The Harrowing

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The north side of campus was built on a hill. A set of terraces connected by staircases descended to the main plaza, each terrace leading off to different paths and buildings, like an elaborate vertical maze.

Robin and Martin walked down the staircases, under oaks and maples, an occasional tall pine, as Robin recounted the coffeepot episode. “It was just like the mirror—that night. It felt the same. This…tension— and suddenly the coffeepot shattered in her hand.”

“And this happened with just you and Marlowe present.”

“And Waverly.”

Martin stopped on a terrace, leaned against the base of a statue to write rapidly in a spiral-bound notebook.

Robin debated telling him about the yearbook moving from its spot under her bed, then decided against it. He seemed perfectly convinced already; she was gratified that he didn’t question her experience at all.

Robin looked down the walkway, lined on one side with brooding Greek statues on stone pedestals. The wind blew her hair in her face and she brushed it away.

“I think he’s still around. Zachary. I think he has been—since that first night we talked to him.”

Martin stopped his scribbling. “A ghost again?”

Robin bristled. “What else?”

“Purely psychological. Taken one at a time, each incident can be rationally explained. But taken together…well, we all bought into something bigger. We fed it energy, if you will.” He looked up, out over the layers of clouds on the horizon, beyond the tops of the trees. There were high red spots in his cheeks from the cold. “And physical manifestations occurred. The mirror did shatter. There were rappings. And now, with the coffeepot breaking, peripheral manifestations.”

He flipped back pages in his notebook…and Robin realized that the whole binder was filled with notes of the Thanksgiving weekend. Dozens of pages, scribbled in his cramped longhand. She saw her own name, and Lisa’s, and what she was sure was Hebrew lettering before he shut the notebook.

She frowned. “So nothing more has happened to you since that night?”

“Nothing.” Martin’s voice was short; he sounded disappointed.

He tapped his pen on his notebook thoughtfully. “But we have all the classic conditions for a poltergeist haunting. You and Marlowe—all that hormonal angst…” He glanced at her, then away.

Robin flared up. “You guys aren’t exactly choir boys.”

“That’s my point. There’s a synergy of…unhappiness among us. A fusion of ‘Discarded Ones.’”

He seemed amused by the term, and Robin felt a chill, although without knowing why. She looked around at the statues surrounding them, blank marble eyes staring down.

Martin spoke beside her. “I bought a new board.”

Robin turned and stared at him. “What?”

“How can we not follow up?” he said impatiently. “It’s a perfect term paper. My thesis question is ‘Can a focused collective emotional energy cause a psychokinetic effect?’”

Robin shook her head almost violently. She unzipped her backpack and pulled out the book of old newspapers. “I don’t think it’s emotional. I’ve been doing some research, too.” She opened the book on the marble pedestal, turned pages to the article about the fire. (She’d been careful to remove the inserted page with the vile song before she packed the book).

She held the pages down against the wind and stepped back so Martin could read. “It’s all here, just like he said. Zachary died in a fire in Mendenhall. I think that’s why he’s so angry and… lost.”

Martin looked exasperated. He stepped closer, glanced over the article.

She watched him read, and was gratified to see a shadow flicker in his eyes. “How do you explain that we were talking to a ghost who called himself Zachary when there was a real student named Zachary who died in that very building in 1920?”

“But that’s precisely how these subconscious messages work,” he explained with exaggerated patience. “You and I were reading texts from the 1920s. The board we were using was dated from 1920, so 1920 was in the atmosphere between us. We’re living in the building where this student died—in 1920. One of us is bound to have heard something about it. We bring all these random facts together on”—his voice dripped sarcasm—” ‘a dark and stormy night.’ The collective subconscious energy puts all those connections together and starts spelling out messages from this so-called ghost.”

Robin felt her face getting hotter and hotter. It was almost perverse, the way he refused to see.

“Maybe you just don’t want to believe,” she said suddenly.

He almost gaped at her. “What—”

“Maybe you’re not seeing because you don’t want to see. It reminds you too much of religion, when you’ve just flat-out rejected everything, right? It’s all psychology to you. No God, no religion, no ghosts.”

Martin looked startled, and, in fact, she’d surprised herself with her outburst. But he answered her with raw impatience.

“Of course I rejected it. It’s so completely archaic. I’m supposed to believe in a religion based on texts from the Middle Ages that seriously acknowledge astrology and numerology and… demons? It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s beyond comprehension. Give me Freud any day.”

Robin wanted to point out that he had a charm from that archaic religion nailed to his door frame, but she didn’t know what good it would do. He was extremely conflicted; that much was clear. She had a sense that he wanted to believe, and was overcompensating in his skepticism. All to do with his rabbi father, no doubt. Positively Freudian.

But before she could say any of that, Martin abruptly switched gears.

“All right, we have conflicting theories. So we test it.” He cleared his throat, suddenly seeming nervous. “We could…do the paper together, from the two different points of view.” He looked at her briefly. “‘Poltergeists—Psychic or Psychological?’”

Thrown off by the change in tack, Robin stalled. “Have you talked to the others?”

Martin reddened, looked off down the terraced stairs. “I was hoping maybe you could. I mean…you’re so honest and real and…they like you.” His voice dropped. “People don’t tend to like me.” He looked away from her, blushing even deeper.

Robin herself flushed—both with pleasure at Martin’s assertion that the others liked her and confusion at the realization that he liked her.

Martin stood awkwardly, in an agony of embarrassment. She reached, grasped his arm, and shook it gently. “I’ll talk to them. But not for a term paper. To find out why Zachary’s here, what he wants. We can’t just play around.” She looked off toward the edge of campus, toward the Hall, and her face was troubled. “He’s not playing.”

The sky was already streaked with dark when she left Martin at the bottom of the stairs on the main plaza. She did not see that he turned to watch her as she went…holding his arm where she’d touched him.

She turned off the plaza and walked along the footpaths that meandered through the oak grove, her feet crunching on the slippery dry leaves. Branches entwined over her head, enclosing the path. Her thoughts were stormy. Martin might have convinced himself that he could find a scientific explanation, and maybe write a brilliant and groundbreaking thesis in the process, but there was something else behind this obsessive pursuit of the facts. In his own way, he was as caught up in the mystery as she was. He was only being hyperacademic because it was comfortable, or reassuring, or safe. And he was obviously rejecting anything that resembled faith—so hell-bent on not believing that he was ignoring what was right in front of him. That wasn’t only stupid; it might even be dangerous.

And, she suddenly intuited, she had the distinct feeling he wasn’t telling her everything. He was—maybe not lying, exactly, but he was definitely holding back. Her mind went to the Hebrew lettering she’d seen in his notebook. Significant, but she didn’t know why.

Ahead of her was a small copse of trees, a circle within the grove, with a bench inside the circle. Her steps slowed and she realized that she had been headed here all along, although she’d never thought much about the place before.

She moved off the path and waded through a tangle of vines into the quiet circle of trees, approaching the curved marble bench.

She’d passed it before and noticed the inscribed names, but she’d never really looked; there were many such memorial benches and statues scattered about campus, gifts from wealthy alumni, sometimes from an entire class or club or fraternity. But there was something about this one, a heaviness—the isolation of it, maybe, or the formality of the circle that enclosed the bench.

She brushed past the rough trunk of an oak, stopped in front of the bench, and looked down at the lettering in the marble. The date made her shiver.

There were five names engraved underneath in alphabetical order. She reached out slowly and touched the fifth.

And as she stood with her fingers against the cold, smooth stone, she felt a breath on her cheek, exactly as if someone was standing beside her.

She whirled, staring around her in the shadowy grove.

The trees were tall and still, the air heavy.

There was no one there.

But there was. She could feel it, a presence like eyes, like touch.

“Zachary?” she whispered.

The slightest wind breathed through the shrubbery around her, brushed teasingly at her clothes, slid into the cloth like fingers. Robin gasped.

The breeze lifted her hair, caressed her cheeks, breathing into her ear. Robin closed her eyes, turned her head into the touch, even her heartbeat suspended.

The wind rustled again through the trees—and was gone.

Robin opened her eyes.

The grove was still, and suddenly colder, the sky almost completely dark.

Her face was flaming, but she trembled with cold. And then, suddenly terrified, she turned and ran from the circle of trees through the grove.

She pulled the heavy front door of Mendenhall closed behind her and stood beside the wall of mailboxes in the dim hall, flushed with strange feelings, not all of them fear.

It was Zachary.

The longing—she’d felt it. It was real, and intense, and—

Pleasurable.

Her legs felt light and weak and her breasts ached as she remembered the touch of wind under her clothes.

Someone touched her back in the dark and she twisted around, freaked.

A shadow towered in the dark hall.

She shrank back against the coat rack, barely bit back a scream—and then she recognized Patrick.

His face was tight in the shadows of the entry hall, his voice curt, distant. “We need to huddle. All of us. The Columns at eight.”

Robin nodded, speechless. And then for a moment, something flickered in Patrick’s eyes—stark, intimate—

Terrified.

Her gaze locked with his.

Then he turned sharply and walked off, leaving her in the dark.