The Unseen

CHAPTER FIVE

Even as Laurel began to read the explanatory placards, a rush of connections and memories was flooding into her consciousness. The cards with their strange symbols were Zener cards, designed for use in the groundbreaking ESP tests of Dr. J. B. Rhine.

Laurel was experiencing a rush of emotions she was having trouble identifying. And then a childhood memory swept over her, shocking as ice water.

Laurel at eleven, camping out in her school library, working for two weeks on a science report on Rhine and his ESP experiments, illustrated with diagrams and sketches: two students seated at a table with a black screen between them, one looking down at a card, the other concentrating intently, trying to guess which of the five symbols the other student held.

Laurel had slaved over the report, had even made up her own set of Zener cards, and had proudly presented the project to her mother. Meredith had gone white and swept the cards off the table, a reaction which, coming from her normally clinical and detached mother, had confused and frightened eleven-year-old Laurel. Meredith proclaimed Rhine a “kook” and parapsychology a sham, and by the end of her tirade Laurel was in tears; she ripped up her report, and hastily wrote another on right and left brain function. But her interest in psychology and the mysteries of the mind had taken root and grown, though effectively channeled into a more scientific groove.

But I didn’t remember any of that, she realized with an uneasy feeling. Not the Zener cards, not that the Rhine Lab was at Duke, not any of it. I came straight to the Rhine Lab—without even knowing what I was doing.

The coincidence was unsettling… and thrilling.

Laurel turned back to the glass case and quickly read through the rest of the historical placards of the display:

Poltergeists? Laurel thought, startled. They were investigating poltergeists?

And then on the last placard she found the sentence that stopped her dead.

Laurel had to read that last part three times before it fully sank in.

Seven hundred boxes of original parapsychology research material? Right here in this very building? And available to anyone who wanted to look?

She felt behind her for a chair and sat down hard, a little breathless.

It was sensational. It was unbelievable, really, that she hadn’t read or heard about any of this.

Surely someone had already claimed this topic, was writing articles, papers…

J. Walter Kornbluth’s voice suddenly spoke clearly in her mind. “These days nothing less than a book will do.”

Laurel looked over at the glass case, and thought with crystal clarity: This is my book. Her whole body was tingling, her face warm and flushed.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you thinking?” she muttered to herself. You’re a psychologist, a research professor. Parapsychology has nothing to do with your life’s work.

Oh, yeah? What life’s work is that? some alien voice whispered back, mocking.

And she hadn’t felt a rush like this, hadn’t felt so enthused, since, well, since before the dream had shattered all her ideas of reality.

She stood from the chair, moved past the glass case in a daze, and went into the main reading room to find the librarian.

As always, Laurel approached Dr. Ward with some caution, and hovered some distance from the tall dark desk. Ward looked her over with a slightly raised eyebrow, and Laurel remembered that she was still in cocktail-party attire. She felt blood rising to her cheeks, and surreptitiously tugged the hem of her dress down.

“I was just reading the exhibit about the Rhine Lab,” Laurel began. “I guess I somehow forgot all that happened here.” Now that she was thinking about it, it hit her that the auditorium downstairs in the Psych Building was called Zener Auditorium. I must have been asleep not to put it together.

“Thirty-eight years,” Ward agreed laconically. “Put the university on the map.”

Encouraged by a whole two sentences from the librarian, Laurel pressed on. “I’d like to know more about it—all. Is it really true that there are seven hundred boxes of original research files right here in the library?”

“There are indeed,” the librarian said, without smiling. Laurel had never seen her smile. “Seven hundred boxes.”

“And anyone can just look at them—any time?”

“Any time.”

Laurel hazarded another question. “Is there some study being done, then?”

“A study?” The librarian repeated.

“A research project, or a book being written, or… I mean… if seven hundred boxes of original research have just been opened to the public, isn’t someone going through them?”

“There have been a few,” the librarian said noncommittally.

“Of course,” Laurel said. There was no reason to think otherwise, after all. She stood for a moment, then suddenly asked. “Do you know why the department was shut down?”

The librarian raised her eyebrows.

“The parapsychology lab was so famous, and then…” Laurel nodded back toward the display case. “The placards say it shut down entirely in 1965… and I wondered why.”

“Dr. Rhine was approaching retirement age and wanted to move his research to a private institution where he could continue his work,” Dr. Ward recited without inflection.

“That makes sense,” Laurel admitted. “But why shut the whole lab down?”

Again the librarian looked up at her without speaking. This time Laurel didn’t notice; she was off on her own train of thought.

“And why were they sealed?”

The librarian regarded her impassively.

“The boxes,” Laurel elaborated, for some reason feeling uneasy. “Why were they sealed, for all those years?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Ward said.

“Thanks,” Laurel said. Her mind was already a million miles away. “Thanks.”

She walked out of Special Collections, out of the library, moving in a daze through Gothic stone arches, her face lit from within.

Seven hundred boxes.

What in the world might be in them?