The Harrowing

by Alexandra Sokoloff

  Cain laughed humorlessly. “I don’t believe this shit.”

  Patrick spread his arms, the picture of innocence. “Hey, it wasn’t me, man. Maybe Marlowe.”

  “Right. Little Lisa moved all this stuff.”

  Behind Patrick, Lisa and Martin walked in together. They both stopped still in the doorway, with an almost comic double take as they registered the chaos of the room.

  “Oh my God,” Lisa breathed.

  Patrick turned to her. “Zach left us a present.”

  Martin looked around, taking in the damage, eyes blinking behind round glasses. Then he looked straight to Patrick.

  The implication wasn’t lost on Cain. “Yeah, that’s what I think, too.”

  Patrick turned on Cain, pointing at Martin. “It coulda been him, you know. Or the two of them together.” He waved his hand to include Lisa.

  Martin looked to Robin. “You guys didn’t do this? It isn’t a joke?”

  Robin looked at him, then at the others, slowly. “I don’t know.” They were silent in the dim hush of the room.

  Lisa pushed her hair back. “Well, I know. Show them.” She nudged Martin—a surprisingly proprietary gesture. Martin took the newspaper from under his arm and unfolded it to the sports section to reveal a headline. He displayed it like an attorney with Exhibit A:

  CORNHUSKER ROUT: 28-14

  Patrick gaped. “Alabama by fourteen. Fuck me backwards.” He grabbed the paper, scanned the article.

  Robin was reeling. We couldn’t have known that. Not any of us.

  “Now tell me how we just happened to call that, dude.“ Lisa gloated.

  Cain’s face had gone very still. He glanced at Robin sharply, and she looked back, bewildered.

  Lisa was already pulling out a chair, seating herself at the table in front of the board. “Okay, Zach. Time to wake up.” She looked up at Robin expectantly. Her eyes gleamed in the muddy light.

  Patrick looked up from the newspaper, glancing around at the rest of them. “How the hell did someone know that?” His eyes came to rest on Lisa.

  Lisa smiled at him, catlike. “We didn’t. Zachary did.”

  Cain spoke, his voice hard. “Bullshit.”

  “Interesting, though, isn’t it?” Martin said. “I for one can’t think of any logical explanation for any of us knowing those game scores. Which leaves us with two alternatives: Coincidence…” He paused importantly.

  For effect, Robin thought.

  “Or…we actually achieved some kind of precognition. Perhaps through our mutual concentration on the board.”

  Lisa sat back in her chair and laughed. “We could keep blatantly ignoring the obvious. Or we could just ask him. Zachary.”

  Cain laughed shortly, shaking his head. “It’s your game. Go on and play.” His glance grazed Robin, and for a moment she thought he would say something more, but he merely walked out through the arched doorway, leaving the four of them in the dim paneled room.

  “Robin,” Lisa urged from the table. Robin took a step forward.

  “I’ll do it,” Martin said abruptly, and brushed past Robin to sit across from Lisa. The two reached simultaneously over the board to put their hands on the planchette, and Robin noticed again that they seemed strangely comfortable with each other.

  Patrick moved in closer. He caught Robin’s eyes for a moment, then looked away.

  Lisa pressed her fingertips into the wooden pointer. “Zachary, are you there? We want to talk to you.”

  The room was silent. Robin found herself holding her breath. The trees outside the tall windows swished in the wind.

  But the planchette was motionless under Lisa’s and Martin’s hands.

  “Zachary, did you move the furniture?” Lisa demanded.

  The planchette was still over the black letters. Lisa shifted in her chair, wheedled suggestively. “Please won’t you come talk to us?”

  Nothing.

  Robin moved closer to the table, impatient. It won’t work with Martin. He knows that—we saw it last night.

  Lisa looked up at Robin, as if reading her thoughts. Martin looked at the two girls, then stood reluctantly, ceding his seat to Robin.

  Robin sat, extended her hands to the pointer.

  Lisa met her eyes, pressed her fingers into the wooden piece. “Zachary…”

  Beside the table, Martin and Patrick watched, everyone holding their breath.

  Robin leaned forward slightly, trying to feel…something. “Zachary…”

  The planchette was still and dead under her fingers. Lisa looked at Robin.

  Robin shook her head slightly, spoke to the others. “He’s not here.”

  Martin nodded, looked at the girls, at the board, thoughtfully. “The conditions aren’t right. Why?”

  Robin took in the other three against the shapes of tumbled furniture. She didn’t know how, but suddenly she knew. “Cain. We need everyone.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The rain poured down monotonously outside.

  Lakes formed in the lawns of the faded mansions; muddy rivers churned in the footpaths under the drenched and drooping trees.

  In the window seat of her room, Robin had a book open on her lap, as if to fool herself that she was studying. But her gaze was fixed on her spiral notebook, where she was doodling a rather romantic sketch of the pale young man from her dream.

  She wrote, “Zachary.”

  She paused for a moment, then wrote the letter Q.

  She stared down at it, traced it, trying to remember the rest of the strange word that the board had spelled last night.Qloth? Qiloth?

  But the word evaded her. She frowned, then wrote:

  The shells?

  The shelves?

  ????

  She could feel the icy wind through the glass of the window, scratching at the building to get in. She pulled the comforter closer around her, looked up, brooding.

  The wind swirled the trees outside, shaking the branches, bending the old trunks. Robin shivered, disturbed by the violence of it. There was an anger there, an anger at exclusion.

  Something interrupted her thoughts, and she turned her head back into the room, suddenly listening.

  There was someone in the corridor outside.

  She could feel rather than hear at first. Footsteps, muffled by carpet, barely audible…approaching…stopping at her door…

  Robin looked at the door, waiting for a knock.

  Silence.

  Robin tensed. After a moment, she pushed the comforter off her and stood. She moved to the door, reached out—

  Something prickled on the back of her neck and she stopped, her fingers inches from the knob. She spoke aloud, wary. “Hello?”

  There was no response. She was listening. But it felt like someone was there.

  Panic tightened her chest. She stood paralyzed, her heart pounding.

  She grabbed the knob, twisted it, pulled the door open.

  The corridor was empty.

  She looked both ways down the dank hall, then slammed the door. Simultaneously, there was a rattling behind her.

  She turned with a gasp—to see something slide very fast down the wall on the opposite side and crash to the floor behind Waverly’s desk.

  Robin stood frozen, her pulse racing, her throat tight with fear.

  Dead silence. Nothing moved.

  Stop it, she ordered herself. Something fell off the wall. Just go look.

  She pulled herself together, walked over to the desk. She leaned gingerly on the edge to peer behind, and frowned. She crouched, reaching, and withdrew a small decorative shelf. Above her on the wall, the nail hole gaped in the plaster, the nail lost.

  Stupid. Nothing. You slammed the door, remember? The vibration…

  Then she looked at what she held in her hand and her breath stopped. A shelf?

  A shelf.

  “The shelves,” she whispered, triumphant.

  The lounge was cold and empty and dim. None of them had moved the furniture back into p
lace, and Robin hesitated in the doorway, weirded out by the jumble of upended pieces, silhouettes in the dismal light from the windows.

  Who had done it?

  Patrick was the obvious suspect, she had to admit. He was strong enough, and yes, it seemed like him to do it. But Cain was plenty strong, and he’d been so opposed to the séance to begin with. He could easily be hazing them—teaching them a lesson.

  Lisa you couldn’t trust as far as you could throw her, and it was clear she’d do anything at all for attention, but she’d been in bed with Robin the entire night. And Martin was just…unlikely. Somehow, Robin doubted he could be loose enough to prank them like that.

  But even as she thought it, something in the back of her mind countered: As an experiment, maybe? Some psychological test?

  She felt a wave of unease, remembering the books Martin had been studying: Psychoanalysis and the Occult. Dreams and Telepathy.

  She looked around the wrecked room.

  Whoever had done it, it hadn’t seemed so sinister when they were all together.

  And what if none of them had done it?

  She shivered, hugging herself. But that’s what you want, isn’t it? You want it to be Zachary. You want him to be real.

  A draft stirred her hair, warm, like breath.

  She turned sharply, eyes searching the room.

  Of course, there was no one.

  And then her eyes fell on the built-in bookshelves against the wall. Several large volumes had been ripped from the bottom shelves and lay scattered on the floor, some facedown and open, pages crushed.

  Robin frowned, forced herself to move forward into the room, past the overturned table where Martin had been studying, the scattered candles on the floor, the knocked-over chairs.

  She stood above the pile of books and looked up at the shelves they’d fallen from.

  Two long shelves of tall, slim leather-bound volumes.

  Robin’s eyes widened as she realized what they were.

  Yearbooks.

  There were books tumbled on the floor, open to pages of photos, serious-eyed students in black and white, who looked both younger and older than Robin felt.

  But it was one volume on the rug that drew her.

  Without even hesitating, Robin stooped for the book that had fallen facedown and now lay in the middle of a patterned rose. The cover had the date 1920 in cracked gold.

  She touched it and felt the same electric charge she’d felt from the planchette.

  She opened the cover and in a flash, before she looked down at the page, she knew what she would see.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Robin stood outside Lisa’s room, knocking hard on the door with the moonlit desert scene.

  After an eternity, the door swung open. Lisa stood in a camisole and bikini underwear. Her black-rimmed eyes were barely open; she looked half-dead.

  Robin held up a yearbook bound with cracked leather, BAIRD LAW SCHOOL 1920 stamped on the cover in gold. “Look.” Her face glowed with excitement.

  Lisa blinked and squinted at the book, which was open to a full-page black-and-white photo with a dedication: “In Memoriam: ZACHARY PRINCE 1901-1920.”

  The photo showed a pale young man, startlingly like the one from Robin’s dream: broodingly handsome; dark hair and haunting eyes.

  Lisa drew an admiring breath. “Oh, Daddy.”

  Robin’s eyes were shining. “He was here. In the law school. He died here—in 1920.”

  The girls looked at each other, electrified.

  Kneeling beside Lisa’s bed, the yearbook between them on the coverlet, they looked through the book page by page, scouring for any hint of who Zachary had been. The epitaph below the photo was maddeningly discreet, and vaguely disturbing: “Arise, arise from death, you numberless infinities of souls.”

  There was no detail of the death, no other photos of Zachary, save a smaller version of the same photo among the other third-year law students. Beneath that photo of Zachary it read “Law Review and Sigma Chi.”

  “That’s what Mendenhall used to be, the Sigma house,” Lisa murmured. “So I bet you anything he lived here. He probably died right here in the Hall.”

  Though it was a long shot, they went to Lisa’s laptop and tried Googling him. There were 212,000 matches for Zachary Prince, but none with any connection to Mendenhall or Baird, no 1920 obituaries.

  “Damn, damn, damn.” Lisa closed the computer in frustration. “We have to find out what happened.”

  “There’ll be old newspapers in the library,” Robin offered.

  Lisa grimaced. “Which is closed until Monday, of course.” She smiled rather wickedly at Robin. “Oh well—we’ll just have to ask him.”

  Now dressed in a raveled sweater that showed purple lace through fraying black cashmere, Lisa pounded on a door in the boys’ wing. Robin hovered behind.

  Lisa pounded again. Patrick’s voice groaned from inside. “Go to hell.”

  Lisa tried the knob; it turned. She pushed the door open and marched in. Robin followed.

  Inside, the walls and shelves were covered with rock posters and concert paraphernalia. Otherwise, the room was surprisingly neat…almost rigidly so.

  Patrick was sprawled in bed, bare-chested, hair mussed. Robin flushed, seeing him. Lisa was unimpressed. “We need you, cowboy,” she informed him, and jumped into the bed, bouncing slightly.

  “That’s what they all say.” Patrick pulled her comfortably against him, as if they’d known each other for years. It was an easy intimacy, with none of the charged antagonism of the night before.

  Robin stood awkwardly in the door, mortified.

  Patrick glanced over at her and lifted the plaid comforter on the other side of him with a lazy smile. “Room for one more…”

  Robin blushed deeper, if that was possible. Lisa flopped the yearbook on Patrick’s chest, open to Zachary’s picture. “Robin found Zachary.”

  Patrick stared down at the photo. Robin could see he was unnerved.

  “Fuck me…”

  Lisa rolled away from him and stood, kicked the bed imperiously. “Get your ass up and let’s play.”

  She grabbed the yearbook off Patrick, threw a sweatshirt at his head, and pulled Robin out the door.

  As the girls headed down the dark corridor outside, Lisa smiled at Robin knowingly. “He likes you, too.”

  Robin colored. “He’s with my roommate.”

  Lisa shook her head, rippling her mane of hair. “And how high school is that? He’s out of the South, away from Daddy.…Miss NASCAR is holding on like hell, but he’s better than she is and he knows it. Baby doll, that cowboy’s looking for the real thing.”

  She ran ahead down the hall, glanced back with a teasing smile before she ducked around the corner.

  Her mood suddenly lifted, Robin ran, too. She caught up to Lisa at another door, where she stood knocking authoritatively.

  There was a standard drug-store-issue plastic sign posted on it:

  NO MINORS

  How Cain, Robin thought, amused. And then she glanced at Lisa, wondering, How does she know where everyone lives?

  Lisa was already pushing the door open, striding inside. Robin followed, more hesitantly.

  Cain lay back on the bed in the dim light from the window, playing an acoustic guitar, an intricate melody. He barely looked up as Lisa strode to the bed.

  Robin hovered inside the open door, looked around the room. On the floor-to-ceiling shelves, law books competed with a staggering collection of vinyl and CDs. An electric keyboard and guitar were shoved in one corner. Posters of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Johnny Rotten glowered from the walls. Old school, she thought. And that’s Cain, too.

  On the bed, Cain was pointedly ignoring the yearbook Lisa held open in front of him.

  “You found this open on the floor, huh? Right to this picture. Isn’t that convenient.”

  Robin bristled, defensive. “It wasn’t open.” But it was set off from the other books. Almost positioned, a
voice in her head reminded her. It could be a setup—someone playing a game….

  Lisa was speaking impatiently. “Oh, come play with us. You know you want to.” Lisa leaned over Cain seductively, one knee on the mattress.

  Cain didn’t budge. He looked up at her with that level gray gaze. “Don’t you ever get tired of yourself, Marlowe?”

  Lisa’s eyes blazed, but she didn’t flinch. “Every minute of every day, Jackson.”

  The two locked eyes for a long moment, a hot, contentious look. Robin felt herself bristling, something twisting in her chest.

  Cain shook his head. “Pass.” Then he looked directly at Robin. “And I think you should, too.”

  Robin looked back at him, startled. Before she could respond, or even process, Lisa flared up at him. “Crap out if you want, but don’t spoil everyone else’s fun.”

  Cain dropped his eyes to the guitar. “Whatever.” He bent over the strings and didn’t look at Robin again.

  Robin felt her face burning, but Lisa grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the room, slamming the door behind them so hard that the NO MINORS sign fell to the carpet.

  But as she dragged Robin toward the stairwell, Lisa was smiling, cheerful—that constant, mercurial shift. “He’ll be down,” she informed Robin lightly. “Trust me.”

  They found Martin’s room at the very dark end of a third-floor hall. Unlike most of the other student rooms, his door was unadorned by any message boards, posters, or signs.

  Then Robin caught sight of a small rectangular metal piece nailed into the door frame just below eye level, almost unnoticeable against the dark wood: a little scroll with Hebrew lettering. The word mezuzahflashed through her mind, though she wasn’t sure that was right.

  Lisa was knocking and knocking. “Martin, we need you. Pretty please? I’ll breathe on your glasses….”

  There was no answer. Lisa pressed her ear to the door, listening, then stepped back, shaking her head. She pushed back her hair, defiant. “Come on.”

  Robin followed Lisa down the main stairs to the lounge. Lisa’s face was grimly determined; she hugged the yearbook to her chest like a shield. But some of the energy had gone out of the mission. Privately, Robin had serious doubts about what they could do without the others. There had been something between them the night before. Maybe the sudden, unexpected intimacy, maybe just the drinking and smoking. But whatever it was, it was all of us. She was quite sure.