Alexandra Sokoloff - The Unseen

Laurel had a strange impulse to answer, when she noticed two coeds with Duke sweatshirts approaching the statue behind Tyler. One scrambled up into Washington Duke’s lap, while the other giggled and aimed a camera phone. At the flash of the camera, Laurel halted in her tracks.

“Of course,” she said aloud. “Of course.” Before Tyler could speak, she had turned and was running, across the grassy yard again toward Perkins Library.

Laurel pushed through the doors of the Special Collections room and approached the rolltop desk. Ward gave an exaggerated sigh and reached for the keys to the basement.

Laurel gasped out, still breathless from her mad dash across campus. “Actually… I was wondering if the library kept a collection of school yearbooks… and where I might find those.”

On the third floor, Laurel sat at a table with stacks of yearbooks in front of her and a panoramic view out the window in front of her. After two weeks in the basement it was strange to sit at a library table with a view of trees and Duke Gardens and the spires of the Chapel, rather than the windowless gloom of the underground.

As she began to browse the yearbooks, one thing was immediately clear: the parapsychology lab had been a vital, vibrant part of university life. In nearly every yearbook since the lab’s opening there were candid and posed photos of Dr. Rhine, his wife and colleague Dr. Louisa Rhine, other professors and assistants, and students. Laurel turned the pages and saw history go by in the progression of photos on the lab, the evolving postures and attitudes of the students, along with the changing hairstyles and tie widths and skirt lengths.

She skipped through to the sixties, reached for the 1965 yearbook, and opened it to the inevitable section on the Rhine Lab. Her eyes were immediately caught by a candid black-and-white photo of a mesmerizingly handsome, light-haired man. Laurel felt an electric thrill: the man was unidentified in the photo caption but she recognized Dr. Alaistair Leish from the film.

“Yes!” she said aloud, so forcefully that several students looked out from their study carrels. Laurel blushed to the roots of her hair, but she felt a rush of triumph at this proof of her intuition.

So it’s true: Leish was at the Duke lab. I knew he couldn’t stay away from the poltergeist research.

He was here, and he died.

She sat very still… then started turning pages impatiently. When she found the photo, she recognized it instantly: a handsome, ruddy, round-faced young man with bright, clear eyes that she knew were blue, Carolina blue.

Uncle Morgan…

There were no captions identifying the students, either. In the photo he was standing beside a lab counter, watching a dice machine with its rotating oblong cage.

To be sure, Laurel flipped to the senior portraits, and found his photo in the Ms—Morgan MacDonald. It was the same boy. He was laughing and glowing with youth and health, his eyes and face animated. There was a string of initials and notations under his name: Varsity Football, Varsity Baseball, Kappa Alpha…

Laurel felt an ache in her heart.

What happened, then? He was at university, he was in a frat, he played sports—he was alive and sound. He had a life.

She stared down at the yearbook.

I have to know what happened.

She was still brooding on the question as she halted in the upstairs hall of the psych department and reached for the door of her office, carefully balancing the armload of yearbooks (1960–1965) she’d persuaded the reference librarian to loan her, as she fished for her keys. A gratingly familiar voice called from behind her.

“I’ll get that for you.”

She half-turned, almost losing her stack completely, and saw J. Walter Kornbluth bustling up behind her. He deftly plucked the books from her arms. Unable to protest, Laurel forced a smile, unlocked her door, and pushed it open. Kornbluth marched into the tiny office and unloaded the books on the desk.

“Thanks, I appreciate it,” Laurel said dutifully from the doorway.

“Happy to help,” Kornbluth said expansively. He looked over the volumes he had deposited with a frown. “Yearbooks?” Laurel thought his eyes lingered on the dates.

“Yes, my… my aunt is an alum…,” she hedged.

Kornbluth turned, took in the office with a sweeping glance, and sat on the edge of the desk. “How are you settling in?”

Laurel paused, disoriented by the sudden and seemingly unwarranted attention. “Well… it’s a big change from L.A., that’s for sure. At least I’m not getting lost every time I get on the freeway. I’m enjoying the teaching—the kids are top-notch. And the campus is gorgeous….” She stopped, painfully aware she was rambling, but Kornbluth smiled at her tolerantly.

“You’ve been putting in a lot of library time,” he said, and she froze. So there is an agenda here.

“Yes, it’s like working in a castle, really—” she started, flustered.

“And then there’s the lure of the Rhine files,” he said cheerfully, but the look he gave her was shrewd. He was firmly planted on her desk, and short of leaving him unattended in her office, she wasn’t going to be able to avoid this conversation. Also, she was suddenly acutely aware that she had parapsychology notes all over her desk: all he had to do was glance down at a page and he’d know exactly what she was up to.

“It is fascinating, that all of that actually happened here,” she agreed, inching toward the desk.

“Finding anything of particular interest?” he pressed on.

“It’s all interesting, isn’t it?” she countered. “But it would take about twenty years to go through everything properly. They saved everything from soup to nuts.” (She had in fact found a can of petrified peanuts in one of the boxes.) “At a certain point…” She gave what she hoped would come off as a nonchalant shrug.

“It’s overwhelming, I know.” Kornbluth smiled with easy and completely false camaraderie. “Seven hundred boxes.” He widened his eyes.

Laurel smiled back, tightly.

“And it’s not really your thing, after all. Vocational testing, Myers-Briggs, a little Allport, a little Maslow…”

She fought not to let her surprise show. He’d obviously been checking up on her. So he’s interested in the files. He thinks there’s something there, and he wants to make sure I’m not going to beat him to it, she thought, and was immediately annoyed by her own paranoia.

“Yes, I did a lot of vocational testing analysis in Los Angeles,” she agreed.

“And I thought everyone there just wanted to be stars,” he quipped. True enough, but Hollywood’s not the only place you find aspiring stars, she thought, while on the surface she laughed at his wit.

“So are you doing work with the files?” she asked, when they’d finished their mutually artificial chuckle.

“Oh no,” he said, heartily. “No no. You’ve seen them—it’s just a mess. Total waste of time. It seems the entire lab was operating under a mass delusion.”

“My thought exactly,” she said, and immediately wondered if she’d said too much, as the idea of mass delusion was increasingly interesting to her. “A total waste of time,” she repeated, to clarify.

“Well,” he pushed off from the desk and stood, energetically. “Feel free to run your research by me any time. I know a thing or two about proposals.”

“How nice of you to offer. I will do that,” she said sweetly, half a second from batting her eyes.

She was still smiling a strained smile as she closed the door on him. Then immediately was flooded with a surge of possessiveness the likes of which she had never felt before.