Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

“Well. Great. How nice for you,” she replied tightly. She turned to go.

Lisa spoke suddenly. “He’s not doing it to you?” There was a slight tremor in her voice.

Robin turned back to look at her, shook her head.

Lisa smiled thinly. “Lucky me.”

The mirrors reflected them both… multiple images. Robin spoke carefully into the silence. “Do you want me to stay with you?”

Lisa’s smile twisted. “Why? You want a piece of the action?”

Robin flushed, deep red. Stung, she turned to leave.

Lisa called out shakily, “Robin.”

This time there was no mistaking the desperation in her voice. Robin turned back, almost afraid to know.

Lisa dropped the hairbrush into the sink. She faced Robin and slowly unbuttoned the high collar of her shirt. Robin gasped.

Lisa’s throat and chest were covered with bruises and scratches.

And bites.

The girls looked at each other in the glare of the fluorescents, too frightened to speak.

A few candles burned in Lisa’s room, since neither girl had wanted to sleep completely in the

dark. Robin had been sure she’d be wide awake all night ( and better that way ) but she’d drifted off and now slept fitfully on one side of the bed.

So it was just on the edges of consciousness that she heard it start—a low rhythmic bumping somewhere in the room.

Robin frowned in her sleep, stirred.

The bumping grew louder.

Robin’s eyes fluttered open. Through the haze of sleep and shimmering candlelight, she saw shadows battling on the wall. A huge dark mass, crouched over a feminine form.

The bumping grew louder, beginning to shake the bed, pounding, violent.

Robin jerked up, wide awake now.

The shadows were gone. But Lisa’s side of the bed was shaking and bouncing as Lisa flopped up and down on top of it, crying out in terror, fighting at something invisible.

Robin cowered. The room was like ice; the presence beside her was thick, palpable, a choking sense of malevolence, paralyzing her with an almost-blinding terror.

Her mind recoiled, folding in on itself—a swooning madness—then she pulled herself back from the brink and screamed aloud.

“Zachary, stop! STOP!”

Lisa spasmed, then suddenly ceased flailing and collapsed on the bed.

The candles on the bed stand flickered, flaring up.

To Robin’s horror, she felt the presence there, the dark energy, turn its attention to her.

She could feel the hair on her arms rise, her whole body going numb as she felt cold breath on her face, smelled a sick, rotting stench.

She pressed herself back against the headboard, her eyes wide and glazed. The presence leaned in to her; her body could feel the mass of something huge and alive, throbbing with malevolence. Invisible breath stirred her hair…and she heard herself whimper like an animal.

Then it was gone.

The shadows in the room softened; the air was no longer freezing. And there was no sense of the fist that had seemed to squeeze her heart.

Lisa lay beside her, shaking with terror. She broke into raw sobbing.

Robin shook herself free of the paralysis and leaned over to hug Lisa, holding her. She could feel Lisa’s spasms through her whole body. Her own teeth were chattering from adrenaline.

“God…” Her words were choked. “Has that been—is that the way it’s been?”

Lisa shook her head, swallowing. “Never like that.”

Robin clenched her nails into her own palms, fighting to keep control of herself. “We can’t do the séance. It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what we’re dealing with.”

Lisa pulled away from her. Her eyes were dilated, glazed. “We have to do something . We have to get rid of him.”

They looked at each other in the wavering candlelight.

Lisa spoke, her voice low and fierce. “Don’t you dare tell anyone.”

After a moment, Robin silently nodded.

Robin watched the campus recede from the window of the bus, on her way to Ash Hill Cemetery. Lisa had sworn her to silence about the attacks, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do some more investigating on her own. Before they went any further (she thought of Cain briefly), she was going to check some facts.

It had been a relief to leave campus. Simple enough to call directory assistance and learn that yes, there was a graveyard just outside of town, and when she’d pretended she was seeking the grave of a relative, the grounds manager readily confirmed that a Zachary Prince who had died in 1920 was buried in the older section.

The bus route that connected the school to various towns along the interstate ran right by the cemetery. Wedged in a window seat, Robin saw the town really for the first time. Central Ash Hill was a good jaunt from campus, and she’d not had a set of friends to coax her to prowl about the main street’s few shops and restaurants and its one cinema.

But she barely noticed as the main drag turned to clapboard houses with wide porches; she was sunk into herself, brooding over the night with Lisa.

What she felt—it had come to her at some point, beyond the horror, beyond the revulsion, and the sheer psychotic unreality of it—was betrayal. She’d somehow been able to rationalize the terror of the initial hauntings (now that they were past) as the cry of a lost spirit, angry and confused.

But what had happened to Lisa was vile, unforgivable. Robin felt violated herself. She could not believe it of Zachary—not the haunted young man from the yearbook, not the Zachary of her mind, the Zachary who called to her in her dreams. There was gentleness in that face, and compassion. None of the smirking entitlement of a predator.

Yet she’d seen the attack with her own eyes.

Could death—admittedly a horrible death (she thought of fire, of melting flesh, and shuddered)— change the character of a soul? Somehow she couldn’t believe that. Of course, she had to admit, the seductive banter of the board hadn’t sounded much like the words she would expect from the troubled young man in the photo, either. And neither had the degrading things the board had said to Martin.

So which was the real Zachary?

She had unquestioningly accepted what the board, and Zachary (or whatever presence had been speaking through it), had said to them.

Now she felt tricked, lied to. And because Robin had been fooled, she was more determined than ever to find out what was really going on.

But for all the terror of the moment when the presence had turned to her, she had had a puzzling sense—no, a certainty—that she wouldn’t be attacked in the same way. That was something she knew, though she couldn’t quite get to why.

It gnawed at her as she watched the outer streets of the small town turn to expanses of woods and fields through the bus windows. Something that Lisa had done.

From the start, Lisa had been brazenly flirtatious with Zachary. More than flirtatious, even. Inviting.

Inviting .

Robin sat up on the seat. That was it. Something Lisa said that first night, like Mae West—an invitation: “Well then, come up and see me sometime.”

And he had.

Robin didn’t know why it was important, only that it was.

The bus groaned to a halt in front of a high granite wall. Robin pulled herself up on the steel bar of the seat in front of her and walked a little unsteadily to the door. Three deep metal steps down and the automatic doors were flapping shut behind her.

The bus roared off, spewing black exhaust, leaving her alone outside the imposing iron gates of the cemetery.

The wind was strong, gusting under layers of clouds in the sky; too high for rain, but dark enough to make her wish she’d asked one of the others to come with her. It wasn’t merely the promise she’d made to Lisa that had held her back, though. Asking Patrick to go along was out; Waverly had been watching him like a hawk ever since Thanksgiving. Lisa was too shaken.