Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

Robin shifted her eyes to the screen again, found her place. “‘The Master of the Universe threw the broken shells of these first defective beings, the original Sephiroth, into the Abyss.’”

Cain murmured, “Rabbi knows his Zohar.”

Robin continued. “‘The Qlippoth, these husks, or shells, are not alive, but touched with life, like a smear of oil upon the lamp.’”

She stopped, recognizing the phrase from Zachary.

I am energy. You are mass.

But it wasn’t Zachary, was it? It was one of these .

Cain scrolled down, and they read in silence, trying to process the information. Sometimes the text was too obscure to grasp, but Robin got an unsettling picture of the Qlippoth as inchoate energy, spirits without bodies from the beginning of time, hovering always at the edges of the living world. Another disturbing sentence caught her eye: “They manifest as malevolent autonomous forms throughout the universe.”

Cain stopped on a piece of text and read aloud.

“‘Like the fallen angels of the Bible, banished from Heaven, the Qlippoth are enraged with their exclusion from creation and inflamed with a desire to invade and pervert mankind. ‘Shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion’; they long for life, and are responsible for all the evil of the world.’”

Robin felt queasy, a weird, disconnected feeling of unreality. How can this be happening?

And yet, there was something familiar about the words she was reading. Defective. Cast out. Envy of the chosen. Rage at exclusion.

Like me. Just like me.

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

1 guess it doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s here .

She looked at Cain in the dim light of the computer screen, shaken. “Inflamed with a desire to invade and pervert mankind…”

Cain had scrolled down and stopped on another sentence. “Jesus. Listen.” He read, “‘The malevolent intent of the Qlippoth has been made manifest throughout human history, as in the case of Hitler and the Nazis, who through séances and other occult practices opened the door to widespread Qlipponic possession. See Key of Solomon .’”

Robin sat still, stunned. Cain’s face was bleak. “None of this is good news.” He turned back to the keyboard, and typed “Key of Solomon” into the search engine.

The links appeared and he clicked on the first. A text Web site came up: The Greater Mysteries of the Key of Solomon.

“So much for secret knowledge,” Cain muttered. He scrolled through the text.

Robin looked at the section titles flashing by: “Invocation,” “Protection,” “Banishment.”

“Stop,” she said suddenly. They both leaned forward to read…and then both looked at each other in the same instant.

“Holy shit,” Cain whispered.

Cain veered the Mustang onto a side street at the sight of the police barricade at the school gates.

He pulled over to the curb, parked under a spreading oak. The sky through the windshield of the Mustang was dismal, drizzling icy rain. Robin stared out through the glass, past the remains of a McDonald’s breakfast scattered on the dashboard.

The road into the college was blocked with posts; police and sheriff’s cars lined the road. A steady stream of cars and buses took students out of the college, onto the highway.

Cain shook his head. “They shut the whole place down.” He switched on the radio, searched for a news channel, while Robin scanned the silhouettes in the cars, hoping for a glimpse of a familiar profile.

Cain stopped on a station and they listened to the TV announcer: “Baird College has released students early for Christmas break after the suspicious death of a coed. Two missing students are wanted for questioning….”

Robin looked up, startled, at the last. Cain reached and turned off the radio. He looked out at the stream of cars leaving the campus through the veil of rain.

“They could be miles away by now.”

Robin shook her head, sure. “Don’t you remember how we met? None of us go home.”

She reached into Cain’s backpack for his phone, started to text.

Robin and Cain were the only customers in the dim Main Street diner. They sat edgily in the cracked red vinyl window booth, staring out plate glass at the flooded downtown street. The drizzle of rain had turned into a gale. Wind bent the trees on the sidewalk, gusted against the glass, so that water poured down in sheets.

A bulky Toyota 4Runner pulled up to one of the diagonal parking spaces outside the diner. Two figures emerged from the car and darted across the wet sidewalk, hurried in through the front door of the diner.

The door blew shut with a jangle of bells. Patrick and Lisa shook water off their clothes. They saw Cain and Robin at the window booth and stopped still for a moment before crossing the restaurant to sit across from them.

Robin met Lisa’s eyes, but before anyone could speak, the waitress came to fill their coffee cups.

“Wet out,” she remarked stoically. She handed out menus, then departed.

The four of them looked at one another warily.

Cain spoke first. “Where’s Martin?”

Patrick matched Cain’s curt, neutral tone. “We tried his room before they closed the dorm down. No one there.”

Robin looked across at Lisa. “We called his parents’ house. The housekeeper didn’t even know school was let out. You haven’t seen him at all?”

Lisa started to speak, then her eyes widened; she stared out the window.

A sheriff’s car was cruising slowly down the muddy street outside the diner.

All four of them hunched down in their seats, not breathing, until the car cruised on, disappeared around a comer.

Patrick sat up again, his face grim. “Sheriff came by Mendenhall looking for you all.”

Cain straightened, looked across the table at Patrick. “Why did you stay?”

Lisa looked at Robin. “We had to make sure you were all right.”

Robin felt a sudden ache in her throat. She glanced out the window, in the direction the sheriff’s car had disappeared, then back to Lisa, haunted. “They think I killed Waverly.”

Lisa swallowed. “Was it…Zachary?”

The four of them looked around at one another. Lightning flashed outside, branching fire in the dark sky. They all flinched, and then Cain exhaled. “We think we know what ‘Zachary’ is.”

Outside the wide window, rain pounded into the rutted parking lot of the Mainline. Inside the dim motel room, Cain and Robin had the diagrams and texts they’d printed out in the cyber café spread out on the bed for Patrick and Lisa to see.

Robin watched their faces as Cain gestured, explaining.

“The Key of Solomon is full of truly weird shit. Spells for just about everything. Demons, exorcism, rituals of invocation and banishment. People really believed this stuff—it’s amazingly matter-of-fact.”

Robin recalled Martin’s words on the steps, that windy day: “ I’m supposed to believe in a religion based on texts from the Middle Ages that seriously acknowledge astrology and numerology and…demons? ”

She turned to Lisa, who was standing frozen, pale with disbelief. “But you’ve heard of this, haven’t you? You and Martin were talking about Kabbalah that first night.”

Lisa twisted the knotted red thread on her wrist. “The morning after—when we found the game scores in the newspaper—he asked me what I knew about Kabbalah and”—she breathed in sharply, remembering, “the Qlippoth thing. But I never heard of any of that .”

She looked down at the red yarn, as if just noticing it. “This was something I saw in a magazine. It was for fun.”