Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

Thrown off by the change in tack, Robin stalled. “Have you talked to the others?”

Martin reddened, looked off down the terraced stairs. “I was hoping maybe you could. I mean…you’re so honest and real and…they like you.” His voice dropped. “People don’t tend to like me.” He looked away from her, blushing even deeper.

Robin herself flushed—both with pleasure at Martin’s assertion that the others liked her and confusion at the realization that he liked her.

Martin stood awkwardly, in an agony of embarrassment. She reached, grasped his arm, and shook it gently. “I’ll talk to them. But not for a term paper. To find out why Zachary’s here, what he wants. We can’t just play around.” She looked off toward the edge of campus, toward the Hall, and her face was troubled. “ He’s not playing.”

The sky was already streaked with dark when she left Martin at the bottom of the stairs on the main plaza. She did not see that he turned to watch her as she went…holding his arm where she’d touched him.

She turned off the plaza and walked along the footpaths that meandered through the oak grove, her feet crunching on the slippery dry leaves. Branches entwined over her head, enclosing the path. Her thoughts were stormy. Martin might have convinced himself that he could find a scientific explanation, and maybe write a brilliant and groundbreaking thesis in the process, but there was something else behind this obsessive pursuit of the facts. In his own way, he was as caught up in the mystery as she was. He was only being hyperacademic because it was comfortable, or reassuring, or safe. And he was obviously rejecting anything that resembled faith—so hell-bent on not believing that he was ignoring what was right in front of him. That wasn’t only stupid; it might even be dangerous.

And, she suddenly intuited, she had the distinct feeling he wasn’t telling her everything. He was—maybe not lying, exactly, but he was definitely holding back. Her mind went to the Hebrew lettering she’d seen in his notebook. Significant, but she didn’t know why.

Ahead of her was a small copse of trees, a circle within the grove, with a bench inside the circle. Her steps slowed and she realized that she had been headed here all along, although she’d never thought much about the place before.

She moved off the path and waded through a tangle of vines into the quiet circle of trees, approaching the curved marble bench.

She’d passed it before and noticed the inscribed names, but she’d never really looked; there were many such memorial benches and statues scattered about campus, gifts from wealthy alumni, sometimes from an entire class or club or fraternity. But there was something about this one, a heaviness—the isolation of it, maybe, or the formality of the circle that enclosed the bench.

She brushed past the rough trunk of an oak, stopped in front of the bench, and looked down at the lettering in the marble. The date made her shiver.

There were five names engraved underneath in alphabetical order. She reached out slowly and touched the fifth.

And as she stood with her fingers against the cold, smooth stone, she felt a breath on her cheek, exactly as if someone was standing beside her.

She whirled, staring around her in the shadowy grove.

The trees were tall and still, the air heavy.

There was no one there.

But there was. She could feel it, a presence like eyes, like touch.

“Zachary?” she whispered.

The slightest wind breathed through the shrubbery around her, brushed teasingly at her clothes, slid into the cloth like fingers. Robin gasped.

The breeze lifted her hair, caressed her cheeks, breathing into her ear. Robin closed her eyes, turned her head into the touch, even her heartbeat suspended.

The wind rustled again through the trees—and was gone.

Robin opened her eyes.

The grove was still, and suddenly colder, the sky almost completely dark.

Her face was flaming, but she trembled with cold. And then, suddenly terrified, she turned and ran from the circle of trees through the grove.

She pulled the heavy front door of Mendenhall closed behind her and stood beside the wall of mailboxes in the dim hall, flushed with strange feelings, not all of them fear.

It was Zachary .

The longing—she’d felt it. It was real, and intense, and—

Pleasurable .

Her legs felt light and weak and her breasts ached as she remembered the touch of wind under her clothes.

Someone touched her back in the dark and she twisted around, freaked.

A shadow towered in the dark hall.

She shrank back against the coat rack, barely bit back a scream—and then she recognized Patrick.

His face was tight in the shadows of the entry hall, his voice curt, distant. “We need to huddle. All of us. The Columns at eight.”

Robin nodded, speechless. And then for a moment, something flickered in Patrick’s eyes—stark, intimate—

Terrified .

Her gaze locked with his.

Then he turned sharply and walked off, leaving her in the dark.

On the north edge of campus, just before the woods, lay the overgrown ruins of sunken gardens. Low walls rimmed a crumbling stone plaza; dead vines crawled up the twisted columns of an arbor. In daylight, it was a haunted forest, in moonlight a dryads’ circle, a place of ghosts and broken hearts and fever dreams.

Being of no obvious practical use, in comparison to a sports facility, for example, the Columns had long ago fallen into disrepair. The regents saw no reason to funnel money into rebuilding the structure. But students knew and loved the Columns for their desolate privacy, and found any number of illicit uses for the spot, as evidenced by the glitter of broken glass, the wrinkled ends of smoked-out joints, the pale deflated balloons of used condoms.

As if by some mutual unstated agreement, the five of them had all gone over separately. Patrick was there alone when Robin arrived. She stood in the dark of the arches, watching him sip from a flask as he tended a small fire he’d built in the middle of the flagstones.

She stayed back, hidden by a tangle of vines, and watched as the others appeared, materializing one by one in the arches of the arbor, pale in the darkness, like ghosts themselves. She knew their shadows instantly: Lisa, with her wild mane of hair; Martin’s small stooped silhouette; Cain, moving between the weathered stones with lanky, catlike grace.

Then Patrick looked up the wide, low steps as if he’d known all along Robin was there. She stepped forward with a surge of excitement and anticipation.

None of them spoke as they gathered in the dancing light of the fire. But their eyes met and held, a silence more intimate than words.

Patrick looked around at them in the ruined courtyard. His voice was flat. “Things are still happening, right?”

“Yes.” Robin spoke first, and Lisa echoed her.

“Oh yeah.”

Martin nodded once, and Robin frowned toward him. He’d said nothing had happened to him. Had he lied to her? Or was he just going along to encourage the others to talk?

A cold breath of wind gusted through the courtyard. Robin shoved her hands deep in her pockets and shivered.

Cain turned toward Robin with that direct gaze of his. “What happened with you?”

Robin thought of the grove, the feeling of being touched.

She knew she was blushing and looked toward Lisa, who was crouched beside a granite column, smoking. “Yesterday we were in the kitchen…with my roommate…”

Patrick looked quickly across at her in the firelight.