Bargain With the Gods Read online

  DEAR PROFESSOR WINSLOW

  I REALIZE THAT IT IS UNORTHODOX TO APPROACH YOU IN THIS WAY, BUT I AM MORE THAN INTERESTED IN YOUR WORK AND WOULD LIKE TO BE ABLE TO AUDIT SOME OF YOUR LECTURES AND, IF POSSIBLE, PARTICIPATE IN YOUR EXPERIMENTS. ALTHOUGH I AM NOT AT THE UNIVERSITY, I AM DOING GRADUATE STUDIES ON MY OWN, WORKING TOWARD A GOAL IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES.

  THE STUDY OF MENTAL AND PSYCHIC PHENOMENA, AS YOU KNOW, IS NOT NORMALLY A REQUIREMENT FOR WORK IN PSYCHOLOGY, BUT I FEEL THE ADDITIONAL PREPARATION IN THESE AREAS ARE NECESSARY IF ONE IS TO HAVE ANY REAL IDEA OF THE SCOPE AND CAPABILITIES OF THE HUMAN MIND.

  UNFORTUNATELY, I AM UNABLE TO COMPENSATE YOU FINANCIALLY FOR YOUR ASSISTANCE TO MY PROGRAM, BUT IF THERE IS ANY WAY I MAY ASSIST YOU WITH YOUR WORK, TO COMPENSATE FOR MY LACK OF FUNDS, I WOULD BE MORE THAN WILLING.

  I DROPPED OFF THIS NOTE SO THAT I WOULD NOT APPEAR TOO UNPLEASANTLY AGGRESSIVE IN PERSON, AND TO GIVE YOU TIME TO CONSIDER MY CIRCUMSTANCES.

  PLEASE CONSIDER MY REQUEST. I SHALL TELEPHONE IN A DAY OR TWO AND LOOK FORWARD TO SPEAKING WITH YOU.

  SINCERELY

  MARC AUGENBECH

  Carefully, Elizabeth folded the paper into a small square and slipped it into the side pocket of her cardigan. It was very flattering that some stranger would want to work with her in her research, but curious as well. He made it seem so important, this unorthodox request. What an odd and clandestine way for him to try and maneuver into her lab… and the note itself, written in all capital letters. What could one make of that… a narcissist, a lunatic? Yet, perhaps it wasn't strange at all. She felt almost irritated that she was so out of the loop that she did not know whether it was, in fact, common practice for any other professor to receive just such a note on a semi-daily basis. Who was this man? Perhaps he was a foreigner, judging by his use of the word “circumstances.” The name Augenbech would support that theory, making him German or Austrian perhaps.

  It might be nice to have a foreigner around, Elizabeth mused. She longed for the stimulation of intellect and sophisticated humor that she fancied a foreigner might provide. She had long ago lost interest in the spoiled students, whose thoughts ran only in the direction of sex and financial success. It galled her to have to record their test scores in monosyllables, a verbal response to an intricate testing pattern being an inarticulate “oh wow” or “that's too weird.” She had almost begun to dislike them, not only for their lazy smugness, but for their inane cheerfulness as well.

  She did not, in fact, care whether or not this stranger audited her experiments. She was not an educator, but a research scientist with little interest in impressing young minds with knowledge. Her duty was to carry on the work she and Phillip had started.

  She started the car and backed out into the deserted street. The university clock tower loomed up against the night sky, telling her that it was half past nine, and that she had missed dinner again. As she drove toward the Pacific Coast Highway, her mind turned again to the note and the mysterious Mister Augenbech. If she allowed this person into her lab, she muttered to herself, she would have to set up some conditions. She had already had her share of lanky youths, whose gray complexions had taken on the pallor of the dusty academic world. She had run a course of ghoulish misfits, sexless young men, who viewed the research from the perspective of video games and extraterrestrials. And then there were the angry, overweight girls, longing to find some secret source of revenge deep inside themselves that they could unleash on their tormentors and finally triumph over the cheerleaders and popular co-eds. No, this Mister Augenbech would be allowed into the experiments only on the condition that he was not too strange when he telephoned.

  A mild rush of excitement overtook her at the prospect of meeting the stranger, when she realized, with disappointment, that there was surely no guarantee the young Mr. Augenbech was born outside the US simply because he had a foreign name and a handwriting that was unusually old fashioned and not unlike that of her mother. It suddenly occurred to her that young Mr. Augenbech might not be young at all, but was most probably an aging gentleman. Of course, the puzzle unfolded itself to her. That would explain his working on his own with no need of college credits. And his financial circumstances, as he put it, was nothing more than a fixed income or Social Security. Yes, Mr. Augenbech would be a dear old man with peculiar penmanship and quite possibly a hearing aid. Elizabeth sighed audibly, filling the dark interior of the car with disappointment. She flashed a turn signal and took a side road up into the Palisades hills overlooking the ocean.

  The headlamps from the car struggled to pierce the weight of darkness up ahead as the car slowed to make its way carefully along the cliff's edge. Elizabeth strained to see the road, concentrating her mind on the double yellow line that wavered back and forth in front of her eyes, mesmerizing her into a dull stupor, weaving and unweaving as the highway snaked its way higher. As she reached the summit, overlooking the jeweled pitch of the night sea, she heard a soft murmur of voices around her in the car. They were the sounds that she had heard in her sleep, whispering, mocking her, warning her of the danger ahead.

  Elizabeth watched her trembling hand on the steering wheel and breathed in the cool night air, hoping to clear her head from the fantasies that made her heart force its way into her throat. She glanced around her in the lonely blackness, but saw no one. She checked in the rear view mirror for traffic. But just as she was about to divert her eyes from the reflective strip above the dash, a pair of eyes appeared. They were not her eyes. They were a man's eyes, dark and powerful, black as the lonely night around her. Her throat constricted and her eyes locked with terror on the vision in the mirror. They were unkind, stern eyes, watching her, gauging her every move. She swerved the car onto the shoulder of the road. Suddenly, the guardrail came up at her, throwing back the glaring light from her headlamps. She slammed on the brakes, lurching forward over the steering wheel as the car came to a halt. She gasped with the sharp pain in her chest. She saw the front of her car molded into the wooden form of the road barrier. Without a breath, her eyes darted back to the space above the dash, but nothing appeared in the mirror but a long uninhabited road stretching behind her for miles.

  She was aware of a strange sensation, a sound all around her, engulfing her completely on the open road, and she realized that the car's horn was screaming in a sustained frenzy. She gripped the steering wheel and waited, to catch her breath, for the police, for morning, she did not know. She dared not look again into the mirror, for fear the apparition would return. It must not happen again, she told herself, not here in this lonely place.

  Chapter Two

  Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles

  “I could have told you that you were going to have an accident. Didn't I tell you to look out,” the woman with the red hair insisted. “After all, you drew the TOWER in your last reading. It's exploding all over the place and always means trouble or complete change.”

  “I don't believe in the tarot, Loretta… or reading tea leaves, or any of your other fortune-telling,” Elizabeth answered abruptly, causing her companion to roll her eyes in frustration.

  The two women sat in silence for a moment and watched the clothes tumble around in the row of dryers in front of them. They sat in the laundry room of their apartment complex, one of a series of chance meetings rather than a recognized friendship. Loretta represented to Elizabeth all that was vague and superstitious. Her New Age ideas of healing headaches with bits of colored glass, and her communications with herself in past lives were nothing short of nonsense. The red-haired woman ruled her life by mysterious images on a foolish deck of pasteboard tarot cards. Elizabeth pondered for a moment, then realized with mild embarrassment that her own deck of triangles and squares, which she used in the ESP experiments, had much to do with shaping the course of her own life. She smiled at her sulking companion.

  “I ran off the road, that's all,” Elizabeth said, trying to convince herself as well as Loretta. “It was no big deal. I only pushed in the front bumper
a bit.”

  “And sat in the dark till nearly four a.m., until the cops finally came along and hassled you, as if you were a drunk driver. No, that's no big deal.”

  Elizabeth laughed.

  “God, I was mad. I thought they were coming to my rescue, and instead they made me get out of my cold car into a colder night and walk a chalk line to test my alcohol levels.”

  Loretta shook her head.

  “LA cops,” she said with a sigh, as if the statement carried its own explanation. “If I remember correctly, you not only had the TOWER in your reading, but it was crossed by the card of the MOON, which means the entire event was something created by your own subconscious as a warning, a way of shattering life as you know it and bringing in a whole new consciousness.”

  Elizabeth sighed. She stole a glance at her watch to see how many more minutes she had before the drying cycle was finished and she might escape the intimate observations of her neighbor.

  “There was no significance to it other than the simple fact that I was tired and lost control of my car. Phillip would have scolded me for tiring myself out with those experiments and for skipping dinner. That's what brought it on, not the tower or the moon… just a lack of carbohydrates.”

  “How long has your friend been dead?” Loretta asked bluntly.

  “A year,” Elizabeth answered without emotion, hoping to convey her disapproval at broaching the subject.

  “You'll forgive my saying so, but every time I talk to you down here, you mention that guy as if he were coming home for dinner tonight. Like my mother used to say, you've got to let go of the dead. If you don't, they won't let go of you. If you won't release people emotionally when they die, they can't be set free. They hang around in what they call the astral world… you know, like ghosts.”

  “I know.” Elizabeth said flatly. “Parapsychology is, after all, my line of work.”

  “Well then, you ought to know better than anyone what those dead folks need most. I read once that the Egyptians might have made a big mistake by mummifying and preserving those Pharaohs for so many years. It stops them from being able to reincarnate as something else.”

  “If you were a Pharaoh, believed to be a living god, why would you want to come back and reincarnate as anything else?” Elizabeth countered her logic.

  “I see your point,” Loretta said, scratching her head.

  Elizabeth welcomed the chance to retrieve her laundry, as the dryer in front of her spiraled to a lazy halt. She did not bother to fold her things, but jammed them into her clothes hamper to hasten her retreat from the laundry room philosopher.

  “I've got to run,” she lied.

  “Okay honey, but you remember what I told you. Let go of your friend. There'll never be a moment's peace for either of you until you do.”

  Elizabeth nodded and smiled as she made her way into the cool safety of the hallway. It was not that she disliked Loretta, or that she found her ill-formed, New Age comments about the hereafter and the layering of color of the human aura uninteresting. Such eccentric talk would have been fine at a carefully timed, not too frequent lunch, or a cocktail party given by a mutual acquaintance, but certainly not within the confines of one's own apartment building. Loretta was not an acquaintance that she cared to cultivate on too intimate a level. They had nothing in common except for the coincidence of the laundry day routine, and that, she feared, was not enough for her eager meddling.

  Chapter Three

  UCLA Campus

  As she drove to the university, Elizabeth realized that she had spent the anniversary of Phillip’s death on a desolate highway up in the hills waiting for help. A shudder of dread ran through her as she remembered the eyes in the mirror. Perhaps they had been Phillip’s stern eyes warning her, just has his note from a year ago had warned her that something evil lay in her path, threatening her with enough ferocity to have made his heart stop at the very thought. She sighed to herself. Perhaps Loretta was right. If she stopped allowing him into her cluttered but unoccupied thoughts, she would truly be better off.

  The telephone rang as she hurried to unlock the door to the lab. She lifted the receiver while still struggling to get her arm out of her coat.

  “Hello, is this Doctor Winslow?” a crisp voice came over the wire.

  Elizabeth nodded, “yes.”

  “This is Marc Augenbech. I left a note for you on your car. I do hope you got it, or I'm going to feel rather foolish.”

  “Yes, I received it,” Elizabeth stated coolly. She did not know why this icy breath had drifted into her tone, but he was somehow not what she had expected.

  After a hesitation, the voice continued. “Well, have you given any thoughts to my request? I do hope it's possible.”

  Elizabeth gathered herself, then answered.

  “Yes, of course I remember your request and I have given it thought. It's perfectly all right with me if you audit my experiments, but please understand that the work is very routine, nothing to write a dissertation about.”

  “I understand that,” the voice laughed. “I'm very glad.” With that, the line went dead.

  Elizabeth tapped the button on the headpiece to re-engage the conversation, but after a second, she got a dial tone and hung up. She had meant to ask him to come for a short interview, to bring a reference or a transcript so that she might review his background, but as it stood, she had authorized his admittance with a single nod, and he had taken it as final approval. She was still staring blankly at the lifeless telephone when a knock sounded at the door. She opened it to see a man in his late thirties, wearing a leather jacket, standing outside.

  “I'm Marc Augenbech,” he said, extending his hand.

  Elizabeth's mind raced. How did he get there so quickly? He was not a distinguished old gentleman as she had surmised from his note. He was not at all what she had intended him to be. She felt a sensation akin to embarrassment when he took her hand and smiled boyishly at her.

  “Are you German?” Elizabeth asked.

  The stranger's eyes brightened with amused curiosity. “Actually, I'm American. Born in Dalhart, Texas.”

  Elizabeth sighed with audible disappointment.

  “I hope your work doesn't rely solely on data supplied by German nationals,” Marc asked with some measure of sincerity.

  Elizabeth laughed and shook her head. She could not understand why anyone who dressed as expensively as he did, or who was as handsome, would have the slightest interest in the obscure work of lab research.

  He explained that he was a painter by profession and a would-be actor, working only when opportunities presented themselves. He made jokes about being the starving artist or the out of work actor in search of a play, making himself seem easy and accessible. Still, Elizabeth could not take her eyes off the expensive leather jacket and the tweed slacks that he wore. In an uneasy way, she sensed he was not at all what he claimed to be. He was neither starving nor helpless, and yet he had chosen to hide behind the well-acted role of the harmless young man. Elizabeth suddenly wished that she had washed her hair that morning and worn nicer shoes.

  “I hope I'll do,” Mister Augenbech broke into Elizabeth's thought, “be up to snuff, I mean.” He did not appear to be a man who had ever heard a negative reply to that query.

  Elizabeth could not help but sense a bat squeak of theatrical formality in the way he put things into words. He presented himself like a rakish suitor in a turn of the century farce, and she watched carefully, half expecting that at any moment he might bow from the waist and kiss her hand. It was not that she found him obsequious. It was more as if he displayed a kind of long lost charm and courtliness, polished to the point where it seemed comfortable and second nature to him. Yes, she thought to herself he could be more useful than he realized. He might be just the sort of person who could charm the Board of Regents and their housebound wives into digging deeper into their pockets for funding. He might be called upon to sit through some of the tiresome banquets and benefits that she s
crupulously avoided. His dark curly hair and dazzling good looks would make him the perfect up-front person to breathe new life into her failing department.

  “You'll do just fine,” Elizabeth nodded. “But I warn you, Mister Augenbech, the work is slow and very unglamorous. I hope your expectations aren't too unrealistic.”

  “Call me Marc,” he said, flashing a smile that convinced her that the role she intended for him had real possibilities.

  As the afternoon progressed, Elizabeth's new protégé would not be content with merely the first day tour, and asked countless questions about the nature of Extra Sensory Perception and the theories behind the research.

  “Time is the key to how a thought can seem to travel from one person to another, even halfway around the world,” Elizabeth explained. “Since the late sixties, the Soviets, a Doctor Kozyrev in particular, have proven that time is not propagated like light waves, but appears everywhere at once. Every second of time links each of us as a constant to anywhere and everywhere in the universe. Telepathy, therefore, depends on the density of time, and these scientists have determined that time, as a substance, is actually less dense or thinner nearer the cause and denser at the effect, or more appropriately, thinner at the sender of a telepathic thought and denser at the receiver.

  Time is shown to be a physical reality rather than an abstract concept and explains why, for instance, when an accident occurs or you're in a car crash, everything seems in slow motion. That is in part due to the fact that you are the receiver of an action or event and are actually surrounded and passing through a denser, slower-moving form of time as a substance.”