Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

The rabbi looked startled at the phrase, almost disbelieving. He moved farther up the aisle toward them. “The Discarded Ones—you mean the Qlippoth? The old creation story?”

Robin and Cain locked eyes, a jolt of energy passing between them. Robin turned to the rabbi, trying to keep her voice calm. “Could you tell us about it? It’s for a term paper.”

A strange look passed over the rabbi’s face, conflicted. “From the Kabbalah.”

Robin felt another shock of recognition at the word. Martin and Lisa had used it the first night.

The rabbi’s eyes were clouded. “The Sepher Zohar tells a story…that the Master of the Universe made several failed attempts at creation before our present world. He threw the broken shells of those first defective beings into the Abyss.”

That’s it. This is what it’s about . Robin’s skin prickled with the knowing. The broken shells of those first defective beings .

Cain was equally still and intense beside her. “Are those shells…alive?” he asked cautiously.

“Not alive. Antilife.” The rabbi paused. “Evil.” The word hung in the darkness of the temple. Robin shivered.

“You mean like…demons?” Cain demanded.

The rabbi shifted, suddenly defensive, uncomfortable. “It’s a myth. How could God fail at creation?”

Cain spoke roughly. “The…Sepher Zohar—does it say how to get rid of one?”

Robin knew instantly Cain shouldn’t have asked. The rabbi stiffened.

“Get rid of one? What game are you playing?” He looked sharply from Cain to Robin. Neither of them spoke.

The rabbi pulled himself up, offended. And maybe a little scared , Robin thought—which chilled her more than any of the rest of it.

“The Zohar is sacred knowledge. Secret knowledge. Not for children.” Robin saw the dark flicker in his eyes again. “Not a game,” he added curtly.

He turned on his heel to walk down the aisle. Easier to take offense at a joke than to believe it was a serious question. But that fleeting, frightened look on his face gave Robin a last desperate hope. She broke free from her paralysis, grabbed the game box from Cain, and ran to follow the rabbi.

“Please. It’s not just a story.”

Perhaps struck by the anxiety in her voice, the rabbi hesitated, looked back at her. She pulled off the lid of the box, thrust it toward him, displaying the writing inside. “We have to know what this says.”

The rabbi glanced at the lettering and jolted. He turned over the lid and his face darkened as he looked down at the graphic on the box.

He shoved the box lid back at Robin, wiped his hands against his coat. “Burn it. No good comes from such toys.” He turned abruptly and strode away from her.

Cain was suddenly at Robin’s side. “Come on.” He took her hand, steering her up the aisle.

Robin resisted, looking back. The rabbi had already disappeared behind the curtains. “But we have to find out what—”

Cain pushed through the doors into the dark foyer, pulling her with him. “We’re going to.” She gasped as he pulled her into a dark doorway. He put a finger to his lips and pointed upward.

Above the doorframe was a sign with an arrow: LIBRARY.

Cain eased the door open and they slipped through.

They were in a long, dark hall.

The cantor’s chanting was louder; light spilled from a half-open door. Cain pointed past rows of closed doors to a double doorway down the hall.

He took her hand and they ran light-footed past the open door, heading toward the library.

Robin had just grabbed the brass handle to pull at the door, when she felt Cain freeze behind her.

The corridor was unnervingly silent; the unearthly singing had stopped.

“You there! What are you doing?” a man’s voice shouted from the darkness at the end of the hall.

Cain pushed Robin through the library door. “Go.” He whipped around and ran down the hall.

As the door whispered shut behind her, Robin backed up into the dark library, scanning for a place to hide. Footsteps thudded in the hall outside, but the cantor’s steps thumped past and down the corridor, after Cain.

Robin turned in the dark room and strode for the bookshelves, moving quickly past modern paperbacks with vapid titles: Judaism and You; The Soul of the Torah .

She spotted a shelf of leather-bound volumes behind the heavy front desk, hurried toward it, her eyes searching—and caught sight of a taped label on a box: Sepher Zohar: The Book of Splendor .

The Mustang was idling down the street as Robin slipped out the front doors of the synagogue.

She ran down the long front steps, clutching the book under her jacket.

Cain shoved the passenger door open from inside and she tumbled into the seat, knocked off balance by the bulky book.

“Okay?” he asked tersely.

She nodded, gasping.

He was still breathing hard, too. “Think I’ll quit smoking.” He floored the accelerator, skidding off down the street, as she shook the leather-bound volume from its box and opened it.

“Oh no,” she gasped. Cain braked sharply, startled.

“What?”

She held the book open on the dashboard, displaying the pages. The book was entirely in Hebrew.

“We’ll have to go back.” She swallowed, sick with disappointment.

Cain’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve got a better idea.” He shifted back into gear, whipped the car around. “Where are we going?”

Cain smiled at her thinly. “To the repository of secret knowledge.”

They drove into dim morning light.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Ash Hill was a small community, but every college town makes its reluctant concessions to technology, and Main Street did boast a cyber café.

Trees bent in the wind under an ominous sky as Robin followed Cain through the black glass door of a long storefront building.

The warehouse room was painted black, as well; heavy curtains kept light from coming through the front windows. Stage curtains hung at intervals, creating semiprivate “rooms” with low area lighting, spotlighting a few tables each. Several pay terminals were available for Internet access, and there were plugs and phone lines for laptops, as well.

Robin and Cain wove through the maze of drapery. In a curtained corner, Robin pulled up an extra chair while Cain set up his laptop.

It was almost surreal how easy it was. Cain signed on and in under ten seconds his initial search for “Qlippoth/Kabbalah” yielded over a thousand hits.

Cain gave Robin an almost amused look, then began clicking through the sites.

From Wikipedia, they got a definition of Kabbalah: “An interpretation of the Torah (Hebrew Bible); the religious mystical system of Judaism; a unique, universal, and secret knowledge of God, the laws of nature and of the universe.”

A page appeared with odd symbolic images: a diagram of triangles and wands labeled “The Ten Spheres of Creation”; a black snake coiled up through the tree of life.

Cain clicked onto a link titled “Qlippoth—the Discarded Ones.”

Robin leaned against his shoulder to scan the text, which was illustrated with chilling images of formless swirls of energy with malevolent eyes. She recognized familiar words, read aloud.

“‘ The Sepher Zohar , or Book of Splendor , maintains that there were several failed attempts at creation before the present one. The first beings were unable to hold the light of G-d and shattered into pieces—’”

They both looked at each other in the same moment.

“This was in Patrick’s midterm,” Robin said. Cain nodded slowly.

“It was right in front of us; we just didn’t see it. “

“ We didn’t. I think Martin did.”