The Unseen (23 page)

She had no other proposal to offer to keep her job, no other plan. And despite her nagging unease, there was no record of anyone ever being harmed by a poltergeist, or by a ghost, for that matter.

But the bottom line was, she wanted to
know.
About the Folger House, about Leish, about Uncle Morgan, about her dream, about all of it.

She had to know.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Laurel announced the research project (which they were calling “Patterns and Personality Factors in Psi Testing” to draw the least attention to themselves as possible) to her Intro to Personality class on a windy fall day. Outside the windows the blazing trees were swaying and rustling, a kaleidoscope of bright acid colors in a warm, dry wind.

Laurel stood at the podium and looked out on her class. “Most of you have probably heard that Duke was the home to the first official parapsychology lab on an American university campus. For thirty-eight years, Dr. J. B. Rhine used scientific methods to test psi abilities like telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis in a laboratory setting.” She saw a number of students nodding their heads.

“I’m teaming up with Dr. Cody to conduct a series of tests based on those original ESP experiments, and we’re looking for student volunteers to be tested.”

A ripple of excitement spread through the lecture room, as tangible as the wind outside. Laurel heard muttered exclamations of “
Awesome!
” “
That’s killer
… .”

“What exactly is the experiment?” someone called out.

“We’ll be using Zener cards to test for psi, or ESP abilities.” Laurel held up a cardboard strip with Zener cards mounted on it to illustrate. There were murmurs of recognition from some of the class.

“I know what Mayfield is thinking right now,” a kid named Wooten called to his frat brother.

“What else is there to think about?” Mayfield shot back, and got a few laughs.

Tyler put his hand casually up in the air and slouched back against his chair, waiting for Laurel to call on him. She steeled herself mentally before asking, “Yes, Mr. Mountford?”

“Do you believe that parapsychology falls under the purview of psychology, Dr. MacDonald?” His voice dripped with respectful insolence.
“Believe”
was emphasized with a hint of incredulity.

Laurel did her best to hold her temper.
Trust Tyler to get right to the sticking point.

“I absolutely think that what we
believe
falls under the heading of psychology, and that will be the emphasis of these tests,” she answered evenly. “Anyone can volunteer, and we’re looking for as many volunteers as we can get so we can collect the widest range of responses. You’ll be taking several personality inventories as well. Pay is ten dollars per hour, and you can sign up on the sheet making the rounds, on the departmental bulletin board, or on the department Web site.”

When the sign-up clipboard came back to her, as she’d expected, Tyler’s name was the first on the list.

The response was overwhelming, to put it mildly. They had hundreds of student volunteers in the first two days. They couldn’t put flyers up fast enough: the tear-off contact numbers were gone within minutes; between the flyers and the “Call for Participants” on the departmental Web site, both their e-mail boxes were filled to capacity.

Laurel couldn’t believe how the idea captured the student imagination. Brendan was exultant. “What did I tell you? We’re onto something. When you’ve got it, you’ve got it.”

They’d had their meeting with Dr. Unger together and whatever doubts the Chair may have had about the legitimacy of the project were neutralized by his practicality: he knew a media-genic topic when he heard it. The project was approved instantly.

They were assigned two lab rooms in which to do the testing. First, they scheduled two large group sessions to administer the standard personality inventories to their volunteers, then they scheduled students for individual tests with the Zener cards.

Brendan had discovered a file box in the basement that was full of packs of original Zener cards, and they instantly agreed that they should use them. Just as exciting was their discovery of several of the original card displays and sorting boards in the equipment storage room of the basement, and several original dice-throwing machines, too.

Laurel and Brendan were in their lab preparing several sets of twenty-five cards—every set consisting of five each of the five symbols, each card encased in its own opaque white envelope—when J. Walter Kornbluth breezed into their testing room, bristling with casually collegial interest. He circled the room like an unhappy bee, his eyes drinking in the display board of Zener cards, the dice-throwing machines on another table.

“Well, this looks like déjà vu all over again,” he said with forced heartiness. Laurel laughed politely from the lab table where she was sealing Zener cards in envelopes, and said nothing. Kornbluth tried again. “So you’re replicating the Zener card tests for precognition?”

“With an emphasis on personality factors,” Laurel answered, in her best professor voice. “Obviously, we’re testing personality, not precognition,” she lied. “We’re administering NEO PI-R and Myers-Briggs to study correlations between personality traits and ESP scores.”

“Nothing groundbreaking, but of perennial interest,” Brendan said offhandedly, and passed another stack of sealed cards to Laurel.

Kornbluth stared at them suspiciously. “That’s the extent of your study? Replicating the precognition tests?”

“Oh, no,” Laurel said sweetly. “We’re also replicating the dice tests for psychokinesis, using the original dice machines.”

She had no idea if they were pulling it off; it seemed so patently obvious that they were completely hazing him. But Kornbluth wasn’t so much paying attention to them as he was circling the testing board, staring at the cards.

“And Unger really approved department funds for this—study?”

The quotation marks in his inflection were unmistakable.

“Well, you know how it is,” Brendan said humbly. “We can’t all write
USA Today
bestsellers. Some of us are destined merely to footnote the giants.”

Laurel kicked him under the table, thinking he’d really gone too far. But Kornbluth visibly perked up at the flattery. “I suppose.” He circled the room once more and finally departed.

Brendan closed the door behind him, and the two of them broke into stifled but irrepressible laughter. Finally Brendan got hold of himself.

“I’m telling you, we must be doing something right. Inspector Kornbluth is on the trail.”

The testing itself was amazing.

Each student volunteer was tested sitting at a table in front of a display stand of particle board, painted black, showing a row of the five cards with their different symbols: star, circle, square, two squiggly lines, and cross. Beneath each symbol was a built-in box big enough to hold a stack of envelopes. The test subject took one envelope-encased card at a time, held it, then placed the card in the box under the symbol he felt was inside it. A “run” was a set of twenty-five cards. Statistical chance would be five hits per run.

The students’ excitement was palpable in the tests: they
wanted
to do well. And Laurel was giddy with the sense of adventure and discovery. She felt her own mind opening and her senses reactivating. There was no predicting who was going to score what. A wistful and bookish girl tested well below chance, while the clowning, sweetly boneheaded center of the basketball team scored 20 percent above chance—in fact at the moment he was their high scorer, though nowhere in the range that they were looking for.

Their findings were bearing out what past studies had shown: extraverts scored significantly above chance, and introverts scored significantly below chance. If Laurel believed in ESP—and that was still a big
if
—she would have started to wonder if extraverts did better in social situations because they had that little extra edge of being able to read what people were really thinking, what they secretly wanted, and what one might say or do to put an unsuspecting person at ease—or manipulate them.

It occurred to Laurel that even if they never found their high scorers, the extraversion factor was enough to do a decent article, and her spirits lifted. In fact, watching the Zener card tests, she found herself holding her breath during a good run of hits. She
wanted
the student subjects to score high. And once in a while, like the gangly center, one did, but not anywhere near the level they were looking for to replicate the Folger Experiment.

Until Tyler.

Laurel ended up testing him herself through no plan of her own. She had been careful to assign Tyler’s card testing to Brendan. She was still furious with Tyler for having duped her with those phony stories of the haunted auditorium, although she had been careful never to let on to him that she knew he’d conned her.

But when she opened the door of the lab for her first test subject on Wednesday, he was standing there, smirking.

“Tyler,” she said, caught off-guard. “I have Paul Mayfield signed up for this slot.”

“We switched. Mayfield wasn’t up for coming in this early in the morning. Big night last night. Hope that’s okay,” he said innocently and sauntered past her into the room.

When she didn’t answer immediately, he turned to look at her. “Unless you don’t
want
to test me?” His voice went up questioningly in that uniquely Southern inflection.

She bit her tongue and indicated the big leather easy chair at the back of the room. When he was seated, with his usual indolent slouch, she took a position as far away from him in the room as possible. “We do this testing in the Ganzfeld, which means ‘empty field.’ Previous studies have shown that test subjects perform better when their minds and bodies are relaxed.”

Tyler smiled slyly. “It’s all about the performance, isn’t it?”

She ignored that, and showed him the sets of cards in their envelopes, explaining the sorting process. “After the relaxation preparation, you’ll be sorting these cards into the appropriate boxes in this display.” She indicated the board with the set of Zener cards posted above the boxes. “You hold each envelope for as long as you like and then put it in the box under the symbol you think it contains—that’s all there is to it. The CD I’m about to play is to relax you, put you in a receptive mood.”

Then she handed him the eye goggles. “Put these on, and you can either close your eyes or keep them open.” He smiled at the Ping-Pong goggles, but put them on and sat forward, poker-faced, staring at her with Ping-Pong-ball eyes. She had to fight a surge of annoyance and amusement.

“Just sit back and make yourself comfortable in the chair, and the CD will lead you through some relaxation exercises. When that’s done, we’ll begin the card testing.”

He leaned back in the chair. “Are you going to be watching me?” He made it sound like porn.

“I’ll be here but not watching, no.”

She was familiar with the relaxation CD by now: typical New Age meditation music with interspersed suggestions for letting go of tension in different parts of the body. Even though she’d heard it dozens of times, it was surprisingly effective, almost instantly relaxing, which at the moment was welcome, since Tyler always seemed to know exactly what to do to make her blood pressure skyrocket.

She started the CD, then sat at her desk to wait. As the music filled the room, she felt her own neck and back untensing, her muscles unclenching, her breathing slowing. The sterile lab room seemed to soften, becoming a peaceful cocoon. Tyler had sunk into the chair like a big housecat (apparently relaxation was another one of his talents), and was thankfully silent.

At the end of the recording, she spoke softly. “When you’re ready, you can take off the goggles, and we’ll begin.”

Tyler smiled lazily, without moving or taking off the goggles. “Well, I’m definitely ready for
something
.”

He reached to remove the goggles, unfolded himself from the chair and resettled himself at the testing table, where he proceeded to sort five sets of twenty-five envelopes into the boxes beneath the symbols. He was the picture of nonchalance, almost lazily handling the envelopes, then tossing them into the boxes with the precision of an experienced cardplayer.

Laurel pretended to be scoring other tests, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off him: Despite his practiced pose of boredom, there was a focused concentration in his every move that she found mesmerizing.

When he was finished, he pushed back the chair as languorously as he had slouched in it, and stood.

“Thank you, Mr. Mountford.”

“The pleasure was all mine,” he said, with a maddening half-smile. “So when do I get the results, Doctor?”

“We’ll be contacting students throughout the week,” Laurel said offhandedly. “Dr. Cody will be in touch.”

Tyler raised his eyebrows, but said nothing more as he strolled out.

As the door shut behind him, she took her keys and locked it from inside, then sat down in the seat in front of the Zener-card board to tally his results. She’d already administered Tyler’s personality tests in one of the large group testing sessions. Predictably, he’d scored very high in Extraversion (gregariousness, assertiveness, action, excitement-seeking) and Openness to Experience, and far lower in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness. She’d also noted with some surprise that his Neuroticism scores were also very high (anxiety, hostility, depression, impulsiveness, self-consciousness, vulnerability to stress).

But his Zener-card tests were off the charts.

She counted the cards out with growing incredulity, and checked them again to be sure. Tyler had correctly guessed a staggering average of twenty cards per twenty-five.

“He cheated,” Laurel told Brendan, as she paced in their lab room.

“How could he cheat?” Brendan said, leaning back on a high stool, entirely puzzled. “You were right there watching him, weren’t you?” Before she could protest again, Brendan barreled on, waving a sheaf of pages at her. “And take a look at his Paranormal Belief Scale scores. That kid doesn’t believe in
anything
. He’s a great control on the existing belief front.”