The Link (26 page)

He reaches across the table and strokes her cheek. “If we weren’t, how could we have had such a lovely daughter?”

“Oh.” She looks embarrassed but pleased.

“Just remember,” he adds, “the fact that your Mom and I were unable to maintain a relationship doesn’t mean we don’t love you very much. That’s a separate thing. Okay?”

She swallows, nods. “Okay.” She holds out the plate. “Another biscuit?”

Later, they take a walk in the woods and start to talk about the Allright “curse”.

“It’s not really a curse,” he tells her, smiling. “Actually, I guess, it’s a blessing.”

“You guess,” she says.

He chuckles. “Well, we both know it can be a problem,” he says.

He asks her to tell him exactly what she’s been experiencing. She hesitates, she’s kept it bottled up so long but, finally, tells him.

He has had no idea how radically extensive it has been. (We see it as she tells it.)

To begin with, for a long time now, she has seen not merely physical bodies but bodies set within a nebulous egg-shaped covering.

“You see it on me now?” Robert asks.

She concentrates, looking at him, then nods. We see what it looks like to her, a surrounding transparency filled with shifting colors.

“It changes when people change,” Ann says. “Like when they get angry.”

“It gets red?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says interestedly. “Do you see it too?”

“No.” He shakes his head. “You Aunt Ruth claims to though.”

“I’d like to talk about it with her.”

He indicates a desire to discourage that, not because he has anything in particular against Ruth but because he wants to protect Ann from being proselytized into Spiritualism.

“Oh,” says Ann, with a nod. “I know; Mom says you hate them.”

“I don’t hate them, honey,” he tells her. “I’m just not sure it would be a good idea for you to be involved in it right now. When you get older, you can decide for yourself.”

Her story continues and we see, again, what she describes.

For years—it started when he and Barbara were first having “troubles” with their marriage—she has seen what she calls “surrounds” encasing every living person, animal and plant.

She tried, a few times, to talk to other girls about the mist-like envelopes she sees but they either made fun of her or were alarmed. She soon stopped mentioning them.

“I used to stay in my room a lot, remember?” she asks. Robert does, sadly. “I’d lie on my bed and feel the air around me. After a while, I could see it too, little moving things like tiny stars weaving around the room, going in and out among each other.”

“I’m glad you didn’t tell Mom about that,” Robert says, laughing. “I wish you’d told me though.”

“I couldn’t tell anyone,” Ann says.

He puts an arm around her shoulders. “What do you see now?” he asks.

“Well—” she looks around. “It’s hard to describe. It’s like… everything has its own song, I know that doesn’t make sense.”

“I like it though,” Robert says with a smile.

Ann moves to a tree and leans back against it, closes her eyes. Robert smiles at her beauty and her innocent expression.

“I hear tones coming from it,” she says (perhaps we hear them too). “I feel them vibrating through me. Like a—a—”

“An energy?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says, opening her eyes with a smile. “An energy that never stops.”

She moves back to him, snuffling close as he puts an arm across her shoulders again. “If I lie on the grass when it’s warm,” she says, “I hear sounds in the earth. Not the same as in the tree but like them. If I really concentrate—” she hesitates.

“What?” he asks.

“You sure you won’t put me away?” she asks.

He laughs. “I don’t promise nothin’, kid,” he teases.

“Well—” She looks around as though they are fellow conspirators. “If I listen really hard, really concentrate, I can tell the difference between the song of the grass, the song of the earth and the song of the insects under the earth.”

He shakes his head. “Sweetheart, you are lucky,” he tells her. “You can hear the sounds of Life. My God, be grateful.”

She smiles as though another weight has lifted form her shoulders.

They sit together on a log, surrounded by the silent woods.

“Tell me what you see,” he asks.

She is open now, pleased to tell him everything. We see it as she speaks.

“I see around every tree and branch and twig and leaf—even the dead ones—a ‘surround’ that seems to breathe and move. It’s like a—cradle sort of, holding everything alive in it. Things grow in it and are taken care of by it—especially us.”

She stares at a nearby tree. “I see the air filled with—very tiny globes, like the smallest soap bubble you could blow. The trees and the plants like… suck them in right out of the air. They’re like little globes and light dancing in the air and the surrounds of everything keep drawing them in, never stopping.

“In the summer, when it’s hot, the globes get drawn out of trees and plants and flowers and swallowed by the sunlight. Then, later, when it cools off, the globes come back again and dance faster and get… what’s the word?”

“Re-absorbed?” suggests Robert.

“Yes, re-absorbed,” she says. “And it’s as if—well, it seems just like the tiny globes are
glad
to be going back into the surrounds. Helping them. Giving them life. Does that sound crazy?”

“If it does, it’s the kind of crazy everyone should be a part of,” Robert tells her.

He and Ann sit together in the soundless glade, his arm around her, her head resting on his shoulder. It is a scene of quiet peace for both of them.

When Ann comments on the lack of water pressure in his house, Robert decides it’s time to try a dowser. Why not? What has he got to lose?

The man shows up the next day, a small, wiry man with the facial characteristics of a leprechaun. Robert and Ann enjoy his visit hugely.

“I know, you think it’s witchcraft,” says the little man, starting on a non-stop monologue. “Most people do. Well, let me tell you, some important people have been dowsers.”

CUT TO the backyard of someone’s house, a SHOT of a highly concentrated Albert Einstein walking slowly across the ground, holding a forked stick in front of him.

“Found it too, by crackers,” says the little man; his name is FISHER WHITMAN. “Wasn’t only relativity old Albert found. Also found a leak in an underground water flow that was draining the pond of a friend of his.”

To their surprise, the man starts dowsing inside Robert’s house instead of out. He asks casually if Robert’s back aches in the morning when he wakes up. When Robert, taken back, says yes, it does, Whitman nods. “Vile water underneath your bed,” he says. “Move it over there.” He points to the other side of the room.

They follow him around the property as he dowses it, using an L-shaped rod made of metal, keeping up a running commentary as he walks.

“Geologists can only hope to strike a water table at approximate depths,” he says. “Dowsers will tell you exactly where to drill and exactly how deep, tell you the quality and amount of the water you’ll find. They call it water-witching, sure enough, but it’s not witchcraft, it’s more exact.”

Did they know that, in the winter, woodpeckers “dowse” in the tree trunks for frozen worms? “Never miss either,” Whitman says.

Did they know that donkeys are so good at finding water that, in Mexico, dowsers are called ‘burros’?

Did they know that a statue of a Chinese emperor made in 2200 B.C. shows him dowsing? That the Kabbalists had instructions for dowsing in 1275 A.D.?

And consider the Bible. “Says ‘And Moses smote the rock with his rod and water came forth abundantly’. Dowsing, friends.”

People think that dowsing is only for water, he tells them. “Wrong. Use it to find minerals, ores, oils, cables, wires, pipes, sunken ships, crashed planes, buried treasure, lost objects, anything.”

The standard approach to finding water says that water sources depend on rain. “What we look for is what we call ‘primary’ water,” says Whitman. “Permanent, in underground veins, not depending on rain. I find you water, it won’t go dry, I can promise you that.”

If Robert’s interested, there’s going to be a Dowsercon in a week in the adjoining county. “Mighty interesting,” he says. “You’d like it. Lots of good material.”

He stops as the L-rod dips down. “Here she be,” he says. “You won’t have water pressure troubles now. You may blow out your pipes the pressure’s going to rise so much.”

He points at Robert. “And don’t forget to move your bed,” he says.

Robert drives Ann home. She is feeling better now. She will “play the game” with her mother, keep her insights to herself and Robert will help her to develop them as time goes by if she wants it.

They embrace and he kisses her goodbye.

He goes home and starts working on his article about psi.

To his astonishment, water is struck exactly where the dowser told him to drill, at the exact depth, the pressure almost exactly what Whitman said it would be.

The little man is not surprised. “Told you it would be there,” he tells Robert. “Moved your bed yet?”

Robert says he hasn’t. It’s a water bed and kind of heavy.

“Water bed?” says Whitman. “Even worse. You better move it.”

He tells—and we see dramatized—a true story about a Vermont family doctor, Herbert Douglas, M.D.

“Dowser told him about ‘vile’ water or ‘black streams’ underneath the ground which can trigger off arthritis and other ailments.

“Dr. Douglas, he was dubious. Until he learned to dowse himself.”

We see Douglas checking, with a split-fork twig, around the beds, chairs and couches of arthritic patients. To his amazement,
fifty-five consecutive cases
, without a single exception, he finds that the twig reacts to intersections of underground veins of water.

“Over a period of time,” says Whitman’s voice over the dramatization, “twenty-five of those people agreed to move to a different place to sleep.

“All twenty-five improved substantially or were completely free of pain,” he finishes.

That day, Robert takes the time to drain his water bed, move it across the room and re-fill it.

He can scarcely believe it when, in the morning, he wakes up without an aching back.

“Why not?” asks Whitman on the telephone. “I told you you would, didn’t I?”

Robert telephones Peter and convinces him he has to go to the Dowsercon with him.

North Africa, 1943. Retreating German troops have blown up all the water wells and General Patton is saying, “The only thing that can defeat us in Africa is lack of water!”

CAPTAIN RALPH HARRIS, A LANKY OFFICER WITH A Virginia twang in his voice, tries to get in to see Patton. He is turned back until Patton hears him saying loudly, “Dammit, we need water here! I can get you water!”

He is taken to see the General and tells him that, if he can get hold of a forked willow stick, he can find enough water for 600,000 men.

Patton stares at him, then growls, “I’ll fly you in a whole damn tree!”

He does and Harris cuts himself a divining rod. Then he and a highly skeptical geologist Colonel drive out into the desert in a jeep.