Well, I put together a few more pieces of the puzzle last night.
Seeing how nervous and unconvinced I was during our coffee date, Chloe offered to come with me to Raph’s place—perhaps to lend moral support, or more likely because she was afraid I’d chicken out. But I told her no. I love Chloe, but she has a way about her . . . You only have to see her status at school to know that she has a tendency to rub some people the wrong way. And Raph was hypersensitive under the best of circumstances. With people deliberately pushing at the things he had walled off and forbidden us to talk about . . . I had a feeling the situation could be volatile.
After dinner I steeled myself and headed down to the basement with no idea which version of Raph to expect. When he opened the door, I checked his face for clues. He seemed more calm, less manic than he had last time . . . and he didn’t kick me out right away, which I took as a good sign. But stepping closer, I noticed his eyes were rimmed with red, and as he closed the door behind me, he wiped his nose on the back of his hand.
“Allergies?” I said.
“What?” said Raph. “Oh yeah. Spring’s the worst. All that cottonwood fluff in the air . . .”
I stood in the middle of the room, looking around for any clue to what Raph knew. Any clue that would let me get out of there and mollify Chloe, without having to actually speak and reveal my mission. The apartment was not as crazy looking as it had been with the boxes everywhere, but it also didn’t look as spic and span as it had the last time I had been here. Instead it bore the signs of a more typical college-age kid: dirty dishes in the sink, mail and magazines heaped on various surfaces, a lamp askew, a rug corner flipped up. Or was it more than that? Was this typical post-adolescent slovenliness, or the incipient signs of depression? For example, a plant that my mom had given him had fallen from a window ledge and broken on the floor, but he’d made no effort to sweep up the dirt. And the teakettle he had been so excited about last time I saw him was on the floor next to the couch, knocked over on its side.
I looked up at Raph again and saw suspicion in his eyes. I think the way I was looking around his apartment was making him nervous. “Look,” he said, “do you need anything? Because I was just . . .” He trailed off, like he was hoping I would take the hint, but with Chloe in the back of my mind, I pushed forward.
“You were just what?” I said.
“Huh?” he tried, stalling for time. “I was busy. This isn’t the best time, Paige, but maybe—”
“Busy with what?” Raph just stared at me. “You’re not taking classes, you don’t have a job, you don’t seem to have any friends other than my mom and me. What exactly are you doing tonight that can’t be interrupted?”
Raph swallowed. “I thought I told you,” he said. “When someone—”
“When someone changes the subject, when someone makes it clear that they don’t want to talk about something, you let it drop, right? Well, I’m not letting it drop this time. I’m sorry, Raph, but I need answers. Logan’s been to the hospital twice now. The electronics in the house are going haywire. Total strangers are terrified of the place. This isn’t a joke anymore, and it’s not something you can just keep to yourself, because you’re not the only one affected.”
Raph sat down at the counter. “I didn’t realize it had gotten that bad.”
“You know something,” I said. “Tell me what’s going on. Tell me what you know.”
“How much have you figured out?”
He was deflecting, of course, and I felt a flare of rage at him for continuing to be so evasive when he knew what we were facing. He was as bad as Dr. Clyde, in his way. But I took a deep breath and calmed myself. At least he was acknowledging that there was something to know. This was progress, and if he was willing to go this far, I might get him to go further.
“I know you saw Dr. Clyde,” I began, wondering what danger there might be in bluffing. “I know she thinks you’re dangerous. And I know . . .”
“What?”
His direct question was making me all too aware of how little I did know. “Something about that pamphlet! That cult. Pronoica. It’s tied in with all this somehow.”
“Anything else?”
I shook my head, relieved that none of what I said was so off base it would close him off. He scrubbed a hand roughly through his hair.
“I did see Dr. Clyde. I was her patient for almost a year.”
“What happened? She said you were cured?”
Raph laughed dryly. “You have a lot to learn about shrinks. No. I stopped going. Maybe I believed I was cured, or maybe I just wanted to be. No, that’s not it. I believed I was sick, and that was all I needed to know. That solved all my problems.”
“You’re doing it again. Talking in riddles.”
“Risk you take when you ask people stuff they don’t want to tell you.”
“It’s the morgue, isn’t it? You told us it wasn’t haunted to throw us off the track, but there’s something going on that has to do with—”
“The morgue isn’t haunted. It has nothing to do with the morgue.”
I sat down across from him. “Why don’t you just start at the beginning? Why did you leave school?”
Raph shook his head. “That wasn’t the beginning. Not by a long ways. You’re asking the wrong questions, Paige.”
I flailed about, helplessly. “Fine, then. Start with the boxes. What was in those boxes? Why did you have them here in your apartment?”
“Getting warmer.”
“Your professor,” I said as a memory from one of our earlier conversations surfaced. “You were working on a project with him . . .”
Raph winced as if he had been slapped. He closed his eyes and didn’t open them for a long moment. “Hot yet?” I said. Raph opened his eyes and took a slow, unsteady breath. And indeed, he seemed to be sweating, though the room was as chilly as it had been earlier.
He checked his phone for the time. “Why don’t I just show you?” he said. I looked around the apartment, wondering what he had that he could show me, but he shook his head. “Not here.” He opened his front door and strode out into the chill night. I followed him.
We walked for blocks, heading toward downtown, but I still had no real idea where we going, just a pit of nervousness in my stomach. As we walked along quiet, treelined residential streets, the cottonwood fluff drifted down on us like a scene from a demented snow globe, and I was struck by the eerie sense that even the seasons had gotten out of joint. None of it made any sense. If my problem was in the house, what solution were we going to find anywhere else? But Raph was so touchy, I was afraid to harass him with more questions than I already had, afraid he would change his mind and head back, or do something even stranger.
Soon we were on the university campus. I had been there a few times to visit Mom in her office, or to see an exhibit at the student art center, but never at night. The dorms and fraternities were brightly lit, and sounds of laughter and camaraderie echoed from them, but we kept walking toward the main quad, which was surrounded by classroom buildings, and was silent and still this time of night. But Raph strode purposefully up the empty paths toward a hulking, modern building, which I realized was the library. There were lights on inside, but otherwise very little sign of life. I read the hours off the sign on the door, then checked my watch. “They’re only open another 20 minutes,” I said.
“Yes,” said Raph, and he opened the door. He gave only the briefest of glances toward the reception desk before moving swiftly toward the stairs and, taking them two at a time so that I panted to keep up, led me up to the fourth floor of the building, then through a maze of library stacks, administrative offices, and storage rooms until we at last reached our apparent destination. The room was filled with boxes, and after a moment’s confusion, I realized that they were the same boxes that had been in Raph’s apartment not too long ago.
“So this is where they went,” I marveled.
“This will tell you most of the story.”
The boxes were stacked floor to ceiling, and what labels there were were written in a code that was impenetrable to me. “Where do I begin?”
Raph scanned the room, obviously having something in mind. Then he picked a box from one of the precarious towers, carefully slid it apart from the others, and opened it. “Here,” he said, thrusting a slim booklet into my hands, then going back to rifling in the box. I flipped it open and read the title page. Your Spirit Power: with 20 lessons in how to find it and use it, it read. I opened it and skimmed through the text.
“What the hell is this stuff?” I said.
“This is our project,” said Raph. “This is Pronoica.”