The Unseen

CHAPTER SIX

It was Sunday, and Laurel had lain awake all night in a state of overloaded excitement, and now pretty much felt as if she’d been hit by a truck, but she was at the front door of Perkins Library when it opened.

She marched through the ethereal front hall with its medieval tapestries and lambent light, straight to the intricately carved dark-wood doors of the Rare Books Room. She took the fortifying pause required to face Dr. Ward, and pushed through the doors.

Ward was unblinkingly in place behind the looming rolltop desk. Laurel walked forward, stopped before it, and said all in one breath:

“I’d like to put in a request to view the parapsychology lab files.”

Ward took a good long time looking Laurel over before she reached for a library request form. “Which boxes did you want to see?”

Laurel lifted her chin. “All of them.”

After summoning a library minion of indeterminate sex who scurried into place behind the rolltop desk, clearly as intimidated by Ward as Laurel was, Ward took up a massive set of keys and walked Laurel down to the basement of Perkins Library.

It was two long flights of stairs down to double doors… which opened onto a dim and high-ceilinged basement space that was larger than anything Laurel would have dreamed lay beneath the corridors she moved through every day.

She followed Ward in a daze, down through rows of shelves that reminded her of nothing so much as the warehouse in the classic last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which a janitor wheels a trolley carrying the deadly Ark, enclosed in a wooden crate, through stacks of thousands of similar crates.

In this case the crates were cardboard office file boxes, but the sight was no less labyrinthine and ominous… and the contents perhaps even more mysterious.

Ward abruptly turned down an aisle and stopped. Laurel followed her gaze to the massive wall of shelves, all lined with identical boxes.

“This is the first aisle,” Ward informed her without expression. “Where did you want to start?”

Seven hundred boxes, covering thirty-eight years of laboratory research. It was monumental.

Laurel sat at a long basement table, staring at the first seven boxes of the seven hundred, neatly lined up in front of her. She had worked her way through the first third of the first box, and was beginning to get a glimmer of what she was up against.

The files were remarkably inclusive. Overwhelmingly so. The scientists, professors, researchers, and staff of the Rhine Laboratory seemed to have saved every scrap of correspondence, accounting, lab test results, employment applications, and field research reports that had ever passed through the lab. Laurel found scribbled notes on sessions with trance mediums, pored over mind-bendingly tedious statistical analysis reports of ESP tests with the Zener cards, leafed through letters to the lab from clearly paranoiac, borderline personalities claiming alien abduction and governmental thought-control.

And the files were in no discernible order whatsoever.

In fact, it seemed as if whole drawers had been dumped randomly into file boxes—even more—as if the entire lab had been turned on its side and its contents poured into one box after another. Among the letters and memos and files were old cigarette packs, movie stubs from 1965, a petrified candy bar, Sen-Sen breath mints, a tarnished silver teaspoon. It was more like looking at the contents of a recluse’s basement than the official department files of a major university.

After partially working through the chaos of the first box, Laurel checked several more boxes, hoping Box Number 1 was an anomaly. It wasn’t. If anything, Boxes 2 through 7 were even more chaotic than the first.

Laurel had done a semester of fieldwork in a mental hospital for her PhD, cognitive therapy for schizophrenic patients. Reading through the boxes was like that—waves of delusion with occasional startling glimmers of insight. After the first hour, her head was swimming. After the second, she felt like a candidate for an institution herself. She would have to learn to skim if she was ever going to get out of that basement in her lifetime. Yet as soon as she started reading, she was hooked.

She read letters from parents who had experienced an overwhelming sensation or a vividly detailed dream of danger to their children, who had kept them from school, off flights, from getting into cars—and averted certain death by random accident.

She read story after story of ordinary people who had dreamed, or actually seen, a loved one appear to them—only to learn later that that relative or friend had died at the exact moment the apparition came to them.

She read accounts, backed up by testimony from witnesses, from family members who had experienced phantom pain in a limb at the exact moment a relative had been injured.

And as she read, she felt a rightness about it—there was an unmistakable ring of sincerity and truth to the accounts. She believed them.

At the end of the day, Laurel returned the boxes to the front desk of the basement archives and used the call button to page Ward, then stood in a daze beside the desk, every muscle in her body and her mind sore.

The dour librarian appeared in less than a minute, as if she’d been poised and waiting for the call. She looked over Laurel and the boxes without a trace of expression.

Despite herself, Laurel blurted out, “So there’s no order to any of this?”

“Not that anyone’s seen so far,” Ward said dryly. “Had enough?” Somewhere deep inside Laurel, something flared. “I’ll be back tomorrow at nine,” she said defiantly.

“Huh,” Ward said, and began stacking the boxes.

As Laurel drove home through the dark maze of trees, her mind kept straying to her own dream. Finally, she pulled the car over to the side of the road, stopped the engine, and sat back against the seat, letting herself experience the memory…

Step by step down the long, dark hall, bare feet on the cool hardwood floor… the sick-sweet scent of jasmine and the sound of moans…

And the shattering…

Laurel gasped and pulled herself out of the memory. She was breathing hard… and she could feel the beginning of welts rising on her chest.

She clenched her hands around the steering wheel, and closed her eyes, trying to calm herself.

As much as she had tried to dissect the dream in logical terms: she was subconsciously aware of Matt’s infidelity; she’d gotten real life hints that Tracey was his lover, there had been clues, there had been signs all along…

None of those hints and clues explained the time on the clock, the siren and the dog, and the smell of jasmine—all details she dreamed, exactly as they happened, before they happened.

And the mirror… the mirror…

Without realizing it, she spoke aloud into the dark. “It wasn’t broken before. It shattered… while I was standing there.”

For the first time she allowed herself to consider the possibility that there may have been more to the dream.

Much, much more.