Description: Ghostlight CHAPTER ONE WHAT IS TRUTH? Beholding the bright countenance of truth in the quiet and still air of delightful studies. --JOHN MILTON NORTH OF NEW YORK CITY, ALONG THE EDGE OF THE Hudson River, there is a small estate lying between the railroad tracks of Metro North and the broad expanse of the river. Its main building was once a cider mill, and the mill--as well as the descendants of the original orchard--still occupies the site. Brick walkways cross the gently rolling lawns, and there is a yearly battle between the students and the deer for the produce of the trees. Later buildings in the exuberantly classical Federalist mode complete the campus, but there has been no new construction on the campus for nearly a century. Its architectural conservatism makes the place so much the perfect image of an eighteenth-century college that the Dean must very firmly discourage the advances of several movie companies every year who wish to film here, but Taghkanic College guards its privacy--and that of its students and faculty--in the same stern fashion it always has. In 1714 Taghkanic College was founded to provide education to the local Indians, mostly members of the Taghkanic and Lenape tribes, and to the free Blacks who had also settled in the area. Existing to this day on the terms of its original charter, Taghkanic College 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. Adherence to this policy has led, over the years, to a liberalization of its admission policies: In 1762 Taghkanic College opened its doors to "alle younge gentillmen of goode familie," and in 1816 to women, making Taghkanic one of the first institutions of higher learning in the United States to do so. Even with such broad admission policies, Taghkanic College would not exist today save for two individuals: Margaret Beresford Bidney and Colin MacLaren. Miss Bidney graduated Taghkanic College in the same year that the Insurrection of the Southern States turned her father''s comfortable fortune into a large one. She never married, and in the last years of her life she was a disciple of William Seabrook, noted occultist. It was perhaps inevitable that Miss Bidney''s fortune should go to fund, at the college of her matriculation, what grew to become the Margaret Beresford Bidney Memorial Psychic Science Research Laboratory at Taghkanic College. From its inception, the laboratory--or, as it came informally to be known, the Bidney Institute--was funded independently of the college through the endowment fund created by the Bidney Bequest. The trustees of the college 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 appointment as director of the Institute. Dr. MacLaren had been known in parapsychological circles since the early fifties, frequently operating under a cloud due to his willingness to accept at face value what were dismissed by others as the ravings of charlatans and kooks. MacLaren maintained that there should be no distinction made between the fields of 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. MacLaren''s particular field of study was trance psychism, or mediumship, and his aggressive leadership was precisely what the moribund Bidney Institute needed. Under his guidance, the Institute took the lead in the investigation both of psychic phenomena and its wicked stepsister, occult phenomena, and became an institution of international repute. The specter of its dissolution 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 when Hell froze over--an event that the staff of the Margaret Beresford Bidney Psychic Science Research Institute intended, in any event, to measure. Truth Jourdemayne sat brooding in her tiny cubicle at the Bidney Institute in a Monday-morning stupor unleavened, as yet, by the healing power of coffee. Her short dark hair in its sensible crop looked faintly rumpled, and her white lab coat, open over a sensible cotton sweater and jeans, looked less crisp than usual. A pile of computer printouts six inches thick lay under her right elbow: Truth''s work for the immediate future. She glanced up at the clock on her wall, shoving her horn-rimmed reading glasses up on her brow as she did so. Eight forty-five, and when she''d gotten here fifteen minutes ago Meg had just been starting to fill thepercolator. It was large, and old, and took its sweet time to boil; there wouldn''t be coffee for a while yet. Truth sighed, and pulled the printouts over to her. Might as well get some work done while she waited. Davy had finished the last of the runs just yesterday. It was part of an experiment Truth had designed; nothing out of the ordinary, merely an attempt to establish once and for all a statistical baseline for incidents of clairsentient perception. It was necessary work, but collecting the data to validate the experiment was a mind-numbing labor: ten individuals aged twenty to twenty-five, in good physical health, who were willing to participate in 100 double-blind machine runs of 100 Rhine cards each--and at that Truth thought her findings might be challenged on the grounds of being based upon too small a statistical sample. But the experiment would have been impossibly unwieldy with more volunteers, even if she could have gotten them. It had taken over a year to amass the data as it was. And the preliminary work was sound enough. The experiment met all the International Society of Psychic Research guidelines: Responses were recorded electronically, symbols were chosen randomly by machi there was no possibility that a human researcher could accidentally communicate the symbols to the subjects through body language. Or even telepathy. It was hard enough having to design an experiment that would generate baseline statistics by which clairvoyance could be measured without having to design one that excluded other psychic talents--such as telepathy or precognition--as well. Still, Truth thought she''d managed. Since the computer in some sense already "knew" the order of all the symbols it would choose, that event lay in the past by the time the subject entered the experiment, so that any ability to see the future--assuming any of their subjects possessed such, which Truth hoped for the sake of her experimentthey did not--would not be involved in guessing the symbols on the cards. Welcome to the glamourous world of statistical parapsychology, Truth thought wryly to herself, and picked up a pencil. She''d forgotten entirely about coffee when Meg came in an hour later. "Hello? Hibernating?" Meg Winslow was the Parapsychology Department''s secretary, short, cheerful, round, and efficient. She entered with an armful of mail and a steaming coffee cup held perilously steady with three fingers. "I lost track of the time," Truth admitted sheepishly. " Lots of lovely mail," Meg announced decisively, "and Dyl brought in some currant shortbread he made over the weekend. I saved you a piece." Dumping the mail carefully on the desk, Meg set the cup down and dove into her jacket pocket to retrieve sugar and cream packets and a tile of shortbread wrapped in a paper napkin. "You''re spoiling me," Truth protested laughingly. This service wasn''t part of Meg''s job description. "If I don''t, you''ll starve to death, and be buried in a pile of statistics," Meg said promptly. "I''d better get a move on--today''s the start of classes, and we''re sure to have a dozen lost freshmen wander in here before noon if I don''t keep ''em out." Meg swept out again, carefully closing the door behind her, in obedience to Truth''s preference. As one of the nonfaculty researchers at the Bidney Institute, Truth was entitled to an office with a door, just as if she were a full professor, and she kept it shut, whether she was in the office or not. The professors whose offices flanked hers kept their doors closed only, Truth suspected, as a vacuous show of status, especially since most of them popped up and peered out at the slightest footstep from outside. But when Truth closed her door, she meant it. Truth kept her door shut so she could keep people out. Especially now. Truth Jourdemayne hated September with a passion more often reserved for the holiday season; she hated the flocks of returning students, the bewildered new arrivals, the graduate students. It was not so much that she disliked any individual student, she told herself unconvincingly. It was just that taken all together they were too many--too noisy, and too energetic. Well, after all, they''re just arriving, while you''ve been here all summer, toiling away in the vineyards of statistical analysis , Truth told herself mockingly. The Institute did not follow Taghkanic''s academic year--a good thing, as they''d never get any work done--and so September was just another month for her, and not the end of a long vacation. She sighed, and reached for her

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