The Harrowing (6 page)

CHAPTER TEN

The rain poured down monotonously outside.

Lakes formed in the lawns of the faded mansions; muddy rivers churned in the footpaths under the drenched and drooping trees.

In the window seat of her room, Robin had a book open on her lap, as if to fool herself that she was studying. But her gaze was fixed on her spiral notebook, where she was doodling a rather romantic sketch of the pale young man from her dream.

She wrote, “
Zachary
.”

She paused for a moment, then wrote the letter
Q
.

She stared down at it, traced it, trying to remember the rest of the strange word that the board had spelled last night.
Qloth? Qiloth?

But the word evaded her. She frowned, then wrote:

The shells?

The shelves?

????

She could feel the icy wind through the glass of the window, scratching at the building to get in. She pulled the comforter closer around her, looked up, brooding.

The wind swirled the trees outside, shaking the branches, bending the old trunks. Robin shivered, disturbed by the violence of it. There was an anger there, an anger at exclusion.

Something interrupted her thoughts, and she turned her head back into the room, suddenly listening.

There was someone in the corridor outside.

She could feel rather than hear at first. Footsteps, muffled by carpet, barely audible…approaching…stopping at her door…

Robin looked at the door, waiting for a knock.

Silence.

Robin tensed. After a moment, she pushed the comforter off her and stood. She moved to the door, reached out—

Something prickled on the back of her neck and she stopped, her fingers inches from the knob. She spoke aloud, wary. “Hello?”

There was no response. She was listening. But it felt like someone was there.

Panic tightened her chest. She stood paralyzed, her heart pounding.

She grabbed the knob, twisted it, pulled the door open.

The corridor was empty.

She looked both ways down the dank hall, then slammed the door. Simultaneously, there was a rattling behind her.

She turned with a gasp—to see something slide very fast down the wall on the opposite side and crash to the floor behind Waverly’s desk.

Robin stood frozen, her pulse racing, her throat tight with fear.

Dead silence. Nothing moved.

Stop it
, she ordered herself.
Something fell off the wall. Just go look
.

She pulled herself together, walked over to the desk. She leaned gingerly on the edge to peer behind, and frowned. She crouched, reaching, and withdrew a small decorative shelf. Above her on the wall, the nail hole gaped in the plaster, the nail lost.

Stupid. Nothing. You slammed the door, remember? The vibration
…

Then she looked at what she held in her hand and her breath stopped. A shelf?

A
shelf
.

“The shelves,” she whispered, triumphant.

The lounge was cold and empty and dim. None of them had moved the furniture back into place, and Robin hesitated in the doorway, weirded out by the jumble of upended pieces, silhouettes in the dismal light from the windows.

Who had done it?

Patrick was the obvious suspect, she had to admit. He was strong enough, and yes, it seemed like him to do it. But Cain was plenty strong, and he’d been so opposed to the séance to begin with. He could easily be hazing them—teaching them a lesson.

Lisa you couldn’t trust as far as you could throw her, and it was clear she’d do anything at all for attention, but she’d been in bed with Robin the entire night. And Martin was just…unlikely. Somehow, Robin doubted he could be loose enough to prank them like that.

But even as she thought it, something in the back of her mind countered:
As an experiment, maybe? Some psychological test?

She felt a wave of unease, remembering the books Martin had been studying:
Psychoanalysis and the Occult. Dreams and Telepathy
.

She looked around the wrecked room.

Whoever had done it, it hadn’t seemed so sinister when they were all together.

And what if none of
them
had done it?

She shivered, hugging herself.
But that’s what you want, isn’t it? You want it to be Zachary. You want him to be real.

A draft stirred her hair, warm, like breath.

She turned sharply, eyes searching the room.

Of course, there was no one.

And then her eyes fell on the built-in bookshelves against the wall. Several large volumes had been ripped from the bottom shelves and lay scattered on the floor, some facedown and open, pages crushed.

Robin frowned, forced herself to move forward into the room, past the overturned table where Martin had been studying, the scattered candles on the floor, the knocked-over chairs.

She stood above the pile of books and looked up at the shelves they’d fallen from.

Two long shelves of tall, slim leather-bound volumes.

Robin’s eyes widened as she realized what they were.

Yearbooks.

There were books tumbled on the floor, open to pages of photos, serious-eyed students in black and white, who looked both younger and older than Robin felt.

But it was one volume on the rug that drew her.

Without even hesitating, Robin stooped for the book that had fallen facedown and now lay in the middle of a patterned rose. The cover had the date 1920 in cracked gold.

She touched it and felt the same electric charge she’d felt from the planchette.

She opened the cover and in a flash, before she looked down at the page, she knew what she would see.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Robin stood outside Lisa’s room, knocking hard on the door with the moonlit desert scene.

After an eternity, the door swung open. Lisa stood in a camisole and bikini underwear. Her black-rimmed eyes were barely open; she looked half-dead.

Robin held up a yearbook bound with cracked leather, BAIRD LAW SCHOOL 1920 stamped on the cover in gold. “Look.” Her face glowed with excitement.

Lisa blinked and squinted at the book, which was open to a full-page black-and-white photo with a dedication: “
In Memoriam: ZACHARY PRINCE 1901-1920
.”

The photo showed a pale young man, startlingly like the one from Robin’s dream: broodingly handsome; dark hair and haunting eyes.

Lisa drew an admiring breath. “Oh, Daddy.”

Robin’s eyes were shining. “He was here. In the law school. He
died
here—in 1920.”

The girls looked at each other, electrified.

Kneeling beside Lisa’s bed, the yearbook between them on the coverlet, they looked through the book page by page, scouring for any hint of who Zachary had been. The epitaph below the photo was maddeningly discreet, and vaguely disturbing: “
Arise, arise from death, you numberless infinities of souls
.”

There was no detail of the death, no other photos of Zachary, save a smaller version of the same photo among the other third-year law students. Beneath that photo of Zachary it read “
Law Review and Sigma Chi
.”

“That’s what Mendenhall used to be, the Sigma house,” Lisa murmured. “So I bet you anything he lived here. He probably died right here in the Hall.”

Though it was a long shot, they went to Lisa’s laptop and tried Googling him. There were 212,000 matches for Zachary Prince, but none with any connection to Mendenhall or Baird, no 1920 obituaries.

“Damn, damn, damn.” Lisa closed the computer in frustration. “We have to find out what happened.”

“There’ll be old newspapers in the library,” Robin offered.

Lisa grimaced. “Which is closed until Monday, of course.” She smiled rather wickedly at Robin. “Oh well—we’ll just have to ask him.”

Now dressed in a raveled sweater that showed purple lace through fraying black cashmere, Lisa pounded on a door in the boys’ wing. Robin hovered behind.

Lisa pounded again. Patrick’s voice groaned from inside. “Go to hell.”

Lisa tried the knob; it turned. She pushed the door open and marched in. Robin followed.

Inside, the walls and shelves were covered with rock posters and concert paraphernalia. Otherwise, the room was surprisingly neat…almost rigidly so.

Patrick was sprawled in bed, bare-chested, hair mussed. Robin flushed, seeing him. Lisa was unimpressed. “We need you, cowboy,” she informed him, and jumped into the bed, bouncing slightly.

“That’s what they all say.” Patrick pulled her comfortably against him, as if they’d known each other for years. It was an easy intimacy, with none of the charged antagonism of the night before.

Robin stood awkwardly in the door, mortified.

Patrick glanced over at her and lifted the plaid comforter on the other side of him with a lazy smile. “Room for one more…”

Robin blushed deeper, if that was possible. Lisa flopped the yearbook on Patrick’s chest, open to Zachary’s picture. “Robin found Zachary.”

Patrick stared down at the photo. Robin could see he was unnerved.

“Fuck me…”

Lisa rolled away from him and stood, kicked the bed imperiously. “Get your ass up and let’s play.”

She grabbed the yearbook off Patrick, threw a sweatshirt at his head, and pulled Robin out the door.

As the girls headed down the dark corridor outside, Lisa smiled at Robin knowingly. “He likes you, too.”

Robin colored. “He’s with my roommate.”

Lisa shook her head, rippling her mane of hair. “And how high school is that? He’s out of the South, away from Daddy.…Miss NASCAR is holding on like hell, but he’s better than she is and he knows it. Baby doll, that cowboy’s looking for the real thing.”

She ran ahead down the hall, glanced back with a teasing smile before she ducked around the corner.

Her mood suddenly lifted, Robin ran, too. She caught up to Lisa at another door, where she stood knocking authoritatively.

There was a standard drug-store-issue plastic sign posted on it:

NO MINORS

How Cain
, Robin thought, amused. And then she glanced at Lisa, wondering,
How does she know where everyone lives?

Lisa was already pushing the door open, striding inside. Robin followed, more hesitantly.

Cain lay back on the bed in the dim light from the window, playing an acoustic guitar, an intricate melody. He barely looked up as Lisa strode to the bed.

Robin hovered inside the open door, looked around the room. On the floor-to-ceiling shelves, law books competed with a staggering collection of vinyl and CDs. An electric keyboard and guitar were shoved in one corner. Posters of Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Johnny Rotten glowered from the walls.
Old school
, she thought.
And that’s Cain, too
.

On the bed, Cain was pointedly ignoring the yearbook Lisa held open in front of him.

“You found this open on the floor, huh? Right to this picture. Isn’t that convenient.”

Robin bristled, defensive. “It wasn’t open.”
But it was set off from the other books. Almost positioned,
a voice in her head reminded her.
It could be a setup—someone playing a game
….

Lisa was speaking impatiently. “Oh, come play with us. You know you want to.” Lisa leaned over Cain seductively, one knee on the mattress.

Cain didn’t budge. He looked up at her with that level gray gaze. “Don’t you ever get tired of yourself, Marlowe?”

Lisa’s eyes blazed, but she didn’t flinch. “Every minute of every day, Jackson.”

The two locked eyes for a long moment, a hot, contentious look. Robin felt herself bristling, something twisting in her chest.

Cain shook his head. “Pass.” Then he looked directly at Robin. “And I think you should, too.”

Robin looked back at him, startled. Before she could respond, or even process, Lisa flared up at him. “Crap out if you want, but don’t spoil everyone else’s fun.”

Cain dropped his eyes to the guitar. “Whatever.” He bent over the strings and didn’t look at Robin again.

Robin felt her face burning, but Lisa grabbed her arm and pulled her out of the room, slamming the door behind them so hard that the NO MINORS sign fell to the carpet.

But as she dragged Robin toward the stairwell, Lisa was smiling, cheerful—that constant, mercurial shift. “He’ll be down,” she informed Robin lightly. “Trust me.”

They found Martin’s room at the very dark end of a third-floor hall. Unlike most of the other student rooms, his door was unadorned by any message boards, posters, or signs.

Then Robin caught sight of a small rectangular metal piece nailed into the door frame just below eye level, almost unnoticeable against the dark wood: a little scroll with Hebrew lettering. The word
mezuzah
flashed through her mind, though she wasn’t sure that was right.

Lisa was knocking and knocking. “Martin, we need you. Pretty please? I’ll breathe on your glasses….”

There was no answer. Lisa pressed her ear to the door, listening, then stepped back, shaking her head. She pushed back her hair, defiant. “Come on.”

Robin followed Lisa down the main stairs to the lounge. Lisa’s face was grimly determined; she hugged the yearbook to her chest like a shield. But some of the energy had gone out of the mission. Privately, Robin had serious doubts about what they could do without the others. There had been something between them the night before. Maybe the sudden, unexpected intimacy, maybe just the drinking and smoking.
But whatever it was, it was all of us.
She was quite sure.

She followed Lisa through the archway of the lounge and almost ran into her as Lisa abruptly halted.

Martin was there, standing over the round table with a legal pad and a pen, looking down at the board, a small figure amid the weirdly tumbled furniture.

Lisa said, “Hey!” loudly, and he jolted, clearly startled to see them, almost flustered at being discovered.

Lisa crossed the carpet to join him in front of the fireplace, blithely unaware of his consternation. “We were just looking for you,” she informed him, with that exasperating imperiousness that Robin was beginning to warm to. “We want to do another sitting. You’re game, aren’t you?”

Martin blinked at her. “Quite. I’ve been reading up on Ouija boards. There’s a good bit of legitimate research on the subject on the Internet.” He took off his glasses, gestured at the board like a small professor. “Our experience wasn’t unique, you know. It’s amazing how many cases of supernormal effects have been reported by reputable people.”

Lisa winked at Robin. “
Reputable
people.”

Martin put his glasses back on and looked to Robin, a diffident glance. “Something happened between us last night…the collective focus on the board, possibly the combination of personalities, some link between all of us…”

Robin was startled to hear what she had just been thinking coming out of Martin’s mouth. Behind them, the wind blew a spattering of rain against the windows, like a handful of tiny rocks.

“We achieved some kind of mental communication at least. Possibly precognition, as evidenced by the game scores in the newspaper.” Martin glanced at Robin again. ‘Taken from a psychological perspective, it would make a good subject for a term paper.”

“Hate to burst your Freudian bubble,” Lisa said loftily. She slapped the yearbook open on the table in front of him.

Martin stared down at the photo of Zachary, clearly taken aback.

“Zachary was as real as you and me. He lived here. He probably died here.”

“A ghost?” Martin looked up, not at Lisa, but at Robin. “Surely you don’t believe that.”

Lisa looked offended. “What’s your
supernormal
explanation for the furniture?” She waved around at the shambled contents of the room.

Martin blinked at her in the grayish light. “It’s highly likely the furniture was a prank. We can’t discount the human element.”

It was a perfect deadpan delivery. Robin and Lisa burst into spontaneous laughter. Lisa reached out, tousled Martin’s hair with something like affection. “God, no—not the human element.”

As if on cue, Patrick sauntered in, marginally dressed in sweats and a jersey. He yawned, surveyed the room and the others lazily. “What, no food?”

Robin and Lisa looked at each other and collapsed into giggles again. Martin smiled shyly, enjoying the joke. Robin felt a rush of warmth and camaraderie, and found, surprised, that she was on the verge of tears.

Patrick looked around at all of them, then pulled a new bottle of Jack Daniel’s from the waistband of his sweats. “Lucky I came prepared.”

Lisa stooped to pick up the candles from the floor in the back. She arranged them on the table beside the board and fished in a pocket for a lighter.

Almost automatically, Robin turned and knelt beside the fireplace, reached for logs to make a fire. Patrick hefted the yearbook, flipped through it. “So that’s Zach, huh? My man don’t talk much like a 1920s ghost, though, do he?”

Lisa rolled her eyes. “What does a 1920s ghost talk like?”

Patrick layered a British accent over his Southern one. “I say, old sport. Ripping good.”

Lisa scoffed, “He didn’t say he was English.”

But as they bickered, Robin thought fleetingly that Patrick was right. There was something off about Zachary’s speech patterns. Inconsistent.

Martin spoke impatiently, as if reading her mind. “The point is, it’s
not
a ghost. The messages are coming from us.”

He glanced down at his legal pad, which Robin could see was covered in notes.

“The history of the Ouija board is fascinating, really. The game became quite the rage in the 1920s. The occult movement, with its various forms of mysticism—séances, tarot, ceremonial magic, Kabbalah”—he glanced at Lisa briefly—”had taken off in Europe, and then America, due to the unprecedented number of deaths in World War One. And it was a dark time in general—World War Two already on the horizon, and of course…” He trailed off, took his glasses off and wiped them.

Robin realized instantly what Martin wasn’t saying.
Hitler. The Nazis
. She remembered Martin’s reference to his rabbi father.
We all have our ghosts, don’t we?

Martin replaced his glasses on his nose and continued. “Suddenly, a whole generation was desperate to contact deceased loved ones. In fact, this very board dates from 1920.”

He pointed to a cluster of Roman numerals beside the BALTIMORE TALKING BOARD imprint.

Robin thought,
1920 again. I wonder
—

But the thought evaporated as Martin continued.

“The spirit board was a rather sophisticated technological innovation for the time. Before the advent of the board, participants in séances attempted to communicate with the ‘beyond’ through table tipping or tapping.” Robin could almost see the quotation marks in the air as he spoke.

“ ‘Spirits’ would supposedly rap through the tabletop”—he demonstrated by tapping his knuckles sharply on the table—”which restricted questions to those requiring yes or no answers, or forced querents to count knocks corresponding to numbers of the letters of the alphabet—A was one knock; Z was twenty-six.” He rapped a few times—four, five, six—then lifted his hands. “Well, one can only imagine how tedious it must have been, waiting.”

Lisa murmured, “Insufferable,” but everyone was riveted.

Martin passed his hands over the board like a magician. “But then one Georges Planchette invented the alphabet board and this little piece.” He picked up the wooden indicator. “The planchette eliminated the need to count knocks numerically; the board could simply spell out words, or indicate numbers. At the time, an innovation about as revolutionary as the telephone.”

Robin noticed that his voice held real admiration. But then Martin turned dismissive.