The Unseen (13 page)

“Now, as far as I can see Leish was involved in some way with the poltergeist investigations. He wasn’t in on the ones that Roll and Pratt did, the obvious ones like Seaford and Newark …” He glanced at her to see if she were following the references, and she nodded. “There was so much press coverage on those, it would have been easy to find out if Leish had been involved, and yeah, I checked. But he was reviewing
all
of the poltergeist cases. I know that because I found a requisition form for back files, signed by him.” He stared past her shoulder toward the aisles of the Rhine boxes. “Sometimes I swear they burned everything relevant and just saved the memos. Anyway, his handwriting is all over some of the documents I found.” Laurel started slightly at this, remembering the bold, spiked handwriting on the test documents, which were still tucked in the waistband of her skirt.

“My guess is that he was on another case, or maybe brought in specifically for one—but something went wrong and they’ve buried everything about it.”

Laurel was fighting a whole spectrum of conflicting feelings. “Why are you telling me all this?” Her voice sounded hollow in the cavernous basement space.

“It hasn’t been much fun working on it alone,” he admitted, and his candor tugged at her. “And sometimes what I’m thinking sounds so trippy I’ve just wanted a reality check. I mean, you can tell me—I won’t be offended. Does all of this sound completely nuts?”

“Well, it
was
nuts,” she responded spontaneously. “They were seriously studying poltergeists.”

He looked caught. “Okay, there’s a point.” Then his face lit up again and he leaned forward on the table so suddenly she flinched.

“I’ve been pulling documents. Some tests. Mostly stuff that I could figure out was in Leish’s handwriting. I compared it to photographs of his writing in several of his books.”

Brendan reached down into the backpack that he’d dropped beside the table and pulled out some manila file folders. He handed them across the table to her. There were pages paper-clipped together, with notes scribbled on top sheets that she assumed were Brendan’s. She lifted a top sheet to look at the first original document, the handwritten notes there. It was without a doubt the black, spiked handwriting from the tests she’d found.

She looked down on the writing without reacting, and flipped through the paper-clipped pages. The documentation in itself was innocuous: standard personality tests, invoices for work-study students.

“I know, I know—nothing earth-shattering,” Brendan said from across the table. “The point is, the notes are in Leish’s handwriting. And I know he wasn’t here to be an office boy.”

What quickened Laurel’s pulse was that the dates on the tests and forms were within weeks of the dates on the extraordinary test scores she’d discovered herself. Brendan was right, Leish was up to something. What Brendan didn’t know was that it was all leading up to something Leish had decided to call the Folger Experiment, that involved three of the highest-testing students the lab had ever seen.

She felt the cool rush of the air conditioner, and shivered.

Brendan was looking across the table at her and this time there was no hint of a smile on his face. “I think they brought him here for a poltergeist investigation. And whatever happened, it shut down the department permanently. They pulled the documentation concerning it—all of it they could find—and covered everything up. Which makes me think: maybe he actually found one.”

Looking into his eyes, she realized it was not the air-conditioning that was giving her a chill.

At that moment a bell jangled through the basement, so loud that both she and Brendan jumped out of their chairs to their feet …

… and then collapsed in laughter, recognizing the library closing bell.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

They sat over Chinese food in a restaurant on Franklin Street, nearby Chapel Hill’s main drag.

“Not so many Dukies, and if you half-close your eyes, sometimes you can imagine yourself back in Berkeley,” Brendan beamed at her over a chopsticks-load of lo mein.

“How long have you been doing this?” she asked.

“Ages,” he said glumly. “I moved here three years ago. I miss the Left Coast every day.”

Laurel actually had meant his research in the Rhine files, but as his words spilled out she didn’t feel like correcting him.

“At least the beach is close. The Outer Banks are out of this world.” He brightened slightly. “And then there’re the leaves.”

Laurel had never seen the leaves change in the fall. There were the few scattered deciduous trees that you’d see around Southern California, but she’d never experienced a full-color East Coast autumn.

“Never seen them, huh?” he said, reading her mind. “It’s a trip. You’ll see. You can’t even begin to describe it.” He looked a little dreamy and she felt an unwelcome surge of longing, which she quickly pushed down, closing off.

“Actually, I was asking about the Rhine files,” she said, her voice cool. “How long have you been sorting through them?”

“Mid … summer,” he said vaguely. “I had no idea they were there, at first. The unsealing of the files has not been all that widely publicized, bizarrely. It’s almost as if …” He stopped.

“As if what?”

He shook his head. “I’ve been trying to find out. The official story is that the files were sealed for a generation to protect the privacy of study participants. But anyone who would have known the real dirt is dead, and no one associated with the university wants to talk about it.”

“And why are you so interested?”

He broke into a huge, irresistible smile. “Oh, please. How much cooler does it get? You start reading this stuff, the field reports of clairvoyance, crisis apparitions, telepathy … and it’s like, whoa. It happens
all the time.
The dying relatives appearing to their family members. The brides-to-be who dreamed their fiancés’ mistresses.”

Laurel froze.

But Brendan Cody rolled right on, oblivious. “You read these same stories, over and over, and you
know
they’re true. They’re all the same. From all over the world. It happens. To perfectly ordinary people.”

Laurel felt the cool tingling behind her ears, the excited fluttering in her stomach. It was exactly the way she had felt. Exactly.

“And then you get to the poltergeist stuff. I mean,
man.
”

In front of them, the water glass suddenly slid across the table by itself.

Laurel gasped. Brendan’s eyes were almost comically bugged out, glued to the glass. Laurel realized what had happened just as he laughed and reached for the glass, shaking his head.

“No, look. I couldn’t resist.” As she watched, he slid the glass over a puddle of condensation on the smooth surface of the table, then took his hand away. A few seconds later, the glass slid several inches on its own.

He shrugged apologetically. “Old bartender trick. Put myself through grad school behind the bar at O’Houlihan’s on Geary.”

Yeah, and I can just imagine the tips you were getting—from women
and
men.
Laurel pushed back her chair, overcome with the instinct to flee, when he reached across the table, practically lunging, and grabbed her arm.

“Come on come on come on. I was just trying to prove a point. You should have seen your face—you lit up like a Fourth of July sky when that glass moved.” Before she could protest, he tightened his grip on her arm. “You know it’s true. This stuff is exciting, home girl. It’s out-of-this-world exciting.”

Laurel felt a rush of blood through her body, to her head, as if the very fact of him saying “exciting” could elicit a physical reaction.

Just stop it,
she warned herself.

But Brendan was not only oblivious, he was on a roll. He nodded to the long bar along the side wall. “I was reading the other night about a pub in Denver that had a ghost that walked down the bar and blew on the backs of all the women’s necks.” Laurel laughed, startled, and he grinned at her. “Yup. The bartenders said you could watch it happening. A woman sitting at the bar would suddenly turn around as if someone had touched her neck—and there was no one behind her. And then you could see it happening all the way down the bar, one woman after another turning to look. Only the women, ever.” He laughed aloud, his eyes shining. “You want personality, Dr. Myers-Briggs? There’s
personality
there, no doubt about it. Pure personality.”

Well, he has your number,
she thought in a daze.
Watch it,
she warned herself again.

He leaned forward on his elbows. “What I’m really interested in is the evolution of the character of the poltergeist. The word started appearing in general usage in the late nineteenth-century, with Catherine Crowe’s
The Night Side of Nature,
and people were starting to use ‘poltergeist’ to differentiate a certain set of phenomena from more sedate hauntings. Poltergeists were the ones that threw things around, that made noises, that pulled pranks. Some psychic researchers wrote that boisterous ghosts tended to show up in houses where children were living.”

“Children—or hysterical young female servants,” Laurel pointed out.

“Hah. Exactly. I’m getting to that, just hold your horses.” He slurped down another tangle of noodles, and took a large swallow of beer. It was his second pint, and it was already almost gone, and Laurel wondered about that, too.

“But no one disputed that poltergeists were ghosts—they were just a more violent or mischievous kind of ghost. It wasn’t until Freud—psychoanalytic theory and unconscious motivation and covert sexual drives—that this person-centered theory evolved to explain what a poltergeist was. The afterlife was out; neurosis was in. So suddenly you have Nandor Fodor writing about how poltergeists are the projected sexual repressions of traumatized adolescent girls.”

Laurel must have grimaced because Brendan nodded sagely. “Yeah, how Freudian, right? Blame it on the girls. Downfall of man, and all that.”

That made her smile in spite of herself, and he winked at her.

“Then Rhine comes along just at the same time as the science of statistics was invented, and the scientific method is
in.
The space program kicks into high gear … everything has to be scientifically quantified. So Roll and Rhine start in with the scientific terminology: focal person, attenuation—”

“Recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis,” Laurel finished.

“Yes.”
Brendan pointed at her with his chopsticks. “Sounds great, right? RSPK—how scientific is that? The focus of the Rhine Lab was to bring parapsychology into line with the ‘real’ sciences. So here we go with all the scientific terminology and the flow charts and the quantifiable results. And because it’s really tough to scientifically quantify the afterlife, researchers focused on the theory that poltergeists aren’t ghosts at all, but projections of human energy. But
I
think …”

He dipped into his noodles again, and scarfed them down in a prolonged slurp, before he continued. “I think that was all window dressing. Well, and the zeitgeist.

“Now, our man Leish was coming at it from a completely different perspective. He’d headed up these poltergeist investigations in Europe and reported back that poltergeist manifestations usually increased over the course of an incident—and actually stepped up once an investigator was on the scene. Leish didn’t think it was
one
agent at all. He thought it was a group dynamic that fueled poltergeist energy, that poltergeists were actually
created
by a spiraling group dynamic—which included the investigators.” He quoted: “ ‘The expectation and desire to experience a poltergeist factored into the manifestations.’

“Now look,” Brendan waved a chopstick for emphasis. “The post-RSPK theory is that poltergeists and hauntings are facets of the same phenomenon. Haunted houses can host RSPK outbreaks, and hauntings may to an extent be person-oriented. Most contemporary researchers admit in retrospect that the combination of haunting and poltergeist features is the rule, rather than the exception.”

His face grew serious and at the same time suffused with light. “But you know what I say? This isn’t a science. Not nohow, not no way. It is, I submit, asinine even to try to find the science in it.” He picked up the mysteriously moving glass and shook it at Laurel. “It’s the unknown, for Christ’s sake. But …
but.
” He paused, and waited until he had her absolute attention, then continued. “The psychology of it all is a different story. You can learn a lot about human psychology by studying test subjects’ reactions to completely unscientific phenomena. And that’s our book.”

“
Our
book?” she stammered. At the same time she felt a thrill start from the base of her spine and sizzle through her body to the top of her head.

“Of course, our book,” he said expansively. “It’s obviously big enough for a book.” He suddenly leaned across the table and snapped his fingers in front of her face. “Have you not been paying attention?” His eyes glowed with the candlelight. “This is
huge
. This is the meaning of life. Who are we? What are we capable of? What the hell other forces are we sharing this planet with? Do we have the freaking power or do we not?”

He was, she had to admit, completely mesmerizing. And he knew it, too, because he suddenly leaned back in his chair with his hands on his thighs, smirking, as if he’d won something.

“So what’s the current psychoanalytical construct for poltergeists, hmm? What
is
a poltergeist, for us, today? What does it look like? What does it
want?
”

Laurel just stared at him, speechless.

“That, my dear, is an award-winning book. I guaran-fucking-tee it.”

He leaned abruptly forward over the table, startling her. “So we’re going to do this, right?”

She looked at him, caught up in a miasma of feelings—helpless confusion, amusement, distrust, excitement. “Do
what?
How?”

“I—don’t know,” he admitted. “But whatever it is, we’re close.” His eyes were alight. “Don’t you feel that? We’re so close.”