The Harrowing

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.