The Harrowing

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Isolated at the end of a residential street at the edge of town, Temple Emanu-el was a product of sixties architecture, built in a series of white arches that looked weirdly like a huge white shell.

It was early morning, but inside, the synagogue felt as dark as night, only a few ghostly safety lights casting oval pools of illumination beside the pews.

Cain and Robin moved into the resonant silence. Robin looked up and around at the high arched ceilings, the Hebrew lettering in the stained-glass windows, took in the mosaic tiled floors under their feet. Somewhere, a cantor was chanting, a haunting dissonance. Robin hadn’t been in a church in years, but this place felt older than any church she’d ever seen. She felt the strange sensation of slipping backward in time.

She jolted as a voice came sharply from the darkness in the front of the synagogue. “Yes? Is there something you want?”

Cain and Robin spun, searching the shadows.

A set of heavy curtains rippled and a rabbi stepped through a curtained door by the side of the dais—formal and severe in his black coat and white shirt, yarmulke and black-rimmed glasses.

They’d worked out their cover story in the car, agreeing to say as little as possible. But faced with the reality of trying to explain their dilemma to an adult human being, Robin faltered.

“We’re working on a school project,” she stammered.

Cain spoke over her, taking control. “We need someone to translate this.” He walked forward in the long aisle, turned on the recorder. Martin’s voice echoed in the temple.

“Im ata Qlippah tochi-ach et ze.”

The rabbi had seemed about to refuse them, to question the intrusion, but his face changed at the sound of Martin’s voice. He frowned deeply, seemingly more perplexed by the words than by the students’ uninvited presence in the synagogue.

He looked blankly from one to the other. “‘If you are Qlippah, prove it to me’?” He shook his head. “That makes no sense.”

Cain spoke quickly. “Why? What’s a Qlippah?”

The rabbi shrugged, spread his hands. “It’s a…a potato peel, or an orange rind.”

Cain glanced at Robin. Robin’s heart sank. That didn’t make any sense at all. Maybe Martin just didn’t know that much Hebrew.

“Are you sure?” Cain asked. He rewound the tape, played it again.

“Im ata Qlippah, tochi-ach et ze.”

The rabbi listened intently, then gestured impatiently. “Qlippah. A peel. A rind. An…eggshell.”

Robin jolted. “A shell?”

The rabbi nodded to her. “Or a husk. The part of something that you throw away. The discards.”

Robin’s pulse quickened. She had a sudden flash of Martin on the windy hill, smiling secretively to himself. She looked at Cain, spoke softly. “Martin called us that—the ‘Discarded Ones.’”

The rabbi looked startled at the phrase, almost disbelieving. He moved farther up the aisle toward them. “The Discarded Ones—you mean the Qlippoth? The old creation story?”

Robin and Cain locked eyes, a jolt of energy passing between them. Robin turned to the rabbi, trying to keep her voice calm. “Could you tell us about it? It’s for a term paper.”

A strange look passed over the rabbi’s face, conflicted. “From the Kabbalah.”

Robin felt another shock of recognition at the word. Martin and Lisa had used it the first night.

The rabbi’s eyes were clouded. “The Sepher Zohar tells a story…that the Master of the Universe made several failed attempts at creation before our present world. He threw the broken shells of those first defective beings into the Abyss.”

That’s it. This is what it’s about. Robin’s skin prickled with the knowing. The broken shells of those first defective beings.

Cain was equally still and intense beside her. “Are those shells…alive?” he asked cautiously.

“Not alive. Antilife.” The rabbi paused. “Evil.” The word hung in the darkness of the temple. Robin shivered.

“You mean like…demons?” Cain demanded.

The rabbi shifted, suddenly defensive, uncomfortable. “It’s a myth. How could God fail at creation?”

Cain spoke roughly. “The…Sepher Zohar—does it say how to get rid of one?”

Robin knew instantly Cain shouldn’t have asked. The rabbi stiffened.

“Get rid of one? What game are you playing?” He looked sharply from Cain to Robin. Neither of them spoke.

The rabbi pulled himself up, offended. And maybe a little scared, Robin thought—which chilled her more than any of the rest of it.

“The Zohar is sacred knowledge. Secret knowledge. Not for children.” Robin saw the dark flicker in his eyes again. “Not a game,” he added curtly.

He turned on his heel to walk down the aisle. Easier to take offense at a joke than to believe it was a serious question. But that fleeting, frightened look on his face gave Robin a last desperate hope. She broke free from her paralysis, grabbed the game box from Cain, and ran to follow the rabbi.

“Please. It’s not just a story.”

Perhaps struck by the anxiety in her voice, the rabbi hesitated, looked back at her. She pulled off the lid of the box, thrust it toward him, displaying the writing inside. “We have to know what this says.”

The rabbi glanced at the lettering and jolted. He turned over the lid and his face darkened as he looked down at the graphic on the box.

He shoved the box lid back at Robin, wiped his hands against his coat. “Burn it. No good comes from such toys.” He turned abruptly and strode away from her.

Cain was suddenly at Robin’s side. “Come on.” He took her hand, steering her up the aisle.

Robin resisted, looking back. The rabbi had already disappeared behind the curtains. “But we have to find out what—”

Cain pushed through the doors into the dark foyer, pulling her with him. “We’re going to.” She gasped as he pulled her into a dark doorway. He put a finger to his lips and pointed upward.

Above the doorframe was a sign with an arrow: LIBRARY.

Cain eased the door open and they slipped through.

They were in a long, dark hall.

The cantor’s chanting was louder; light spilled from a half-open door. Cain pointed past rows of closed doors to a double doorway down the hall.

He took her hand and they ran light-footed past the open door, heading toward the library.

Robin had just grabbed the brass handle to pull at the door, when she felt Cain freeze behind her.

The corridor was unnervingly silent; the unearthly singing had stopped.

“You there! What are you doing?” a man’s voice shouted from the darkness at the end of the hall.

Cain pushed Robin through the library door. “Go.” He whipped around and ran down the hall.

As the door whispered shut behind her, Robin backed up into the dark library, scanning for a place to hide. Footsteps thudded in the hall outside, but the cantor’s steps thumped past and down the corridor, after Cain.

Robin turned in the dark room and strode for the bookshelves, moving quickly past modern paperbacks with vapid titles: Judaism and You; The Soul of the Torah.

She spotted a shelf of leather-bound volumes behind the heavy front desk, hurried toward it, her eyes searching—and caught sight of a taped label on a box: Sepher Zohar: The Book of Splendor.

The Mustang was idling down the street as Robin slipped out the front doors of the synagogue.

She ran down the long front steps, clutching the book under her jacket.

Cain shoved the passenger door open from inside and she tumbled into the seat, knocked off balance by the bulky book.

“Okay?” he asked tersely.

She nodded, gasping.

He was still breathing hard, too. “Think I’ll quit smoking.” He floored the accelerator, skidding off down the street, as she shook the leather-bound volume from its box and opened it.

“Oh no,” she gasped. Cain braked sharply, startled.

“What?”

She held the book open on the dashboard, displaying the pages. The book was entirely in Hebrew.

“We’ll have to go back.” She swallowed, sick with disappointment.

Cain’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve got a better idea.” He shifted back into gear, whipped the car around. “Where are we going?”

Cain smiled at her thinly. “To the repository of secret knowledge.”

They drove into dim morning light.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Ash Hill was a small community, but every college town makes its reluctant concessions to technology, and Main Street did boast a cyber café.

Trees bent in the wind under an ominous sky as Robin followed Cain through the black glass door of a long storefront building.

The warehouse room was painted black, as well; heavy curtains kept light from coming through the front windows. Stage curtains hung at intervals, creating semiprivate “rooms” with low area lighting, spotlighting a few tables each. Several pay terminals were available for Internet access, and there were plugs and phone lines for laptops, as well.

Robin and Cain wove through the maze of drapery. In a curtained corner, Robin pulled up an extra chair while Cain set up his laptop.

It was almost surreal how easy it was. Cain signed on and in under ten seconds his initial search for “Qlippoth/Kabbalah” yielded over a thousand hits.

Cain gave Robin an almost amused look, then began clicking through the sites.

From Wikipedia, they got a definition of Kabbalah: “An interpretation of the Torah (Hebrew Bible); the religious mystical system of Judaism; a unique, universal, and secret knowledge of God, the laws of nature and of the universe.”

A page appeared with odd symbolic images: a diagram of triangles and wands labeled “The Ten Spheres of Creation”; a black snake coiled up through the tree of life.

Cain clicked onto a link titled “Qlippoth—the Discarded Ones.”

Robin leaned against his shoulder to scan the text, which was illustrated with chilling images of formless swirls of energy with malevolent eyes. She recognized familiar words, read aloud.

“‘The Sepher Zohar, or Book of Splendor, maintains that there were several failed attempts at creation before the present one. The first beings were unable to hold the light of G-d and shattered into pieces—’”

They both looked at each other in the same moment.

“This was in Patrick’s midterm,” Robin said. Cain nodded slowly.

“It was right in front of us; we just didn’t see it. “

“We didn’t. I think Martin did.”

Robin shifted her eyes to the screen again, found her place. “‘The Master of the Universe threw the broken shells of these first defective beings, the original Sephiroth, into the Abyss.’”

Cain murmured, “Rabbi knows his Zohar.”

Robin continued. “‘The Qlippoth, these husks, or shells, are not alive, but touched with life, like a smear of oil upon the lamp.’”

She stopped, recognizing the phrase from Zachary.

I am energy. You are mass.

But it wasn’t Zachary, was it? It was one of these.

Cain scrolled down, and they read in silence, trying to process the information. Sometimes the text was too obscure to grasp, but Robin got an unsettling picture of the Qlippoth as inchoate energy, spirits without bodies from the beginning of time, hovering always at the edges of the living world. Another disturbing sentence caught her eye: “They manifest as malevolent autonomous forms throughout the universe.”

Cain stopped on a piece of text and read aloud.

“‘Like the fallen angels of the Bible, banished from Heaven, the Qlippoth are enraged with their exclusion from creation and inflamed with a desire to invade and pervert mankind. ‘Shape without form, shade without color, paralyzed force, gesture without motion’; they long for life, and are responsible for all the evil of the world.’”

Robin felt queasy, a weird, disconnected feeling of unreality. How can this be happening?

And yet, there was something familiar about the words she was reading. Defective. Cast out. Envy of the chosen. Rage at exclusion.

Like me. Just like me.

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

1 guess it doesn’t matter. Either way, it’s here.

She looked at Cain in the dim light of the computer screen, shaken. “Inflamed with a desire to invade and pervert mankind…”

Cain had scrolled down and stopped on another sentence. “Jesus. Listen.” He read, “‘The malevolent intent of the Qlippoth has been made manifest throughout human history, as in the case of Hitler and the Nazis, who through séances and other occult practices opened the door to widespread Qlipponic possession. See Key of Solomon.’”

Robin sat still, stunned. Cain’s face was bleak. “None of this is good news.” He turned back to the keyboard, and typed “Key of Solomon” into the search engine.

The links appeared and he clicked on the first. A text Web site came up: The Greater Mysteries of the Key of Solomon.

“So much for secret knowledge,” Cain muttered. He scrolled through the text.

Robin looked at the section titles flashing by: “Invocation,” “Protection,” “Banishment.”

“Stop,” she said suddenly. They both leaned forward to read…and then both looked at each other in the same instant.

“Holy shit,” Cain whispered.

Cain veered the Mustang onto a side street at the sight of the police barricade at the school gates.

He pulled over to the curb, parked under a spreading oak. The sky through the windshield of the Mustang was dismal, drizzling icy rain. Robin stared out through the glass, past the remains of a McDonald’s breakfast scattered on the dashboard.

The road into the college was blocked with posts; police and sheriff’s cars lined the road. A steady stream of cars and buses took students out of the college, onto the highway.

Cain shook his head. “They shut the whole place down.” He switched on the radio, searched for a news channel, while Robin scanned the silhouettes in the cars, hoping for a glimpse of a familiar profile.

Cain stopped on a station and they listened to the TV announcer: “Baird College has released students early for Christmas break after the suspicious death of a coed. Two missing students are wanted for questioning….”

Robin looked up, startled, at the last. Cain reached and turned off the radio. He looked out at the stream of cars leaving the campus through the veil of rain.

“They could be miles away by now.”

Robin shook her head, sure. “Don’t you remember how we met? None of us go home.”

She reached into Cain’s backpack for his phone, started to text.

Robin and Cain were the only customers in the dim Main Street diner. They sat edgily in the cracked red vinyl window booth, staring out plate glass at the flooded downtown street. The drizzle of rain had turned into a gale. Wind bent the trees on the sidewalk, gusted against the glass, so that water poured down in sheets.

A bulky Toyota 4Runner pulled up to one of the diagonal parking spaces outside the diner. Two figures emerged from the car and darted across the wet sidewalk, hurried in through the front door of the diner.

The door blew shut with a jangle of bells. Patrick and Lisa shook water off their clothes. They saw Cain and Robin at the window booth and stopped still for a moment before crossing the restaurant to sit across from them.

Robin met Lisa’s eyes, but before anyone could speak, the waitress came to fill their coffee cups.

“Wet out,” she remarked stoically. She handed out menus, then departed.

The four of them looked at one another warily.

Cain spoke first. “Where’s Martin?”

Patrick matched Cain’s curt, neutral tone. “We tried his room before they closed the dorm down. No one there.”

Robin looked across at Lisa. “We called his parents’ house. The housekeeper didn’t even know school was let out. You haven’t seen him at all?”

Lisa started to speak, then her eyes widened; she stared out the window.

A sheriff’s car was cruising slowly down the muddy street outside the diner.

All four of them hunched down in their seats, not breathing, until the car cruised on, disappeared around a comer.

Patrick sat up again, his face grim. “Sheriff came by Mendenhall looking for you all.”

Cain straightened, looked across the table at Patrick. “Why did you stay?”

Lisa looked at Robin. “We had to make sure you were all right.”

Robin felt a sudden ache in her throat. She glanced out the window, in the direction the sheriff’s car had disappeared, then back to Lisa, haunted. “They think I killed Waverly.”

Lisa swallowed. “Was it…Zachary?”

The four of them looked around at one another. Lightning flashed outside, branching fire in the dark sky. They all flinched, and then Cain exhaled. “We think we know what ‘Zachary’ is.”

Outside the wide window, rain pounded into the rutted parking lot of the Mainline. Inside the dim motel room, Cain and Robin had the diagrams and texts they’d printed out in the cyber café spread out on the bed for Patrick and Lisa to see.

Robin watched their faces as Cain gestured, explaining.

“The Key of Solomon is full of truly weird shit. Spells for just about everything. Demons, exorcism, rituals of invocation and banishment. People really believed this stuff—it’s amazingly matter-of-fact.”

Robin recalled Martin’s words on the steps, that windy day: “I’m supposed to believe in a religion based on texts from the Middle Ages that seriously acknowledge astrology and numerology and…demons?”

She turned to Lisa, who was standing frozen, pale with disbelief. “But you’ve heard of this, haven’t you? You and Martin were talking about Kabbalah that first night.”

Lisa twisted the knotted red thread on her wrist. “The morning after—when we found the game scores in the newspaper—he asked me what I knew about Kabbalah and”—she breathed in sharply, remembering, “the Qlippoth thing. But I never heard of any of that.”

She looked down at the red yarn, as if just noticing it. “This was something I saw in a magazine. It was for fun.”

She suddenly, savagely pulled the yarn from her wrist, breaking it and flinging it away from her.

“I didn’t know,” she whispered, looking sick.

“None of us did,” Cain said. He indicated a diagram of a starlike arrangement, then bent and quickly sketched out a table with five figures around it in the same arrangement. Robin noticed fleetingly that Cain’s trademark cynicism was gone; he was strangely comfortable with the ancient symbols.

“Look. We’ve been creating a pentagram all along—the five of us in this shape. Five is a magic number. A pentagram is a gateway. We made an opening—”

“And this…this shell thing came through,” Patrick finished grimly.

Robin turned dark eyes on the others. “Zachary Prince and the kids who died in the fire were doing a séance in the attic—with the same Ouija board that Lisa found. They wrote the answers the board gave them.” She showed them the faded writing in the lid of the box. “They called up the Qlippah.” Her voice dropped. “And it killed them.”

Lisa blanched. “Why? What does it want?”

Cain sat on the edge of the radiator. “The Kabbalah texts say the Qlippoth want life.”

Lisa turned to Robin. “But you just said it killed those people.”

“And Waverly.” Patrick spat.

Robin nodded. “That’s the thing. It wants life—it’s jealous of all human life. But it can’t have life. It can only destroy.”

Patrick paced in the small room. “The truly fucked-up thing is that I believe it.”

“What do we do?” Lisa’s voice was small and wan. Robin felt like crying herself.

Patrick stopped his restless prowling. “We head for the tall grass. The fuck away from here.”

“We can’t leave Martin,” Robin protested.

“Every man for himself,” Patrick retorted.

Robin whirled to Cain, her eyes appealing.

“We don’t know he’s anywhere near here,” Cain told her. His voice was gruff, but he looked away from her gaze.

Robin stared around at all of them. “Martin wouldn’t have left. You know he wouldn’t. He’s obsessed. He doesn’t think. He’s still in Mendenhall with…that thing.”

Lisa hugged herself. “What if he’s dead?”

Robin flared up. “What if he’s not?’ Her voice rose. “We all let this thing out. What if it can move? It killed Waverly. What’s it going to do next?”

An uneasy silence fell between them. Thunder rumbled again, then the not-so-distant crack of lightning.

Cain picked up some printed pages. “There’s one more thing. We found a banishing ritual. It’s pretty wild. But at least there’s a precedent.”

Lisa was suddenly very still. “You mean we could get rid of it? For good?” she asked cautiously.

Cain looked troubled. “I don’t know. But somebody thought so. This stuff has been passed down for ages.” He looked around at them. “We allhave to do it, though, or the ritual won’t work.”

They looked at one another in silence. Then Patrick growled. “Shit on the mumbo jumbo. This thing kills. We go in, we get Martin, we get out. End of story.”

Four pairs of eyes locked over the strange diagrams on the bed. And slowly, they all nodded agreement.