Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

The professor half-smiled. “Jung believed in ghosts utterly.”

He was so matter-of-fact. Robin stared up at him. “What do you think?”

He studied her, an appraising look. “I think the question is, What do you think?”

It felt like more than a question. But someone cleared his throat behind Robin, breaking the moment. She turned and saw a lanky, hawkish grad student standing behind her, balancing a briefcase and a stack of files. He looked pointedly at the stairs she was blocking. Robin stepped aside and muttered, “Thanks” in Lister’s general direction as the grad student brushed past her, and then she hurried for the aisle.

Outside the lecture hall, she stood on the mosaic marble tiles under the domed rotunda of the psychology building.

No help at all , she thought irritably. “ What do you think? ”

The truth was, she’d expected him to dismiss the idea of a ghost outright. Almost hoped it. Instead, this maddening ambiguity.

“ Do our demons come from without, or within us? ”

She felt unbalanced by the notion that Zachary could be something inside her coming out.

She certainly didn’t recognize the spirit as something from her. Or did she? Could she have made Zachary up? A student like her, lost like her, reaching out?

She could almost believe it was from her mind—if not for the book of newspapers in her backpack. Zachary lived here. He died here .

She was suddenly aware of a prickling on the back of her neck, an unmistakable sense of presence behind her.

She went cold, whirled on the floor.

Martin stood above her on the sweeping staircase, looking down from the shadows. “God,” she gasped.

“I need to talk to you,” he said flatly. His voice was hollow in the vast rotunda.

She breathed out. “I need to talk to you .”

The north side of campus was built on a hill. A set of terraces connected by staircases descended to the main plaza, each terrace leading off to different paths and buildings, like an elaborate vertical maze.

Robin and Martin walked down the staircases, under oaks and maples, an occasional tall pine, as Robin recounted the coffeepot episode. “It was just like the mirror—that night. It felt the same. This…tension— and suddenly the coffeepot shattered in her hand.”

“And this happened with just you and Marlowe present.”

“And Waverly.”

Martin stopped on a terrace, leaned against the base of a statue to write rapidly in a spiral-bound notebook.

Robin debated telling him about the yearbook moving from its spot under her bed, then decided against it. He seemed perfectly convinced already; she was gratified that he didn’t question her experience at all.

Robin looked down the walkway, lined on one side with brooding Greek statues on stone pedestals. The wind blew her hair in her face and she brushed it away.

“I think he’s still around. Zachary. I think he has been—since that first night we talked to him.”

Martin stopped his scribbling. “A ghost again?”

Robin bristled. “What else?”

“Purely psychological. Taken one at a time, each incident can be rationally explained. But taken together…well, we all bought into something bigger. We fed it energy, if you will.” He looked up, out over the layers of clouds on the horizon, beyond the tops of the trees. There were high red spots in his cheeks from the cold. “And physical manifestations occurred. The mirror did shatter. There were rappings. And now, with the coffeepot breaking, peripheral manifestations.”

He flipped back pages in his notebook…and Robin realized that the whole binder was filled with notes of the Thanksgiving weekend. Dozens of pages, scribbled in his cramped longhand. She saw her own name, and Lisa’s, and what she was sure was Hebrew lettering before he shut the notebook.

She frowned. “So nothing more has happened to you since that night?”

“Nothing.” Martin’s voice was short; he sounded disappointed.

He tapped his pen on his notebook thoughtfully. “But we have all the classic conditions for a poltergeist haunting. You and Marlowe—all that hormonal angst…” He glanced at her, then away.

Robin flared up. “You guys aren’t exactly choir boys.”

“That’s my point. There’s a synergy of…unhappiness among us. A fusion of ‘Discarded Ones.’”

He seemed amused by the term, and Robin felt a chill, although without knowing why. She looked around at the statues surrounding them, blank marble eyes staring down.

Martin spoke beside her. “I bought a new board.”

Robin turned and stared at him. “What?”

“How can we not follow up?” he said impatiently. “It’s a perfect term paper. My thesis question is ‘Can a focused collective emotional energy cause a psychokinetic effect?’”

Robin shook her head almost violently. She unzipped her backpack and pulled out the book of old newspapers. “I don’t think it’s emotional. I’ve been doing some research, too.” She opened the book on the marble pedestal, turned pages to the article about the fire. (She’d been careful to remove the inserted page with the vile song before she packed the book).

She held the pages down against the wind and stepped back so Martin could read. “It’s all here, just like he said. Zachary died in a fire in Mendenhall . I think that’s why he’s so angry and… lost.”

Martin looked exasperated. He stepped closer, glanced over the article.

She watched him read, and was gratified to see a shadow flicker in his eyes. “How do you explain that we were talking to a ghost who called himself Zachary when there was a real student named Zachary who died in that very building in 1920?”

“But that’s precisely how these subconscious messages work,” he explained with exaggerated patience. “You and I were reading texts from the 1920s. The board we were using was dated from 1920, so 1920 was in the atmosphere between us. We’re living in the building where this student died—in 1920. One of us is bound to have heard something about it. We bring all these random facts together on”—his voice dripped sarcasm—” ‘a dark and stormy night.’ The collective subconscious energy puts all those connections together and starts spelling out messages from this so-called ghost.”

Robin felt her face getting hotter and hotter. It was almost perverse, the way he refused to see.

“Maybe you just don’t want to believe,” she said suddenly.

He almost gaped at her. “What—”

“Maybe you’re not seeing because you don’t want to see. It reminds you too much of religion, when you’ve just flat-out rejected everything, right? It’s all psychology to you. No God, no religion, no ghosts.”

Martin looked startled, and, in fact, she’d surprised herself with her outburst. But he answered her with raw impatience.

“Of course I rejected it. It’s so completely archaic. I’m supposed to believe in a religion based on texts from the Middle Ages that seriously acknowledge astrology and numerology and… demons? It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s beyond comprehension. Give me Freud any day.”

Robin wanted to point out that he had a charm from that archaic religion nailed to his door frame, but she didn’t know what good it would do. He was extremely conflicted; that much was clear. She had a sense that he wanted to believe, and was overcompensating in his skepticism. All to do with his rabbi father, no doubt. Positively Freudian.

But before she could say any of that, Martin abruptly switched gears.

“All right, we have conflicting theories. So we test it.” He cleared his throat, suddenly seeming nervous. “We could…do the paper together, from the two different points of view.” He looked at her briefly. “‘Poltergeists—Psychic or Psychological?’”