The Unseen

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

She lay in her narrow bed, trying not to let on that she was awake. A man… she knew it was a man… stood in her room, a man with a clipboard, standing over her, watching. There was a heaviness beside her, holding the blankets down—

Laurel forced open her eyes. The room was filled with gray light, and empty. No sign of the man with the clipboard. But there was something cold and hard in bed with her, pinning the blankets so she couldn’t move. She gasped and shoved out, and there were multiple loud THUMPs on the floor. She froze, fighting against panic.

Some of the heavy pressure was gone, but not all. She reached out gingerly—and her hand found a rough hard lump. She closed her fist around it.

A rock?

She sat up and in the dim light from the window she could make out several lumps of rocks in the bed beside her. She looked over the bed and saw several more on the floor, the ones she’d shoved off the bed. She was alone in the room. But there had been someone. There had.

What? Who?

She threw the blankets off her and stood.

She tried the door—it was locked from inside, but she hadn’t propped the chair under the doorknob when she’d come back upstairs, after they’d all stayed up for hours waiting vainly for more crashes.

She turned to the balcony door.

She opened it and stepped out on the balcony into the chilly morning air, under a sky blanketed by dark layers of clouds. She looked to her left and right. Both of the other doors leading out to the balcony were closed. In front of her, fog snaked through the garden, through the pines…

Laurel edged cautiously to the low railing to look down—and gasped.

The brick patio below her was littered with rocks. Hundreds of them.

Back in the upstairs hallway, Laurel pounded on Brendan’s door. When there was no response, she hesitated, then took the knob and twisted it, shoving open the door.

Brendan sat up groggily in the narrow bed. His face was gray and his eyes were dull; he was clearly hungover. Even so, Laurel’s body flushed with heat. She could smell him, too: the warm scent of skin and the faint aftershave he’d been wearing the night before. Her heart beat faster and she clenched her hands against the vertiginous feeling of desire.

“Something happening…,” he slurred, not yet awake.

She forced herself to focus. “You need to see. Now.”

As he grabbed for his pants, she turned away and lifted the digital camera from the small writing table under the window.

They stepped out the French doors of the dining room and Brendan stopped on the bricks, staring stupefied at the rocks. There were even more than Laurel had thought from looking down at them, hundreds and hundreds, from pebbles to baseball-sized stones to rocks as big as her head.

They both walked slowly around on the brick veranda, Brendan clicking off photo after photo. His whole body was tense with excitement. “It’s exactly as in the 1965 police report—the sound first and then the stones later.”

“Yes, exactly,” Laurel said in a thin voice. But Brendan seemed oblivious to her—all he could think of was the rocks. He had already pulled out the EMF reader and was waving it around.

“Two-two… three point three…,” he mumbled, and she had the sudden and disturbing thought that he looked like a mental patient, measuring his own unquantifiable reality. “I’m not getting any raised levels. It must have happened hours ago.” There was disappointment in his voice; then his face brightened. “But the sound displacement is classic. I should have had a monitor out here, damn it. Maybe something will have recorded through the windows….”

She had said nothing for some time, and finally he turned to look at her. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s a little too perfect, isn’t it?” she said slowly. “Exactly like the police report?”

His face closed, but she could read his thoughts perfectly. She was resisting again, she was fighting the evidence, and he hated her for it.

“I’m going in to check the monitors,” he said flatly.

There was a man with a clipboard in my room, she thought. I know it.

But she said nothing as she followed him into the house.

The playback of the rest of the night showed no movement, and registered no sound, either in the great room or the dining room or upstairs—although the clocks in the dining room continued implacably to tick. Brendan stared into the monitor screen with a intensity that unnerved Laurel, but there was only dark beyond the windows of the dining room; no sign of movement, no bodies sneaking around placing rocks.

In her head Laurel was thinking of a dozen ways it could have happened. After all, Brendan had taken the DVDs out of the computers after the crashing incident and replaced them with new ones. The DVDs could have been switched and replaced with a recording of a previous, quiet night, or could simply have been stopped, while someone crept around outside setting out rocks. Laurel kept thinking of Katrina watching her and Brendan from the window, thinking of how the crashing sounds of the night before had oh-so-conveniently put a stop to her encounter with Brendan.

She was worried that Brendan was far too invested in the occurrences, when another explanation should have been obvious: they were in a house with two unprincipled, self-centered adolescents who more than had their own agendas. And there was Pastor Wallace/Rafe Winchester—who wanted God only knew what from them and the house. He’d been in the garden before, and he would have known about the rocks from the police report of the 1965 rock incident.

But Laurel bit back her objections and watched.

Tyler and Katrina surfaced within the hour and were suitably bowled over by the rocks. Their surprise seemed genuine, but Laurel was aware that they were expert manipulators: the more sincere they were, the more she doubted them.

“You mean we heard the rocks first and then they fell?” Katrina asked breathlessly, all blue-eyed innocence. She was practically batting her eyelashes at Brendan, who visibly brightened at her interest.

“Sound displacement is a commonly reported characteristic of poltergeist manifestations,” he explained, and excitement was a crackling current in his voice. “For some reason no one’s ever been able to explain, the sound often seems to be out of sync with the actual breakage or falling.”

“That’s so awesome,” Katrina said, practically swooning.

Tyler was uncharacteristically silent, walking slowly around the rocks. “Of course, we didn’t ever go outside on the veranda last night,” he pointed out. “The rocks could’ve been there all along and we wouldn’t have known.”

Laurel was surprised at his return to skepticism. She found herself both suspicious and strangely relieved that someone besides her was not swallowing this latest occurrence whole.

She could see Brendan bristling, even as he struggled for a neutral tone. “I’ve watched the recordings ten times by now. There’s no movement through the windows.”

Tyler half-smiled. “It was dark.”

Tyler was clearly intrigued, but at least he was fighting against instant belief. Laurel could see him struggling to maintain objectivity. Brendan and Katrina, on the other hand, were off in their own fog of fascination.

Laurel left the three of them to their obsessive viewing of the night’s recordings (it would take hours… hours). They didn’t even notice her leaving.

She walked first into the dining room… and felt a frisson of unease when she was face to face with the newly ticking grandfather clock. To her side the antique clock in the dome ticked along in tandem.

Explain that; something whispered inside her.

Well, it’s a great parlor trick, isn’t it? she argued back. A clock that has wound down… set the other clock to the same stopped time… for all I know it could all be set up so it would just take the slightest tremor to start the clocks again, and in the moment, it looks like magic.

She continued out of the dining room, through the kitchen to the stairs. As she climbed she was strategizing. Yesterday’s paranoia—maybe it had even been fear—had faded and she was feeling a different kind of paranoia. She felt played. She had the unmistakable feeling of being set up. And not by any paranormal entity.

Last night she had been almost desperate to get out of the house. She had almost had herself convinced that there was something supernatural in the house… some amorphous evil. And yes, she could go—her suitcase was packed, she could be in the car in five minutes. But now she was angry. Now she had the cold and implacable desire to know what was going on.

She reached the small upstairs servants’ kitchen, started the coffeepot, and sat at the table, forcing herself to slow down, to go over everything.

There was a human element to this—a human trickery. She knew it. But what had changed, since yesterday, since her frantic, nebulous panic to get out?

The knocking and crashing of the night before… again, so suspiciously like the reports she had read.

And Tyler was a sound technician. How hard would it be to fake?

And there was a man in my room last night.

That was it most of all. The presence in her room—the man with the clipboard. As bizarre as it seemed, she could not believe that was a dream. The house was being monitored. So, who? Brendan? Tyler? Pastor Wallace, haunting the house in his own way?

And who was visiting Victoria Enright, forty-two years after the fact?

No, there was definitely someone human out there, with a very human interest in the house.

And Laurel was angry. She was furious. She was being manipulated again, cheated, just like with Matt. She could feel the heat of rage burning through her, energizing her. And this time she had no desire to run. She wanted to know.

She held her coffee cup in her hands, and was resolved. From now on, she was watching them.