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

by Douglas Clegg

  He smelled something that might’ve been burning meat—

  The boy revealed all to Hugh Carrington.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Call for you,” Meloni said, shaking him on his shoulder. “Hook. Come on. Get up.”

  Jim awoke slowly—it seemed minutes had passed before he stopped feeling groggy. He eyed his roommate suspiciously. “What’s up?”

  “Call for you. In the hall.”

  “Who? Lark?”

  “Didn’t ask. Sounds like your mom,” Meloni said, and tossed his books over on his bed. “What—you napped through supper?”

  “Yeah.” Jim felt sticky and sweaty, and wanted to wash himself off. He sat up.

  “You better get out there before she hangs up.”

  “Who?” he said, sleepily.

  “Your mom. How many times do I have to say it?”

  “Mom?”

  Pause.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m here,” she finally said. He could imagine her, sitting on the flower-print sofa with a cup of coffee beside her, and the evening news on the television but without the sound. “Did you get the letter I sent?”

  “Letter? No. Not yet. I didn’t check yet, though. Is something wrong?”

  “No,” she said, her voice slightly hoarse. “All right, I got a call last night.”

  “Call?”

  “A phone call. Someone called and told me something.” She sighed into the phone. “I’m sure it’s only some prank. Probably one of the boys. I’m sure they just got the number from the student handbook.”

  “Someone called you? Last night?”

  “I... they said something strange. It was the strangest thing. This person—well, it had to be one of your friends or some prankster up there—this person said that you . . . Well, this is ridiculous. It doesn’t matter what they said. It just got me to thinking about the letter I sent the day before yesterday.”

  “What did they tell you on the phone?”

  His mother ignored him. She waited a moment, and then continued. “It’s something I found the other day. I was cleaning up a little, going through the trunks in storage, trying to find some of your father’s things, just thinking I’d come across—you know which ones I mean—those really elegant cuff links he had from Spain. And when I was going through things, I found something that I thought you should have.”

  “What was it?”

  “Oh, I should let you be surprised. You’ll be surprised,” she said, laughing nervously. “I don’t want to spoil it. How’s school going?”

  “Fine. Mom, what are you sending?”

  “If I tell you, it won’t be a surprise. Let’s just say it’s something that you’ll cherish when you see it.”

  He blurted it out. “Is it his ring?”

  He heard his mother catch her breath.

  “Is it Stephen’s class ring? With his name engraved on the inside? Is that what you sent?” Jim was only dimly aware of how his voice rose slightly, almost aggressively.

  His mother went silent. He could hear a siren in the background. She was sitting by the window, with the blinds drawn but the windows open wide. It was how she kept things in the apartment: blinds always drawn.

  Then she said, “Of course it’s not his ring. Why in god’s name would you guess that? My god.”

  The silence on the phone was replaced by the barking of some dog in the neighborhood where his mother lived; the echoes of traffic and boom boxes.

  “Are you all right, Mom?”

  “I’ll. . . I’ll be fine in a minute. What you said. It just brought back that night for me.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m not sure why I guessed the ring. I know he lost it.”

  “He found it again,” she said, swiftly. “That night. He found it and he wore it. It’s been enough years, you’d think this wouldn’t bother me. Something like that ring. The way his fingers . . . I’m sorry, Jimmy. I don’t mean to be this upset.”

  “Mom? His fingers?”

  “Jim, I have to go. I can’t run up the phone bill this month. Look, I’ll put some money in the mail for you. It’s not much, but it’ll make it so you and your girl can go out to the movies or something.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t send it, Mom. I’m doing fine. And I’ve got work in the Development office and the kitchen on weekends, so it’s not like I’m completely broke.”

  “You should have a little fun,” she said.

  “I do. Don’t send me the money. Okay?”

  She hesitated. “If you say so. All right. I’ll hold it.”

  He wanted to jump in with, And Mom, you don’t go without a meal just so I can have an extra twenty dollars, do you? But he didn’t want to believe it, he didn’t want to know if it was true. The thought of his mother skipping lunch or dinner just so he could have pocket change upset him. He knew it couldn’t be true. And how would the others know that anyway? How could they know?

  “You sure everything is fine there?”

  “Yeah, Mom. Yes. It is. Really.”

  “Good. Prank phone calls,” his mother said. “I guess boys do those kinds of things. Well, keep an eye out for that envelope. I miss you.”

  “Yeah, me too, Mom.”

  “You sure you’re not in any trouble?”

  “Positive. Good night, Mom.”

  “Night, Jim. And Jim . . .”

  “Still here.”

  “He’d be proud of you. You know that. You don’t need me telling you that.”

  He stared at the telephone in the hall for a moment before hanging it up. Tears overcame him. He felt like a three-year-old lost at a shopping mall. He couldn’t let the other guys see it— if anyone came down the hall, he’d look like a pathetic loser who couldn’t handle himself. That’s pretty much what the other kids thought of criers. He wasn’t going to be thought of that way. He wasn’t going to leave himself that open to the bastards.

  He felt as if he had never learned anything in all his life.

  He might as well be dead.

  It was over for him.

  Between the bullies who had beat the crap out of him, and the Honor Council, he felt as if he might as well go to the roof and just jump.

  He couldn’t eat that night. Now, thoughts of his mother were making his head throb and his ears ring, and his stomach felt like it was full of butterflies getting drowned in gastric acid. Poor Mom. Christ, poor Mom. Up in Yonkers putting on a show so I’ll feel comfortable here. And me just taking, taking, taking. Christ, I shouldn’t even be here. Poor boys don’t go to rich boys’ schools.

  It’s absurd.

  Ridiculous.

  Crazy.

  He drank some of the vodka that Mojo kept hidden in his green canvas duffel bag full of dirty laundry. Mojo had a Dixie cup full, but Jim ended up just swigging from the bottle.

  “You’re a terrible drunk,” Mojo said with far too much sincerity. He motioned for the bottle. “Come on, hand it over. You’re bogarting it too much. You’re gonna get sick.”

  “I don’t care. I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

  “Now you’re talkin’.” Mojo lip-farted. “Put the bottle down. Jim. Put. The. Bottle. Down.”

  “I’ve been here, what? A total of a semester and maybe a half? Maybe? A half? And what— I have my dad and bro to thank for being such perfect—you know they weren’t such perfect— they been bad—very, very bad,” Jim said, thinking that he was headed somewhere with this profound thought, but the room spun a little and it seemed to spin his thoughts out into space.

  “Drink much?” Mojo laughed, finally wrestling the Stolichnaya from him. “Keerist, Hook, you done drank half the bottle.”

  “I did?” Jim grinned, feeling vaguely proud. “I hope the cops don’t find out.”

  “The cops,” Mojo laughed. “Yeah, they’re gonna throw your butt in jail.”

  “Drunk tank.” Jim laughed a little too loud. A few minutes later, he was throwing up in the sink, and Mojo held a wet hand towel to the back of his n
eck.

  “Take it easy,” Mojo said.

  Jim was afraid he had just been telling Mojo about the finger and the shadow students who roughed him up and read him their manifesto, but he was too drunk to be sure if he had actually said something or imagined it.

  He began babbling, tears and sweat and cuss words pushing their way out from his body in one way or another. “I can’t take this bullshit anymore, this utter and complete bullshit, I am never gonna be Stephen and I’m never gonna bring them back and my mom can cry and sacrifice and be Mrs. Martyr all she wants, but I don’t need this bullshit, this absolute bullshit, all this bullybullyshitshit.”

  Then the world spun like a carousel ride. He saw the room and its contents blur. Mojo seemed to grow six eyes, and some compact disc was playing from some room—it sounded like jazz but not the kind he liked, the kind that was like a trumpet solo with a cello in the background and a drum beat—and then every corner of the room began to creep with inky blackness until all the dots met and he passed out.

  When he regained consciousness, it was pitch black. He could hear Mojo’s snores from the nearby bed. Jim was in his bed, lying there in his briefs, his mouth tasting like a cat’s hindquarters, and his head pounding with a jack-hammer. He checked the green light of the digital alarm clock—it was 2 a.m.

  It’s always 2 a.m. for me.

  So this is what people do when they get drunk and pass out.

  He felt a heave come on, and he sat bolt upright in bed, but the wave of nausea passed.

  Then the pain became more intense—the pain in his body and in his mind.

  It was like a windowsill slamming down on his brain, over and over again. He began imagining his Honor Trial; he thought of those guys in the dark, and then he thought of the boy who had jumped from the tower decades ago and wondered what that had felt like.

  The towers were very nearly inaccessible to students, owing to the one suicide the school had ever had.

  All Jim really knew about it was that a senior had jumped because something bad had happened in his life—drugs were the culprit according to popular lore. There was, perhaps, a love motive, since the boy had sent a dozen red roses to a woman in the village who was much older and perhaps even pregnant—so went the tale—and the boy left a note that mysteriously disappeared (again, the legend had grown over the years to include this detail, although no student could corroborate this wrinkle).

  As a result, the entrances to the towers were locked most of the time, and only accessible with permission and when a student was accompanied by a teacher or administrator. After studying the ancient world, Fricker had begun calling them “ziggurats.” Jim Hook didn’t think he’d ever consider climbing them and jumping out of them.

  But it was late; he couldn’t sleep; his mouth tasted like rat dung; his head burst anew with stings and squeezes and a blam-blam-blam pulsing ache; Mojo was snoring in his small bed nearby, and a glow of moonlight had crept down the casement and through the sliver of open window. Jim looked out through it, and saw a bit of ziggurat reaching skyward from among the wispy trees.

  He drew his gym shorts on, and scuffled into a rugby shirt that stank from need of a good washing. Feeling thirsty in a way he had never felt before, he stuck his head under the bathroom sink and gobbled down what seemed like a gallon of water before turning off the spigot and heading out. He just wanted to get out of the Trenches and the stifling, unbreathable air, away from the dreadful thoughts of what his meager future held, and out into the night.

  He snuck past Bleeder’s room, creaking floors and all, and when he opened the back door, he felt ice in the wind.

  It was freezing out. The temperature had dropped so many degrees since he’d been out earlier that it was suddenly like winter. He pulled the long sleeves of the rugby shirt down over the palms of his hands, and began jogging down the flagstone path toward the road that led up to the towers.

  When he reached the Great Door, he glanced back along the road to see if anyone might be there—there were at least two security guards who were supposed to be patrolling the grounds at night, but usually they were watching television in the teachers’ lounge. The spotlights hit the fountain and St. George and the Dragon perfectly—the water was turned off, and the dragon looked very nearly doglike, a Doberman crossed with a goose, but with bat wings, and St. George’s spear struck the beast right in its shoulder. Leaves swirled about in the wind, falling to the pavement and gravel—but no one seemed to be about.

  For a moment, Jim took it all in: the night, the waving trees, the sound of some distant bird, the feeling of absolute human aloneness in the universe. The pulsing in his head hadn’t diminished with his run, but he was feeling better being out in the chill.

  He went to the tower at the right hand side of the building. The door was curved in a smooth arch, and looked as medieval as a tower entrance could be. Lit by one of the stronger lights, it looked like the entrance to some Rapunzel castle.

  And of course, it was locked.

  Then Jim went to the tower to the left of the Great Door. The light was dim—shadows from the branches of a nearby tree flagged back and forth across the lamplight. Perhaps it was the stones of the tower itself, but this corner felt colder just stepping up to the worn stone step that led to the door. He tried the door, but it was locked as well.

  “How the hell am I going to jump when I can’t even get inside the damn thing?” he asked the night.

  Then he sat down on the step and began weeping again, and felt like the biggest pussy in the world. The pounding hangover took over, and he began shivering from the cold.

  He leaned back against the tower door, and it opened behind him.

  Jim told himself that it wasn’t just some imagined fear that held him back; nor was it the hammering in his head from his first-ever hangover; nor was it because, at this hour between night and dawn, every movement was fraught with a kind of inherent spookiness.

  It was simply the darkness within the tower.

  It was pitch black, and he had the terrible feeling that something stood within the small room of the tower—what would have, in another time, been considered the guard room— and that something was waiting just for him to set foot inside.

  He remained outside, staring at the open door for several moments, and then pulled the door shut again.

  He had no interest in exploring that place. He shivered, just thinking of it.

  Jim began shambling back to the Trenches— his thirst growing immense, his stomach hurting, his head still popping and crashing, and when he reached the dorm, he turned back for a moment to look at the tower.

  He thought he saw a flicker of light at one of the uppermost windows, but then, nothing.

  And then he decided to go back to the tower and up those stairs.

  He got a flashlight from his room and convinced Meloni to come along with him, mainly because he didn’t want to go up there all by himself feeling half-drunk and all-scared and a little bit chickenshit. It had taken ten minutes to wake Meloni from a sound sleep, and another three to make him a cup of coffee by mixing Maxwell House instant with hot water from the tap. It tasted like dog doo, but it did the trick.

  “Always wanted to go up the tower,” Mojo said.

  “Crap, look at this,” Mojo Meloni said when they came around the first curved stair of the tower. “Shine the light up.”

  Jim shot the beam above his head. The curved steps were warped with age, and narrow.

  “How many steps you think we have to climb to get to the top?”

  “I dunno. It’s a ways up.”

  “Fuck yes it’s a ways up. Now, why’d I let you talk me into this?”

  “Because I’m scared shitless to go up by myself.”

  “Face it, Hook, you’re just scared shitless, period. Come on. Hold the light up. I’ll go first.” And Mojo went ahead, moaning now and then about how sleepy he was and how the steps seemed to go on forever and how it reminded him of this campfire story about t
hese kids who get caught in a rainstorm and enter this castle and start going up these stairs just like these stairs and there are only one hundred steps, but as they run back down they realize there are more steps down, many more than a hundred, and they keep going down down down.

  “Thanks for that.” Jim shivered. “Not like I believe it.”

  “Me neither,” Mojo said, but began counting the steps aloud as he went.

  “One hundred seventy-two,” Mojo said when he reached the top, out of breath. “Come on, Hook, get the light up here.”

  Jim’s limbs ached and he was breathing hard, but he made it up the last steps. “I think my ears just popped.”

  He shone the light around the small room they now stood in. Three long windows with shutters on the inside rounded the curve of the tower room. Mojo went to open the one in the middle. He drew the shutters back, latching them in place. This brought in another glow of light from the big lights along the drive below.

  “Gotta match?” Jim asked as he directed the light’s beam to the several fat candles that were on the floor.

  “Always,” Mojo said, reaching in the breast pocket of his T-shirt. He lit three of the candles, which lit the turret well enough to see its flickering edges. “It’s like an old castle.”

  “Yep. Wonder why they don’t let us up here.”

  “Jumpers.”

  “Jumpers?”

  “Kids jump. You know, like Dutch last year, who got all suicidal when his girl dumped him and tried to slit his wrists after he had toked up too much. And that kid jumped a long time ago. I heard about it.”

  “It’s a nice view up here,” Jim said as he opened up another set of shutters.

  “Looky here.” Mojo walked to a low door right next to the top step. He pulled on the door and then pushed, but it wouldn’t give. “I wonder where this goes to.”

  “Let me try,” Jim said.

  “Okay, Mr. Strongman.”