The Forgotten Room (13 page)

Stifling a yawn, Taylor Pettiford walked into Lux’s elegant dining room and looked around a little blearily. The room had been set up in the standard breakfast arrangement: long, buffet-style counters along one wall, while the rest of the room was filled with the usual round tables covered in crisp white linen.

Pettiford got in line at the buffet, grabbing a tray and a plate and helping himself to his favorite breakfast: freshly squeezed orange juice, black coffee, a Gruyère and fines herbes omelet from the attendant at the omelet station, three sausage links from one steam tray, five rashers of bacon from another, and a croissant from the overstuffed bakery basket. Carefully balancing the alarming load, he glanced around the room for a place to sit. There, at a table in the near corner, he saw his friend and fellow sufferer, Ed
Crandley. He maneuvered his way over and plopped down in the seat beside Crandley.

“Another day in the salt mines,” he said.

Crandley, mouth full of
pain au chocolat
, mumbled a reply.

Pettiford took a sip of coffee, a mouthful of orange juice, and then froze. There, across the room, was Roger Carbon: the reason he was so tired this morning. Carbon was sitting with the thin, birdlike Laura Benedict, the quantum engineer who shared an office adjoining Carbon’s. Pettiford believed Benedict didn’t especially like Carbon, and guessed she’d sat with him simply because she was too kindhearted to see him eating alone.

Roger Carbon
. Lux, as everyone knew, was the country’s most prestigious think tank. When, fresh from U. Penn with a newly minted degree in psychology, Pettiford had won a year’s position as an assistant at Lux, he felt like he’d just won the lottery.

How little he’d known.

Actually, he thought as he downed the first piece of bacon, that wasn’t quite fair. Lux had a reason for its sterling reputation, and a lot of excellent scientists and researchers passed through its doors, producing high-quality work. And many interns and assistants had pretty decent experiences there as well. Take Ed Crandley, for example: he had a good enough gig, working for a fair-minded, well-regarded statistician.

It had been Pettiford’s own bad luck to catch Roger Carbon for a boss.

Upon arriving at Lux, Pettiford had been unprepared for a man like Carbon: unprepared for his withering sarcasm, his impatience and impetuousness, his quickness to find fault and seeming blindness to a job well done. Instead of handing Pettiford interesting assignments, or trusting him to help with the raw research, Carbon treated him the way a marquee Ivy League professor might treat his lowliest research assistant. Just the night before, Pettiford had been up until 2 a.m., cross-checking bibliographic citations for Carbon’s latest monograph.

Ah, well. Shit happens
. Pettiford polished off his second strip of bacon, his mood improving as his thoughts turned to plans for the upcoming weekend. Half a dozen of the assistants were going to converge on a popular singles bar overlooking the Newport boat basin. Such an outing was a rare thing—the volume of work, coupled with the way Lux frowned on intermingling with the local townspeople—and it had taken Pettiford a fair amount of time to put it together, wheedling, cajoling, promising to buy the first two rounds.

“You’re still in for Saturday night, right?” he asked Crandley, with a leer and a nudge.

“Oh, yeah.”

“You know, I haven’t been out of this place in six weeks. I think I’m getting cabin fever.”

“That’s because you didn’t bring a car.”

“The orientation literature urged us not to, and—”

There was a commotion on the far side of the dining room—a raised voice, a burst of animated talk—and Pettiford looked up. It was the historiographer, Dr. Wilcox. He was standing up, burly and easily six feet four, hands outstretched, his tablemates looking on.

Pettiford shrugged. In a place that took itself as seriously as Lux, Wilcox was an anomaly: a laid-back guy with a flair for melodrama, even at times a ham. No doubt he was entertaining the table with something out of his endless fund of stories and off-color jokes. Pettiford speared a sausage link and turned back to Crandley.

“It’s a conspiracy,” he said, picking up where he’d left off. “That’s what it is. First, they situate this place just far enough from town that you can’t reasonably walk in. Then they suggest—strongly—that you don’t bring your own transportation. They don’t pay us much—such an honor to be here, and all that—so we’re not likely to have the dough for regular cab fares. Get the picture? We’re indentured servants.”

“This paranoia is something new,” Crandley said. “Maybe
you ought to have a skull session with your pal Dr. Carbon over there.”

“Are you kidding? Carbon? That would be the last straw.” And Pettiford shuddered in mock horror.

Suddenly, there was another commotion from the far side of the room—this one much louder. Pettiford looked over quickly. It was Wilcox again. He was shouting something, and Pettiford could tell instantly that this was no joke, no amusing anecdote: the historiographer’s eyes were so wide that all he could see was the whites, and the froth that flew from his mouth flecked his generous beard with foam. There were gasps around the room; people rose from their chairs; one or two made for the exit.

Through his surprise, Pettiford began to make out what Wilcox was shouting. “Get them out!” he cried. “Get them out of my head!”

Wilcox’s tablemates were now gathering around him, speaking soothingly, urging him to sit down again. Several people from other tables—friends, acquaintances, Wilcox was a popular fellow—approached. Pettiford looked on, frozen in place, sausage halfway to his mouth. Now Wilcox fell silent, allowing himself to be led back to his seat. He sat down, then shook his head, like a horse trying to drive off a determined insect. There was a moment of stasis. And then, abruptly, he leapt to his feet again, roaring, his seat tumbling away behind him.

“Get them out!” he shouted. “They’re too sharp—they hurt.
Get them out!
”

Once again, a small crowd gathered around, trying to calm him. Easily freeing himself, the big man spun around, crying and roaring in obvious torment. He was now scratching desperately at his ears and, to his horror, Pettiford could see even at this distance flesh shredding under the man’s nails, the blood beginning to flow from long gashes.

Suddenly, Wilcox darted away from the table and—fists drumming at his ears—looked this way and that. For a moment, his gaze locked with Pettiford’s, and the assistant felt a stab of
fear. Then Wilcox turned toward the long row of tables on which breakfast had been laid out. Shouting
“Out of my head! Please, no more voices in my head!”
he rushed toward the buffet. The waiters standing in position behind the offerings backed away nervously as he approached.

Wilcox ran toward the tables so violently, fists still pounding at his head, that the impact almost toppled the closest one backward. Everyone in the dining room except the frozen Pettiford was now on his feet, some rushing toward Wilcox, others running in the opposite direction. From the corner of his eye, Pettiford saw someone speaking frantically into a house phone.

Bellowing out increasingly inarticulate cries, Wilcox looked up and down the table, eyes jittering and rolling in his head. Then he darted forward, once again shaking off the well-intentioned hands of friends trying to restrain him, and grasped the steam tray holding the bacon Pettiford had helped himself to, not five minutes earlier. Batting the tray away with one swipe of his meaty paw, bacon flying in all directions, Wilcox grabbed the two small cans of jellied cooking fuel that sat flaming in the panel beneath. He scooped up one of the cans in each hand, roaring.

As he looked on, Pettiford suddenly had a dreadful, chilling premonition of what was about to happen.

The room was full of alarmed cries, shouts of dismay. But for the moment, Dr. Wilcox himself went silent. And then—quite deliberately—he jammed one container of canned heat into each ear. An instant later, he became vocal again: only now, the shouts of torment had been replaced with shrieks of pain.

Everyone had abruptly fallen back in shock and disbelief. Even the security guards who had come running into the dining room faltered, struck dumb by what had just occurred. Wilcox was lurching back and forth, purple gel flaming from both ear canals, his sideburns and beard catching fire as the fuel dribbled toward his jaw. Screaming ever louder, he slashed this way and that, sending plates of artisanal breads, jams, and marmalade flying away from the tables.

And then Wilcox stopped again. Not the screaming—that was now continuous—but his physical movement. It seemed to Pettiford, for whom the scene had now abandoned any semblance of reality and morphed into nightmare, that the man had seen something that caught his attention. Wilcox lurched forward once more, ears and beard still afire, and stopped before an industrial four-slice toaster. Bellowing at the top of his lungs, he plunged a hand into one of the four slots; depressed the machine’s toasting lever, powering its element; and then—with his free hand—grabbed a nearby pot of steaming coffee and poured it directly into the unit.

Flames; a blue arc of electricity that rose like a single-colored rainbow above the serving table; a universal, room-wide cry of shock and horror, overridden by a single, larynx-shredding ululation of pain—and then the convulsing form of Wilcox was obscured by a rising pall of smoke.

Above all the noise, a sudden thud sounded to Pettiford’s left. Crandley had fainted.

As the afternoon slowly slid toward evening, Logan remained in his third-floor office, poring over books of secret knowledge; transcripts of paranormal encounters; and the writings of famous occultists and mystics: Helena Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, Aleister Crowley. He had tried, with only some success, to blot out the shocking events he’d witnessed that morning. He had also avoided going downstairs for lunch, which under the circumstances was being served in a series of conference rooms: given the public nature of what had happened, he was sure that the conversation would be about nothing else. Wilcox had occupied the suite of rooms right next to his own. He’d only spoken with the man a few times, but he’d struck Logan as bluff, hearty, and an utterly grounded individual.

Out of my head
, Wilcox had said.
Please, no more voices in
my head
. Logan thought back to Strachey’s transcript:
It follows me everywhere. It is with me. In the dark
. Different words—and yet, in a chilling way, similar.

Logan put down the book he was reading and wondered whether he should pause to look into Wilcox. But no: Wilcox, in stable but serious condition at Newport Hospital, suffering from both chemical and electrical burns, was raving, incoherent, unresponsive to questions from either doctors or psychiatrists. Better to continue the investigation at hand—and continue it as quickly as possible. If he could discover what lay behind Strachey’s breakdown, then what happened to Wilcox—and what, to a far lesser degree, had happened to several others at Lux—might be more explainable.

He picked up the book again: a 1914 volume titled
Chronicles of the Risen Beyond
.

About fifteen minutes later, he came across a passage that stopped him cold. He read it again, and then again:

The apparition, which had been summoned by a complex set of rituals which I will not describe here, was undoubtedly malignant. Those who had been present (I was not among them) spoke of a terrible stench that assaulted the nostrils; an odd thickening of the atmosphere, as if one was within a compression chamber; and, most noticeably, the sense of a malefic presence—a hostile entity, angered at having been disturbed and wanting nothing more than to harm its disturbers. One member of the group collapsed outright; another began shouting incomprehensibly and had to be restrained. But the thing of greatest interest was that the presence, once roused, did not dissipate, but seemed to remain in the chamber where it had first been appeared. Indeed, even now—thirty years after the original event—its presence has been attested to by nearly all who have frequented the chamber (there are not many who have willingly done so). This small group includes myself, and I
write this to give assurances that—for whatever reason—the entity remains in the room where it was first summoned.

Logan put the book aside. He knew from personal experience that certain places—houses, cemeteries, deserted abbeys—could be home to evil presences: shadows of people or things who had once dwelled there. The more evil the person, the longer the aura tended to remain after death. Some might consider such places haunted; Logan himself did not like the term. But he could not deny the unsettling, even chilling sense of menace he had experienced upon first entering the forgotten room—a sense that had persisted, to one degree or another, ever since. In fact, even now, far from the West Wing, he felt uncharacteristically nervous and irritable.

He’d told Kim Mykolos that the electronic field generator built into the strange device might have been a mechanism for detecting paranormal phenomena. Ghosts. The heavily redacted lines of scientific inquiry he’d found in the Lux files helped lead to such a conclusion. Since the radiator-like assembly built into the other flank of the device appeared to be an EVP recorder, was it indeed possible Lux scientists had, in the 1930s, attempted to summon a spirit from beyond the grave—and succeeded?

Logan rose from his desk and began to pace the room slowly.
Chronicles of the Risen Beyond
and dozens of other books like it gave accounts of such entities being summoned against their will—and then remaining in the immediate vicinity, angry, malevolent, unwilling or unable to return to the void from which they had come.

Was this the case with Project Sin?

If such a thing had happened—if the scientists had succeeded, and perhaps gotten more than they bargained for—it would explain a lot of things: the abrupt cessation of work, the sealing of the room, the careful culling of Lux’s files.

And then, what of Strachey? If a malign presence had persisted in the forgotten room all these years, his breaking into the space
would have been like stumbling into an invisible hornet’s nest. Was it possible this was what had caused…

Another thought struck Logan. He’d found the room unsealed, broken into; exactly when was uncertain, save that the plaster which plugged the hole had been fresh. Others at Lux had seen things,
done
things, most recently the tragic events of that very morning. Could the forgotten room have been a prison—and, now breached, could whatever was inside have escaped into the mansion at large?

He moved past the large, ornate window of his office, pondering the question. As he did so, he stopped abruptly, frozen in place. He stared out through the leaded panes, jaw going slack.

There, on the lawn far below, was the figure of his wife. She was wearing a yellow sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat, with a bandanna tied—as was her style—loosely around its brim. She was squinting against the sun, smiling, one hand resting on a cocked hip in the characteristic pose he remembered so well, the other hand waving up at him. The ocean breezes caught at the dress, worried the sleeves and the hem.

“Kit,” Logan whispered.

His mouth went dry and his heart began to race. He blinked; looked away a moment; then glanced once again out of the window.

His wife, Karen Davies Logan, was still there. She was still smiling, still beckoning, her silhouette framed by the angry breakers, her long shadow pushed back by the afternoon sun across the verdant green lawn. She opened her mouth now, and cupped her hands as if to call out, and he heard, or thought he heard, her voice:
Jeremy…Jeremy…

He looked away again, counted to sixty. Then—slowly—he looked back through the window.

The figure was gone. And no surprise: Kit had been dead more than five years.

Logan stared out the window for a long moment. Then, shakily, he made his way to the desk and sat down again. Unbuttoning the top button of his shirt, he drew out the amulet that he always
wore around his neck and began to stroke it unconsciously. Something was happening to him; something he did not care to explore, or even admit. It was more than just a case of nerves. He’d begun hearing strange, faint, disquieting music—the music of Strachey’s study, of the forgotten room—even when he was nowhere near the West Wing. He had awoken in the middle of last night, certain that somebody had been whispering to him, but he’d been unable to recall what was said. Ever since waking, he’d felt poorly. And now, this…

He sat at his desk for another five minutes, breathing slowly, letting his heartbeat return to normal. And then he rose and left his chambers. Perhaps a bracing walk around the grounds would help restore him to better form.

He could only hope.