The Unseen (37 page)

Laurel stepped closer to them and looked down at Tyler’s clipboard. There were random words scribbled on it—nothing like a sentence, just words:
shimmer growing round watching moving breathing.

“I think we should break for dinner,” she said, too loudly. “Tyler.”

“Things are finally starting to happen, Dr. MacDonald,” he said, without looking at her. “We can’t break now.”

Laurel stared at him in disbelief.
Is he actually being serious?

Laurel stepped closer to Katrina, who just clutched her clipboard to her chest protectively and continued to stare into the pool.

Laurel turned to Brendan. “We need to talk
now.
”

Irritation bordering on anger flickered across his face, but Brendan rose and followed her out of the room, through the entry hall, into the small library.

She closed the door behind him. Brendan hovered beside the door, not taking a seat, as if ready to bolt any second. “I think we need to leave,” Laurel said, and immediately knew it was not the way to start.

He half-laughed. “Mickey, we’re not leaving. The house is just starting to activate.”

“It’s a pool of water,” she said.

“It’s a pool of water that has formed itself in the exact spot, at the same rate of speed, in the exact dimensions—three times in a row, now.” His voice was patient, logical. For a moment Laurel felt like screaming, just to break his impenetrable wall of calm. Instead she tried a different tack.

“Don’t you want to know where I was, today?”

“Where were you?” he asked dutifully, without a hint that he’d even noticed she was gone.

“Dorothea Dix.”

He looked at her blankly, and finally it registered. “The asylum? In Raleigh? Why?”

“I found Victoria Enright. She was institutionalized in April 1965, with a diagnosis of catatonic schizophrenia.” In her mind Laurel saw Victoria again, slumped in her chair, hollow-cheeked, eyes dilated with horror …

“You left the house?” Brendan said, with a flare of ire. “We agreed not to do that.”

“Brendan, are you not listening to me? Victoria Enright participated in the Folger Experiment in 1965, and she has been in a mental institution ever since.”

Brendan sat on the edge of the peacock-covered love seat.

“Mickey, first of all, you don’t know that this Victoria Enright had anything to do with the Folger House. She was in a photo in a yearbook. What does that prove? You’re making huge logical leaps.”

“It’s not just Victoria,” Laurel said. “It’s all of them. We know Leish died. Rafe Winchester—”

“You aren’t really going to tell me that Rafe Winchester is at Dix, too.”

“Pastor Wallace is Rafe Winchester.”

He stared at her incredulously. “How do you know?”

She hesitated. “The yearbook photo.”

“The yearbook photo,” he said again, as if that ended the discussion. “That’s all the proof you have of all of this? A forty-two-year-old photo?”

“He’s the right age. He knows about the experiment.” She knew it sounded flimsy.

Brendan stared at her through the dim of the library, and his voice was suddenly gentle. “All right, stop. You are now officially freaking yourself out over nothing. This is not proof—it’s wild speculation, Mickey.”

“We can’t take a chance. We’re responsible for the well-being of two students. We’re shutting this down.”

His face closed and he stood. “You can leave if you want to. But I’m not.”

He started for the door and she turned on him. “We can’t keep these kids here when we don’t know what might happen.”

He halted by the door, in front of the ship in its glass case. He was looking at her with interest, now. “So you really think we’re in danger? From what?”

She stopped short, confused. Was she really thinking there was a … not a ghost, but some kind of danger, evil—in the house? Something that could actually cause madness, even death?

“I … didn’t say that.”

“What, then?”

Yes, what?

“People died here. Paul and Caroline Folger. Leish …”

“But that was over forty years ago,” he said patiently.

“Leish died while doing the exact same thing we are doing.” She was aware that her voice was rising, and that it made her sound unbalanced.

“We don’t know it was while he was engaged in the experiment. You’re making it sound like he died at the house, and you don’t know that.” He laughed, but there was no mockery in the sound. “Laurel, you’ve read all the same literature I have. People don’t get hurt by poltergeists. They certainly don’t get killed by them. Something may have happened, maybe even something terrible, but that part of it was human, not supernatural. What could that possibly have to do with us? I just don’t see where you think the danger is, here.”

“Victoria …” She swallowed, felt her voice breaking. “She’s been catatonic for over forty years… .”

His voice dropped, soft and comforting. “I’m sure it was unpleasant to see her. But mental illness is biochemical, Laurel. You don’t develop schizophrenia from trauma. You know that. Whatever is wrong with her has nothing to do with this house, or with us. She can’t do us any harm.”

“The pastor can. Whoever he is, he’s not stable,” Laurel said, grabbing on to something tangible. “It’s not safe for any of us, having someone like that wandering around.”

“A sixty-year-old man? How much of a threat can he be?” he said lightly.

But Brendan had not met the man, had not felt the madness emanating from him.

“You didn’t meet him.”

“No, I didn’t. In fact I haven’t even seen him,” he said pointedly.

She felt suddenly short of breath. “Are you saying I made him up?”

“Of course not,” Brendan said reassuringly, but it sounded hollow to her. She looked in the direction of the great room, where the students were.

“You can’t afford to be dismissive when we have two students working for us,” she repeated. “We’re responsible for their safety.”

“First of all, I haven’t seen anything remotely like danger in this situation, and second, Laurel, they’re adults. Being here is entirely their choice.”

She wanted to laugh at the idea that their two subjects were adults. Twenty-one was barely the age of reason.

“But they don’t know.”

“Know what?”

They don’t know what I know and don’t know.

She lifted her chin. “They don’t know any of this. It’s time to tell them.”

He stood looking at her for a moment, then turned up the palms of his hands. “All right. Let’s tell them.”

They found Tyler and Katrina standing over the monitors, their chairs beside the pool of water abandoned.

Brendan was instantly alert. “What? Did something happen?”

Tyler looked up with a scowl, and Katrina tendered Laurel one of her patented loathing looks. “No—it’s stopped happening,” Tyler said. “The pool stopped growing. It’s been at ten inches for half an hour—”

“Since
she
came back,” Katrina said pointedly, with a sideways glance at Laurel.

“The EMF readings have dropped back to normal, too,” Tyler said, without looking toward Laurel himself.

“Good. We all need to talk,” Laurel said firmly.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

The three of them refused to budge from the room, in case the pool “became active” again, so they were seated stiffly in the embroidered straight-backed chairs with the pool of water at their feet.

“We both feel you should know,” Laurel looked from Katrina to Tyler. “There’s more that’s gone in this house than we knew going into this investigation. There was a murder/suicide here—a sister and a brother, Caroline and Paul Folger. Paul Folger was discharged from the army because of paranoid delusions—he suffered from schizophrenia. The family kept him here instead of institutionalizing him… .” She glanced at Brendan, who was pointedly not looking at her. “They kept him in this house for fifteen years, until the sister killed him and herself on the same day.”

She looked from Tyler to Katrina. They were watching her, Katrina with a blank and unreadable look, Tyler with a faint smile. He raised his eyebrows, as if inviting her to go on.

“The Duke group who came here in 1965 did so after a report of poltergeist activity. It was an experiment—the one that we’re duplicating. It ended … badly. The researcher in charge of the investigation died, and as far as we’ve been able to determine, at least two of the student participants, maybe all three of them, suffered severe mental trauma.” She paused to let that sink in, and looked again from Tyler to Katrina.

“I’m sorry for my part in bringing you here, because I feel strongly that we don’t know enough about what we’re dealing with and we need to terminate the experiment and leave this house.” She looked around at all of them. She could feel Brendan bristling beside her, and Katrina’s contempt, rolling off her in waves. Tyler was studying her, a thoughtful, curious gaze.

“This guy … this researcher—,” he began.

“Leish,” Laurel supplied.

Tyler raised an eyebrow. “Leish. You mean the guy who wrote that article?” Laurel nodded. “How did he die?”

“We don’t know that. But he died in the same month as the experiment.” Laurel could hear the agitation in her own voice.

“And then what happened?”

“Well, the lab was shut down, and the files were sealed. They were only recently opened, in fact.”

Tyler leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked intently at Laurel. “I don’t think I get it. Those things happened—when?”

Brendan spoke before Laurel could. “Over forty years ago. Both of them.”

Tyler barely glanced at him, his attention was completely on Laurel. “So you’re thinking—we’re in some kind of danger from that? Forty years later?”

Laurel found her certainty wavering, just as when Brendan had asked the same question. It did sound far-fetched when anyone said it aloud.

She looked at the reflection of the group in the cloudy mirrors on the walls.

“Is this because of that trauma imprint you were talking about?” Now Tyler did look at Brendan.

“It’s one of the theories,” Brendan answered. “That an imprint of trauma—an echo—can remain in a house.”

“And it could
hurt
us?” Katrina was taking her cues from Brendan; her voice fairly dripped condescension.

“I have never read or seen any proof of that. Ever. We wouldn’t be here if I thought that,” Brendan assured her.

“So what do you think got imprinted, Dr. MacDonald?” Tyler asked. “Are you saying that the murder/suicide got imprinted on the house and somehow caused someone else’s death? Or caused someone else to go nuts?”

I don’t like the coincidence,
Laurel thought.

“It is a creepy coincidence, I guess,” Tyler said, and hearing her own thought voiced, she started, staring at him. “But it was forty years ago. Could an imprint last that long, Dr. Cody?” he said, turning to Brendan with that fake, interested-student look.

“It’s a paranormal theory,” Brendan said. “There’s no proof about any of these things.”

Laurel again felt caught in an undertow, mocked, and helpless to do anything about it.

“Well, seems to me that in the interest of science we should be staying right here and doing our job,” Tyler said, with exaggerated seriousness. Without budging an inch, Katrina gave the impression of having moved even closer to Brendan. “Especially with what we’ve seen this afternoon,” Tyler added disingenuously, giving Brendan an obsequious look, completely false. “We can’t possibly abandon the mission now.”

The three of them looked up at Laurel from their chairs, united. Laurel stood quietly, then dropped her head. “All right.” She turned and walked from the room.

Just as she reached the archway, Tyler said behind her: “Where did they keep the brother, by the way?”

She stopped and looked at him. “I don’t know, Tyler.” She moved out of the room, inwardly flinching as she had to pass through the arched doorway.

As she climbed the stairs, Tyler’s question echoed in her head.
“Where did they keep the brother?”

“I don’t know, Tyler.”

In the entry beside the staircase, she stopped and looked out on the garden.

But don’t you?

Laurel walked down the upstairs hall, now nearly dark in the deepening twilight. But instead of going into her room, she continued on toward the middle room with the narrow door. Brendan’s room.

Paul Folger’s room.

She reached out for the knob—then there was a flicker of white in the corner of her eye. She spun around—

And gasped at the sight of a pale figure standing in the dark of the hall. Katrina stepped forward. The blond girl looked Laurel over disdainfully.

“Why don’t you just leave, Dr. MacDonald? If it’s bothering you so much? Why don’t you just go? Why stay? Just go.”

Laurel was breathless from the venom in the girl’s words.

Why don’t I? I will.

So she packed. She stalked past Katrina, back to her bedroom, where she slammed the door behind her like a teenager and stood in the middle of the floor. The sun was sinking behind the trees outside, darkening the room, and she switched on the light.

Without giving herself time to talk herself out of it, she strode to the clothes cabinet. The door was shut and as she reached for the knob, she froze, suddenly overcome with trepidation, an almost paralyzing fear that she’d open the door and find … something—her clothes on the floor again, some other sign of derangement.

And what if they are?
she told herself impatiently.
What difference does it make, now? You’ll be out in fifteen minutes. Just pack up and go.

But she literally had to force her hand from her side. She twisted the knob and pulled open the door.

Her clothes were lined up on hangers, perfectly normal.

She pulled her suitcase off the floor, opened it on the bed, and grabbed an armful of clothes.

Downstairs she stopped in the archway of the great room with her suitcase and looked in on them without stepping through the doorway. They were lined up at the monitors, now looking at footage of themselves seated on chairs watching the pool.