The Unseen

CHAPTER SEVEN

In the early morning before class, Laurel sat in the darkness of a basement library carrel, the light from a black-and-white sixteen-millimeter film flickering on her face. The film was of an interview: On the small screen in front of her a man was speaking from a leather armchair in front of a wall lined with books, in what looked like a private study or library. The man was tall, lean, blond, and gorgeous, dressed in an elegantly tailored suit with a narrow tie. His voice was as rich and refined as the voices of the best actors and news broadcasters of the time.

He leaned forward in this chair with an intensity that sent chills through Laurel’s entire body; he seemed to be speaking directly to her, in that velvety British accent.

“Perhaps that which we call ‘reality’ is no more than an agreement, a social contract that the less imaginative among us have decided upon, for the sake of convenience. But what if life is—in reality—more like the dreaming state? If time is a spiral, then is it possible to remember the future as well as the past? Might that begin to explain ESP?”

The black-and-white film had the grainy quality of a newsreel and seemed like a jolt from history. The only marking on the film can was ALAISTAIR LEISH, 1965. Laurel had found the can of film in one of the file boxes and was now watching it on one of the library’s machines, completely riveted to the screen.

An off-camera interviewer was asking: “Dr. Leish, what are the implications if ESP really exists?”

Leish looked into the camera, straight at Laurel, into her very soul. “It means everything we know about reality is in question. It means that we are on the threshold of a whole new world.”

His voice was so quietly confident, so clearly in awe of the possibilities, that Laurel felt a thrill running up her spine, ending in a tingling behind her ears. She was barely aware of her body in the chair.

The film cut to overhead shots of the Duke campus in the sixties. Laurel was enchanted by the agelessness of it, the time-machine feeling of seeing the same buildings she walked by and worked in every day, in another era. The camera lingered on a distinctive Greco-Roman building with a copper dome and four tall white pillars on the portico. Laurel felt another shiver at a shot of a wooden door, with a window of frosted glass and the lettering: PARAPSYCHOLOGY LAB.

Then she leaned on her elbows and watched, mesmerized by the footage of Zener-card tests: the volunteers in their 1960s dresses and suits sitting at opposite sides of a small square table with a dark-wood screen partition in the center of the table that hid the cards on either side from view of the researcher and the test subject.

The next shot was of a machine consisting of a stand and a long lever that rotated a two-foot-long rectangular cage with rolling dice inside it.

Both shots were so familiar Laurel felt she must have seen some similar film before, if not the same reel. But she had no idea where that would have been.

The film moved back to a voice-over of Leish telling his own story, while Laurel was treated to a series of photos of the younger Leish, breathtakingly, arrogantly handsome, with thick blond hair and light piercing eyes.

“My first poltergeist investigation took place at a farm in Sussex in 1951. The family had reported knocking and scratching in the walls, bedclothes being pulled off the children as they were sleeping, the radio going on and off at odd hours.” Leish’s voice dropped into a storytelling hush and Laurel leaned forward, entranced. “I was convinced that the twelve-year-old son of the farmer had been faking all the ‘poltergeist’ effects: pulling out drawers when no one was watching, spilling sugar and salt on the kitchen counters and floor.” Leish paused. “But one night, in the middle of the night, long after this boy had gone to bed, I was sleeping on the couch in the living room, and I suddenly awoke to intense cold. A fire was blazing in the hearth, but I could see my own breath in the air. Then with my own eyes I saw coins begin to fall from the ceiling. They appeared just below the ceiling and fell to the floor without a sound, like rain.”

Dr. Leish paused again to let the story resonate. Laurel felt chills through her entire body now.

“Such an experience changes you on the most profound level. How can you not halt everything in your life, and devote the rest of your life to pursuing that question—of whether a thing like this could happen… and how?”

Laurel pushed back her chair to stand… and found her legs were too weak to hold her. She sat, shivering, wanting to shout, Yes! It happened to me, too! It happened and nothing has been the same.

The film continued, but Laurel had no idea what was playing on the screen. Her face was flushed, her own blood pounding in her ears. She knew what she was looking for, now: Leish had just spoken her inmost feelings aloud. How could she not stop everything to pursue how such things happen? How she could have had the dream, how could she have seen it all, known it all?

How?

Laurel drove home from campus with wind gusting through the streets, whipping at the trees around her, turning the green wall into a moving ocean of branches and leaves. A storm was coming; she could see it in the roiling dark clouds above. The frequent and sudden thunderstorms were another unnerving but strangely thrilling aspect of her new Southern life.

She reached home just as the sky opened, and she ran toward the house through pelting rain, soaked but exhilarated.

Up in the study, the cat sat watching in the doorway as Laurel patted her hair dry with a towel and logged on to the Net to learn more about Dr. Leish. She had never heard of him, and she had to admit it was not just the thrill of the unknown; it was the man himself who was mesmerizing. She Googled him (which was cheating, she knew, but she needed the instant gratification), and clicked through several links, skimming eagerly. And all she got was a mystery wrapped in a mystery.

Leish had begun his career as a psychologist with a specialty in hypnotism, but became converted to the study of parapsychology after his experience on the farm in Sussex. He made a name for himself in Europe by investigating haunted houses and lecturing to parapsychology societies, and was a member of the British Society for Psychical Research. He wrote a book specifically about poltergeists, on which he continued to do field investigations into the 1960s.

So was he here at Duke? Laurel wondered. The film had shown footage of the Duke campus, and the shots of Leish testing students with the Zener cards and dice machines in the film certainly looked like photos she’d seen of the Duke lab. She tried Googling “Leish+Duke University,” but found no matches beyond a few articles that mentioned both in general reference to the subject of parapsychology—nothing to indicate he was ever part of the Duke parapsychology lab.

Next she Googled Leish’s book, The Lure of the Poltergeist. It was out of print and going for a staggering $1,800 on Abe Books, when it was even available.

“Well, that’s out,” she murmured wryly.

She returned to clicking through articles online and skimming. As a personality psychologist, she found the whole idea of poltergeists fascinating: that random, inexplicable movements could have a mischievous, teasing quality, even an intention—although surely those qualities were simply projected onto the phenomena by human observers. But that in itself was tantalizing: the psychological projection of human qualities onto inexplicable phenomena.

She was intrigued by Leish’s take on the subject. He’d headed up poltergeist investigations in Europe and reported that poltergeist manifestations almost always increased over the course of an incident—and actually stepped up once outside investigators were on the scene. Leish advanced a theory that a poltergeist was fed by a spiraling group dynamic, that started with the family and then was fed by the expectations of investigators, researchers, even law enforcement officials and the media—in other words, that a poltergeist was actually created by human intention.

A kind of group hypnosis, Laurel thought, or shared madness. There was something that made sense about it, and admittedly, was fascinating.

She clicked onto another article—then her eyes stopped on a phrase:

She sat back in her chair, thinking, So he must have died not long after that film was made.

She felt a curious sense of disappointment, even loss.

She made a notation in her notebook and circled it. After a moment she added a row of question marks as well.

She stood from her table and stepped to the window, opening it to let in the cold, wet air. She stood leaning against the sill, watching the rain, and thinking about the maze of boxes.

The initially daunting lack of order to the files had become intriguing. Laurel had a growing suspicion that the chaos had an order of its own, that someone had deliberately scrambled the contents of the boxes so that only someone with a road map could decipher the patterns. The mystery made her even more determined to crack the code.

“There’s something else, too,” she said aloud into the cool dimness of the room.

At first, it was just a question that surfaced again as she worked her way steadily through the boxes, a question she filed away to consider later, but which kept popping up in her mind and then gradually took over her thoughts.

Why the hell did the lab shut down?

She went back to her desk table, and sat in her chair to open the notebook in which she’d been compiling her random notes.

In 1965, the Duke parapsychology lab had shut down completely. All right, Dr. Rhine had retired from the Duke faculty, and he moved his research off campus, continuing his work with the other foundations he’d set up. Laurel could understand that—to a degree. But why shut the entire lab down? All records stopped short in 1965, just when it seemed that the parapsychology lab was more famous than it had ever been, garnering national media attention on the Seaford poltergeist investigation—“The House of Flying Objects”—and the subsequent “Project Poltergeist” case in Newark. The entire world had known about the Duke parapsychology lab.

And even more puzzling: Why had all those years of research been sealed?

Why seal it all up for so long?

“Why?” she said aloud.

Across the room there was a sudden scraping slide and crash.

Laurel leaped out of her chair, which toppled to the ground behind her as she spun in the direction of the crash.

The window had slid shut on its own, falling violently against the sill.

Laurel stood staring at it with her heart racing in her chest. After a moment she approached cautiously.

The window was old, of course, an archaic counterweight device, the ropes of which were either cut, or sprung, or painted shut on half the windows in the house.

“It’s an old house,” she told herself, unaware until she heard the words that she’d spoken them aloud. “And the wind…” Her voice sounded shaky in the twilight silence of the room.

But right there: a perfect example of what she’d been reading.

I actually psyched myself into believing for half a second in some kind of paranormal visitation. Just exactly what happens in these poltergeist incidents.

She moved back to the long table and looked down at her notebook, at the notation she had made:

It bothered her. It didn’t merely bother her, it gnawed at her. Why?

It was a genuine mystery. Leish was only forty-one when he died. Did he die in the middle of some investigation? Without realizing it, she spoke aloud: “He died the same month that the lab shut down. Within weeks.”

And then a thought struck her that sent chills through her.

Could his death possibly have anything to do with the lab shutting down?

She grabbed her notebook and a pen and wrote quickly.

Then she almost jumped out of her skin—as the phone shrilled on her desk behind her.