Free The Link by Richard Matheson Page A

sibilant sound which becomes the letter S. As she holds her ear, eyes wide with dread, she hears a woman’s voice saying, “Aunt Sara, not dead but with you still.”
    The terrified girl runs, sobbing, to the house and tells her mother. “Something hit me on the ear and Aunt Sara said she wasn’t dead but ‘with you still’.”
    Robert’s voice breaks in to say that, at the very moment of the little girl’s experience, her Aunt Sara had died unexpectedly.
    We see another eight-year-old girl sitting in her nursery, smiling as she watches something o.s. “Gladys Osborne, born in 1882, showed equal evidence of being psychic at an early age. Unlike Lenore Simonds, however, her experience, at first, was pleasant.”
    We see what the girl is looking at. Where the nursery wall should be there is, instead, a dazzling vista: valleys, slopes, trees, flowers of every shape and hue, the landscape extending for miles. Walking about on velvety grass are couples and groups attired in flowing robes, looking radiantly happy. INTERCUT BETWEEN the young girl in her nursery and what she sees.
    “It is not reported whether Lenore Simonds had trouble with her mother over what she said but Gladys Osborne definitely did,” Robert narrates.
    Young Gladys, clad in a dressing gown, sits with her father, sharing breakfast and seeing another view of the lovely vista where the dining room wall should be.
    “Dada, isn’t that a specially beautiful place we’re seeing this morning?” she says.
    Her father frowns. “What place?”
    “That place,” she says, pointing at the dining room wall which is, to her father’s eyes, bare except for a couple of hanging guns.
    “What are you talking about?” her father demands.
    Gladys tries explaining and her father’s expression darkens.
    We see, next, the entire family gathered around her in a state of annoyance and anxiety as the young girl, becoming frightened, tries to describe her vision. We hear Robert’s voice narrating.
    “At first, they thought young Gladys was making it up. Then, when she persisted and described her vision so minutely, they became alarmed and Gladys was forbidden sternly to ever see or look for what she called her ‘happy valley’.”
    CUT TO Lenore Simonds, now 22 years of age, seated in a circle of people, her father-in-law beside her, in a modest parlor.
    “When Lenore Simonds was 22, she married William Piper of Boston and, at the urging of her father-in-law, because she was suffering from the effects of an accident some years previously, was persuaded to attend a healing session of Dr. J. R. Coche, a blind clairvoyant.”
    The clairvoyant reaches Lenore and puts his hands on her head. Abruptly, she shivers as a chill floods through her and she sees, in front of her, a blaze of light in which strange faces hover.
    Then a hand begins to pass to and fro before her face and she rises from her chair and walks to a table in the center of the room on which writing materials have been placed. Picking up a pencil, she begins to write rapidly on a piece of paper.
    CUT TO several minutes later. She puts down the pencil, hands the written page to an elderly man in the circle, then returns to her seat.
    Everyone stares at her, the elderly man reading the paper with mounting amazement. Lenore Piper blinks and looks around in surprise. “Is something wrong?” she asks.
    “Young woman,” says the elderly man, “I have been a spiritualist for over thirty years but the message you have just given me is the most remarkable I have ever received.” His voice breaks as he finishes. “It gives me fresh courage to go on for I know now that my boy lives.”
    Lenore Piper stares at him, incredulous.
    CUT TO Gladys Osborne Leonard and TWO WOMEN descending a steep, narrow staircase, above them a chaos of backstage NOISES. As the sounds fade, Robert’s voice is heard.
    “When Gladys Osborne was 24, she married Frederick Leonard, an actor. One winter, when she and her husband were