The Harrowing (20 page)

The Qlippah bellowed. “NOOOO—LIFE—LIFE— NOOOO—”

Flames exploded around Patrick, licked up his clothing, eating at the rope. The corpse shrieked, straining and contorting its chest; the chair hobbled wildly in the air.

Then suddenly, the ropes binding Patrick burst. The chair fell to the floor.

Patrick’s corpse lurched grotesquely forward, dead limbs flailing like a puppet with its strings cut. Flames ignited his hair, searing the dead flesh.

All four of the others stood paralyzed, staring in horror and shock. Around them, reality seemed to ripple; what was left of the lounge was suddenly insubstantial, as if there was nothing but darkness around them, swirling forms in the wind. Robin groped for the Star of David in her pocket.

Cain grabbed Robin’s arm, shouted, “Everyone out—”

Lisa and Martin were already backing for the door. Robin clenched the metal piece in her hand, thinking mindlessly,
Help
… .

And at that moment, across the room, she saw him. Just a shade, incorporeal, very still in the swirling chaos of the room, standing at the top point of Cain’s chalked pentagram: the pale young man from the yearbook, from her dreams.

As Robin stood, transfixed, Zachary locked his bottomless eyes on hers and raised his fist to his chest: the gesture from the ritual.

Cain pulled violently at her arm, shouted in her ear above the maelstrom. “Robin! Now!”

“Zachary—” she gasped out. Cain stared at her, uncomprehending. Martin and Lisa hesitated by the arched doorway, glancing back blankly.

They don’t see,
Robin realized.

She looked back toward Zachary, who again pressed his fist to his chest. Robin’s eyes widened in comprehension. She spun to the others, shouting, “Finish the ritual. The others didn’t finish.”

At the archway, Martin stopped in his tracks. He grabbed Lisa and spun back, shouting, “
Yes
.”

Robin faced the staggering, burning corpse and raised her arms before her, shouting, “We close the portal of earth!”

She pulled her hands together, shutting the curtain. The burning corpse started to howl.

“LIFE. WARM. BODY. BLOOD. LIFE.”

Robin’s eyes were streaming. She gagged on the stench of burning flesh, but she spun to Lisa. Terrified, Lisa faced the burning corpse and shouted.

“We close the portal of water!”

She raised her arms as far as she could, shut her hands together. The corpse staggered jerkily toward her, burning arms raised. As Lisa stumbled back, screaming, Robin and Cain surrounded the corpse on the other side. Martin raised his arms, shouted over the howling: “We close the portal of air!”

The corpse turned away from Lisa, jerked toward Martin spasmodically.

“BREATH LIFE BODY GOD BLOOD DAMN BLOOD.”

Cain raised his arms, shouted, “We close the portal of fire!”

The burning corpse flailed horribly, screaming.

“GOD DAMN DAMN GOD DAMN YOU.”

Cain and the others all pulled their hands together at once.

And Patrick’s screaming body exploded in flame.

The force of the explosion tumbled the four of them backward. Flames ripped through the room, searing the walls and furniture.

Cain, Robin, Martin, and Lisa staggered to their feet, beating sparks off their clothing.

Above them, the roof beams burst into flame. Fire raced over the walls, lapping at the dry old wood of the paneling and furniture.

“Run,” Cain shouted.

For a split second, Robin looked toward the specter of Zachary, still standing on the point of the pentagram. Time seemed to stop. Then Zachary raised his hand to Robin—a farewell, or a blessing. Tears pushed at Robin’s eyes; then she turned away and shouted to the others against the wind, “
Go
.”

She seized Martin’s arm and ran for the door. Cain grabbed Lisa and ran with her.

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.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

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.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

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:

IN MEMORIAM — PATRICK O’CONNOR

OUR FRIEND

EPILOGUE

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 END

Read on for an excerpt of THE SPACE BETWEEN, by Alexandra Sokoloff

1.
Burning

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.

Don’t think about it. Can’t think about it. Keep moving. Caffeine and go
.

Anna grabs a Diet Coke from the kitchen fridge, grabs her backpack from the hall, and plunges out the front door into the black-and-blue pre-dawn. The dark outside is moving, alive, trees bending sinuously in the dry wind, which is always strongest just before sunrise.

She runs, and makes it to the corner just in time to catch her bus.

Inside, she rides in rumbling darkness, alone with the bus driver and two Latina housekeepers, over potholed streets, under the towering silhouettes of palms and old-growth trees, through sleeping San Gorgonio.

San G. is a base town, or was until the base was shut down in the closures of the nineties, plunging the city into economic depression. The war in Iraq did not revive the base. The dying town sprawls in a semi-desert ringed by mountains, pocketed in a valley which traps heat and smog for the entirety of the summer, only somewhat relieved in fall by the winds Anna once read described as “those hot, dry Santa Anas that come through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” And bring asthma and arson and devastating wildfires, Anna knows all that.

Santa Anas make people crazy.

But
…

But. The winds also signal change and excitement, and sometimes even magic…

Like that fall in first grade when she’d brought an umbrella to school even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and walking home from school she opened the umbrella and the wind picked her up and she could fly, actually fly off the ground like Mary Poppins, flying.

And for one day, she was magical—

The memory gives way to another and she sits up on the cracked vinyl bus seat with a gasp.

Tyler.

I dreamed about Tyler Marsh last night.

Definitely. Definitely something about Tyler
.

She focuses, concentrating with all her mind, but the dream is elusive, just out of reach. Still, the feeling is so intimate it makes her stomach flutter and her cheeks warm.

I knew him. He knew
me.
There was something between us
…

But the dream hadn’t been good. That much she does remember.

Not good at all
.

Her chest tightens with anticipation and unease as the bus shudders to a stop in front of the high school.

Read on for an excerpt from THE PRICE, by Alexandra Sokoloff

PROLOGUE

Dead of winter, and snow falls like stars from a black dome of sky. All sound is swallowed by the swirling white chaos.

No human life out there on this night. The city of Boston sleeps in the storm….

But underneath the ice beats a great heart that is never still.

Beneath the falling snow, a vast complex sprawls like a frozen spider buried in the white drifts—-the architectural wonder of Briarwood Medical Center: six state-of-the-art hospitals symbiotically entwined. Labyrinthine underground tunnels and high glass bridges above the snow-swept streets mate the white marble, Doric buildings of the old Massachusetts Bay Medical College, the dark brick buttresses of Mercy, the sleek curves of Briarwood Children’s Medical. Torturously twisting corridors wind through Gothic arches and classic Colonials and angular modern structures, creating a bewildering, futuristic maze.

Inside, the hospital has a peculiar vacuum quality of silence. In the fluorescent halls, medical personnel walk in measured paces; dazed, dreamy patients in robes drift past the open doors of darkened rooms. Snow flies outside the windows, beating soundlessly against the glass.

Deep within the labyrinth, a man moves in the endless halls: tall and dark, a graceful shadow against the white of the walls.

He is at home here, his movements fluid and unhurried, his angular face thoughtful and intent.

The corridors twist and turn, drawing the man deeper into the hospital, past vast wards with the injured and terminally ill moored in their beds. There is a throbbing pulse around the man, the heartbeat of the hospital: life-support machines augmenting labored breathing, soft moans of pain, quiet sobbing…and a whispering, barely audible at first, but increasing…

The man cocks his head slightly, listening.

The sound builds around him, the prayers of relatives keeping vigil. Pleas in all languages…overlapping…rising and falling in waves…through anger, through tears:

Please, God… please help her.…Don’t let him die…Dear Lord…Signora, aiutami…Hear me, Jesus
….

The dark man closes his eyes, listening to the music of the voices. Then his face sharpens, eyes opening and focusing to pinpoints, at the sound of one fierce, stark vow:

I’ll do anything
.

CHAPTER ONE

Deep in the heart of Briarwood Children’s Hospital—or perhaps it was Carver Women’s, the boundaries between the separate hospitals having so merged by now it was at times impossible to tell the difference—stretched a long corridor rarely traveled in the winter months.

A glass wall ran along one whole side of the corridor, looking out on the hospital garden, in mid-February now an Arctic wasteland, the shapes of statues and trees frozen and drifted in snow. On the other side of the hall, arched wooden doors led to the hospital chapel. The doors were not immediately apparent or even easy to access, but not a few people found themselves there almost by magic, in the course of desperate midnight wanderings through the hospital maze.

Inside, the chapel was small and dim, with four rows of wooden pews and a low platform serving as a dais, and cold, as if the oppressive overheating of the hospital had not been able to penetrate here. In a center pew, Will Sullivan sat alone in the enveloping silence. Handsome in the most well-bred of ways, a classic, uniquely American combination of movie-star elegance and frontier ruggedness, he currently looked ten years older than his forty-two years. His six-foot-plus frame seemed as stooped as an old man’s, his gray-blue eyes sunken, his face haggard with worry.

Will clasped his too-dry hands as if in prayer and tried to sit up straight, but it was a great effort; he felt scraped raw, nearly dead with exhaustion. In fact, for days, or weeks, or even months, he had not been entirely sure if he was awake or asleep.

Behind the podium at the front of the chapel, a tall stained glass window portrayed a slightly cubistic Christ as the Shepherd, watching over lambs. Against another wall, a wooden wheel depicting symbols from the world religions was mounted above a bookshelf lined with religious texts in various languages. Votive candles in red glass flickered on a side altar.

Will gazed up through bleary eyes at the patterned glass before him. Black words were scattered almost randomly in the panels like code, and for a moment Will lost himself, puzzling over the sentence.

THE LORD

IS THE STRENGTH OF

MY LIFE A VERY

PRESENT HELP IN TROUBLE

OF WHOM SHALL I

BE AFRAID ?

Will stared harder, caught by the final phrase, the last words set apart from the others, black and grim.

BE AFRAID

He shivered in the unheated chapel.

A shadow moved to the side of him. Will twisted in his seat, startled.

A round-cheeked, salt-and-pepper-haired chaplain stood in a side doorway, looking at Will inquiringly.

“May I help you?”

Will briefly took in the chaplain’s ruddy, eager face, the wrinkled suit, the too-tight collar around the clergyman’s substantial neck. Without thinking, Will shook his head. “No. Thank you.”

The chaplain hesitated, but when Will turned back to face the dais, the clergyman disappeared back through the side door.

Will sat again in the silence—and spoke aloud, surprising himself.

“God.”

He stopped, confused.

God who?

His tired mind paged through memories of Sunday services: sumptuous cathedrals with well-heeled parishioners; midnight masses at lace-curtain Irish churches; wakes, baptisms, charity events…all such a pillar of his father’s political life.