Free Mediums Rare by Richard Matheson

him up ten minutes later by yanking the speller out from under his head so that his skull thumped down on the floor.
    “All right,” his father said in a threatening voice. His tone made it obvious that he was sure that nothing had changed.
    Grabbing Edgar by the left arm, he pulled him to his feet and sat him on the chair again.
“Capital,”
he ordered.
    “C-a-p-i-t-a-1,” the boy replied.
    The Squire’s eyes narrowed suspiciously.
    “
Household
,” he said.
    “H-o-u-s-e-h-o-l-d,” the boy responded.
    “
Valid
,” said the Squire.
    “V-a-l-i-d.”
    When Edgar had spelled every word in the lesson correctly, his father went on to the next lesson. The boy spelled every word in that lesson as well.
    Then the boy said, “Ask me anything in the book.”
    The Squire’s face was getting red now. Glaring from the book to Edgar and back again, he skipped through the speller at random, picking out the hardest words he could find—which Edgar spelled correctly.
    When the boy said, “There’s a picture of a silo on the next page, the word
synthesis
under it—s-y-n-t-h-e-s-i-s.”
    The Squire slammed the book down in a fury.
    “What kind of nonsense is this?!” he roared. “You knew that lesson all the time! You knew the whole blessed book!”
    “Yes, because the angel—” Edgar broke off with a cry of pain as his father whacked him on the head again, knocking him off the chair.
    “Go to bed!” the Squire shouted. “Before I lose my temper!”

    The headaches had been plaguing him for weeks now. By the time he reached Elkton, the pain had become severe and constant.
    Edgar couldn’t find the strength to sell anymore. Locating the nearest doctor, he visited the man’s office and asked for a sedative.
    The doctor gave him some powder in a folded square of paper and, as soon as he arrived at his hotel, Edgar poured the powder into several inches of tap water, stirred it with an index finger and swallowed it in one gulp. Then he lay down on the bed to try and sleep.
    It was March, 1900.
    When he opened his eyes again, two doctors were leaning over him, looking very grave.
    “How do you feel?” one of them asked.
    Edgar tried to answer but was unable to summon more than a whisper.
    Shocked, he tried again; in vain. He looked at the doctors frightenedly.
    Then he looked around, experiencing a jolt of new dismay.
    He was no longer in the hotel room but in his bedroom at home.
    He had no recollection whatever of being taken there.

    His voice had never returned.
    In the ensuing year, Edgar, unable to speak above a painful whisper, had been forced to give up being a salesman and became, instead, a photographer’s apprentice.
    In an attempt to regain his voice, he had been working with a local hypnotist named Al Layne. But every time he’d reached a certain level of hypnosis, something had held him back.
    Until the afternoon of March 31, 1901.
    Edgar was in the parlor of his home, lying on a horsehair sofa, eyes shut. Sitting in a chair beside the sofa was Al Layne.
    Across the room, Edgar’s wife Gertrude was sitting with his parents, all observing worriedly.
    After yet another attempt to get him to speak normally proved fruitless, Al Layne told them that he was going to try something different.
    “Edgar,” he said, “instead of trying to speak,
look inside your throat
and see if you can find out what the problem is.
    “Take your time. Look carefully inside your throat and, when you’re ready, tell us what you see. And tell us in a normal tone of voice.”
    Edgar Cayce remained motionless on the sofa, eyes closed. His wife and parents stared at him in concern.
    Several minutes passed in silence.
    Then Edgar began to speak to himself. They all leaned forward in their chairs, straining to hear, but could make no sense of what he was mumbling.
    Finally, he cleared his throat.
    “Yes,” he said, “we have the body.”
    They all stared at him in mute astonishment as he continued, his tone so clear that it was