He pushed at it, but nothing happened.
And then, from behind him, he heard something moving.
Someone was thumping down the passage.
Toward him.
He felt his heart in his throat.
The footsteps were getting louder. Something was scraping on the wall.
Wait for what will come, a voice in his head said. Where had he seen that? On the wall of the crypt, written in blood, that first night.
Wait for what will come.
Where else? Somewhere else?
Then Jim remembered. It was the school motto:
Journey with Us into Enlightenment, and Wait for What Will Come.
Well, guess what? It’s here. It’s here and I’m here and I need some enlightenment, Harrow, I need to know what my place in this is and how I can get out of this and I need to find Lark, I need to see if they really have Lark, I need to get her and I need to get out, please God, give me some enlightenment, anybody, anything, any ghost who wants to help me just give me some enlightenment right now!
And as he pressed himself against the door, it gave, and as he fell backward into the room, he scraped up his chest and arms, and he found his balance as he slammed the door on whatever it was that was coming at him with that spike that had opened up Miles once upon a time, Miles and a thousand others, and Jim turned into the round room he found himself in.
It was a torture chamber.
Fricker set his cigarette down on the fat candle at his feet. “It’s been about an hour, right?”
“What’s he saying in there?” Mojo asked.
“You said a shitload when it was your Mischief Night,” LeCount said. “You went on and on about how you didn’t want to die.”
Mojo cackled. “True, true. You bastids.”
“Ten more minutes,” Shep said, glancing at his watch. He was half out of his robe, and sweating up a storm.
“Let’s call it an hour and drag his sorry ass out of there so we can party before I fall asleep,” Fricker said. “No way. A full hour,” Wilson said.
In the room that Jim Hook entered, there were racks and wheels and a mechanism that was once called a strappado, which dangled from the ceiling. Gas lamps lit the room.
“Here’s the thing,” Jim said to himself when he saw what was left of Hugh Carrington strung up on the wall, his arms wrapped in chains, shackles on his ankles and wrists, drawing them apart in a cross formation. “I know I’m insane now. I know it’s like that.”
Carrington’s head swung slowly, side to side.
He had been opened up, and Jim couldn’t even look at him, could not even look beyond the eyeless face of the guy who had accused him of cheating—accused him? Caught him! Caught him red-handed, and now they had done this. The ghosts. These ghosts were damn hungry, that was for sure. They wanted to play with them.
“You let ‘em out yourself,” Jim said, his eyes glancing at the weapons along the wall, the mace, the axe, the ancient battered swords. “You wanted to see your brother so bad when you were a kid, you became—what, a ghost magnet, ho-ho,” he chuckled to himself, while part of him fought the fear and pain, knowing what the student he had never really liked must have gone through—Hugh Carrington, a runaway? Not bloody likely. Hugh Carrington had met up with whatever Jim had conjured here, some ghost of a kid who had been killed centuries ago in some castle by some Ogre. Hugh had just crossed paths with the Infinite Ones, as Isis Claviger would have said, Isis with her Alexandrite ankh ring, those damn eternal life ankhs with their symbols of good things like life everlasting, but they only delivered this . . . this . . . insanity.
“You’re not really there, Hugh,” he said. “Not really. It’s my brain. I went crazy sometime this week, and you’re part of it.”
Miles materialized before him. “We tried to contact you other times since you got here, Jim Hook, but you didn’t seem to see us. And what you’ve been going through this past week, it was a sudden thing. It was as if we finally got through.” There was blood on Miles’s lips.
“You’re a dream,” Jim said.
“I assure you, I am not.” Miles laughed, spitting blood that sprayed across Jim’s chest. “Ask Lark—” Miles motioned to what looked like a giant metal teakettle nearly as tall as Jim. “It’s an iron maiden, very effective,” Miles said.
“You told me you’re French. And Miles isn’t really your name. But you speak like anyone else. That means you’re a hallucination,” Jim nodded, and felt better. “I’m probably still in the Red Chamber with your corpse tied around my body, and this is part of it all. Mischief Night Initiation.”
“I don’t have all the answers,” Miles said.
“And Lark’s not in that iron maiden, is she?”
“See for yourself,” Miles said.
Jim went over to the large metal container. It was locked shut. For a terrible moment, he thought he saw Lark’s eyes staring out the rectangular opening at him, but when he looked again, it was empty.
“Where is she?” But when Jim turned around, it was morning, and he stood on the ledge of the tower window. “It’s all a dream, isn’t it? It’s in my mind. It’s like you. You’re not really here.”
Miles grinned, and then began laughing.
“What do you want more than anything else in the world?”
“You know. I already told you.”
“Say it.”
“You can’t bring back the dead.”
“There’s a way to do it.”
“It’s a game,” he said, mostly to himself. “It’s only a game, right? Like a room in my mind. It is a game.”
“If you say so. Believe what you want. No one ever said you couldn’t. But many have died for such games.”
“It has to be,” Jim said. “It’s some kind of game. A test. Part of the initiation.”
The wind brushed through his hair as he stood at the open window, looking down.
It was a hell of a long drop. He stood on the ledge at the top of the tower. He imagined dropping a water balloon and counting till ten before it hit the pavement. That’s what it would be like. He’d drop and then it would all be over.
“Every game has its rules. I just need to know what the rules of this one are,” he said, hoping the other boy would tell him something—anything—that would give away this game.
He kept feeling the tug of the earth—not gravity, but the need to be there, the need to leave the tower and return to the ground again. He couldn’t keep from looking down.
The more he looked at the distance between where he stood and the earth below, the more interesting it became. It didn’t seem like a fall, it seemed like he could just step over into it, as if... his eyes were playing tricks on him . .. but it was as if it weren’t a long way down at all.
The other boy stood behind him and whispered, “It’s just like a corridor, isn’t it? You look down and see the drive and the stones and the fountain, but it changes when you watch it, the edge of your vision wraps around it, and it becomes a long corridor, and it makes you feel as if you could just step out into it, and walk that long way to its end, to find out what waits there for you. You can’t go back because you know what waits for you there. You can’t stay where you are. You must go forward.”
“What’s there?” Jim asked.
“What you want. More than anything.”
“No,” he said.
“Go on. You’ll see. You can’t stay on the ledge, can you? You can’t go back. You know what’s there. You can only go on. You want to, I can tell.”
“What’s there?” Jim repeated his previous question.
But the boy behind him didn’t answer. He may have stepped away.
“It has to be a game,” he said. “This can’t be real. This can’t be.”
Jim Hook stood alone at the top of the tower.
And then he stepped off the ledge.
He stood on air. It felt as if he could not fall, for the air was too solid.
He turned to see if
Miles was still there.
The boy stood within the tower room, windows open.
“You can be one of us,” Miles said. “We want you with us, Jim. Your brother wants you with us.”
“It’s like magic,” Jim whispered, feeling as if something else were close to them. When he looked down again to the driveway of the school, it was just a stone floor. He was still in the torture chamber. “It’s just some game. I’m somehow making it seem more than a game, aren’t I?”
But Miles’s form began shimmering, and Jim rubbed his eyes.
It wasn’t Miles at all, it was Stephen, his brother, standing before him.
“You don’t understand, Squirt, do you? It wasn’t you. You didn’t bring me back that night. I wanted to see you. I brought myself to you. And I guess I brought something with me, too. I didn’t know I had done it. But I had opened something in your mind, and it was like a key that needed to find another door. Harrow’s just the wrong place for that.” Stephen’s image wavered like a candle flame. “I’ll see you again someday, Squirt. Down the road. So many years from now, you probably won’t know what hit you. Then I’ll take your hand and we’ll light out for the territories, just like Huck and Tom.”
“Don’t leave me,” Jim said, feeling a bone-crunching pain inside himself. He wept, but barely noticed his own tears; he shivered but had no sense of warm or cold; he still remained fearful, but felt stronger for standing there, coming out of the fire. “Don’t go. Please!”
“You can’t keep me here. Even if you wanted to. I don’t belong in this place, Jim. It’s a bad place. It’s unclean.” Stephen’s face darkened, and soon it melted away as if in an invisible rain, until there was just a shadowy ash.
“Stephen,” Jim said, and his voice sounded like a baby’s cry. If he hadn’t been in pain, he would have laughed at himself. His brother had died years ago. This was a phantom. A reflection from his own mind. But he wanted the phantom. He wanted it so badly. He wanted to keep it there, even if it meant awful things happening, even if it meant things leaking out of Harrow, the others with their pranks and games and death—
He wanted Stephen to be there with him as he had never wanted anything else in the world. His mind ached, his flesh felt warm, and something deep within his gut churned and rose to his throat, like a shiver from his soul.
He wanted Stephen so badly.
So much.
He had to let the image and the thought go.
He had to, for his own sanity.
“Your sanity,” someone whispered to him, “is mine.”
And then he saw the small door open, and the others, his brothers, the Corpse Society, there, waiting for him.
Only they wouldn’t look at him.
“Holy Christ,” Fricker gasped, drawing the two bodies, bound together, from the Red Chamber. “Holy Christ.” He tore at the ropes binding Jim to the skeleton, the red marks all along his wrists and body, and Fricker pulled his friend against him and began weeping. “Holy shit, no!” And someone else—Mojo?—said, “It’s a joke, right?” And still someone else said, “Aw, fuck,” and then Jim saw his body lying there, blood coming from his mouth and nose, a terrible grimace on his own face.
“Look at them,” Miles whispered. “They only think about themselves.”
“I’m not dead,” Jim said. “I know I’m not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I know the difference now.”
“The difference?”
“Between life and death,” Jim said. “My brother told me I wouldn’t die yet. I believe him.”
“If you stay with us, you will never die,” Miles said.
It had been an illusion, a trick, after all. Part of a game. Hallucinations came easy to this place.
Jim was still in the torture room, and he knew what to do now. He knew how to stop Miles and whatever else was there.
He knew the thing that scared even Miles: whoever or whatever had the spike and the axe, the monster who was buried somewhere here as well. Someone named Gilles de Rais? Was that the name from Claviger’s book? A man who had murdered scores of children? Justin Gravesend had brought the bones to rest in these walls, as some kind of ritual.
You’re in the stones, you told me so yourself. You‘re part of the house. I may have opened a door, but I can do one thing to close it.
“Something’s coming through,” Jim said, and the boy looked up at him.
“What?” Miles said, his eyes widening.
“Hour’s up.” Trey Fricker opened the low door, and peered inside. He was met with complete darkness. He glanced back at the others. “He must be shittin’ bricks. The candles went out.”
“LeCount!” Wilson slapped his forehead.
“Not my fault the candles went out. God, blame me for everything.”
“Pass me one,” Trey said, reaching his hand out as he squatted down. “Jim? You okay?” Mojo got him a lit candle, and Trey raised it into the Red Chamber, only the face he saw wasn’t Jim Hook’s, but that of a boy with dark hair,
whose eyes had been gouged out, and the boy reached out and grabbed Trey Fricker and pulled him into the darkness.
All the other Corpse Society brothers saw were Trey’s legs shaking; but not a sound had come from his throat.
Then his legs settled on the floor, still.
Mojo went up to him and said, “Hey, quit clowning, Fricker,” but when he pulled on Fricker’s shoes, he fell backward. Fricker’s legs came back, and the rest of him, too, only he was frothing at the mouth, and his eyes rolled up into the back of his head so only the whites were showing.
“Fricker?”
“He’s joking, it’s a joke,” LeCount said. “Christ, look at him, it has to be a joke.”
A small thin line of blood trickled from Trey Fricker’s nose as he lay there, his body shivering.
“Someone get a robe, something’s wrong!” Mojo shouted. “He’s in shock or something.”
“Hook!” Shep said. “Christ, what’s going on?” and then something emerged from the small doorway, and as it rose to its full height, they saw it was a thickset man with long stringy hair, wearing some costume that reminded Shep of a knight’s mail and tunic—but all soaked in red—and in one hand he had a spike, and he said in a low voice, “Ah, my boys, so good of you to be here, I’ve heard so much about you from your friend Jim.”
Someone—maybe Wilson—knocked over one of the candles, and his robe started burning, but he didn’t even notice at first, and then, in the brief silence that followed, voices began whispering all around the boys, and the fire was tearing up Wilson’s leg, but they saw the man with the spike, and even when the ripping began, and the fire tore through them, there were no screams.
“He’s coming,” Jim said. “Your friend. And others.”
Miles began shivering. “Something’s wrong.”
“Where’s Lark?”
“In the Red Chamber.”
“What do you want?”
“You,” Miles said.
“Dead?”
“Stay with us. What you have in you – what you were born with. You bring us back.”
“No,” Jim said.
“Either you stay, or she dies,” Miles said, but something was terrifying him, although Jim couldn’t tell what it was.
And then, he knew what to do.
Every secret was meant to be told. Every door was meant to be opened.
Every man was meant to die.
He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was in the passage between the walls, and it was dark, and he thought he smelled fire. He ran along the narrow path, feeling his way along the walls.
Finally, he nearly tripped over the small skeleton. He lifted it up. “Miles, you’re not going to get to me.”
He crouched in the doorway, but the room where the Corpses had been had become an inferno. The flames licked the edges of the doorway.
The house was burning.
Then he heard a weak voice, and kne
w it was her.
His hands and feet felt icy cold, and a pounding in his head made him know he was alive, and possibly about to have the Mother of All Headaches.
He found Lark farther down in the darkness, crouched low, whimpering. “It’s so dark,” she muttered. “I... I got... I got lost. I thought I was in the tower and then I heard something. Some awful scraping. And all those things you told me scared me, and I started running and I tripped over things, and something was here, something was coming for me, and I...” She coughed finally, and said, “How the hell can we get out of this place?”
He covered her as much as he could with his body, and took her out through the burning room. In the flames, he saw Trey Fricker and the others, standing in a circle, shimmering with fire.
He felt his body burning—along his back and his hair—as he pushed Lark onward, practically throwing her to the door. She was coughing, but she seemed all right.
It would be all right, he knew. If he could just get her out of all this.
He pressed the door to get out, but it wouldn’t budge.
“Open it, Miles,” he whispered. “Open it. You promised. I will give you what you want!”
The flames licked at the edges of his consciousness. He had to get through them, he had to get Lark out, away from the ghosts and the fire.
“You promised, Miles!” he shouted as the fire engulfed him, and all he saw was blackness. “Every door is meant to be opened! You promised me!”
“Will you stay with me?” Mile’s voice, a whisper at his ear.
Yes! Jim tried to shout through the numbing ice of fire. Yes! If she’s safe. If she’s safe. I’ll stay! With you. Here. Here. Forever!
Epilogue
November was bitter cold, and Jim spent every day at her bedside in the hospital. Harrow Academy had all but burned to the ground – yet the house remained, the old house, the original of it, untouched in some way. Half the country thought Watch Point was the biggest tragedy of school violence in history; others felt what had happened at that school was a sign of the times.
Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite) Page 34