Superstition

27

Peggy's office, though even smaller than Sam's, was considerably tidier. She had shifted everything off her desk and onto the window ledge in order to make room for the stack of reference books that she had spent the morning going through. In the midst of them, carefully wedged between a couple of paperweights, was the plaster cast of the arm, turned so that the thing it held faced upward. She peered through a magnifying glass at the barely discernible detail on it.

What had at first appeared to be sweeping lines began to look more like one continuous spiral that coiled into some kind of double vortex pattern. She still wasn't sure what the straight lines running through them represented, if anything, partly because the point at which two of them appeared to join was obscured by the fingertips curled over it. She turned several pages of the largest of the books open on her desk, and reluctantly conceded defeat. Nothing in there even remotely resembled the design on the plaster cast she was examining.

She went to the basement-Adam's room-where Sam was going through the previous night's wreckage with Pete and Bryan Meade, the engineer. Joanna was with them, taking notes in shorthand to back up what she was getting on tape; she no longer relied on technology as much as she had, especially in this place. Peggy caught Joanna's eye as she entered. The two women liked each other, and it took only the faintest shake of Peggy's head for Joanna to understand that she'd drawn a blank with her research. “What have they found down here?” she asked.

Joanna told her that according to Bryan there was nothing unusual about the damage to the furniture or electrical equipment. They had been trashed by straightforward physical strength-but strength on a human not a superhuman scale. Nothing had been crushed or bent or broken to any degree that a normal man or woman couldn't accomplish. Nobody examining the debris would have reason to suspect the intervention of any paranormal force. The only inference any reasonable outsider could draw would be that the group members had inflicted the damage themselves in some kind of frenzy.

“Which according to Sam's theory,” Peggy said, “is exactly what happened.”

“What do you make of all this, Peggy?” Joanna asked. “Just between us?”

Peggy's hands were clasped in front of her as she lifted her shoulders in a gesture of incomprehension and unease. “It's the most extraordinary thing I've ever been this close to. I've told Sam I think it's a mistake to go on-at least until we can figure out some safeguards against this happening again. What about the rest of you?”

Before Joanna could answer, Sam looked over and called out, “Any luck yet, Peggy?”

Peggy shook her head again. Sam came toward them, frowning. “There's got to be something that'll tell us what that design means.”

“Why must it mean anything?” Joanna asked. “Do you think it's important?”

For the first time he looked genuinely surprised by what she had said. “Of course it's important. Nothing that's happening here is happening by chance. Believe me, it's important.”

Drew and Barry were planning to catch the six o'clock screening of a movie, then have dinner at their favorite Chinese restaurant. The traffic had been light and they'd arrived early, bought their tickets, and found they had twenty minutes to kill. There was a bar next to the theater, but neither of them felt like a drink, so they took a stroll around the block to look at the shops.

Barry headed straight for a secondhand bookshop that he knew well. Drew was already absorbed in a display in the window of a fabric shop a couple of doors along, but she saw Barry signaling to her that he was going into the bookshop, and she nodded.

The interior was dark and seemed to stretch way back, with book stacks from floor to ceiling everywhere, barely leaving room for two people to pass between them. Barry wandered through in search of anything that might pique his curiosity. Subjects were divided into sections that were labeled with faded signs handwritten in ink. He spent a few minutes scanning the “Military History” shelves, but found nothing of great interest. He went on alphabetically, skipping “New Age” without even a glance, and barely pausing at “Occult” he'd had enough of that for the time being. Philosophy looked more promising. There was a complete set of Bertrand Russell's autobiography that looked almost new. He checked inside the cover; it was a first edition.

He began to read and became engrossed. A couple of times he had to step back or press up against a book stack to let somebody pass, but the response was automatic and didn't break his concentration. What did was the sound of books tumbling onto the floor as he backed into a pile of them. He looked down and saw an assistant crouched where he had been refilling one of the lower shelves. Apologizing profusely, Barry bent down to help him clear up the mess.

The assistant was a young man with a wispy beard and gentle manner who told him not to worry, it happened all the time. But Barry was already only half listening. He straightened up slowly, gazing at the book he had picked up, open at the page where it had fallen.

He recognized the design at once.

When he began to read the text accompanying it, he felt the blood drain from his face.