The Unseen (21 page)

They moved on to the last door, facing them at the end of the hall.

As they stepped in, Laurel gasped.

It was large and dark—almost completely black, due to the solid wood shutters covering every window.

But her gasp was at the touch of the room. There was a sense of it like breath, a cool, live presence. Brendan stepped close to her and she could feel his warmth, although from far away.

They stood suspended in the breathing dark … and slowly their eyes became accustomed to the room, illuminated only by the thinnest shafts of light from the shutters.

“Library,” Audra’s voice came from somewhere.

There was a sudden blinding intrusion of light. Laurel blinked against the assault, dazzled, and saw Brendan silhouetted by the window, opening the shutters.

As her eyes adjusted she saw the room was dark-paneled and lined against one long wall with built-in bookshelves of some fine hardwood. There were tables, cushioned window seats under every window, two fireplaces, a standing globe, and an elegant carved bar, above which was a large framed painting of a dashing man in his forties, wearing a crimson smoking jacket. The painting was powerful but crude, the same primitivism of the family portrait in the entry downstairs. On the walls without bookcases were hundreds of black-and-white photographic portraits of men and women, mostly studio shots.

It was a magnificent, resonant room.

Laurel moved slowly along the wall of bookshelves.

Audra spoke behind, her voice distant, abstracted. “You’ll recognize many of the names under those photos: the authors who came here to work and play in the twenties and thirties—even a few movie stars. This room has seen a lot.”

Laurel had reached the end of the wall and turned to the next wall of bookshelves. A familiar navy blue volume caught her eye—a Duke yearbook, and she jolted at the date—1965.

Brendan spoke suddenly. “Audra, what is it you’re not telling us?”

The agent turned vacuously inquiring eyes on him.

“You’ve skipped a good deal of the history of the house. In the interest of full disclosure, I think it’s time you were straight with us. What exactly happened here, that no one has really lived in the house since the sixties?”

Audra’s gaze burned with resentment, and Laurel could see her calculating, coming to some decision. When she spoke it was with no inflection. “James and Julia’s son, Paul Folger, suffered from what they called dementia praecox.”

Brendan and Laurel knew instantly what she meant. “Schizophrenia,” Laurel said aloud.

“Paul Folger showed early signs of having a talent like his father’s, in painting rather than writing, but the story was that he became ill in the military—delusional and violent. There were no antipsychotics at the time, of course, only frontal lobotomies, electroshock, or permanent institutionalization. He was discharged from the service and returned home.”

“After James Folger’s death in Iwo Jima, Julia and her daughter Caroline kept Paul at home. After Julia’s death, Paul’s sister oversaw his care for fifteen years. Caroline rarely left the house; Paul Folger never did.”

Audra paused for a second, then continued tonelessly.

“Caroline killed herself in the house in 1960. At the same time that her body was discovered, her brother was found dead in his bed.”

“She killed him and then herself?” Brendan asked.

Audra didn’t answer. “No one has lived in the house since,” she said.

They were all silent in the library: there was a pall in the air. Laurel just had time enough to wonder what could have taken place between a spinster sister and a mad brother in fifteen years of living alone together, when Brendan spoke.

“Of course, people die in houses, all the time. As family histories go, that’s not too gruesome of one. Are you certain there weren’t more—occurrences?” Brendan suggested.

“I don’t know of any
occurrences,
” Audra said stiffly. “I’ve done some reading about the Folger family. The house has changed hands many times since then. That’s the extent of my knowledge of the house.”

“We’d like to rent it,” Brendan said beside Laurel.

Both Laurel and Audra turned to him, startled.

Brendan looked at Audra guilelessly. “The house is just sitting here. Why not get some money for it?” He took Laurel’s hand again, including her. “We can move in here and look for another place at our leisure. You can arrange that for us, can’t you?”

Audra looked from one to the other. “Who are you?” she said softly.

The room was completely silent, waiting.

No.
Hovering.

“We’d like to rent this house, Ms. Lennox,” Brendan said again. “Who do we need to contact to do that? You’ll be paid a commission, of course.”

His certainty was chilling. Laurel felt she was standing beside a whole different person. Even his voice was different.

“I sincerely doubt that will be possible. But I will phone the Historical Society,” Audra said flatly.

“You are an angel. We really appreciate it, don’t we, hon?” Brendan said, back to his usual ebullient—
and false,
Laurel thought grimly—charm.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Audra’s cell phone chimed as they stepped through the front doorway. She excused herself and moved off, pacing the gravel drive while speaking into the phone. Brendan drew Laurel toward a statue and bench under a magnolia tree, out of earshot. Laurel was momentarily arrested by the statue, the ambivalent look on the naked nymph’s face. She forced her eyes away and turned to Brendan, speaking in low disbelief.

“You want to
rent
it?”

“We’re going to replicate the experiment.” As Laurel’s eyes widened, he pushed on. “It’s a perfect house. A weird history, a weird vibe, schizophrenia, suicide, reported paranormal events. There are established protocols for a previous experiment. We do the whole damned thing exactly the same way. Test for ESP and PK, bring the highest scorers into a house with a documented history of events, and see what expectation plus ability does in those circumstances.”

Laurel could not at first speak through the surge of disbelief, and then Brendan was motioning her silent, as Audra made her way delicately across the overgrown lawn.

Audra dropped them back at Brendan’s car on Main Street as evening shadows fell, and they drove the forty miles back to Durham on a dark road with the looming dark shapes of trees around them. Laurel kept feeling odd little flip-flops in her stomach. Brendan was positively manic, blasting the radio, singing along to Nirvana. Laurel tried to think over the music.

“I think we can safely say that the house has a history,” Brendan interrupted his Kurt Cobain imitation to beam over at her.

Laurel suddenly realized something that had been nagging at her. “But how did Audra know all that? Where’s she getting her information?”

Brendan considered. “The Historical Society, most likely. Also, we’re thinking the clip files were stolen by the same person or people who erased Leish and the Folger Experiment from Duke’s records … but any one of the new owners could have disappeared the clip files as well—erase the sordid history of the house when he was trying to unload it. Audra could’ve read those before they disappeared.”

He paused. “There’s another explanation, of course,” he said, and maddeningly, waited until she had to ask.

“Well?”

“Leish made up the entire story. Every bit of it. Except for the initial poltergeist report—the police report confirms that.”

She stared at him. “But why would he?”

“Maybe he was testing expectation. For all we know he was just trying to prep his research subjects to anticipate something in the house. He stole the clip files himself to conceal the real and more boring history of the family and started rumors instead, and that invented story became ‘fact,’ and Audra was just parroting back to us what Leish had created as the history of the house.”

Laurel tried to process the idea.

“We may never know,” Brendan said cheerfully. “In any case it’s a fantastic story to tell our own team. Schizophrenia, suicide, possibly murder … poltergeists will be showing up no time.”

Laurel stared out the passenger window into the rushing dark. Beyond the fact that—at least according to classical definition—the history he was rattling off so blithely was more conducive to ghosts than poltergeists, Brendan’s exultant tone deeply disturbed her.

“We can’t really duplicate the experiment, you know,” she said, trying to bring it all back to some level of sanity. “Even if we did know all the details, which we don’t, the original investigation took place soon after there was actual reported poltergeist activity. That was over forty years ago. According to all the literature, poltergeists don’t generally stick around that long.” Then something else occurred to her. “Actually, if we accept the theory that poltergeist activity is caused by human agents, the agent wasn’t there, either. The housekeeper and her family moved out before the investigators moved in.”

“I know. Interesting, isn’t it?” Brendan said. “The family was long gone. And Leish didn’t have his full team until April. What he did was bring his own agents. But clearly he thought
something
would happen. And it did, didn’t it?”

“Yes, it did. It went totally wrong. Dangerously wrong.” Laurel said, with a growing sense of disbelief.

He laughed. “Mickey, Mickey, you’re classic. You’re believing your own story. What single shred of evidence do you have for any of your disaster scenario? Two students who dropped out of school in the sixties? One who ended up on the street? Do you know how many people end up homeless and in the streets? I have a couple in my own family, if you want to start counting.”

And sometimes they don’t have to be homeless to be lost,
Laurel thought, but said nothing.

“But what if there
was
a good reason to bury it?” she said pointedly.

“Like what?”

She was silent. She had no idea what could go wrong during a poltergeist experiment that wasn’t out of a bad horror movie. Despite her suspicions, she had not been able to come up with any kind of scenario that made sense. And part of her, the L.A. part, was well aware that if a book on poltergeists was commercial, a book about poltergeists and murder, or some other disaster, was moving into bestseller territory.

Brendan picked up her hand and squeezed it, which sent an electric current through her entire body, completely derailing her train of thought. “Don’t go second-guessing this. We don’t even have to know what really happened in the house—that might just taint our impressions. Let’s strive for beginner’s mind.”

Laurel groped for an objection that would make sense. “You really think Dr. Unger will approve a study on how to create a poltergeist? How would we even propose it?”

“We don’t,” he said so grimly she felt a prickle of unease. He must have sensed her reaction because he smiled and took on a lighter tone. “What we propose is to run the original Rhine ESP tests with an emphasis on how personality factors affect results. We administer standard personality tests to study correlations between personality traits and psi scores. In the proposal we’re just running the tests. But really we’re scouting our team.”

Laurel felt an unwanted thrill of enthusiasm. She forced it down.
We. Our. Forced pairing again.
She reminded herself that it was folly to trust him. But she kept all that to herself.

“There’s no guarantee at all we’re going to find high scorers like the ones in the Folger Experiment,” she pointed out.

“True,” he admitted. “But it’ll be fun trying.”

She had to fight not to smile. “Very scientific.”

“It’s a perfectly valid study and I’m shocked that no one else has jumped in to do it,” he said primly. “We concentrate on how expectation influences results. Now, if while we’re doing that, we happen to find our high scorers, well, the experiment … evolves.”

He grinned at her and this time she couldn’t hold back her own smile. But just as quickly his grin faded, and his eyes took on an intensity that was almost mesmerizing.

“I want to see what it is that they did, back then. I want to see what they were doing that scared everyone so much that they completely buried it.” He stared out the windshield into the dark.

Laurel felt there were so many things wrong with the idea she didn’t even know where to start. But the conversation was entirely theoretical, anyway.

There’s no chance anyone’s going to rent us that house, the idea is completely absurd.

Of course, she’d be fired when she walked into Unger’s office for her meeting and had nothing to propose to him, but she’d deal with that. Somehow. Tomorrow.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The next morning, when Laurel opened her eyes, something had changed. The light in her bedroom was a different color, a golden orange, pulsing with its own energy.

She walked downstairs in the same golden light. She opened the door onto her porch—and stopped dead in the doorway. It was, again, as if she had opened the door onto Oz—an Oz of autumn-toned Technicolor: hallucinatorically brilliant yellows, golds, reds, oranges.

The leaves had turned.

Laurel walked in a daze off the steps into the yard, gaping in awe at the jewel-toned trees: the blinding yellow of a poplar, the ruby glow of a Japanese maple, feeling as if the top of her head had come off and pure sensation was flowing directly into her brain.

It had happened everywhere. Overnight. She almost had an accident on the way to campus when she slammed on the brakes to stare at a tree that seemed on fire, glowing with an orange so pure and intense it was literally painful to look at. Her head was buzzing, she was tingling all over. By the time she got to the Psych building, she felt as if she were hallucinating, which was the only explanation she had for what happened next. She was walking down the second-floor hall toward her office in a weightless daze, when footsteps pounded behind her and Brendan caught up with her in the hall. “We’re good to go.”

She was still giddy from the trees and had no idea what he was talking about. “What?”