The Harrowing (5 page)

The silence was heavy in the shadowed room. Robin saw Patrick’s eyes dart from Martin to Lisa, wary and appraising.

Martin turned and faced them. “Freud. I was just reading that passage before I came over.”

The fire crackled behind them.

Martin looked at the girls. “Pure thought transference. It was in my mind…and you—one of you—picked it out.”

Or Zachary did
, Robin wanted to say, but she didn’t. The room was spinning; she felt a vertiginous excitement. She could see Martin’s eyes were shining, the detached academic stance gone.

Cain looked at her across the candlelight. “I heard you say you were in his psych class. You’ve read the same book.”

His face was cold. Robin felt a rush of indignation. “No, I haven’t.” She stared at him.

Martin reached across the table for his legal pad. “We’ll test it. We each write something secret about ourselves and leave it back here. Then we ask the board—and see what happens.”

Cain laughed shortly. “Forget it. I’m out of here.”

He started for the door, a long, lithe stride.

Robin faced him, calling out, “I didn’t set this up.”

Cain turned under the arch of the doorway, looked back at her. Robin stared back at him, and she could feel his hesitation, the question in his gaze.

But then his face closed and he walked out. Robin stood, her face as hot as if she’d been slapped.
Be a prick, then
, she thought. She was barely aware of Martin speaking impatiently from behind her.

“Doesn’t anyone else want to know what’s going on here?”

Robin turned slowly. Martin was tearing strips of paper off his yellow legal pad. He looked at Lisa, extended a slip of paper and a pen.

Lisa frowned but took the pen and paper.

Patrick strode over to the table. “What the fuck.” He reached for a strip.

Martin turned to Robin. She took the yellow strip, stood for a moment, then reached into her skirt pocket and scribbled quickly with her own purple pen.

Martin was writing, too. He folded up his paper so no one would be able to see what he had written. The others folded theirs, as well.

“Everyone put their papers down on the table,” he directed.

Patrick rolled his eyes in obligatory protest, but they all added their squares of paper to Martin’s.

Now Martin crossed the carpet to the table in front of the fire. The others followed.

How funny—he’s taken total charge
, Robin thought.
And we’ve let him. Even Patrick. Not such a White Rabbit after all
.

Martin stopped in front of the board and looked expectantly at Lisa and Robin. Almost obediently, the girls sat across from each other again. Lisa put her hands on the planchette and Robin followed, with some reluctance.

Martin cleared his throat and then spoke rather formally. “We’d like to ask some questions.”

Patrick and Martin hovered beside the table. Robin could feel everyone holding their breath, but the pointer didn’t move.

Lisa bit her lip. “Zachary?”

The planchette didn’t move at all. Robin’s hands felt heavy and awkward on the wood. Lisa looked across at Robin in the flickering light, and Robin knew she felt it, too.

“Zachary?”

Another long beat, then Lisa shook her head. She took her hands from the pointer, looked at the boys. “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean?” Martin frowned at her.

“There was something there before. An…energy. You could feel it. It’s gone.” She looked at Robin. Robin met her green gaze, nodded.

“Maybe it’s playing hard to get,” Patrick half-joked.

“Let me try,” Martin said abruptly.

He’s really into this
, Robin thought uneasily. But she stood, moved back from her chair so he could sit.

Martin sat down across from Lisa, put his fingers on the indicator. He spoke stiffly into the air. “Is…something there?”

Darkness…silence…

Nothing.

Lisa tried again. “Zachary?”

They sat for a long moment, fingers quivering on the wooden pointer.

The wind rushed the building, rattling the windows, whistling through the cracks of the wood, worrying the old bones of the house.

The pointer was completely lifeless.

Lisa looked at Robin again. “Nada. He’s gone.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

There was something anticlimactic about trooping upstairs, carrying candles from Martin’s table to light their way. The moving candlelight was disorienting, they had to feel their way up along the banisters in the darkness. The stairs creaked more than Robin had ever noticed in the daylight world.

No one spoke. After all their intimacy it was as if they were strangers again.
Almost as if we’re ashamed
…

Robin was dying to ask, to compare notes, to see if anyone would even acknowledge what had happened.
Did it only happen to me?
Her face flushed with a sudden paranoia.
Are the rest of them all in on it together, setting me up?

With a flash of unease, she remembered the books on the table in front of Martin:
Psychoanalysis and the Occult. Dreams and Telepathy
.

Was it all going to turn out to be some horrible, humiliating trick?

Robin caught a glimpse of Patrick’s face, startlingly coarse and crude in the candlelight, and she turned away quickly, disturbed.

As they reached the third-floor landing, Martin stopped and turned, about to speak, but Patrick broke the silence first, stretching suggestively. “Well, ladies, I hate to sleep alone on a holiday. What do you say, Marlowe?”

Lisa deftly avoided the arm he tried to drape around her, shot back at him, “You wouldn’t be able to handle me after Miss Tri Delt.”

Patrick leered toward her. “I bet Martin could use a good mauling.”

Martin ducked his head and skittered off into the dark of the boys’ wing.

Lisa exploded. “God, you’re an asshole.”

“You want him back? I can arrange it—for a cut—”

Lisa slapped Patrick viciously across the face. There was a stunned, frozen beat, then in a split second Patrick had grabbed her arm and pinned her against the wall, pressing his body into hers. Both were breathing hard; Lisa’s eyes flamed with fury. The sex between them was palpable.

Robin was frozen against the opposite wall, invisible.

Patrick smiled slowly, pushed back off the wall, releasing Lisa.

“Not worth the sperm.”

“You’ll never know,” Lisa snarled after him as he sauntered off into his own wing. She whirled and slammed through the door of the girls’ wing without a word to Robin.

Robin stood in the juncture of halls, feeling abandoned, bereft. After a moment, she stepped after Lisa into the pitch-black of the girls’ wing—and froze, her heart pounding.

A taper floated before her in the darkness of the hall.

Robin caught her breath, then realized the candle was her own, reflected in a mirror down the hall.

She turned and saw Lisa standing against the wall, watching her obliquely, the light from her own candle flickering on her face. “Want to sleep in my room?” she asked suddenly.

Robin was caught off guard—flooded with paranoia again. Was this part of the game? Get Robin to her room and scare the shit out of her later, when she was asleep?

Then Robin flashed back to the electric feeling of the planchette under her fingers, the ominous quotation the board had spelled out in the end—“
The most evil of those half-tamed demons
”—and realized that no matter what prank Lisa could dream up, it couldn’t be worse than going back to her room alone.

She nodded briefly. “Okay.”

Lisa started down the long hall, and Robin trailed her in the dark to a door with—

A window?
Robin thought for a moment, startled. She looked closer at the door and realized it was a painting of a window frame, looking out on a desert landscape at night, sand dunes stretched out under a huge moon.

Interesting. We’re all so much more interesting than anyone would have guessed
.

Lisa handed Robin her candle so she could unlock the door. She pushed it open and let Robin by—into a room like a Moroccan harem.

For a moment, Robin forgot her suspicions and looked around her in wonder at twin beds pushed together to form one big lush bed, draped veils, tin-framed mirrors on the wall, a carved wood screen, big pillows on the floor. Books lay open everywhere, overflowing ashtrays beside them. Robin noticed a Madonna CD case open on top of the dresser.
Not what I would have expected of Lisa at all. So Martin was right
, she realized, startled.
Or did he know Lisa before tonight?
She felt another sickening wave of paranoia.

Robin turned and caught Lisa watching her narrowly.

“You have a private?” Robin asked, flustered.

Lisa widened her eyes in mock innocence. “Can’t seem to keep a roommate. Oh
well
.” She grinned at Robin, tossed her a T-shirt to sleep in. She pulled her own torn sweater over her head, then peeled off her camisole with deliberate languor, exposing a Celtic tattoo on her left breast.

She turned to examine herself in the dresser mirror, stroking her stomach, trailing her hands down her waist. She held Robin’s eyes in the reflection.

God, everything’s an act with you, isn’t it?
Robin thought. But there was a charge in the room, electric and titillating.

Irritated, Robin moved to the bed, set her candle on the bed table, and unzipped her skirt.

So we ‘re not going to talk about tonight at all, then?

As she slid off her skirt, Waverly’s prescription bottle fell from the pocket and rolled on the floor, rattling. Robin reached for it, her face hot with shame, but Lisa was too quick for her. She scooped it up and looked at the pills with an expert eye, then turned her gaze to Robin, speculatively.

“How many were you going to take? All of them, or just enough to get you some attention?”

Lisa gasped as Robin grabbed her wrist, held it hard. “I won’t tell. You were moving it, weren’t you?”

Lisa’s eyebrows quirked. She smiled thinly. “Sweetie pie, I swear I thought
you
were.”

They looked at each other for a long moment Robin felt chilled. Then Lisa shrugged, her eyes sparkling. “Well, well, well. This could get interesting.”

She climbed into bed, flashing long bare legs, and snuggled under the covers.

Robin sat slowly on the other side, confused—and strangely exhilarated.

Lisa twisted down on the cap of Waverly’s prescription bottle and popped a pill, then offered it to Robin. “Valium?”

Robin shook her head.

Lisa leaned to her bed table to blow out the nearest candles, then paused, her face wreathed with the flickering glow. She called out brightly into the shadows, “Night night Zachary. Sweet dreams.” She huffed the candles out.

CHAPTER NINE

The last candle flickered out, drowned in its own wax. In the pitch-black of Lisa’s room, the girls slept, crashed out on opposite sides of the wide bed. But there was something else there, not asleep. The darkness of the room seemed to breathe.

Robin stirred, frowning… She opened her eyes.…

A pale young man stood in the shadows at the foot of the bed, looking down at her, his sunken eyes dark and fathomless
.

Robin jolted awake, her heart hammering madly. Her eyes jumped to the end of the bed.

No one.

She breathed out slowly, realized she had been dreaming.

She sat up, looked around her. Though her arms were still covered in gooseflesh, there was no one else in the room.
Obviously
, she chided herself.
What did you really think?

The light was sluggishly gray, but bright enough to register as afternoon.

She glanced down to her left. Lisa was sprawled on her side of the bed, dead to the world.

Robin looked past her, out the window, at yet another miserably rainy day.

Suddenly, the rest of the evening came back to her, a flurry of weird, disturbing images and emotions: the electric tingling under her fingers; the heart-stopping feeling of someone, or something, really in the room with them and moving the wooden pointer; fear and fierce exhilaration—the promise of something wildly mysterious just out of reach.

She felt confused and excited and alive. For the first time in ages, she couldn’t wait to see what happened next.

She sat up with a wild desire to laugh, then forced herself to stop, breathe, and get out of bed as carefully as she could. Lisa didn’t move.

Dressed now and reasonably combed, Robin slipped out of Lisa’s room and quietly closed the door behind her, clutching a Sartre coffee mug she’d grabbed from Lisa’s bookshelf.

She peered down the hall. With the overhead lights still on the fritz and all the doors closed along both sides, the corridor was as dank as if it were midnight. She stood for a moment, letting her eyes adjust to the dark, then moved through the murky hall, descended through the hollow stairwell to the second floor.

The tiny kitchenette was dark, the lights still not functioning. Robin stepped into the room—and pulled up short. Someone was at the counter. She recognized the lithe frame even before Cain turned, holding a Pyrex pot of coffee. His black T-shirt had a graphic of an eyeball dressed in top hat and tails, no doubt from a band Robin would have recognized if she’d been sufficiently hip.

His face brightened slightly, seeing her. “Oh, hey.” He extended the pot, offering her some.

“How’d you get it hot?” Robin asked, puzzled.

Cain shrugged, flicked his Zippo lighter with his free hand. “Don’t even try to keep me from my coffee.”

Robin stepped forward, holding out the Sartre mug for him to pour. When the cup was full, he lifted his eyes, meeting hers. “Any more spooks last night?” he asked, his voice heavy with irony.

She said carelessly, “It stopped after you left. We figure you were doing it all along.”

She felt a rush of pleasure that he laughed, startled. “You got me.”

Their eyes met again, a moment of surprising heat. Robin looked away quickly, confused, and gulped coffee, scalding the roof of her mouth.

The frisson of attraction was still there as they walked down the main staircase, a little flustered with each other. Unsure of how to talk to Mr. Skeptic about the previous night, Robin kept silent. But then she caught Cain looking at her. They swayed against each other and it felt like electricity crackling between them.

Robin pulled away and spoke abruptly, caffeine and nervousness making her brusque.

“So what’s your major, anyway?”

He actually flashed her a smile. “Pre-law—can’t you tell?” She found herself relaxing, smiling back. “What’s yours?”

“Undeclared.” And then she fired back impulsively, “Can’t you tell?”

Cain didn’t laugh this time, but looked it her so intensely, she had to look away.

They’d reached the bottom of the stairway, and although Robin had been completely unaware of where they were going, it seemed inevitable that they moved across the hall to the lounge.

They stepped into the arched doorway and both halted, staring. Robin felt her breath knocked out of her.

The room was a shambles, furniture overturned, the couch pushed across the room and tipped on end against the wall, books dumped from the shelves as if a cyclone had spiraled through the room. Robin looked around her, speechless.

In the gray light from the windows, Cain’s face was tight. “Someone’s playing games.”

Robin turned to him, startled. “Who?”

His eyes narrowed. “Smells like frat boy to me.”

Robin stiffened, protective of Patrick, but said nothing as she moved slowly into the room. The round table she and Lisa had used last night was still in front of the fireplace, seemingly the only thing in the room that hadn’t been tossed. She walked up to look.

The board was centered neatly on the table, with the pointer poised over

Z

Robin gasped, staring down. Cain stepped quickly to her side. She looked at him, stricken. Cain started to shake his head, then something thudded behind them and they both spun.

Patrick stood in the doorway, holding a beer. He stared around at the mess. “Whoa…”

Cain ground out, “Park it. We know you did it.”

Before Robin could protest that she thought no such thing, Patrick was speaking, staring at Cain. “Get out. You didn’t?”

Cain laughed humorlessly. “I don’t believe this shit.”

Patrick spread his arms, the picture of innocence. “Hey, it wasn’t me, man. Maybe Marlowe.”

“Right. Little Lisa moved all this stuff.”

Behind Patrick, Lisa and Martin walked in together. They both stopped still in the doorway, with an almost comic double take as they registered the chaos of the room.

“Oh my God,” Lisa breathed.

Patrick turned to her. “Zach left us a present.”

Martin looked around, taking in the damage, eyes blinking behind round glasses. Then he looked straight to Patrick.

The implication wasn’t lost on Cain. “Yeah, that’s what I think, too.”

Patrick turned on Cain, pointing at Martin. “It coulda been him, you know. Or the two of them together.” He waved his hand to include Lisa.

Martin looked to Robin. “You guys didn’t do this? It isn’t a joke?”

Robin looked at him, then at the others, slowly. “I don’t know.” They were silent in the dim hush of the room.

Lisa pushed her hair back. “Well, I know. Show them.” She nudged Martin—a surprisingly proprietary gesture. Martin took the newspaper from under his arm and unfolded it to the sports section to reveal a headline. He displayed it like an attorney with Exhibit A:

CORNHUSKER ROUT: 28-14

Patrick gaped. “Alabama by fourteen. Fuck me backwards.” He grabbed the paper, scanned the article.

Robin was reeling.
We couldn’t have known that. Not any of us
.

“Now tell me how we just happened to call that,
dude
.“ Lisa gloated.

Cain’s face had gone very still. He glanced at Robin sharply, and she looked back, bewildered.

Lisa was already pulling out a chair, seating herself at the table in front of the board. “Okay, Zach. Time to wake up.” She looked up at Robin expectantly. Her eyes gleamed in the muddy light.

Patrick looked up from the newspaper, glancing around at the rest of them. “How the hell did someone know that?” His eyes came to rest on Lisa.

Lisa smiled at him, catlike. “We didn’t. Zachary did.”

Cain spoke, his voice hard. “Bullshit.”

“Interesting, though, isn’t it?” Martin said. “I for one can’t think of any logical explanation for any of us knowing those game scores. Which leaves us with two alternatives: Coincidence…” He paused importantly.

For effect
, Robin thought.

“Or…we actually achieved some kind of precognition. Perhaps through our mutual concentration on the board.”

Lisa sat back in her chair and laughed. “We could keep blatantly ignoring the obvious. Or we could just ask him. Zachary.”

Cain laughed shortly, shaking his head. “It’s your game. Go on and play.” His glance grazed Robin, and for a moment she thought he would say something more, but he merely walked out through the arched doorway, leaving the four of them in the dim paneled room.

“Robin,” Lisa urged from the table. Robin took a step forward.

“I’ll do it,” Martin said abruptly, and brushed past Robin to sit across from Lisa. The two reached simultaneously over the board to put their hands on the planchette, and Robin noticed again that they seemed strangely comfortable with each other.

Patrick moved in closer. He caught Robin’s eyes for a moment, then looked away.

Lisa pressed her fingertips into the wooden pointer. “Zachary, are you there? We want to talk to you.”

The room was silent. Robin found herself holding her breath. The trees outside the tall windows swished in the wind.

But the planchette was motionless under Lisa’s and Martin’s hands.

“Zachary, did you move the furniture?” Lisa demanded.

The planchette was still over the black letters. Lisa shifted in her chair, wheedled suggestively. “Please won’t you come talk to us?”

Nothing.

Robin moved closer to the table, impatient.
It won’t work with Martin. He knows that—we saw it last night.

Lisa looked up at Robin, as if reading her thoughts. Martin looked at the two girls, then stood reluctantly, ceding his seat to Robin.

Robin sat, extended her hands to the pointer.

Lisa met her eyes, pressed her fingers into the wooden piece. “Zachary…”

Beside the table, Martin and Patrick watched, everyone holding their breath.

Robin leaned forward slightly, trying to feel…something. “Zachary…”

The planchette was still and dead under her fingers. Lisa looked at Robin.

Robin shook her head slightly, spoke to the others. “He’s not here.”

Martin nodded, looked at the girls, at the board, thoughtfully. “The conditions aren’t right. Why?”

Robin took in the other three against the shapes of tumbled furniture. She didn’t know how, but suddenly she knew. “Cain. We need everyone.”