Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  It was a finger, with the nail torn off.

  A real finger. He didn’t want to examine it too much, but he had to see if there really was a bone in there. That would prove it once and for all. Using a thumbtack from the cork board above Meloni’s bed, Jim pulled back some of the skin.

  Sure enough: a small white lump of bone.

  Finger bone.

  He felt the threat of vomit at the back of his throat. After having lost breakfast, but managing to keep his lunch down, he didn’t want to let anything else come up. He took a few deep breaths.

  Okay. So it’s a finger. Maybe it’s from some dead guy. Some guy from maybe the mortuary in town. Maybe that was all. Or maybe it was from something else. I mean, there wasn’t that much blood. It might be an old, old finger. It was in a crypt. It was from some dead guy. They cut it off as a joke or a trick. That was the kind of thing these guys probably did to scare people off. It was morbid and gross, but he wouldn’t put it past half the assholes in school to do that kind of thing.

  He went and washed his hands; then he sat down on his bed, and picked the finger up again.

  The ring around it was a school signet. He took the ring off, and examined it.

  Inside the ring, the inscription: Stephen Hook, Class of 95.

  Yet it was not his brother’s finger. Plus, his brother had not had that ring. Not precisely. It had been lost; Jim knew it had been lost, because Stephen, then a Junior, whined about losing it. His mother was furious with him, because the ring had cost good money; but his father did not mind, and told his mother that there were other rings the boy would have in the world.

  His father always had that tender way of speaking to his mother. It was something Jim missed about him. He could practically see his father’s face: It was nearly unlined at forty, his hairline had receded a bit, and there was a frosting of gray along his short-cut sandy brown hair, turning the ends to silver. His eyes were youthful and twinkly, and even when angered, his father had managed to keep a look about him of calm and patience. Even when the seas got rough (that’s what his father, raised on sailing, had said), he kept his hands on the rudder.

  Jim couldn’t conjure his brother’s face; and his eyes blurred. All that had happened within the past two days clutched at his throat. He felt stirring, like someone plucking at strings beneath his skin.

  He sat on his small bed, alone in his dormitory room, and stared at the green walls. His eyes felt as if they were burning; he was sure that he was going to have a heart attack. As crazy as it sounded, he felt his heart beating in his chest, and it seemed to thump louder and more violently than usual. His neck felt stiff, and his back ached.

  Whatever mess he’d gotten himself into, it wasn’t going to go away.

  “I’ve been waiting for your call.”

  “Sorry,” Jim said, sounding less smooth than he wanted to. He glanced at his wristwatch. It was just after five p.m. The other guys were horsing around in the hall, so it was hard to hear Lark’s voice. “Hey,” he said, cupping his hand over the receiver. “Shut the hell up, will ya?”

  Then, back to the hall phone. “I meant to call earlier, only I got wound up in some stuff.”

  “Hey, how’s the dog?”

  “Dog?”

  “The Great Pup Caper,” Lark said, brightly. Then, “We told the vet we’d check in before the weekend.” Her voice sank a bit. “You didn’t call the office?”

  “Oh, yeah. I tried calling this morning but got put on hold. And I’ve been busy. I’ll go look in on the muttly tomorrow.”

  “He’s not a muttly.”

  “He’s a muttly mange of a pup. But I’ll check in on the son of a bitch tomorrow,” Jim promised.

  “Aw, that poor puppy. And you calling him bad things. Okay if I come up Friday night? Jenny wants to see Rich, and we can borrow her car and go to the movies or something if we want after they hook up.”

  “Sure. Yeah. Sure.”

  “Something up? You sound funny.”

  He hesitated. Better not tell her. “Naw. Just have a lot of tests this week. You know the drill.”

  “Tell me about it. I’m having a crappy week myself. I had chemistry this morning. I had no idea the elements were so, well, elemental. I probably flunked it.”

  “No, you probably aced it.”

  “I bet I flunked. How’d Western Civ go?”

  A momentary silence on the line. Then he said, “Okay. I probably flunked that one, too.”

  “You underestimate yourself all the time. You probably passed with flying colors.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Doubt it.”

  The conversation felt tense. He didn’t like lying to her. But he just didn’t want to get into what had happened with the midterm. “I can’t wait to see you Friday. I miss you already.”

  “Aw. Thank you. No one else seems to miss me. Oh, darn it—I better go, Jim. I’m getting signals from Marti that she wants the phone.”

  “Okay. See you Friday.”

  “All right. All right,” she said, not to him, but to her roommate, and then the dial tone came up. He looked at the phone, and then hung it back up on the wall.

  He felt like the biggest jerk in the world for not at least telling the truth.

  Jim Hook wished he could erase the world back to Sunday night when he was kissing her and rescuing puppies and running through the rain feeling as if, for once in his life, things were headed in the right direction.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Lark Trotter passed the cell phone to her roommate, and was out the door of the dorm room, letting it slam less than gently behind her. There was this thing with Lark: She wanted to win too badly, in any situation. It wasn’t a pretty quality, she knew.

  And she didn’t win most of the time. That was her other problem.

  Her roommate, Marti Hofstadter, was a real bitch, and had practically turned her in the night before for breaking curfew. Lark had to bribe her with doing her English term paper on “Animal Imagery in Shakespeare,” which was due in two weeks and for which Lark would now have to spend half her free time rereading “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” just to figure out what the hell she was going to write about. And she had wanted to try out for the school play, too, but between seeing Jim on the weekends and now her virtual slavery to Marti over a six-page paper (which seemed unimaginable since most of the papers they had to write were two to three typed pages), it was not shaping up like a good week.

  Lark was not going to win this week.

  She was in a terrible mood, and the worst part of it was she had wanted to appear so sweet to Jim on the phone, but felt that she was channeling Marti or one of Marti’s nasty friends.

  Then, of course, she’d barely gotten any sleep the night before, which didn’t help—the alarm had gone off at seven, and she’d had to rush to the showers just to get a place in line, and even so, she was late for first period.

  And then, there was that note, which pissed her off but good.

  She didn’t even want to think about it. It was just some nasty human being who had nothing better to do than play some nasty head game with her, and if she had to guess which rat it was, it might’ve been any number of the rats at Harrow Academy.

  And this hall. This dorm. This school. Everything.

  The hall was a mess—none of the girls ever kept it the least bit clean until the weekend, and Hally Cromwell was on resident duty, which meant it would remain a mess through the next few days until the end of October, when someone else got assigned.

  “Jen!” Lark called, striding down the hall, feeling a bad nervous energy just from Jim’s voice. Something was definitely up—it practically spat over the phone line with electric force—but she hadn’t been about to wheedle it out of him. They had dated a few weeks, and she was falling too fast; even she knew it. He was a year younger than she, he wouldn’t even have his driver’s license until spring or summer, and what would happen? There was something unnerving at times about him, too, but she just could not help her
self. She wanted to spend as much spare time over at Harrow with him as she could. She wished she could borrow Jenny’s car and just take off to see him that night, but it wasn’t going to work.

  And anyway, she had too much to get done. She had her own essay to write on imagery in “Macbeth,” and then she was supposed to start memorizing that prologue from The Canterbury Tales, which sounded silly in Middle English, but it was one of those St. Catherine’s requirements. And then that damn paper for blackmailer Marti. “All St. Catherine’s graduates will have committed Chaucer’s Prologue to memory by the time they leave these halls,” so commanded Suky Shultz, the young, far too chipper Junior Honors English teacher. Suky had been a graduate of St. Cat’s, as had her mother and aunt. Then, she had returned after studying at Middlebury and the Sorbonne and even had a Fulbright Scholarship in London after all that— and still, she’d returned to St. Cat’s, as did more than a few college graduates for a year or two of teaching.

  “Whan that Aprille with it shoures sootah,” Lark said as she walked down the hall, trying to remember more than one line from the Canterbury Tales prologue. Then, “Jen!”

  Jenny’s door was open, but she had her headphones on. When she saw Lark, she held up her index finger.

  “I distinctly smell pot in this room,” Lark said, coughing. “Open the windows, come on, you’re gonna get tossed out.” She stepped back out of the room and leaned against the wall. Pembroke Wallis and Nancy Shipman waltzed in like the twinsies they were, with their identical skirts and identical sparkling blond hair. Lark rapped on the wall. “Come on, Jen, let’s go.”

  Jenny was hooked on Beck, who brought her out of her not-infrequent depressions. Usually she played an album of his over and over again. Sometimes she smoked pot with a half dozen fans turned up and a towel under the door crack. That was one aspect of Jenny that Lark had never liked. “You’re going to be a head, a stoner, a wastrel,” she’d tell her.

  “It makes me think more clearly,” Jenny would tell her and then, stoned, drift off to some other thought or plane of existence.

  Lark waited in the hall—everyone who went by on the way to dinner annoyed her, and she realized one of the reasons was that it was going to be time for what Jen called the Dreaded Visitor, and that didn’t help matters, because it meant she’d be popping Midol and being grumbly until Thursday at least—if she were lucky.

  Within a few minutes, Jenny came out, smoothing her blouse and skirt, brushing the crumbs of some previously devoured graham crackers onto the floor.

  “Ready for supper?”

  “Always,” Jenny said.

  “You need a sweater. You’re gonna freeze.”

  Jenny ignored her. She playfully pushed Lark onward, out of the dorm, into the quad. The lights had come up too bright—squintingly bright—since the days had begun darkening early. It was like stadium lighting—it made the quad look two-dimensional in the broad, flat light.

  When they were halfway down the walk toward the cafeteria, Lark stopped and grabbed her hand. “I have to tell you something.”

  “Shoot,” Jenny said.

  “I got this today.” Lark reached into her breast pocket and withdrew a small, torn piece of paper. “I talked with him tonight but I didn’t... I didn’t really mention it.”

  She passed it over to Jenny, and when Jenny looked at it, her brows knit on her forehead. “This is just sick. Oh, Lark. Jeez, who coulda wrote this?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, it’s obviously not true.”

  “You think?” Lark managed a smile.

  “Oh my god, yeah. Good gravy,” Jenny said. She always said corny things like that. Good gravy. Cheese and crackers. Dagnab it. Jinx on a Coke. It made her sweeter in Lark’s eyes, because once, when Jenny got really mad after Alice Carver made a crack about her weight, Jenny had just exploded with the foulest language that had ever been heard in the halls of St. Cat’s—which was saying a lot. “Jimmy isn’t this kind of guy. I know it. I know people, Lark. Didn’t he just rescue a puppy? Boys who rescue puppies don’t have anything to do with this kind of crapola.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he’s never done anything remotely like this, right?”

  Lark nodded.

  “So.” Jenny glanced back at the note in the light; she squinted. “Who wrote this piece of trash?”

  “I have no idea. It was in this little envelope in my mailbox when I got out of French today. Someone mailed it yesterday. From Watch Point.” She began to feel flustered all over again, as she had the minute she’d opened the envelope and read the note the first time. And then again. And again. Until her imagination had just gone too wild. “It’s like a stalker note. Who would write it? Why me? Why use his name?”

  “You didn’t ask him?”

  “What would he say? He’d be embarrassed and angry that someone had even done this. And then, he’d know. You know. That I’d read it. That for a second, I might’ve even thought it.”

  “Guess so.” Jenny wadded the note up. “It was probably Shreve Boucher. He’s the type. Or Carrington. What a dick that guy is. He’s after you, too. I can tell. He has been since ninth grade. You don’t think it’s Charlie, do you?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. No. No, Charlie wouldn’t do that. I doubt even Shreve would.” Lark shivered. “What kind of boy writes that kind of thing and sends it—let alone thinks it?”

  “Ooh, maybe it’s just some pervert who saw you with him,” Jenny said, and then shook her head. “Nope. It’s probably just one of those jerks. Remember what Coop did last year to Trish Pepper? Harrow always has a few psychos in its midst. Well, forget it. I seriously doubt that our Jimmy boy is the kind of guy to do that stuff or make up crap. But those other preppie-heads-up-their-asses Harrow hard-ons, yeah, I could believe it of almost any of them,” Jenny said, and then she nudged Lark. “Now, let’s go. I hear they’re serving train wreck for dinner, with a little squirrel on the side.”

  The note:

  Dear Lark bitch,

  Your little boyfriend Jimbo told all of us how your pussy smells like tuna salad with lots of mayo and how he already had you fifty ways to Sunday and how he’s going to share you with all of us come this weekend, you fucking whore.

  I can’t wait to taste your juicy juicy red red rosy portal of pleasure. Jimbo said it was scrumpdiddlyumptious.

  Love always, your secret admirer in hell.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Hugh Carrington was what the teachers thought of as a pure Harrow student.

  He had come to Harrow in the seventh grade from St. Anselm’s, the Episcopal Elementary School in Crossfield, Connecticut, with high marks and an early aptitude for sports and mathematics. His hair was honey-blond, he was strong and handsome, he rowed crew in the summers with the Academy Achievers, a small group of upperclassmen who intended to get in to Ivy League schools and excel in every way. It was getting to be time for the dinner bell, but he had just gotten out of football practice, and decided to skip dinner and go for a jog along Hadrian’s Wall at the back of campus.

  The brisk air felt good—it was nearly October, and the Hudson spewed up a magnificent stench as he tried to keep his pace regular to avoid cramps and the exhaustion that generally accompanied an after-practice sprint.

  Twilight had darkened with the oncoming night, and the purplish hues of the river and the hills rising from its opposite bank were calming for him as he ran. Leaves crunched beneath his feet, and the last bird calls would continue; geese flew in formation overhead; the world was a good place for boys like Hugh.

  He took the more difficult path when he reached the woods, the one that went in among the trees, and that was Hugh Carrington’s first mistake.

  His second mistake was stopping among the trees, feeling as if someone were watching him.

  His third mistake was going deeper into the woods to find out who exactly was there.

  Hugh’s mind worked like this: He came, he saw, he conquered, just like
the Latin lesson about Caesar, and he wasn’t about to let some jerk-off like Shrike or Coop play those freak tricks on him like they had during baseball practice the previous spring. It was one thing to get some goony cheerleader from Watch Point High to come over hanging her tits out and carrying a big old crate of what were supposed to be hash brownies but turned out to be Ex-Lax brownies just so he’d be crapping his pants when he was pitching from the mound, but it was another to be following him and trying to make him all paranoid.

  Hugh Carrington was not going to put up with that kind of shit.

  “Come on, Shrike, get your butt out here, you pussy,” he said, and jumped over some brambles, off the path, and into the woods. He deftly avoided the potholes of nature—the rocks and fern outgrowths that hadn’t quite died with autumn, the slick piles of leaves that covered the earth. He had to duck under some branches, but he caught sight of the kid who was standing there—

  “Who are you, you stupid son of a bitch,” he spat as he came to a small clearing with a thicket at its center. “Come out now so I can break your face.”

  A boy of about eleven or twelve emerged from the thicket, only as he got closer to him, Hugh Carrington began shivering—

  His eyes—

  Dark, as if there were no eyes at all, but shaded, empty sockets—

  And then when the boy came closer, he showed Hugh Carrington something terrible.

  Hugh felt the piss run down his jockstrap, soaking his running shorts, but this was replaced by the absolute chill—

  The ice of knowing something he wasn’t supposed to know.

  Foam poured from between his lips, and he felt something scrambling in his head—

  Knowing—

  Not knowing what others knew, but knowing something—

  Witnessing something—

  That human eyes were never meant to witness—

  His blood began boiling within his skin—