The Harrowing

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The sky swirled with turbulent clouds outside the cathedral windows in the college library.

Robin walked through the labyrinthine stacks of the periodicals archives, her eyes running along the years listed on the bound spines of old magazines—1950, 1949, 1948—a feeling eerily like going backward in time. She passed the thirties, moved through the twenties, thought faintly of Gatsby and flappers and stock market disasters.

And Hitler. “A dark time in general,” Martin had said.

She halted at 1920, the date in cracked gilt on a wide, crumbling spine.

She stepped to the shelf, pulled out the thick book of bound yellowed news journals.

In the soporific quiet of a study carrel, she pored over old school newspapers with photos of solemn jocks with slicked-back hair and baggy uniforms; ads for soaps that promised God-like cleanliness, for bottled study-aid tonics that might as well have been labeled “cocaine”; news of war, of students enlisting, shipped overseas. The black-and-white pages had turned sepia, fragile; the musty smell was a sense memory of a time she’d never lived.

She carefully turned another delicate page, and stopped, her eyes widening.

She was looking at a photo of Mendenhall. Not quite the rambling hodgepodge it was now, but the main structure was recognizable—except that the top floor, what had to be the attic, was blackened, charred by fire. Smoke still curled from the turrets. The headline proclaimed in seventy-two-point type: FIVE KILLED IN FRATERNITY FIRE.

Robin’s mind barely had time to register. Five? Like us. We’re five—

Then her eyes locked on one of the names: “Zachary Prince, son of Dr. and Mrs. Abraham Prince…”

She scanned the newsprint quickly, the words pounding in her head. “The fire originated in the Mendenhall attic, trapping the five students, who succumbed to the blaze. Fire investigators have no clue how the fire started or what the students were doing in the attic….”

Robin looked up, her eyes dark. Her thoughts roiled, with no coherent theme; everything in her body felt numb.

She turned the page of the book to see if the article continued. There was no more on Mendenhall, but a slip of paper was stuck between the pages, yellowed, with a hand-printed verse:

Robin gasped aloud at the viciousness of it.

You don’t know what you’re dealing with, the voice in her mind said grimly. You’re in way over your head.

She felt a cold prickling on the back of her neck, spreading down her spine. Suddenly, she was sure that she was being watched.

She twisted in her chair, stared back into the narrow rows of metal bookshelves behind her, searching the shadows between the stacks.

No one in sight.

After a long moment, she turned back to the desk and the book, tried to focus again on the article. But the feeling of intrusion remained on her skin, clammy and unwelcome as a stranger’s touch.

The sunset was spectacular and bleak, a thin, piercing silver and black, like a prizewinning photograph. The wind, high and chill, whistled through the spiky, sharp tops of trees.

Lights were on all over the dorm, students hunkered down with their laptops and books in bed or hunched at their desks, wrapped in blankets.

Robin stood at the very end of the third-floor boys’ hall, knocking on the door of Martin’s room.

She stepped back, a bit breathless, waiting. Under her arm she held the book of newspaper clippings from 1920.

There was no sound from within the room and, now that she noticed, no crack of light showing under Martin’s door. Robin hesitated, then knocked again, harder this time, just in case.

Why her first thought was to go to Martin, she wasn’t sure. It was an impulse, or maybe more an instinct: in a group of outsiders, Martin was as much an outsider as she was. There was a bond there—of alienation?—that she trusted more than any connection she had with the others.

At the very least, what she had under her arm was a fact; he would appreciate that. He was as determined as she was to know.

And there’s another connection as well, isn’t there?

Her eyes fell on the little metal piece hammered into the doorjamb, its Hebrew letters barely visible in the gloom of the hall. Mezuzah, her mind reminded her, though she had no real idea how she knew the word.

Funny—didn’t Martin say that first night that he didn’t believe in God? But wasn’t having this piece, this mezuzah, like having a cross beside your door? A reminder of God? Not exactly an agnostic thing to do.

She thought uneasily of the board’s fury at Martin.

But it wasn’t at Martin, was it?

Her mind flashed back to the board, the savage messages:

She stood still. God… a Jewish God… the rage of it… Zachary’s anger is at God….

She knew it was meaningful, somehow. And then the thought was gone, and she was back in the corridor, in front of Martin’s door.

There was only silence from the room. But somewhere on a floor below, she could hear someone playing electric guitar, fast, hot riffs.

Robin turned, listening. After a moment, she stepped through the stairwell door and followed the sound down the dark stairs. She moved with the sound into the second-floor hall and stopped, as she had somehow known she would, outside the door with the NO MINORS sign.

She stood outside Cain’s room for a long time without moving, then raised her hand and knocked.

There was no answer, just the music. Robin had an image suddenly: an electric guitar plugged into an amp…the sound surrounding Cain through the headphones he wore, shuddering through him in the dark as he played furiously, obsessively, his eyes dark and strange…

Robin stood in the dark outside the door for longer than she knew, the guitar searing through her cells, vibrating her bones, somehow eerily familiar. And then she recognized it.

The sickening, delirious feeling of the energy through the planchette.

Robin backed away, turned, and ran down the hall toward the stairwell.

Flushed but calmer, she stopped off at Lisa’s room on the way back and knocked on the door

with the desert moonscape. There was no answer. She thought briefly, longingly, of going to Patrick’s room, but chances were dismally good that Waverly would be with him, and there would be no explaining what Robin was doing there. Waverly was suspicious enough (of orgies, ritual sacrifice, Robin wasn’t sure) without any prompting.

In the end, she simply went to bed and lay in the dark, listening to the swirling wind, watching the trees bend outside the dark glass of her window, thinking of the other four, the group of them. Not friends, not even companions. But she’d shared something with them more profound than anything she’d ever experienced. Now she didn’t have the first idea how to approach them, or even if she had the right to—but she knew it wasn’t over.

It was a long time before she fell asleep.

And the last thought that kept running through her mind in the dark was: Five.

There were five of them, too, in 1920. Zachary and the others.

And they all died.