Laura Kasischke - The Raising

“Seen Nicole?” Craig asked, looking at the girl as if he hadn’t noticed her until then. “They think they’ve seen Nicole?”

The girl shrugged elaborately, rolled her eyes, and said, “Her or Alice Meyers. Who cares? They’re crazy.”

Craig’s roommate looked at the professor and said, “We have to tell him now.”

The professor nodded, and Craig leapt to his feet, stepped toward his roommate and said, “Tell me what?”

“Craig,” the professor said, also standing. She took a step toward him and touched his arm. “Other people have seen her, too. Or they think they’ve seen her.”

“Jesus Christ,” the girl by the radiator said. “I’m leaving here. This is crazy.” She raised a hand as if she might slap the professor, but then put the hand into the pocket of her sweater. “You’re crazy, Professor Polson. You’re supposed to be teaching us, not fucking with us. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’m done with it. I’m dropping your class, and I’m—” She shook her head, and then she looked from Shelly to Craig to Craig’s roommate, as if trying to find the sane one, and, not finding it, walked quickly to the door, opened it, and slammed it shut behind her.

They all listened to the sound of her heels on the stairs until it was clear she was long gone, and then Shelly said, “I think someone died that night. But I don’t think it was Nicole.”

She reached into her bag and took out the little snapshot of Denise Graham that Denise’s mother had given her earlier that day.

Craig parked the Taurus at the side of the street outside the sorority, but he stayed in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, looking out.

The sky was clear, and the snow had melted into a wavering, wet carpet on the sidewalks and the street. From where he’d parked, the Omega Theta Tau House seemed to cast its own extra darkness onto the lawn around it. He couldn’t see even a single candle flickering inside. It was as if the house had been abandoned, or never built. Craig shoved Lucas’s car keys in his pocket, got out. Nicole was in there, and he had to see Nicole.

He crossed the lawn, purposely walking slowly, deliberately, upright, in full view of the house and anyone who might have been watching him from within it.

Why shouldn’t he?

He wasn’t a criminal. He was there to see his girlfriend. This was a sorority, not a secret society, not a high-security prison facility. Jesus Christ. He just wanted to see Nicole. Why should he have to crawl on his belly to do it?

Still, it made him nervous. He could feel his heart racing in his chest. Although the house was dark, and Craig heard nothing but silence emanating from it, he had the distinct feeling that he was being watched. He tried to maintain the slow, determined gait, but he was walking faster the closer he got. His hands were sweating, and when he reached the side of the house, he crouched down in the shadows, hiding.

He should have worn his jacket. It was that kind of late winter cold that was damp, not solid anymore. Back in Fredonia, you’d be able to feel the thaw in things. But this was a long way from thaw. This was going to be cold like soiled sheets or something. Like sleeping in your own wet laundry.

Suddenly, crouching in the dark at the side of the OTT house, he felt sadder than he’d ever felt in his life. On his knees. In the dirt. He found himself remembering, stupidly, his mother of all people:

Her ankles.

Traveling toward those ankles at high speed on his hands and knees because he couldn’t walk. Because every time he tried to walk he fell on his fucking ass. Because he was a baby. Why wouldn’t she pick him up? He was her baby.

He shook his head. How idiotic was that? Thinking about his mother? Right now?

(“I’ve fucked Nicole,” Perry had said. “Half of fucking Godwin Hall has fucked your virgin girlfriend, you stupid, stupid, deaf, blind, fucking idiot.”)

He was behind familiar shrubbery, he realized—right where he’d been that other night, when he’d gotten tossed out of OTT. He put his face to the little window and looked down (blinking, blinking) at the whole tableau of the basement again.

This time, he hadn’t really expected to see anyone.

There was no music. No strobe light. He’d convinced himself that he was right, that the whole house was either an illusion, or empty. There was no way a whole house full of girls all dressed up for their Spring Event could be so still, and silent.

It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the darkness well enough to make out the scene:

They were standing so motionless they’d blended into the atoms around them, it seemed. They were as gray as the air.

Sorority girls made of air, made of shadows. They were all in black, with their heads bowed, and the only bright thing Craig could see at all was the glinting silver handles on the coffin they were standing around. In the darkness.

But then he pressed his face closer to the window, and he could see that, in the coffin, there was girl. She must have been wearing white, because she was brighter than anything around her, but the darkness was so complete that she seemed to absorb it. She must have been the one they were raising from the dead. (Ridiculous. Pathetic.) He was about to stand up, just leave, when he heard what sounded like vague, dull, stupidly girlish chanting under him.

Girlish monks.

He snorted, hearing that.

Stupid game. Stupid hazing. Stupid him for being here, for caring so much, for crouching down behind a bush trying to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend, who was standing around a coffin in a basement pretending to raise some sorority sister from the dead.

And then, there that guy was:

The omnipresent EMT.

He was standing in a corner, in the shadows, the way he always was.

Craig remembered Nicole saying, “What’s EMT stand for?” Denying she’d ever even seen the guy before. He heard Perry say it again: “You fucking idiot. You blind asshole.”

He wanted to walk away, but it was mesmerizing, too—the sound of their voices. It was like music bubbling out of the ground. It was the coldness seeping through his jeans. It sounded ancient, and completely new. He could see it very clearly now, the whole thing in the basement. This was no game. The girl in that coffin was dead. The silky inner lining of the casket they’d placed her in was the same color as her blue-gray, blue-white skin. Yes, she was wearing white, but the white had turned to a deathly nothingness, a bluish absence. Craig stared, and stared, and held his breath. Shit. Had they killed her? Did they know she was dead? Was he the only one who could see clearly from where he looked down at her through the basement window that the girl was actually dead?

Did they have their eyes closed? Why was the fucking EMT just sitting there in the corner? Were they so caught up in their chanting that they couldn’t see the girl was dead?

Before he even knew what he was doing, Craig was slamming his fists against the flimsy glass until he’d broken it, and was falling into it, and the girls were all screaming and running and shrieking, just like the time before when he’d run down the basement steps, except this time the screaming had nothing to do with him.

“Something happened to him,” Perry said, “after the accident. I know Craig. He can be an asshole, but he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He remembers everything. He can tell you all the presidents in order, their terms of office. He won’t admit it, but he can. He’s not going to forget what happened on that night.”