Superstition

13

The 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.”