The Harrowing (15 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The rain had started in earnest, pounding into the railroad tracks at the edge of town, pooling on the boarding platform of the Ash Hill train station, the town’s gateway to the outside world.

Cain drove his dented Mustang across the iron tracks and turned into the parking drive of a drooping two-story railroad hotel across the street from the station.

He parked in front of the office and turned off the engine, looked at Robin briefly in the reddish neon light. They turned away from each other in the same moment, got out of the car without speaking, and ran through the sheets of rain for the door.

The Mainline office was as seedy as Robin would have expected from the hotel’s reputation on campus. She avoided the filthy sprung couch, hovered by the door, dripping water, as Cain put bills down on the battered counter.

The red-eyed, rail-thin night manager scooped up the twenties. He leered toward Robin, smirked at Cain, dangled the room key from a finger. “Happy trails.”

Robin’s cheeks were burning as they went out into the rain. The sagging screen door slapped closed behind them.

In the boxy little room, Cain pulled faded chintz drapes across the window. He turned, caught Robin staring at the lumpy bed.

She lifted her eyes from the bed to his face.

The room flashed with blue light. Thunder cracked, booming through the sky. Rain spilled down outside, another torrent.

Robin breathed out and sat shakily on the edge of the mattress. The box springs squeaked under her weight.

Cain sat on the windowsill, his face streaked with rain, watching her. “So what really happened—back there—in your room?”

She looked up at him with haunted eyes. “I don’t
know
.” She shivered, remembering. “I thought I was dreaming…but I woke up and there was something on top of me.” She nearly lost her breath again, feeling the foul dead weight, the black terror. “I was fighting it—and then I heard a crash and screaming…and when I went to the window, I saw her…I saw her…”

And then the thought that she had been fighting all night long to suppress finally bubbled to the surface, and she looked at him, stricken. “Oh my God. What if I really did kill her?”

The whole horror of it overcame her. She put her face in her hands and began to cry.

Cain moved swiftly to crouch in front of her. He took her arms hard. “You didn’t kill anyone. Robin.” He shook her slightly. “Was there
something
on top of you? Or
someone
?”

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.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

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.’ ”

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.”

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.