Authors: Alexandra Sokoloff
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The sky swirled with turbulent clouds outside the cathedral windows in the college library.
Robin walked through the labyrinthine stacks of the periodicals archives, her eyes running along the years listed on the bound spines of old magazines—1950, 1949, 1948—a feeling eerily like going backward in time. She passed the thirties, moved through the twenties, thought faintly of Gatsby and flappers and stock market disasters.
And Hitler
. “A dark time in general,” Martin had said.
She halted at 1920, the date in cracked gilt on a wide, crumbling spine.
She stepped to the shelf, pulled out the thick book of bound yellowed news journals.
In the soporific quiet of a study carrel, she pored over old school newspapers with photos of solemn jocks with slicked-back hair and baggy uniforms; ads for soaps that promised God-like cleanliness, for bottled study-aid tonics that might as well have been labeled “cocaine”; news of war, of students enlisting, shipped overseas. The black-and-white pages had turned sepia, fragile; the musty smell was a sense memory of a time she’d never lived.
She carefully turned another delicate page, and stopped, her eyes widening.
She was looking at a photo of Mendenhall. Not quite the rambling hodgepodge it was now, but the main structure was recognizable—except that the top floor, what had to be the attic, was blackened, charred by fire. Smoke still curled from the turrets. The headline proclaimed in seventy-two-point type: FIVE KILLED IN FRATERNITY FIRE.
Robin’s mind barely had time to register.
Five? Like us. We’re five
—
Then her eyes locked on one of the names: “
Zachary Prince, son of Dr. and Mrs. Abraham Prince
…”
She scanned the newsprint quickly, the words pounding in her head. “
The fire originated in the Mendenhall attic, trapping the five students, who succumbed to the blaze. Fire investigators have no clue how the fire started or what the students were doing in the attic
….”
Robin looked up, her eyes dark. Her thoughts roiled, with no coherent theme; everything in her body felt numb.
She turned the page of the book to see if the article continued. There was no more on Mendenhall, but a slip of paper was stuck between the pages, yellowed, with a hand-printed verse:
Oh, Harvard’s run by millionaires.
And Yale is run by booze,
Cornell is run by farmers’ sons,
Columbia’s run by Jews.
So give a cheer for Baxter Street
Another one for Pell,
And when the little sheenies die,
Their souls will go to hell
.
Robin gasped aloud at the viciousness of it.
You don’t know what you’re dealing with
, the voice in her mind said grimly.
You’re in way over your head
.
She felt a cold prickling on the back of her neck, spreading down her spine. Suddenly, she was sure that she was being watched.
She twisted in her chair, stared back into the narrow rows of metal bookshelves behind her, searching the shadows between the stacks.
No one in sight.
After a long moment, she turned back to the desk and the book, tried to focus again on the article. But the feeling of intrusion remained on her skin, clammy and unwelcome as a stranger’s touch.
The sunset was spectacular and bleak, a thin, piercing silver and black, like a prizewinning photograph. The wind, high and chill, whistled through the spiky, sharp tops of trees.
Lights were on all over the dorm, students hunkered down with their laptops and books in bed or hunched at their desks, wrapped in blankets.
Robin stood at the very end of the third-floor boys’ hall, knocking on the door of Martin’s room.
She stepped back, a bit breathless, waiting. Under her arm she held the book of newspaper clippings from 1920.
There was no sound from within the room and, now that she noticed, no crack of light showing under Martin’s door. Robin hesitated, then knocked again, harder this time, just in case.
Why her first thought was to go to Martin, she wasn’t sure. It was an impulse, or maybe more an instinct: in a group of outsiders, Martin was as much an outsider as she was. There was a bond there—of alienation?—that she trusted more than any connection she had with the others.
At the very least, what she had under her arm was a fact; he would appreciate that. He was as determined as she was to
know
.
And there’s another connection as well, isn’t there?
Her eyes fell on the little metal piece hammered into the doorjamb, its Hebrew letters barely visible in the gloom of the hall.
Mezuzah
, her mind reminded her, though she had no real idea how she knew the word.
Funny—didn’t Martin say that first night that he didn’t believe in God? But wasn’t having this piece, this
mezuzah
, like having a cross beside your door? A reminder of God? Not exactly an agnostic thing to do.
She thought uneasily of the board’s fury at Martin.
But it wasn’t at Martin, was it?
Her mind flashed back to the board, the savage messages:
ASK HIS COCKSUCKING MASTER OF THE UNIVERSE
ASK YOUR PORK LOVING KIKE GOD
She stood still. God…a Jewish God…the rage of it…Zachary’s anger is at
God
….
She knew it was meaningful, somehow. And then the thought was gone, and she was back in the corridor, in front of Martin’s door.
There was only silence from the room. But somewhere on a floor below, she could hear someone playing electric guitar, fast, hot riffs.
Robin turned, listening. After a moment, she stepped through the stairwell door and followed the sound down the dark stairs. She moved with the sound into the second-floor hall and stopped, as she had somehow known she would, outside the door with the NO MINORS sign.
She stood outside Cain’s room for a long time without moving, then raised her hand and knocked.
There was no answer, just the music. Robin had an image suddenly: an electric guitar plugged into an amp…the sound surrounding Cain through the headphones he wore, shuddering through him in the dark as he played furiously, obsessively, his eyes dark and strange…
Robin stood in the dark outside the door for longer than she knew, the guitar searing through her cells, vibrating her bones, somehow eerily familiar. And then she recognized it.
The sickening, delirious feeling of the energy through the planchette.
Robin backed away, turned, and ran down the hall toward the stairwell.
Flushed but calmer, she stopped off at Lisa’s room on the way back and knocked on the door
with the desert moonscape. There was no answer. She thought briefly, longingly, of going to Patrick’s room, but chances were dismally good that Waverly would be with him, and there would be no explaining what Robin was doing there. Waverly was suspicious enough (of orgies, ritual sacrifice, Robin wasn’t sure) without any prompting.
In the end, she simply went to bed and lay in the dark, listening to the swirling wind, watching the trees bend outside the dark glass of her window, thinking of the other four, the group of them. Not friends, not even companions. But she’d shared something with them more profound than anything she’d ever experienced. Now she didn’t have the first idea how to approach them, or even if she had the right to—but she knew it wasn’t over.
It was a long time before she fell asleep.
And the last thought that kept running through her mind in the dark was:
Five
.
There were five of them, too, in 1920. Zachary and the others.
And they all died
.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“ ‘
Each one of us is not even master in his own house, but must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind
…’ ”
In the top tier of the psychology lecture hall, Robin barely heard Professor Lister’s lecture. More Freud. Endless Freud.
Her mind was on the oversized book in her backpack, the newsprint images of the attic fire.
Suddenly, students all around her were standing, collecting belongings. Robin realized the period was over.
She looked over the wave of departing humanity, searching for Martin. She’d looked for him at the beginning of class, but he hadn’t been there…and still wasn’t.
Robin stood, but lingered at her seat looking down at the white-haired professor on the dais, who was arranging his notes on the lectern for the next class.
Do it
, she ordered herself. She started down the stairs toward him.
Lister glanced up as Robin approached the dais. She hesitated, and he smiled down at her like some kindly Greek philosopher from the mount.
“Something I can help you with?”
Robin took a breath. How could she say it without sounding like a complete nutcase? “I wondered…what Freud had to say about ghosts.”
The professor raised his eyebrows. Robin hurried on, “I mean, people did see ghosts back then…in Vienna?”
“And since the beginning of recorded time,” he agreed. He took off his glasses, polished them. “Freud said ghosts are a manifestation of hysterical repression—deep wounds of the psyche slipping past the mind’s censor.”
He put his glasses back on, and must have caught the blank look on her face, because he elaborated. “At the risk of sounding simplistic, what haunts us is what is haunting us.”
Robin frowned. “So, basically, he was saying ghosts are all in the mind.”
“Not exactly. I believe he was saying that ghosts are the things we have buried in the mind—coming out.”
Students were filing into the hall for the next class. Robin shifted. “But Jung believed in real ghosts.”
The professor half-smiled. “Jung believed in ghosts utterly.”
He was so matter-of-fact. Robin stared up at him. “What do
you
think?”
He studied her, an appraising look. “I think the question is, What do
you
think?”
It felt like more than a question. But someone cleared his throat behind Robin, breaking the moment. She turned and saw a lanky, hawkish grad student standing behind her, balancing a briefcase and a stack of files. He looked pointedly at the stairs she was blocking. Robin stepped aside and muttered, “Thanks” in Lister’s general direction as the grad student brushed past her, and then she hurried for the aisle.
Outside the lecture hall, she stood on the mosaic marble tiles under the domed rotunda of the psychology building.
No help at all
, she thought irritably. “
What do
you
think?
”
The truth was, she’d expected him to dismiss the idea of a ghost outright. Almost hoped it. Instead, this maddening ambiguity.
“
Do our demons come from without, or within us?
”
She felt unbalanced by the notion that Zachary could be something inside her coming out.
She certainly didn’t recognize the spirit as something from her. Or did she? Could she have made Zachary up? A student like her, lost like her, reaching out?
She could almost believe it was from her mind—if not for the book of newspapers in her backpack.
Zachary lived here. He died here
.
She was suddenly aware of a prickling on the back of her neck, an unmistakable sense of presence behind her.
She went cold, whirled on the floor.
Martin stood above her on the sweeping staircase, looking down from the shadows. “God,” she gasped.
“I need to talk to you,” he said flatly. His voice was hollow in the vast rotunda.
She breathed out. “I need to talk to
you
.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The north side of campus was built on a hill. A set of terraces connected by staircases descended to the main plaza, each terrace leading off to different paths and buildings, like an elaborate vertical maze.
Robin and Martin walked down the staircases, under oaks and maples, an occasional tall pine, as Robin recounted the coffeepot episode. “It was just like the mirror—that night. It felt the same. This…tension— and suddenly the coffeepot shattered in her hand.”
“And this happened with just you and Marlowe present.”
“And Waverly.”
Martin stopped on a terrace, leaned against the base of a statue to write rapidly in a spiral-bound notebook.
Robin debated telling him about the yearbook moving from its spot under her bed, then decided against it. He seemed perfectly convinced already; she was gratified that he didn’t question her experience at all.
Robin looked down the walkway, lined on one side with brooding Greek statues on stone pedestals. The wind blew her hair in her face and she brushed it away.
“I think he’s still around. Zachary. I think he has been—since that first night we talked to him.”
Martin stopped his scribbling. “A ghost again?”
Robin bristled. “What else?”
“Purely psychological. Taken one at a time, each incident can be rationally explained. But taken together…well, we all bought into something bigger. We fed it energy, if you will.” He looked up, out over the layers of clouds on the horizon, beyond the tops of the trees. There were high red spots in his cheeks from the cold. “And physical manifestations occurred. The mirror
did
shatter. There
were
rappings. And now, with the coffeepot breaking, peripheral manifestations.”
He flipped back pages in his notebook…and Robin realized that the whole binder was filled with notes of the Thanksgiving weekend. Dozens of pages, scribbled in his cramped longhand. She saw her own name, and Lisa’s, and what she was sure was Hebrew lettering before he shut the notebook.
She frowned. “So nothing more has happened to you since that night?”
“Nothing.” Martin’s voice was short; he sounded disappointed.
He tapped his pen on his notebook thoughtfully. “But we have all the classic conditions for a poltergeist haunting. You and Marlowe—all that hormonal angst…” He glanced at her, then away.
Robin flared up. “You guys aren’t exactly choir boys.”
“That’s my point. There’s a synergy of…unhappiness among us. A fusion of ‘Discarded Ones.’ ”
He seemed amused by the term, and Robin felt a chill, although without knowing why. She looked around at the statues surrounding them, blank marble eyes staring down.
Martin spoke beside her. “I bought a new board.”
Robin turned and stared at him. “What?”
“How can we not follow up?” he said impatiently. “It’s a perfect term paper. My thesis question is ‘Can a focused collective emotional energy cause a psychokinetic effect?’ ”
Robin shook her head almost violently. She unzipped her backpack and pulled out the book of old newspapers. “I don’t think it’s emotional. I’ve been doing some research, too.” She opened the book on the marble pedestal, turned pages to the article about the fire. (She’d been careful to remove the inserted page with the vile song before she packed the book).
She held the pages down against the wind and stepped back so Martin could read. “It’s all here, just like he said. Zachary died in a fire
in Mendenhall
. I think that’s why he’s so angry and... lost.”
Martin looked exasperated. He stepped closer, glanced over the article.
She watched him read, and was gratified to see a shadow flicker in his eyes. “How do you explain that we were talking to a ghost who called himself Zachary when there was a real student named Zachary who died in that very building in 1920?”
“But that’s precisely how these subconscious messages work,” he explained with exaggerated patience. “You and I were reading texts from the 1920s. The board we were using was dated from 1920, so 1920 was in the atmosphere between us. We’re living in the building where this student died—in 1920. One of us is bound to have heard something about it. We bring all these random facts together on”—his voice dripped sarcasm—” ‘a dark and stormy night.’ The collective subconscious energy puts all those connections together and starts spelling out messages from this so-called ghost.”
Robin felt her face getting hotter and hotter. It was almost perverse, the way he refused to see.
“Maybe you just don’t want to believe,” she said suddenly.
He almost gaped at her. “What—”
“Maybe you’re not seeing because you don’t want to see. It reminds you too much of religion, when you’ve just flat-out rejected everything, right? It’s all psychology to you. No God, no religion, no ghosts.”
Martin looked startled, and, in fact, she’d surprised herself with her outburst. But he answered her with raw impatience.
“Of course I rejected it. It’s so completely archaic. I’m supposed to believe in a religion based on texts from the Middle Ages that seriously acknowledge astrology and numerology and…demons? It’s beyond ridiculous. It’s beyond comprehension. Give me Freud any day.”
Robin wanted to point out that he had a charm from that archaic religion nailed to his door frame, but she didn’t know what good it would do. He was extremely conflicted; that much was clear. She had a sense that he wanted to believe, and was overcompensating in his skepticism. All to do with his rabbi father, no doubt. Positively Freudian.
But before she could say any of that, Martin abruptly switched gears.
“All right, we have conflicting theories. So we test it.” He cleared his throat, suddenly seeming nervous. “We could…do the paper together, from the two different points of view.” He looked at her briefly. “ ‘Poltergeists—Psychic or Psychological?’ ”
Thrown off by the change in tack, Robin stalled. “Have you talked to the others?”
Martin reddened, looked off down the terraced stairs. “I was hoping maybe you could. I mean…you’re so honest and real and…they like you.” His voice dropped. “People don’t tend to like me.” He looked away from her, blushing even deeper.
Robin herself flushed—both with pleasure at Martin’s assertion that the others liked her and confusion at the realization that
he
liked her.
Martin stood awkwardly, in an agony of embarrassment. She reached, grasped his arm, and shook it gently. “I’ll talk to them. But not for a term paper. To find out why Zachary’s here, what he wants. We can’t just play around.” She looked off toward the edge of campus, toward the Hall, and her face was troubled. “
He’s
not playing.”
* * *
The sky was already streaked with dark when she left Martin at the bottom of the stairs on the main plaza. She did not see that he turned to watch her as she went…holding his arm where she’d touched him.
She turned off the plaza and walked along the footpaths that meandered through the oak grove, her feet crunching on the slippery dry leaves. Branches entwined over her head, enclosing the path. Her thoughts were stormy. Martin might have convinced himself that he could find a scientific explanation, and maybe write a brilliant and groundbreaking thesis in the process, but there was something else behind this obsessive pursuit of the facts. In his own way, he was as caught up in the mystery as she was. He was only being hyperacademic because it was comfortable, or reassuring, or safe. And he was obviously rejecting anything that resembled faith—so hell-bent on not believing that he was ignoring what was right in front of him. That wasn’t only stupid; it might even be dangerous.
And, she suddenly intuited, she had the distinct feeling he wasn’t telling her everything. He was—maybe not lying, exactly, but he was definitely holding back. Her mind went to the Hebrew lettering she’d seen in his notebook. Significant, but she didn’t know why.
Ahead of her was a small copse of trees, a circle within the grove, with a bench inside the circle. Her steps slowed and she realized that she had been headed here all along, although she’d never thought much about the place before.
She moved off the path and waded through a tangle of vines into the quiet circle of trees, approaching the curved marble bench.
She’d passed it before and noticed the inscribed names, but she’d never really looked; there were many such memorial benches and statues scattered about campus, gifts from wealthy alumni, sometimes from an entire class or club or fraternity. But there was something about this one, a heaviness—the isolation of it, maybe, or the formality of the circle that enclosed the bench.
She brushed past the rough trunk of an oak, stopped in front of the bench, and looked down at the lettering in the marble. The date made her shiver.
CLASS OF 1920:
IN MEMORIAM
There were five names engraved underneath in alphabetical order. She reached out slowly and touched the fifth.
ZACHARY PRINCE
And as she stood with her fingers against the cold, smooth stone, she felt a breath on her cheek, exactly as if someone was standing beside her.
She whirled, staring around her in the shadowy grove.
The trees were tall and still, the air heavy.
There was no one there.
But there was. She could feel it, a presence like eyes, like touch.
“Zachary?” she whispered.
The slightest wind breathed through the shrubbery around her, brushed teasingly at her clothes, slid into the cloth like fingers. Robin gasped.
The breeze lifted her hair, caressed her cheeks, breathing into her ear. Robin closed her eyes, turned her head into the touch, even her heartbeat suspended.
The wind rustled again through the trees—and was gone.
Robin opened her eyes.
The grove was still, and suddenly colder, the sky almost completely dark.
Her face was flaming, but she trembled with cold. And then, suddenly terrified, she turned and ran from the circle of trees through the grove.
She pulled the heavy front door of Mendenhall closed behind her and stood beside the wall of mailboxes in the dim hall, flushed with strange feelings, not all of them fear.
It was Zachary
.
The longing—she’d felt it. It was real, and intense, and—
Pleasurable
.
Her legs felt light and weak and her breasts ached as she remembered the touch of wind under her clothes.
Someone touched her back in the dark and she twisted around, freaked.
A shadow towered in the dark hall.
She shrank back against the coat rack, barely bit back a scream—and then she recognized Patrick.
His face was tight in the shadows of the entry hall, his voice curt, distant. “We need to huddle. All of us. The Columns at eight.”
Robin nodded, speechless. And then for a moment, something flickered in Patrick’s eyes—stark, intimate—
Terrified
.
Her gaze locked with his.
Then he turned sharply and walked off, leaving her in the dark.