’s attention dispersed by them. Not to mention the period of our separation and divorce. Good God, isn’t that enough motivation for her to be acting a little strangely? Have you considered some counseling? I’ll be glad to pay for it.”

“That’s very logical, very precise, as always,” Barbara says tightly. “But it doesn’t explain her crying about a neighborhood girl being hit by a car—
a week before it happened
. It doesn’t explain her…
looking
at things that aren’t there! That’s
your family
, Robert!”

“Well, it isn’t me!” he snaps.

He lowers his eyes. “It isn’t Ann,” he says.

He stares into his cup of coffee, trying to repress the tangled feelings he has kept below the surface since he was a boy.

D
ecember, 1862. A closed carriage rattles through the dark streets of Washington, D.C. Robert’s voice narrates.

“Nettie Colburn was in Washington in answer to a letter from her youngest brother, a Union soldier desperately ill in a hospital in nearby Alexandria. Knowing that her brother would die if he were not furloughed home, Nettie had come to the capitol to plead for him.”

The carriage’s interior reveals NETTIE COLBURN, 20, and a MR. LAURIE. Nettie’s eyes are red and swollen from crying. Mr. Laurie pats her hand in reassurance.

“That night,” continues Robert’s voice, “a friend named Mr. Laurie was taking her to where she could seek help for her brother.

“A place where the young Spiritualist medium was to have an effect on the course of American history.”

The carriage stops; they enter a building through a guarded doorway. Led through shadowed hallways, they are ushered into a parlor.

Present there, to Nettie’s startlement, are Mrs. Miller (Mr. Laurie’s daughter), Mr. Newton, the Secretary of the Interior and Mrs. Abraham Lincoln.

Nettie Colburn is in the Red Parlor of The White House.

Mrs. Lincoln, noting her appearance, inquires as to its cause. When Nettie tells her what is wrong, Mrs. Lincoln comforts the young woman.

“Your brother shall have a furlough,” she promises, “if Mr. Lincoln has to give it himself.”

Nettie is thanking her profusely when Mrs. Miller (also a spiritualist medium) seats herself at a grand piano. Under “control” she brings her hands down on the keyboard with striking force and begins to play a grand march.

Everyone falls still. The march plays on. CAMERA MOVES IN on the doorway to the hall.

Abruptly, Mrs. Miller’s hands lift from the keys, the room is deathly still. The door opens.

Standing there is President Lincoln.

He enters, telling them he heard the first notes of the march exactly when he reached the head of the grand staircase. “I kept step with it as I came down,” he tells them, smiling. “It stopped precisely as I reached the parlor door.”

He crosses the room, the stress of his responsibilities evident on his drawn features, in his weary movements. Still, he smiles with kindly greeting at the young medium and puts a hand on her head.

“So this is our little Nettie, is it, that we have heard so much about?” he says.

Her smile is that of a shy school girl as she murmurs, “Yes, sir.”

He leads her to an ottoman and seats her. Sitting on the chair in front of her, he repeats that, indeed, her brother will be furloughed, then asks, in a gentle, genial way, about her mediumship.

Awed by his presence, the young woman can barely answer him beyond a muted, “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir.”

“You know, of course,” he tells her, “that I cannot openly declare belief in what you do or I would surely be pronounced insane and probably incarcerated. I can scarcely risk that when the fate of our nation is in such peril.”

Nettie murmurs, “No, sir.”

Lincoln smiles. “Well, how do you do it?” he asks.

Mr. Laurie, coming to her rescue, seats them in a circle and, in lowered light, they all join hands. Nettie closes her eyes, breathing deeply.

In an instant, she has passed under whatever control possesses her when she sits.

It is no timid schoolgirl who speaks now. Her voice strong and forceful, she tells the President that “after the disaster at Fredericksburg it is essential that you bolster the sagging morale of the Army.”

CAMERA MOVES IN on her face which is, somehow, not her face.

“Go in person to the front,” her voice directs the President, “taking with you your wife and children; leaving behind your official dignity and all manner of display.

“Resist the importunities of officials to accompany you and take only such attendants as may be absolutely necessary; avoid the high grade officers and seek the tents of the private soldiers. Inquire into their grievances; show yourself to be what you are, ‘The Father of your People’. Make them feel that you are interested in their sufferings and that you are not unmindful—”

As she speaks on, Robert’s voice breaks in to say that Lincoln, apparently heeding this advice, did as the voice declared, his visit to the front rallying the Army of the Potomac, a turning point in the Civil War.

“Then the voice which spoke so strongly, so unlike Nettie Colburn’s normal voice, told Abraham Lincoln something even more important.”

Nettie Colburn is on her feet now, looking squarely into the President’s eyes, speaking with the utmost solemnity and force of manner, her voice resonant as she says, “You must not abate the terms of the issue uppermost in your mind. You must not delay its enforcement as a law beyond the opening of the year. This act will be the crowning event of your administration and your life.