Authors: Alexandra Sokoloff
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
And the rest of the weekend could not have been more ordinary. Residents began to trickle in early Sunday morning, becoming an unstoppable tide. There were midterms to study for, after all, and perhaps there were others who were glad enough to cut the family visit short.
By noon that cloudy day, doors were standing open all over the Hall, music blasting again, residents visiting, making sandwiches out of leftover turkey, passing around foil-wrapped care packages of pumpkin loaf and gingerbread cookies while they moaned about pounds gained, nursed hangovers, and visibly started to panic about term papers and exams.
Back in her room, Robin swallowed two of Waverly’s Valium before returning the bottle to the bottom drawer, then slept a black sleep until six that evening, when she bolted up in terror at the sound of her door slamming open.
Waverly breezed in, one of her signature thoughtless entrances. She turned all the lights on full and proceeded to fuss about the room, pulling open drawers and unpacking prissily and noisily, with appalling disregard for her roommate.
Robin lay back on her pillows, barely able to move. She was aware through her depressant haze that Waverly would think Patrick was still out of town, and that Patrick would go to pains to make her think he had been. At least Robin wouldn’t be alone that night. And for the first time in their short acquaintance, Robin was painfully glad of her roommate’s presence. Surely nothing mysterious or out of the ordinary would dare happen around Waverly.
Strangely comforted, she drifted back into a drugged and troubled sleep.
Late that night, when the rooms went dark and all the rest of the Hall slept, two lights remained on.
One was a solitary desk lamp, in a dim room lined with bookshelves along every available inch of wall space. There were no other adornments—not a poster on a closet, not a rug on the floor. The bed was unmade and there was a pall in the room, the numbness of loneliness.
Martin sat at his desk, surrounded by uneven piles of books. His laptop was open and signed on to the Net, but he seemed unaware of anything in front of him; he merely stared into space.
Abruptly, he stood and crossed to his bed. He knelt, reached underneath, and dragged out a suitcase. He unzipped the brown vinyl flap and looked down at the contents. After a long moment, he removed several leather-bound books with gilt Hebrew lettering on the covers.
He seemed to brace himself before he lifted one onto the bed and opened the cover.
The other light hung from a cord that surely had never passed an electrician’s inspection. The single bare bulb dimly illuminated the basement.
The long, low-ceilinged room was a horror-movie dream, a claustrophobic maze of stacked furniture and metal utility shelves and twisted pipes.
A shadowy figure moved stealthily through the crooked aisles.
There was a sudden hiss and clanging just to the right.
The shadow jumped back—then Cain relaxed as he made out the shape of the old boiler. He crossed to it, knelt to open the control box, studying the gauges inside.
Then his eyes fell on the floor beside him. He frowned, reached out to pick something up off the concrete.
A cold smile creased his lips as he stared down at the object in his hand.
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.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The clock radio buzzed her awake. She had been dreaming of Zachary: she’d been running in the halls, trying to find him, hearing him call her name…
She settled back on her pillow, thinking back on the dream. It hadn’t been scary, she decided. In fact, it wasn’t an unpleasant feeling at all.
The clock buzzed again and she remembered with dismay that her Ancient Civilizations midterm was that morning.
She threw on clothes she’d left on the floor the night before and grabbed a portable plastic coffee mug along with her backpack.
She left her floor and hurried down a dark set of back stairs that led toward the second-floor kitchenette. Near the bottom of the narrow stairs, she heard feminine voices from below, raised in a fight. One was shrill, with an unmistakable Southern accent.
“I know y’all were up to something while I was gone….”
Robin halted in the stairway door. In the kitchenette, Waverly held the brimming Pyrex coffeepot. Her pert features were twisted in a lethal fury; she advanced on Lisa, who leaned against the counter, looking sleepless and drugged. “You cross me, you bitch, and I’ll rip your cocksucking tongue out.”
Lisa laughed; her voice had a dangerous edge. “And get blood on that little
ensemble?
Not in this lifetime—”
Robin watched in fascination. She could almost feel the animosity rolling off them in waves. Waverly noticed Robin standing in the doorway, and her voice jumped up an octave. “And what are
you
looking at?
Simultaneously, Lisa turned away, sick of it. “Do the world a favor and drop dead—”
And as their voices crossed in mutual malice, the coffeepot shattered in Waverly’s hand.
Waverly jumped back to avoid the splash of scalding liquid, but too late. Her silky pink sweater was drenched. She stood speechless, with just the brown plastic handle of the pot clutched in her fingers. All three girls were frozen. Robin’s eyes locked with Lisa’s. Zachary’s name hovered in the air, unspoken between them.
Then Waverly started to screech, holding out her coffee-stained sweater. “Goddamn it. This is Nicole Farhi. It’s ruined!”
Lisa started to laugh, but there was an edge of hysteria underneath. She bolted from the kitchen, running away down the hall, leaving Robin, wondering, and Waverly, wet and ranting, behind.
* * *
Robin’s mind kept returning to the incident as she sat taking her Ancient Civilizations midterm in an arena-seated lecture hall. She replayed it again and again: the coffeepot in Waverly’s hand, the tension in the room, the sharp cracking, and the sudden explosion of glass. The energy had been the same as in the séances, like static electricity between her and Lisa, before the pot shattered. And unnervingly reminiscent of her dream that night of her own body shattering.
She was certain it had been Zachary. He was still here.
She stole a look back at Patrick, who was sitting rows away from her in the sea of silent students, always bigger and blonder than she remembered. Ever since the midterm had been distributed, he had been sitting without writing, deathly pale, just staring down at the page of essay questions.
Robin felt her stomach twist in sympathy. She knew he needed this grade to keep his football scholarship. If only he had come to her, she could have helped him study, drilled him on the possible questions.
But there was nothing to be done now. She sent him a silent wish for inspiration and forced her attention back to her own test.
A little while later, she glanced up from an essay comparing and contrasting creation myths.
On the other side of the room, Patrick was bent over his blue book in the awkward curl of the left-hander, writing very quickly, his big hand almost flying across the page.
Robin watched him a beat, surprised. Patrick looked up suddenly, straight at her. His eyes were startlingly blank. He stared toward her, not seeming to see her, and Robin jolted. His hand was continuing to write, as if divorced from his body. Robin stared for a moment, then turned quickly away, chilled.
When she glanced back again, Patrick was bent over his blue book again, writing in a continuous, uninterrupted flow.
She found the Mendenhall lounge deserted; apparently the Hall’s residents were too freaked out by midterms even to zone out to TV. The shadowy groupings of furniture again reminded her of a stage set, waiting for the players.
Her gaze went to the fireplace. The hearth was clean; the shattered mirror had been replaced by a square modern thing that clashed with the ornate Victoriana of the room. Either the powers that be had attributed the breakage to the storm, or the Housing Office, out of long experience, had decided not to bother tracking down the vandals.
Robin stood in the drafty room on the cabbage-rose carpet and spoke aloud. “Zachary?”
She closed her eyes, held her breath.
The cold air enveloped her. She strained through the silence to hear, feel—anything.
Finally, she opened her eyes. The lounge seemed dreary, dusty, and perfectly, obtusely normal. Not a trace of whatever had been with them over their long, lost weekend.
So why was she shivering?
She looked toward the bookshelves, the yearbooks returned to a neat line. She remained looking at them for a long time.
Outside the door of her room, she listened for a good minute before she slid her key into the lock and twisted the doorknob cautiously.
The room was blessedly empty.
She turned toward her bed…and gasped.
The yearbook lay out in plain view on the rug beside her bed, open to the black-and-white photo of Zachary.
Fury at Waverly swept through Robin.
How dare she?
She stooped to pick up the book.
Her hand brushed the leather cover and she gasped again, pulling the hand back, clutching her fingers closed. She’d been shocked—a crackle, like static electricity.
She was suddenly certain that Waverly had not moved the book at all.
She let herself remember for a moment the terror of that night—Zachary’s desperate and inexorable presence. Such fury and…despair. So tormented. Seemingly trapped for eternity in the agony of his death.
But when she looked down at the photo, she felt again the twist in her stomach, the ache of longing and companionship. The haunted young man…handsome, sensitive, diffident…there was no anger or violence there.
He was lost—as lost as the rest of them.
And he was reaching out to her.