Alexandra Sokoloff - The Harrowing

The four scrambled into the hallway, running full force for the front door. Behind them, there was a whoosh and a crackling roar as the lounge exploded into an inferno. Flames billowed into the hall behind them. Robin could feel the heat like breath on her back.

Cain lunged forward for the front door, shot the bolt, and jerked it open.

The four of them burst through the door onto the porch, slamming the door shut behind them, running down the steps, running as hard as they could from the burning building, into the grove, into the night.

Inside the dorm, windows began to burst from the heat, tongues of flame licking out. Firelight glowed and danced from the upper floors.

And inside, one last demonic howl of rage roared, rising to a crescendo, then was sucked away.

Into the Abyss.

Ash Hill Courier , December 21, 2011:

Ash Hill police today attributed the death of Waverly Todd, business student at Baird College, to another troubled student. The student, whose name has not been released, allegedly killed Todd before setting fire to a campus residence hall. The student perished in the blaze.

They stood in the copse of oak trees, in front of the memorial bench from 1920, Martin, Robin, and Lisa watching as Cain mounted the new bronze plate onto the marble under the names of Zachary Prince and the four other students.

Lisa placed a bouquet of wildflowers gently down on the bench; then Cain and Robin stepped up and put their arms around her.

Martin hovered apart until Lisa looked at him and reached out a hand.

He stepped to her side and the four of them looked down at the new bronze plaque under the old names:

The sun was setting over a Midwestern campus, pouring golden light over gently rolling hills.

Students walked the footpaths between modern buildings.

In the lounge of Norton Residence Hall, several students sprawled around the room, watching the old big-screen TV, playing Game Boys, half-studying.

A few of them looked up when an excited voice came from beside the built-in cabinets. A girl pulled a familiar-looking rectangular game box from the shelves, turned to the room.

“Hey, look what I found. Anyone want to play?”

The B Building is burning.

Anna Sullivan stands alone in the upstairs corridor, halfway between the Social Studies wing and the Math wing, her legs rooted to the floor, her heart racing in her chest. She can barely catch a breath through the smoke stinging her eyes and lungs. The wide dark halls of the school are thick with it, curling, wafting. Bluish, with an acid bite.

There is a creeping fear, undefined, but growing. And not just the usual school anxiety, either, the butterflies that always started the moment she stepped off the bus to cross the yard toward the prison gates of the high school. For one thing, she can’t seem to move.

What’s happening? A chemical fire? Those morons from Litwack’s 3rd period lab, trying to shut down the building?

There’d been half a dozen false fire alarms since the beginning of the semester.

But why are the lights out?

The only illumination is from the red EXIT signs above the side stairwell doors. The whole building is dark; there is only the drifting smoke, tinged red from the neon.

Alarm bells are ringing, but far, far away.

And why am I alone?

Anna turns her head and looks around her for what oddly feels like the first time, blinking through the smoky gloom. The cavernous halls are empty, and there’s no one in the open classrooms, either.

There is the sound of sobbing, though, from somewhere, resonating faintly in the tomblike dark.

And softly, softly, screams.

Screams?

Anna’s heart stops in her chest.

Panic breaks through her paralysis and she spins to stare down the center aisle of the classroom to the left of her, down the collapsing fiberglass curtain that serves as a wall between classrooms. What she sees turns her to ice.

Oh God oh my God …

Blood is splashed across the maps from World War II battle campaigns, the National Geographic history charts, bright crimson against the sepia.

Male legs in khaki pants and reindeer socks stick out from under sweet Mr. Brooke’s desk. The legs are stiff and still. Anna thinks absurdly of the Wicked Witch of the East, how she ran screaming from the living room when she was five and first seeing The Wizard of Oz on TV and those black-and-white striped witch legs curled up and rolled under the house… I

In her peripheral vision, a dark shadow runs suddenly past.

It is fast, so fast. Sinuous, snakelike. And it carries a long, thin…

Gun?

Smoke, screaming, blood, a gun ….

Anna whips around, staring down the corridor, her heart racing. No sign of the shadow.

Where is it? What is it?

Silence, stillness…

But it’s a heavy stillness, live.

She holds her breath, watching…and the shadow falls again across the wall.

It has two heads.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod

Anna unfreezes and runs for the main staircase. It feels unbearably slow, like running through sand. Like running—

In a dream

The fire alarms start to shrill, piercing, pulsing beats.

Anna veers instinctively toward the EXIT doors of the side emergency stairs. Her stomach plunges and she stops in her tracks. Someone has twisted a bike chain around the release bars, locking them.

It’s real. It can’t be real. This can’t be happening ….

Anna bolts past the chained doors, heading toward the center stairwell of the building.

Her breath is coming faster, her legs moving even more maddeningly slowly. Her pulse pounds in her head, the sound distorted and visceral. She knows the shadow is behind her - she can hear a double breath.

Madness ….

She reaches the edge of the main staircase, grabs the rail to pull herself forward onto the stairs—

At the foot of the staircase, on the landing below, Tyler Marsh stands looking up at her, as real as she is, even now heart-stoppingly beautiful, perfect profile and long, dark silky hair falling into his eyes. The alarms pulse around them, vibrating through her body.

Tyler?

She takes a shaky step toward him.

“ Run ,” he says, without opening his mouth.

The clock alarm is bleating in shrill pulses, five a.m. blinking redly from the digital screen. The morning is pitch black, the wind outside scrapes the thorns of the orange tree across the window like some creature wanting in. Anna’s heart still pounds crazily in her chest, shaking the mattress. She reaches for the clock to silence it, then lies back, dazed and groggy. The dream is gone.

The stench of smoke is in her nose.

Shower in the cramped, dark bathroom to wash away the lingering, inexplicable smell of smoke, then way too long with the hair dryer, reluctant to shut off the warmth. Anna mostly avoids her own eyes in the mirror, but sometimes, with her thick, dark hair blowing around her, she is almost pretty.

Dressed in a sleeveless, shapeless black dress with sweater wrapped around her waist, she negotiates the tiny, but labyrinthinely cluttered living room by the light of the silent TV screen. Her father is passed out and snoring in the huge vile LaZBoy, empty beer bottles scattered at his feet.