Alexandra Sokoloff - The Unseen

Rhine went on to perform laboratory tests of psychokinesis, the movement of objects by the mind, using motorized dice-throwing machines, and in the early sixties his researchers conducted field investigations of poltergeists.

Poltergeists? Laurel thought, startled. They were investigating poltergeists?

And then on the last placard she found the sentence that stopped her dead.

When the Duke lab closed in 1965, seven hundred boxes of research material from the parapsychology lab were sealed and stored in the basement of Perkins Library. Now for the first time in forty-five years, those boxes have been made available for public viewing.

Laurel had to read that last part three times before it fully sank in.

Seven hundred boxes of original parapsychology research material? Right here in this very building? And available to anyone who wanted to look?

She felt behind her for a chair and sat down hard, a little breathless.

It was sensational. It was unbelievable, really, that she hadn’t read or heard about any of this.

Surely someone had already claimed this topic, was writing articles, papers…

J. Walter Kornbluth’s voice suddenly spoke clearly in her mind. “These days nothing less than a book will do.”

Laurel looked over at the glass case, and thought with crystal clarity: This is my book. Her whole body was tingling, her face warm and flushed.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What are you thinking?” she muttered to herself. You’re a psychologist, a research professor. Parapsychology has nothing to do with your life’s work.

Oh, yeah? What life’s work is that? some alien voice whispered back, mocking.

And she hadn’t felt a rush like this, hadn’t felt so enthused, since, well, since before the dream had shattered all her ideas of reality.

She stood from the chair, moved past the glass case in a daze, and went into the main reading room to find the librarian.

As always, Laurel approached Dr. Ward with some caution, and hovered some distance from the tall dark desk. Ward looked her over with a slightly raised eyebrow, and Laurel remembered that she was still in cocktail-party attire. She felt blood rising to her cheeks, and surreptitiously tugged the hem of her dress down.

“I was just reading the exhibit about the Rhine Lab,” Laurel began. “I guess I somehow forgot all that happened here.” Now that she was thinking about it, it hit her that the auditorium downstairs in the Psych Building was called Zener Auditorium. I must have been asleep not to put it together.

“Thirty-eight years,” Ward agreed laconically. “Put the university on the map.”

Encouraged by a whole two sentences from the librarian, Laurel pressed on. “I’d like to know more about it—all. Is it really true that there are seven hundred boxes of original research files right here in the library?”

“There are indeed,” the librarian said, without smiling. Laurel had never seen her smile. “Seven hundred boxes.”

“And anyone can just look at them—any time?”

“Any time.”

Laurel hazarded another question. “Is there some study being done, then?”

“A study?” The librarian repeated.

“A research project, or a book being written, or… I mean… if seven hundred boxes of original research have just been opened to the public, isn’t someone going through them?”

“There have been a few,” the librarian said noncommittally.

“Of course,” Laurel said. There was no reason to think otherwise, after all. She stood for a moment, then suddenly asked. “Do you know why the department was shut down?”

The librarian raised her eyebrows.

“The parapsychology lab was so famous, and then…” Laurel nodded back toward the display case. “The placards say it shut down entirely in 1965… and I wondered why.”

“Dr. Rhine was approaching retirement age and wanted to move his research to a private institution where he could continue his work,” Dr. Ward recited without inflection.

“That makes sense,” Laurel admitted. “But why shut the whole lab down?”

Again the librarian looked up at her without speaking. This time Laurel didn’t notice; she was off on her own train of thought.

“And why were they sealed?”

The librarian regarded her impassively.

“The boxes,” Laurel elaborated, for some reason feeling uneasy. “Why were they sealed, for all those years?”

“I couldn’t tell you,” Ward said.

“Thanks,” Laurel said. Her mind was already a million miles away. “Thanks.”

She walked out of Special Collections, out of the library, moving in a daze through Gothic stone arches, her face lit from within.

Seven hundred boxes.

What in the world might be in them?

Precognition— the ability to see or predict a future event or occurrence.

Clairvoyance— the ability to see an event as it happens without being physically present.

Telepathy— the ability to read or communicate thoughts directly between minds.

Psychokinesis— the ability to move objects with the mind.

It was Sunday, and Laurel had lain awake all night in a state of overloaded excitement, and now pretty much felt as if she’d been hit by a truck, but she was at the front door of Perkins Library when it opened.

She marched through the ethereal front hall with its medieval tapestries and lambent light, straight to the intricately carved dark-wood doors of the Rare Books Room. She took the fortifying pause required to face Dr. Ward, and pushed through the doors.

Ward was unblinkingly in place behind the looming rolltop desk. Laurel walked forward, stopped before it, and said all in one breath:

“I’d like to put in a request to view the parapsychology lab files.”

Ward took a good long time looking Laurel over before she reached for a library request form. “Which boxes did you want to see?”

Laurel lifted her chin. “All of them.”

After summoning a library minion of indeterminate sex who scurried into place behind the rolltop desk, clearly as intimidated by Ward as Laurel was, Ward took up a massive set of keys and walked Laurel down to the basement of Perkins Library.

It was two long flights of stairs down to double doors… which opened onto a dim and high-ceilinged basement space that was larger than anything Laurel would have dreamed lay beneath the corridors she moved through every day.

She followed Ward in a daze, down through rows of shelves that reminded her of nothing so much as the warehouse in the classic last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in which a janitor wheels a trolley carrying the deadly Ark, enclosed in a wooden crate, through stacks of thousands of similar crates.

In this case the crates were cardboard office file boxes, but the sight was no less labyrinthine and ominous… and the contents perhaps even more mysterious.

Ward abruptly turned down an aisle and stopped. Laurel followed her gaze to the massive wall of shelves, all lined with identical boxes.

“This is the first aisle,” Ward informed her without expression. “Where did you want to start?”

Seven hundred boxes, covering thirty-eight years of laboratory research. It was monumental.

Laurel sat at a long basement table, staring at the first seven boxes of the seven hundred, neatly lined up in front of her. She had worked her way through the first third of the first box, and was beginning to get a glimmer of what she was up against.

The files were remarkably inclusive. Overwhelmingly so. The scientists, professors, researchers, and staff of the Rhine Laboratory seemed to have saved every scrap of correspondence, accounting, lab test results, employment applications, and field research reports that had ever passed through the lab. Laurel found scribbled notes on sessions with trance mediums, pored over mind-bendingly tedious statistical analysis reports of ESP tests with the Zener cards, leafed through letters to the lab from clearly paranoiac, borderline personalities claiming alien abduction and governmental thought-control.