The Forgotten Room (3 page)

For at least a minute, neither man moved. And then, silently, the director turned on the lights, stowed away the projector, slid the curtain back over the screen, and returned to his chair.

“My God,” Logan murmured.

“We couldn’t conceal the fact that Strachey killed himself,” Olafson said. “But for obvious reasons, we’ve tried to keep the details to a minimum. Nevertheless, rumors have been circulating.” He looked up at Logan. “I have to ask—do you have any initial thoughts?”

“My God,” Logan said again. He was in shock. He tried summoning up a mental picture of Willard Strachey from his own time at Lux, but all he could recollect was a quiet, rather shy man with thin, mouse-colored hair. They had traded smiles and nods but never a conversation.

He tried to push the shock away and address Olafson’s question. “I think,” he began slowly, “that to kill oneself in such a way…can only mean this was a man who absolutely could not bear to live another minute. He couldn’t wait until he had access to pills, a gun, a car, the roof of a building—he had to die.
Immediately
.”

The director nodded, leaned forward. “I don’t concern myself with the day-to-day operations of Lux; I leave that to Perry Maynard. But I knew Will Strachey for thirty years. He was the most stable, the most gentle, the most rational of men. He was also one of my best friends. He was a groomsman at my wedding. There is no way he would ever attack somebody. And he would never,
ever
, commit suicide—especially in such a way. Will abhorred ugliness or scenes. An act like this would be completely outside his nature.”

Olafson leaned a little closer. “The authorities, of course, just listed it as a suicide and had done. It seems they have a dim view of policy institutes and their residents to begin with. And the police psychiatrist dismissed it as, to the best of my recollection, a ‘brief reactive psychosis brought on by a fugue state.’ ” The director scoffed. “But I know that isn’t the case. And I know something else:
that man in the video is not the man I knew
. It’s as simple—and as mystifying—as that. And that is why we’ve asked you here.”

“It’s not exactly my line of work,” Logan said. “I’m no private detective; I’m an enigmalogist.”

“And isn’t
this
an enigma?” Olafson asked, passion adding a faint tremor to his voice. “I just told you—that man on the video can’t be Strachey. He would never have done such a thing. And yet there’s no denying that he killed himself. You saw him do it.
I
saw the body.” He paused to pass a hand across his forehead. “We need to learn what happened to him. Not for myself—but for the good of Lux.”

“You say you were one of his best friends,” Logan said. “Was there anything troubling him—anything in either his personal or professional life?”

“I didn’t see as much of him over the last year or two as I’d
have liked.” Olafson waved a hand toward his desk as if pleading a heavy workload. “But I’m sure there was nothing. He never married, never minded being single. He was independently wealthy. There were no health issues—annual physicals are one of the perks here, and nothing came up at his examination two months ago; I checked. I believe he was in the process of wrapping up his work; his assistant Kim, or Dr. Maynard, could tell you more about that than I. But I can assure you the prospect of retirement didn’t concern him. Will Strachey was a full Fellow here at Lux; he’d already made a lasting contribution to his chosen area of research. He had a lot to be proud of—and he had a lot to live for. The last time we had lunch together, he spoke of all the things he was looking forward to when he retired. Touring the cathedrals of Europe—he was a huge fan of architecture and architectural design, knew a great deal about it. Picking up the piano again; did you know that he was a talented pianist, classically trained? He’d had to put his more serious instrumental studies aside years ago when his database work became all consuming. Sailing the Mediterranean—he was quite the sailor. This was a man with everything to live for.
Everything
.”

For almost a minute, silence descended on the office. And then, at last, Logan nodded. “One condition. I’ll need unrestricted access to Lux’s offices, labs, and records.”

The director hesitated for just a second. “Very well.”

“Am I going to need a brief? A reason to be here, poking around, asking questions? After all, there’s my, shall we say, past history with Lux to consider.”

A pained look crossed Olafson’s face. “I’ve thought about that. Many of the people you knew ten years ago are still here. And, of course, you’ve become rather well known since then. But if you’re to operate with a free hand, I don’t see how there can be any coyness or dissembling. You’re here, at the request of the board, to look into the circumstances surrounding Dr. Strachey’s death. It’s as simple as that—and I wouldn’t be any more specific.”

“Very well. Anything else I should know before I start?”

“Yes.” The director paused a moment. “It’s only fair to warn you that not everyone is going to be happy to see you. I’m not just referring to the ‘past history’ you mentioned. A lot of new blood has joined Lux since you were here, but at heart it is still a very conservative place. There are people who are going to question your motives; people who won’t trust you. You might as well know that the board was deadlocked, three to three, on bringing you in. I myself cast the tiebreaking vote.”

Logan smiled a little wearily. “I’m used to that. Unfortunately, it seems to come with the territory.”

“You’re still part of the Yale faculty, correct?”

“Correct.”

“Well, that can only help.” Olafson stood up. “Come on—let’s get you processed.”

At half past four that afternoon, Logan stood in his private office on the third floor of the vast mansion, looking thoughtfully out the window. It was of the same heavy, leaded, metal-lined variety that Strachey had employed; Logan knew he would never look at such a window in quite the same way again. It was closed, but nevertheless he could hear the faint roar of breakers as the Atlantic crashed and worried against the boulders below.

He raised one hand and lightly traced his fingers along the window sash. Lux had its roots in a private club, founded in the early 1800s by six Harvard professors to debate issues of art and philosophy. Over the years it expanded in both ambition and scope, its mission broadening, until finally, in 1892, it was organized into Lux, with a formal charter and an impressive endowment. This made it the country’s oldest policy institute—“think
tank” to the unwashed—antedating the Brookings Institution by more than two decades. It enjoyed unprecedented success in its early years, quickly outgrowing its Cambridge quarters and relocating first to Boston and then—in the early 1920s—making its final move here to Newport, where it purchased the mansion known as Dark Gables from the heirs of an eccentric millionaire. Over the years, Lux had continued to thrive in its areas of expertise: economics; politics; applied mathematics; physics; and more recently, computer science. The only subject expressly forbidden by its charter was any form of military application—which set it apart from other think tanks, many of which enthusiastically pursued such lucrative research.

Logan stepped away from the window and glanced around the room. Like the rest of the mansion, it was ornate, opulent, and expansive. In addition to the office, there was a small sitting room, a bedroom, and a bath. Logan’s eye stopped when it reached his desk. He had already laid out some of his work materials: a laptop; a camcorder; a digital voice recorder; an EM detector; an infrared thermometer; and a dozen or so books, many of them bound in leather, most hundreds of years old.

A low knock on his door interrupted this survey. Logan walked over and opened the door to see a young man in a muted business suit hovering outside. “Excuse me,” the man said, handing Logan a sealed folder marked
PRIVATE AND CONFIDENTIAL
. “Dr. Olafson asked me to deliver this to you personally.”

“Thanks,” Logan replied with a nod. The young man went off down the richly carpeted corridor and Logan closed the door with one shoulder, unsealing the folder as he did so. Inside was a single, unlabeled DVD.

Walking over to the desk and taking a seat, he powered up the laptop, waited for it to boot up, and then inserted the DVD. Moments later, a media player window opened on the screen and a video began to play. Logan immediately recognized it as the security feed he’d watched in Olafson’s office: the grainy, black-and-white
image of a man in an elegantly appointed library, pacing and pulling at his hair.

Logan clicked the pause button. He did not want to watch that again. He stared thoughtfully at the now-frozen image of Strachey. Olafson’s words came back to him:
I knew Will Strachey for thirty years. He was the most stable, the most gentle, the most rational of men. This was a man with everything to live for. That man in the video is not the man I knew
.

He closed the view window, then fired up a utility to extract the audio portion of the DVD. Next, he opened the resulting file in a forensic audio-editing program and played it in its entirety. It was just four minutes and twenty seconds long. After listening to it once, Logan deleted the last thirty seconds: the screech of the descending window sash, the sickening crack, and the two thuds that followed were almost as horrifying to listen to as they’d been to witness.

Now Logan listened to the audio file again. The first forty-five seconds consisted only of heavy footsteps and stertorous breathing, and he deleted that as well. He was left with an audio file approximately three minutes long, of poor quality, full of hum and hiss and digital artifacts.

In the editor’s main window, the audio was displayed as a waveform: a fat, ragged line that ran from left to right, studded throughout with needlelike spikes. Logan opened a smaller window and instructed the program to run a spectral analysis of the audio file. He peered at the resulting display, examining and adjusting the amplitude and frequency values. Next, he ran a glitch-detection macro over the audio, adjusting its threshold slider to an aggressive setting. He corrected the file for DC offset, increased the gain, then ran it through a parametric equalizer chained to a high-pass filter.

Now the file was louder and clearer, and the majority of the hum was gone. Strachey’s voice was more audible, but it was still difficult to interpret—partly because of the poor audio, and partly
because Strachey was alternately gasping and mumbling. Nevertheless, Logan made the best transcript he could, playing the difficult passages again and again and listening very closely. As much as possible, he tried to put himself in Strachey’s shoes, imagining what the man might be feeling, then interpolating the results.

“No…No. I can’t, I can’t.”

This was followed by a passage of rapid breathing, almost hyperventilation.

“Help me, please. It follows me everywhere. Everywhere. I can’t, I can’t escape!”

Logan heard the doorknob being rattled, books flung from their shelves.

“It comes from the [undecipherable]. I know it does.”

Various crashing noises; the sound of a table being overturned. For a brief moment, the voice became clearer:

“The voices—getting too close. They taste like poison. Have to get away.”

Then the voice grew more distant as Strachey staggered away from the recording camera.

“It is with me. They are with me. In the dark. No, God, no…”

That was it. Suddenly, the tremulous agitation in the voice eased. The breathing slowed, became almost calm. Logan stopped the playback; he knew what was going to happen next.

Saving the transcript to a text file, he closed the laptop and stood up, returning to the window and the view of the gray Atlantic. He had, for the purposes of deciphering the audio, tried to put himself in Strachey’s shoes. Now he wished he hadn’t. There was nothing there but inexplicable, sudden madness—madness and death.

They are with me. In the dark
.

The sun beat down over the greensward that ran away from the mansion toward the sea. In the oak-paneled office, it was warm. Yet despite the warmth, Logan felt a shiver run through him.

It was half past seven when Logan left his rooms, descended the sweeping central staircase, and entered the main dining room. Dark Gables, Lux’s home, had been the product of the febrile imagination of Edward Delaveaux. During its construction, the reclusive, bizarre millionaire had purchased an ancient French monastery, disassembled it stone by stone, and brought sections wholesale back to Rhode Island to incorporate into his mansion. The dining room had once been the monastery’s refectory. It was a large gothic space, with huge wooden beams forming a vaulted ceiling and decorative arches lining the tapestried walls. The only things breaking the illusion were the two opposing Solomonic, or barley-sugar, columns that—with their inlaid bands spiraling from bottom to top—matched those at the mansion’s main entrance.
Such columns were the primary load-bearing supports of the building, and could be found, in varying sizes, throughout Lux.

Logan paused just within the doorway a moment, looking around at the tables, the people dining at them, and the tuxedoed waiters hovering attentively here and there. There were several vaguely familiar faces, still more that he didn’t recognize. The tables were all identical: round, seating six, covered with crisp white linen tablecloths.

One of the closest tables was almost empty. There were just two people seated at it, a man and a woman, and another place setting indicating that a third person had temporarily left the table. Logan recognized the seated man. He was Jonathan King, a specialist in game theory. While Logan hadn’t been close to King during his time at Lux, the man had always been friendly. He began walking toward the table. As he did so, he was aware of people doing double takes as he passed. He’d had his image on the cover of enough magazines that he was used to this.

King looked up as Logan approached. He looked blank for a moment; then his face broke into a smile. “Jeremy!” he said, standing up and shaking Logan’s hand. “What a surprise. And a pleasure.”

“Hi, Jonathan,” Logan replied. “May I join you?”

“Of course.” King turned toward the woman who was seated beside him. She was perhaps thirty years of age, with black hair and bright, inquisitive eyes. “This is Zoe Dempster,” King said. “Joined Lux six months ago as a junior Fellow. She’s a specialist in limits and multivariable calculus.”

Hearing this, Logan remembered how, at the think tank, people were automatically introduced not only with their name but their specialty. “Hello,” he said with a smile.

“Hello.” Dempster frowned. “Have we met before?”

“This is Jeremy Logan,” King said.

The frown remained for a moment. Then a lightbulb went on over her head. “Oh. You’re the—” and she stopped suddenly.

“That’s right,” Logan said. “The ghost detective.”

Dempster laughed with something like relief. “You said it, not me.”

Logan caught a glimpse of Olafson. He was seated at a table in the rear of the dining room, along with vice director Perry Maynard and several others. Looking up, the director noticed Logan’s glance and nodded.

“Jeremy was in residence here for a time,” King said tactfully. “That was—How long ago was it, Jeremy?”

“Almost ten years.”

“Ten years. Hard to believe.” King shook his head. “Are you back here for more research?”

Logan noticed the way the two were looking at him. He knew they were curious about his presence here, and he was considering the best way to answer, when somebody sat down at the third table setting: a man in his late fifties, with close-cropped black-and-silver hair and a beautifully trimmed beard that would have done Sigmund Freud proud. He set down a cup full of black coffee beside his plate, then looked over at Logan with an expression of theatrical surprise.

“Well, well,” he said. “I was wondering if you might be showing up about now.”

“Hello, Roger,” said Logan.

“Hullo, yourself.” Roger Carbon had a honeyed English accent that somehow made everything he said sound slightly disdainful. He turned to the others. “Jonathan, you remember Jeremy Logan, no doubt. Zoe, you wouldn’t. Although you might have seen him on television. I happened to catch you on CNN just the other night. ‘There ain’t no Nessie.’ How droll.”

Logan merely nodded. Roger Carbon, specialist in evolutionary psychology, had been Logan’s nemesis during his time at Lux, considering his work on enigmas and the qualification of supernatural phenomena to be sensationalist, beneath the institution. Carbon had been one of a small group that had been instrumental in seeing that Logan was asked to leave.

A waiter appeared at Logan’s side with a small printed menu;
Logan glanced at it, checked off his choices, and passed it back to the waiter, who quickly vanished.

“I must say, the modus operandi you described sounded remarkably scientific,” Carbon went on airily. “And you have a name for your, ah, discipline now—don’t you?”

“Enigmalogy,” Logan said.

“That’s it. Enigmalogy. As I recall, you had not yet gotten as far as a name during your time here at Lux.”

“Remarkable what can happen in a decade,” Logan replied, tolerating the man’s snide tone.

“It is indeed. Can I assume, then, that you’ve codified this new field of yours? Systematized it, established its principles? Can we expect a textbook any time soon?
Ghostbreaking 101
, perhaps? Or, no
—Spooks for Dummies
?”

“Roger,” Jonathan King warned.

“I’ve gotten very good at ancient curses, too,” Logan said, careful to keep his tone light. “In fact, I’m offering a special today: I’ll hex two people of your choice for the price of one.”

Zoe Dempster chortled, covered her mouth with one hand. King smiled. Carbon took a sip of coffee, ignoring the remark.

“But you are here about Strachey, right?” he asked, changing the subject.

“More or less,” Logan said.

“Well, let’s have some details, then!”

“Another time. Suffice to say the board has asked me to make some inquiries into the nature of his death.”

“The nature of his death. Nobody’s talking much about that, but the word is it was pretty ghastly.” Carbon gave him a penetrating gaze. “Is it true Strachey’s head was found in a rosebush?”

“I couldn’t say,” Logan replied, with a double meaning.

“Well, at least tell us how you’re going to get started.”

“I’ve started already.”

Carbon digested this for a moment. Clearly, he did not like the insinuation.

Logan’s first course appeared: frisée salad with lardons and a poached egg. “Actually, I thought I’d drop in on Perry Maynard.”

“Ah. Well, when you do, be sure to ask him about the others.”

Logan stopped in the act of raising his fork. “Others?”

“Others.” And Carbon finished his coffee, dabbed primly at his mouth with a linen napkin, smiled at King, winked at Zoe Dempster, then rose and left the table without another word.