The Link

THE LINK

An Introduction

by Richard Matheson

Some years ago Stephen Deutsch (that was his last name at the time. He has since taken the last name of his natural father, Simon) and I discussed the possibility of presenting a lengthy drama for TV which would incorporate spiritualism, parapsychology, the occult and metaphysics all told through three major stories. Since Stephen had just produced my script for Somewhere In Time, I felt confidence in his ability to produce this story.

We approached Brandon Stoddard at ABC with the concept. Since great success for them had resulted from such mini-series as Roots and The Winds of War, it seemed an excellent company to consider. We were given a go-ahead for my idea which would also include brief contemporary events in this area as well as events throughout history and a detailed account of two major historic occurences—the true identity of Jack the Ripper through psychic means and the psychic elements involved in the sinking of the Titanic.

I spent the next year-and-a-half preparing the continuity for this massive undertaking. The entire four walls of a work room were covered with 3x5 file cards—all the elements of the proposed mini-series. Those were finally stitched together into an outline which I called The Link. (The significance of the word to be revealed at the conclusion of the main story.) Stephen, in a burst of enthusiasm had the outline (557 pages long) bound in leather which we submitted to Brandon Stoddard and his associates at ABC.

We quickly discovered that either they had lost interest in my vision or were staggered by the size and scope of it. They told us that the story might be workable as a 7-hour mini-series which would have to include yet another major story.

Common sense should have told me to forget any attempt to provide ABC with the project they wanted. Eventually I did just that, but not before I tried, in vain, to accommodate them within the seven-hour length.

In a state of monumental disappointment, I asked ABC if they would let me convert my outline into a novel. What they saw in that as potentially valuable to ABC I have no idea. But they said yes.

I spent the next year-and-a-half trying to novelize the outline, ending up with more than 800 pages which comprised part of Part One. My New York agent cautioned me against continuing the novel (which I estimated would probably be so huge it might very well be too expensive to sell).

Years went by. Then, riding to the rescue like some literary Lone Ranger, Barry Hoffman of Gauntlet Press offered to publish what portion of the novel I had written. Later, he amended his offer, preferring to publish my outline for The Link since it included the entire story I visualized. Later, he decided to use a portion of what I had written of the teleplay and the outline of The Link, calling the package a narrative, which now, in 2011, appears as an E-Book on the screen in front of you.

ONE

An Arizona desert; pre-dawn. Total silence. CAMERA PANS ACROSS the shadowy landscape, PAST the ruin of an ancient temple wall. A man’s VOICE speaks.

All these happenings—each one of them—are evidences of a greater truth. Traces of the ultimate reality.

A VOICE responds; that of Robert Allright, our protagonist. "Which is—?" he asks.

CAMERA has STOPPED before a man-made aperture in the temple wall. An instant after Robert’s voice has spoken, sunlight breaks across a distant hilltop and our eyes are flooded with the blazing light. The screen is filled with it.

We see, then, what will be the logo for our story—a pair of sculpted bronze hands, reaching upward, fingers bowed, palms facing. Between them—floating, untouched—is a crystal, which seems, at first examination, unlike the regular shape of a prism, devoid of any specific shape. It presents one uneven, triangular face and an adjoining five-sided one. The three-sided face reveals nothing but unmarked glass. The five-sided face encapsulates what appears to be the skull of some impossible to describe creature. Turning the crystal reveals two more multi-sided faces. The jewel-like skull does not appear in either one of these.

TITLE: THE LINK.

A moment. Then, abruptly, we are looking at a window rivuleted by steady rain. MUSIC plays, its source unknown: a familiar song from 1950. CAMERA PULLS BACK. Pale, white curtains hanging at the window. CAMERA TURNS. A living room in 1950, dim, untenanted.

The rain sound should be comforting; so, too, the music. There is something wrong though, virtually intangible but wrong. CAMERA MOVES toward the front hall, starts to pick up speed a bit.

ROBERT FRANCIS ALLRIGHT turns his head on a pillow, opens his eyes. The MUSIC fades. A dream.

He stares a moment more, then turns his head a little further; smiles.

His black Lab sits beside the water bed, looking at him. Robert reaches out to stroke the dog’s head. Hi-ya, Bart, he murmurs. Bart’s tail thumps against the floor. "What do you dream, Bartie?" Robert asks.

He rises slowly, stretches, groans. The back again. Oh, boy. He winces; cannot raise his left arm all the way.

He moves into the bathroom, twisting on the cold water faucet of the sink. He groans his a.m. groan at the pitiful water pressure in his house, then washes off his face and stares into the medicine cabinet mirror at the reflection of his dripping features.

An abrupt SHOT of his dream, remembered: the living room, the rain, a fragment of the 1950 song. Then back to his reflection. HOLD.

CUT: Robert in a blue running suit and shoes, doing stretching exercises. Next we see him moving through the woods with Bart. His eyes glaze as they run together. He begins to mumble to himself.

The girl was nineteen, born in California—

We see the girl, dressing in a dark outfit. She was dressing to attend a funeral when an overpowering urge came over her, Robert’s voice narrates.

The girl’s movements get more and more erratic. She is obviously distressed.

We see her getting on a bus. Instead of going to the funeral, she boarded a bus, says Robert’s voice. The girl sits down, looks at her wristwatch uneasily. "She had to see her mother."

SHOTS of the moving bus, the girl. She grows increasingly disturbed. Arriving at her destination, she almost leaps from the bus and runs along the small town street.

Arriving at her parents’ furniture store, she enters hurriedly and finds them taking a break in the front window, sitting on chairs. They look at her in startlement. What is she doing there?

Her lips move, Robert’s voice speaking the words. ‘I’m hungry, let’s get something to eat’, she said. Her parents smile, her manner is so peculiar. Urgently, she gets them up and moves them toward the back room, OUT OF SCENE.

A large, black sedan, out of control, appears in the street, skids sharply, jars across the curb, the sidewalk, plows into the window of the store, demolishing everything.

Another five seconds and her parents would have been crushed, says Robert’s voice.

He is back at the house, muscles loose. He showers, dresses, makes a pot of coffee, feeds Bart who is wheezing as he sprawls on the kitchen floor. What’s the matter, pal, you getting old? Robert asks him, stopping to stroke the Lab’s head.

Minutes later, he is in his office, Bart lying in a cushioned basket by the desk. Robert speaks into the microphone of his word processor. As he dictates, the machine types words onto the screen.

What made this girl, ignoring all else, board a bus and rush to her parents’ furniture store to take them from the front window seconds before that car came crashing in? He completes the story.

"Call it extra-sensory perception. Psychic foresight. Psi. The words are unimportant. What matters is a remarkable human capacity for knowing what can only be defined, by standard scientific means, as the unknowable."

As he lists these remarkable capacities, we see brief SHOTS of coming scenes in which these psychic faculties will be explored. Telepathy. Precognition. Clairvoyance. Psychokinesis. Healing. Psychic crime solving. Out-of-the-body experiences. Haunted—

The telephone rings. Robert grumbles, switching off the processor and picking up the telephone receiver.

Is this Robert Allright? asks a voice.

The call is from Hollywood, a young producer named ALAN BREMER. He got Robert’s number from an editor at Robert’s publishing house. He is crazy about Robert’s latest book THINGS WITHOUT EXPLANATION. He wants to make a three or four-hour film for t-v, using the book as source material. He’d like to include everything in it but that, of course, would be impractical.

What he sees as viable (and fascinating!) is a film recounting the historical background of parapsychology, the events leading up to the world of psi today. Would Robert be interested in preparing an outline? He is thinking in the neighborhood of fifty thousand dollars.

Robert looks at Bart, a hand across the telephone mouthpiece. Nice neighborhood, he murmurs.

He indicates his interest. Great! enthuses Bremer. I’ll talk to your agent right away! Can you fly out to the coast tomorrow?

Robert hesitates; he isn’t used to functioning with such abandon. But he allows seeing as how it’s possible.

Sensational! cries Alan Bremer.

Robert hangs up, looking at Bart. Well, what do you know about that? Bart’s tail thumps on the cushion.

Mid-afternoon. Robert prepares to leave the house. He dresses, sets the timer on Bart’s automatic feeder, pockets his hand-size bio-feedback control and drives off in his impeccable 1975 Mercedes. An unhappy Bart watches him go. He likes to ride with Robert.

En route to the city, listening to a cassette of Mahler’s sixth, Robert begins to muse aloud regarding Alan Bremer’s plan.

The historical background of parapsychology? he mutters dubiously. The events leading up to the world of psi today? Is he insane? Does he have any idea of all the material that covers?

We see brief SHOTS of sequences to come concerning these events as Robert’s voice recounts them. Early psi. Mesmer. The Fox Sisters. D.D. Home. Nettie Colburn. Palladino. Mrs. Piper. Mrs. Leonard. Margery. Edgar Cayce. J.B. Rhine. Good Lord.

We are back in the car with Robert as he groans. Maybe I should just forget it.

Reaching Manhattan, Robert parks on the outskirts (to avoid inner city traffic) and cabs to an apartment house on the East side near the 30’s.

There, responding to a previously phoned request, he sees his father DR. FRANCIS KENNETH ALLRIGHT, 69, a retired professor of Archeology, formerly at Columbia University.

His father is a man possessed by anger and frustration, a condition exacerbated by his chronic inability to express emotion.

Something has occurred to him which, in essence, has defied a long-lasting conviction in his work. There is no time to start over again, check it all out. Consequently, rage consumes him—rage at his years, his frailties, the fate which makes it impossible for him to continue working.

He and Robert have never had an open relationship. Francis Allright has been unable to communicate with any of his three children but least of all with Robert.

So when, imperious and cold, he informs Robert that he wants him to go to Arizona and continue his project there, the all but open demand scarcely falls on fertile soil.

Robert tries to be polite but tells his father that he cannot leave his own pursuits. He has magazine and book commitments, a probable commitment on the coast now. Why not ask John? he suggests. He even lives within a reasonable distance of—

His father interrupts impatiently. If I wanted John to do it, I would have asked him, he says. John is unqualified.

Robert gestures haplessly, forcing a smile. So am I, he says. You know—

"This is important, his father interrupts again. Unlike Robert’s journalistic projects which betray a constant tendency to backslide into your mother’s illogical world."

Robert tenses. He resents the contempt with which his father holds the memory of Robert’s mother. Can we leave her out of this? he asks.

I know you think her to have been a saint, his father snaps. She was not. She was a woman crippled by untenable delusions.

I didn’t come here to listen to that, Robert says.

His father waves that off. I’m going to show you something, he says.

Robert stands. I’m sorry, he tells his father. I really don’t want to see anything or hear any more.

A few more heated exchanges, then Robert is gone. His father stands in the living room of his small apartment, seething with the fury of a man who believes that his life’s work is being rendered meaningless.

He turns and moves to his desk, picking up a small crystal. He stares at it with almost hatred, finally setting it down with a sudden, fierce movement.

He had shown the crystal to Edgar Vance, a long-time associate at the Percival Laboratories. Vance had reacted strangely to the analysis. The crystal, he said, consisted of a number of elements which he had not run across in more than fifty years at the laboratory.

For that matter, the crystalline structure consisted of elements that existed no place on earth.

The crystal refracts a beam of sunlight, casting spectrum colors on the sheet of white paper on which it lies, a torment to the aging man.

Driving home, Robert unconsciously removes the bio-feedback control from his sportcoat pocket, holds it to his left ear and tries to will down the faintly pitched howl. It is not easy.

The visit to his father has upset him.

Reaching his community, he stops at the residence-office of veterinarian AMELIA BROOKSTONE, an attractive spinster in her fifties and a friend of Robert’s. Can he leave Bart with her while he goes to Los Angeles?

Of course, she says. We see, from her collection of books, records and art works, part of the rapport between the two. They often go to plays, concerts and art shows together.

Arriving home, Robert switches on his telephone answering machine. The agitated voice of ex-wife BARBARA asks him to return her call as soon as possible.

He does immediately to hear that things with Ann are still distressing. "You know what I mean," she emphasizes. This is your kind of thing.

Robert tenses, keeps his voice as even as he can. He has to fly to Los Angeles tomorrow. As soon as he gets back, he’ll come over and speak to Ann.

Please do, says Barbara tightly, hanging up.

Later. Robert packing, questioning his trip to L.A. on the morrow. Sighing, he inquires of himself, What am I getting into?

SUDDEN CUT. A trap door opening overhead. A tall man climbing down a ladder to an underground, dirt-walled chamber. Torches lit and placed in brackets on the wall. The flickering illumination shows a handsome Indian face, a man in his forties.

Holding an odd-looking dagger in his right hand, he performs a soundless ritual. In the wavering light, he faces north, outlining a star-like figure in the air with the dagger point. He erases the figure, turns to the east, using the dagger point to outline the figure once again.

He erases it, turns to the south, repeats the unseen outline with the dagger point. Erases that, turns to the west, outlines the figure for the fourth time.

Then he speaks in Hopi; after several sentences, we hear the words in English.

—Great Spirit who is the life that is in all things. The Creator of all things. Grant this request. CAMERA MOVES IN SHARPLY on his lips as he whispers. "Show me the one who is to come."

CUT TO Robert on the airplane as it sets down in Los Angeles. A driver picks him up and he is limoed to the studio where Alan Bremer works.

En route, he has the first of what will constitute a running gag throughout the story. He imagines what his meeting with the young producer will be like.

We see his fantasy. Bremer, five-feet tall, in jodhpurs and beret, a foot-long cigar clamped between his teeth, whacking at his giant desk top with a riding crop in an office resembling the inside of a Hapsburg hunting lodge.

Immediately after, he is at the studio and ushered into Alan Bremer’s modest office. Bremer rises, smiling, hand outstretched, a pleasant-looking young man in his thirties. He welcomes Robert, seats him, Robert glancing at a large wall photograph of Bremer’s wife and two daughters.

The producer reaffirms his enthusiasm for the project, his desire that everything in the book could be used—all that great stuff about Egypt and the Mayans, Stonehenge, Atlantis, UFOs, The Abominable Snowman, the Loch Ness Monsters, etc.

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.