The Harrowing

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

By Monday, Mendenhall was as full and boisterous as ever, bearing little resemblance to the endless and haunted halls that the five of them had inhabited over the weekend.

The maelstrom of school descended, spiked by the heightened anxiety of midterms. Students studied everywhere, huddled alone in corners with piles of books, gathered in nervously chattering groups at every available table.

Everything returned to normal—except Robin. Instead of sleepwalking through her days under a dark cloud, she was wide-awake.

Somehow the terror of the haunting had receded and she was left with an overwhelming feeling of, yes, excitement, and impatience to know more. No longer envious of groups and pairs of students, she hurried through the halls, flushed and light-headed with her secret. Finally, she belonged to something bigger, something almost unbearably strange and fascinating. In fact, she could think of little else. If not for a dreaded biology midterm that afternoon, she would have gone to the library the very first morning.

Now, one midterm down, curled up in her room with Ego and Id, her mind kept wandering back to the long weekend, the board, the veering, delirious, almost sexual sense of being completely out of control. The tug of…something…responding under her hands.

And the impossible shatter of glass.

She shivered, but not exactly from fear.

Zachary was baffling. From 1920, but as Cain had said, pretty hip for a ghost. Lonely and charming. Sensitive and scathing. Intuitive and playful—and then the vicious fury at Martin, for no good reason.

There was a mystery here, and it tantalized her.

She thought of the sensitive young man in the yearbook (now concealed under her bed, threatened by dust mice but safe from Waverly’s prying eyes). Surely there was nothing monstrous in that face. Maybe the scary things, the lashing out, were coming out of his pain. He’d died suddenly, horribly; he was confused, frightened, lost, angry. And he, this lost spirit, had been reaching out to them, to her.

But the anti-Semitism, her mind reminded her. Those horrible things he said to Martin.

It seemed unlike him, whoever he was.

But it was part of that whole time, the twenties—

She realized immediately, ashamed, how hollow that rationalization was. It was vile, no matter how you looked at it.

Nothing good could possibly come from that.

Her eyes fell on her open notebook, and a phrase from Professor Lister’s lecture leapt out at her: “Do our demons come from without, or within us?”

She bit her lip, looked quickly away from the words—then realized that across the room, Waverly was turned around in her desk chair, watching her with a narrow blue gaze.

“What did you do around here for three days?” she demanded, obviously suspecting more than studying.

Robin looked her straight in the eyes. “Talked to ghosts,” she said dryly.

Waverly stared at her, then grabbed her overnight bag from the closet and stormed out of the room, slamming the door behind her against Robin’s laugh.

Robin almost went to the library that minute, but then a shutter banged against the window and a spike of fear shot through her—a memory of the rapping, and her own screams.

She shivered, and then went back to Freud.

But the longing continued.

She looked for the others, making needless trips to the laundry and the Coke machine, hoping to run into them, but they seemed to have melted back into the woodwork like whatever phantom they had been talking to.

Then on a blustery Wednesday, she was walking through the maples of east campus in the icy and intrusive wind. The sky through the branches roiled with dark clouds; the wind pushed at her, half-lifted her. Every step was like trying to balance against an invisible, chaotic power. But what she felt was exhilaration, anticipation. She stopped to catch her breath on the bridge over the swollen creek, leaned against the wall with her hair whipping around her, and found herself staring up at the weathered stones of Moses Hall, the philosophy building.

Cain stood on an upper balcony. He was smoking, staring off at the masses of dark clouds over the hills, completely unaware of anything below.

Then he looked down, right at her. Her heart leapt, and she saw him start. Their eyes locked across the distance…electric, and real.

So it did happen. And it’s not over, she realized. Not by a long shot.

The thought was a shiver of excitement and unease.