Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

Or Zachary did , Robin wanted to say, but she didn’t. The room was spinning; she felt a vertiginous excitement. She could see Martin’s eyes were shining, the detached academic stance gone.

Cain looked at her across the candlelight. “I heard you say you were in his psych class. You’ve read the same book.”

His face was cold. Robin felt a rush of indignation. “No, I haven’t.” She stared at him.

Martin reached across the table for his legal pad. “We’ll test it. We each write something secret about ourselves and leave it back here. Then we ask the board—and see what happens.”

Cain laughed shortly. “Forget it. I’m out of here.”

He started for the door, a long, lithe stride.

Robin faced him, calling out, “I didn’t set this up.”

Cain turned under the arch of the doorway, looked back at her. Robin stared back at him, and she could feel his hesitation, the question in his gaze.

But then his face closed and he walked out. Robin stood, her face as hot as if she’d been slapped. Be a prick, then , she thought. She was barely aware of Martin speaking impatiently from behind her.

“Doesn’t anyone else want to know what’s going on here?”

Robin turned slowly. Martin was tearing strips of paper off his yellow legal pad. He looked at Lisa, extended a slip of paper and a pen.

Lisa frowned but took the pen and paper.

Patrick strode over to the table. “What the fuck.” He reached for a strip.

Martin turned to Robin. She took the yellow strip, stood for a moment, then reached into her skirt pocket and scribbled quickly with her own purple pen.

Martin was writing, too. He folded up his paper so no one would be able to see what he had written. The others folded theirs, as well.

“Everyone put their papers down on the table,” he directed.

Patrick rolled his eyes in obligatory protest, but they all added their squares of paper to Martin’s.

Now Martin crossed the carpet to the table in front of the fire. The others followed.

How funny—he’s taken total charge , Robin thought. And we’ve let him. Even Patrick. Not such a White Rabbit after all .

Martin stopped in front of the board and looked expectantly at Lisa and Robin. Almost obediently, the girls sat across from each other again. Lisa put her hands on the planchette and Robin followed, with some reluctance.

Martin cleared his throat and then spoke rather formally. “We’d like to ask some questions.”

Patrick and Martin hovered beside the table. Robin could feel everyone holding their breath, but the pointer didn’t move.

Lisa bit her lip. “Zachary?”

The planchette didn’t move at all. Robin’s hands felt heavy and awkward on the wood. Lisa looked across at Robin in the flickering light, and Robin knew she felt it, too.

“Zachary?”

Another long beat, then Lisa shook her head. She took her hands from the pointer, looked at the boys. “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean?” Martin frowned at her.

“There was something there before. An… energy. You could feel it. It’s gone.” She looked at Robin. Robin met her green gaze, nodded.

“Maybe it’s playing hard to get,” Patrick half-joked.

“Let me try,” Martin said abruptly.

He’s really into this , Robin thought uneasily. But she stood, moved back from her chair so he could sit.

Martin sat down across from Lisa, put his fingers on the indicator. He spoke stiffly into the air. “Is…something there?”

Darkness… silence…

Nothing.

Lisa tried again. “Zachary?”

They sat for a long moment, fingers quivering on the wooden pointer.

The wind rushed the building, rattling the windows, whistling through the cracks of the wood, worrying the old bones of the house.

The pointer was completely lifeless.

Lisa looked at Robin again. “Nada. He’s gone.”

There was something anticlimactic about trooping upstairs, carrying candles from Martin’s table to light their way. The moving candlelight was disorienting, they had to feel their way up along the banisters in the darkness. The stairs creaked more than Robin had ever noticed in the daylight world.

No one spoke. After all their intimacy it was as if they were strangers again. Almost as if we’re ashamed …

Robin was dying to ask, to compare notes, to see if anyone would even acknowledge what had happened. Did it only happen to me? Her face flushed with a sudden paranoia. Are the rest of them all in on it together, setting me up?

With a flash of unease, she remembered the books on the table in front of Martin: Psychoanalysis and the Occult. Dreams and Telepathy .

Was it all going to turn out to be some horrible, humiliating trick?

Robin caught a glimpse of Patrick’s face, startlingly coarse and crude in the candlelight, and she turned away quickly, disturbed.

As they reached the third-floor landing, Martin stopped and turned, about to speak, but Patrick broke the silence first, stretching suggestively. “Well, ladies, I hate to sleep alone on a holiday. What do you say, Marlowe?”

Lisa deftly avoided the arm he tried to drape around her, shot back at him, “You wouldn’t be able to handle me after Miss Tri Delt.”

Patrick leered toward her. “I bet Martin could use a good mauling.”

Martin ducked his head and skittered off into the dark of the boys’ wing.

Lisa exploded. “God, you’re an asshole.”

“You want him back? I can arrange it—for a cut—”

Lisa slapped Patrick viciously across the face. There was a stunned, frozen beat, then in a split second Patrick had grabbed her arm and pinned her against the wall, pressing his body into hers. Both were breathing hard; Lisa’s eyes flamed with fury. The sex between them was palpable.

Robin was frozen against the opposite wall, invisible.

Patrick smiled slowly, pushed back off the wall, releasing Lisa.

“Not worth the sperm.”

“You’ll never know,” Lisa snarled after him as he sauntered off into his own wing. She whirled and slammed through the door of the girls’ wing without a word to Robin.

Robin stood in the juncture of halls, feeling abandoned, bereft. After a moment, she stepped after Lisa into the pitch-black of the girls’ wing—and froze, her heart pounding.

A taper floated before her in the darkness of the hall.

Robin caught her breath, then realized the candle was her own, reflected in a mirror down the hall.

She turned and saw Lisa standing against the wall, watching her obliquely, the light from her own candle flickering on her face. “Want to sleep in my room?” she asked suddenly.

Robin was caught off guard—flooded with paranoia again. Was this part of the game? Get Robin to her room and scare the shit out of her later, when she was asleep?

Then Robin flashed back to the electric feeling of the planchette under her fingers, the ominous quotation the board had spelled out in the end—“ The most evil of those half-tamed demons ”—and realized that no matter what prank Lisa could dream up, it couldn’t be worse than going back to her room alone.

She nodded briefly. “Okay.”

Lisa started down the long hall, and Robin trailed her in the dark to a door with—

A window? Robin thought for a moment, startled. She looked closer at the door and realized it was a painting of a window frame, looking out on a desert landscape at night, sand dunes stretched out under a huge moon.

Interesting. We’re all so much more interesting than anyone would have guessed .

Lisa handed Robin her candle so she could unlock the door. She pushed it open and let Robin by—into a room like a Moroccan harem.