Above all the noise, a sudden thud sounded to Pettiford’s left. Crandley had fainted.
28
As the afternoon slowly slid toward evening, Logan remained in his third-floor office, poring over books of secret knowledge; transcripts of paranormal encounters; and the writings of famous occultists and mystics: Helena Blavatsky, Edgar Cayce, Aleister Crowley. He had tried, with only some success, to blot out the shocking events he’d witnessed that morning. He had also avoided going downstairs for lunch, which under the circumstances was being served in a series of conference rooms: given the public nature of what had happened, he was sure that the conversation would be about nothing else. Wilcox had occupied the suite of rooms right next to his own. He’d only spoken with the man a few times, but he’d struck Logan as bluff, hearty, and an utterly grounded individual.
Out of my head, Wilcox had said. Please, no more voices in my head. Logan thought back to Strachey’s transcript: It follows me everywhere. It is with me. In the dark. Different words — and yet, in a chilling way, similar.
Logan put down the book he was reading and wondered whether he should pause to look into Wilcox. But no: Wilcox, in stable but serious condition at Newport Hospital, suffering from both chemical and electrical burns, was raving, incoherent, unresponsive to questions from either doctors or psychiatrists. Better to continue the investigation at hand — and continue it as quickly as possible. If he could discover what lay behind Strachey’s breakdown, then what happened to Wilcox — and what, to a far lesser degree, had happened to several others at Lux — might be more explainable.
He picked up the book again: a 1914 volume titled Chronicles of the Risen Beyond.
About fifteen minutes later, he came across a passage that stopped him cold. He read it again, and then again:
The apparition, which had been summoned by a complex set of rituals which I will not describe here, was undoubtedly malignant. Those who had been present (I was not among them) spoke of a terrible stench that assaulted the nostrils; an odd thickening of the atmosphere, as if one was within a compression chamber; and, most noticeably, the sense of a malefic presence — a hostile entity, angered at having been disturbed and wanting nothing more than to harm its disturbers. One member of the group collapsed outright; another began shouting incomprehensibly and had to be restrained. But the thing of greatest interest was that the presence, once roused, did not dissipate, but seemed to remain in the chamber where it had first been appeared. Indeed, even now — thirty years after the original event — its presence has been attested to by nearly all who have frequented the chamber (there are not many who have willingly done so). This small group includes myself, and I write this to give assurances that — for whatever reason — the entity remains in the room where it was first summoned.
Logan put the book aside. He knew from personal experience that certain places — houses, cemeteries, deserted abbeys — could be home to evil presences: shadows of people or things who had once dwelled there. The more evil the person, the longer the aura tended to remain after death. Some might consider such places haunted; Logan himself did not like the term. But he could not deny the unsettling, even chilling sense of menace he had experienced upon first entering the forgotten room — a sense that had persisted, to one degree or another, ever since. In fact, even now, far from the West Wing, he felt uncharacteristically nervous and irritable.
He’d told Kim Mykolos that the electronic field generator built into the strange device might have been a mechanism for detecting paranormal phenomena. Ghosts. The heavily redacted lines of scientific inquiry he’d found in the Lux files helped lead to such a conclusion. Since the radiator-like assembly built into the other flank of the device appeared to be an EVP recorder, was it indeed possible Lux scientists had, in the 1930s, attempted to summon a spirit from beyond the grave — and succeeded?
Logan rose from his desk and began to pace the room slowly. Chronicles of the Risen Beyond and dozens of other books like it gave accounts of such entities being summoned against their will — and then remaining in the immediate vicinity, angry, malevolent, unwilling or unable to return to the void from which they had come.
Was this the case with Project Sin?
If such a thing had happened — if the scientists had succeeded, and perhaps gotten more than they bargained for — it would explain a lot of things: the abrupt cessation of work, the sealing of the room, the careful culling of Lux’s files.
And then, what of Strachey? If a malign presence had persisted in the forgotten room all these years, his breaking into the space would have been like stumbling into an invisible hornet’s nest. Was it possible this was what had caused…
Another thought struck Logan. He’d found the room unsealed, broken into; exactly when was uncertain, save that the plaster which plugged the hole had been fresh. Others at Lux had seen things, done things, most recently the tragic events of that very morning. Could the forgotten room have been a prison — and, now breached, could whatever was inside have escaped into the mansion at large?
He moved past the large, ornate window of his office, pondering the question. As he did so, he stopped abruptly, frozen in place. He stared out through the leaded panes, jaw going slack.
There, on the lawn far below, was the figure of his wife. She was wearing a yellow sundress and a wide-brimmed straw hat, with a bandanna tied — as was her style — loosely around its brim. She was squinting against the sun, smiling, one hand resting on a cocked hip in the characteristic pose he remembered so well, the other hand waving up at him. The ocean breezes caught at the dress, worried the sleeves and the hem.
“Kit,” Logan whispered.
His mouth went dry and his heart began to race. He blinked; looked away a moment; then glanced once again out of the window.
His wife, Karen Davies Logan, was still there. She was still smiling, still beckoning, her silhouette framed by the angry breakers, her long shadow pushed back by the afternoon sun across the verdant green lawn. She opened her mouth now, and cupped her hands as if to call out, and he heard, or thought he heard, her voice: Jeremy…Jeremy…
He looked away again, counted to sixty. Then — slowly — he looked back through the window.
The figure was gone. And no surprise: Kit had been dead more than five years.
Logan stared out the window for a long moment. Then, shakily, he made his way to the desk and sat down again. Unbuttoning the top button of his shirt, he drew out the amulet that he always wore around his neck and began to stroke it unconsciously. Something was happening to him; something he did not care to explore, or even admit. It was more than just a case of nerves. He’d begun hearing strange, faint, disquieting music — the music of Strachey’s study, of the forgotten room — even when he was nowhere near the West Wing. He had awoken in the middle of last night, certain that somebody had been whispering to him, but he’d been unable to recall what was said. Ever since waking, he’d felt poorly. And now, this…
He sat at his desk for another five minutes, breathing slowly, letting his heartbeat return to normal. And then he rose and left his chambers. Perhaps a bracing walk around the grounds would help restore him to better form.
He could only hope.
29
Kim Mykolos was so busy with a minute examination of what they had begun to call “the Machine” that she did not hear Jeremy Logan enter the forgotten room. When he softly cleared his throat, she swiveled around with a brief, sharp cry, almost dropping the video camera.