The Harrowing

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

“‘Each one of us is not even master in his own house, but must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind…’”

In the top tier of the psychology lecture hall, Robin barely heard Professor Lister’s lecture. More Freud. Endless Freud.

Her mind was on the oversized book in her backpack, the newsprint images of the attic fire.

Suddenly, students all around her were standing, collecting belongings. Robin realized the period was over.

She looked over the wave of departing humanity, searching for Martin. She’d looked for him at the beginning of class, but he hadn’t been there…and still wasn’t.

Robin stood, but lingered at her seat looking down at the white-haired professor on the dais, who was arranging his notes on the lectern for the next class. Do it, she ordered herself. She started down the stairs toward him.

Lister glanced up as Robin approached the dais. She hesitated, and he smiled down at her like some kindly Greek philosopher from the mount.

“Something I can help you with?”

Robin took a breath. How could she say it without sounding like a complete nutcase? “I wondered…what Freud had to say about ghosts.”

The professor raised his eyebrows. Robin hurried on, “I mean, people did see ghosts back then…in Vienna?”

“And since the beginning of recorded time,” he agreed. He took off his glasses, polished them. “Freud said ghosts are a manifestation of hysterical repression—deep wounds of the psyche slipping past the mind’s censor.”

He put his glasses back on, and must have caught the blank look on her face, because he elaborated. “At the risk of sounding simplistic, what haunts us is what is haunting us.”

Robin frowned. “So, basically, he was saying ghosts are all in the mind.”

“Not exactly. I believe he was saying that ghosts are the things we have buried in the mind—coming out.”

Students were filing into the hall for the next class. Robin shifted. “But Jung believed in real ghosts.”

The professor half-smiled. “Jung believed in ghosts utterly.”

He was so matter-of-fact. Robin stared up at him. “What do you think?”

He studied her, an appraising look. “I think the question is, What do you think?”

It felt like more than a question. But someone cleared his throat behind Robin, breaking the moment. She turned and saw a lanky, hawkish grad student standing behind her, balancing a briefcase and a stack of files. He looked pointedly at the stairs she was blocking. Robin stepped aside and muttered, “Thanks” in Lister’s general direction as the grad student brushed past her, and then she hurried for the aisle.

Outside the lecture hall, she stood on the mosaic marble tiles under the domed rotunda of the psychology building.

No help at all, she thought irritably. “What do you think?”

The truth was, she’d expected him to dismiss the idea of a ghost outright. Almost hoped it. Instead, this maddening ambiguity.

“Do our demons come from without, or within us?”

She felt unbalanced by the notion that Zachary could be something inside her coming out.

She certainly didn’t recognize the spirit as something from her. Or did she? Could she have made Zachary up? A student like her, lost like her, reaching out?

She could almost believe it was from her mind—if not for the book of newspapers in her backpack. Zachary lived here. He died here.

She was suddenly aware of a prickling on the back of her neck, an unmistakable sense of presence behind her.

She went cold, whirled on the floor.

Martin stood above her on the sweeping staircase, looking down from the shadows. “God,” she gasped.

“I need to talk to you,” he said flatly. His voice was hollow in the vast rotunda.

She breathed out. “I need to talk to you.”