She moved slowly, down one aisle, up another … all the time in the world. And then she felt it. In the middle of the third aisle, something like a magnetic pull.
It was so clear and yet so subtle that she was afraid to breathe.
I’m making this up, I must be.
The backs of her ears were tingling… .
She eased another step forward … and the feeling was gone. She froze … then slowly, slowly stepped back …
… and again felt the subtle pull … the fine hairs on her forearms were standing straight up.
Okay … okay …
She reached out a hand—and felt the magnetism like a gentle vacuum, pulling at the center of her palm. She let the pull take her palm, forward, forward …
… and suddenly felt her hand flat against the side of a cardboard box.
Her eyes flew open.
Her hand was pressed up against a box, number 642, at about eye level on a shelf. She was no longer in a dreamy trance; her heart was beating a mile a minute.
She breathed in, and reached up to pull the box from the shelf. It was heavy, like the others, obviously full to capacity.
Too impatient to haul the box back to her table, she put the box on a lower shelf and lifted the lid, staring down into the box at the row of files and documents and pages. Her palms were sweating. She wiped them absently on her skirt.
Unlike in her mind’s eye, there was no document with FOLGER clearly spelled on the top.
Well, go on, she told herself, crossly, to dispel the almost unbearable nervousness.
She took out a stack of papers from the front. By now she was used to skimming, and she zipped through the pages, searching only for the words: Morgan MacDonald, Folger House, Alaistair Leish, and 1965.
The documents were discouragingly familiar: bills, memos, pages and pages of personal letters.
Just breathe, Laurel told herself. It’s there. Just look.
She reached into the box for another stack of papers …
And then there it was. She knew it the second she saw it: a thin paper-clipped sheaf of pages, all test-result charts—the same Zener-card test charts she’d already seen hundreds of in the files. The names of the subjects had been redacted (she held them up to the light but was not able to read any names through the slashes of black marker), and relabeled SUBJECT A, SUBJECT B, SUBJECT C. But all three of the test scores were through the roof, the highest she’d come across: 51 percent correct, 55 percent correct, and an astonishing 75 percent correct.
And on each test, someone had scribbled at the top in bold spiked handwriting, the same authoritative slash of penmanship:
FOLGER EXPERIMENT—start date 4/03/65
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Laurel realized she’d been holding her breath for some time, and forced herself to exhale. She shuffled through the test forms again, just to make sure she really was seeing what she was seeing.
It was what she’d been looking for. There was a Folger Experiment. whatever it was, it took place just before the parapsychology lab was shut down. And it had involved test subjects with ESP scores higher than any other recorded test subjects she’d ever come across in the literature.
(She wasn’t even going to think about how she’d actually found the test packet, yet.)
The room suddenly felt colder, as if the air-conditioning had kicked into high gear, although she hadn’t heard any kind of mechanical change. She felt the fine hair on her forearms rising, and then the tingling began in back of her ears … the same chilling feeling of being watched she’d experienced at her house the night before.
She clutched the sheaf of test papers, inched toward the end of the aisle and peered out.
The central area of tables was deserted, just as she’d left it. She exhaled silently and shook her head. All right, stop freaking yourself out.
She walked back to the middle of the aisle and grabbed the box, hoisting it off the shelf, and walked out of the aisle, back to her work table. She set the box down—and froze, staring down at the table top.
Five Zener cards were laid out on the table in a row.
There was someone in the basement with her.
______
It was long after dark, too—she hadn’t noticed how late it had gotten.
Instinctively she darted into an aisle of shelves, and hovered, listening with every cell of her body.
She realized she was still clutching the packet of tests she’d found. Without really understanding why she was