It was a little room with slanted rafters, a narrow antique bed, a closet door, and—inexplicably in such a small room—a fireplace across from the bed.
Katrina frowned into the room, stepped tentatively forward …
… then wrinkled her nose and shook her head, as if warding something away. She moved quickly out. Laurel lingered in the doorway after Katrina moved on. The one small bed in it seemed more like a prison cot than a bed, and it may have been her imagination, but the atmosphere was simply—thick. A hat stand stood in the corner beside the door. There was a dark
O
on the window, about three inches in diameter, painted, she thought, but when she stepped closer she saw it was not painted, but etched into the glass and then darkened in with ink. It gave Laurel a strong sense of unease. At the window, the filmy curtains stirred, trembling in some unfelt current of air, and Laurel felt the flesh on her forearms rise.
She remembered the clipboard she held stiffly at her side and lifted it, looking at her own copy of the floor plan. She hesitated about how to mark the room, and then put squiggly lines over it.
Electromagnetic,
she wrote; it was the only word she could think of.
She stepped out of the room, and experienced a palpable sense of relief. Katrina had drifted down the hall toward the next rooms. Laurel watched as she drifted through slowly through them, without comment and without writing anything on her clipboard. She didn’t stop again until the room with the faded animal wallpaper and the sleigh beds. Paul and Caroline’s room, Laurel remembered.
But why would the room have been preserved as a nursery, obviously long after the children were grown?
Katrina was frowning and writing.
At the end of the long hall they moved into the perpendicular Spanish section again, with its larger rooms: the master bedroom, the two smaller rooms in the middle with their corresponding bathrooms across the hall, and the large library.
Katrina seemed to enjoy the master bedroom with its sweeping views of the garden; Laurel sensed that given the chance she would be moving out of her smaller bedroom forthwith.
They both turned at the sound of voices behind them.
Brendan and Tyler appeared at the top of the main staircase as the women reached the end of the hall.
“Nice timing,” Brendan remarked, and they all went into the big library together.
Brendan and Laurel stayed by the door as the two students wandered around the room under the watchful eyes of the rows of photographs. Rain blew against the windows outside in spatterings and lighting cracked across the sky, accompanied by the low rumble of thunder.
“Yeah, there’s some major heaviness here, all right,” Tyler drawled. “Almost feels like I’m being watched.” Laurel glanced at Brendan and he shrugged.
As Tyler turned back to the bookshelves, Brendan muttered to Laurel, “Actually he’s been pretty cooperative.” The warmth of his breath on her neck made Laurel flush, her ears tingle. “What about her?” he queried softly.
“Loving the attention,” Laurel murmured.
He smiled at her with sparkling eyes and she had to look away.
The two students were industriously making notes on their floor plans. Brendan waited until they were through and then spoke.
“Okay. Have we all gotten through the whole house?” Brendan looked to Laurel and Katrina, who nodded. The two students seemed more subdued than normal, almost as if they were drained by their experience.
“Great. Let’s talk.” Brendan indicated the center arrangement of small sofas and chairs, and they all took seats. To Laurel’s discomfort, Tyler joined her on one sofa, and Katrina took the opposite couch, looking to Brendan with clear expectation on her face. Brendan remained standing, and Laurel could feel the girl’s flare of anger.
“Just an overview first, and then we’ll get more detailed,” Brendan started cheerily. “Can we point to any hot spots? Specific rooms?”
Tyler looked to Katrina.
“The green entry hall downstairs,” she said promptly. “The archway between the front hall and the great room.”
Laurel noted she used the words “great room” as if she said them every day.
“That dining room,” Katrina continued, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Upstairs, the little room with the sticky door. The one with the sleigh beds.” She looked around her at the library. “And this one.”
Brendan looked to Tyler. “Mr. Bradford?”
“The stairs next to the kitchen,” he said, and shot a glance toward Laurel. “This room, yeah, but that could just be all the damn pictures staring down.” He smiled slyly and everyone laughed, which seemed to gratify him. He glanced at Katrina. “Gotta agree—that dining room doesn’t feel right. Don’t know why. And my own room is pretty hot—if anyone would like to come have a feel,” he added.
“Thanks, I’m sure we’ll all keep that in mind,” Brendan said. “Let’s talk about what you felt in the rooms, specifically.”
“The archway—a lot of pain,” Katrina said almost dreamily. “It feels heavy. The air.”
Laurel felt a wave of irritation even though she had to admit she actually had a sense of what Katrina meant. The air just felt
denser,
there. But Katrina was performing like a professional psychic, as if she’d been doing house readings all her life, when her preliminary questionnaires had not revealed any previous psi experiences.
“What about the back staircase?” Brendan asked Tyler. “You said you felt something there.”
Tyler smiled slightly. “Well, if you must know, it made me horny as hell. Don’t ask why.”
Laurel remembered the unexpected sexual feeling she’d experienced on the stairs and had to will herself not to blush.
“Thanks for sharing,” Brendan said dryly.
“Don’t mention it,” Tyler shot back. “That
is
my job here, right?”
The air fairly crackled between the two males for a moment, so manifestly that Laurel was about to speak, when Brendan suddenly stood down, although she could not have said exactly how.
He wrote something on his clipboard and said, “What else?”
“The dining room …” Tyler said slowly. “I don’t know. I just step inside there and I want to get out.”
Laurel felt a chill … and then a rush of annoyance—and skepticism.
This is sounding a little too perfect. Everyone feeling the same things? Highly unlikely. And the chances of Tyler being serious? Even more unlikely.
“It’s bad,” Katrina announced. “Something bad happened there.”
Oh, great. They’re already making up things,
Laurel thought.
But that’s the point, isn’t it?
she answered herself immediately.
We want them to psych themselves out.
Katrina addressed her next monologue directly to Brendan. “And that little room upstairs is bad, too, the one with the sticky door. And there’s something very strange about the archway into the great room. I could
feel
it.” She put her hand on her chest, in case Brendan had somehow not noticed her lushly rounded breasts. Laurel was appalled to find herself tensing. To make matters worse, Tyler tipped his head back against the sofa and looked lazily from Katrina to Laurel to Brendan, as if he wasn’t missing a thing.
“Good,” Brendan said heartily, pointedly ignoring the unspoken dynamic that was like an electric charge in the room. “I think we’re off to a great start. Now here’s how it’s going to go. No Internet, no television, no phones, no music, unless one of you plays the piano, in which case knock yourself out. We do want you to carry these at all times, though.” He passed out a phone-sized walkie-talkie to everyone. “If there’s anything of note, or if anyone gets in trouble, you can hit ‘Page All’ and reach the whole group at the same time. I expect everyone to respond immediately to any page, is that clear?”
Everyone nodded, solemnly.
“We’ll be having you run card tests every day, and dice tests. We’ll also want you to record your dreams as soon as you wake up in the morning, anything you can remember, and do mood questionnaires twice a day. It’s fine to walk around the house and the gardens, and read or write, but no going off the grounds. We want you to immerse yourselves in the house, and simply—see what happens. Understood?” He looked around at all of them. “Just observe the house.”
“And let it observe us?” Tyler quipped.
Brendan smiled, and Laurel didn’t like the smile. “Exactly, Mr. Mountford.”
“Let the games begin,” Tyler said.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
It was too wet to tour the gardens, and the sky was going black behind the rain, so they split up, then—Brendan and Tyler to set up the cameras and monitors and infrared equipment and magnetic readers, Laurel and Katrina to make dinner.
Look at us, already time-warping back into the sixties, patented sex-role division of labor,
Laurel thought—but she didn’t really mind.
Let’s face it, I can barely program my own cell phone. Hooking up a poltergeist monitoring system? Forget it.
As it turned out, Laurel made dinner by herself while Katrina disappeared into the house, clearly used to having her meals magically appear for her.
And I’m fine with that, too, thank you very much.
It was vastly more comfortable not having Katrina around and the food they’d brought was mostly heat and eat—thankfully Trader Joe’s had recently opened several stores in the Research Triangle area. Laurel put a couple of spinach-and-feta pizzas into the huge stove and opened a carton of tomato basil soup.
They’d bought paper plates to keep the kitchen work to a minimum, but it just seemed wrong to use paper in such opulent surroundings, and the kitchen was well stocked with dishes, so Laurel decided to indulge. She found a large crystal bowl that was perfect for the salad, and turned on the water to wash it and some gilt-edged china plates for dinner.
It was odd how comfortable she felt, since she had never been in a kitchen this size. Big, yes, but the ceiling was surprisingly low, compared to the rest of the house.
I guess because no one but the servants were ever in it—why bother with high ceilings?
she thought wryly, as she swirled dishes in the sudsy water to wash the dust off. It was weird beyond words to be in a house that actually had full separate living quarters for the household staff, to walk through the small rooms in the back part of the house and realize just how many live-in servants there had been at Folger.
Not my world. None of this.
She turned to a cabinet to look for glasses—and froze—at the sound of loud thumping from the wall.
She knew there was a rational explanation,
knew
it, but inside her mind she panicked. A wave of primal fear washed over her and she literally could not move. The thumping continued, shuddering through the wall.
Then logic kicked in and she lunged to turn off the running water. The thumping stopped.
She took a moment to draw a breath, then reached slowly forward again and turned on the water.
Nothing but the sound of water rushing into the sink.
Then the thumping started again, slowly, then building to a frenzied pounding, coming from the same high spot in the wall above the sink.
Laurel turned off the water, laughed shakily at herself.
And remember, that’s all a haunting probably is, ever: just the mind playing tricks on itself. Expectations creating an atmosphere in—
A
THUMP
came from the wall behind her. She gasped, whirled toward the doorway.
Brendan was in the archway of the stairs, looking in through the kitchen door at her. “Sorry—missed a stair …”
She stared at him, pale and speechless.
“What? What?” He crossed to her with concern.
She leaned back against the prep table and laughed shakily. “Shit!”
“Mickey, what?” He took her arms, steadying her.
She stopped laughing. “Nothing. I’m just managing to freak myself out completely and it’s barely past nightfall.”
He smiled, relaxing. “Well, fasten your seat belt.”
She became aware of the warmth of his hands on her arms, the touch of his fingers like a caress on her wrists. He must have realized it at the same time, that he was still holding her, because he released her slowly, with a reluctance that she found thrilling.
“Guess it’s time to feed the children.”
“But where?” she said suddenly, realizing that the logical place—the dining room—was the last place she wanted to spend time in.
He looked at her innocently. “The dining room, of course. That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”
The dining room was a mass of shadows, the gardens an eerie unexplored country outside the French doors with the arched windows above them.
Brendan was unabashedly going for atmosphere; he’d brought out candles to light the long oak table rather than use the electric lights. The grandfather clock stood silently in the corner, frozen at 2:59.
Aside from an unspecific nervousness, Laurel was not experiencing the discomfort she had expected to feel in the room.
Maybe it’s just ugly in the day.
Katrina ate as daintily and sparingly as Laurel would have expected, barely touching the tips of her knife and fork to her food as she cut it. Tyler dug into the pizza, but used his silver on the salad in the European style.
There’s one for the statistical analysis page,
Laurel thought.
Rich kids have higher psi levels than commoners.
“So who died here?” Tyler asked bluntly.
Brendan looked at Laurel. They had decided for the time being not to reveal the—so far unsubstantiated—rumors of the mad brother and the murder/suicide.
“It’s an old house,” Brendan said noncommittally. “Chances are a lot of people died. But that’s not necessarily what we’re here to investigate. It might not be a haunting at all. What we do know is that people in this house reported poltergeist-like activity.”
Tyler whistled the
X-Files
theme. Katrina turned up her nose—
A sudden loud knock reverberated from the middle of the table. Katrina gasped and drew back against her chair.