“Well, that’s a relief,” he said. “Because mine’s pretty rusty. When we moved to Italy, I’m afraid the Italian pushed aside whatever meager French Andover had managed to impart to me.” He smiled, a sadness behind it. Sibyl rested a reassuring hand on his arm.
At the circulation desk, the laconic young man working his rubber library stamp said, “Working late tonight, then, Professor Derby?”
“Seems so,” he said, passing the boy the call slip.
“Le Sang de Morphée, huh? That’s some kinda strange title.”
“The Blood of Morpheus,” Sibyl translated. She glanced at Benton, worried. He smiled at her, and she felt his hand come to rest on the small of her back.
“Right you are,” the boy affirmed. “But you’re not the first person to ask for that book this week. Thought it was a weird title then, too.”
“Beg pardon?” Benton said.
“Hang on,” the boy said, riffling through a box of note cards. “Aha! Yep. It’s charged out to another professor. You want I should recall it? Take a few weeks, probably.”
“Perhaps whoever it is will just let me take a quick look,” he said, leaning forward on a conspiratorial elbow. “I don’t suppose you could tell me who’s got it, could you?”
The boy gave Benton a long look. “You know I’m not supposed to do that,” he said.
Around them footsteps and rising voices signaled the closing of the building for the night. In the adjoining periodicals room the lights snapped off.
“Oh, sure,” Benton said. “But listen. I just need a peek at it. I’m sure whoever it is won’t mind if I just drop by. Saves us all the trouble of having to recall it and charge it out all over again. Right?”
The boy weighed this idea, calculating the time and energy necessary to fill out the needed paperwork. “Okay,” he demurred. “I suppose it’ll be all right. Don’t make a habit of it, though.” He gave the professor a wily look, and said, “Maybe I’m just persuaded by your research assistant, here.”
Sibyl blushed. Benton, however, smiled. “And a better research assistant I’ve never had,” he said. His elbow nudged her ribs.
Without a word the boy passed the card to Benton, and then leaned on his elbows, chin on his hands, sending his most inviting smile in Sibyl’s direction.
“Ha!” Benton exclaimed, looking at the card. “Well, I’ll be damned. Thank you.”
He slid the card back and took Sibyl’s elbow. She glanced over her shoulder as they went, and the boy behind the desk waggled his fingers at her in a coquettish wave.
“Where are we going?” she asked as they hurried ahead of snapping-off lights, out the front doors of the library, and into the deepening darkness of the Yard.
Benton looked away and sighed. “I don’t know why it should surprise me. His curiosity is insatiable. Always was.” He then leveled his gaze at Sibyl, and she saw the red rims of his eyes. “Edwin,” he said. “Edwin has it.”
Sibyl bit her lower lip, sickened with guilt and sadness. “Professor Friend,” she whispered. She stopped in her tracks, bringing her hands to her face. He paused, looking left and right before enfolding her in a quick embrace.
“Come now,” he whispered to her. “Can you think of anyone else who’d be more excited by the idea of precognition? Real, provable precognition? Can you?”
She snuffled, eyes on her feet, shaking her head.
“Can you imagine how excited he’d be? If he were here, don’t you think he’d insist on testing you right away? He would, wouldn’t he?” Benton brought a hand up to Sibyl’s hair and smoothed it off her brow. The hand then traced along her jaw and lifted her face to meet his gaze. She saw that his eyes had cleared, in fact were glimmering with resolve.
“He would,” Sibyl agreed, wiping her damp eye with the back of her wrist.
“You bet he would,” Benton said.
She stared up at him, probing. “Yes,” she agreed. “All right.”
He took her by the hand, gave it a reassuring squeeze, and they hurried to the philosophy building. With his free hand Benton rummaged in a pocket for a set of keys. He shook his head and muttered, “Dammit, Edwin. I don’t see why you had to get on that blasted boat.”
The door lock gave with a creak, and Benton held the door open for her to enter ahead of him.
“Ben,” she asked, hesitant in the empty building. “How are we going to get it out of his office?”
“I’m not sure yet,” he confessed.
All the lights were out. Sibyl shivered against the forlorn atmosphere haunting the philosophy building at night. Benton produced a silver cigarette lighter from his pocket and lit it, holding the flame overhead to guide them. Sibyl edged nearer, threading her arm around Benton’s elbow.
“Nothing to worry about,” he said, though she could tell he was injecting his voice with confidence for both their benefits. They moved down the hall, the flickering flame tossing their shadows about in a way that made Sibyl dizzy.
“I’m not worried,” she lied.
They arrived at a glass door with the name FRIEND inked on it. Benton tried the door.
Locked.
“Drat,” Sibyl said. Benton glanced at her, amused.
“Drat?” he repeated.
“What?” she said, folding her arms.
“Drat,” he said again, smiling out of the side of his mouth.
“Now what do we do?” she asked.
“Hmm.” Benton tried the door again, but it was just as locked as before. The two of them stared at the doorknob, each silently willing it to open of its own accord.
Benton glanced at Sibyl with a small, mischievous smile. “How daring are you feeling today?” he whispered.
“Well. I’m already in an abandoned classroom building in the dead of night with a strange—dare I say very strange—man. So I guess I’m feeling more daring than usual today.”
“Touché,” Benton said. He reached over and pulled a hairpin from Sibyl’s hair. She gasped with surprise and brought a hand up to stay the slipping lock of hair. He grinned, said, “Thank you, Miss Allston,” handed her the cigarette lighter, and knelt before the office door.
“Ben!” she hissed. Benton slid the pin into the mouth of the lock.
“Could you bring the light a bit closer, please?” he asked, concentrating. Gingerly, she knelt on the floor next to him, moving the flame as close as she dared without singeing his eyebrows.
“Wherever did you learn how to do this?” she whispered, peering down her nose as he made delicate, gentle probing movements with the pin inside the lock.
“They don’t just teach French at Andover,” he said. They heard a soft click. Benton reached up and turned the handle of the door. He looked at her with a small smile. “I read about it once in a book of detective stories. When I was a boy.”
She laughed and accepted his help getting to her feet.
The room was illuminated only by shafts of pale moonlight falling through the windows behind the central wooden desk. Sibyl could just make out the ghostly shapes of furniture and books. She imagined she could almost see the form of Edwin Friend, bent over the pile of undergraduate term papers still heaped before his empty desk chair. She swallowed. If only she’d understood sooner.
“Ben,” she whispered. “You’re sure Edwin wouldn’t mind?”
“I’m sure. In fact, knowing him, I think he’d enjoy it. You saw his face when I opened that cabinet at the Dee woman’s place. But all the same, I think it would be better”—he kept his voice near a whisper—“if we didn’t turn on the lights.”
“I don’t suppose the university would look kindly on a professor’s rummaging in his colleague’s office late at night,” Sibyl agreed, scanning the bookshelves, eyes narrowed.
“Better to skirt the issue entirely,” he suggested, seating himself behind the desk. He started sifting through papers. Sibyl moved to the bookshelf, squinting to read the spines of the books. She found numerous works of William James, together with
other philosophers that she had never heard of. On a lower shelf, the full-bound edition of the Proceedings of the American Society for Psychical Research, and the companion volumes of the organization’s British counterpart.
“Benton,” she ventured. “How is it you and Professor Friend both studied with William James, yet you’ve come to such drastically different conclusions? I’ve never understood the feud between the two of you.”
“Feud?” Benton said, opening desk drawers for a quick look. “There’s no feud. I’d characterize it as a debate, rather than a feud. Edwin is—” He paused, and Sibyl thought he was considering his choice of verb tense. “A good friend of mine. And I had only the utmost respect for his intellect.”
“Yet every time I saw you together, you seemed to be arguing.”
Benton closed a drawer, leaned his head in his hands, and sighed. “Well, you’re right that we both studied under Professor James. But Professor James held some contradictory beliefs, you see. He was the original Pragmatist. Any idea had to be tested for truth before it should be believed. Yet parapsychology—which, to my mind, is a matter of faith rather than science, and is therefore untestable—informed everything that he thought about the human mind. I guess”— he paused—“Edwin and I, we each took hold of opposing sides of James’s thought. I espoused a pragmatic approach in the use of psychology. But Edwin, he was after something that, even if it were true—and I didn’t think it was—but even if it were, it wouldn’t really help anyone.”
“The séances helped me, when I believed in them,” Sibyl said slowly, dragging her fingertips along the book spines without looking at him. “I’ve never felt so soothed as when I believed Mrs. Dee was able to reach my mother. That one night, when I saw her hand . . .” She trailed off. “Well,” she finished. “It helped.”
“I know,” he said. “But the thing of it is—” Benton paused, looking for a way to explain himself. “I suppose I can understand that. I can certainly sympathize with it. Don’t you think there was a time in my life when I wanted nothing more than to live my life in the past?”
He waited. Sibyl looked at him and nodded without speaking. Benton held her gaze for a long moment, and looked away.
“But,” he continued, his hands busy among the papers on Friend’s desk, “a life spent only looking back, at the past, or ahead, after death, is a life that has no meaning. Edwin thought just the opposite. He thought that we should try to understand the beginnings and ends of a human life, the frame of it. But frankly, I’m much more interested in what happens in between.”
Sibyl held the cigarette lighter overhead, rising onto her toes to scan the higher shelves of Professor Friend’s books. “What was the title again? Le Sang de Morphée?” she asked, pulling a plain bound library book from a high shelf.
“That’s it,” Benton said, looking up. “Did you find it?”
“I believe I did,” Sibyl said, her eyes lit with triumph. She held the slim volume out to show him the title on the cover.
“Excellent!” Benton exclaimed. “Now I propose we take it back to my laboratory. Then if anyone happens upon us, at least we won’t have to explain ourselves.”
“You won’t, at any rate,” Sibyl muttered. “Come to think of it, wasn’t Harley expelled for a similar offense? Who’d think that Harvard would give so much more leeway to its junior faculty than it does its senior undergraduates?”
“I don’t think it was quite the same set of circumstances.” Benton grinned.
Benton restored Professor Friend’s desktop to its undisturbed state, and the two of them crept out of the office. He paused in the doorway, taking a last look around the bookshelves and the desk, Sibyl’s hand on his shoulder.
“Well,” he whispered. “I guess that does it.”
Her hand tightened.
“Thank you, Edwin. It’s been my privilege, working with you.” His voice caught, and he cleared his throat.
Benton and Sibyl glanced at each other, and she nodded to reassure him. He relocked the door, and Sibyl found his hand in the darkness, weaving their fingers together, their warm palms meeting with sureness as they hurried away.
“Well?” Sibyl asked from inside the crook of her elbow. Her head drowsed in her folded arms on the cool soapstone of the laboratory table. The pipes in the psychology department clanked, the noise in the otherwise empty building causing her to twitch back to consciousness. Benton pored over the French book, reading, his mouth sounding out the words.
Sibyl sighed and sat up.
“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I read it?” she asked.
“No, no,” he said, waving her off. He continued reading.
She crossed her arms, impatient. “I’ll wager you a dollar my French is better. Is it a bet?” She held out her hand, trying to tempt him to shake on it.
“I have no doubt you’re right,” he said, pointedly refusing to take her hand. “But unfortunately, for the experiment to work, I must be the one to read it. We must keep you in the dark.”
She sighed again, exaggerating the sound to indicate her boredom, and dropped her head back to the table.
“What sort of book is it, anyway?” she asked, voice muffled within her arms.
“Well,” he said, flipping a page and jotting notes. “It seems to be a sort of report-cum-travelogue. Written, I think, by an anthropologist. The publication date is given as 1888.”
“Mmhmm,” she said, eyelids drooping. “And what’s it got to say about scrying?”
“Some interesting things,” he said, keeping coy. “Mostly it catalogues the cultural uses of opium. There’s a long chapter on China. Indochina, also. The wars with Britain in the last century. Afghanistan. California, interestingly, especially San Francisco. I wouldn’t have thought of that at first, but of course they have quite a lot of Chinese there. And then it goes into the uses. Medicinal. Spiritual. Escape. Pleasure.”
She half raised her head to look at him, but the loose ribbon of hair freed by her stolen hairpin drifted into her eyes, and so she rested her head back down.
“You know, it’s curious, Benton. I can’t tell whether you believe it’s true, what I’ve been seeing.”
He laid his pen to the side and rubbed his fingertips over his eyes, under his spectacles. Then he dropped his hands to the laboratory table and looked at her.
“I can’t tell, either,” he confessed. “My heart is shocked that Edwin has likely died, in such a tragic and spectacular way, and astonished that you might have seen it before it happened. My mind, of course, knows this is impossible. And now your vision has changed. My mind tells me that the change is merely a result of suggestibility, of the changes within your psyche in response to shock and nervous strain. My heart—” He trailed off, gazing beyond Sibyl into an undefined middle distance.
Sibyl placed her hand on his forearm. Her touch brought him back to himself, and he picked up the pen, turning to his notes, leaving his unfinished thought hanging in the air.
“Now then,” he said. “One of the reasons paranormal skills are so difficult to test is that they often take place outside of a laboratory setting. They happen in a medium’s parlor, say, which as you know can feature all sorts of sophisticated gadgetry. Surrounded, furthermore, by people with a vested interest in the outcome, which can cause a subject to behave, consciously or not, in a way designed to please the spectators. Further, in settings such as that, a naïve subject—”
“Naïve!” she protested.
“It’s not a judgment on your character,” he assured her. “It means in this case only that you are not actively trying to fool the researcher. You aren’t, are you?” He smiled at her in good-natured collusion, and his foot nudged hers under the laboratory table.
“Of course not,” she said, straightening in her chair.
“Well, all right,” he said. “As I say, the challenge lies in conducting the experiment in a controlled setting, free of suggestion. And in your case, there’s also the question of . . .” He trai
led off.
“Of ?” she pressed.
“Well,” he said. “Of dosage.”
“Ah.” She looked down at her hands.
They trembled. Just a little.
“The book has a chapter which posits that whereas most people under a heavy dose of opiate experience vivid flights of fancy, a select few acquire unusual self-knowledge. Which raises an interesting question.”
“Yes,” Sibyl said, uncertain.
“That is, what, exactly, are you seeing? How do these events, if that’s what they truly are, relate to yourself specifically?” He watched her.
Sibyl twisted her fingers together in her lap and looked with worried eyes into Benton’s face.
“I don’t know,” she said in a small voice.
“All right. Perhaps that’s something we’ll find out, then. Are you ready to begin?” he asked.
Sibyl squared her shoulders and tucked the loose strand of hair out of her eyes.
“Yes,” Sibyl said. “I’m ready.”
Interlude
Shanghai
Old City
June 8–9, 1868
“Me,” Lannie breathed.
There inside the tea leaves stood himself, dressed in his present clothes, feet planted apart, holding a dripping knife. His left arm wiped across his forehead, smearing grime. Lannie’s pale eyes glowed an unsettling blue. At his feet lay two men, one curled up, leg twitching, and the other, Johnny, stretched out on his stomach, motionless.
Lannie stared into the teacup, overwhelmed with horror, insensible to everything but the imperative that he must change what he’d just seen. He squinted his eyes closed, but the image lingered behind his eyelids as if burned there.
“Hmmmm?” inquired an unconcerned voice. Lannie wrenched an eye open. He was met with the scholar’s dangling arm over the edge of his bunk.
“I told you not to spend too long in the pipe dream. Not always so pretty, is it.”
“But you don’t understand,” Lannie started to protest. His hands clutched the teacup so hard that his knuckles were white.