Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

Back in her room, Robin swallowed two of Waverly’s Valium before returning the bottle to the bottom drawer, then slept a black sleep until six that evening, when she bolted up in terror at the sound of her door slamming open.

Waverly breezed in, one of her signature thoughtless entrances. She turned all the lights on full and proceeded to fuss about the room, pulling open drawers and unpacking prissily and noisily, with appalling disregard for her roommate.

Robin lay back on her pillows, barely able to move. She was aware through her depressant haze that Waverly would think Patrick was still out of town, and that Patrick would go to pains to make her think he had been. At least Robin wouldn’t be alone that night. And for the first time in their short acquaintance, Robin was painfully glad of her roommate’s presence. Surely nothing mysterious or out of the ordinary would dare happen around Waverly.

Strangely comforted, she drifted back into a drugged and troubled sleep.

Late that night, when the rooms went dark and all the rest of the Hall slept, two lights remained on.

One was a solitary desk lamp, in a dim room lined with bookshelves along every available inch of wall space. There were no other adornments—not a poster on a closet, not a rug on the floor. The bed was unmade and there was a pall in the room, the numbness of loneliness.

Martin sat at his desk, surrounded by uneven piles of books. His laptop was open and signed on to the Net, but he seemed unaware of anything in front of him; he merely stared into space.

Abruptly, he stood and crossed to his bed. He knelt, reached underneath, and dragged out a suitcase. He unzipped the brown vinyl flap and looked down at the contents. After a long moment, he removed several leather-bound books with gilt Hebrew lettering on the covers.

He seemed to brace himself before he lifted one onto the bed and opened the cover.

The other light hung from a cord that surely had never passed an electrician’s inspection. The single bare bulb dimly illuminated the basement.

The long, low-ceilinged room was a horror-movie dream, a claustrophobic maze of stacked furniture and metal utility shelves and twisted pipes.

A shadowy figure moved stealthily through the crooked aisles.

There was a sudden hiss and clanging just to the right.

The shadow jumped back—then Cain relaxed as he made out the shape of the old boiler. He crossed to it, knelt to open the control box, studying the gauges inside.

Then his eyes fell on the floor beside him. He frowned, reached out to pick something up off the concrete.

A cold smile creased his lips as he stared down at the object in his hand.

By Monday, Mendenhall was as full and boisterous as ever, bearing little resemblance to the endless and haunted halls that the five of them had inhabited over the weekend.

The maelstrom of school descended, spiked by the heightened anxiety of midterms. Students studied everywhere, huddled alone in corners with piles of books, gathered in nervously chattering groups at every available table.

Everything returned to normal—except Robin. Instead of sleepwalking through her days under a dark cloud, she was wide-awake.

Somehow the terror of the haunting had receded and she was left with an overwhelming feeling of, yes, excitement, and impatience to know more. No longer envious of groups and pairs of students, she hurried through the halls, flushed and light-headed with her secret. Finally, she belonged to something bigger, something almost unbearably strange and fascinating. In fact, she could think of little else. If not for a dreaded biology midterm that afternoon, she would have gone to the library the very first morning.

Now, one midterm down, curled up in her room with Ego and Id , her mind kept wandering back to the long weekend, the board, the veering, delirious, almost sexual sense of being completely out of control. The tug of… something …responding under her hands.

And the impossible shatter of glass.

She shivered, but not exactly from fear.

Zachary was baffling. From 1920, but as Cain had said, pretty hip for a ghost. Lonely and charming. Sensitive and scathing. Intuitive and playful—and then the vicious fury at Martin, for no good reason.

There was a mystery here, and it tantalized her.

She thought of the sensitive young man in the yearbook (now concealed under her bed, threatened by dust mice but safe from Waverly’s prying eyes). Surely there was nothing monstrous in that face. Maybe the scary things, the lashing out, were coming out of his pain. He’d died suddenly, horribly; he was confused, frightened, lost, angry. And he, this lost spirit, had been reaching out to them, to her.

But the anti-Semitism , her mind reminded her. Those horrible things he said to Martin .

It seemed unlike him, whoever he was.

But it was part of that whole time, the twenties —

She realized immediately, ashamed, how hollow that rationalization was. It was vile, no matter how you looked at it.

Nothing good could possibly come from that .

Her eyes fell on her open notebook, and a phrase from Professor Lister’s lecture leapt out at her: “ Do our demons come from without, or within us? ”

She bit her lip, looked quickly away from the words—then realized that across the room, Waverly was turned around in her desk chair, watching her with a narrow blue gaze.

“What did you do around here for three days?” she demanded, obviously suspecting more than studying.

Robin looked her straight in the eyes. “Talked to ghosts,” she said dryly.

Waverly stared at her, then grabbed her overnight bag from the closet and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her against Robin’s laugh.

Robin almost went to the library that minute, but then a shutter banged against the window and a spike of fear shot through her—a memory of the rapping, and her own screams.

She shivered, and then went back to Freud.

But the longing continued.

She looked for the others, making needless trips to the laundry and the Coke machine, hoping to run into them, but they seemed to have melted back into the woodwork like whatever phantom they had been talking to.

Then on a blustery Wednesday, she was walking through the maples of east campus in the icy and intrusive wind. The sky through the branches roiled with dark clouds; the wind pushed at her, half-lifted her. Every step was like trying to balance against an invisible, chaotic power. But what she felt was exhilaration, anticipation. She stopped to catch her breath on the bridge over the swollen creek, leaned against the wall with her hair whipping around her, and found herself staring up at the weathered stones of Moses Hall, the philosophy building.

Cain stood on an upper balcony. He was smoking, staring off at the masses of dark clouds over the hills, completely unaware of anything below.

Then he looked down, right at her. Her heart leapt, and she saw him start. Their eyes locked across the distance…electric, and real.

So it did happen. And it’s not over , she realized. Not by a long shot .

The thought was a shiver of excitement and unease.

The clock radio buzzed her awake. She had been dreaming of Zachary: she’d been running in the halls, trying to find him, hearing him call her name…

She settled back on her pillow, thinking back on the dream. It hadn’t been scary, she decided. In fact, it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling at all.

The clock buzzed again and she remembered with dismay that her Ancient Civilizations midterm was that morning.

She threw on clothes she’d left on the floor the night before and grabbed a portable plastic coffee mug along with her backpack.