The Harrowing

Read on for an excerpt of THE SPACE BETWEEN, by Alexandra Sokoloff

The B Building is burning.

Anna Sullivan stands alone in the upstairs corridor, halfway between the Social Studies wing and the Math wing, her legs rooted to the floor, her heart racing in her chest. She can barely catch a breath through the smoke stinging her eyes and lungs. The wide dark halls of the school are thick with it, curling, wafting. Bluish, with an acid bite.

There is a creeping fear, undefined, but growing. And not just the usual school anxiety, either, the butterflies that always started the moment she stepped off the bus to cross the yard toward the prison gates of the high school. For one thing, she can’t seem to move.

What’s happening? A chemical fire? Those morons from Litwack’s 3rd period lab, trying to shut down the building?

There’d been half a dozen false fire alarms since the beginning of the semester.

But why are the lights out?

The only illumination is from the red EXIT signs above the side stairwell doors. The whole building is dark; there is only the drifting smoke, tinged red from the neon.

Alarm bells are ringing, but far, far away.

And why am I alone?

Anna turns her head and looks around her for what oddly feels like the first time, blinking through the smoky gloom. The cavernous halls are empty, and there’s no one in the open classrooms, either.

There is the sound of sobbing, though, from somewhere, resonating faintly in the tomblike dark.

And softly, softly, screams.

Screams?

Anna’s heart stops in her chest.

Panic breaks through her paralysis and she spins to stare down the center aisle of the classroom to the left of her, down the collapsing fiberglass curtain that serves as a wall between classrooms. What she sees turns her to ice.

Oh God oh my God…

Blood is splashed across the maps from World War II battle campaigns, the National Geographic history charts, bright crimson against the sepia.

Male legs in khaki pants and reindeer socks stick out from under sweet Mr. Brooke’s desk. The legs are stiff and still. Anna thinks absurdly of the Wicked Witch of the East, how she ran screaming from the living room when she was five and first seeing The Wizard of Oz on TV and those black-and-white striped witch legs curled up and rolled under the house… I

In her peripheral vision, a dark shadow runs suddenly past.

It is fast, so fast. Sinuous, snakelike. And it carries a long, thin…

Gun?

Smoke, screaming, blood, a gun….

Anna whips around, staring down the corridor, her heart racing. No sign of the shadow.

Where is it? What is it?

Silence, stillness…

But it’s a heavy stillness, live.

She holds her breath, watching…and the shadow falls again across the wall.

It has two heads.

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod

Anna unfreezes and runs for the main staircase. It feels unbearably slow, like running through sand. Like running—

In a dream

The fire alarms start to shrill, piercing, pulsing beats.

Anna veers instinctively toward the EXIT doors of the side emergency stairs. Her stomach plunges and she stops in her tracks. Someone has twisted a bike chain around the release bars, locking them.

It’s real. It can’t be real. This can’t be happening….

Anna bolts past the chained doors, heading toward the center stairwell of the building.

Her breath is coming faster, her legs moving even more maddeningly slowly. Her pulse pounds in her head, the sound distorted and visceral. She knows the shadow is behind her - she can hear a double breath.

Madness….

She reaches the edge of the main staircase, grabs the rail to pull herself forward onto the stairs—

At the foot of the staircase, on the landing below, Tyler Marsh stands looking up at her, as real as she is, even now heart-stoppingly beautiful, perfect profile and long, dark silky hair falling into his eyes. The alarms pulse around them, vibrating through her body.

Tyler?

She takes a shaky step toward him.

“Run,” he says, without opening his mouth.

The clock alarm is bleating in shrill pulses, five a.m. blinking redly from the digital screen. The morning is pitch black, the wind outside scrapes the thorns of the orange tree across the window like some creature wanting in. Anna’s heart still pounds crazily in her chest, shaking the mattress. She reaches for the clock to silence it, then lies back, dazed and groggy. The dream is gone.

The stench of smoke is in her nose.

Shower in the cramped, dark bathroom to wash away the lingering, inexplicable smell of smoke, then way too long with the hair dryer, reluctant to shut off the warmth. Anna mostly avoids her own eyes in the mirror, but sometimes, with her thick, dark hair blowing around her, she is almost pretty.

Dressed in a sleeveless, shapeless black dress with sweater wrapped around her waist, she negotiates the tiny, but labyrinthinely cluttered living room by the light of the silent TV screen. Her father is passed out and snoring in the huge vile LaZBoy, empty beer bottles scattered at his feet.

Don’t think about it. Can’t think about it. Keep moving. Caffeine and go.

Anna grabs a Diet Coke from the kitchen fridge, grabs her backpack from the hall, and plunges out the front door into the black-and-blue pre-dawn. The dark outside is moving, alive, trees bending sinuously in the dry wind, which is always strongest just before sunrise.

She runs, and makes it to the corner just in time to catch her bus.

Inside, she rides in rumbling darkness, alone with the bus driver and two Latina housekeepers, over potholed streets, under the towering silhouettes of palms and old-growth trees, through sleeping San Gorgonio.

San G. is a base town, or was until the base was shut down in the closures of the nineties, plunging the city into economic depression. The war in Iraq did not revive the base. The dying town sprawls in a semi-desert ringed by mountains, pocketed in a valley which traps heat and smog for the entirety of the summer, only somewhat relieved in fall by the winds Anna once read described as “those hot, dry Santa Anas that come through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch.” And bring asthma and arson and devastating wildfires, Anna knows all that.

Santa Anas make people crazy.

But…

But. The winds also signal change and excitement, and sometimes even magic…

Like that fall in first grade when she’d brought an umbrella to school even though there wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and walking home from school she opened the umbrella and the wind picked her up and she could fly, actually fly off the ground like Mary Poppins, flying.

And for one day, she was magical—

The memory gives way to another and she sits up on the cracked vinyl bus seat with a gasp.

Tyler.

I dreamed about Tyler Marsh last night.

Definitely. Definitely something about Tyler.

She focuses, concentrating with all her mind, but the dream is elusive, just out of reach. Still, the feeling is so intimate it makes her stomach flutter and her cheeks warm.

I knew him. He knew me. There was something between us…

But the dream hadn’t been good. That much she does remember.

Not good at all.

Her chest tightens with anticipation and unease as the bus shudders to a stop in front of the high school.