Chapter 8
Eight
Llewellyn Wren threaded the movie reel himself. It turned out they weren’t watching any scary movie . . . but one starring Llewellyn himself.
Colin’s grandfather was not always, or even often, a part of their get-togethers in the study. Years later, though, when Arthur
thought back on their almost daily gatherings at The Briars to do schoolwork, or share a meal, or test each other for psychic
powers, it seemed to him the old man often wandered among them for a while, warming himself by the hearth of their enthusiasms.
Or maybe that had it backward and they warmed themselves by his.
He was a spare, slight man who said things like “Hot dog!” or “Swell!” as if he were a 1940s newsboy stuck in an old man’s
body. To remove an object from his Cabinet of Curiosities was to invite an hour of exuberant conversation, full of digressions
into history, psychology, and literature. One night, Donna found a jade box, filigreed with gold. She slid open a drawer in
the side to reveal a collection of small, dusty ivory pieces. It was an Egyptian game of Set, which Llewellyn said represented
a voyage from one world to the next. They had been playing for nearly an hour before the old man casually mentioned the pieces
were an infant’s finger bones.
Another time Donna removed a long-barreled rifle and sighted down the length of the room with it. Llewellyn was at his desk,
where he had a candy jar full of Excedrin, which he tossed back like M&Ms. His eyes brightened and his eyebrows rose at the
sight of the gun.
“Who’d this belong to? Lee Harvey Oswald?” Donna asked, cheek pressed to the stock as if she planned to put a slug into the player piano.
“Close,” Llewellyn said. “A substitute English teacher with a history of mental illness attempted to assassinate a Congressional
candidate, Greg Stillson, with that gun. The shooter, John Smith, supposedly suffered from the gift of prophecy. He for sure
suffered from a brain tumor. They found a cancerous mass as big as your fist at his autopsy. Golly—wouldn’t that be something
for the Cabinet? John Smith’s brain tumor! I wonder if it’s pickled in a jar somewhere.”
“My parents loved Greg Stillson,” Allie said.
“My dad did a couple of events with him, said he could’ve been president.
He was polling great with independents and white evangelicals.
It was so sad. He had such terrible PTSD after the assassination attempt, he killed himself.
John Smith might as well have shot him.”
“Do you think the baby had PTSD too?” Van wondered. “The one Stillson was using as a human shield when John Smith drew down
on him?”
“Ignore him,” Donna said. “That’s a lot of Van’s leftie bullshit. Stillson was trying to throw the baby to safety. Rush Limbaugh had a pretty good breakdown of what really happened.”
Arthur didn’t have any comment. His mother had been arrested protesting outside a Stillson rally and was of the opinion that
Greg Stillson pretty much ate babies.
Llewellyn’s seventy-year-old mind was itself a kind of cabinet of curiosities. There was no end to the things he knew. He
collected butterflies and reels for his player piano. He was casually fluent on the current thinking in psychology . . . and
Swedish film, cheese-making, and the spiritual beliefs of the !Kung bushmen. He preferred Jung to Freud, and claimed, with
an unnerving certainty, that extraterrestrials had been present as neutral observers at Los Alamos on the day Oppenheimer
lit the Bomb.
Today, Llewellyn and Colin were behind an iron Bell & Howell projector from the 1960s and Allie was rolling down a small classroom movie screen in front of the desk.
Donna and Gwen were rearranging the stools from the card table into a kind of seating area.
Van sprawled on the piano bench, smoking one of Llewellyn’s Sobranies, watching the smoke trickle toward the ceiling.
Colin ran an extension cord to the projector while Llewellyn threaded the reel. Llewellyn spoke as he worked, offering them
a sort of prologue to the film at hand.
“I gather Colin has already told you something of Dr. Whitton’s Philip Experiment in Toronto. Joel Whitton was well read on
the Victorian séance, and while the spiritualists of that day were easy marks for hoaxers, it was clear that many séances
had produced phenomena worth exploring: voices, abrupt changes in temperature, levitation in plain daylight. Whitton believed
if you could get a group with a shared belief system into a relaxed, creative state, they could throw reality for a bit of
a wobble. So he and a gang of merry sociologists and psychologists came up with an experiment. They invented the fictional
Philip Aylesford and began to hold séances to see if they could contact him.”
“Even though they made him up?” Gwen asked, pushing her glasses up her nose. Her mother had sent her in with mugs of tea and
then she had stayed, Colin inviting her to join them with as little as a glance at an empty chair.
“Even though. Dr. Whitton felt that Philip was simply a magnifying glass to focus their directed unconscious. And by the fall
of 1972, Philip was showing up at every séance. Division 19—the branch of the US military concerned with psychological research—figured
it warranted further investigation, and as their in-house researcher, I was tasked with replicating Whitton’s work. Our ghost
was one Elwood Hondo, who died in the chair after strangling several young men in Florida. I had a theory that a killer would
produce a more aggressive and hence more measurable response.”
“A made-up killer,” Donna said. “You made up a homicidal maniac because you thought he’d be more likely to do violent ghost shit.”
“We certainly didn’t want a ghost too polite to rattle his chains,” Llewellyn said. “Ask any novelist—an unstable, violent
personality is a wonderful thing for advancing the plot.”
The projector began to chatter, and Colin shut off the lights. A square of brightness appeared on the pull-down screen. The image was fuzzy for a moment, then Llewellyn adjusted something and the picture sprang into focus.
Half a dozen men and two women were squeezed in around a folding card table. Arthur recognized Llewellyn straight off, although
he had a tidy black mustache and wore a thick burgundy turtleneck that was as much of the era as lava lamps and disco. None
of the men were in uniform. A bull-necked Black man wore mirrored sunglasses, even though the group was indoors and there
were no visible windows. The women were in their late forties or early fifties, with hairstyles straight off The Brady Bunch. All of them
sit with fingertips lightly touching the table’s surface. A low bookshelf crammed with textbooks runs the length of the wall
behind them. A reel-to-reel tape recorder sits on top of it, spools turning slowly. Normally, this would be a briefing room,
but today, maybe thirty bare metal chairs have been folded up and stacked against the wall to one side.
Several of the people around the table are murmuring to one another, as if they are gathered at a suburban cocktail party.
Llewellyn’s voice rises above them all, clear and playful:
“Corporal Hondo? Are you with us tonight? Elwood? I have a whole folder of dirty pictures here. If you can be a good boy and
give us a knock, I’ll show them to you.”
“Give us a knock,” shouts a woman, and one of the men joins in, “Give us a couple raps, Elwood!”
“C’mon, Elwood boy,” says the Black man in the mirrored shades. “You know you want a look in that folder. Got one of some
skinny ol’ white boy just chokin’ on a dick. You gonna love it.”
1970s-Llewellyn flips open the folder and turns over a photograph within. The photo cannot be seen from the camera’s fixed
angle. “Do you want to see one, as a sort of appetizer? Feast your eyes, dear boy. And if you like this, there’s more and better where that came from. But if you want to view the others, you’ll have to give us a sign. Give us
a good old rap on the table and say hello.”
One of the women begins to sing “We Are the Champions” at the top of her voice. Several others join in. They have made it through a bit of the first verse when a metal folding chair falls over with a sharp clap of steel on concrete and
Donna screamed and almost fell over in her own chair. Arthur, who was right behind her, reached to steady her. Colin laughed, a teenager going over the first drop on a fast roller
coaster, high on his own velocity. On the screen the
revelers look around. The sing-along hitches, falters . . . and then they throw themselves back into it, louder than before, WEEEeeeEEE’LL KEEEEEEEEP on fffIIIIIIIIGHTIN’ . . .
Another folding chair falls with a crash, followed by another. They collapse with one shocking steel bang after another. Then
a chair goes flying, as if thrown. A second follows it. Something flings a whole stack of them. At the séance table, Llewellyn
and the women erupt into manic laughter. The man in the sunglasses begins to withdraw his hands from the table, catches a
cautionary glance from Llewellyn, and puts his fingertips back. All of them are twisting in their seats to watch the folding
chairs tumble and crash. One of the folding chairs opens itself up and then begins to walk across the room, opening and closing, hitching itself along.
Suddenly the members of the séance are rising unsteadily to their feet. They have to stand if they want to keep their fingers on the tabletop, because the card table is coming loose from the floor, wobbling
drunkenly into the air, and someone cries out—
“That’s where I’d get the fuck out of the room,” Van said.
“Not me,” Gwen said. The glow of the movie screen lit up her glasses, turned them to circles of ghost-colored light. “I think
I’d stay. You don’t turn your back on a guy like Elwood Hondo.”
“A make-believe guy?” Arthur asked.