Superstition (20 page)

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.

28

B
arry had made the call to Sam's office just before ten the following morning. He was subdued and apologetic, but unshakable: he and Drew were quitting the group and would play no further part in the experiment. Sam had asked for a face-to-face meeting, but Barry had hedged awkwardly, saying there was no point.

Joanna had been at the magazine when she got the news from Sam. She had called Drew and Barry immediately and asked if she could talk to them—“just to help me round off this part of the story. I'm not going to try to change your minds.”

There had been a whispered conversation at the other end of the line, then they had invited her to come by after lunch. They would talk to her—still on the condition that their names would not be mentioned.

She took a cab out to the quiet tree-lined street in Queens where they lived. It was a prosperous middle-class neighborhood with houses that would have won no architectural prizes but which were large, detached, and comfortable-looking. She walked up a redstone path past an impeccably tended lawn and flower beds and rang the doorbell. Barry let her in. He was friendly, but subdued. She could sense his underlying tension.

Drew appeared in the living room door. The brightness of her white trousers and floral blouse only emphasized the tiredness in her face. She looked as though she had slept little, if at all. They took Joanna into a good-sized rectangular living room and invited her to sit in one of the two brocade-upholstered armchairs placed at precise angles alongside a matching sofa. The whole room was arranged with jarring symmetry, every object in a space of its own with no sense of an integrated whole. It was, Joanna reflected, with an immediate sense of guilt at her own snobbery, a home typical of a working-class couple who had made money but never acquired the patina of sophistication that would have moved them up the social ladder. Barry and Drew were what they were, without pretense. They weren't the kind of people she would have spent much time with, if any, outside of their group meetings, but she had liked them and instinctively respected them from the outset.

“Thank you for seeing me,” Joanna said. “I know you're still pretty shaken up after the other night. So are we all.”

The couple exchanged a look, as though for mutual reassurance. Joanna decided to leave the small tape recorder in her bag and not turn an informal conversation into an interview. She sensed that Drew and Barry wanted to talk, but could easily lose their nerve. They needed encouraging, not intimidating.

“I was just making some coffee, if you'd like some,” Drew said.

Joanna sensed it was an excuse to leave her alone with Barry. “Thank you, that would be nice.”

As Drew left the room, Barry picked up a book from a table by his chair. It had no dust jacket, its spine was split, and whatever color it had been had long since faded to a murky brown. “I came across this last night by chance in a secondhand bookshop.” He thumbed through in search of a particular page. “When I say by chance, I mean it literally. It fell off the shelf open…right here.”

He handed it to her. She found herself looking at a plain black-and-white drawing or engraving of some kind. It was circular and contained a long, artfully designed spiral that doubled back on itself to give a strangely three-dimensional effect. There could be no doubt that it was the same design as on the object in the plaster-cast hand. The various straight lines and their relationships to one anther were now clearly visible.

“They're alchemical symbols,” Barry told her. “Some of it's Egyptian, but the spiral is closer to a Tibetan mandala. It's all in the text.”

She flipped to the front of the book. Only one word was inscribed on the title page:“Magick.” She turned back to the diagram. “What is it?” she asked.

He inhaled before answering. There was a ragged edge to his breathing, as though he was making an effort to hide his nervousness. “It's something that's supposed to give its possessor the power to place a death curse on his enemies.”

Joanna looked at him. “A what?”

“If you look upon this and the gaze of its possessor simultaneously, your life is in that person's power.” He shrugged, as if to excuse himself for the absurdity of what he'd said, and also for being tempted to believe it.

Joanna looked down at the book in her hand, skimmed a few paragraphs, turned a page. “It says this thing belonged to Cagliostro.” She looked at Barry again. “Wasn't that…”

“The guy Ward mentioned,” he finished for her. “And Adam later confirmed that he'd known him in Paris.”

They were both silent a moment.

“How much do we know about this Cagliostro?” she asked.

Barry walked across the room, passing an impressive-looking sound system with expensive speakers. He reached a wall entirely covered with bookshelves on which rows of volumes were arranged with fastidious care. He ran a finger along them until he found the one he wanted. It was a hardback that was almost as worn as the one he had just shown her. He returned thumbing through the pages in search of something, then handed it to her in silence. She saw that it was open at a chapter headed “Cagliostro, Count Alessandro di (1743–1795).”

“Whether he was a charlatan or not, nobody knows,” Barry said. “But there's a report of a meeting he had in 1785 with the highest-ranking Freemasons in Paris, who demanded proof of the magical powers he claimed to have. He demonstrated a system of numerology derived from the letters in people's names. That day he predicted a revolution in France in four years’ time, and the execution of the royal family and various other people, all precisely named and with the dates on which it would happen. And it did, exactly as he said. He also predicted the rise of Napoleon, and his eventual exile in Elba. All this before an audience of at least a hundred highly educated, respected, powerful men.”

“Did they believe him?”

“Apparently not enough. The following year he was arrested over some financial scandal and was thrown in the Bastille for nine months on the orders of the king, then exiled from the country. He died in another jail in Rome ten years later—by which time almost everything he'd predicted had come true, and the rest came true soon afterwards.”

He paused to let his words sink in, then gave another apologetically self-conscious shrug. “Whichever way you look at it, this was an extraordinary man. I don't think I want to go up against him.”

Joanna looked again at the book in her hand. It showed a head and shoulders engraving of Cagliostro—a plump face with heavy features, slightly bulging eyes and full lips. His hair was either white or very fair, swept back and shoulder length. He looked barrel chested, physically strong, probably not tall.

“Are you saying that what we conjured up wasn't Adam at all, but this man Cagliostro?”

“I don't know what we conjured up,” Barry said. “All I know is we built a bridge back to a strange place—and I'm getting scared about what's coming over it.”

Drew returned with coffee and three delicate porcelain cups on a tray. “We both feel bad about letting Sam down,” she said, placing the tray carefully in the center of a rectangular table in front of the sofa. “But we talked for a long time last night, and we don't see what else we could do.” She straightened up and fixed Joanna with a direct, unblinking gaze. Her voice was flat and toneless, like somebody in shock and still coming to terms with the event that had caused it. “This isn't something we've created. We've raised something evil. I beg you to believe me, Joanna. You have to warn the others.”

“If you think this,” Joanna asked, “why don't you and Barry warn them yourselves?”

The answer was without hesitation. “They wouldn't believe us.”

“Why not?”

Drew and Barry exchanged a look, as though agreeing which of them should answer this. It was Barry who spoke.

“We know Sam, and he'd never accept this. He'd find a million reasons to explain it away. That's because he's an intellectual. I mean no disrespect, but people like Sam analyze everything till they can't see the forest for the trees anymore. Me, I'm just a plumber who's read a few books, but I know when I'm up against something I can't fight. And that's where I am now. And that's why we're out.”

29

A
ll I can say is that Drew and Barry were ill matched to this experiment. It's my fault—I chose them.”

Joanna gave a wry smile. “They said you'd explain it away.”

“That's not what I'm doing,” he protested. “Explaining it away is saying it didn't happen. I
know
what happened. All we're talking about is
how
. Frankly, an eighteenth-century alchemist coming back from the dead doesn't cut it for me.”

They were in Adam's room, she and Sam seated on either side of the new table that had been installed that afternoon, and the lanky form of Pete leaning in a corner, arms folded, watching them.

“Okay,” Joanna said, “so give me an explanation that
does
cut it for you.”

Sam accepted the challenge with an open-handed gesture. “Barry already had a book about Cagliostro in his library, so he knew about him when Ward first mentioned the name. He says he never saw the design on this so-called magic talisman until last night, but the fact is it existed. He might have seen it and forgotten. Ward might have seen it. Any member of the group could have seen it, but without consciously remembering having done so. The mention of Cagliostro, however, brought it back into play, so—bingo!—it manifests itself in the way we saw. That's the whole point of what we're trying to demonstrate with this experiment.”

“But what about what happened last night? Why did Barry go into that particular bookshop? Why did that particular book fall open at that particular page?”

“We only have Barry's word for the fact that it happened like that.”

“Oh, come on. Why would he lie?”

“I don't know. People have their reasons. All I'm saying is he could have lied—we weren't there.”

“You're doing exactly what you accuse people of doing to you—rejecting an uncomfortable truth by demanding impossible standards of proof.”

He slapped the table with his open hand. “I know! Don't think I'm unaware of the irony.” Then he laughed. “Sorry.”

Pete stirred in his corner, shifting his weight from one foot to the other and refolding his arms. “The problem is that some as yet undiscovered force field emanating from the human brain is every bit as unverifiable as the malevolent spirit of a dead alchemist.”