Authors: Alexandra Sokoloff
Cain nodded at the book of newspapers under her arm. “Can I take a look at those?”
Patrick’s voice called behind her. “Robin. You comin’?”
She turned and saw the others waiting for her at the top of the worn stone stairs. She stepped forward and handed the book to Cain. Their eyes held for a moment as he took it.
Robin turned and walked across the dark courtyard for the steps. But before she climbed, she turned and looked back.
He was watching her—as she’d known he would be.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The walk home was cold and largely silent as they made their way through the tall shadows
of trees back to the Hall. It was as if once they’d made their decision, there was nothing more to talk about.
Lisa walked stiffly, sunk into herself, and Robin had to bite her lips not to ask her what was wrong. Whatever it was, Lisa obviously didn’t want to talk in front of the others.
Or me, either, I guess
.
Once the building was in sight, they separated. Lisa and Patrick hung back to smoke, but there was more to it—a feeling that they shouldn’t be seen together.
And why is that? Guilt? Or possessiveness? Do we just not want to let anyone else in on it?
Even Martin paused at the mailboxes, fumbling distractedly with his keys, so Robin could go in ahead, without him.
Her room was empty, thankfully no Waverly to deal with.
Robin stripped off her coat—the wool smelled like cold air and smoke from Patrick’s fire—and threw it on her bed. She stood for a long time in the center of the rug before turning and leaving the room again.
She moved blankly down the hall toward the bathroom, but near the open bathroom door, she slowed, listening, her pulse quickening.
Scrabbling sounds came from within, and a labored breathing.
She froze, then after a moment stepped warily to the doorway and looked in.
In the sickly light of the girls’ bathroom, Lisa was rummaging ferociously through her locker. She grabbed for an orange prescription pill bottle, twisted it open.
Obviously empty. Robin flinched as Lisa hurled the bottle at the wall, slammed her locker closed.
Then Lisa glimpsed Robin in the mirror, a shadow in the doorway behind her. Lisa whirled, freaked.
Robin stepped forward into the light. “It’s me.”
Lisa breathed out silently, then bent over the sink to wash her face, so as not to look Robin in the eyes. The red string was like a slash of blood on her wrist.
Robin moved slightly closer. “Are you okay?”
For a moment, Robin thought Lisa wasn’t going to answer. She buried her face in a towel, and when she looked up again, her eyes were distant, sunk into pale flesh. But abruptly she spoke. “I’m dreaming about him. I mean, I’m dreaming about him fucking me.” She turned and looked Robin in the eyes.
Robin stared at her, jolted, not knowing what to think. She was always wary of Lisa’s grandstanding. But Lisa had been so quiet all evening, not herself at all. And she was pale and jumpy, her usual bravado gone. In fact, she looked sick.
Could it be true? Is she actually being
—Robin’s mind skittered away from the word.
Robin’s face must have changed to reflect the sick jolt of horror she felt. Lisa immediately closed off. She tossed her hair, smiled that mocking smile. “Oh, look, he’s good. What can I say? I come.” She threw her towel into her locker and pulled out a hairbrush, attacked her hair viciously.
Robin tensed, wounded by Lisa’s tone and roiling with mixed emotions—distrust, the old paranoia, and something else, too.
Jealousy?
No, of course not. But—but what?
The truth was, she’d thought Zachary was only appearing to her.
“Well. Great. How nice for you,” she replied tightly. She turned to go.
Lisa spoke suddenly. “He’s not doing it to you?” There was a slight tremor in her voice.
Robin turned back to look at her, shook her head.
Lisa smiled thinly. “Lucky me.”
The mirrors reflected them both…multiple images. Robin spoke carefully into the silence. “Do you want me to stay with you?”
Lisa’s smile twisted. “Why? You want a piece of the action?”
Robin flushed, deep red. Stung, she turned to leave.
Lisa called out shakily, “Robin.”
This time there was no mistaking the desperation in her voice. Robin turned back, almost afraid to know.
Lisa dropped the hairbrush into the sink. She faced Robin and slowly unbuttoned the high collar of her shirt. Robin gasped.
Lisa’s throat and chest were covered with bruises and scratches.
And bites.
The girls looked at each other in the glare of the fluorescents, too frightened to speak.
A few candles burned in Lisa’s room, since neither girl had wanted to sleep completely in the
dark. Robin had been sure she’d be wide awake all night (
and better that way
) but she’d drifted off and now slept fitfully on one side of the bed.
So it was just on the edges of consciousness that she heard it start—a low rhythmic bumping somewhere in the room.
Robin frowned in her sleep, stirred.
The bumping grew louder.
Robin’s eyes fluttered open. Through the haze of sleep and shimmering candlelight, she saw shadows battling on the wall. A huge dark mass, crouched over a feminine form.
The bumping grew louder, beginning to shake the bed, pounding, violent.
Robin jerked up, wide awake now.
The shadows were gone. But Lisa’s side of the bed was shaking and bouncing as Lisa flopped up and down on top of it, crying out in terror, fighting at something invisible.
Robin cowered. The room was like ice; the presence beside her was thick, palpable, a choking sense of malevolence, paralyzing her with an almost-blinding terror.
Her mind recoiled, folding in on itself—a swooning madness—then she pulled herself back from the brink and screamed aloud.
“Zachary, stop! STOP!”
Lisa spasmed, then suddenly ceased flailing and collapsed on the bed.
The candles on the bed stand flickered, flaring up.
To Robin’s horror, she felt the presence there, the dark energy, turn its attention to her.
She could feel the hair on her arms rise, her whole body going numb as she felt cold breath on her face, smelled a sick, rotting stench.
She pressed herself back against the headboard, her eyes wide and glazed. The presence leaned in to her; her body could feel the mass of something huge and alive, throbbing with malevolence. Invisible breath stirred her hair…and she heard herself whimper like an animal.
Then it was gone.
The shadows in the room softened; the air was no longer freezing. And there was no sense of the fist that had seemed to squeeze her heart.
Lisa lay beside her, shaking with terror. She broke into raw sobbing.
Robin shook herself free of the paralysis and leaned over to hug Lisa, holding her. She could feel Lisa’s spasms through her whole body. Her own teeth were chattering from adrenaline.
“God…” Her words were choked. “Has that been—is that the way it’s been?”
Lisa shook her head, swallowing. “Never like that.”
Robin clenched her nails into her own palms, fighting to keep control of herself. “We can’t do the séance. It’s too dangerous. We don’t know what we’re dealing with.”
Lisa pulled away from her. Her eyes were dilated, glazed. “We have to do
something
. We have to get rid of him.”
They looked at each other in the wavering candlelight.
Lisa spoke, her voice low and fierce. “Don’t you dare tell anyone.”
After a moment, Robin silently nodded.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Robin watched the campus recede from the window of the bus, on her way to Ash Hill Cemetery. Lisa had sworn her to silence about the attacks, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t do some more investigating on her own. Before they went any further (she thought of Cain briefly), she was going to check some facts.
It had been a relief to leave campus. Simple enough to call directory assistance and learn that yes, there was a graveyard just outside of town, and when she’d pretended she was seeking the grave of a relative, the grounds manager readily confirmed that a Zachary Prince who had died in 1920 was buried in the older section.
The bus route that connected the school to various towns along the interstate ran right by the cemetery. Wedged in a window seat, Robin saw the town really for the first time. Central Ash Hill was a good jaunt from campus, and she’d not had a set of friends to coax her to prowl about the main street’s few shops and restaurants and its one cinema.
But she barely noticed as the main drag turned to clapboard houses with wide porches; she was sunk into herself, brooding over the night with Lisa.
What she felt—it had come to her at some point, beyond the horror, beyond the revulsion, and the sheer psychotic unreality of it—was betrayal. She’d somehow been able to rationalize the terror of the initial hauntings (now that they were past) as the cry of a lost spirit, angry and confused.
But what had happened to Lisa was vile, unforgivable. Robin felt violated herself. She could not believe it of Zachary—not the haunted young man from the yearbook, not the Zachary of her mind, the Zachary who called to her in her dreams. There was gentleness in that face, and compassion. None of the smirking entitlement of a predator.
Yet she’d seen the attack with her own eyes.
Could death—admittedly a horrible death (she thought of fire, of melting flesh, and shuddered)— change the character of a soul? Somehow she couldn’t believe that. Of course, she had to admit, the seductive banter of the board hadn’t sounded much like the words she would expect from the troubled young man in the photo, either. And neither had the degrading things the board had said to Martin.
So which was the real Zachary?
She had unquestioningly accepted what the board, and Zachary (or whatever presence had been speaking through it), had said to them.
Now she felt tricked,
lied
to. And because Robin had been fooled, she was more determined than ever to find out what was really going on.
But for all the terror of the moment when the presence had turned to her, she had had a puzzling sense—no, a certainty—that she wouldn’t be attacked in the same way. That was something she knew, though she couldn’t quite get to why.
It gnawed at her as she watched the outer streets of the small town turn to expanses of woods and fields through the bus windows. Something that Lisa had done.
From the start, Lisa had been brazenly flirtatious with Zachary. More than flirtatious, even. Inviting.
Inviting
.
Robin sat up on the seat. That was it. Something Lisa said that first night, like Mae West—an invitation: “Well then, come up and see me sometime.”
And he had.
Robin didn’t know why it was important, only that it was.
The bus groaned to a halt in front of a high granite wall. Robin pulled herself up on the steel bar of the seat in front of her and walked a little unsteadily to the door. Three deep metal steps down and the automatic doors were flapping shut behind her.
The bus roared off, spewing black exhaust, leaving her alone outside the imposing iron gates of the cemetery.
The wind was strong, gusting under layers of clouds in the sky; too high for rain, but dark enough to make her wish she’d asked one of the others to come with her. It wasn’t merely the promise she’d made to Lisa that had held her back, though. Asking Patrick to go along was out; Waverly had been watching him like a hawk ever since Thanksgiving. Lisa was too shaken.
Martin was so openly contemptuous of the idea of a ghost that there was no point in involving him unless she got something definite. And Cain—
She didn’t know what to think about Cain. But of course he didn’t believe in anything. So what was the point?
Still, anyone would have been better than facing a whole cemetery alone.
Robin shivered in the wind, then grimly straightened and pushed the tall gate open, flinching at the iron squeal of rust against metal.
The more modern part of the cemetery was well tended, the grass, already turned winter brown, clipped and smooth. Most of the graves were modest; many of the headstones were simple marble rectangles set flat into the ground.
What’s the point of a flat headstone?
she thought as she walked along the smooth packed-dirt paths, past curved marble benches under clusters of oaks.
So discreet, it doesn’t even seem like death.
The older part of the cemetery made up for it, though, with statues and monuments crooked and streaked with age, cracked by moss that spread in patches like some pestilent disease. Wind gusted around her, whispering dryly through overgrown grass and bare trees. There was a feeling here…the heaviness of arrested time. Her steps were slower and slower; she found herself wishing for the polite modernity of the polished flat stones.
Too late to turn back, though. She made herself move forward through the haphazard maze of stones, paused under a row of bent cypress to puzzle over the directions the grounds manager had given her over the phone.
There was supposed to be a gate separating one section of the graveyard from the one she was in—the north section, the grounds manager had said, although he’d hesitated before he said it, in a way that made Robin think he’d meant to say something else.
She turned and squinted through the line of cypress, and then she saw it—rusted bars and crumbling foundation posts. She moved toward it through the trees.
Inside the gate, these grounds felt even older than the rest, tombstones crowded together and falling over. As Robin stepped through the iron arch, she had an instant impression of a different cemetery altogether. She moved slowly in through the stones. Here and there, she saw little piles of small rocks placed on the gravestones…some ritual she seemed to recall from a movie, but she didn’t remember which or what it meant.
There were no crosses, either, she realized. And something was different about the writing.
She turned in a circle, looking around her at the tombstones. Many were in English, but every third or fourth one bore a strange alphabet, square and archaic.
And then she saw it: a weathered granite oval, three feet high. She registered the name first, so familiar to her now.
ZACHARY PRINCE
1901-1920
But what made her gasp was the Star of David carved into the top of the stone.
Jewish. He was Jewish
.
Looking around her now, she could see the same stars on other graves around her, the little rocks—a ritual she’d seen in a Holocaust movie. The alien lettering was Hebrew. It was the Jewish section of the cemetery, that’s what the grounds manager had been reluctant to say. Segregated—in 1920, it would have been.
She stepped close to the worn stone and read the inscription beneath the name. Her eyes widened at the epitaph:
GENTLE BROTHER, LOVING SON
It all hit at the same time: the finality of the grave of a nineteen-year-old boy, barely older than she was. The bewildering inscription—as far from the angry personality they had encountered as she could imagine. And the paradox of raging anti-Semitism coming from a Jewish ghost.
Robin looked around her under the darkening sky, shivering. She spoke low. “Zachary? I’m here.”
She stood very still, listening to the dry whisper of the grass. She knelt on the grave and reached out, put her hand against the rough stone.
“What do you want?”
She was barely breathing. The light around her slipped lower, darker; the movement of wind was almost imperceptible. But nothing and no one answered her.
She sat back on her heels, withdrawing her hand from the stone and resting both hands on the ground beside her. And then something stung her palm, a dull but discernible prick. She pulled her hand back instinctively and stared down into her palm. There was no mark.
She frowned and scanned the ground in front of her. Scattered beside the base of Zachary’s headstone were some small rocks like the ones she’d seen piled on other tombstones. Perhaps they’d fallen from the headstone over the years. But the sting hadn’t felt like a rock. Then she saw it, lying half-buried in the dirt.
Gently, she picked it up—a small flat piece of silver, blackened with age. She broke the encrusted dirt from the delicate bars and looked down at the medallion: a Star of David.
Zachary’s? Had someone left it for him, all those years ago? Had he meant for her to find it?
She sat very still, holding it—until she realized she was waiting for the touch of the wind. And then she jumped up from the grave and ran as if chased through the acres of stone.