by M. Verano
“But what was he looking for? What kind of paranormal evidence could you hope to find in some dusty old box?”
“Well . . . ,” said Raph, “that was a problem. We had no idea what we were looking for. I kept asking him the same question, but he’d only repeat that historical research doesn’t work that way. You can’t go in with something specific in mind, or else you’ll miss all the other details that are staring you right in the face. You have to be open to anything and everything.”
“So you never found anything, then?”
Raph put the papers he had in his hand down carefully. “Not exactly. Or in any case, nothing I could be sure of. A lot of what’s in these boxes are testimonials: messages that Williamson’s fans and acolytes sent him over the years, explaining how Pronoica had worked for them.”
“So it did work.”
Raph shrugged. “According to some old lady in Texas, sure.” He picked a yellowed sheet of notebook paper from a file folder in one of the boxes. “Dear Doctor Williamson,” he read, “Thank you again and again for sharing the teachings of Pronoica. Your lessons have truly been a blessing to me. I was going to lose my home, but on that day I discovered one of your pamphlets and learned of the Spiritual Power I contain within myself. The following morning I learned that a recently deceased aunt had left me exactly the amount I needed to release my debts.”
“Lucky lady,” I said.
“Not-so-lucky aunt,” Raph observed. “Anyway, yeah, there was lots of evidence. Williamson’s whole career was devoted to collecting evidence of how well his system worked, so he could turn around and pitch it to more people, and get them to subscribe too. But who is it going to convince other than desperate old ladies?”
“It convinced Professor Verano.”
Dear Doctor Williamson,
Thank you again and again for sharing the teachings of Pronoica. Your lessons have truly been a blessing to me. I was going to lose my home, but on that day I discovered one of your Pamphlets learned of the Spiritual Power I contain within myself. The following morning I learned that a recently deceased aunt had left me exactly the amount I needed to release my debts.
“Not the testimonials—something else. To this day, I’m not sure if it even makes any sense. But when I got frustrated, he told me to change my tactic. He said there was more to all these letters and documents than what people were saying—we had to be alert to what they weren’t saying. Things glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, that might lead us to what was really going on. That’s what led me to the Pronoica Clinic.”
“The clinic? What’s that?”
Raph gave a wry smile. “Once again, no one knows. In all these hundreds, maybe thousands, of documents, I only ever found one reference to the Pronoica Clinic. But it stuck with me, because it was different from the other stuff. Something physical. Something present. Not a pamphlet sent through the mail, but a real place, in this very town.”
Raph flipped through the files once more, this time his fingers stopping at something and tugging it up from the box. He handed it to me.
“PRONOICA CLINIC,” it read. Then, “A private institution devoted to the ethical and scientific practice of Medicine and Surgery as an adjunct to the healing power of the Spirit of God. Located at Moscow, Idaho.” Underneath it was a photograph of a squat Victorian mansion with a turret and a wraparound porch.
“The house,” I said softly. I looked up to meet his eyes. “The clinic—it was in our house. So that’s why . . .” I shook my head. “But it doesn’t make sense. All these pamphlets, all the testimonials. This was no devil-worshipping cult. Williamson believed in the same kind of stuff my mom does: positive energy and being the good you want to see in the universe. That kind of junk. So why does the house seem so . . . angry?”
“Maybe the pamphlets and the testimonials don’t tell the whole story.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “That Pronoica has some kind of dark side? That Williamson and his followers were conjuring demons in their spare time?” I meant it as a joke, but something about the way Raph shrugged made me uneasy.
“Not on purpose, maybe,” he said. “But what if all that spiritual power they were playing with stirred up something they didn’t know how to control?”
“In the house, you mean. The clinic. You think something happened there that they weren’t expecting,” I guessed. “Something Williamson tried to cover up. Is that why the place is messing with us now?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but think about it. It’s one thing to send people hopeful messages through the mail, but if he was telling people to travel here from all over the country—sick and injured people—so that he could heal them through some mixture of faith and pseudoscience . . .”
“Yeah, I see it now. Something could have gone seriously wrong.”
“Whatever it was, he did a good job hushing it up. No mention of it anywhere. Not in his documents, not in the local papers, or any public record.”
“So what about Verano? What did he think of it?”
Raph didn’t answer.
“You did tell him, right?”
Raph got to his feet and started rifling through another box, not meeting my eye.
“Right, I get it,” I said. “You’re changing the subject. We only ever get to talk about the stuff you want to talk about.”
Just then, the door opened behind me, and I whirled around to see who it was. It was a young woman, the one I had seen down at the circulation desk when we came in.
“Just letting you know that the library is closing. You need to start heading out now, or . . .” She stopped, in the middle of a thought. “Raph?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s fine, I—don’t worry, Lizzie. I just wanted to check something, is all. We’ll be going right now, you don’t have to—”
“You’re not supposed to be here. They told me to call security if I ever saw you, I could get in a lot of trouble, if—”
Raph took a deep breath. “You’re not going to get into any trouble because you’re not going to tell anyone. My friend and I were just leaving. We’re going straight home. We don’t want any trouble, and neither do you. Right?”
Lizzie still stood in the doorway, not speaking, clearly deliberating. “Lizzie,” said Raph again, and this time his voice was not nervous or hard-edged, as it so frequently was, but soft and kind . . . and even—could it be?—a little flirtatious. He gave her a winning smile that transformed his whole face from a dark and brooding creature weighed down by who knew what troubles to a charming and stunningly handsome college boy, irresistible in his every movement. He leaned almost imperceptibly closer to her. “You know there’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s only me.”
I could see the war going on behind Lizzie’s eyes—a strange mixture of apprehension and desire. At last she stepped away from the door. “Seriously, go straight home. You shouldn’t be here, and I don’t want to get into trouble.”
The smile dropped suddenly from his face, but he grabbed my hand and tugged me to the door. “Come on, Paige. We’ve seen what we needed to see.”
Raph speed-walked all the way home, and I could barely keep up with him, let alone assault him with all the questions that were swirling around in my head. When we got back to the house, I tried to follow him into his apartment, but he made it clear there would be no more discussion tonight. “Your mother will wonder where you are,” he said darkly, and he closed the door in my face.
MONDAY, JUNE 15, 10:12 A.M.
I woke up this morning into what is essentially a hellscape. The air is heavy and dark and smells wonderful, and a scary blood-orange ball reigns over it all.
Logan came inside while I was eating breakfast and said, did you see the moon this morning? It was bright red.
I said, that wasn’t the moon, you dummy, it was the sun, but he was pretty sure, and we wound up looking up sunrise and moonset timetables. (I was right.)
I know this is because of the fire
s burning over in Washington. It’s a weird day when you can’t tell the difference between the sun and the moon.
TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 12:16 A.M.
After three days of Raph avoiding me, I finally made Chloe come over after school to help me corner him. We stood together on his doorstep while I knocked, but no one came to the door.
“Now what?” I said.
Chloe put her ear to the door. “I can hear movement.”
“Doesn’t do us much good if he’s ignoring us.”
“Let’s make ourselves harder to ignore, then.” I stared at her and she rolled her eyes. “We know he doesn’t lock his door, remember?”
Raph was at least dressed this time, but he surprised me by not demanding immediately that we leave. He looked almost as though he had been expecting this visit. As if he viewed it as unpleasant but inevitable.
“Ladies,” he said, but I wasn’t interested in playing his games this time.
“Why aren’t you allowed on campus?” I asked.
“I don’t think that’s any of your business.”
“You brought me there, Raph. You made me an accomplice to your violating . . . what, a restraining order? I don’t even know, but you dragged me into it, and now it is my business. So why don’t you tell me what exactly is going on.”
“It’s nothing,” he said forcefully. “I’m telling you, it’s not what you’re thinking. It’s nothing to do with . . . It was a misunderstanding, that’s all.”
“The kind of misunderstanding that makes someone call the police?” said Chloe.
Raph glared at her. “Last semester I—” He stopped himself and took a deep breath. “I was behaving erratically,” he went on. “Or so I’m told. People were concerned. For my safety, and for the safety of . . . others. But I’m not supposed to . . . It was part of the agreement, I swore I wouldn’t . . .” Raph thrust a hand into his hair and tugged, as if using the pain to balance out some inner turmoil. He seemed to be speaking mostly to himself now. “He said it could do a lot of damage, if anyone . . . it would ruin everything. And anyway, I brought it on myself. Things had been going so well. We were getting so close. And all I wanted was . . . of course he had warned me, but I didn’t see . . . it all seemed harmless . . . until it wasn’t.”
Chloe and I watched him in silence for a minute. He seemed close to giving us the answers we were looking for, and I didn’t want to spook him. “Who warned you?” I said gently. “About what?”
Raph looked up and seemed almost surprised that we were still there. Then he seemed to come to some realization. “You want to know about Pronoica,” he said, as if that hadn’t been obvious all along. “I can tell you about that. As long as I . . .” He stood up and paced a little, gathering his thoughts. “Yes,” he said at last, sounding much more normal. “All right. You know already about Verano’s obsession. He wanted to know if Williamson had been on to anything, if any of it was real. He had me combing through those documents, endless documents, hours and hours each day until my eyes ached.”
“Right,” I said. “So?”
“So, I got sick of it. And I thought—I knew there was a simpler way.”
I waited for him to continue. “Simpler?” I prompted when he didn’t.
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? I decided to try it. Williamson’s methods.”
“The stuff from the mailings? You mean the kooky meditation exercises he gave the little old ladies?”
Raph shrugged lightly.
“Did anything . . . happen?”
“Not much at first. Just a sense of peace, an aura of well-being. Nice enough, but you can get that much at any yoga studio these days. But after a week or so, it really kicked in.”
I exchanged a look with Chloe.
“Material blessings,” he said. “ ‘The Living Spirit can bring to you perfect abundance. The World may be yours, and everything in it.’ This is the key to Pronoica. Williamson didn’t just promise his followers spiritual bliss, or a ticket to eternal salvation. He promised them cash.”
“And you . . . that worked?”
Raph grinned. “Found twenty bucks in my pocket the first day. A week later, got a job offer for the summer. I even won a couple hundred dollars off a lotto ticket. But it wasn’t just that . . . it was weirder stuff too. More personal. I’d get a burger at Zips, and when I got home, there’d be two in the bag. Kept finding songs on my hard drive that I couldn’t remember downloading. I’d do laundry and wind up with twice as many socks as I’d started with. I had never been very lucky before, but now I felt . . . more than lucky. I felt blessed.
“Still, nothing you’d want to contact the local news over. It wasn’t proof exactly, but it was exciting.” He began moving again. “I was a convert, you could say, just like Williamson’s followers had been. I wanted to share my good fortune with the world. Or at least a few friends.” He cast a sharp look at Chloe. “Yes, I did have friends. Then.” He sat down on a stool for a moment before popping up again. “None of them took it too seriously, and it became kind of a joke around the department. People teased me about it, and others got concerned, and the whole thing wound up getting back to Verano.
“He was furious. He said it was dangerous to undertake an experiment like this when we had so little information. He called me foolish, said I had lost my sense of scholarly remove. And I . . . I . . . well, never mind about that.” Raph’s shoulders slumped. “Around that time I was advised to take some time off, to collect myself. That’s when I moved in here. And started seeing Dr. Clyde.”
“Did you tell her about all this?”
“About Pronoica? Some. I tried to. But she had other things she was more interested in dissecting.”
I nodded grimly. “I know that story. Somehow you always wind up talking about what she wants to talk about.”
“And she was convinced it was all in my head. I can’t really blame her—in all honesty, I wasn’t exactly acting like a man in possession of all his faculties. There were . . . strikes against me in that department already. It was a relief, actually,” he said. “Turns out I was more comfortable playing the delusional nutcase than the only living prophet of a kook religion that died out half a century ago. And I couldn’t deny that her approach worked. I took her pills, I did her visualization exercises, and everyone agreed I was doing much better.”
“I don’t understand, though,” I said. “This still doesn’t explain why the house started acting up the minute my family moved in.”
“I know,” said Raph. “People have been calling this place haunted for years, but it was always some old story remembered off a friend of a friend of a friend. Then when I started working on the place, I’d get . . . bad feelings. Dreams. A sense that I wasn’t completely alone. But nothing like what’s been happening recently.” He shook his head. “Something must have changed.”
TUESDAY, JUNE 16, 3:58 A.M.
I don’t know what possessed me to go to sleep in this house after that conversation with Raph. For some idiotic reason I was feeling better about the whole thing—like we were closing in on the reasons for everything that has gone on here. But having the reasons isn’t the same as making everything go away! Why did I think it was? I didn’t think it, really. Not consciously. But on some level I must have believed it, because after our talk Chloe went home and I went upstairs and I typed everything that had happened into my journal, and it all seemed . . . so exciting. Like I was finally on the trail of something real. Finally getting some answers. And I went to bed feeling calm and contented, like we had made real progress.
Then I woke up.
It was still dark out. Normally at this point I would look at the clock and then turn over and try to get back to sleep, or sometimes listen closely to see if I could figure out what Logan might be doing. But this time I didn’t have to listen. Logan was sitting on the edge of my bed. Watching me.
When I saw him, my adrenaline spiked so bad I nearly jumped out of bed. Even though this wasn’t the first time, ther
e was something deeply unsettling about his presence there. He wasn’t trying to wake me up to tell me something, or just sitting with me for company, or anything even vaguely normal like that. He was just . . . staring at me. When he saw that I was awake, saw me looking at him, he smiled.
“Logan?” I said cautiously. “Are you okay?” But the look on his face made it plenty clear that he was not.
He smiled even bigger. “Hey, Paige,” he said, and the weird thing was, his voice was totally normal. I don’t know why that’s weird. That’s the opposite of weird, right? But I was expecting him to sound ethereal or strange in some way, or, if he were a normal kid waking his sister in the middle of the night, he might sound scared or embarrassed or something. But his tone . . . he was talking to me as if he had just found me in the kitchen in the middle of the day. As if there were nothing remotely weird about any of it. And that was what creeped me out.
He must have seen the expression on my face because he immediately said, “Don’t worry, Paige. I was getting rid of them for you.”
Um . . . what?
“The spiders,” he said. “I know you don’t like them, so I just sit here and pick them off you.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t say anything. I just stared at him in wide-eyed horror.
“I think I’m beginning to understand why you don’t like them,” he went on. “I’ve been studying them. Did you know that they pulsate when they eat things alive? All eight legs, pulsing, like a heart that only knows how to eat things. Creepy, right? But don’t worry, they don’t do it all night long. They usually come out around 3 in the morning, or a little after. And by 4:30 they’re gone. But if I don’t stop by between 3 and 4, it gets real bad. One night I was doing something else, and didn’t make it here until 3:30. And when I got here, I couldn’t even see your face. It was just a solid mass of swarming black spiders. Oh, don’t be afraid, Paige. They haven’t hurt you yet. And they don’t usually even wake you up. I promise, they are perfectly harmless.”