The Harrowing Read online

  Robin’s only consolation was that her very existence was as annoying to Waverly as Waverly’s was to her.

  Robin hung her detested coat to dry above the radiator, dug her Ancient Worlds textbook out of her backpack, and curled in the window seat with her back to the other girl.

  The room itself was fantastic, really: diamond-beveled windows, a cozy, creaking recessed window seat, delicious dark mahogany paneling up half of the wall. But the decor was a battlefield, lines strictly drawn. Waverly’s half of the room was fussily, oppressively feminine: Laura Ashley linens and cut-crystal knickknacks perkily punctuated with various plush stuffed animals, a framed photo of the boyfriend on the dresser.

  Robin’s half was dark and cryptic and arty: black sheets and worn Surrealist prints on the wall, the melted Dali watches a defiant blot in Waverly’s Martha Stewart universe.

  Waverly finally hung up on whatever relative she was torturing and turned her full attention back to her suitcase. Robin bent over her book. She had no intention of actually studying, but she kept up the pretense of reading to annoy Waverly. It was working. Waverly watched Robin suspiciously, irritated to paranoia by Robin’s stoic refusal to acknowledge her presence. The silence fairly crackled between them. Finally, Waverly had to speak.

  “You’re not going home?”

  Robin turned a page, not looking up. “No.”

  “You’re just going to stay here? By yourself?”

  Robin’s eyes never moved from the book. “Looks like it.”

  Waverly’s gaze narrowed; her drawl lengthened. “You never go anywhere, you know.”

  Robin’s voice was flat. “I must be weird or something.”

  “Or something,” Waverly sniffed.

  The door crashed open and a tall, broad jock filled the door frame.

  The boyfriend.

  In the window seat, Robin stiffened, every molecule of her being instantly aware of him. If Waverly was a black hole, Patrick O’Connor was the sun, big and blond and full of life. Robin could feel her heart lifting, hope returning.

  He swaggered into the room, duffel hanging from his shoulder. “Taxi’s here,” he complained in Waverly’s direction, Southern accent rich as butter. “Ready to roll?”

  Waverly continued rearranging her suitcase, adding outfits she had no chance in hell of wearing over the four-day break. “He’ll wait,” she knifed back.

  Robin kept her eyes glued to her book, raging inwardly. Why Waverly? It was always the golden, stupid ones who were chosen.

  It was pathetic, really, a typical Southern disaster in the making. High school quarterback fucking what brains there were out of the prom queen. Prom queen bent on marriage, quarterback overflowing with hormones, scamming on every other girl in sight.

  As if to illustrate the point, Patrick ran his hand along the curve of Waverly’s ass as she bent over her suitcase. She pushed him away. Unfazed, Patrick twisted his hand in her hair and pulled her head back to kiss her, full mouth grazing on her lips, dropping lower to nuzzle on her throat.

  Robin’s jaw tightened; she pretended not to watch. Pathetic.

  Even more pathetic was that against all logic and better judgment, Robin was hopelessly in lust with him. It was a stupid cliché, doomed, she knew—but Patrick was the only person at the school who’d paid any attention to her at all, who smiled when he saw her, as if she weren’t broken or damaged beyond repair. Granted, he lighted up for everyone, especially when he wanted something. But at least Robin felt there when he was around. At least he saw her. He saw her.

  She’d listened to them make love in the dark, not knowing or caring that she was awake, and imagined herself under him, his mouth on her throat, his hands holding her down, his heat filling her—

  She started back to the present as Patrick turned Waverly loose and flashed his grin at Robin, warm and brilliant. “Hey, Rob. Could not motivate myself out of bed this morning. I miss anything in Ancient Civ?” A direct blue gaze, irresistible.

  Robin closed her book on her finger, kept her voice casual. “Besides that next Friday’s the midterm?”

  Patrick’s look was comically dismayed. “Fuck a duck. I’ll choke.” His voice dropped, low and caressing.” ‘Less I can get your notes.” The Carolina drawl that was like fingernails on a blackboard from Waverly was a lingering tease in Patrick’s voice, full of warmth and promise.

  Robin felt her knees go weak, but she put her book aside and stood, moving past him to her desk. She could feel Patrick’s eyes on her. He stepped to her side (so close!) as she flipped through a spiral notebook. The heat of his body beside hers made her stomach twist with longing.

  She ripped four classes’ worth of notes on creation myths from the notebook and turned quickly, pages in hand, so he couldn’t see she was trembling. “That’s the last two weeks. You haven’t been for a while.”

  He looked down into her eyes and she felt her breath catch. “Saved my ass. I owe ya—”

  Waverly’s voice came from behind, a shrill note of warning. “Are you finished coming all over my roommate?”

  Patrick winked at Robin, turned and hoisted Waverly’s suitcase, then his duffel bag, and then hooked an arm around Waverly’s waist and slung her up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Waverly pounded on his back, her voice rising to a banshee shriek. “Put me down, you assholel”

  Patrick ignored her and carried her out, calling cheerfully back over his shoulder. “See ya, Rob. Happy Turkey Day.”

  Robin could hear Waverly starting to swear a blue streak, her voice fading down the hall.

  She kicked the door closed behind them and stood still in the fading light.

  CHAPTER THREE

  By five, the dorm was completely, eerily empty, halls dark and silent as the grave.

  Robin had expected to feel at least some relief at Waverly’s departure. Instead, she felt a dread closing in on panic.

  She had never experienced the dorm without dozens of people in it. Deserted, it was much bigger than she’d realized, three stories and two and a half wings of crooked corridors, confusing to navigate without the landmarks of familiar faces. All the floors looked disconcertingly the same when the doors were shut.

  And Robin hadn’t really imagined how different it would feel—that there was a life force in the presence of others that pervaded the building. Even when she was in her own room, consciously unaware, her subconscious must have registered all the others.

  Now the Hall was as empty and dead as a shell.

  Without people, too, the dorm seemed to lose its very insulation. The wind reached icy fingers through minute cracks in the walls, snaked its way up through the floorboards. The rain had started again, slanting and relentless, and with it a fresh assault of wind. The windows rattled like bones; the whole structure shifted and groaned on its foundation.

  And it had finally occurred to Robin that the communal bathroom was all the way down the hall. She’d have to leave her room in the middle of the night, when anyone could be lurking around, lying in wait for lone college girls stupid enough not to go home for vacation. No one could possibly hear her if she screamed and screamed.

  Stop it, she ordered herself. Go out there right now instead of being an idiot about it.

  She opened her door to a dark hall of closed doors, all locked to silent rooms. She took a breath and made her way down the corridor to the bathroom.

  She stepped through the doorway—and pulled up short, stifling a gasp. There was someone else in the bathroom.

  A slim girl with a wild mane of questionably blond hair was leaning over one of the sinks lined up under the long horizontal mirror. Her mouth was pursed in concentration as she outlined her already-blackened eyes with kohl. Her torn lace blouse and short skirt revealed an elaborate navel piercing and several provocatively placed tattoos. A piece of red yarn was tied around one wrist, knotted in several places and frayed at the ends. Some L.A. thing, no doubt; she positively reeked of California.

  The girl—Li
sa, Robin thought her name was—had a room on the opposite side of Robin’s floor. She had the paleness and perpetual yawn of a druggie, but there was an interesting fuck-you fire in her eyes. In the two months of the short term, Robin had seen numerous boys leaving and entering her room at all hours of the night and day, almost never the same one for even two days in a row.

  Lisa glanced at Robin sideways in the mirror, drawled, “Love these holidays …”

  Robin felt again the blistering envy of the fierce, crackling life in the other girl. But this time, along with the envy was something more: a yearning, an uncharacteristic impulse to reach out. She hovered by the lockers, gathering the courage to ask the girl if she was staying—then jumped as a voice spoke right behind her.

  “You comin’, or what?”

  Robin twisted around. A sullen leather-jacketed young man with dyed black hair slouched in the doorway.

  Lisa half-smiled ambiguously, stuck the kohl pencil behind her ear, and sauntered out past Robin, a hip-shot walk, oozing an indolent and perhaps slightly stoned sensuality. She disappeared in the direction of the stairwell with the boy.

  Robin stood looking at her own reflection in the mirror for a long time. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark clothes…dark, dark, dark. The harsh fluorescents hummed above her head. Beyond the tiled divider wall, a shower dripped.

  She reached out and put her hand on the mirror, blocking out her own face.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The wind felt along the building outside…scratching for entry, whispering to get in.

  Robin walked along the dark hall…past closed doors…moving inexorably toward a door at the end with brilliant light along the cracks of it. The whispering was all around her, growing as she approached…louder…louder—

  The door crashed open, tearing from its hinges, unleashing a storm of formless swirling energies, howling with rage…rushing forth—

  Robin woke to dim gray light, with her heart pounding crazily in her chest.

  The shutters banged steadily against the window. The wind moaned as rain pelted down, icy, miserable.

  She lay still, burrowed in bed, unnerved by her dream, the images of inchoate swirling things.

  She’d fallen asleep while trying to read Jung’s explanation of archetypes; she could feel the heavy lump of book beside her in the bed. That’s where the swirling things had come from.

  She reached for the book and looked down at the page.

  The archetype is an irrepresentable, unconscious, pre-existent form that seems to be part of the inherited structure of the psyche and can therefore manifest itself spontaneously anywhere, at any time….

  Robin wasn’t sure she understood the concept, but there was something disturbing about it. A pre-existent form that could spontaneously manifest itself anywhere, at any time? Not exactly something she wanted to hear this weekend.

  In fact, everything about Jung so far was unnerving…a man who’d begun his psychological studies back in the 1920s by going to séances—which, although cool, was somehow not what she’d expected to be studying in college.

  She looked out the window at wind churning the trees, and shivered.

  Then her stomach growled almost comically and she realized she was starving. She stared out at the storm in dismay.

  She hadn’t thought about food, or that there would be too much of a gale outside for her to try for a convenience store or for The Lair on campus—which, she suddenly remembered, would be closed over the holiday anyway. She made a quick mental inventory of the stock on her closet shelf. It was as bleak as the day: a box of Triscuits, some packages of instant cocoa, and a stack of the student’s friend, Top Ramen—none of which was even remotely appealing. Waverly never ate, of course, though Robin knew there was an emergency bottle of Jack Daniel’s hidden behind her spare comforter on the top shelf of her closet, kept around to wash down the designer pain medication Waverly no doubt lifted from a mother as blond and petite and shrill as she was.

  Robin’s only hope of food was a trip to the second floor, where a communal laundry room housed a Coke and candy machine, and there would surely be coffee and perhaps someone’s leftovers in the kitchenette.

  But that meant going out into the hall.

  She lay under the pile of comforters as long as she could, clinging to the warmth, until caffeine withdrawal forced her up. She dressed randomly, a skirt over wool leggings, a bulky sweater over a turtleneck, black on black, while rain pelted against the window behind her.

  Her door creaked open into the corridor as she stepped carefully outside her room.

  With all the doors closed, the hall was dim, spooky, far too reminiscent of her dream. She glanced toward the end of the hall…but of course there was only a wall, no door edged with brilliant light.

  She stood uneasily in the doorway, listening for any sound.

  Nothing but the wind scraping along the building outside.

  A fragment from Lister’s lecture hovered in the back of her head:

  … Jung believed there was a universal unconscious around us, populated by ancient forces that exist apart from us, yet interact with and act upon us.

  She eased the door closed behind her, irrationally not wanting to disturb the silence, or draw attention to herself.

  What are you afraid of, archetypes? She mocked herself. That’s mature.

  She hurried down the carpeted hall, descended a flight of pitch-black stairs as quickly and silently as she could manage.

  The second floor was as deserted as her own, a dark tube of locked doors. Blue light spilled from the open doorway of the laundry room. Robin swallowed and crossed the hall.

  Inside, she reached along the wall and flicked on the light, grateful for the spluttering glare of the fluorescents. The washing machines were silent cubes, the dryers black, watching windows against the wall.

  Robin walked past the line of washers to the lighted Coke machine, a cheery red in the monochromatic room. She reached into her skirt pocket, slid in quarters until a Coke can dropped into the tray with a sharp clunk.

  Robin flinched, raw-nerved, at the sound.

  Behind her there was a huge inhalation, like the rush of breath. Robin gasped, whirled—and stared at the generator, which had whooshed on behind her.

  She ran all the way back to her room and slammed the door behind her, leaned against it, shaking, berating herself.

  And wondered how she could possibly make it through three days.

  * * *

  The phone call came right after noon, just as she’d known it would.

  When she picked up her phone, her mother was drunk, of course. Robin could almost smell it through the airwaves, sweet, stale whiskey. ‘Tis the season, though for Mom, any old season would do.

  Robin had carefully explained, the last time she’d called and found her mother not too out of it, that she’d be staying at school over Thanksgiving. Her mother had seemed to absorb it at the time.

  But somewhere along the line, something must have been lost, and her mother had missed the fact that Robin wasn’t going to be coming home. Now her voice was edged with hysteria.

  Robin tried for calm. “I told you, Mom. I can’t leave. I have a huge exam next week. Practically everyone’s staying. We’ve having a big dinner here....”

  She flinched and held the phone away from her face. Drunken rambling came from the earpiece.

  She sank down on the window seat, looked down at a lone student, head bent against the rain as he crossed the deserted street. The wheedling and cajoling segued into recrimination, and then the crying jag. Robin rested her forehead against the cold glass. The words didn’t matter; she’d heard it before. It was all some dark, unfathomable mass, a vortex of chaos and confusion.

  Her mother was screaming now—her father again, always her father. “You’re just like him. Lying, selfish bitch…”

  Robin choked out, “I gotta go, Mom. I gotta go.” She punched off the phone and hurled it against the wall. It bounced under her d
esk and she backed away, swaying, sick.

  Instantly, it began to ring again. She threw herself down on the floor, groped under her desk, found the phone next to the wallboard. She pushed down on the power button until the ringing stopped.

  She sat back on her knees, hugging herself, feeling her mother’s energy like a bottomless whirlpool, taking her down, down.

  It wasn’t him she was afraid of being like.

  That was what she came from. That was what she was. Broken, defective, fatally abnormal. No wonder no one wanted to come near her.

  It was all black, all nothingness.

  The abyss.

  * * *

  Pure dark now. The rain gusted outside, the trees shivered in the wind. The Hall shuddered in its own kind of agony, impervious to the one human sound deep within it. But something in the dark corridors leaned forward…listening.

  Robin was tightly curled in the window seat of her room, arms wrapped around her knees, sobs tearing through her. The blackness had descended again, leaving no room for anything else.

  After a long while, she looked up, drew a shaky breath. Her chest hurt from crying, but now, suddenly, she was calm. Exhausted, but deeply calm.

  She stood, swiped at her eyes with an overlong sleeve, and crossed unsteadily to Waverly’s bureau. She knelt on the brown carpet and opened the bottom drawer, pushing aside sweatshirts and petite tees in pastel colors—to find the bottle of Valium.

  She shook it. More than enough.

  And suddenly, she was clear.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The wide main staircase descended into the murky gloom of the bottom floor, lighted only by red neon EXIT signs.

  Robin stood at the top of the stairs with Waverly’s bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, the bottle of pills in the other, looking down into the abyss.

  She’d cracked the bottle in her room, even swallowed the first pill, washed down with whiskey—and immediately realized that not under any circumstances was she going to have Waverly be the one to find her. She could just hear the shrill screaming, the exaggerated hysteria. In the lounge, she could abandon herself to the infinitely more acceptable kindness of the first returning stranger.