Pacific Northwest University (PNU) is a fictional college in Greywalker Seattle. It was founded by Calvinists in 1890, although the school is no longer a specifically religious institution. The apparent campus of PNU is rather small, although the school owns many of the nearby large houses that are used as dorms, labs, and offices. From Harper's description is is a common mistake of people to think that PNU is actually a private high school instead of a college. PNU makes it's first appearance in the series in Poltergeist as the site of Gartner Tuckman's experiments.
Facilities[]
St. John Hall[]
A squat Art Deco building of yellow brick, with numerous oddly-sized windows. While the building may have been very charming when first built, its age and use have contributed to a rather grubby appearance, with numerous windows covered from the inside. A small receptionist's area guards the front door to the building, but it is usually unoccupied.
Its appearance in the Grey is not that different from its appearance in the real, although there is a line of yellow energy that has been diverted from the local grid to run through Room 12 for the course of events described in Poltergeist. Harper indicates that the gridline will move back to its original placement after the contents of Room 12 are dismantled at the end of the novel.
Room 12[]
At the front of the third floor, right across from the stairs, this is the room designed to hold the seances that resulted in the creation of Celia Falwell. While most of the furnishings were removed from the room at the end of Poltergeist, while it was in use the room held a bookshelf, end tables, and assorted bric-a-brac. There was a sofa, complete with numerous pillows, on the far end of the room from the observation window, and the center of the room was dominated by a large round wooden table that stood on an Oriental rug with a flower design. A small brass chandelier hung above the center of the table. Enough chairs for the seance group surround the table, with a few extra chairs against the walls. Near the door stood a tall whitewashed board with color sorted rows of Christmas lights sticking out of it. Under the single external window in the room, a potted plant and stuffed toy cat sat on the sill. Several publicity photos and movie posters from the 1930's and '40s decorate the wall. In addition to these, there was a
framed computer generated photo of a young blond woman bearing a wistful look, who looked somewhat like Loretta Young {right}. Next to this image was a ragged photo of a man in the uniform of a decorated World War II pilot.
There were a few obvious pieces of recording and monitoring equipment around the room. Several black disks were hidden under the rug, and wires ran from them, through the rug, and were disguised in the swirling flower pattern. In Quinton's analysis of the room, it was revealed that the bottom of the table legs were metal, and that the black disks could induce a low-level electromagnetic field that would make the table slightly lighter or heavier on demand. Quinton also found numerous subminiature visual and audio recording devices hidden in the walls and furniture of the room, as well as a series of small, low power speakers set into the floor. The configuration of the speakers could be used transform the entire wooden floor into a large, subaudio speaker which would cause a subtle sense of disquiet in anyone standing on it. The entire setup was very well done, and quite expensive.
On Quinton's second visit to the room, he noted to Harper that several of the expensive electronics had been replaced by cheaper components.
In the Grey, the room was thick with half-images of the participants in Tuckman's experiments. The table itself was shrouded in image traceries, with a few of the swirls glowing with red, blue, and green traceries of energy. A ball of harsh yellow energy threads hung in the center of the underside of the table. In the deep Grey these threads extended from the table and covered everything in the room, eventually binding back up with the yellow gridline at the external window.
Room O-12[]
This smaller room housed the other end of the monitoring and recording equipment used to observe the events in Room 12. The adjoining wall was dominated with a large one-way glass observation window. Harper noted that the glass of the observation window seemed to severely limit her ability to see the Grey within Room 12. During one of Celia's more energetic manifestations, the table in Room 12 was used to crack the observation window.