Free The Link by Richard Matheson

whatever judgement is due is already taking place “as they know”.
    Robert does not reply.
    “To seek old bones instead of new inspiration,” Ruth observes. “It seems to say it all about his inability to understand her.”
    Robert hesitates, then mentions his dream. Does Ruth have any idea why it recurs so regularly?
    Ruth looks uncomfortable. “Well,” she says, “the hallway is where she fell, of course; you remember that.”
    He says he doesn’t.
    It was too much of a shock for you, she says; you’ve repressed the memory. “Pray that the dream be taken from you.”
    He persists and, reluctantly, she repeats what she has told him before—that he came back from a neighbor’s house when he was six and she wouldn’t let him in because their mother had fallen down the stairs and “passed” immediately into Spirit.
    “Surely, you remember Aunt Grace coming to take you to her house,” she says.
    He nods; that he remembers.
    “You’re better off without the rest of it,” she tells him. “Seek instead the consciousness of God.”
    This leads her to remind him that the Allrights are a “gifted” family. (John excluded since he has “rejected” it so totally.) “It’s in
you
though, Robert,” she says. “Your legacy from
God.”
    He shakes his head. “You’re wrong,” he tells her.
    “No, no, you forget,” she says with smiling negation.
    Abruptly, she rises and gets an old 78 RPM record. “You remember this?” she asks. He shakes his head and she reminds him that, when he was three, this was his favorite record. Mother would put it in a pile of other records where he always found it by running his “little fingers” down the edge of the stack.
    “Probably nicked,” he says.
    She smiles. “Oh, no.”
    Robert tries to talk her out of playing it but Ruth goes to her phonograph.
    The record starts to play: a man blowing on a trumpet, a woman laughing at him, the man’s playing becoming increasingly spluttering until, as overwhelmed as the woman, he bursts into a seizure of wild laughter with her.
    It should be very funny; the record is ludicrous, engaging. Robert has to smile at Bart’s reaction to it.
    But memories flood over him; him sitting in the living room, a small boy, laughing with his mother. The living room of his dream. A distorted recollection. The laughter of his mother somehow frenetic and disturbing.
    Abruptly, the record snaps on the turntable, pieces of it flung to the floor, making Robert twitch in shock.
    “Oh, well,” says Ruth, unmoved. “It was very old.”

    Robert arrives home, settles Bart in, then begins to pace the living room.
    The visit to Ruth has unsettled him. He keeps flashing to moments in the past with his mother, his father, Ruth, John, Aunt Grace, a man we will come to see later, Uncle Jack. His nervousness increases as though something dark is closing in on him. He recalls Ruth saying, “It’s in
you
though, Robert. Your legacy from
God.”
And has to do something to occupy himself. Moving swiftly to his office, he switches on the processor and begins to work.
    “In the latter part of the 19 th Century,” he dictates and the processor writes, “the emphasis on physical mediums like Home and Palladino began to diminish to be replaced by a study of what came to be known as mental mediums.”
    CAMERA MOVES IN ON the processor screen. “Two of the greatest of this new variety of psychic were Mrs. Lenore Piper and Mrs. Gladys Leonard (called “the British Mrs. Piper”) whose spectacular careers were, in many ways, alike from childhood on.”
    We see eight-year-old LENORE EVELINA SIMONDS playing by herself in a garden, busily engaged in pushing acorns through a hole in one of the garden chairs.
    “Lenore Evelina Simonds had her first experience when she was eight, on a warm spring afternoon in the year 1867, the place New Hampshire.”
    The young girl is shocked as, suddenly, she feels a sharp blow on her right ear accompanied by a prolonged