Mediums Rare by Richard Matheson Read Free Book Online

gown and brought downstairs to the dining room to have breakfast with him.
    Scarcely awake, she sat in dutiful silence while he lectured her, telling her how he expected her to behave in his absence.
    Too sleepy to concentrate on his words, Gladys stared at the wall across from her, enjoying the vision she had seen for several years now.
    Before her lay a green valley bordered by verdant hills. The sky above was a sparkling blue, the light a vivid golden hue although there was no sunshine and no shadows.
    Walking on the velvet-like grass, past banks of multi-colored flowers, were couples and groups of people dressed in graceful, flowing robes of varying hues. They all looked happy and contented.
    As they always did.
    “
Gladys
,” said her father firmly.
    She blinked and turned her head to look at him.
    He was gazing at her with a frown of disapproval.
    “What the devil are you looking at?” he asked.
    She stared at him, not knowing what to say.
    “You haven’t heard a word I’ve spoken,” he told her. “You’ve been staring at that wall the entire time.
Why?”
    She swallowed. “I….”
    “
What
?” he interrupted. “What were you looking at? That pair of mounted pistols?”
    “
Oh, no
,” she said, concerned that he would think that.
    “What then?”
    She felt a sense of confusion. Dada didn’t
see
it?
    “My …place,” she said. “My Happy Valley.”
    He gaped at her. “Happy—?” he began, then did not complete the phrase.
    After several moments of dark appraisal, he did complete it.
“Happy Valley
?” he enunciated slowly.
    “Yes, Dada.”
    William Jocelyn Osborne put down his cup of coffee and leaned across the table to peer suspiciously at his daughter.
    “
What in the name of God are you talking about
?” he demanded.
    At first, her father, then her family, thought that Gladys was making it up.
    But when she persisted, describing, in such minute detail, what she saw, they became alarmed, then punitive.
    Their orthodox beliefs did not include probing into “things which were not meant to be understood.”
    Gladys was forbidden to ever see this “Happy Valley” again.
    In time, the visions—doubtless weakened by the collective negativism of her family, her doctors and friends—disappeared, leaving Gladys with a sense of deprivation.

    When Leonore Simonds was twenty-two, she married William Piper of Boston.
    At the urging of her father-in-law—because she was suffering from the effects of an accident experienced some years earlier—Leonore was persuaded to consult a blind clairvoyant named J.R. Cocke who was attracting considerable attention by his uncanny medical diagnosis and subsequent cures.
    Those who attended the meeting that Sunday night were seated in a circle around which the clairvoyant slowly moved, placing his hands on the head of each person in turn.
    While he was standing opposite Mrs. Piper, diagnosing the afflictions of the woman seated across from her—on whose head Dr. Cocke’s hands were resting—the face of the clairvoyant seemed to get smaller and smaller to her eyes as though it were receding into the distance.
    Mrs. Piper began to lose all consciousness of her surroundings.
    It did not return until the blind clairvoyant stopped behind her and placed his hands on her head.
    Abruptly, she shuddered as a chill ran through her body.
    She saw, in front of her, a flood of light in which a number of odd faces were hovering.
    Then a hand passed to and fro before her eyes.
    Dr. Cocke jerked his hands from her head as Mrs. Piper stood and walked around him to a table in the center of the room on which writing materials had been placed earlier.
    Picking up a pencil, she leaned over and, for almost a minute, wrote rapidly on a piece of paper.
    Then she turned, handed the piece of paper to an elderly man seated in the circle and took her chair again.
    A few moments later, she started, re-focusing her eyes. Looking at her husband, she murmured, curiously, “What’s