The Harrowing

CHAPTER THREE

By five, the dorm was completely, eerily empty, halls dark and silent as the grave.

Robin had expected to feel at least some relief at Waverly’s departure. Instead, she felt a dread closing in on panic.

She had never experienced the dorm without dozens of people in it. Deserted, it was much bigger than she’d realized, three stories and two and a half wings of crooked corridors, confusing to navigate without the landmarks of familiar faces. All the floors looked disconcertingly the same when the doors were shut.

And Robin hadn’t really imagined how different it would feel—that there was a life force in the presence of others that pervaded the building. Even when she was in her own room, consciously unaware, her subconscious must have registered all the others.

Now the Hall was as empty and dead as a shell.

Without people, too, the dorm seemed to lose its very insulation. The wind reached icy fingers through minute cracks in the walls, snaked its way up through the floorboards. The rain had started again, slanting and relentless, and with it a fresh assault of wind. The windows rattled like bones; the whole structure shifted and groaned on its foundation.

And it had finally occurred to Robin that the communal bathroom was all the way down the hall. She’d have to leave her room in the middle of the night, when anyone could be lurking around, lying in wait for lone college girls stupid enough not to go home for vacation. No one could possibly hear her if she screamed and screamed.

Stop it, she ordered herself. Go out there right now instead of being an idiot about it.

She opened her door to a dark hall of closed doors, all locked to silent rooms. She took a breath and made her way down the corridor to the bathroom.

She stepped through the doorway—and pulled up short, stifling a gasp. There was someone else in the bathroom.

A slim girl with a wild mane of questionably blond hair was leaning over one of the sinks lined up under the long horizontal mirror. Her mouth was pursed in concentration as she outlined her already-blackened eyes with kohl. Her torn lace blouse and short skirt revealed an elaborate navel piercing and several provocatively placed tattoos. A piece of red yarn was tied around one wrist, knotted in several places and frayed at the ends. Some L.A. thing, no doubt; she positively reeked of California.

The girl—Lisa, Robin thought her name was—had a room on the opposite side of Robin’s floor. She had the paleness and perpetual yawn of a druggie, but there was an interesting fuck-you fire in her eyes. In the two months of the short term, Robin had seen numerous boys leaving and entering her room at all hours of the night and day, almost never the same one for even two days in a row.

Lisa glanced at Robin sideways in the mirror, drawled, “Love these holidays…”

Robin felt again the blistering envy of the fierce, crackling life in the other girl. But this time, along with the envy was something more: a yearning, an uncharacteristic impulse to reach out. She hovered by the lockers, gathering the courage to ask the girl if she was staying—then jumped as a voice spoke right behind her.

“You comin’, or what?”

Robin twisted around. A sullen leather-jacketed young man with dyed black hair slouched in the doorway.

Lisa half-smiled ambiguously, stuck the kohl pencil behind her ear, and sauntered out past Robin, a hip-shot walk, oozing an indolent and perhaps slightly stoned sensuality. She disappeared in the direction of the stairwell with the boy.

Robin stood looking at her own reflection in the mirror for a long time. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes…dark, dark, dark. The harsh fluorescents hummed above her head. Beyond the tiled divider wall, a shower dripped.

She reached out and put her hand on the mirror, blocking out her own face.