David Ambrose: Superstition

“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.”

Sam made a brief tour of the rest of the house while Ralph packed a couple more suitcases for his wife and himself. Joanna's parents had insisted on driving down when Joanna had called them before breakfast to tell them what had happened. She was going to go stay with them for a few days; meanwhile Ralph would rent an apartment in Manhattan, then join her on the weekend.

There was nothing much that he hadn't seen already. In the basement kitchen drawers had been yanked open and their contents scattered. Various things, although not everything, had been swept from shelves, and several pots and pans dislodged from where they usually hung. The damage wasn't as bad as in the drawing room, but it still looked as though a tornado had swept through.

Ralph's footsteps sounded on the stairs-coming down, Sam thought, a little faster than necessary. He had insisted that he didn't mind staying alone a few minutes to do his packing. “What can happen in broad daylight?” he'd asked. “This stuff only happens at night-right?”

Sam hadn't disabused him, though in fact there were no rules on the subject. “Phenomena”-to use that sterile, antiseptic term that Sam found increasingly unsatisfactory-occurred any time and any place, in the dark or in full light, below ground or above it.

“Okay, let's go,” Ralph said as Sam joined him in the hall.

“Let me take one of those.” Sam picked up one of the heavy suitcases.

They left the house and found a cab. Twenty minutes later they entered the lobby of the small hotel where Sam had spent time with Joanna's parents in the past. The desk clerk told Ralph that they had already arrived and were upstairs with Joanna.

As they went up in the elevator, Sam felt the same tense, nervous hollowness in his stomach that he'd felt waiting on the steps earlier while Ralph opened up the house. He was sure that Bob and Elizabeth Cross would not recognize him, yet the meeting filled him with apprehension. Nothing, he repeated to himself, could be taken for granted. Logic dictated that Joanna's parents, like the Joanna he was about to see again, would be part of the subtly changed world in which Adam Wyatt had been born not out of the minds of men and women, but out of the genes of his forebears.

Yet, as Sam knew, logic did not rule the universe. Or if it did, it did so in a fashion that remained impenetrable to the human mind. He used the thought to calm himself, to prepare himself with a Zen-like detachment for the confrontation.

Bob Cross opened the door of the suite when Ralph buzzed. There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes as they stepped inside and Ralph introduced them. Sam found himself in a medium-sized sitting room. Elizabeth Cross came in from what he supposed was the bedroom, closing the door behind her.

“Joanna's just getting out of the shower,” she said. “If you've got those clothes, you'd better take them through to her, Ralph.”

He did so, leaving Bob Cross to introduce Sam to his wife-again without a hint that their paths might have crossed before.

“Joanna tells me you investigate this kind of thing professionally,” Elizabeth Cross said.

“I run a department at Manhattan University,” Sam said. “We look into anomalous phenomena of all kinds.”

“Well, this sounds about as anomalous as anything I've ever come across,” Bob Cross said. “I saw a flying saucer one time, but that's nothing compared with all this.”

“Bob, will you please stop talking about your flying saucer? There's no comparison.” Elizabeth Cross sounded as though she had already rebuked her husband on the subject more than once that morning. “Nobody else saw your flying saucer, but we've both seen this woman. Ralph's seen her, Dr. Towne's seen her-even Joanna saw her in the mirror.”

She turned to Sam. “What do you think is happening here, Dr. Towne? Can you tell us anything?”

Her face and tone of voice reflected the touching confidence that outsiders have, or need to have, in whoever is designated an “expert” in some field in which they find themselves perhaps unwillingly involved.

“Do you know what I mean by poltergeist activity, Mrs. Cross?” he said. He and Ralph had agreed on this approach on the way over.

“Well, yes, of course I've read about it and seen movies. Is that what this is?”

“I believe so.”

It was a deliberate lie, and he disliked himself for telling it, but he had no choice under the circumstances. For one thing, the alternative could only cause unnecessary pain to Joanna and her parents; for another, his access to the house depended on his keeping his word to Ralph.

“I thought poltergeist activity was something that only happened around adolescent kids,” Bob Cross said, sounding skeptical. “Repressed sexuality, conflicting emotions, that kind of thing. Isn't that right?”

“It's right,” Sam said, “but not a rule.”

He wanted to tell them that there were no rules, that the truth made no sense, only the lies. But it was bad enough having to think like that, without forcing others to share in his despair.

It came as a shock to realize that “despair” was the word that best described his state of mind. Until that moment he had hidden from it, clinging outwardly to a pretense of normality, and inwardly to the increasingly threadbare idea that even if the world was crazy he could remain sane by responding to it rationally. But it wasn't true. The truth was that the more clearly he saw things, the more swiftly he descended toward madness. He knew suddenly, deep inside himself, that he had already passed some point of no return. Yet he continued speaking calmly in his practiced, authoritative, expert's manner.

“Poltergeist activity, things being thrown across rooms and smashed, is one of several psychokinetic effects-that's mind over matter, or mind working through matter, or in matter.”

“But there's always somebody who's doing it-right?” Bob Cross said. “Somebody sending out mind waves or whatever? There's always somebody responsible?”

“That's true,” Sam conceded. “Mind over matter-by definition there has to be someone doing it.”

“Then who's doing it here? One of us? That woman we saw last night?”

“From what I've heard, I'd say she's part of the effect and not the cause.”

“I don't understand,” Bob Cross persisted. “I thought the poltergeist effect was things flying across the room, not people hammering at your door and talking to you and then disappearing.”

“That woman was a ghost, wasn't she, Dr. Towne?” Elizabeth Cross spoke as though it was a thought that had been bearing down on her and of which she had to unburden herself.