Alexandra Sokoloff - The Unseen

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.