The Link (29 page)

“That’s wonderful,” Robert says. His eyes meet Harry’s. Was that why Harry asked him what he did? Because he knew that Robert and Cathy were being thrown together again?

Peter and Michael comes out of the hotel and Cathy tells them. Peter is delighted.

“I’m so happy, I’ll even go to your pure-bred, real-live haunted house!” she enthuses.

“Jolly good!” says Peter, laughing.

They separate to various cabs and Robert returns to his hotel.

As he starts across the lobby, a short, heavy-set woman rises and confronts him. “Ah, Robert,” she says.

He stares at her.

“Myra Danley,” she tells him. “Your mother’s sister.”

He starts. “Oh, yes.” He doesn’t know how to react.

It doesn’t matter. She is not there to socialize. “I’ve been waiting here to give you a message,” she says. “Your father has been pestering me unmercifully. He insists you take over his ‘dig’, whatever that may be. He says it’s most urgent, it will answer all questions.”

She takes hold of his arm with an iron grip.

“Let your spirit be prepared for all things coming,” she tells him.

Then she is gone, leaving a dumfounded Robert. He goes up to his room and prepares for bed, his mind a jumble of conflicting emotions.

“How in the name of God could she know?” he asks himself. He grimaces. “A prime example of telepathy, Mrs. Graves? Is there no boundary where your facile explanations reach their limit?”

Exhausted by jet-lag and everything that’s happened to him, he falls across the bed with a groan.

Late night. London. Traffic noises. The vast metropolis in low gear.

SHOCK CUT TO Robert’s staring eyes!

He is floating in the air again, rigid, horizontal, on his back several feet above the bed and rising.

This time he is aware of a strong pressure in the back of his head. He doesn’t know what it is and tries to reach back to see what it is. He cannot.

Then, as he reaches a point six feet above the bed, he is suddenly uprighted from the horizontal position into a vertical one; in an instant, he is standing on the floor, looking dazedly around the room. Everything looks hazy and unreal.

He tries to take a step. He cannot, is pulled back at an angle toward the bed. He bobs around, then manages to turn.

Although he has seen it before, the sight of another him lying asleep on the bed is a shock.

Even more of a shock is the sight of the pale, elastic-like cable joining him to the other body, his end fastened to the lower back of his head where the top of the spine ends, the other end centered between the eyes of the sleeping him.

The cable extends across the bed and floor, more than seven feet in length.

He stares at it in confusion, having difficulty keeping his balance, swaying first to one side, then the other.

He turns his head abruptly as Big Ben strikes the hour of four. Below, in the street, he hears an automobile drive by.

He tries to touch the cable but his fingers go right through it.

His consciousness begins to dim. He starts to hear a strange chaotic noise as though a dozen men with high-pitched voices are babbling simultaneously. The sound reverberates in his head.

There is a pronounced increase in the resistance of the cable now. It pulls at him more strongly. Resisting it without thought, he zigzags back and forth, powerless to control his stability.

Suddenly, he is jerked back up to a horizontal position above the bed, vibrating as he lies rigid in the air again.

Then, with a jerk that shakes him as though an anchor has been dropped into his stomach, he falls abruptly toward the bed.

His body on the bed jerks spastically and he wakes up with a cry, a pain penetrating through him as though he has just been split open from head to foot.

He falls back with a sob. His right fist hits the mattress weakly, over and over. “Why?” he mutters.
“Why?”
A tear rolls down his cheek unnoticed.

VERY SLOW DISSOLVE TO a dark sedan being driven across the English countryside. It is drizzling slightly, overcast.

It is not exactly sunshine and light inside the car either. A somber Peter drives. Carol has refused to go with him to Harrowgate; she insists on staying with her family as much as possible. Robert, tired, weak, sits staring out a window. Teddie is asleep, snoring softly.

“Well, we’re a merry crew,” says Cathy finally.

Robert glances at her. Peter manages a faint smile.

“Are you all right?” she asks Robert. “Not your name, I mean.”

“You should talk,” he replies. “A parapsychologist named Graves?”

“Touché,” she smiles. “Are you all right?” she repeats.

“No, I’m not,” he says.

“You want to talk about it?”

“No, I don’t,” he answers.

“Oh. Well. That is that, I guess,” she says. She looks at Peter. “So what about this Harrowgate?” she asks.

Briefly, Peter replies that it is a new investigation because the man who owns the house—a doctor—never wanted to have anyone “intruding” but his wife insisted, supported apparently by her daughter.

“The haunting force is said to be some sort of ugly, short man appearing under a variety of circumstances,” Peter says.

Robert glances at him. “Ugh,” says Cathy.

“We hope to get in contact with whatever personality or personalities are responsible for the phenomena,” Peter says. “Whether living or dead,” he adds for Cathy’s benefit. “Bertha Warrenton will be our medium.”

Cathy frowns. A séance medium? “Isn’t that counter-productive?” she asks.

“Catherine,” Peter says in a patient voice. “I feel I must point out to you that you’ve become inordinately single-minded.”

“What do you—?”

“The question of survival after death has been a very minor one in psi for some time,” he breaks in. “Since, however, the thrust of our study is toward an establishment of the fact that the mind works independently of the body, it is certainly not beyond scientific credence to presume that that independence could conceivably survive the loss of that body.”

“There we—”

“We are dealing, in psi, with extended states of consciousness,” Peter interrupts again. “Any research into these is relevant.”

“May I speak now?” Cathy says.

“I’m sorry if I sound abusive,” Peter says. “But I simply cannot remain silent any longer on what I regard to be a crippling limitation in your thinking.”

Cathy sighs. “I don’t believe in survival,” she says, calmly. “I will never believe in survival. Whatever we investigate—from telepathy to haunted houses—comes, in my opinion, from aspects of the human system and nothing more.”

“And so the lines are drawn,” says Robert, still looking out the window. “Who will win? Tune in tomorrow.”

She is not amused.

Peter cheers up as they near Cambridge, telling them he has arranged for them to have lunch with Arthur Bellenger. This snaps Robert out of his doldrums too. The prospect of meeting the world-famed astro-physicist, the “Einstein of England”, is a thrilling one.

Cathy, too, is thrilled. Even Teddie is impressed, no mean feat.

Luncheon takes place in a plant-filled greenhouse-like restaurant overlooking the Thames. SIR ARTHUR BELLENGER is everything Peter has advertised, a quiet, pleasant, unspectacular looking man with a crystal clear, spectacular mind. The meal is much in the nature of disciples at the feet of their master, not because Bellenger expects it—on the contrary, any hint of adulation from others embarrasses him—but because he has earned it and deserves it.

He is, in no sense, an advocate of parapsychology but, in the expansiveness of his thinking, neither does he discard the “intriguing potentialities” of psi. Indeed, as he points out, the word “Physics” means, in the original sense of its Greek origin, “seeing the essential nature of all things” which, of course, must, by definition, allow for the fullest examination of parapsychology.

Moreover, he says (not pedantically but presenting the idea as one friend to another) there exists, in the world, evidence that many “unknown” realities not only exist at present but apparently existed, as well, in the pre-dawn of recorded history.

“We speak here, naturally, of evidence which begins to merge with ancient memories,” he says. “Evidence more imprecise than that of customary science involving, as it does, the concept of early man possessing abilities to discover—and even harness—certain earth forces of which we are no longer aware.”

His words throw Robert back momentarily to the Dowsercon and the words of the speaker who mentioned “a vital life stream creating a connection between mankind and some kind of cosmic force the nature of which we no longer seem to comprehend.”

He is back almost instantly, hearing Bellenger begin to speak of the Dogons.

“Here are these primitive African people who, centuries before astronomy existed, possessed a knowledge of the universe astonishingly accurate.”

We may, at this point, briefly dramatize the Dogons, using Bellenger’s voice as narration.

“Using sticks with which to scratch their symbols in the dusty soil, these incredible people described the actual existence of the star Sirius. They knew it to be a binary star, a ‘dwarf’ star—call it Sirius B—revolving around Sirius A. They knew it to be white, to be, as they described it, ‘heavier than all the iron on earth’, that the orbit of Sirius B around Sirius A took 50 years and was elliptical! How? How could such people have possibly known that?”

Back to Bellenger. We see, now, what makes him what he is—an almost childlike fascination with knowledge, an insatiable curiosity to know what “makes things tick”.

“The Dogon knowledge of astronomy in general is no less astounding,” he continues. “They knew about the halo which surrounds Saturn before telescopes were invented to see it. They knew about the four main moons of Jupiter. They knew that the planets revolve around the Sun—that the Earth is basically round and that it spins on its own axis.

“Inconceivably, they knew that the Milky Way—they didn’t call it that, of course—is
spiral-like in shape
, a fact not known to astronomy until well into this century. How, I ask you? With no instruments whatever at their disposal, how could these people know the movements and characteristics of virtually invisible heavenly bodies?”

He has scarcely touched his lunch. Clearly, thought is his food, investigative zeal his nourishment.

“And consider this,” he says. “Evidence strongly indicates that some ancient race explored the coasts of Antarctica when those coasts were free of ice. A race that utilized instruments of navigation far superior to anything possessed by man until the second half of the eighteenth century. How?

“Further, that a capacity for abstract thinking of an extraordinary degree is indicated by what we would term ‘primitive’ astronomy, mathematics, cartography, tool-making, stonemasonry, architecture, seamanship, metallurgy, etcetera.

“You see,” he goes on, sharing the wonder with them, “the point is and the question is: Do we know now what mankind may well have known eons ago?”

Robert stares at Bellenger. It is as though the scientist is telling him something directly, something which may help him tie together all the “loose strings” of his thinking and understand the result. He has no idea what that something is.

He knows, however, that he is in contact with it.

“You know,” says Bellenger, “one of the unutterable tragic circumstances of man’s history was the burning of the library at Alexandria. Here was a veritable fount of knowledge—one-million-volumes in which the entire science, philosophy and mystery of the ancient world was recorded. Burned by soldiers to heat water for their baths! Good God, how can we live with this dreadful memory? Such cleanliness is hardly close to Godliness.”

He is silent for a few moments. No one speaks. They wait.

“For what appears to be,” he continues, “from the legends of ancient civilizations to the philosophical and mathematical literature of classic times, is a body of tantalizing hints. Hints of lost knowledge that had come to terms with phenomena not yet acceptable to modern science—phenomena which, most definitely, includes those of parapsychology.”