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

by Douglas Clegg

  Then he began to feel paranoid, and wanted to get away from them. Something was bothering him. Something in the back of his mind. As if an image had been burned there, and he could not quite remember what it was.

  He looked around, but their shoulders and legs were in the way.

  He glanced up to the sky again, but it was disappearing, and he was going down, down, down, down into some underworld.

  And then wavering yellow light came up.

  He knew where they had brought him.

  It made his skin crawl.

  It was the crypt.

  They laid him down. He felt an icy floor beneath his back.

  Christ, I’m naked. They stripped me. Oh shit, no, just my shirt. Christ, what is this? Holy shit, what are they going to do?

  Words began forming into a scream in his head and all that came up in his mind was: Somebody help me!

  “You have passed the first test, Hook. It was the test of trust. And you have restored it,” Trey Fricker said.

  “Yeah,” someone grunted. Who the hell was it? Take off the masks, scaredy-cats. Jim giggled, imagining them all taking off their masks and beneath, a bunch of yowling cats.

  “You sure did, Hook.”

  “You are now at level one. A seeker. Tonight, you must undergo a further proving ground before you become one of us.”

  “Before your initiation.”

  “To become an Adept in the Corpse Society, you must pass the test of fear.”

  He was too sleepy and feeling too drunk and high and like he was floating up from the cold cold slab they’d put him on—he floated to the ceiling, he spun, he hung there awhile. A renewed anger washed over him, and he felt his blood rise. He wanted to beat the crap out of all of them. And then he felt a calm. The room began spinning.

  Then, when he took a deep breath, he was just lying on the floor again.

  “The test of fear is a test of your ability to remain sane through a dark journey.”

  “The test of fear is to teach you courage and patience.”

  “The test of fear is to become one with the brotherhood of Corpses.”

  “You have brought us the stolen ring, which symbolizes for us our core. That which was stolen by your brother has been returned by you, and redeemed your brother’s memory.”

  “Your brother was one of our society, Hook.”

  “A sacred brotherhood which is based on the life of each individual brother coming together to stoke a great fire of brotherhood.”

  “We are a secret and powerful group, Hook.”

  “Tonight, you will sleep with the dead. You will remain here. You will not be able to move until morning.”

  “You will lie with the dead to prove yourself worthy,” one said.

  He recognized Fricker’s voice as he felt a hand give his shoulder a squeeze. “It’s all right, Hook. Remember, you need to conquer your own fear.”

  Jim felt himself being lifted and then brought down into some dark tunnel. No, it was like a lumpy bed.

  No, it was . . .

  And then he knew.

  They had put him inside a tomb with a dead body.

  He tried to open his mouth to scream, but it felt as if it were clamped shut.

  He began to feel sleepy. The damn drug was having too good an effect, and he tried to fight it, but there was no fight in him—he was conscious of the feeling of something that lay beneath him, and he imagined a dusty skeleton crackling under his weight. He began to sink down, and he felt his throat tightening up, and then he was sure that whatever he slept with wrapped its arms around him.

  But it was only the hands from above, the hands of the Corpse Society, and they did something that terrified him even more.

  There were trying to make him comfortable.

  And then, what little light there was began to dim.

  And he knew.

  They were closing the lid of the tomb.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  He counted his breaths. They were slow and strained, and his first thoughts were like flights of wild birds—panicking winged thoughts of death and burial and terror and nightmare. Yet, nothing in his body raced. His heartbeat— which he could practically feel in his throat— seemed slow and methodical. He felt cold, but not so cold as to shiver. It was as if his body were turned off somewhere, but his mind was there, fighting to remain while the rest of him had deserted.

  He could smell. That was the next thing he noticed. It wasn’t an unpleasant stink. Almost like dried flowers. Chrysanthemums. Not rose. Not anything very pretty. Just a smell that was strong.

  He tried not to think of what he lay beside and slightly on top of.

  It was just a lumpy, hard mattress. He had to see it that way if he was going to get through the night.

  Who knows?

  They may pull me out of here in an hour or two. The Key Club had this hazing ritual where they made the pledges sit in a huge wash bucket full of ice in nothing but their jockstraps. He had heard of a fraternity at Harvard that made its initiates jump naked into Boston Harbor in the middle of winter. Some of the guys had older brothers or sisters at Yale who told them about all kinds of bizarre and frightening rituals for joining clubs. This wasn’t much different, was it?

  Then the darkening thoughts came.

  They were burying him alive.

  They all thought it was a funny joke to stick the scholarship student in a tomb right before he gets kicked out for cheating. Serves him right. He was looking at another student’s paper. In fact, Trey Fricker might say, he was looking at my paper, the creep, and he deserves everything he gets.

  But what if they forgot him? What if they all went over and did their stupid secret society stuff and he was stuck here and no one came to get him in an hour? What if the air cut off and he slowly suffocated? What if something happened to them—what if they all forgot and then he screamed and no one heard him because the entire crypt was sealed? He imagined the days passing, and how he’d feel hunger and thirst and if the drug they’d given him—what was it, some kind of paralysis that he felt?—never wore off and he lay there until the last breath had left him and then someday someone would come down in that tomb, someday years later, and they’d find the two bodies lying together. His . . . and the bones beneath him.

  Wait, you can scream. Surely you can. Open your mouth. Open it. Damn it.

  He opened his mouth, but could not even feel his tongue or teeth and couldn’t tell if his mouth had opened far.

  And then he began to imagine things.

  “Hey, Squirt,” his brother said after the light came up. His brother sat on the edge of his bed, and wore a blue shirt and his boxers, the way he always did whenever he was just hanging out on a Saturday morning. “There’s this girl I got to tell you about. I think she’s something special.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Jim mumbled, even though he couldn’t hear his own voice. “Ivy Martin.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. She’s something special. I didn’t know you met her.”

  “Sure. I went down to New York and saw her. I saw her place, too.”

  “Did you see her paintings?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She has neat stuff.”

  “You gave her some ring.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where is it?” Stephen asked, his smile kind of twisting like he’d just sucked on a lemon.

  “They wanted it. That’s why I went there, I guess.”

  “They?”

  “The Corpse Society.”

  “Oh. Them,” Stephen laughed. “Holy crap, Squirt, how’d you ever get mixed up with those geeks?”

  “Yeah, I know. Stupid, huh?”

  Stephen swiped his hand over Jim’s hair, and then covered his eyes for a moment. “How do you know you’re my brother?”

  “I look like you.”

  “How you gonna make your big bro proud?”

  “By doing the best I can,” Jim said to the sweaty darkness
of his brother’s hand.

  His brother brought his hand back, and Jim was lying in the tomb again, only there was this big light, and some shadow hovered over him.

  The shadow shimmered into a form, and it became clearer—Miles, the boy who had disappeared right before his eyes.

  “Hi Hook.”

  “You’re not real. You’re a hallucination or something.”

  “Keep telling yourself that. You’re in a tomb, right? With a dead woman all rotted and mangled under you. There are no ghosts, Hook. Just keep telling yourself that.”

  “You bet.”

  “Here’s the thing: I’m dead, Hook. I’ve been dead for—well, a long, long time. And you brought me back.”

  “You’re a dream.”

  “No, I’m something you woke up here, Hook. Something you started waking up a long time ago. Remember the night when your brother died? How you saw him? How he spoke to you and then something else was there, too? Something that you couldn’t see, something up in the attic? Something’s coming through, Hook, and guess what? It probably would’ve stayed in that little attic in your head except for one thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “You’re here. You’re where we are.”

  “A grave?”

  “Oh.” The boy shivered as if an arctic breeze had just passed through him. “The world is a grave, Hook. This is Harrow.”

  “And what’s Harrow?”

  “It was built to bring back the dead,” the boy said, and then the light went down and Jim was able to move. He pushed the lid of the tomb away, and it wasn’t a tomb at all.

  It was some kind of castle.

  “Where is this?” he asked Miles, who stood before him wearing what Jim could only think of as a tunic, although the kid had some kind of trousers on, all wrapped up with shreds of cloth and rope, his feet bare.

  “It’s the place where I died,” Miles replied, and then held his hand out. “Come, see?”

  But then the sounds came up too—cries of children, the laughing of some man—the wet noises, too, as if something were being chopped open—

  “He’ll grind your bones to make his bread,” someone whispered, only it wasn’t Miles, and it wasn’t his brother. It was her.

  He saw her clearly, standing in an alcove of stone, and it reminded him of pictures he had seen of the Virgin Mary, or maybe it was Venus in some picture, but he knew who it was as soon as he saw that face:

  It was Isis Claviger, the woman from the book he’d gotten from the school library. She stood there and smiled and then she began to fade into the stone wall.

  But the man’s laughter became louder, and Jim heard what sounded like a great hammer or club or axe slamming and scraping against walls, and someone cursing in—French? Was it French? It didn’t sound quite like French, but it might’ve been—

  The edges of the walls split open, like a wound, and blood began seeping from the stones, and Miles began shivering again, and whispered, “He took me to the Red Chamber. It’s an awful place. The other boys were all dead. He made powders of their bones, and potions of their blood. The Red Chamber, filled with rotting flesh. And I was the last one. My name was Thousand, because he told me he had slain a thousand other boys before me in war and in peace. He told me I was a sacrifice to his god, whose name was blasphemy. He did terrible things to me in the Red Chamber before he killed me, Hook, he did unspeakable things, and then he took a great spike and opened up my stomach and poured my life into a large cauldron, and it wasn’t just me, there were hundreds, and you, you resurrected me, you resurrected all of us, and worse, worst of all, more dreadful than anything in the world, Hook, but something’s coming through, and he’s coming through, he’s coming back, and you brought him back with whatever is in your mind to bring him back with, and he’s coming for you. You ripped something open and it’s all coming through now and nothing can control it because you should never have come to this place. Don’t go to the Red Chamber, Hook, don’t let it out.”

  Miles’s face rippled. The skin at his scalp began splitting down the middle of his face, and what looked like a spike made of brass shot up from his chest as if someone were behind him, jabbing him, and the spike tore down his belly, and a fountain of dark blood broke from the boy—

  And something emerged from inside the skin as it fell.

  Something’s coming through.

  Grind your bones to make his bread.

  You ripped it open when you came here, Hook, you tore into it like a wild animal with something in your brain and you spilled its blood and now it’s coming through and you can’t control it and it’s going to devour you and take everything you have because you are the key.

  Wait for what will come.

  Darkness seeped into his mind again, and he lay in the tomb and knew he was there, and not in some hellish castle, and then what felt like a large spider—

  No, it was a hand—

  Crawling across his shoulder—

  It’s an illusion. Hallucination. Dream. Anything but what he was afraid of now—

  That the dead woman in the tomb—the skeleton beneath him—was reaching around to hold him.

  This time, he found his voice, and he screamed at the top of his lungs, and felt sweat tingle along the back of his neck, and smelled the mold of the grave as the body beneath him filled with air and then began moving as he tried to escape the corpse’s grasp.

  And then he felt the ragged jaw against his neck, and the fleshless kiss.

  Had anyone been in the crypt, he would’ve heard a bleating coming from beneath the slab of the sarcophagus, and the beating of arms and legs against the stone.

  Someone might have heard the muffled sweet laughter of a woman, as if she had just found her one true love, and wondered if he were imagining things in the early hours of the morning.

  PART THREE

  INITIATION

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Jim felt flesh growing along the bones that held him, and then he sensed others there with him, several bodies all embracing him, pressing their lips against his face and neck and lips and shoulders and scalp, and then he felt their moldering hands pressed into his mouth, and he could no longer even scream.

  The night seemed endless.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Just before six a.m., six boys wearing plastic Halloween masks of skulls and goblins and ogres trooped down the warped steps. Each carried a candle or a flashlight, and they tracked their sleepiness with them as they pushed back the stone slab that covered the tomb.

  Jim Hook lay there, his skin pale, soaked with sweat.

  “You passed,” Trey Fricker said, taking off his mask.

  Jim looked up at his best friend and opened his mouth to speak, but his voice was gone.

  “Who brought the coffee?” Fricker glanced over at the others.

  A boy back by the stairs raised the Dunkin’ Donuts cup in greeting, and took off his mask as he approached; it was Shep Shepard.

  Fricker helped Jim sit up. “See? No skeleton.”

  Jim glanced behind him. Dried leaves and a few sticks had been his bed. There was no skeleton or rotting corpse beneath him.

  Jim looked from Trey Fricker to his roommate, Mojo Meloni, as he drew the mask from his face. “Mornin,’ Jimmy,” Mojo said, passing him the coffee.

  Jim’s hands were shaking as he took the warm Styrofoam cup. He shivered and suddenly felt the iciness of the crypt as he hadn’t all night long.

  “Easy does it, Hook,” Fricker said.

  Jim glanced around the room. Mojo, Fricker, two upperclassmen, one named Wilson and the other named Peck, and then there was Andy LeCount, who was taking off a vampire mask.

  None of their identities surprised him as much as he thought they should. They weren’t some horrible secret society. They were guys who might as well have been outcasts.

  Maybe Trey Fricker didn’t fit the outcast mold, but he definitely wasn’t what anyone would call pure Harrow. They all, in their o
wn ways, didn’t fit in, and the Corpse Society might as well have been called the Guys Who

  Tried Harder Some of Whom Were Slackers, Losers, and Maybe Just Messed Up.

  “You made it,” Fricker said. “You only have one last test.”

  Jim sipped the coffee and said nothing. It was nearly scalding, but he didn’t mind. The heat felt good against the chills he was feeling. The drug, as it wore off, left him with a splitting headache.

  He tried not to remember all he had seen in the night.

  In the tomb.

  Whispering to him.

  After he’d finished most of the cup, they helped him out of the sarcophagus. His legs were wobbly. “You could’ve killed me in there,” he finally managed to say.

  Mojo passed him his shirt, which he put on. He went to a corner, and unzipped and peed; he didn’t care that it was a crypt. It could use a little pee. He was surprised—and a little impressed—that he hadn’t peed his pants all night long. It had been that kind of night.

  “My ass hurts,” Jim said. “You guys stick a pin in my butt?”

  “We branded it. Slightly.”

  “Just a small C. Your left cheek. Barely noticeable.”

  “C for Corpse Society. We did it last night after you passed out the first time. We iced your butt afterward. That way it doesn’t really hurt,” Andy LeCount said. “At least not for a while.”

  “Hurts now. Not sure I like people doing things to my butt without my permission,” Jim said, and then he wanted to fall over laughing at what he’d just said. And the ridiculousness of it all. Even all his hallucinations. All the things he saw but could not have seen. And the pain. Not just where they’d stuck their hot poker. The truth was, every part of his body ached and seemed to sputter like a live wire. He was all nerves and twitches, and he wanted more than anything to just crawl into bed somewhere and never wake up again.