Superstition (19 page)

For a long time nobody spoke. Drew had closed her eyes. Joanna couldn't see whether Barry had closed his too, or whether he was simply staring down at his hands. Roger was looking at the tabletop. Ward, too. Sam was looking across the room. Following his gaze Joanna saw the glowing red lights which meant the sound and video equipment were running.

Drew's voice broke the silence in a flat, defeated monotone. “It's not going to work.”

Everyone looked at her. Her eyes remained closed.

“What makes you say that, Drew?” Sam asked.

She opened her eyes and looked directly at him. “Because he's part of us all now. Like a child. You create them out of what you are, then they become themselves. But whatever happens, they never really leave you.”

As she finished, her face contorted from within to form a terrible image of unbearable pain. She began to weep silently, as though an anguish bottled up for years was finally coming out of her. Barry put his arms around her and tried to comfort her, but she only wept more bitterly, her sobs arising from the depths of a long-buried heartbreak.

The others looked on helplessly, embarrassed and moved in equal parts. Pete turned away and stared down at his hands spread out on the tabletop. “Don't, Drew,” he said, his voice tight with nerves. “You're bringing him back. You have to stop.”

As though the truth of his barely audible words had pierced her consciousness, she nodded vigorously and took the handkerchief that Barry had been offering her. She dried her eyes, blew her nose, and quickly pulled herself together. “I'm sorry…I'm all right now…”

“Drew alone can't bring him back,” Sam said. “The rest of us have already destroyed him. He's already gone.”

The two strip lights on the ceiling exploded in a shower of sparks and glass. The sudden darkness that enveloped the closed basement room was absolute, and the cries of its occupants were swallowed in a howling blast of wind that came from nowhere, as though the walls had dissolved and they found themselves transported to some icy mountaintop. The howl of the wind became a roar no longer made by any natural element. Whether it came from man or beast, or something in between the two, was hard to say. But it made Joanna fear for something she had given little thought to thus far in her life. It made her fear for her immortal soul.

In that moment she knew with utter certainty that something alien and evil was in the room with them. Among the bodies that brushed past and collided with her in terrified confusion was another presence, one that she sensed by faculties she neither knew she had nor could describe. She knew only that something was among them, something more terrible than death itself.

As abruptly as the whole thing started, so it ended. A total silence fell, broken only by the moans and whimpers of the terrified group who, for all she knew, could be maimed and wounded, if not worse. Joanna herself, as far as she could tell, was unhurt, but crawling on her hands and knees with no precise memory of how she got there.

“Joanna…? Where are you…?” It was Sam's voice, close by.

“Here.” She reached out in the dark and touched someone. She couldn't tell who, but they pulled away with a gasp of fear.

“Sam, where are you…?”

“Trying to find the door…”

There was a scraping sound, then a crash as something was knocked over, and finally a rattling of the door handle and somebody pulling on it as though it was stuck.

It came open suddenly, and the pale light that filtered down the stairs, although no more than a reflection from the campus shining through a window higher up, was enough to show the figure of Sam groping for a light switch. The single bulb on the stairs illuminated a scene of devastation in the room that took her breath away.

The table they had been sitting around had been flung against a wall and lay now with one leg snapped clean off. All the chairs were scattered and upended, half of them smashed. Roger Fullerton crouched in a corner, breathing hard, eyes wide with terror. Drew was curled into a fetal ball with Barry lying across her for protection. Ward Riley was flat on his back with his arms spread, as though he'd been wrestled to the ground by a more powerful opponent. Pete was picking himself out of the tangled wreckage that was all that remained of their video and recording equipment, all of it smashed beyond repair.

Sam came back in, took her by the arm, and helped her to her feet. “Are you all right?”

She tried to speak, but her mouth and throat were dry. She nodded her head. Only now, when he held her, did she realize how violently she was trembling.

“It's over now,” he whispered. “Come on, help me with the others.”

Sam went over and helped Roger to his feet while Joanna went to Barry and Drew. When she turned, she saw that Sam and Roger were already helping Ward up. They were all in shock, but nobody seemed physically hurt.

There was a crash as Pete got to his feet, knocking over the twisted remains of one of the camera tripods. He lifted a hand to his face, and Joanna gave a gasp of alarm as he appeared to peel away a strip of soft flesh.

He heard her and turned. “Wax,” he said. “Paraffin wax, splashed over me. Doesn't hurt, it's barely warm.”

She saw now that the tub that had contained it lay on its side, also twisted. Then she saw something else lying nearby.

“What's that?” she said.

Sam crossed over and picked it up. It was about two feet long, thick, and rounded. He brought it over, turning it to examine it from all sides. There was something sculpted about it.

“Dear God in heaven,” Sam murmured. There was a shocked, almost reverential tone in his voice. “Do you know what this is?”

It was a wax cast of a man's forearm—bare, with the hand closed loosely in a fist. Whatever or whoever had been in the room with them had, deliberately or otherwise, left an imprint in the wax put there for that purpose.

26

T
hey had moved upstairs to the central waiting area of the deserted lab. Barry perched on the arm of the chair in which Drew huddled, pulling her coat tightly and protectively around her. He offered her a paper cup filled with water from the cooler, but she shook her head without looking at it.

Roger was slumped on a couch along the wall, balancing a glass of whiskey on his stomach. Joanna walked across and stood over him. “How are you feeling?” she asked.

“Better.” He pushed himself up into a sitting position. “Where's Sam?”

“Through there.” She pointed to a closed door in back of the lab. “He and Pete are making a plaster cast from the wax impression.”

There was the sound of a toilet flushing, and a moment later Ward Riley emerged from the small bathroom pulling on his jacket. Joanna asked if she could get him anything.

“No thanks.” He nodded toward the door in back. “How's it going in there?”

“Pete said it wouldn't take long—if it worked.”

Ward settled into an ancient armchair across from Roger, obviously intending to wait for the results. Roger was staring down at his feet stretched out in front of him, turning his whiskey glass in his hand. “So,” he said reflectively, “was it something coming from us, or coming through us? And is there a difference?”

Ward thought for a moment. “Hard to say.”

“It's hard to say anything that makes sense under the circumstances.” Roger looked up at Joanna. “Though Joanna's going to have to. What are you going to say about it when you write your piece?”

“Maybe I won't
say
anything. Just describe it.”

“Probably a wise choice.”

They turned as the door behind them opened and Sam emerged, carrying something. Ward and Roger got to their feet and followed Joanna to get a closer look at the white plaster cast that he now held out to them. “It came out pretty good,” he said.

Drew and Barry joined them, he supporting her with an arm around her shoulder. One by one, with the unconscious veneration of believers reaching out to touch a holy relic, they ran their fingers over the smooth and still slightly warm surface of the plaster.

“It's incredible,” Joanna murmured.

Sam's expression was faintly sardonic. “That's just what most people will call it.”

She knew what he meant. “I guess you're right.”

“There's absolutely no way we can prove that this thing isn't a fake.
I
can't even prove to
you
that Pete and I didn't cook this thing up back there just now. Or that I didn't plant that wax mold downstairs.”

“I think we're resigned to being called crackpots or liars, or both,” Roger said with a sigh. “The issue is no longer what people think of
us
, but what
we
think of what's happening.”

Ward bent forward to get a closer look. “Is it holding something?”

“Yes, but I'm not sure what.” Sam turned the cast over and sought out a brighter patch of the not very powerful overhead light. “The detail isn't perfect. You can see these ridges between the fingers that look like the links of a chain attached to this thing in the palm of the hand—an amulet or talisman, or something similar.”

“Talisman more likely,” Ward said. “An amulet is traditionally for protection, a talisman confers occult powers on its possessor. I didn't get the feeling that that thing down there was in much need of protection.”

“I don't know,” Sam laughed softly. “Maybe we scared it as much as it scared us.”

Drew shivered. “I find that hard to believe,” she said in an unsteady voice, but into which she nonetheless managed to inject a note of humor. Barry tightened his arm around her shoulder.

Ward took the cast from Sam and peered more closely at the design on the thing that it was holding. “There's some kind of pattern on it—sweeping lines overlaying what look like more lines.”

“Isn't that a triangle?” Joanna asked, pointing.

“Or a compass,” Roger said. “Which could make it some kind of Freemasonic sign—not that I'm an expert.”

“I'll have Peggy look at it tomorrow,” Sam said. “She's pretty good on that kind of thing.”

It was after eleven when Sam locked the cast in his office safe for the night. No one had given a thought to dinner, and now they found they weren't hungry. They stood for a moment in a little group on the sidewalk just off the campus. They decided that they would all talk with Sam on the phone in the next few days and decide whether or not to go ahead with their next group meeting, which was scheduled for the beginning of next week. Then they went their separate ways.

Joanna and Sam took a cab to Riverside Drive. Neither spoke. She looked out at the familiar lights and landmarks flashing by in the night. Somehow they seemed slightly less familiar than before. Something had changed. Whether it was in the world or in her she wasn't sure, but there had been some underlying shift in her sense of reality. Perhaps it was just a delayed reaction to shock, an adjustment to the weeks of strangeness which had culminated in the extraordinary evening she had just experienced. The only thing she knew with any certainty, and she sensed it in her deepest being, was that something irrevocable had happened that meant her life would never be quite the same.

She reached out for the comforting touch of Sam's hand in the darkness, and felt his fingers interlace with hers.

“What do you think we should do?” she asked.

He sighed and looked at her. “We began the evening by trying to get rid of it, but somehow I don't think that hand we produced was waving good-bye.”

“I notice you say
we
produced. You're still sure that's what happened tonight?”

He looked at her in the darkness of the cab. “It's still more feasible than any other explanation.”

“I wonder.”

“What exactly do you wonder?”

Her gaze went back out to the city. “If it was something we created, why would it attack us that way? Why would we attack ourselves?”

He took a moment to reply, as though preparing himself to hear aloud the thoughts that were turning in his mind.

“I suspect that what attacked us was the part of ourselves that knows it would be a shame and a crime to abandon this experiment now. So it made its disapproval known when we attempted to do so—and left a tantalizing hint of what we might achieve if we go on.”

She turned to him again. “That's what you want? To go on?”

“Yes,” he answered simply. “As I said, I'll go on with another group if this one folds.” He paused. “What about you?”

She too thought a moment, then spoke as if disappointed by her own answer. “I don't know.”

He nodded and gave her a faint smile of reassurance. It was the answer he'd expected and he didn't blame her for it.

“At least,” he said, “you can't say you aren't getting a story.”

27

P
eggy's office, though even smaller than Sam's, was considerably tidier. She had shifted everything off her desk and onto the window ledge in order to make room for the stack of reference books that she had spent the morning going through. In the midst of them, carefully wedged between a couple of paperweights, was the plaster cast of the arm, turned so that the thing it held faced upward. She peered through a magnifying glass at the barely discernible detail on it.

What had at first appeared to be sweeping lines began to look more like one continuous spiral that coiled into some kind of double vortex pattern. She still wasn't sure what the straight lines running through them represented, if anything, partly because the point at which two of them appeared to join was obscured by the fingertips curled over it. She turned several pages of the largest of the books open on her desk, and reluctantly conceded defeat. Nothing in there even remotely resembled the design on the plaster cast she was examining.

She went to the basement—Adam's room—where Sam was going through the previous night's wreckage with Pete and Bryan Meade, the engineer. Joanna was with them, taking notes in shorthand to back up what she was getting on tape; she no longer relied on technology as much as she had, especially in this place. Peggy caught Joanna's eye as she entered. The two women liked each other, and it took only the faintest shake of Peggy's head for Joanna to understand that she'd drawn a blank with her research. “What have they found down here?” she asked.