asking: “Dr. Leish, what are the implications if ESP really exists?”
Leish looked into the camera, straight at Laurel, into her very soul. “It means everything we know about reality is in question. It means that we are on the threshold of a whole new world.”
His voice was so quietly confident, so clearly in awe of the possibilities, that Laurel felt a thrill running up her spine, ending in a tingling behind her ears. She was barely aware of her body in the chair.
The film cut to overhead shots of the Duke campus in the sixties. Laurel was enchanted by the agelessness of it, the time-machine feeling of seeing the same buildings she walked by and worked in every day, in another era. The camera lingered on a distinctive Greco-Roman building with a copper dome and four tall white pillars on the portico. Laurel felt another shiver at a shot of a wooden door, with a window of frosted glass and the lettering: PARAPSYCHOLOGY LAB.
Then she leaned on her elbows and watched, mesmerized by the footage of Zener-card tests: the volunteers in their 1960s dresses and suits sitting at opposite sides of a small square table with a dark-wood screen partition in the center of the table that hid the cards on either side from view of the researcher and the test subject.
The next shot was of a machine consisting of a stand and a long lever that rotated a two-foot-long rectangular cage with rolling dice inside it.
Both shots were so familiar Laurel felt she must have seen some similar film before, if not the same reel. But she had no idea where that would have been.
The film moved back to a voice-over of Leish telling his own story, while Laurel was treated to a series of photos of the younger Leish, breathtakingly, arrogantly handsome, with thick blond hair and light piercing eyes.
“My first poltergeist investigation took place at a farm in Sussex in 1951. The family had reported knocking and scratching in the walls, bedclothes being pulled off the children as they were sleeping, the radio going on and off at odd hours.” Leish’s voice dropped into a storytelling hush and Laurel leaned forward, entranced. “I was convinced that the twelve-year-old son of the farmer had been faking all the ‘poltergeist’ effects: pulling out drawers when no one was watching, spilling sugar and salt on the kitchen counters and floor.” Leish paused. “But one night, in the middle of the night, long after this boy had gone to bed, I was sleeping on the couch in the living room, and I suddenly awoke to intense cold. A fire was blazing in the hearth, but I could see my own breath in the air. Then with my own eyes I saw coins begin to fall from the ceiling. They appeared just below the ceiling and fell to the floor without a sound, like rain.”
Dr. Leish paused again to let the story resonate. Laurel felt chills through her entire body now.
“Such an experience changes you on the most profound level. How can you not halt everything in your life, and devote the rest of your life to pursuing that question—of whether a thing like this could happen … and how?”
Laurel pushed back her chair to stand … and found her legs were too weak to hold her. She sat, shivering, wanting to shout, Yes! It happened to me, too! It happened and nothing has been the same.
The film continued, but Laurel had no idea what was playing on the screen. Her face was flushed, her own blood pounding in her ears. She knew what she was looking for, now: Leish had just spoken her inmost feelings aloud. How could she not stop everything to pursue how such things happen? How she could have had the dream, how could she have seen it all, known it all?
How?
Laurel drove home from campus with wind gusting through the streets, whipping at the trees around her, turning the green wall into a moving ocean of branches and leaves. A storm was coming; she could see it in the roiling dark clouds above. The frequent and sudden thunderstorms were another unnerving but strangely thrilling aspect of her new Southern life.
She reached home just as the sky opened, and she ran toward the house through pelting rain, soaked but exhilarated.
Up in the study, the cat sat watching in the doorway as Laurel patted her hair dry with a towel and logged on to the Net to learn more