Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

Robin had expected to feel at least some relief at Waverly’s departure. Instead, she felt a dread closing in on panic.

She had never experienced the dorm without dozens of people in it. Deserted, it was much bigger than she’d realized, three stories and two and a half wings of crooked corridors, confusing to navigate without the landmarks of familiar faces. All the floors looked disconcertingly the same when the doors were shut.

And Robin hadn’t really imagined how different it would feel —that there was a life force in the presence of others that pervaded the building. Even when she was in her own room, consciously unaware, her subconscious must have registered all the others.

Now the Hall was as empty and dead as a shell.

Without people, too, the dorm seemed to lose its very insulation. The wind reached icy fingers through minute cracks in the walls, snaked its way up through the floorboards. The rain had started again, slanting and relentless, and with it a fresh assault of wind. The windows rattled like bones; the whole structure shifted and groaned on its foundation.

And it had finally occurred to Robin that the communal bathroom was all the way down the hall. She’d have to leave her room in the middle of the night, when anyone could be lurking around, lying in wait for lone college girls stupid enough not to go home for vacation. No one could possibly hear her if she screamed and screamed.

Stop it , she ordered herself. Go out there right now instead of being an idiot about it .

She opened her door to a dark hall of closed doors, all locked to silent rooms. She took a breath and made her way down the corridor to the bathroom.

She stepped through the doorway—and pulled up short, stifling a gasp. There was someone else in the bathroom.

A slim girl with a wild mane of questionably blond hair was leaning over one of the sinks lined up under the long horizontal mirror. Her mouth was pursed in concentration as she outlined her already-blackened eyes with kohl. Her torn lace blouse and short skirt revealed an elaborate navel piercing and several provocatively placed tattoos. A piece of red yarn was tied around one wrist, knotted in several places and frayed at the ends. Some L.A. thing, no doubt; she positively reeked of California.

The girl—Lisa, Robin thought her name was—had a room on the opposite side of Robin’s floor. She had the paleness and perpetual yawn of a druggie, but there was an interesting fuck-you fire in her eyes. In the two months of the short term, Robin had seen numerous boys leaving and entering her room at all hours of the night and day, almost never the same one for even two days in a row.

Lisa glanced at Robin sideways in the mirror, drawled, “Love these holidays …”

Robin felt again the blistering envy of the fierce, crackling life in the other girl. But this time, along with the envy was something more: a yearning, an uncharacteristic impulse to reach out. She hovered by the lockers, gathering the courage to ask the girl if she was staying—then jumped as a voice spoke right behind her.

“You comin’, or what?”

Robin twisted around. A sullen leather-jacketed young man with dyed black hair slouched in the doorway.

Lisa half-smiled ambiguously, stuck the kohl pencil behind her ear, and sauntered out past Robin, a hip-shot walk, oozing an indolent and perhaps slightly stoned sensuality. She disappeared in the direction of the stairwell with the boy.

Robin stood looking at her own reflection in the mirror for a long time. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes…dark, dark, dark. The harsh fluorescents hummed above her head. Beyond the tiled divider wall, a shower dripped.

She reached out and put her hand on the mirror, blocking out her own face.

The wind felt along the building outside… scratching for entry, whispering to get in.

Robin walked along the dark hall… past closed doors… moving inexorably toward a door at the end with brilliant light along the cracks of it. The whispering was all around her, growing as she approached… louder… louder—

The door crashed open, tearing from its hinges, unleashing a storm of formless swirling energies, howling with rage… rushing forth —

Robin woke to dim gray light, with her heart pounding crazily in her chest.

The shutters banged steadily against the window. The wind moaned as rain pelted down, icy, miserable.

She lay still, burrowed in bed, unnerved by her dream, the images of inchoate swirling things.

She’d fallen asleep while trying to read Jung’s explanation of archetypes; she could feel the heavy lump of book beside her in the bed. That’s where the swirling things had come from.

She reached for the book and looked down at the page.

The archetype is an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time….

Robin wasn’t sure she understood the concept, but there was something disturbing about it. A pre-existent form that could spontaneously manifest itself anywhere, at any time? Not exactly something she wanted to hear this weekend.

In fact, everything about Jung so far was unnerving…a man who’d begun his psychological studies back in the 1920s by going to séances—which, although cool, was somehow not what she’d expected to be studying in college.

She looked out the window at wind churning the trees, and shivered.

Then her stomach growled almost comically and she realized she was starving. She stared out at the storm in dismay.

She hadn’t thought about food, or that there would be too much of a gale outside for her to try for a convenience store or for The Lair on campus—which, she suddenly remembered, would be closed over the holiday anyway. She made a quick mental inventory of the stock on her closet shelf. It was as bleak as the day: a box of Triscuits, some packages of instant cocoa, and a stack of the student’s friend, Top Ramen—none of which was even remotely appealing. Waverly never ate, of course, though Robin knew there was an emergency bottle of Jack Daniel’s hidden behind her spare comforter on the top shelf of her closet, kept around to wash down the designer pain medication Waverly no doubt lifted from a mother as blond and petite and shrill as she was.

Robin’s only hope of food was a trip to the second floor, where a communal laundry room housed a Coke and candy machine, and there would surely be coffee and perhaps someone’s leftovers in the kitchenette.

But that meant going out into the hall.

She lay under the pile of comforters as long as she could, clinging to the warmth, until caffeine withdrawal forced her up. She dressed randomly, a skirt over wool leggings, a bulky sweater over a turtleneck, black on black, while rain pelted against the window behind her.

Her door creaked open into the corridor as she stepped carefully outside her room.

With all the doors closed, the hall was dim, spooky, far too reminiscent of her dream. She glanced toward the end of the hall…but of course there was only a wall, no door edged with brilliant light.

She stood uneasily in the doorway, listening for any sound.

Nothing but the wind scraping along the building outside.

A fragment from Lister’s lecture hovered in the back of her head:

… Jung believed there was a universal unconscious around us, populated by ancient forces that exist apart from us, yet interact with and act upon us .

She eased the door closed behind her, irrationally not wanting to disturb the silence, or draw attention to herself.

What are you afraid of, archetypes? She mocked herself. That’s mature .