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?
CHAPTER SIX
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.
And the files were in no discernible order whatsoever.
In fact, it seemed as if whole drawers had been dumped randomly into file boxes—even more—as if the entire lab had been turned on its side and its contents poured into one box after another. Among the letters and memos and files were old cigarette packs, movie stubs from 1965, a petrified candy bar, Sen-Sen breath mints, a tarnished silver teaspoon. It was more like looking at the contents of a recluse’s basement than the official department files of a major university.
After partially working through the chaos of the first box, Laurel checked several more boxes, hoping Box Number 1 was an anomaly. It wasn’t. If anything, Boxes 2 through 7 were even more chaotic than the first.
Laurel had done a semester of fieldwork in a mental hospital for her PhD, cognitive therapy for schizophrenic patients. Reading through the boxes was like that—waves of delusion with occasional startling glimmers of insight. After the first hour, her head was swimming. After the second, she felt like a candidate for an institution herself. She would have to learn to skim if she was ever going to get out of that basement in her lifetime. Yet as soon as she started reading, she was