“We want to talk to … whatever is in this house,” she said in a firm, clear voice. “We know you’re there.”
There was a long, deliberate stillness, which not even Tyler tried to spoil.
Katrina suddenly leaned forward and rapped her knuckles sharply on the center of the wood table, as if she were knocking on a door.
“Are you there?” she demanded.
Again, stillness. But Laurel felt something else in the air now. That quality of listening, of waiting …
Katrina’s eyes shone in the dim room. “I know you’re there,” she breathed. “I can feel you.” She leaned forward and knocked again, and Laurel saw Tyler flinch in his chair. Brendan was staring at Katrina, mesmerized.
“Talk to us,” Katrina commanded. “Answer us.” She knocked again, so hard that Laurel cringed.
She’s going to tear her knuckles apart …
Katrina seemed oblivious. “Are you here?” she demanded. “Answer me!” Her china-blue eyes shone with the intensity of madness.
And from the ceiling, or deeper than the ceiling, from the center of the house, came an immense, hollow
THUMP
. The sound reverberated through the house, through the room, through Laurel’s body.
All four of them jumped in their chairs. “Whoa,” Tyler muttered, through a dry mouth. Katrina’s eyes blazed with triumph. Brendan looked stupefied.
“Thank you,” Katrina breathed. “Welcome.”
Through her fear, Laurel felt a rush of absurdity.
Welcome? We’re the outsiders here.
“How do we do this?” Tyler muttered feverishly. “One knock for yes, two for no?”
Brendan leaned toward Katrina from his chair at the head of the table. “Were you here when the original experiment was done here?” he prompted her.
“Were you here when the original experiment was done here?” Katrina repeated aloud.
There was another reverberating
KNOCK.
Laurel could feel it through the floorboards, hear it echoing in the walls.
“Whoa,” Tyler mumbled again, and he looked a bit sick.
“One knock is ‘yes’?” Katrina clarified.
Another hollow
KNOCK.
Laurel felt her pulse racing, her heart pounding in her throat, the same dizzying thrill as being on a roller coaster.
“Are you a ghost?” Katrina demanded, her eyes alight. “It’s not—,” Brendan started, but another single
KNOCK
boomed through the house, silencing him.
“Yes,” Katrina said.
Brendan’s face darkened with confusion.
“Are you Paul Folger?” Laurel said suddenly, looking at Katrina. Katrina stared back at her without expression, and for a moment Laurel thought the girl would simply refuse her. Then Katrina turned her eyes to the ceiling again and asked in her clear, firm voice:
“Are you Paul Folger?”
Another booming
KNOCK
.
“Yes,” Katrina breathed, her face glowing. At their sides of the table, Tyler and Brendan were electrified, practically vibrating with excitement.
Laurel said sharply, “Wait.” Her thoughts were racing, questions forming. Now she spoke aloud, projecting as Katrina had. “Are you Caroline Folger?” she demanded of the air.
A single, reverberating
KNOCK.
“Yes,” Laurel said, and looked around the table. Katrina’s face was stormy, Brendan’s confused. Laurel felt an electric thrill.
I know what you’re up to.
She leaned forward on the table.
“Are you Alaistair Leish?” Laurel asked loudly.
Another
KNOCK
shook the house.
“You’re all of those people,” Laurel said, her eyebrows raised skeptically.
Now two thundering
KNOCK
s.
“That’s ‘No’,” Tyler said.
“Are you Paul Folger?” Laurel asked again.
Two
KNOCK
s. “ ‘No,’ ” Tyler repeated. He looked toward Laurel with admiration.
“Are you Alaistair Leish?” Laurel demanded.
Two
KNOCK
s again. “Are you Caroline Folger?”
Two
KNOCK
s.
Laurel sat back, and they all looked around at each other, stymied at the contradiction.
“Are you dead?” Laurel tried.
Two
KNOCK
s … then another.
So all it’s doing is playing,
Laurel thought.
Or maybe it doesn’t understand English.
But she didn’t say it aloud.
Tyler suddenly said loudly, “Show us something. Show us what you can do.”
They waited in breathless silence. Nothing.
Katrina shot an oblique look at Tyler and leaned forward, her cornflower eyes wide and appealing. She said to the center of the table, in an enticing voice, “Please show us.”
The girl’s words hung in the silence, and the four of them sat poised at the table, upside-down paintings and shattered mirrors around them. And then Laurel felt something change.
“What’s that—,” Tyler began. Brendan held up a warning hand.
“Shh … ,” said Katrina. Her face was glowing. Everyone sat still, not even breathing …
The air changed, turning both heavy and cold around them … and then the temperature plunged, as if the room had suddenly frozen. Katrina gasped and hugged herself. Laurel shuddered violently. All their breaths were showing in the air in misty white puffs.
“Jesus Christ … ,” Tyler said, through chattering teeth.
And then rocks began to fall from the ceiling. Not a violent shower, but as light as rain. Large rocks, small rocks, fist-sized, pebbles. They materialized from just below the ceiling and fell softly to the floor, as slowly as drifting leaves. There was no noise, no sound at all as the stones hit the floor, not so much as a muffled thud. But Laurel could see that on the floor, some of the rocks were steaming, wisps of white mist.
“Oh my fucking God … ,” Tyler said, from miles and miles away.
Katrina clapped her hands like a child. Her face was glowing, and she laughed, that tinkling, musical laugh. Brendan and Tyler were simply frozen, staring around in awe.
Laurel reached out as if in a dream and held out her hand. A rock fell on her open palm and for a moment it was light as a feather—and then all she felt was heat. She pulled back her hand and the rock fell with an audible thud on the floor.
“Hot … ,” she said. Her voice sounded faraway to her.
Tyler stood slowly. Katrina was already on her feet, and she opened her arms as if to catch the falling rocks, embrace them. “Yes … yes …” Her face was ecstatic. “More!” she cried out. “More!” She spun in the room like a child.
“No,” Laurel said, and a black wave of dread crashed over her. “No!” She grabbed Katrina and shook her, shouting in her face. “Stop it now.”
Katrina stiffened in Laurel’s grasp. Her eyes were dilated to black saucers … but as Laurel dug her fingers into the girl’s forearms, she saw Katrina slowly returning to awareness. It was warmer around them—the intense cold was fading. Laurel was suddenly aware that it was pouring rain outside, storming, with thunder and lightning cracking through the sky in brilliant bursts of illumination.
“No!” Brendan’s voice suddenly burst through the room.
Laurel turned to look. The rock showers had stopped. The stones lay around the room, steaming, but still.
Brendan turned on Laurel and the rage in his eyes was terrifying as he advanced on her, through the rocks littered on the floor. His whole body was shaking. “What are you doing? Why did you do that?” He was nearly screaming at her. “What the hell are you thinking? We were there, we had it—” Even Tyler cowered back from Brendan’s fury, his eyes suddenly haunted, as if he were seeing someone quite else.
Laurel was so stunned at Brendan’s anger she couldn’t speak, but she was certain, certain, that it had to be stopped, that to go further would be to lose themselves in something from which they might never return …
Lightning split the sky again, a burst of white light.
“Get out of here,” Brendan shouted at Laurel. “Get out!” And behind him, Katrina looked at Laurel, her eyes glassy with triumph.
Laurel backed up from Brendan, then turned and ran from the room.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Even then she didn’t leave, though; she had no thought of the front door, of her car, of escape. Instead she ran up the stairs like a chastened child ordered to her room, past the window overlooking the drenched garden, and up… . She didn’t stop until she’d reached the upstairs hall, where she halted in the middle of the floor, panting, half-crying, barely able to breathe.
Her knees buckled and she realized she was shaking from head to foot with adrenaline. She was barely able to lurch to the green leather divan against the wall in the hall, where she collapsed, leaning her head against the back of the seat, swallowing against a sudden wave of nausea.
My God … my God … did that just happen?
What
just happened?
With her eyes closed she pictured the softly falling rocks … and felt chills through her body at the sheer unreality of the memory. It was like a painting, like a dream … only it wasn’t.
She felt exhilaration … and terror. Her mind battled between the two.
We have to get out,
one part of her shouted, while another part of her wanted to cry out, just as Katrina had:
More, more, more!
But Brendan… . His rage … the desperation of his rage …
What was that about? What is going on?
And suddenly her uncle’s voice was very clear in her head.
Pay attention.
Laurel bolted up to sitting, as if she had been slapped.
Pay attention.
She drew in a deep breath. The nausea had passed, but she was still shaking. She wiped her sweating palms on her skirt … and felt something stiff inside her front pocket.
She reached in and drew out the Zener card with the thick black circle on it.
He gave me the card… .
But what was it trying to say?
Something stirred in her memory, and her eyes widened.
A circle …
She looked down the hall to the closed door of Brendan’s room.
She stood from the divan and held still for a moment, checking her balance, then walked slowly toward Brendan’s door. She reached for the doorknob with trepidation, as if it would burn her. She breathed in shallowly, tried to slow her racing heart.
It’s a room. It’s just a room.
Then she grasped the knob and twisted it, swung open the door.
She stepped in quickly so as not to lose her nerve, and pulled the door shut behind her. She stood with her back against the door. The walls were white; the room was cold, and dim from the curtain of rain outside. The sense of claustrophobia was instantaneous and sickening, but she steeled herself and walked across the narrow expanse of floor to the window, leaned over the writing table, and pushed back the gauzy curtain …
… to reveal the thick circle scratched in the glass, filled in with black ink: a circle just exactly like the circle of the Zener card—the exact same size and thickness.
But what does it mean?
She pulled her eyes away from the circle in the glass and looked down at the writing desk. It was a mess, the familiar clutter of academia … so many notebooks, so many pages of notes Brendan had made already. Diagrams, including several sketched floor plans of the room she was in. There was a file of floor plans of the whole house, dozens of copies, each labeled with a date and time, and mathematical notations in each room.
The EMF readings?
she wondered.
Or some other obscure formula of his own?
There were journal pages, too, and paging through them made her heart start to beat faster. While they started out normally, with dates and time entries and margins and spaces between entries, by the middle of the first book the sentences were continuous, from the very top of the page to the very bottom, from one far end of the page to the next, a dark tidal wave of writing, with no margins, no line spacings, no pauses, and in later pages, no punctuation or capitalization either:
The smell again today bad eggs rotten yellow odiferous no order odor yellow stink sulfer sulfurous sulfa
Laurel’s mind was reeling. It was familiar, this writing, she knew what it was …
And then she could smell the stink, faint … horrible … the smell of goat. She turned in the room, holding her breath against the smell, fighting the rising tide of panic.
I know it didn’t smell like this before. I know that smell.
The smell of the schizophrenic ward at Dorothea Dix. The smell of schizophrenia. It was like a living thing in the room.
And then she thought she finally understood, and the thought was terrifying. Bile rose in her throat and she turned to bolt for the door, to get out, when Uncle Morgan’s voice spoke sharply again in her head.
Pay attention.
Laurel stopped.
It was so real, that voice.
Pay attention to what?
She forced down her claustrophobic feeling and turned where she stood, looking around the room.
Her eyes fell on the closet door, and her ears began to tingle.
She stepped forward and opened the door.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, then she was startled to look in on a much deeper closet than she ever would have expected. Brendan’s few clothes were pushed to one side of the clothes rail, leaving a blank space that revealed a length of at least ten feet back to the back wall beyond the rail.
It’s almost like a—
Passageway.
Laurel stepped forward and ducked under the clothes rail, and walked back toward the back closet wall. She squinted in the dark and then reached her hand forward, put it flat against the wall, and pushed.
The wall swung open, and Laurel looked up … at a narrow, steep stairway.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
Laurel stepped through the back of the closet, and climbed the dark and narrow stairs, one cautious footstep after another, carefully, noiselessly.
As she reached the open doorway at the top, she held her breath, and eased forward, an inch at a time …