The stairway opened into a large attic with slanting rafters and small, high, dirty windows.
Laurel swept her gaze quickly over the room, but there was no one human in the attic space. It was empty except for a bed, a chest of drawers, a camp toilet, a square mini-refrigerator, a table and chair set up as a desk with a metal filing cabinet beside it—and against the far wall, a bank of monitors and computer equipment that was the twin of the one downstairs, but with double the equipment, double the screens. Laurel moved forward to it in a daze, and drew in a sharp breath seeing her own room with the narrow bed and the raven above the desk on one of the screens. Each of the other bedrooms was being recorded as well.
We’re all being watched. Who? Who?
She could see the great room on another of the screens, with rocks now scattered all over the floor and on the long table in the center. Brendan and Tyler and Katrina were back to sitting beside the slowly growing pool of water, watching the puddle form again.
Laurel could tell from the angle of the cameras that they were set high, almost on the ceiling.
The cameras must be in the molding,
she thought, even as she reeled with the shock of the discovery.
In those medallions on the crown molding.
Still moving in a trance, she stepped to the desk. A file folder was open on top, and she looked down at a collection of brochures, some of them plain flyers, others glossy four-color versions, some formal applications. Words jumped out at her:
Prize. Grant.
She picked one up, and then another, and read with increasing disbelief.
Abraham Kovoor’s Challenges, Prize: 100,000 Sri Lankan Rupees
Alfredo Barrago’s Bet, Prize: British £50,000
Center for Inquiry West, Prize: U.S. $10,000
Association for Skeptical Enquiry, (United Kingdom) Prize: £13,000.
Stuart Landsborough’s Puzzling World, Prize: NZ $50,000.
All were international prizes for conclusive evidence of the paranormal.
Laurel looked up from the brochures, reeling. She suddenly leaned over the table and picked out one bold-lettered flyer:
The James Randi Educational Foundation Prize: One Million U.S. Dollars.
Laurel jolted in disbelief.
There was a handwritten notation on the sheet:
“May be combined with the Sima Nan Prize from China—for a total of two million two hundred thousand U.S. dollars.”
Laurel put a hand to the desk to steady herself. She was staggered.
Two million two hundred thousand. Enough money to make someone risk … anything.
She felt ill.
He’s using you. He’s been using you all along. He’s in this for money. He might even have faked it all.
There was an overpowering sense of familiarity about it.
Betrayal. Lies. Used. Again.
She could barely stand, now; she was adrift, loose from her moorings. Nothing real or solid or rational.
Don’t think about it. Don’t think about it.
But underneath the disbelief, anger was rising, blood flooding into her face.
There was a disorienting scraping as a file drawer suddenly slid out in the file cabinet.
Laurel whirled and stared at it. The cabinet was motionless, the drawer open as far as it could go without falling.
What? What?
She started to back up, filled with an overpowering urge to run. She turned—and gasped. Behind her in the dark corner of the room was the man with the clipboard, standing, observing, a shadow in the dim light of the attic. He studied Laurel with clinical detachment.
“Who are you?” Laurel whispered, stunned. And then her eyes focused in the dimness and she recognized the dark man. The lecturer from the Paranormal Research Center. “Dr. Anton.”
The man smiled, white teeth in a swarthy face. “That’s right, Dr. MacDonald.”
Her mind scrambled to make sense of it. “How … how long have you been here?”
He gestured casually with the clipboard. His voice was relaxed, unstressed. “Since the beginning, of course,”
“It’s your experiment,” she said, with dawning realization.
“That’s right.” He half-smiled. “And I might add—successful beyond anything I dared hope.”
Laurel stared at him, grasped at a thought. “Have you faked everything, then?”
His eyes widened in mock surprise. “Oh no. I may have primed the pump in the beginning … but the house … the house is coming alive. You’ve all exceeded my wildest expectations.”
She was fighting for composure, fighting not to scream. He had been inside her room, and inside Katrina’s—he had watched them as they slept, had recorded their every move. It was monstrous, and he was unbalanced, quite possibly dangerous, and she was trapped in a secret attic with him and no one knew where she was, and he was between her and the door. She swallowed her panic, groped for an air of detachment.
“I suppose you had to keep us in the dark to keep from tainting the experiment,” she said, colleague to colleague.
“Naturally.”
Something occurred to her and her eyes flicked to the wall. “The monitors up here weren’t damaged. You have it all recorded? The glass smashing, the rock showers …”
“Oh yes. Everything,” he agreed, and for a moment, a feverish light burned in his eyes.
A familiar voice suddenly spoke from the stairwell. “What the hell?”
Laurel’s knees went weak with relief.
Brendan. Thank God, thank God …
But as he came forward from the narrow attic doorway he was looking at her with reproach and regret … and she knew.
He stopped some distance from her and shook his head sadly. “Mickey. I wish you hadn’t done this.”
She was cold all over, but she looked from Brendan to Anton. “So this was your experiment all along, both of you. You’re doing it for prize money.”
“We’ll cut you in, Mickey,” Brendan said, and his smile was sickly. “It’s just that we needed you to be here with no expectations—”
“It’s hardly just the money,” Anton interrupted, and there was a fervor underneath his words that froze her marrow. “This is an active, powerful poltergeist manifestation. It’s bigger than anything ever documented, and we have it all recorded.”
“It’s real. You know it, Mickey. You know it,” Brendan said softly.
It was true, but it was wrong. The rough attic walls seemed to be closing in on her.
“We’re making history,” Anton pontificated. “There’s something monumental, here—”
“Don’t talk to me,” she said to Anton, and turned to Brendan. “It’s not too late. We need to take Tyler and Katrina out of here. We need to get out—get out now.”
She tried to keep her voice calm, professional. “I think I understand what’s going on. There
is
an imprint in this house, just as in the theories. It’s an imprint of Paul Folger’s mental state. An imprint of schizophrenia. The symptoms are all here. Hallucinations. Obsession. Delusions. The feeling of being watched. The smells.” She looked into Brendan’s eyes. “I know you’ve experienced them. It’s in that room, the room you’ve been sleeping in. That’s the center of the house. It was Paul Folger’s room. All those years, the hallucinations, the paranoia, the emotions, his madness—it soaked into that room, and into the walls.”
She was listening to her own voice, and somehow the thoughts that had seemed so coherent to her in the room downstairs were not having the effect she intended.
“The house is delusional,” she said. “We see its delusions.”
“A fascinating theory,” Anton said. “I’m impressed. We’ll have to take that under consideration.”
“We don’t have to prove
why,
though, Mickey,” Brendan explained patiently. “We only have to show that it
is
.”
She wasn’t following, and then she was. “For the money, you mean.”
“We could live like this, Mickey,” he gestured vaguely, indicating the house. “In a house like this, a life like this …”
“You don’t understand,” she heard herself saying. “Don’t you see? Rafe Winchester, Victoria Enright, my uncle … whatever is in this house, it imprinted them, too. There’s madness here, and it’s contagious. We have to get out.”
Brendan looked away from her, and her heart dropped.
Anton shook his head. “We simply can’t let you do that, Dr. MacDonald. We are in the midst of a breakthrough study and we can’t let you interfere.”
She turned again to Brendan numbly.
“Just one more night, Mickey.” His voice was a raw plea. “The children are doing so well; the house responds to their intentions. You saw what Katrina did this afternoon. We just need one more night to film it, to make sure we have everything documented.”
This is crazy. I have to get out. I have to get them out.
She made a desperate attempt. “I can understand that. I’m of no use to you, though. You don’t need me anymore… .”
She looked to Brendan, pleading … desperately seeking the person she’d thought she’d known. And for a moment, he met her eyes.
“We do need you, Mickey,” he said. “We might need you most of all.” She stared at him in a new confusion.
Brendan walked to the file cabinet and pulled a file from the already open drawer, approached, and handed it over to her with a bizarre formality.
This is absurd,
she thought, as she opened the file.
I’m a hostage and they’re standing around discussing it as if we were in a lab—
Then she froze. What she was looking down at were test charts: the familiar charts for Tyler and Katrina, the initial results of the Zener card tests.
But there was a third chart, and the scores were higher than Tyler’s or Katrina’s. She stared in disbelief at the numbers before the name of the test subject finally registered. She was looking at her own chart.
She paged through the charts again, thinking there must be a mistake. Even as she did it, she was remembering the tests she ran with Tyler, and Brendan’s strange, distant responses when she asked about the scores.
Nothing there,
he’d said.
Perfectly average. Right at statistical chance.
But the scores told another story. Her own psi levels were 85 percent above chance, higher than Tyler’s, off the charts.
Her head was ringing—and Uncle Morgan’s voice whispered in her ear:
Runs in the family.
She looked up, and Brendan was smiling at her sadly, and with a touch of awe. “What are you going to do?” she managed.
“But you know that, Dr. MacDonald,” Dr. Anton said with exaggerated patience. “The group was very close this afternoon, before you interfered. We’re going to finish what the group started. Make contact. The same as the first group did.”
“How do you know that?” she said automatically, curious in spite of herself.
Dr. Anton smiled at her. “Victoria Enright,” he said.
For a moment Laurel flashed on the dingy green halls of the asylum. “You visited her,” Laurel realized. “You were the one.”
“She’s actually quite accessible with the proper techniques.”
Laurel remembered that Anton had been a hypnotherapist. “You hypnotized her.”
“Yes, a very pliant subject. She told me all about their séance. It is truly a loss that none of their recordings survived.”
She tried to keep her voice steady. “Not all of their group survived, either. And not one of them is still sane.”
“Ah, yes, this extravagant theory of yours,” Anton sounded amused. “Do you really believe that whatever happens tonight will drive everyone in this house mad?”
“You’ve seen how Victoria is,” she said, and she heard her voice shaking. “Did you meet Rafe Winchester?”
He smiled faintly. “Oh yes.”
She felt a chill of unease at the insinuation on his face. “What did you do to him?”
“He’s somewhere he can’t interfere,” Anton said lightly. “Amazing that the old fellow has been the self-appointed guardian of the house for all these years. Who would have thought we could have found the house so easily, if we’d just followed that particular trail?”
“So you know about Rafe, and you know about Victoria—” She was not going to mention Uncle Morgan, but Anton added—
“And your uncle, of course, yes.” He met her eyes and she knew that this man would stop at nothing, let no one stand in the way of his goal.
She swallowed. “So—then how do you explain what happened to the original group?” She was keeping him talking, but she was also genuinely curious.
“Simpler minds in a simpler time, unprepared for the expansion of consciousness they experienced.”
His clinical detachment frightened her.
He really only sees people as lab rats, to be used for his purposes
. Aloud she asked, “What makes you think this group is any more prepared for what they might see?
He looked at her, puzzled. “But as a scientist, how can you not go forward and learn for yourself?”
Laurel nodded thoughtfully … and lunged for the staircase, running as hard and fast as she could for the door.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
Brendan bolted after her, grabbed her around the waist. She flailed out at him, punching and kicking, but Anton seized her arm from behind, twisting her around, and both of them tackled her, holding her struggling and screaming between them, only Anton’s hand was clamped hard on her mouth and all she could hear was her own muffled grunting.
Brendan held her down on the floor as Anton duct-taped her mouth shut and tied her hands with some silky rope. The agony of having Brendan’s hands on her like that forced tears to her eyes and she clenched her eyes shut, clenched her jaw, her legs, her body… . She was sick with fear, that they would leave her upstairs, trussed and helpless, possibly to die. But instead of tying her to the chair, or a pillar, the two of them hauled her up from the floor and marched her down the narrow stairway. Brendan eased open the back closet panel at the bottom and they brought her through the dark closet, out the door into Paul Folger’s tiny, white room.
They muscled her toward the bed and she stiffened, fighting them.