Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

He touched her chin, made her look at him. “Listen. Jock boy yells at her. He follows her out. And then suddenly she’s dead.”

Robin pushed him away, her eyes suddenly blazing. ‘It’s not Patrick. You know it’s more than Patrick doing—”

“I don’t know!”

She exploded to her feet. “God, why? Why? Why do you hate him so much?”

Cain wheeled on her, shouting back, “Because he cheats on everyone . The way he treated his girlfriend…and you—he’s got you waiting in line for it…and you don’t see. He has no idea who you are…what you are…what’s really there. He doesn’t care. And he never will.”

Robin stood still, looking at him in shock. “Oh,” she managed, in a small voice.

Cain walked forward and pulled her roughly against him, his mouth coming down on hers. Robin breathed in and kissed him back fiercely. Heat flooded through her body. She pushed her hands up under his shirt, feeling the skin of his back, the taut muscles trembling as he crushed her closer, kissing her mouth, her throat. Her nails dug into his skin.

He whispered into her neck, shaky. “I don’t want you to die.”

She whispered back, “I don’t want to.”

They kissed and kissed, mouths fused, hands slipping into wet clothes to find skin, arms and legs intertwining. Reason melted away and there was only her body and his, his breath in her mouth, the pulse of his blood through her skin.

Life…blood…body…warm…life…blood…life …

Their legs became too shaky to stand…and they were sinking on the bed…then falling, riding the waves of sensation and fierce, exultant heat.

She woke to pitch-blackness and the sound of the rain, and her heart pounding, and the all-too- familiar feeling of terror.

Someone was whispering in the room, a slithery, electrical sound.

Robin’s eyes went wide; the hair at the back of her neck rose. She sat up slowly, trying not to breathe.

A dark shape suddenly rose from the floor. Robin gasped, cowered back.

Cain’s face came into focus as he leaned on the bed, contrite. “Sorry. Sorry. It’s me.” He pulled off headphones connected to a digital tape recorder. The slithery whispering vibrated from the earpieces.

Cain put the recorder aside and lay back on the bed with Robin, holding her, burying his face in her hair. For a moment, the fear receded. She pressed her cheek against his chest, her heart racing again, skin flushed with the awareness of his body, the newness of him. She felt sore and deliriously alive. So this is what it is ….

He held her tighter, but she could feel him tense against her. Immediately, the dread was back, like an icy wind. She whispered, “What were you doing?”

He pulled away slightly; his voice was reluctant. “I taped that attic séance, too. I had this feeling Martin was working on his own agenda.”

She sat up to look at him. He shook his head, but reached for the recorder.

“He’s been speaking Hebrew to—whatever it is, and it spoke Hebrew back.” He clicked the recorder on, rewound the tape to find Martin’s voice. He pulled the headphones out so the tape played aloud.

“ Im ata Qlippah, tochi-ach et ze .”

Robin stiffened at the Hebrew. “There. That word. Qlippah ?” She looked at Cain. “The board said something like that the very first night.”

“Yeah. But that’s not all.” He felt on the floor, pulled up a familiar box, yellowed with age. The cover had a graphic of the alphabet board, and the label: BALTIMORE TALKING BOARD.

The box , Robin realized. The box the board was in .

Cain nodded. “I went down and looked in the game cabinet in the lounge, after we left the attic. We burned the board but not the box.”

You burned the board , she thought, remembering Cain grabbing it, flinging it onto the fire while the walls pounded all around them.

Cain’s face was taut, as if he were remembering, too. “Look at this.” He removed the lid of the empty box and showed her the inside cover. Her eyes widened.

There was writing in the box—old and faded, but still readable, except the words were unfamiliar, spelled out in uneven capital letters. Then she caught a glimpse of a phrase that looked familiar: ADON OLAM. And another word jumped out at her: QLIPPAH.

She drew in a breath as she realized what she was looking at. Cain met her eyes.

“They took notes on their séance, right? Back in 1920? And it was saying the same things to them that it was saying to Martin.”

They looked at each other in the darkness. Martin’s voice spoke eerily from the tape recorder, like an ancient chant. “ Ze ma she-uchal leharot lecha —”

Cain reached down to the floor for his pants, his face set. “We need to know what it means.”

Isolated at the end of a residential street at the edge of town, Temple Emanu-el was a product of sixties architecture, built in a series of white arches that looked weirdly like a huge white shell.

It was early morning, but inside, the synagogue felt as dark as night, only a few ghostly safety lights casting oval pools of illumination beside the pews.

Cain and Robin moved into the resonant silence. Robin looked up and around at the high arched ceilings, the Hebrew lettering in the stained-glass windows, took in the mosaic tiled floors under their feet. Somewhere, a cantor was chanting, a haunting dissonance. Robin hadn’t been in a church in years, but this place felt older than any church she’d ever seen. She felt the strange sensation of slipping backward in time.

She jolted as a voice came sharply from the darkness in the front of the synagogue. “Yes? Is there something you want?”

Cain and Robin spun, searching the shadows.

A set of heavy curtains rippled and a rabbi stepped through a curtained door by the side of the dais—formal and severe in his black coat and white shirt, yarmulke and black-rimmed glasses.

They’d worked out their cover story in the car, agreeing to say as little as possible. But faced with the reality of trying to explain their dilemma to an adult human being, Robin faltered.

“We’re working on a school project,” she stammered.

Cain spoke over her, taking control. “We need someone to translate this.” He walked forward in the long aisle, turned on the recorder. Martin’s voice echoed in the temple.

“ Im ata Qlippah tochi-ach et ze .”

The rabbi had seemed about to refuse them, to question the intrusion, but his face changed at the sound of Martin’s voice. He frowned deeply, seemingly more perplexed by the words than by the students’ uninvited presence in the synagogue.

He looked blankly from one to the other. “‘If you are Qlippah, prove it to me’?” He shook his head. “That makes no sense.”

Cain spoke quickly. “Why? What’s a Qlippah?”

The rabbi shrugged, spread his hands. “It’s a…a potato peel, or an orange rind.”

Cain glanced at Robin. Robin’s heart sank. That didn’t make any sense at all. Maybe Martin just didn’t know that much Hebrew.

“Are you sure?” Cain asked. He rewound the tape, played it again.

“ Im ata Qlippah, tochi-ach et ze .”

The rabbi listened intently, then gestured impatiently. “Qlippah. A peel. A rind. An…eggshell.”

Robin jolted. “A shell ?”

The rabbi nodded to her. “Or a husk. The part of something that you throw away. The discards.”

Robin’s pulse quickened. She had a sudden flash of Martin on the windy hill, smiling secretively to himself. She looked at Cain, spoke softly. “Martin called us that—the ‘Discarded Ones.’”