The Unseen

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Even then she didn’t leave, though; she had no thought of the front door, of her car, of escape. Instead she ran up the stairs like a chastened child ordered to her room, past the window overlooking the drenched garden, and up…. She didn’t stop until she’d reached the upstairs hall, where she halted in the middle of the floor, panting, half-crying, barely able to breathe.

Her knees buckled and she realized she was shaking from head to foot with adrenaline. She was barely able to lurch to the green leather divan against the wall in the hall, where she collapsed, leaning her head against the back of the seat, swallowing against a sudden wave of nausea.

My God… my God… did that just happen?

What just happened? With her eyes closed she pictured the softly falling rocks… and felt chills through her body at the sheer unreality of the memory. It was like a painting, like a dream… only it wasn’t.

She felt exhilaration… and terror. Her mind battled between the two. We have to get out, one part of her shouted, while another part of her wanted to cry out, just as Katrina had: More, more, more!

But Brendan…. His rage… the desperation of his rage…

What was that about? What is going on?

And suddenly her uncle’s voice was very clear in her head. Pay attention.

Laurel bolted up to sitting, as if she had been slapped.

Pay attention.

She drew in a deep breath. The nausea had passed, but she was still shaking. She wiped her sweating palms on her skirt… and felt something stiff inside her front pocket.

She reached in and drew out the Zener card with the thick black circle on it.

He gave me the card….

But what was it trying to say?

Something stirred in her memory, and her eyes widened. A circle… She looked down the hall to the closed door of Brendan’s room.

She stood from the divan and held still for a moment, checking her balance, then walked slowly toward Brendan’s door. She reached for the doorknob with trepidation, as if it would burn her. She breathed in shallowly, tried to slow her racing heart.

It’s a room. It’s just a room.

Then she grasped the knob and twisted it, swung open the door.

She stepped in quickly so as not to lose her nerve, and pulled the door shut behind her. She stood with her back against the door. The walls were white; the room was cold, and dim from the curtain of rain outside. The sense of claustrophobia was instantaneous and sickening, but she steeled herself and walked across the narrow expanse of floor to the window, leaned over the writing table, and pushed back the gauzy curtain…

… to reveal the thick circle scratched in the glass, filled in with black ink: a circle just exactly like the circle of the Zener card—the exact same size and thickness.

But what does it mean?

She pulled her eyes away from the circle in the glass and looked down at the writing desk. It was a mess, the familiar clutter of academia… so many notebooks, so many pages of notes Brendan had made already. Diagrams, including several sketched floor plans of the room she was in. There was a file of floor plans of the whole house, dozens of copies, each labeled with a date and time, and mathematical notations in each room. The EMF readings? she wondered. Or some other obscure formula of his own?

There were journal pages, too, and paging through them made her heart start to beat faster. While they started out normally, with dates and time entries and margins and spaces between entries, by the middle of the first book the sentences were continuous, from the very top of the page to the very bottom, from one far end of the page to the next, a dark tidal wave of writing, with no margins, no line spacings, no pauses, and in later pages, no punctuation or capitalization either:

Laurel’s mind was reeling. It was familiar, this writing, she knew what it was…

And then she could smell the stink, faint… horrible… the smell of goat. She turned in the room, holding her breath against the smell, fighting the rising tide of panic.

I know it didn’t smell like this before. I know that smell.

The smell of the schizophrenic ward at Dorothea Dix. The smell of schizophrenia. It was like a living thing in the room.

And then she thought she finally understood, and the thought was terrifying. Bile rose in her throat and she turned to bolt for the door, to get out, when Uncle Morgan’s voice spoke sharply again in her head.

Pay attention.

Laurel stopped.

It was so real, that voice.

Pay attention to what?

She forced down her claustrophobic feeling and turned where she stood, looking around the room.

Her eyes fell on the closet door, and her ears began to tingle.

She stepped forward and opened the door.

It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, then she was startled to look in on a much deeper closet than she ever would have expected. Brendan’s few clothes were pushed to one side of the clothes rail, leaving a blank space that revealed a length of at least ten feet back to the back wall beyond the rail.

It’s almost like a—

Passageway.

Laurel stepped forward and ducked under the clothes rail, and walked back toward the back closet wall. She squinted in the dark and then reached her hand forward, put it flat against the wall, and pushed.

The wall swung open, and Laurel looked up… at a narrow, steep stairway.