Gravelight Read Free Page A

and oil spread beneath the car in a glistening puddle oddly reminiscent of blood, and the bottom of the hill was a very long way down. Gingerly, Wycherly reached out and touched the splintered tree trunk, every muscle protesting the movement. He could see now that the bark was weathered and peeling; a fallen tree, wedged among the others at the precise angle to skewer him like a butterfly on an entomologist’s pin.
    Well, that’s totaled. I wonder if I have any insurance?
    Wycherly patted himself down automatically, finding his wallet but failing to turn up either a driver’s license or an insurance card. Experience told him that he probably didn’t have either one—hadn’t his license been revoked a few months ago after the latest DWI conviction? Wycherly suspected it had, which would account for the lack of insurance. He looked back at the Ferrari again, wondering with a certain pleased and distant malice if it was even his car. Perhaps it was Kenny’s. Perhaps he had stolen it.
    He was lucky to have hit the pines and not gone all the way to the bottom. He was lucky the car hadn’t rolled.
    He’d been lucky. Wycherly contemplated the unfamiliar concept. Lucky.
    He wondered where on earth he was.
    He wanted a drink.
    Wycherly shuddered and turned away, starting his climb back up the hill to safety and the road.
    Half a day’s drive north of New York City, along the eastern bank of the Hudson River, lies Amsterdam County, home of Taghkanic College. The college’s nearest neighbors are the town of Glastonbury and a small artist’s colony that seeks anonymity for its residents. The college was founded in 1714 and lies between the railroad tracks and the river, a location easy to miss unless one knows the area well. Taghkanic is a liberal arts college of the sort that once
flourished in this country before a college diploma became only the overture to and preparation for a job. It exists to this day on the terms of its original charter, and has never accepted one penny of government support to cover its operating costs, choosing to remain independent, first from Crown and Royal Governor, and later from the representatives of the fledgling United States.
    But a changing economic climate has forced the closure and assimilation of most of the private colleges in the United States, until only a handful of such privileged and expensive relics remain. Taghkanic does not owe its survival to the generosity of its alumni or the foresight of its trustees but to its affiliation with a most peculiar institution: the Margaret Beresford Bidney Memorial Psychic Science Research Laboratory, founded in 1921 by a bequest from the estate of Margaret Beresford Bidney, class of 1868.
    Like so many of those who sought their loved ones amid the ghosts of the aftermath of the Insurrection of the Southern States, Margaret Bidney was a Spiritualist, a follower of the Fox Sisters of Hydeville, New York. In later life, Miss Bidney’s interests broadened to include the Cayce work and Theosophy, and eventually, as a disciple of William Seabrook, the whole broad field of parapsychology and the Unseen World. She never married, and when she died, her entire fortune went to fund research into the psychic sciences—including a prize of one million dollars to the individual who conclusively provided proof of paranormal abilities. The prize has never been claimed.
    From its inception, the Laboratory—or, as it came informally to be known, the Bidney Institute—was funded independently of the College, though offering courses in psychology and parapsychology to the Taghkanic students and working with the college to provide one of the country’s few degree programs in parapsychology. Nevertheless, the Taghkanic trustees had been attempting to claim the entire. Bidney bequest on behalf of Taghkanic College for more than fifty years and were on the verge of success
when Colin MacLaren accepted an