The Unseen

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

Laurel woke at dawn; they’d all gone to bed so early. The image of a circle card still burned a hole in her head.

She lay still and was relieved to realize she’d had no other dreams or visitations. The bedclothes were still on the bed and the chair was firmly propped under the doorknob.

Dressed now, she walked downstairs via the main stairs. Outside the arched window the garden was drifted with fog. She made her coffee in the main kitchen, avoiding the servants’ kitchen so she would not wake Tyler; the last thing she wanted was to have to face him alone after their connection of the night before. She didn’t want to talk about it. But at the same time she did; she wanted to know if he had had the same vision of the cards.

But what does it matter, if we only performed to chance? There was no uncanny connection going on there. It was all in your head, like everything else.

As the coffee percolated she drifted into the dining room, and felt again a faint but noticeable reluctance to enter it. The light was odd, very bright despite the fog outside the French doors with their glass arches, and weirdly contrasting with the dark paneling. There was an iron cookstove in the hearth, and a many-drawered sideboard that perfectly matched the dark wood of the walls, with a gorgeous gold-and-mahogany clock under a thin glass dome. Laurel paused in front of the looming grandfather clock, forever stopped at 2:59—and suddenly looked back at the smaller clock under the dome. It, too, was stopped at 2:59.

All right, now—what are the chances of that? What kind of an event stops nonelectrical clocks?

She felt a brush of unease, like fingers trailing her neck, and quickly walked out of the room.

In the great room she moved past Brendan’s banks of monitors, looking over the static views of empty rooms. There was no one in any of the common areas. The new camera was up in Katrina’s room—she could see the girl’s sleeping shape, curled on her side under the blankets in the bed in the dim room. The only moving thing Laurel could see on screen was herself, in the great room. She felt a great detachment, looking at herself. Is this how the house watches us, then? she thought, and then shook her head to dispel the thought. But maybe she kept feeling that she was being watched because she was—by the cameras, by whoever might be looking at the cameras. Maybe it really is as simple as that.

And then she realized she was being recorded at that very moment, and later Brendan would be watching her looking at herself. She stepped away from the monitors, flushed with embarrassment.

The sky had lightened outside but not by much; it was overcast and gloomy. Suddenly she walked for the front door. At least outside she could think without feeling on display.

The air had turned chilly, and there was again the wispy ground fog, snaking between the trees, floating in patches in the air as Laurel walked between the trees, so she was not entirely sure of what she was seeing when a black-suited figure with a walking stick and a hat materialized from the indistinct grayness.

The figure from the garden.

Laurel stopped and stared, expecting it to vanish, but he—definitely a he—walked toward her, moving purposefully up the road from the gateposts. He got bigger and more real, red-faced and portly and sweating slightly, in his early sixties, she guessed, though his hair beneath the hat was shiny jet black. Always wary of any lone man when she was alone in an unfamiliar place, she glanced up toward the house, and could see no one stirring. Yet curiosity kept her rooted to the spot.

When he was a few yards from her the man in black removed his hat in a courtly gesture, revealing a full head of the black hair with only a few threads of gray, and a pronounced cowlick. “Morning, ma’am. I’m Pastor Wallace, from Five Oaks Baptist. We’re just down the road a piece.”

“Oh!” she said, startled. “Hello. I’m Laurel MacDonald.” She hesitated, then extended her hand to shake his, and felt he held hers a shade too long. But then again, so many men did. He smiled, a yellow-toothed smile.

“I heard we had guests at Folger again, and I thought I’d come by to welcome y’all.”

“That’s very kind of you,” she said, pleasantly, but she was on alert. Very early for a social call, isn’t it? “You were here before, though, weren’t you? The day before yesterday.”

His eyes narrowed slightly. “Yes, I often make this my morning walk. Keep an eye on the place… make sure tramps don’t get in.”

Tramps? Is that so?

“I had no idea the other day that the house was occupied. I hope I didn’t scare you,” he added, and his eyes gleamed in a way that belied his words.

Laurel’s mind was racing: Did she want to ask him into the house? But here was a chance to find out more about the Folgers—how could she pass that up?

The need to know won out over caution. “Will you come in for coffee?”

He smiled. “I believe I will.”

She had again a moment of unease, which she attributed to city paranoia, then turned to lead him to the house.

After all, there are four of us and one of him. It will be fine.

She brought the pastor through the front entry of the old main house, and he stopped before the staircase, and looked up at the stairs as though he saw someone there. She shut the door behind them and when she turned he was still looking at the stairs.

Finally, he broke his stare and looked to her. “It’s been a long time.” Laurel thought she heard something ambiguous in his tone.

She was already realizing she’d made a huge mistake by inviting him in. With the cameras and monitors set in up the great room and their young research subjects likely to come down—likely half-dressed—any moment, it was going to be next to impossible to keep him from asking the wrong questions.

“We’re not really set up for entertaining,” she hedged. “Why don’t we sit in the library, and I’ll bring coffee.”

“As you like.” He walked ahead of her, as if he knew the house, into the middle entry hall, through the paneled door into the dark book-lined study.

“I’ll be right back,” she called after him airily, stepping casually out through the door again, then racing across both entries, the great room, and the dining room, to the kitchen. She grabbed the whole pot of coffee and two cups from the counter, and hurried back. She was breathless by the time she reached the library, feeling as if she’d just done the hundred-meter dash.

She stopped for a second to catch her breath before she walked back into the study.

It was empty.

She froze… then strode across the room and through the door of the garden room.

The pastor was there in the tiled, airy room, standing, gazing out through the arches of the outdoor patio.

Laurel realized with dismay that she had brought neither milk nor sugar. She was not going to leave him alone again.

The pastor turned and his eyes shone at her as if he knew what she was thinking. “Black will be fine, my dear.”

She set the coffeepot down on one of the counters under a window and poured two cups, then crossed the floor and handed him a mug. “We just haven’t had much time to settle in, and—”

“And settling in is not really what you’re here for,” he said jovially.

She jolted slightly and he smiled. Her mind scrambled back for something he’d said when they walked in. “So, you’ve been here before.”

“Oh my, yes. Yes, we are acquainted, this house and I.” He walked the room, sipping his coffee, trailing his hand over the windowsills and counters, which gave Laurel an unpleasant shiver, but she smiled brightly.

“I would love to hear about it. We haven’t been able to find out that much about the Folgers, after a certain date.”

“And what you have learned has been odd. Even—unsettling.” His eyes gleamed again, he was practically purring.

She swallowed her distaste, and thought of the article she’d found in the upstairs den. She sat in one of the rattan chairs and sipped her coffee. “Is it true that Paul Folger was confined to Dorothea Dix Hospital after he was discharged from the Army? And that he came back to live here after one of the main buildings at Dix burned down?”

The pastor sat, spread his knees and leaned forward. “You are curious, no? You even have suspicions, perhaps?” In the dimness of the room, his eyes took her in with prurient interest. “Suspicions… of perversity?”

She felt her stomach turn in revulsion. And even though it was exactly what she had wondered, she said, “No. Nothing like that.” She had a sudden body memory of an unknown weight on top of her in the dark, of breaking waves of pleasure. She drew in a breath and the pastor looked at her as if he knew, as if he could see.

“But the question must be asked. A young woman, alone with her disturbed brother. Refusing to put him back into the hospital, where he belonged. Never leaving the house herself….” His voice trailed off insinuatingly.

She kept her voice level. “Is that what happened?”

He looked at her. “What do you feel?” He smiled at her, with yellowed teeth and flat eyes. “That is why you’re here, aren’t you? Because you can feel it? Because you know things?”

What she felt were goose bumps rising, and a sickening feeling of vertigo.

“They can’t leave it alone, can they—this house,” he said softly.

“Who can’t?” Laurel said in spite of herself.

“The University, of course. The so-called scientists.” He stared out through the windows at the main house and seemed to be far away for a moment. Then he turned to her. “And what do you think you’re going to find? Are you sure you want to know? The hospital claimed more than one, you know.”

“The hospital?” she repeated, confused. “You mean Dix? What do you mean?”

“Perversity,” he said. “Perversity is what I mean. It’s here.” He looked around the house, breathed in deep. “It is still here.”

As creeped out as she was, he knew far too much for her not to probe. “You know a lot about the University study,” she said carefully. “How is that, Pastor Wallace? Were you living here in Five Oaks at the time?”

He smiled at her. “Oh, I have my ways.”

She calculated quickly. He was probably in his mid-sixties; he would have been the age of a student at the time of the study.

“Did you know Dr. Leish? Rafe Winchester? Victoria Enright?”

He turned on her so suddenly she took a startled step back. “They didn’t get out. No one did.”

She felt a chill, hearing the same words she got from Uncle Morgan. The pastor’s eyes were dully gleaming again and she realized that something about him was not right. And still she pressed on.

“They didn’t get out? You mean, they died?”

“You are playing with something you don’t understand. Open the door to the devil and the devil will walk through.” Spittle had formed in the corner of the pastor’s mouth and his eyes were unfocused. There was something familiar in the cadence of the rant, but all Laurel could think about was getting away from him.

“I think you should go now,” she said, and heard the tremor in her own voice.

“You think you can study it? You think it will yield its secrets? It will not be known,” Wallace thundered. Laurel was frozen, unable to move.

“It’s been waiting,” he said softly. “It waits, like a spider. And eventually, the flies come, the busy little flies, the busy bees. They fly in. They fly in and are devoured. No one leaves.”

Laurel walked straight to the French doors onto the covered porch and opened one. “Get out. Now.”

He planted himself truculently. “You get out. Before it’s too late.”

“Go,” she said. Her whole body was shaking.

He smiled, and said very softly, “No one leaves.”

The pastor sidled past her with a knowing smile and stepped through the door. She shut it and shot the bolt, and stood by the windows, watching as he meandered around the side of the house, turning once to smile unpleasantly back toward her. Then she ran to the front hall to watch through the windows by the door, making sure he really walked down the drive toward the gateposts. She was shaking with adrenaline.

When the black figure had disappeared through the gateposts, she stepped back from the door, and rushed for the stairs. She rounded the corner at the landing in front of the arched window and nearly screamed as she ran into Brendan.