Gravelight Read Free Page B

appointment as director of the Institute in the early seventies.
    When Dr. MacLaren came to the Institute, it was on the verge of closing. Though the height of the anti-occult backlash was still twenty years in the future, occultism as science had received one of its not-infrequent death blows, and parapsychology was not far behind. The dark side of the Age of Aquarius had become more evident in recent years, and less than five years previously Thorne Blackburn, Magick’s most notorious advocate, had vanished in a lurid ritual that left one woman dead, Blackburn gone, and a number of unanswered questions.
    Colin MacLaren changed all that. Publisher, lecturer, parapsychologist, he held the opinion that Magick and Science were both fruitful fields of study, and that Mankind could not be understood without the use both of Science and of Science’s dark twin: the Occult. MacLaren maintained that there should be no distinction made between occultism and parapsychology when studying the paranormal—that if anything, the occultists should have the edge since they had been studying the Unseen World for centuries and attempting to distill a scientific method of dealing with its effects.
    Pragmatist and born administrator, MacLaren hurled himself wholeheartedly into the work of winnowing the deadwood at the Institute and turning its focus toward documentation and standardization. Under his guidance the Bidney Institute became an international clearing house for research into the irrational truths of human perception. As the Age of Aquarius reinvented itself to become simply The New Age, MacLaren’s steady guidance kept the Institute from following popular culture into a frenzy of crystal points and channeling. By the time MacLaren left the Institute at the end of the eighties the specter of its discontinuation had vanished like expended ectoplasm, and it became clear to the disappointed trustees of Taghkanic College that their rich but unwanted foster child would be around until the time Hell froze over—an event that the
staff of the Bidney Institute intended, in any event, to measure.
    The beautiful Federalist campus drowsed in the muggy heat of a Hudson Valley summer. Pollen and humidity gave the air a glistening shimmer and the rows of apple trees which covered and surrounded the campus were in radiant summer leaf. Although it was June, a month in which most private colleges—which closed early and opened late—would be easily likened to ghost towns, there was still a great deal of activity on the campus: The Institute operated year-round. Its non-faculty staff enjoyed the quiet of a campus without students, and its associated faculty—technically members of Taghkanic’s Psychology Department—used the time to generate the “publish or perish” projects common to academia and Science both.
    Dylan Palmer was typical of the “new breed” of faculty who had come up under Colin MacLaren. A 1982 graduate of Taghkanic College, he had gone on to pursue the College’s doctoral program in parapsychology, and then returned to the Institute to teach. He was a professor in the Indiana Jones mold, being tall, blond, handsome, easygoing, and occasionally heroic. A researcher by profession and a ghost-hunter by avocation, Dylan’s primary field of interest was personality transfers and survivals—or, in more mundane parlance, hauntings.
    Dylan taught the undergraduate Introduction to Occult Psychology course that Professor MacLaren had pioneered, as well as handling his share of the usual influx of inquiries and requests that occupied the Institute’s working year.
    But he saved his summers for ghosts.
    â€œHere it is,” Dylan announced, spreading the West Virginia map out on his hastily cleared desk.
    Dylan’s office, like its occupant, possessed a rumpled and friendly informality. There was a Ghostbusters movie poster on the back of the door, and another one over