The Unseen

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Laurel realized she’d been holding her breath for some time, and forced herself to exhale. She shuffled through the test forms again, just to make sure she really was seeing what she was seeing.

It was what she’d been looking for. There was a Folger Experiment. whatever it was, it took place just before the parapsychology lab was shut down. And it had involved test subjects with ESP scores higher than any other recorded test subjects she’d ever come across in the literature.

(She wasn’t even going to think about how she’d actually found the test packet, yet.)

The room suddenly felt colder, as if the air-conditioning had kicked into high gear, although she hadn’t heard any kind of mechanical change. She felt the fine hair on her forearms rising, and then the tingling began in back of her ears… the same chilling feeling of being watched she’d experienced at her house the night before.

She clutched the sheaf of test papers, inched toward the end of the aisle and peered out.

The central area of tables was deserted, just as she’d left it. She exhaled silently and shook her head. All right, stop freaking yourself out.

She walked back to the middle of the aisle and grabbed the box, hoisting it off the shelf, and walked out of the aisle, back to her work table. She set the box down—and froze, staring down at the table top.

Five Zener cards were laid out on the table in a row.

There was someone in the basement with her.

It was long after dark, too—she hadn’t noticed how late it had gotten.

Instinctively she darted into an aisle of shelves, and hovered, listening with every cell of her body.

She realized she was still clutching the packet of tests she’d found. Without really understanding why she was doing it, she slipped them into the waistband of her skirt, hiding them underneath her pullover sweater.

She breathed shallowly and silently, fighting a rising panic, the irresistible urge to scream or make any kind of noise that would alert the person in the basement to where she was.

Stupid stupid stupid. After all her years in L.A., all her precautions of never being caught alone in a parking lot or a deserted building—and here she’d been for weeks, alone in the basement, a total target…

She silenced the panicked voice in her head with sheer will and concentrated on listening, while simultaneously calculating the fastest route to the door.

The basement shelving was set up in a large rectangle: two long rows of about two dozen shelves on either side of the long vertical, and two shorter rows of shelving completing the rectangle at the head and foot. In the center of the rectangle was an open space with several long tables.

Laurel was at present hovering between two rows of shelves on the long right side of the rectangle. She slipped off her shoes and walked, stepping silently, to the far end of the aisle. She stopped, took a breath, and eased her head around the edge of the shelf.

The corridor against the wall was dark and empty.

She pulled her head back, and glanced behind her. No one.

Her heart was pumping out of control; she could hear the blood rushing in her ears, but she seemed to be able to see with hyperclarity.

If I run down that aisle and go right, in an L-shape, I have a straight shot to the door…

But even as she was plotting her escape, and wondering if she had the guts to actually do it, it was dawning on her that her stalker was no ordinary creep. Whoever was in the basement with her knew enough about what she was doing to lay out the Zener cards—he knew they were significant.

So what’s that supposed to mean?

She immediately answered herself. What does it matter what it means? She was alone in a dark basement with someone who was playing games with her. None of it was good.

She pressed her back against a cold metal shelf and resolved to make a run for it along the aisle. She took a breath, then took a look behind her—

And nearly jumped out of her skin.

There was a tall shadow there, hovering at the head of the aisle.

But right before she screamed, a pleading voice spoke quickly. “Sorry sorry sorry—I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s me. It’s me.”

Who the hell is “me”? she thought in a blind rush of panic, at the same time that her mind was registering the man who stood before her. It took a moment for her adrenaline-jolted brain to come up with a name: Brendan Cody, from the faculty welcome party: blue-gray eyes, curly dark hair, freckles, and all.

“What the hell?” Laurel blazed at him.

“I know, I’m sorry…,” he started.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

Her heart was racing, even now that she knew she wasn’t in danger. Although come to think of it, there was no real reason to think she wasn’t in danger; all she knew of this guy was that he was on the faculty with her. It didn’t prove he wasn’t a serial killer. She lifted the shoes in her hand, threateningly.

He was backing away from her now, holding up his hands, an open, conciliatory gesture. “Please please please. Just let me explain.”

She was backing away from him, too, down the aisle, and he stopped in his tracks and just stood still, as if to show he was no threat.

“Look, I didn’t know it was you,” he said appealingly. “I just saw the Rhine Lab boxes out and I was so shocked that someone else was looking into them that, well, I was just going to take a look and see who it was—”

“You laid out the cards—,” she said accusingly.

“I know, I know, it was stupid. But I had no idea it was you. I was—never mind.”

“You were what?” she demanded, now advancing on him. She was aware her voice was shrill, fishwife-like, really, but she was still on the edge of panic.

“I was mad,” he said sheepishly, and for a moment he looked all of ten years old. “I was pretty well furious, actually. I’ve been busting my ass going through the files and I came down here tonight and there were all the boxes laid out, meaning someone else was doing it too, and I guess…” He trailed off. “I wasn’t feeling all that mature about it in the moment. That happens, sometimes,” he admitted.

She was starting to feel less fight-or-flight about it, her terror replaced with a limp adrenaline-crash sense of relief, although she still had no idea what she was in the middle of.

“I’m really sorry I scared you,” he said. “You scared the shit out of me, too, if it’s any help.”

“It’s not,” she snapped.

“Totally understood.” He glanced behind him at the rows of long tables. “Look, can we sit down? I’m feeling a little shaky.”

“You are?”

“I know. Just let’s—sit down.” He backed up slowly, toward the center table section, hands lifted.

After a long moment, she followed him, warily.

When she stepped into the center space, he was standing beside her table with its row of boxes. She glanced pointedly at the five laid-out Zener cards and he grimaced. “Not my brightest idea,” he said again, and hastily scooped them up, shoving them into a front pocket of his khakis. Then he eased himself into a seat, keeping his hands well above the table.

Laurel sat slowly across from him, as if they were gunslingers in the Wild West, sitting down for a summit.

Brendan looked at her across the table and suddenly smiled, a huge great heartfelt warming smile.

“Well. I guess we’ve got a little more in common than California,” he beamed.

Laurel felt herself closing off immediately. She stared across at him stonily.

His smile dropped a few watts. “Um. So—what’s your interest in the Rhine files?”

“Uh-uh,” she said coldly. “You first.”

“Okay, okay, fair enough.” He looked at the boxes on the table, and broke into that grin again. “Well, it’s just freaking awesome, isn’t it? Forty-four years these things have been sealed and suddenly we get access? Criminy.”

Criminy? She thought, bemused.

“And obviously there’s something someone was trying to hide. I mean, the chaos in those boxes. Nothing is that random.” He looked around them at the shelves and shelves of boxes. “There’s a treasure trove of knowledge in there. But it’s like—like someone took the whole history of research in the lab and shattered it into a million little pieces and dumped it willy-nilly into all those boxes. And then sealed it up, to boot. What are they hiding?”

She had to force her face to keep still, not to give away that he’d just voiced the precise thought that had been plaguing her for weeks.

He leaned his elbows on the table, looking across at her with those earnest blue-gray eyes. “But you know what really bugs me? The department was just shut down cold. Sure, Rhine was retiring, but obviously he had no intention of really retiring, because he worked another good fifteen years, right up until his death. But the school shut the whole department down, right? Not only shut the department down, they sealed the files. Why?”

Laurel was listening with a sense of unreality, hearing her own thought process spilling out of his mouth.

“Right,” she heard herself saying, against her will. “Why?”

“So here’s what I’m thinking. You gotta admit, things were getting pretty wild there, by ’64, ’65. The whole poltergeist stuff. The sixties were just starting to explode, and people were testing the boundaries of consciousness. The lab was sending researchers out into the field to study the weirdest stuff in the actual environment it was happening in.”

His eyes sparkled at her with contagious excitement. “I think they did something revolutionary. I think that there was some experiment that was so trippy, that so freaked out the powers that be, it made Duke shut the whole thing down cold, and bury it. Not just whatever happened in that experiment, but everything. They just wanted the whole thing buried.”

An experiment. The Folger Experiment, Laurel was thinking, but said nothing. She could feel the test charts with their amazing scores against the bare flesh of her midriff, scratchy and insistent and real.

Brendan Cody looked at her, and she found herself nodding warily. His face was intense in the dim light. “I don’t know what it was, but it’s in there.” He looked at the boxes on the table, then off into the aisles. “And I’m going to find it.” He turned that blue-gray gaze on her again. “Or we, if you like,” he added hastily. “We’re going to find it.”

“We are?” she said, startled.

“Sure.” He suddenly looked grim. “In case you haven’t noticed—this department gives ‘publish or perish’ a new meaning. It’s true, Duke might just not have been happy having the parapsychology lab here—but if there was some trippy experiment that shut down the lab? It doesn’t matter what anyone thought or thinks. That’s instant publication, no matter what the story is. And not just in some obscure journal, either. That’s worldwide attention.”

But it’s my book, Laurel was thinking. At the same time, she was feeling a thrill that they had been thinking exactly the same things. All of a sudden it was all feeling real.

Brendan Cody looked like he was deciding something, perhaps struggling with himself, and then he leaned slightly forward.

“Okay, look. There was a new guy they brought in, as far as I can see, no more than four or five months before the department got shut down. Alaistair Leish. Ever heard of him?”

Inwardly Laurel froze. But she kept her face neutral, furrowed her brow. She was still light years away from trusting this man. He may even have stolen your notebook, you don’t know. “Not that I remember,” she said aloud.

He nodded. “I’m not surprised. I hadn’t either, by the way, but for a while there, he was a big thing in British parapsychology circles. I’ve been going through the files—it’s a bitch, isn’t it?” he interrupted himself to say directly. She found herself smiling back at him in spite of herself.

“A bit of one, yes,” she admitted. “Just a bit.”

He beamed at her as if they were long-lost siblings. “I had to start somewhere… so I’ve been concentrating on documents just from 1965, to see what they were up to right before the department shut down.”

Laurel felt again that eerie excitement—to realize he’d been following exactly the same path that she had.

Brendan frowned at her from across the table. “What?”

She shook her head, fighting the completely irrational urge to tell him everything, to show him the tests, the scores of the anonymous students. You know nothing about this man. Nothing. She bit down on her lip and kept silent.

“Anyway, I found Leish’s name several times in documents, although he was never on staff here—not officially, that is: I checked with the registrar. But I saw the name enough times that I looked him up. He was a parapsychologist from London—the Society of Psychical Research. Made a reputation investigating haunted houses, lecturing to parapsychology societies—and he wrote a book specifically on poltergeists. But I couldn’t find anything for him after 1965. He disappeared.”

Actually, he died, Laurel thought. He died the same month the lab closed down. But she kept the thought to herself.

“Except he was here. In 1965.” Across the table, in the dim light, Brendan’s eyes gleamed. “Like I said, he’s not on record with the school as ever being part of the Duke parapsychology lab. But his name is on the roster in several memos, and he’s listed as being present at some meetings.”

More proof, Laurel thought, exhilarated. Her pulse spiked, but she kept her face neutral.

Brendan slammed his palm down on the table top, startling her. “He was definitely here. And there’s no official record of him, no acknowledgement of having someone that big around, when they kept records of everything else under the sun?” He leaned back in his chair. “I think not. I’m pretty sure that anything really relevant has been lifted. They took his name off documents, and something happened that year that shut down the lab and sealed these files.”

Laurel was reeling, although she was careful to keep her face expressionless. Her hands were pressed into the table so that she wouldn’t move or betray her excitement. Between what Brendan had and what she had, there was a good chance they could piece together the Folger Experiment.

Brendan was already off again, talking a mile a minute. Laurel was sure by now that he was manic, maybe even clinically, and it wouldn’t be much effort at all to keep him talking. In fact, he did exactly that.

“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.