Alexandra Sokoloff - The Unseen

This is absurd, she thought, as she opened the file. I’m a hostage and they’re standing around discussing it as if we were in a lab—

Then she froze. What she was looking down at were test charts: the familiar charts for Tyler and Katrina, the initial results of the Zener card tests.

But there was a third chart, and the scores were higher than Tyler’s or Katrina’s. She stared in disbelief at the numbers before the name of the test subject finally registered. She was looking at her own chart.

She paged through the charts again, thinking there must be a mistake. Even as she did it, she was remembering the tests she ran with Tyler, and Brendan’s strange, distant responses when she asked about the scores. Nothing there, he’d said. Perfectly average. Right at statistical chance.

But the scores told another story. Her own psi levels were 85 percent above chance, higher than Tyler’s, off the charts.

Her head was ringing—and Uncle Morgan’s voice whispered in her ear: Runs in the family.

She looked up, and Brendan was smiling at her sadly, and with a touch of awe. “What are you going to do?” she managed.

“But you know that, Dr. MacDonald,” Dr. Anton said with exaggerated patience. “The group was very close this afternoon, before you interfered. We’re going to finish what the group started. Make contact. The same as the first group did.”

“How do you know that?” she said automatically, curious in spite of herself.

Dr. Anton smiled at her. “Victoria Enright,” he said.

For a moment Laurel flashed on the dingy green halls of the asylum. “You visited her,” Laurel realized. “You were the one.”

“She’s actually quite accessible with the proper techniques.”

Laurel remembered that Anton had been a hypnotherapist. “You hypnotized her.”

“Yes, a very pliant subject. She told me all about their séance. It is truly a loss that none of their recordings survived.”

She tried to keep her voice steady. “Not all of their group survived, either. And not one of them is still sane.”

“Ah, yes, this extravagant theory of yours,” Anton sounded amused. “Do you really believe that whatever happens tonight will drive everyone in this house mad?”

“You’ve seen how Victoria is,” she said, and she heard her voice shaking. “Did you meet Rafe Winchester?”

He smiled faintly. “Oh yes.”

She felt a chill of unease at the insinuation on his face. “What did you do to him?”

“He’s somewhere he can’t interfere,” Anton said lightly. “Amazing that the old fellow has been the self-appointed guardian of the house for all these years. Who would have thought we could have found the house so easily, if we’d just followed that particular trail?”

“So you know about Rafe, and you know about Victoria—” She was not going to mention Uncle Morgan, but Anton added—

“And your uncle, of course, yes.” He met her eyes and she knew that this man would stop at nothing, let no one stand in the way of his goal.

She swallowed. “So—then how do you explain what happened to the original group?” She was keeping him talking, but she was also genuinely curious.

“Simpler minds in a simpler time, unprepared for the expansion of consciousness they experienced.”

His clinical detachment frightened her. He really only sees people as lab rats, to be used for his purposes . Aloud she asked, “What makes you think this group is any more prepared for what they might see?

He looked at her, puzzled. “But as a scientist, how can you not go forward and learn for yourself?”

Laurel nodded thoughtfully… and lunged for the staircase, running as hard and fast as she could for the door.

Brendan bolted after her, grabbed her around the waist. She flailed out at him, punching and kicking, but Anton seized her arm from behind, twisting her around, and both of them tackled her, holding her struggling and screaming between them, only Anton’s hand was clamped hard on her mouth and all she could hear was her own muffled grunting.

Brendan held her down on the floor as Anton duct-taped her mouth shut and tied her hands with some silky rope. The agony of having Brendan’s hands on her like that forced tears to her eyes and she clenched her eyes shut, clenched her jaw, her legs, her body…. She was sick with fear, that they would leave her upstairs, trussed and helpless, possibly to die. But instead of tying her to the chair, or a pillar, the two of them hauled her up from the floor and marched her down the narrow stairway. Brendan eased open the back closet panel at the bottom and they brought her through the dark closet, out the door into Paul Folger’s tiny, white room.

They muscled her toward the bed and she stiffened, fighting them.

“That’s right,” Anton told her. “I think you might be more of service to us here.”

Anton threw back the coverlet of the bed and for one terrible second her mind went to the worst…

No no God please no don’t hurt me don’t—

Then something at the edge of the bed brushed against her calf. She gasped and twisted in Anton’s grasp.

The horror she felt on looking down was instant and complete. Welded to the metal frame of the bed were three thick iron rings.

For restraints .

There were three identical protuberances on the right side of the bed, beside the wall—which was actually forcing the bed out several inches away from the wall, instead of it lining up flush.

Somehow it was those iron rings that made it real: Paul Folger’s long years of confinement. The room seemed to close in on her, with a rush of all that it had seen, all that it had absorbed, the sodden, stinking madness—the horror…

She bit back a scream. She wanted to scream, to scream her lungs out, but she wouldn’t give them the satisfaction of her muffled, impotent howls.

Anton pushed her down on the bed and held her down. “Do it,” he snapped at Brendan.

“We don’t… have to hurt her,” Brendan mumbled.

“Don’t be a fool,” Anton said sharply, but his voice never rose. “Tie her.” And Brendan did, loosening the rope from her hands and, as Anton held her, looping it through the iron rings, fastening her arms by her sides, one on each side of the bed.

When Brendan stepped back, Anton straightened and looked down on Laurel with nothing like lust, or pleasure at her captivity—only the detachment a scientist would show a lab animal. “I trust your experience here will be illuminating. For you—and all of us.” He glanced around the room with an enigmatic smile. “I think we are in for an interesting night indeed. Perhaps even—life-altering.”

Brendan gave Laurel what seemed for a moment like a stricken look—ambiguous with misery—then the men moved away from the bed, and out.

She heard the lock turn in the door.

She was dizzy and gagging, fighting to breathe through her nose. Her eyes darted frantically around the room.

The room was stark and cold, the magnetic malevolence was heavy in the air.

Scream kick bounce shake make noise get them here make them help . Her mind was shouting at her, fast, panicked thoughts.

No .

Why?

Because Tyler and Katrina can’t help you , she found herself answering herself coldly. You’ll only put them in more danger. Shut up for now and figure out what you’re going to do .

She breathed through her nose, breathed through the heart-pounding panic, until her pulse slowed. Her eyes went again to the side of the bed, to the rings. So Brendan knew that, too, had known from the beginning that it was true, about Paul Folger, that they… they kept him here, that he was what they said he was….