students seemed more subdued than normal, almost as if they were drained by their experience.
“Great. Let’s talk.” Brendan indicated the center arrangement of small sofas and chairs, and they all took seats. To Laurel’s discomfort, Tyler joined her on one sofa, and Katrina took the opposite couch, looking to Brendan with clear expectation on her face. Brendan remained standing, and Laurel could feel the girl’s flare of anger.
“Just an overview first, and then we’ll get more detailed,” Brendan started cheerily. “Can we point to any hot spots? Specific rooms?”
Tyler looked to Katrina.
“The green entry hall downstairs,” she said promptly. “The archway between the front hall and the great room.”
Laurel noted she used the words “great room” as if she said them every day.
“That dining room,” Katrina continued, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “Upstairs, the little room with the sticky door. The one with the sleigh beds.” She looked around her at the library. “And this one.”
Brendan looked to Tyler. “Mr. Bradford?”
“The stairs next to the kitchen,” he said, and shot a glance toward Laurel. “This room, yeah, but that could just be all the damn pictures staring down.” He smiled slyly and everyone laughed, which seemed to gratify him. He glanced at Katrina. “Gotta agree—that dining room doesn’t feel right. Don’t know why. And my own room is pretty hot—if anyone would like to come have a feel,” he added.
“Thanks, I’m sure we’ll all keep that in mind,” Brendan said. “Let’s talk about what you felt in the rooms, specifically.”
“The archway—a lot of pain,” Katrina said almost dreamily. “It feels heavy. The air.”
Laurel felt a wave of irritation even though she had to admit she actually had a sense of what Katrina meant. The air just felt denser, there. But Katrina was performing like a professional psychic, as if she’d been doing house readings all her life, when her preliminary questionnaires had not revealed any previous psi experiences.
“What about the back staircase?” Brendan asked Tyler. “You said you felt something there.”
Tyler smiled slightly. “Well, if you must know, it made me horny as hell. Don’t ask why.”
Laurel remembered the unexpected sexual feeling she’d experienced on the stairs and had to will herself not to blush.
“Thanks for sharing,” Brendan said dryly.
“Don’t mention it,” Tyler shot back. “That is my job here, right?”
The air fairly crackled between the two males for a moment, so manifestly that Laurel was about to speak, when Brendan suddenly stood down, although she could not have said exactly how.
He wrote something on his clipboard and said, “What else?”
“The dining room …” Tyler said slowly. “I don’t know. I just step inside there and I want to get out.”
Laurel felt a chill … and then a rush of annoyance—and skepticism. This is sounding a little too perfect. Everyone feeling the same things? Highly unlikely. And the chances of Tyler being serious? Even more unlikely.
“It’s bad,” Katrina announced. “Something bad happened there.”
Oh, great. They’re already making up things, Laurel thought. But that’s the point, isn’t it? she answered herself immediately. We want them to psych themselves out.
Katrina addressed her next monologue directly to Brendan. “And that little room upstairs is bad, too, the one with the sticky door. And there’s something very strange about the archway into the great room. I could feel it.” She put her hand on her chest, in case Brendan had somehow not noticed her lushly rounded breasts. Laurel was appalled to find herself tensing. To make matters worse, Tyler tipped his head back against the sofa and looked lazily from Katrina to Laurel to Brendan, as if he wasn’t missing a thing.
“Good,” Brendan said heartily, pointedly ignoring the unspoken dynamic that was like an electric charge in the room. “I think we’re off to a great start. Now here’s how it’s going to go. No Internet, no television, no phones, no music, unless one of you plays the piano, in which case knock yourself out. We do want you to carry these at all times, though.” He passed out a phone-sized walkie-talkie to everyone. “If there’s anything of note, or if anyone gets in trouble, you can hit ‘Page All’ and reach the whole group at the same time. I expect everyone to respond immediately to any page, is that clear?”
Everyone nodded, solemnly.
“We’ll be having you run card tests every day, and dice tests. We’ll also want you to record your dreams as soon as you wake up in the morning, anything you can remember, and do mood questionnaires twice a day. It’s fine