Superstition

57

It was barely seven-thirty when Sam's phone rang the following morning. He was already on his second pot of coffee and cut short Ralph's apologies for calling so early.

“What's happened?” he asked, sensing the tension in the other man's voice.

“That woman you were looking for last night? She paid us a visit after you'd left. It seems that she'd also paid a visit to Joanna's parents.”

“And-?”

Ralph hesitated. “I think it would be better if we talked face to face. Joanna and I are in a hotel right now, but I can be at the house in twenty minutes. Can you meet me there?”

Ralph Cazaubon was waiting on the steps of number 139 when Sam got out of his cab. He looked tired and nervous, very different from the self-assured and confident individual who had opened the door the previous day.

“Thanks for coming over, Dr. Towne.” He pulled a key ring from his pocket and gave a vaguely apologetic laugh as he unlocked the door. “I told myself I'd wait outside until you got here so you could see everything exactly as it was, untouched since last night. But the truth is I'm just plain scared to go in there on my own.”

“Anybody in their right mind would be,” Sam said, trying to conceal his own nervous impatience.

Something appeared to be blocking the door, because Ralph couldn't push it all the way back. When Sam followed him through the gap and into the hall, he saw the coat stand lying on its side.

“That was the first thing that happened. The noise it made woke us up.”

Sam nodded, as though only marginally interested in details of this kind. “Tell me about this woman,” he said. “Describe her to me.”

He listened solemnly as Ralph did so. When he was finished he nodded again. “That's her. Did Joanna see her, too?”

Ralph shook his head. “Not then. When Joanna came into the room the woman wasn't there anymore. We thought she'd just slipped out of the house. But then when all this started…” He gave an odd sideways glance at Sam, as though unable or too embarrassed to look him in the eye. “She was a ghost, wasn't she?”

“If I knew for sure I'd tell you. But I don't.”

Ralph looked at him again, more directly this time, as though trying to decide whether Sam was telling the truth. Whatever decision he came to, he kept it to himself. “Come through here,” he said abruptly, moving toward the drawing room, “you'd better see this.”

He stopped dead when he got there, muttering an obscenity under his breath and staring in dismay at what confronted him.

Sam looked past him into the room. It was a scene of devastation. Chairs and furniture were overturned, light fittings had been torn from their sockets and dangled on the ends of electric wire, every ornament and picture in the place had been smashed. Even the carpet and backing had been ripped up in places to reveal bare floorboards.

“It wasn't like this when we left,” Ralph said. “Just the big mirror that was over the mantel. We both saw it lift off the wall and fly across the room.” He pointed. “You can see where it landed. But the rest of this…” He spread his arms in helpless incomprehension.

“You said ‘not then’ when I asked if Joanna saw the woman,” Sam said. “Does that mean she saw her later?”

“She saw something-in that mirror over there. She came into the room and saw the reflection of a woman over my shoulder. By the time I turned it was too late, the mirror was already flying across the room.”

“Did she describe the woman?”

Ralph nodded. “It was the same woman I'd seen.”

He waited for Sam to speak, but the other man seemed lost in thought.

“There's something upstairs you'd better see,” Ralph said, and led the way, talking as they climbed. “We'd gone back up to the bedroom to get our things together to leave. There was a crash from my music room. I came down to take a look. My desk had turned over, papers and everything on it were everywhere. I couldn't have been away from Joanna for more than two minutes, but when I got back upstairs she came staggering out of the bathroom, terrified. She said she'd been locked in and something had been knocking and scratching in the walls. And this thing had appeared, if it's still there…”

Sam noticed that lights still burned upstairs as they had in the hall and drawing room, evidence of the couple's panic-stricken flight in the early hours. He followed Ralph across the bedroom and into the bathroom, and saw the jagged lettering on the mirror.

He moved closer, reaching out instinctively to touch the surface of the glass.

“It's on the back,” Ralph was saying. “It just isn't possible to do that.”

Sam began feeling around the edges of the mirror with his fingertips.

“It doesn't open,” Ralph said. “There's no closet space behind it. That mirror's set right into the wall.”

Sam turned to him. “Your wife wasn't harmed in any way, was she, when this happened?”

The question drew a faintly bitter laugh from Ralph. “If you don't include being scared out of your wits, no, she wasn't harmed. But my wife's pregnant, Dr. Towne. There's no telling what an experience like this might have provoked. I can promise you one thing-there's no way she's going to set foot in this house again.”

Sam was peering over every surface and into every corner of the bathroom, as though in search of something so far overlooked.

Ralph watched him for a few moments, then asked, with an edge of irritation breaking into his voice, “Look, Towne, are you going to tell me what's going on, or what? Who was that woman?”

Sam glanced at him as though he'd forgotten he was there, then walked past him and back into the bedroom.

“Well, what does this mean, for God's sake?” Ralph said more insistently, following him. “What the hell does ‘Help Me’ mean?”

The two men faced each other across the room, Sam with his shoulders hunched and hands thrust deep in the pockets of his raincoat, Ralph with his hands out, waiting for an answer.

“She's some kind of ghost-right? We're being,” he stumbled over the word, as though unable to believe he was actually saying it, “haunted!”

Sam still didn't speak.

“Well, say something, for Christ's sake!”

“I suppose,” Sam said after a while, “‘ghost’ is as good a word as any.”

“What's the connection between this ghost and Joanna? Why does it-she, whatever-have my wife's name?”

Again Sam looked at him for a while, then lifted his shoulders in a shrug of defeat. “I can't explain that.”

“I think you'd better try.” Ralph took a step forward. The anger that had followed on the heels of his fear was beginning to show itself in his physical attitude as well as in his voice. He was, unconsciously perhaps, squaring up for a fight. “I think you owe me an explanation. This whole thing started with your visit last night…”

Sam shook his head. “No, it didn't start there…”

“Then where the hell did it start?”

“If I could tell you that, I would. But I can't.”

“Can't? Or won't?” Ralph was regarding Sam with open hostility now. “I have a strong impression that you're holding something back, and I'm getting pretty tired of it.”

Sam took a hand from his pocket and held it up, palm out in a calming, open gesture. He knew that Ralph was on the verge of an irrational rage and he had to placate him.

“I can only tell you that I would like to make sense of all this every bit as much as you would.”

He saw Ralph's eyes narrow shrewdly, perhaps wanting to believe him, but not yet able to.

“Does all this by any chance have anything to do with Adam Wyatt?” Ralph asked. “Is that why you asked about him last night?”

Sam nodded. “Yes, it has to do with Adam Wyatt.”

“In what way?”

“Look…anything I say is going to sound crazy. Will you just accept that, please, before we start? There's no point in my trying to tell you what I know if your only response is going to be that I'm a liar or a lunatic.”

“Try me.”

There was a leather chair by the wall, its back and arms forming a single curve. Sam sat in it, taking a deep breath as he did so. Then he rested his forearms on his knees and turned his gaze upward on Ralph.

“I'm not going to offer any explanations for what I tell you. Not because there aren't any-there are too many, and none of them mean a damn thing. Beyond a certain point explanations are just new ways of asking the same question-they don't explain anything.”

“Okay,” Ralph said, folding his arms, “that's the preamble, now give me the speech.”

Sam looked down at the carpet, deciding where to begin. Then he sat back, spreading his arms along the arms of the chair.

“About a year ago, a group of us-including Joanna, the Joanna who was here last night-invented a ghost called Adam Wyatt. It was an experiment in psychokinesis-mind over matter. We made him up, his whole life story. We went through every record book imaginable to make sure that he didn't exist historically, and we found no trace of him. The point of the experiment was to see if we could create something that would, in one way or another, communicate with us.”

He paused, not taking his eyes off Ralph, who himself didn't move a muscle.

“Well, we succeeded beyond, you might say, our wildest dreams. Adam Wyatt didn't exist…but he began to communicate with us. And now, it seems, he does exist-or did. And that fact has had several remarkable consequences. You, for example. You wouldn't exist if Adam Wyatt hadn't lived. You're his direct descendant.”

Ralph was staring at Sam. He began to unfold his arms-very, very slowly. The movement reflected an awestruck utter disbelief in what he was being told.

“What in the name of all hell are you handing me here…?”

Sam held up a hand to forestall his protest. “I warned you that none of this would make sense.”

“Are you saying you made me up…?”

Sam made a loose gesture, part apologetic, part just conveying that he had no comment to make.

“And my parents,” Ralph continued, his voice rising with incredulity, “and their parents, and right on back to…?”

“I know,” Sam said. “I know how it must sound.”

“That's as crazy as the idea that God made the world yesterday, and hid the fossils in it to fool us!”

“Another of the consequences of Adam's coming into being,” Sam said, ignoring the other man's indignant astonishment, “is that those of us who created him…are ceasing to exist.”

Ralph snapped back his head as though injury had been added to the insult already on offer. “What the hell is that supposed to mean-ceasing to exist?”

“So far all the members of the original group who created Adam have died. With the exception of myself, and Joanna-the Joanna you met last night. And God alone knows what's happened to her.”

Ralph made an involuntary half-turn and looked back into the bathroom. From where he stood he could see “Help Me” scratched onto the mirror in reverse.

“I'm not insane, Ralph,” Sam said. “I know I'm not. Just as you know that you're not a figment of my imagination. The fact is that we're both of us stuck with-perhaps more accurately in-a very singular situation.”

Ralph looked at him and began to shake his head, slowly at first, then faster. “No…no, no, no, no no…this is nuts…this is just impossible…!”

Sam felt a profound sympathy for him at that moment, understanding how every fiber of his conscious being must be putting up a fight to reject what he was being told.

“The most frightening thing is,” Sam said quietly, leaning forward again, “is that anything's possible. When I tip over a bottle of ink, it's not impossible that all the molecules will get back together and retrace their path out of the tablecloth and back into the bottle. It's not impossible, just highly unlikely. It's probable that if you toss a coin a hundred times it'll come down fifty-fifty heads and tails, but it's also possible it could come down a hundred either way. Things are governed less by rules than gambler's odds.”

Ralph leaned toward him, like a stag locking horns. “I'm no scientist, but I know that Einstein said, ‘God does not play dice with the universe.’ Are you saying he was wrong?”

“That was a statement of faith, not science. Every time it's been tested by experiment, the dice theory has come out ahead. Which means we can't pretend that something isn't happening just by saying it's impossible. Because nothing's impossible!”

Sam's words hung in the air a moment, then Ralph crossed his arms at the wrist and flung them apart. It was the gesture of a man breaking invisible chains.

“No! I don't buy this! I just don't buy it! There has to be some proof, some evidence-at least other people, people I can talk to, somebody else who knew about this so-called experiment.”

Sam's voice was calm and level. “There is no proof, and no evidence. All the people who knew about the experiment, colleagues of mine who weren't involved in it but discussed it with me at the time, now remember nothing. Every trace of it has disappeared. It never happened.”

“So you're telling me there's only your word to support this whole story…?”

“My word-and the fact that someone vanished in this house last night. Someone you saw, spoke to, someone who even brushed past you as she came in the door. You're not going to pretend now that all that never happened, are you?”

Ralph opened his mouth to speak, but seemed to lose heart and instead just sank slowly down onto the edge of the bed, and buried his head in his hands.

“You know something really weird? It's crazy, but it's been bothering me ever since…” He lifted his head to look at Sam, his eyes reddened and pulled down by his fingertips.

“Last night, just for a second when I opened the door to her, that woman, I thought I knew her. It was that sense of deja vu-the way it happens, inexplicably. Something in me said, I know this woman from somewhere. Then I told myself I was imagining it-obviously because I'd heard about her from you, and then that phone call from Joanna's father.”

He paused, his eyebrows knitting in a frown. “I couldn't have seen her before, could I? How would it be possible?”

Sam debated whether to say what was in his mind. He decided they had now gone too far for him not to.

“Joanna- my Joanna-claims to have met you. It sounded pretty much like your meeting with your Joanna-horseback riding, the churchyard, Adam's grave. Except in her case it was three days ago-four now. And in your case it was a year ago.” He paused, then added, “And there didn't seem much chance that you'd be getting married.”

He had leaned forward again as he spoke. Now he sat back.

“That's it, Ralph. The best I can do. What you make of it is up to you.”

Ralph didn't move for some moments, just sat hunched where he was on the edge of his and his wife's untidy, slept-in bed, his hands pressed together and touching his mouth. Eventually he rose very slowly to his feet.

“Where do we go from here?” he said, his voice unsteady.

“I think you should go back to your wife. Be with her.”

“She asked me to bring you over. I said I would. She wants to know what you think about all this.”

Sam got to his feet. “I'll be glad to come with you.”

The other man shot him a hard look. “You stay away from her.”

Sam shrugged. “As you wish. But she's going to wonder why I won't talk to her. Or why you won't let me. And if she doesn't like your story, there's nothing to stop her from calling me. Then what will I say?”

Ralph thought this over. It was true: his wife wasn't the type to be easily fobbed off with excuses.

“Listen to me, Towne…” he began.

“Sam. I think it might be easier if we use first names, don't you?”

“Listen to me, Sam. If you tell her any of the stuff you've just been telling me, ever…I'll break your damn neck. Do you understand me?”

Sam looked at him. Ralph was fit and well built and probably strong enough to do it. He was certainly scared enough to try.

“Don't worry, I'm not going to upset your wife. I have no reason to. I suggest we make a deal, you and I.”

Ralph frowned quizzically. “A deal?”

“I'll come back with you and tell her something-something that makes sense.” He gave a brief, dry laugh. “Not the truth, obviously, because that doesn't. I'll make something up, and say you've given me permission to stay in the house alone for a while to observe the phenomena more closely. What do you say?”

Ralph looked at him, incredulous. “You want to stay here? Alone?”

“That's exactly what I want.”

Ralph stared at him some more. And then a kind of understanding dawned in his face.

“Yes, of course. You and…that woman…I should have guessed from the way you've been talking about her.”

“Can I stay?”

Ralph nodded. “You can stay.”