The Unseen (46 page)

“Jesus.” His voice was weak, and thick, but his eyes were lucid. He looked across the table at Katrina, then at Brendan, slumped lifeless and staring at the table with those black, vacant eyes. “What are we going to do?”

Laurel stood. “We’re going to get out of here,” she said grimly, and hoped that he believed her. “Can you move? Can you stand?”

He leaned his arm over the back of the chair and shoved himself up to standing. He promptly doubled over and retched, dry heaves.

She caught him and held him as he heaved. “I know… . I know.” Her eyes were scanning the room even as she comforted him. On the back wall, a window cracked, a long, slow split. “But Tyler, we have to go. We have to go now, before …” She did not know how to express the unformed horror she felt. She looked to Brendan and Katrina. “We have to get them, and we have to get out.”

“There are no doors,” he said, looking honestly bewildered.

“Yes, there are. Come on, Tyler. Take Katrina. Pick her up if you can. Drag her if you have to. Grab her and run,” she commanded.

Tyler seized Katrina’s arms and pulled the girl’s limp body from her chair. Laurel had to not look at the idiot look on Brendan’s face as she reached for his arm. He felt like a snake in her grasp, but she held his slick skin firmly, slipped her arms under his armpits, and yanked him up from the chair.

She glanced back at Anton, sprawled against the wall, slack jaw dropped open, then turned back to Tyler.

“Go!”

They both heaved forward and half-ran, stumbling, half-dragging Katrina and Brendan through the archway, into the entry hall.

Laurel dropped Brendan’s limp and heavy body to the floor and lunged for the front door, twisting the doorknob. It was locked and solid, would not budge even a fraction of an inch as she pulled and shoved at it. Around them, she could hear the house breathing, that rasping, live breath. Tyler barked behind her: “Out of the way!”

She turned to see Tyler had dropped Katrina, who lay crumpled on the floor. He grabbed an end table and lifted it. Laurel pulled Brendan’s dead weight aside and Tyler hoisted the end table and ran at the long vertical window set beside the door with an inarticulate cry. The table smashed through the glass.

He hit again and again, breaking the remaining glass out. Behind them from the great room came a cackling of voices, whispering, and ranting, a frenzied cacophony.

“Get out!” Laurel said through chattering teeth. “I’ll hand her through.”

With Tyler outside and Laurel inside, they carried/passed Katrina through the broken-out window. Laurel’s mind was screaming at her.

What if they don’t recover?

And then,

What if we don’t get out?

The house began a long, slow rumble again, and the rapping began to shake the walls, rolling through the house in waves.

Tyler lunged back in through the window, and together they muscled Brendan toward the window frame, straining with his weight.

The voices in the great room jabbered, louder and louder, and a man’s voice began to shriek, raw, horrible screams. Laurel cried out and shoved Brendan through the window. As Tyler pulled him through, Laurel squeezed through the window herself, feeling the remaining jagged glass rip her skin, feeling blood seep from her face and arms and legs.

Outside the rain was pouring down, splashing on the porch and path. Wind lashed the trees above them, whipping water against them. The wet was the most welcome thing Laurel had ever felt; she turned her face up to be drenched. Lightning branched through the sky.

Unbelievably, their cars were still lined up in the slate-pebbled drive, and Laurel felt for a moment as if she were in a painting, in a dream.

Then she dropped to the porch beside Katrina, pulled the girl’s soaked and prone body into her arms. “Do you have car keys?” she shouted at Tyler over the thunder. Tyler shoved his hand into a jean pocket and a look of salvation lit his face as he pulled out the keys.

“Let’s fucking go.” He zapped the doors unlocked.

Katrina was shivering, convulsing in Laurel’s arms. The girl’s eyes suddenly flew open.

“Run,” Katrina whispered. “Run run run run run …”

A wave of terror crashed over Laurel and she hauled Katrina up to standing, ran with her for the car. The sky opened and hail began to pelt down in marble-sized chunks, bouncing whitely off the car.

Laurel pushed Katrina into the backseat of the Maserati and ran back to help Tyler, who was stooping to pick Brendan up by his armpits. Together they dragged him across the gravel to hoist him into the car, both of them straining to lift him, straining not to listen as the house loomed and shrieked and raged behind them. And as lightning cracked across the sky, Tyler gunned the engine of the Maserati and drove like the wind.

CHAPTER SIXTY

The hospital was small and pretty—if a hospital could be called pretty—with light, airy open spaces, and arches, and views of rolling hills and fields out the windows.

Laurel knew the views well. She had been there for nearly a week.

The intake doctor in the emergency room, Madsen, had been suspicious but competent. He started Brendan and Katrina and Tyler on IV fluids, and stood with Laurel to take their reports. Katrina was still conscious; Brendan was not.

Laurel and Tyler recounted as little as possible: a break-in at the house they were renting while the two of them had been out, returning to find the house ravaged and Katrina and Brendan in the condition they were in, no idea what happened to them, leaving the house with them, frightened out of their wits. Dr. Madsen listened and watched them and wrote, without speaking.

Then Brendan, Katrina and Tyler were taken on gurneys into the hospital, and Laurel sat down to wait.

Brendan came out of his catatonia on the fourth day. Laurel was not sure how, but when Dr. Madsen was taking Brendan’s intake report, Laurel had said on impulse, “There’s a history of schizophrenia in the family.” Her heart beat faster at the chance she was taking, and the doctor looked at her sharply, but after a moment said, “Interesting,” and made a note on Brendan’s chart.

They let her see him on the sixth day. She had not left the hospital for any of that time.

He was pale and thin, tubes snaking from his arms, but his eyes were clear as he looked at her from the hospital bed, and the range of emotions on his face was painful to see. His voice rasped as he said, immediately:

“Tyler … Katrina …”

“Conscious. Recovering,” Laurel said, standing in the doorway. And she added silently,
Thank God, thank God
. “Faster than you, actually. They’re young. I visit them and they … they’re starting to talk. I’ll be there when they do.”

Brendan looked as if ten years had dropped from him. Then slowly his face tightened. “And Anton?”

Laurel’s eyes clouded; she felt a range of emotions she could not name. “The police went to the house.” Laurel had emphasized the possible danger to the cops, the destruction she and Tyler had seen. But she had not gone with them—not that they would have allowed it—but she was certain in the core of her that they were safer without her. She was afraid to activate the house.

Folger House had been empty. The great room was in chaos, but a chaos still attributable to the random destruction of a criminal, though Laurel had wondered more than a few times what the police had made of that inexplicable scattering of rocks. There was no one else in the house—living, dead, or otherwise.

Brendan stared at her, stupefied. “But where …”

She lifted her hands. She had no idea.
Did he revive and get out somehow? Did the house—or whatever was in it—take him?
She remembered the horrible screaming at the end… .

“The police said there was no trace,” she answered.

“And there’s no record at all, is there? The cameras …” Brendan asked, and added quickly, “Don’t take that the wrong way. I just meant …” He stopped, swallowed hard. “There’s a lot I don’t remember, and what I do …”

She knew what he was going to say. She’d heard it from Tyler and Katrina, and when Brendan spoke he sounded as young as they were, lost and groping.

“Did it really happen? I … don’t know what’s real anymore.”

“I have no idea,” she said simply.

He nodded, looking faintly ill.

“There was nothing left,” she said. “The hidden cameras in the great room and system in the attic—they burned. Electrical fire, the police said.”
Only the electricity had been off for a day
. “Completely destroyed.”

Brendan closed his eyes … then opened them and looked at her.

“Why did you even bother to take me out? Why not just leave me? It was what I deserved.”

She looked away from him and said slowly, “I know what it is to be out of your mind. I’ve spent some time there myself.” She looked out the window, and found with faint surprise that the thought of Matt didn’t cut her heart open anymore.

“I was lost for a long time. I came out of it.” She looked at him briefly. “I believe people can change.”

He bowed his head. “I swear. I …” He looked up, and there was real pain in his face. “It was never supposed to be about hurting you.”

She nodded, abstractly. “The thing is, I
knew
. I knew about—someone else, and I knew about you.” She stopped. “I need to trust when I know.”

“Mickey.” Brendan said softly, and despite everything, she felt it in her heart. “What will you do now?”

“I have no idea,” she said again. “I doubt either of us will have a job by the end of the week, but …” She thought of Uncle Morgan. “Somehow that doesn’t seem so important anymore. There are other things I need to do.”

He looked at her probingly. And then she smiled, with a tremor, and quoted softly. “ ‘How can we not devote our lives to pursuing that question—of whether a thing like this could happen, and how?’ ”

And she looked away from him, out the window at the sun, the sky, and the rolling hills.

AFTERWORD

The Unseen
was inspired by the work of parapsychologist Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University from 1927 to 1965. The history of Rhine’s ESP experiments has always fascinated me; I can still get a thrill just from seeing the Zener card symbols on a page. As the daughter of scientists and educators, I am drawn to the idea that such an elusive thing as ESP could be scientifically proven. And as a thriller writer I know a good story when I see one.

Though
The Unseen
contains some factual circumstances, I have of course embellished the real-life history in all kinds of ways, and will take a brief moment here to delineate the facts from the wild ravings of my imagination.

Dr. J. B. Rhine (1895–1980) began his scientific career studying botany, earning advanced degrees at the University of Chicago, but after a brief stint of teaching he switched fields to study psychology at Harvard under Professor William McDougall, a colleague of celebrated philosopher and psychologist William James. In 1927 McDougall was named the head of the new Duke University psychology department in Durham, North Carolina, and Rhine and his wife and colleague, Dr. Louisa Rhine, moved to Duke with him.

In the psychology department at Duke, Dr. Rhine began his soon-to-be world-famous ESP experiments using Zener cards, and psychokinesis experiments using automated dice-throwing machines. Rhine’s intention was to use rigorous scientific methodology to test and prove the existence of ESP, and Rhine and McDougall coined the term
parapsychology
to describe the study of paranormal psychological phenomena such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and psychokinesis.

Rhine’s work led to the establishment of a dedicated parapsychology laboratory at Duke, headed by Rhine, in 1935. Over his thirty-eight years at Duke, Rhine tested thousands of students for ESP ability, using the Zener card method depicted in
The Unseen
, and employing the new science of statistics and probability to analyze the results. Dr. Rhine identified test subjects who were able to predict the cards with an accuracy far higher than statistical chance, which led him to conclude that ESP really does occur.

In 1934 Rhine published his findings in his monograph,
Extra Sensory Perception
, which was published in several editions in many countries, and which made Rhine internationally famous. He is now credited with almost single-handedly developing a methodology for parapsychology as a form of experimental psychology.

In the late 1940’s Dr. Louisa Rhine began to collect reports from all over the world of spontaneous psi experiences, further contributing to our understanding of clairvoyance, telepathy, precognition, and crisis apparitions.

In 1957, William Roll, a parapsychology researcher who studied at Berkeley and Oxford, joined the staff of the Duke parapsychology lab, and he and Dr. Rhine’s longtime assistant and researcher, J. Gaither Pratt, conducted field studies of reported poltergeist occurrences, including the famous Seaford, or “Popper” case in 1958. Roll developed the theory of “Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis,” RSPK, to explain poltergeist phenomena; that is, that the random movements, noises and breakages characteristic of a poltergeist manifestation are not the work of ghosts or spirits, but are caused by a human agent, usually a prepubescent child or a teenager, who consciously or unconsciously was projecting mental energy outward to cause the movement of the objects.

As in
The Unseen
, the Duke parapsychology lab did close down completely in 1965, when Dr. Rhine reached the age of mandatory retirement, and seven hundred boxes of original files from the lab really were stored in the basement of Duke’s Perkins Library on the Duke campus, and have only recently been made available for public viewing. It was the idea and the existence of those boxes that crystallized the story I wanted to tell.

However, from there my story diverges completely from reality, in more ways than one. There is no such person as Dr. Alaistair Leish, or the nefarious Dr. Richard Anton, nor are they based on anyone in real life. There is no such place as Dr. Anton’s Parapsychology Research Center.