Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [70]
How could she have had friends over with the house in that condition? What was wrong with her? She looked at her cracked image in the mirror and wondered what it was that made her see a man who looked in the dark very much like Hut, having sex with her while she slept, forcing himself into her and against her body, and yet, somehow seeing a video of herself masturbating? What had brought her to this, she wondered. Where am I in all this?
She lay down on the bed, but could not stop looking over at the NannyCam’s metal eye, watching her.
How can someone put an image in my head like that? Make me see it on a video that changed when someone else saw it?
She got up and tried calling her mother, but couldn’t. Next, she tried calling Michael Diamond’s office, but tracking him down was next to impossible.
Julie couldn’t bring herself to watch the tape again until after more wine. She watched it again, and this time, it was exactly as she’d seen it with her sister: she was masturbating, alone in bed, and the room seemed to have more moonlight in it, for she could tell that her eyes were not closed. The video itself didn’t seem that fuzzy. They were open. She felt disgusted with her own body, watching this. She felt as if a nerve pinched inside her mind as she tried to make sense out of this—out of the dreams, out of the tapes, out of seeing things that weren’t there. Seeing things that could not be there.
She had two choices: she was either losing her mind, or this was something else.
3
Her laptop open on her bed, she connected the cable and went online. She pulled up some search engines—Google and Hotbot and Yahoo—and began searching for the terms “school,” “psychic,” “remote viewing” and “1977,” hoping this would come up with something. In each case, there were pages upon pages of listings, and she scrolled up and down the screen, taking a stab at each listing or mention. None of it seemed to point to anything helpful.
After about an hour of searching, she nearly gave up, but came upon a link to a webpage that didn’t have much on the surface—mainly just a mention that there had been a sleep study for psychic ability in the 1970s in Los Angeles, and it had been completely unsuccessful. In the brief article, the writer referred to the “legendary scandal of Project Daylight.”
Julie saved this page, and opened a new browser window, looking up the words “Project Daylight,” “remote viewing,” and “New York.”
Nearly one hundred references came up for these search terms. It completely surprised her.
She began clicking links into each one of the terms. All seemed to go to conspiracy-theory-type sites. Some of the sites dealt with paranormal phenomena, some with urban legends, some with UFOs. When she found mention of Project Daylight, she found mention of a sleep study of children with sleep disorders—whether “night fears,” or general insomnia. Each website she visited seemed to have a different piece of this puzzle about Project Daylight. Brief mentions. “Nobody really knows about Project Daylight, other than a fire destroyed the house where the research took place.” That was really the most definitive statement she could find. There were at least twenty children in the program, and many of them had come from the foster care system. One of the children had shown what they called an “advanced PSI ability,” and she wasn’t quite sure what PSI meant, other than psychic and a variant on the acronym ESP. In due course, she found its definition, and it did, indeed, refer to paranormal ability such as clairvoyance, telepathy, psychometry, and psychokinesis. She knew the first two terms, but was unsure of psychometry or psychokinesis, but she could take a wild guess.
The Chelsea Parapsychological Institute kept coming up