going for atmosphere; he’d brought out candles to light the long oak table rather than use the electric lights. The grandfather clock stood silently in the corner, frozen at 2:59.
Aside from an unspecific nervousness, Laurel was not experiencing the discomfort she had expected to feel in the room. Maybe it’s just ugly in the day.
Katrina ate as daintily and sparingly as Laurel would have expected, barely touching the tips of her knife and fork to her food as she cut it. Tyler dug into the pizza, but used his silver on the salad in the European style. There’s one for the statistical analysis page, Laurel thought. Rich kids have higher psi levels than commoners.
“So who died here?” Tyler asked bluntly.
Brendan looked at Laurel. They had decided for the time being not to reveal the—so far unsubstantiated—rumors of the mad brother and the murder/suicide.
“It’s an old house,” Brendan said noncommittally. “Chances are a lot of people died. But that’s not necessarily what we’re here to investigate. It might not be a haunting at all. What we do know is that people in this house reported poltergeist-like activity.”
Tyler whistled the X-Files theme. Katrina turned up her nose—
A sudden loud knock reverberated from the middle of the table. Katrina gasped and drew back against her chair.
Laurel had one jolted moment—then looked sharply to Tyler. She could tell just by looking at him. “Very funny.”
Tyler raised his hands in surrender. “Sorry, I must have been possessed or something.” He stretched out a leg and tapped the toe of his boot against the underside of the table again, this time not concealing the movement. “But okay, seriously: ghost, poltergeist—what’s the difference?”
“Good question,” Brendan said, pointing his pizza slice at Tyler. “The classic theory about a traditional haunting is that it’s an imprint of violent or emotion or trauma on a house or location, that gets replayed, like a tape. Then there’s the family member or close friend who is visited by the spirit of a departed loved one at the moment of death or extreme trauma—known as a ‘crisis apparition’—or by a spirit who has a specific message to impart. Those are generally one-time occurrences and specific to a certain person, they often come in dreams, and once that message is received, the visitations stop.
“The word ‘poltergeist’ was coined in the mid-nineteenth century—by Martin Luther, no less—to distinguish a certain kind of haunting: one with very kinetic elements: loud rappings and other sounds, furniture and objects moving or flying, showers of rocks, breaking of household objects. For a long time investigators made a sharp distinction between those manifestations and the more traditional haunting apparitions: mist, phantom footsteps, the recognizable shade of a loved one. The theory that these were two very different kinds of manifestations was hot for a while, and the Rhine lab is famous for theorizing that poltergeist ‘hauntings’ are not hauntings at all, but manifestations of psychokinesis—the ability to move objects with the mind.
“Later researchers started to admit that there were almost always elements of both kinds of hauntings involved in so-called poltergeist incidents.” Brendan leaned back in his chair, spreading his hands. “So basically, we know nothing.”
He looked across the table in the flickering candlelight. “There may be a ghost in this house, there may not. There may be a poltergeist, there may not. We’re here to see what happens.”
Tyler slid a glance toward Katrina. “And we’re here because you think we might make something happen. Because of our ‘exceptional abilities.’ That’s what all the testing was about.”
Laurel saw Brendan jolt slightly in the candlelight, but she wasn’t surprised at Tyler’s guess. Neither of their young subjects were fools.
“It’s possible that you will be able to sense more in the house than subjects with less psi promise. As far as precipitating it?” Brendan shrugged. “That’s what we’re here to find out.”
Both students expertly vanished after dinner, leaving Brendan and Laurel with the clearing and dishes. Slipping into the servants’ roles, already, are we? she thought to herself, but she was secretly, shamefully glad to have the intimate time with him by herself, doing the washing up together in the steamy kitchen, Brendan making Father Knows Best–style jokes about “the children.”
They laughed about the violently knocking pipes, and when they were through, they walked up the spiraling servants’ stairs to the second floor, and Laurel again felt her knees go weak with the rush of raw sexuality she felt at the curve of the stairs.