The Unseen

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The wispy fog of the morning had thickened to soup. When Laurel drove back through the stone gateposts, there was a fog beyond them that rendered the entire landscape insubstantial.

She motored slowly on the road, past the rail fence and the crape myrtles, all shrouded in mist. The gray pebbled path wound in and out through trees; there was no sign of the house in the fog.

And then suddenly it was there, in front of her, the porch so close that Laurel slammed on the brakes and the car came to a jolting stop beside Tyler’s Maserati.

The house was silent as she let herself in. Walking into the entry felt like being swallowed.

Why? What’s changed?

It was so quiet.

She walked across the first entry, and into the second, with the hearth and the family painting…

Not a sound.

She found Brendan and both students in the great room. They had placed chairs at some distance around the pool of water, which seemed exactly as it had been when Laurel had left, and the three were seated in a circle, each holding a clipboard poised in their lap, just watching the pool. Someone had taped three straight parallel lines of duct tape on the floor beside the pool and marked each tape with inches, like a ruler. There were notations handwritten in marker at various points along the scales. Brendan and both of the students held clipboards, and they did not move when Laurel stepped through the archway.

“What are you doing?” Laurel said, her voice hollow in the room, and was unnerved when for a prolonged beat, not one of them looked up. “Professor Cody?” she asked, more loudly, her heart beating faster.

Brendan finally pulled his gaze from the pool and looked at her blankly, without speaking.

“What are you doing?” she asked again.

“It keeps coming back,” he said, and his voice was alarmingly vague. “We’ve wiped it up three times now, and each time it wells up again.” He waved a hand toward a plastic tub with several sopping towels piled up in it. “It comes up from the floorboards. It takes forty minutes for the entire pool to appear, and then it stops growing. It doesn’t get any bigger than seventeen inches in diameter—it just stops at exactly seventeen inches.”

Laurel noted with unease that Tyler and Katrina had not looked up during Brendan’s entire speech—they remained fixed on the pool. She had the sudden feeling that they were playing with her—that it was all an elaborate joke.

“So… you’ve been doing this all day,” she said, her voice brittle.

“Yes,” Brendan said, puzzled. “Of course. This is what we’re here for, Dr. MacDonald. It’s a demonstrable anomaly, a classic manifestation. We have it recorded, too.” He waved toward the monitors without looking away from the pool. “And the EMF readings are three times normal levels: they’ve been fluctuating between eight and nine-five for three hours.”

Laurel looked toward the archway of the great room, and then toward the dining room. “The house is built on inclines,” she said, keeping her voice even. “We’ll need to check with a structural engineer or a geologist. It’s very possible there’s a perfectly explicable structural cause.”

Brendan’s eyes darkened with anger. “Of course,” he said stiffly. “I’ll make some calls tomorrow.”

“I need to talk to you,” she said, and glanced at the students. “Tyler. Katrina,” she spoke more sharply than she intended. Again, the two did not look up. “Tyler. Katrina. You’ve been at that long enough.” Suddenly it was very important to get them to look away from the pool.

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.