Robert smiles. “I think we’ll have more than enough even confining it to the area you mentioned.”
Alan nods, his gaze intent on Robert. “You think the rest would make it too much?”
“Not only too much but disjointed,” Robert says. “Those items don’t add up to anything. At least there’s some kind of continuity in the history of psi.”
“Right,” Alan gestures concedingly. As to details: where does Robert want to work on this?
“Oh, at home,” Robert says immediately. “All my material is there.”
Right, says Alan. That will work out fine since Peter Clarke and Cathy Graves are stationed in the New York area as well.
Robert’s face goes blank.
“Didn’t your agent tell you about them?” Alan asks, surprised. “They’re parapsychologists from England on a one-year loanout to ESPA in Manhattan. They’ll be your technical advisors.”
Robert hesitates, then shrugs. It doesn’t matter to him; it’s a job, no more.
Alan stands. “Come on, I’ll introduce you to her. She’s watching them shoot on the soundstage; we had lunch together.”
As they leave the office, Robert sees a framed motto on the wall which reads THAT WHICH YOU THINK BECOMES YOUR WORLD. “I like that,” he says.
“Applies to everything,” Alan responds.
Exiting the building with Robert, Alan says, “We’ve got to include the names of all the famous people interested in psi. Einstein. Edison. Newton. Lincoln. Freud. Houdini.”
Robert smiles. “I think Houdini was more interested in knocking it down than supporting it,” he says.
“Right,” agrees Alan. “Where would we start?”
Robert thinks a moment, then replies. “Some early incidents in psi might be appropriate.”
His voice narrates as we see some incidents from the early days of psi: King Croesus of Lydia testing the predictive power of his court seer; a witnessed levitation by St. Theresa; an incident from Swedenborg’s life as recounted by Kant; Mesmer and patients in his bizarre “healing” chamber; a leg amputation using, for the first time, “neuro-hypnosis” as an anesthetic; Baron Reichenback’s investigation of so-called “sensitives.”
“Great,” says Alan. “That should get us off in style.”
Entering the soundstage, Robert has another fantasy: Cathy Graves, tall and gaunt, with hawk-like features, thick-lensed glasses, wearing heavy tweed, her throaty voice heavily accented as she greets him with, “Ah! Mr. Allright! So! We’re to be shipmates on the sea of psi, as t’were! Haw!”
He is more than slightly taken back by Cathy Graves’ appearance; she might well be starring in the film she’s been watching being shot. Alan introduces them, then leaves them “to get acquainted” as he goes to consult the film’s director.
Their “getting acquainted” is something less than satisfactory. Robert tries to be polite and pleasant but Cathy Graves appears to have pre-judged him sight unseen. She immediately makes it clear that she believes the film, if it is to be “of any import whatever”, must be strictly informational, scientific in approach. She is not interested in “pandering” to superstition.
Robert eyes her with a faint smile, judging her to be an intellectual snob as she tells him of her objections to the “assumed fringe” subjects of parapsychology; i.e. survival after death, reincarnation, astrology, palmistry, pyramid power, UFOs, the Bermuda Triangle et al.
“There is no methodology in these,” she states. “I trust those aspects of your book will be avoided.”
The faintest icing of his smile betrays his reactions to her.
Alan returns with a group of people—the director, actors, camera man, etc; he calls together further members of the crew. “Robert, tell them about the Great Seal,” he says.
Robert is trapped. Turning from Cathy, he tells everyone to take a dollar bill out and look at it.
Analysis of the Great Seal of the United States, he points out, indicates that the Republic’s founders were believers in the “ancient mysteries”, the Seal disclosing a number of occult symbols.
“For example,” he explains, “the unfinished pyramid with the All-Seeing Eye above it on the back side of the bill is an obvious rendition of the Masonic emblem.
“The mystical number 13 appears in the sacred emblem above the eagle, 13 stars in its center. The motto E Pluribus Unum contains 13 letters as does the reverse inscription Annuit Coeptis. The eagle clutches, in its talon, a branch bearing 13 leaves and 13 berries. In its left talon is a sheaf of 13 arrows and the face of the pyramid, exclusive of the panel containing the date, consists of 72 stones arranged in 13 rows.”
As he continues telling the intrigued group about this, he glances at Cathy.
She is not intrigued.
He turns away from her. He does not intend to lose much time with her regarding the project.
LAX, the following morning. Entering the 747, Robert discovers that Cathy is on the same flight, her seat in a different section of the first-class section. As they pass, she smiles and says good morning. He returns the greeting politely.
The plane takes off and Robert removes a yellow legal-size pad from his attaché case, some notes, a mechanical pencil. He begins to write—and we hear his voice speaking the words aloud, “It is generally accepted that the “birth” of Spiritualism which was, in turn, the origin of modern parapsychology took place on the night of March 31, 1848 in Hydesville, New York, at the home of Mr. and Mrs. John D. Fox.”
We see the house, moonlit, trees and bushes shaking in the wind. We are inside then, hearing noises in all parts of the house, above and below. Sporadic and unsettling noises. Raps and knockings. Loud thumps. What might be footsteps. The apparent noise of moving furniture.
We move upstairs. Mr. Fox lights a candle and attempts to comfort his wife; she is sick with fear. Are they going to have to move? They should have listened to the rumors about the house’s former tenant leaving because of “mysterious noise”. How much more of this can they endure? The sounds have been dismaying them for almost a month now.
Mrs. Fox shivers in her husband’s arms. “I pray that Kate and Margaret are sleeping through it,” she murmurs.
In the girls’ bedroom, Kate, 7 and Margaret, 10, are definitely not sleeping through it, huddled side by side in the dark room, arms around each other, listening to the rapping noises—so severe they make the bedstead jar.
Kate attempts to snap her fingers in time with the noises.
“Don’t,” pleads Margaret.
“Maybe it’s a restless spirit,” Kate suggests. “Maybe we can talk to it.”
“No,” whines Margaret.
But Kate continues and, to their open-mouthed shock, the rappings seem to answer the rhythms of her fingers snapping.
A historic moment then. Kate, on impulse, suddenly says, aloud, “Mr. Splitfoot, do as I do,” and claps her hands.
The girls cry out in unison as the rappings instantly reply with the same number of sounds. Margaret, eyes as wide as saucers, says, “No, do just as I do. Count one, two, three, four,” clapping her hands together four times.
Again, the girls cry out, recoiling into their pillows with delicious terror as the rappings answer—one, two, three, four.
Their parents rush in with a candle, frightened for their daughters’ safety. Hearing what the two girls say, their words tumbling out in terrified excitement, Mr. Fox asks the rappings to tell him his daughters’ ages from the oldest to the youngest.
Mrs. Fox gasps in dread, a trembling hand across her mouth as the rappings instantly reply, giving the correct ages, pausing between each for separation. They include the age of their oldest daughter Leah who no longer lives at home.
Then a final age is given—three—and Mrs. Fox begins to sob.
There had been another daughter who had died at that very age.
Mr. Fox cannot stop questioning now despite the frightened pleadings of his wife.
“Is this a human being that a
nswers my questions so correctly?” he asks.
No sound.
“Is it a spirit?” he asks. “If it is, make two raps.”
They all gasp, chilled, as two raps loudly answer.
“In this way,” Robert’s voice narrates, “it was discovered—and accepted by the family—that the spirit was that of a thirty-one year old man murdered in the house, his remains buried in its cellar.
“Thus began a unique event which marked—though no one knew it at the time—the birth of a field of study which was to sweep the world.”
We see the tale continue. Digging is commenced in the cellar, Robert’s voice describing how the “spirit” had described its death—on a Tuesday night at midnight, his throat cut by the owner of the house, his body dragged downstairs and buried ten feet down in the cellar floor. Motive? Five hundred dollars in his possession.
Water seepage ends the digging. It continues in the summer. At the five-foot level, a plank is uncovered, below it charcoal and quicklime, finally human hair and bones.
“From that day forth,” says Robert’s voice, “the phenomena took on the character of a genuine haunting.”
We see it happening: the sound of a death struggle, throat gurglings, the dragging of a body across the upper floor and down the stairs, the sound of digging in the cellar. Mrs. Fox’s hair turns white. The family can no longer endure it and, “Kate was sent to the house of an older brother, Margaret to the house of her older sister.
“The phenomena continued in both places,” Robert’s voice narrates.
It is especially bad where Margaret is. We see the husband of Margaret’s sister exposed to the first recorded “poltergeist” episode in the United States, objects constantly thrown at him. Pins are stuck into all of them as they pray. Caps are pulled from their heads, combs jerked from their hair. What sounds like heavy artillery is heard on the roof, heard for miles around.
Finally, a visiting friend attempts to converse with the rambunctious spirit and, with deafening raps, a message is spelled out. Robert speaks it aloud.
“Dear friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era. You must not try to conceal it any longer.”
And so the floodgates opened, Robert writes on the pad. He looks around, the cabin darkening; they are about to show the film. He switches on the overhead light.
A tap on his shoulder. He looks up to see Cathy. Would he like to go up to the lounge and chat?
He hesitates. “Please,” she smiles. “There’s something I’d like to say.”
He follows her up the winding stairs and settles on a couch beside her. She wants, she tells him, to apologize. She knows how badly she behaved yesterday; it was uncalled for. Doubly so in light of her having actually looked at his book the night before; Alan had given her a copy. Unlike what she had—“with disgraceful prejudice” she says—assumed it to be (a sensationalized potboiler churned out to make money), she’d found it to be done with scrupulous objectivity and intelligence; even noticeable caution.
“I feel a total fool for acting as I did,” she says.
Robert smiles. “No harm done.” He is impressed that she had taken the trouble to re-examine her behavior.
“As a matter of fact,” she adds, “the book is so well done I wish that you’d included less material and gone into it in more detail.”
Robert shrugs.
“What were you writing on the pad?” she asks.
He tells her and they talk about the Fox Sisters; a prime example of telekinesis, she observes, a prototypical poltergeist event.
“You don’t believe it was a spirit then,” he says, knowing the answer.
“Of course not, do you?” she asks in surprise.
“I have no opinion either way,” he tells her.
“You don’t?” She sounds surprised again. Evoking no response from him, she continues with the Fox Sisters incident. They did recant in later years, she says, admit to fraud, claiming that they make the noises by “cracking their toe joints”. That, of course, is ridiculous, she adds. The phenomena were too extensive for that.
“They also denied their recantation,” Robert reminds her. And, of course, the “toe-joint cracking” thesis is absurd—although they might have done exactly that on occasion in order to impress clients.
Still, on her deathbed, when she couldn’t move a muscle, Margaret Fox involuntarily created rappings in the ceiling, walls and floor of the bedroom.
“A sad story actually,” he concludes. “When they recanted, both sisters were alcoholics, broken by the stresses to which they’d been exposed to by their gifts.”
He makes a scoffing sound, almost bitter. “Gifts,” he says.
She looks at him with curiosity, wondering what lies below the surface of this pleasant, somewhat enigmatic man.
The ice broken now, they engage in conversation, first regarding ESPA which stands for Extended Sensory Perception Association; “all of us believe that psi is an expansion of the five senses, not a sixth,” she tells him.
She says again—this time with more discretion—that the history of psi, while undeniably colorful, is pretty much irrelevant these days. All the early years of research were consumed attempting to prove that what was happening was actually occurring, and that primarily to verify survival after death.
Today, the research is more inclusive. That the phenomena exist is no longer an issue to those in the field. They are more concerned with their significance.
As for herself, she states what Robert has already presumed to be her belief: that all psychic phenomena are attributes of man’s physical system, no spiritual correlation whatever.
“Fine,” says Robert. He is all for that. Superstition out, science in. “We have no argument,” he tells her. He only means to present, in his outline, some of the more intriguing highlights of psi’s past; no harm in that.
Cathy smiles. “Of course not.” There are some incredible stories and she looks forward to working with him on the proposed film.
Soon they are engrossed in personal conversation.
She learns what we already know and, in addition, that his mother died when he was six and that he was wounded in Vietnam in 1968.
We continue to sense that there are things about his past which he protects most carefully.
He learns, from her, that she is married to Harry Graves, a professor of Biology at a London college.
Robert has a brief fantasy about him: a balding man with bottle-bottom pince-nez glasses over berry eyes, a white lab coat on as he hovers above a dead frog, scalpel poised, commenting in a dry as dust voice, “We will now excise the gazongas from this filthy little beggar.”
RETURN to Robert, a faint smile on his lips.
“What?” she asks.
“I’m sorry,” he apologizes. “I was thinking of something else.”
He further learns that her father is world-famed physicist Dr. Alexander Robertson, her mother a well-known psychologist-author, her older brother also a physicist who works with her father.
“I’m impressed,” he says. “You must have to go some to live up to that.”
A faint expression on her face betrays the truth of that.
We learn, as Robert casually speaks of some minute “trivia” fact about the plane, that he is the author of three well-selling books entitled THINGS EXPLAINED, MORE THINGS EXPLAINED and OTHER THINGS EXPLAINED.
“My father loves those books!” enthuses Cathy. “He’s forever reading them in the loo.”
Robert chuckles, taking that for praise.
“So that’s the genesis of THINGS WITHOUT EXPLANATION,” she observes. He nods. “Of course we both know everything can be explained with proper knowledge,” she adds.
He shrugs. “Assuming that the proper knowledge shows up,” he responds.
By the time they reach New York they have become quite friendly with each other; it is a given that, both good looking, they are attracted to each other physically. When the p
lane lands, Robert walks her into the terminal where the mood is dispelled by HARRY GRAVES waiting there to pick her up; he, of course, bears not the faintest resemblance to Robert’s mini-fantasy, a pleasant-looking man in his late thirties, wearing casual clothes.
He shakes hands with Robert as they meet, explaining, when Robert mentions it, that he is on a brief vacation from his teaching duties, visiting Cathy “in the Colonies.” Robert smiles and nods.
Then they are gone and Robert walks to his parked car. He drives to Connecticut and picks up Bart who is a wriggling testimony to joy at seeing his master. Amelia tells him that he might keep an eye on Bart’s breathing; it’s a little strained at times.
At home, Robert finds two messages on his answering machine; one from his literary agent asking him to call and tell him about the trip, the other from his father. Sighing, Robert hesitates, then dials his father’s number.
“Have you reconsidered?” asks his father stiffly. “This is quite important, Robert. Quite important.”
“I’m sorry, Dad, I really can’t,” he says. “I have too many—”
“Your decision, of course,” his father interrupts. “You’re making a mistake however. What you don’t—” he hangs up.
“Oh, God,” Robert groans and, unaware of it, removes the bio-feedback control from his jacket pocket, holds it to his left ear.
It howls.
Early morning. Robert getting up. His aching back, the left arm. Lousy water pressure in the bathroom. Stretching exercises. Running with Bart who wheezes on their return. Robert sitting by the dog, his arm around him. “What’s the matter, pal? You getting old? You? Not you, Bart. You’re a young guy. Sure you are.” The thumping tail, the black face nuzzling his.
Later. Robert at his desk, dictating, CAMERA MOVING IN ON the words appearing on the processor screen.
“Following the events at Hydesville, physical phenomena began to sweep the country.”
We see it as his voice narrates. “Table tiltings. Séance rooms replete with rappings, thumpings, even spirit voices. By 1853, it was estimated that there were 40,000 spiritualists in New York alone.