Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  Mira seemed happy to be out in the brief sunshine of a chilly day, until she walked to the edge of what seemed to be endless bramble bushes and there, on the other side, she thought she saw Chet holding Cali, holding her the way he was supposed to hold Mira herself, at least in her fantasies, and Cali, that witch, loved it; Mira could tell. Mira turned away, whistling to her dog to come to her, and went off to brood.

  18

  Cali pushed her way out of Chet’s arms, gently, with words meant to excuse the closeness they’d had, to deny the feeling she had as he held her in his arms for brief seconds. She didn’t look back to him as she returned to the driveway, to the house, but she was sure that he was watching her.

  She almost wanted him to run after her, but she knew that was wrong. They weren’t right for each other; Det, back in New York, loved her, and despite the fact that that relationship had led nowhere so far, this man—no, she thought, this boy—needed a girl his own age, another nineteen- or twenty-year-old, or perhaps someone as old as twenty-two or twenty-three. Not her, not a twenty-eight-year-old whose life was messed up, who was not fit to have the kind of innocent and pure affection that Chet would no doubt offer a girl closer to his age.

  When she headed for the house she thought she saw someone’s face up near one of the gothic-arched stained-glass windows. She couldn’t tell who it was, but she knew it most likely was Frost Crane.

  19

  Frost went to meet Ivy, who was just waking up at four in the afternoon after having been up until six that morning. She surprised him with her sullenness and lack of interest in his books and his ability. He didn’t like the way she seemed to be watching him from the corner of her eye; and Jack, meanwhile, had returned to his work of checking the meters and the cameras and seeing if any phenomenon had yet presented itself.

  He showed Cali and Chet how to use the night goggles, and how they had to get used to them first, because it was a bit disorienting to see in the dark with them. The goggles looked alien to them, and attached with a kind of headgear; Cali complained a bit, saying she had to keep her head balanced better, which felt impossible. To try them out, Cali and Chet and Jack went into one of the rooms that had no windows and shut the door, sealing cracks of light from under the door with a towel. “Ambient light is helpful but unnecessary with these,” Jack told them. “Most night-vision goggles are very limited, but Ivy spared no expense. We have enough of these for everyone. All I ask is that you be gentle with them when taking them on and off because . .. well, they’re expensive.”

  In total darkness, Cali felt a slight headache. A sickly green light came up, as if from the edges and comers of the room. She saw what looked like a shimmering green-yellow version of the person she assumed to be Chet, and off in another part of the room, Jack, who leaned against a wall as if he was just watching them.

  “How’s it feel?”

  “Weird,” Chet said. “Cool!”

  “You don’t need to shout. We’re both right here.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Chet said. “And you both look like you’re from outer space.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Cali began, “is why we really need these. I mean, lights are all over the house.”

  ‘The cellars,” Jack said. “There’s no light to speak of in some parts. There are these passages down there with zero light. We can take flashlights down, but not much else. If someone gets separated ... well, it’s good to see in the dark, that’s all I can say.”

  20

  After setting the goggles carefully on a table, Jack took the two of them to see yet other rooms in the house, a few of which seemed to be nothing more than glorified closets. Mira caught up with them and tagged along, staying close to Chet, who virtually ignored her. They went out near the statue garden, and Jack pointed out how the abbey had existed on the grounds up until the 1950s, at which point it had to be taken down because it was falling apart. ‘These stone arches are all that’s left,” he said, pointing to what seemed like cathedral arch ribs that sprouted from the earth, surrounded by dead grass and large stones that were laid out haphazardly in piles. An icy wind came up that sent Cali into a coughing fit, and it was at that point that Chet said, “I just realized, I haven’t had a problem since coming here.”

  “Chet?” Mira asked, touching his arm.

  “Well, like asthma. I haven’t had it. I mean, my breathing is better than it has ever been. In my entire life.”

  21

  “Here’s the Gravesend crypt,” Jack said. They’d hiked up through the woods, to an area that Jack called “Bald Hill.” A small graveyard was there, with no more than a dozen or so markers, as well as the miniature stone house that was the crypt. “It’s locked up now, but it holds the graves of Justin Gravesend and his wife. Once, it can be assumed, there was an entry from it to the house. At least, according to Esteban Palliser’s diary, but again, it was closed off with concrete and brick well before the school opened, and the tunnels flooded from an underground stream. In fact”—he pointed around the dusky woods—”there were various streams here at the end of the nineteenth century, but Gravesend had them either filled in or diverted farther away, but they still exist to some extent. They cut the first tunnels that served as Matilde Gravesend’s underground home.”

  “And some people believe that underground water is sometimes responsible for disturbances in electromagnetic fields,” Cali said.

  “Yes,” Jack said. “Exactly. But all of this only shows me again and again that Harrow was built by Gravesend to become a haunted house. He had the artifacts and the rituals and the design. I think he wanted to make a place for the dead. He wanted an underworld at Harrow.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  1

  Mira sat on her bed, Conan curved against her, impossibly furry and comfortable. She wrote furiously in her diary.

  2

  From Mira’s diary:

  I fucking hate her now. She is too old for him, and it’s disgusting and ridiculous. I thought I liked her at first, but she’s some bizarre freakazoid who is probably afraid that no one is ever going to love her, so she wants him, and he doesn’t even care for her. She really is a witch. I can’t believe someone as pure as Chet would walk into my life like this, and now I just sit by and watch that witch take him away or seduce him or whatever she does.

  I saw the way she touched him. I saw the way he pushed her back to get away from her, but she clung on. She is ruining my life and I don’t get it at all. I don’t get why he hasn’t come to me yet. When we were playing baseball, I knew he and I were meant to be. It felt right, and he even made me feel happy, but then that witch was there the whole time, trying to get him to herself. It was laughable. It was ridiculous. God, I wish I had never come here, but it was worth it to meet him. He’s three years older than me. She’s probably as old as thirty and still trying to hang on to him. It’s completely unnatural. I usually see old men doing that, but Cali is obviously just as warped as a dirty old man. And he was meant for me.

  HE WAS NOT MEANT FOR SOME OLD BITCH WHO ONLY WANTS TO USE HIM.

  I HATE HER MORE THAN ANYTHING OR ANYONE, AND I HATE HER BECAUSE SHE IS TRYING TO RUIN IT FOR ME.

  3

  After writing in her diary, Mira felt a hundred percent better, and actually seemed lighter on her feet as she walked down the corridor to Chet’s bedroom. She glanced up and down the hall to make sure no one was around, and then she went into the room. She stood near the door so that the video camera wouldn’t film her. She looked at the dresser and the desk and the straight-backed chair, and the bed with the sheets all hanging down, and even his underwear on the floor, and she began to feel a surge of some delicious energy flow through her, despite the fact that she’d had cramps earlier in the day.

  It was almost like a feeling of fire deep in her belly, a glorious little fire that made her want Chet even more. She closed her eyes and imagined his fingers touching her warmly, and his mouth burning against her neck.

  But something about
it frightened her a little; she opened her eyes. It was just the room again. Nothing more. It had begun to seem real for a second. It had been unpleasant, that thought.

  For it was not Chet that had been there in her imagination. It had been some other man. Some other horrible man with wolf-like features.

  4

  It was nearly suppertime when Chet followed Jack Fleetwood out back along the stone arches. Jack had Conan on a leash and wore boots and a long jacket. Chet had pulled a down jacket over his sweater and wished he had boots—his sneakers kept getting sucked into the mud.

  “You think anything’s going to happen?” Chet asked when he caught up to Jack. Jack’s pipe was lit, and the smoke from it hung in the air beneath the bright lights of the statue garden. Conan peed on one of the urns.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said.

  “Well, I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “All this money she spent. You spent. Getting each of us here. And nothing.”

  “It’s only been two days. We have a couple more to go.”

  “Yeah, but seriously, I’m not feeling anything. Cali isn’t either. It’s not like, you know, the weird talent I have ever happened much, but even when it wasn’t happening, I felt like it might. But up here, it’s like I never had anything.”

  Jack sighed, tugging Conan away from peeing on the angel statue. “Well, not every haunting will show itself when you want it to.”

  “Sure,” Chet said. “You seen a lot of ghosts and stuff?”

  Jack remained silent for a few minutes, walking along with Conan pulling at the leash so the dog could get to some better sniffs along the thin trail between the ivy beds. Then he said, “Want the truth, Chet? I’ve never seen a ghost. I’ve observed phenomenon, but I don’t really know if what I’ve seen is a ghost or just some perfectly explainable thing. I believe in psychic ability. I’ve spent my life studying it. But the dead? The residue of the living? No. I’m not sure I even believe it.”

  Chet looked at him incredulously. “Then ... I don’t get it.” “I’m in love,” Jack Fleetwood said. “I didn’t think I was, but I am. I have been since I met her.” “Oh,” Chet said. “Cali?”

  Jack glanced sidelong at him, his eyebrows arching. Then he let out a big belly laugh. “No, not her. Good Lord, Ivy. I’ve known Ivy Martin ever since the boy she loved died. He had a connection to Harrow, Chet. That’s why she’s obsessed with this place. And that,” he added, “is why I’m here and hoping we find something for her. Anything.”

  5

  Supper consisted of pizza, ordered from the Pizza Hut out by the highway in Watch Point; the man delivering it said that he was the manager of the carryout, and he had wanted to have an excuse to visit Harrow since the fire. Chet offered to show him around, but the man looked around the foyer and shrugged. “It looks about the same, I guess.”

  The four pizzas were too much, and after Cali had stuffed herself with pizza topped with broccoli and pepperoni, and Conan had managed to steal the crust that Chet left on the edge of his plate, Ivy came into the dining room and turned her chair around. She watched the others eat, but mainly nibbled at a slice of plain pizza. She drank a few glasses of wine but didn’t seem drunk at all. Cali had felt nearly under the table with just a glass and a half of the Vouvray, and Frost was slurring his words by his third glass of beer. Mira skipped supper but sent a message through her father that she’d be down later for all the festivities.

  “Festivities?” Frost asked, chomping on a cheesy slice. He had eaten almost an entire pizza.

  “Sure,” Jack said, and then frowned a bit at the pizza that had been left to him. “Looks like someone mowed their lawn for this.”

  “It’s spinach and broccoli. With pepperoni,” Cali said. “And it’s absolutely delicious.”

  “We having fireworks or something?” Frost asked.

  “Well,” Ivy said, sipping from her wineglass, “we’re living inside a ghost story, aren’t we?”

  “A ghost story without ghosts,” Cali said.

  “Right,” Ivy said, somewhat dismissively. “I’m going to take you down to the cellars tonight. They’re more catacombs than cellars, but I wanted to wait to see what influence the house would have on each of you.” She looked at her wineglass as if it contained some secret. She looked at Chet. Then Cali. Then Frost. Each with what might’ve been contempt. “I don’t understand why nothing has happened yet.”

  “I’m sorry,” Chet said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” Cali said. She raised her glass as a pointer toward Ivy. “It’s not like we’re doing stupid pet tricks. Maybe there’s nothing here for us.”

  Jack began to say something, but Ivy stepped across his words with her own. “Look, I know this place has spirits. And I know that you three can unlock it. You three can make it come back.”

  Neither Cali nor Chet nor Frost said anything in reply, but Cali wondered if they were each thinking what she was:

  Ivy Martin is insane. She has fixated on Harrow and she is insane and should be diagnosed. She looks like she hasn’t slept in weeks. She looks like the last place she should be is in the cellars of some gothic manor looking for the dead.

  6

  Frost was not thinking any such thing as he sat there, his belly full of pizza and his thirst a bit sated with Sam Adams’ Lager.

  Ivy looked to him like a blond kitten who needed petting.

  Frost wanted to rip Ivy’s silky shirt off her. He wanted to press his lips to her nipples and taste her and feel her. The voices were still AWOL, and he didn’t give a damn. He felt more like a man in Harrow than he ever had when he’d been married to that bitch Maria. And Ivy was milk)’ and silky and sulky and sultry, and the words just flowed through his mind when he thought of her body, of her hips that were just wide enough for thoughts of lust and narrow enough that he could get a good handle on them. Her eyes were pools of crystal blue water. Her lips were wet and ripe.

  It was happening again. He felt it. His manhood was growing, and he hadn’t really expected it to, not after that brief moment the other night. He was hard, as he sat there in the cushy chair; he was erect beneath his jeans, and he wanted to let the animal inside him out to race across the room and leap onto her and just taste every part of her.

  She spoke as if she wanted him, as well.

  She wanted everything about him.

  She wanted all of him.

  In his head, Frost thought he heard a voice, and he didn’t know if it was the Voices coming back, or who it was, but he listened to it.

  Are you the consciousness or the carrier of consciousness? If you are the carrier, than your life is no different from a cat’s or a mouse’s. But if you are the consciousness, then you must admit to being part of what is bad in all consciousness as well as what is good. There is no good or bad consciousness. There is only consciousness, and it is part of what we all are who are the consciousness.

  Who are you? Frost asked within his mind.

  Snapping Jaws, the voice said. I am your god.

  7

  ‘Where’s Mira?” Ivy asked as she led the others into the parlor.

  She glanced over to Jack as if he’d know, but he just shrugged. “She told me she wasn’t feeling well. She said she’d have leftovers. She’s probably just resting.”

  “The goggles, oh, fun,” Cali said, walking over to the coffee table to grab a set.

  ‘Those look like cameras,” Frost said.

  “They’re slightly heavy,” Jack warned him as he picked up a set for himself. “But these are featherweights compared to the kind I’ve used in the past.”

  8

  Chet stayed close to Fleetwood, mainly because the lights flickered in the basement area. It was a long, flat room, with doorways and archways that seemed to go on at some length beneath the house.

  “This was the school’s boiler room and maintenance area, pretty much destroyed in the fire, but”—Fleetwood pointed to the new paint job—”Ivy wanted to make s
ure it was close to the original design. It was a bit of a wine cellar at one time in its history, and this was one of the entrances to the underworld.” Cali giggled nervously. “Hell?”

  “Well, not exactly. You see, Justin Gravesend had a certain mania. You know of the Winchester House in California?”

  Cali nodded. “The widow of the rifle maker felt that men who had died by the gun were coming for her. So she built addition after addition onto the house.”

  “Right. Staircases going nowhere, doors to empty space. She had the house built up her entire life. Justin Gravesend had a similar but different mania. His grandson left a written record that was found after he died. The grandson lived until he was just about a hundred years old, and apparently he was sharp up until the end. He described how—and, more interestingly, why—Justin Gravesend built Harrow the way he did.

  “Essentially, he built a house within a house. His grandson called the other house a ‘Looking-Glass House.’ Gravesend had a daughter who had shown evidence of being insane, at least to Gravesend and his specialists. He somehow felt that something he had done had made her crazy. Not abuse, necessarily, but some occult work that Gravesend had been part of before the child was born. By the age of four, I would guess, she was showing signs of multiple personality disorder—which at the time was severely misunderstood, to the point of brutality. She also seemed to have a bit of a dangerous streak to her. I can guess from what I’ve read that she also exhibited paranormal abilities, which, in the late 1800s would be considered embarrassing and shameful to someone of Gravesend s class. His grandson even claims he called in a priest to perform rites of exorcism on the poor girl.