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

by Douglas Clegg

Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “You’re telling me that Harrow is some kind of nightmare house?” Lark asked.

  She had spinach between her teeth, which she must’ve sensed, because a moment later she reached up and scratched it away. They were sitting at the Lantern Restaurant in town, the cheapest place to eat outside one of the burger joints on the highway. Jenny had dropped Lark off at seven, and she had to roam the school searching for Jim, before she’d found him in the Great Hall entrance, sitting on a bench reading something that looked like a big book report in a plastic binder.

  “It was called that, once,” Jim said, excitedly, “according to what I read today. I’m telling you that there’s something wrong here. Something bad.”

  Lark considered this a moment, and then dug her fork into a chunk of lasagna. “I’m worried about you, sweetie.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. Then, “I’m sorry. That was rude.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “Here’s the thing. I haven’t told you everything.”

  “I know,” she said. “And you haven’t asked about the puppy, either.”

  “How’s the puppy?”

  “Alanis is fine. Mrs. Burley said she’d keep her until we find out who the owner is.”

  “Good.”

  “Oh, Jim,” Lark said, continuing to pick at her plate. “Tell me all of it.”

  “You can’t make fun of me.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” she said, and he could tell she meant it.

  Then he began. He told her about getting caught cheating. He told her about the threat of the honor trial. He told her about who Ivy Martin was.

  “Well, that’s sort of good news,” Lark said. “At least she loved your brother.”

  “And she was pregnant. But she lost the baby in the car crash.”

  “How awful. She was in the car, too?” Lark asked, her face registering dismay and sadness.

  “No,” Jim said. “She was in the other car. The one that crashed into them.”

  “She was furious, she told me, because my dad was trying to buy her off and get her to abort the baby. And Stephen was acting hurt, and not really sticking up for her. So she followed them out, intending to just follow them all the way to our house. And somewhere on an icy road, she said, she lost control of her car and it rammed them. She said she skidded along with them, and then her car spun and crashed into a tree. She was thrown from her car into the snow.

  “But Dad and Stephen were dead.

  “And her baby, too.

  “I asked her about the story I had heard, about some farm truck, and she told me there was a truck, and it went off the road, but she didn’t think it caused anything. She told me she would never forgive herself. But you know what? Stephen loved her, and that means something. Even now, with him gone. It means something to me. But she told me something else, too.

  “She told me that Stephen had joined some kind of club, something he wouldn’t talk about. She told me that he had begun to get distant even before the night of the accident. And that the club was bad, somehow.”

  “So, it’s this secret fraternity you’re involved with?”

  Jim nodded.

  They had finished up dinner—a bargain at eight bucks for the two of them with Special Lasagna Night, and were walking along the train tracks toward the depot. The slight wind felt good; he kept his arm around her as they walked, track by track.

  “Why didn’t you tell me any of this on Wednesday?”

  “I just didn’t know. I didn’t know who to trust, really.”

  “Trust is hard, I know,” she said, pulling away slightly, but taking his hand. Her hand was so warm it negated the autumn weather, the wind that swept the tops of the trees but calmed as it descended to the ground, the smell of river and leaves and distant chimneys—her hand kept him warm.

  “You get this ring and bring it back to them, and they make you sleep in a coffin?” Lark had to work hard not to laugh. It did seem ridiculous to him, too. But he knew there was something serious in it. It was part of the mystery of coming to manhood, he knew. There were things guys wanted you to do to prove yourself worthy of their trust. He had known it in sixth grade soccer, and he had known it in wrestling, and he had known it whenever he had to make friends with a new group of boys.

  It was some mysterious process of bonding, of creating a team where there had been none before. It was going to be difficult to explain it all to her. “In a tomb,” he said. “They stuck me in one of those big stone ones. Down in the crypt inside that mausoleum up behind the school. They drugged me. They said it was a roofie.”

  They stepped off the tracks, into the streetlights along River Street, which eventually led back to campus.

  Lark laughed out loud, and then saw he wasn’t joking by the look on his face. The look on her face turned to concern. “Roofies? Rohypnol. People can die from that. Anything could’ve happened. Jesus, these are creeps you’re hanging with. You should just tell the police. Or at the very least, the headmaster.”

  “I think he knows.”

  “What?”

  “I think he’s one of them. He wrote his senior project on Harrow, too. He knows about it.”

  “That people died here?”

  “I don’t think they died,” Jim said solemnly. “I think they were sacrificed.”

  Less than an hour later, they were up by Hadrian’s Wall, wandering among the ruins of stones.

  “I haven’t been entirely honest, either,” Lark said. “I got two messages this week that are pretty disgusting. Whoever wrote them said you told them things about me. Maybe it was this group of Corpses.”

  “Corpses.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’d they say?”

  “Just nasty sexual garbage. Dirty stuff, the way some twelve-year-old would to gross out a girl. It was pretty juvenile.”

  “Maybe it was them. Maybe it was something else.” Jim put his arms around her, hugging her to his body, just to feel some human warmth.

  She pulled away. “Jim, don’t go off in that direction again, come on.”

  “I’m telling you,” he said, feeling cold and lonely even there with her, “I was lying in that tomb, and I saw things. And something held me there.”

  “It was Rohypnol,” Lark said, exasperated. “They gave you liquor and an extremely toxic sedative. It was probably like OD’ing on Valium or something, and you hallucinated. I knew a girl once who claimed some guy from some college in New England slipped one in her soda one time, and she barely managed to get away from him and three other guys before she passed out. It’s an awful thing to do to someone. Criminal. Those boys are not friends of yours. Stay away from them.”

  “No, you don’t understand,” Jim said. “It’s about my brother, too. It’s about the night he died.”

  And then Jim told her about seeing his brother—flesh and blood—in his bedroom the night of the car wreck, and what he said.

  And the thing behind the attic door, scratching to come out.

  “Oh,” was all Lark said afterward.

  “That’s it?”

  “I don’t know what to say,” she added.

  He watched her in the moonlit darkness. She was beautiful and distant even as they stood so close that they were nearly touching each other.

  She didn’t look him in the eye.

  “You think something’s wrong with me,” he said wearily.

  “I don’t know what to think. It all sounds . . . fantastical or something. I don’t believe in ghostly visitations or any spooky stuff, Jim. I just don’t. Maybe you’re overworked. Maybe it was that Rohypnol.”

  “Please,” he said, reaching up to touch her face, his fingers stroking lightly her dark hair. “Believe.”

  “I need to go,” she said, kissing him on the edge of his lips. He felt the distance growing between them as surely as if she were already a million miles away. “Jenny said ten-thirty, so we can get back by eleven. We both can’t risk being out late again. If I
miss her, I have to take the train back.”

  “Okay,” he said, reaching for her hand.

  She let him take it, but he felt ice. Still, he held her hand as they walked.

  She doesn’t love me, he thought. It feels like it’s over. She thinks there’s something wrong with me. It’s going to be over. Maybe not right now, maybe not next week, but sometime soon.

  As if reading his thoughts, she whispered, “You’ve had a rough week. So have I. All these midterms. All the crap you’ve gone through this week. It’s understandable. Don’t worry. As my dad always says, this too shall pass.”

  “Okay,” he said, feeling only slightly better. “I’ll wait for Jenny with you,” he added, but too weakly.

  “I left my jacket at the Trenches,” Lark said, pulling her sweater down around the palms of her hands. “Can you get it for me? I want to just sit for a little bit.” She sat down along the rim of the fountain. “And get me a Coke, too, okay?”

  “Okay,” he said, but he didn’t want to leave her. He didn’t want to break their connection.

  He was afraid if he walked away, she would begin to doubt him, and then she would not want to wait for her jacket, and then she would be gone from his life.

  Lark glanced up at the waving branches, and the sky, which was clear and starry.

  Jenny began calling her name from somewhere down the drive, and she stood up and began walking toward the parking area beneath the shadows of the great trees to the right. But then, she distinctly heard Jenny again, this time calling from back near the school.

  Lark looked up to the front steps, where Jenny sometimes would wait—although not usually on cold evenings like this.

  “Hey, you! Lark!” Jenny called, and Lark glanced up.

  Was that Jenny up at the window, in the tower? “How’d you get up there?” Lark giggled, and went over to get a closer look.

  Lark put her hands on either side of her mouth. “You coming down soon?” she shouted.

  Jenny didn’t respond, and Lark wasn’t sure if she saw her after all in that open window. But there was a light there, and she was positive that she had seen her. Positive.

  She went to the door of the tower, and opened it.

  Creepy. She stepped out of the bright lights of the driveway and entered the darkness.

  It seemed to wrap about her like a cloak.

  “Jenny?” she called again from inside. “You up there?”

  Chapter Thirty

  Jim had just grabbed Lark’s navy blue jacket from where she’d left it on the chair at the entrance to the Trenches, when he saw Jenny’s boyfriend, Rich.

  “Where’s Jen?”

  “She left fifteen minutes ago. Where’s Lark? We were looking all over for you two.”

  “Oh shit, she’s gonna have to take the train, then,” Jim said, and ran back out into the night.

  He ended up running all the way to the train depot, but Lark wasn’t among those waiting; finally, he returned to campus and looked around the fountain, hoping she had run to a bathroom somewhere and would be out there waiting.

  He had missed her.

  He clutched her jacket beneath his arm, and went back to the Trenches.

  Lights Out had already taken place, and he knew that he’d be spending the rest of the weekend cleaning out toilets and wondering if he were cracking up, when someone pushed him from behind, and he landed on the floor, his chin hitting something so hard that he actually saw stars; he struggled against whoever had him, but he knew it was the Corpses—they got a twisted cloth in his mouth, which they then drew back, and gagged him with it, tying it behind his head. Someone slipped a black cloth sack over his head. They ripped his shirt off, and someone tore at his shoes, and still another undid his belt buckle and tugged his jeans over his thighs and knees.

  Fucking hazing! He cursed, but all that came from him were indistinct mumbles.

  Then someone wrenched his arms back and tied his hands together, and then pulled his feet up behind him. They were hog-tying him, and it pissed him off. He struggled as hard as he could, newborn fears bursting in his mind and a feeling that he had to survive at any cost, that he had to get away from the Corpse Society.

  They carried him out along the yard, and he knew where they would take him—up into the tower, up where Mojo had gone with him, had practically shown him the Corpses’ secret place.

  Well, screw ‘em. They’re going to have to drag me up that long winding stone staircase if they want to get me up there.

  He heard their muffled whispers, but couldn’t make out anything of what they were saying.

  The strip of cloth in his mouth tasted like sweat and made him gag, but he concentrated on breathing through his nose. He was going to get through this. Somehow, he would get through it. He couldn’t see much of anything through the dark cloth, but occasionally, he saw shadows and light. They were carrying him up some stairway. Where to? The Great Room? One of the classrooms?

  He saw more light and heard a door lock being rattled. Then he felt warmth, and they were now in well-lit rooms, and then he heard what sounded like the jingling of change.

  Keys?

  Old Man Chambers had been howling all week about his stolen keys. Master keys.

  So, they had keys to something. But what?

  He concentrated as best he could, but could see nothing but shadowy movement, like moths fluttering.

  And then he was being taken up a flight of stairs, but it wasn’t curved like the tower stairs. It was—what? Another staircase? It wasn’t the stairs that went up to the second floor classrooms, because they would’ve been making noise and echoing. He heard the grunts and groans of the guys as they pushed and pulled his body up the stairs, and every few seconds his knees and stomach grazed the hardness of the edge of a step.

  Then, a landing.

  Then, up another flight of stairs.

  He felt like he was suffocating now, and his heart began to beat loud and fast. He tried to make as much noise as he could, but it sounded like a pig’s snorts coming from him.

  “Just relax,” he thought he heard someone whisper.

  Fricker? You asshole! You damn asshole for putting me through this just for something stupid that you probably helped set up in the first place! Screw you and your club! Screw all of you and your nastiness! When I get my chance, I’m going to kick your ass and everybody’s in this club! I don’t care if I’m a Corpse or not, I’m not going to put up with this, and I won’t put some other guy through this either!

  Finally, after what seemed like hours but

  might have only been ten minutes, they dumped him on a hard cold floor.

  Then, he heard nothing.

  It was pitch black, and he lay there on his side, still tied and gagged and feeling like it was a struggle just to get a breath into his body.

  The sound of a door closing.

  He lay there for a long time. How long, he wasn’t sure. He thought he heard a fan whirring, but after a while he thought it was all in his mind. He stared at the blackness, unsure whether his eyes were open or shut. He wondered about Lark, and hoped that she had made it to the train, hoped that she wanted to break up with him after all. She was too good for him. He was basically, he knew, a cheater and a liar, and it didn’t matter if he pretended that he didn’t want to be in the Corpses or not, the truth was, he had never felt he belonged anywhere, not since Stephen had died, and even the thought of his mother brought no comfort, because he knew that on some basic level, he was always failing her. The only shred of hope he could cling to was the idea that he’d make it through this ordeal—and the other ordeals that Harrow had to offer before he graduated, and then he’d get more scholarships, and he’d be the kind of guy who managed to get through it all, and eventually, he would prove to them that he was enough. That he could be one of them. That he wasn’t just some poor scholarship kid whose family had once had some money but now had nothing, which might’ve been worse than just being poor to start with. If he’d bee
n poor to start with, Stephen would never have gone to Harrow, his father would never have been there, either, and he could have just stood up for himself and not felt like every time he stood, they were on his shoulders, too, that he had to carry their memories with him to some future glory that life had taken from them.

  You’ll get through, Squirt, he told himself in Stephen’s voice, and then it wasn’t Stephen’s voice, but Miles’s, and Jim felt a wracking pain overcome his body. His muscles were beginning to cramp. The ropes that bound him hurt and he couldn’t move other than to twist a bit in the pain of the charley horses in his calves, and the wrenching spasms in his back.

  Eventually, he thought he fell asleep, but the darkness was all around him, so he was unaware of consciousness or unconsciousness. It was night where he lay. Someone was telling him something—

  Every secret was meant to be told, and every door was meant to be open.

  And he felt as if death were coming for him. He prayed a bit, which he hadn’t done outside of Sunday Chapel in years. He prayed and then

  he cursed and then he thought he was dreaming and then he thought he could never dream again.

  Finally, hours later, he began to convince himself that it was all right to be a Corpse. It was all right to join up. He felt exhausted and weak.

  Some kind of angel came down and brought a great light, and drew off the sack from his head, and cut the ropes from his ankles.

  It was only one of them.

  It was Mojo, in a purple robe with a hood. He looked vaguely ridiculous, but there was something haunting about him, too. As if he weren’t just Mojo Meloni with headphones and schemes, he was something more with this robe and this candle. It was an act, surely. It was phony dress-up by guys who felt disenfranchised at a school like Harrow. Maybe guys who wanted more than just to get by or get through. Guys who believed that they really were running the show. Guys who were not the football quarterbacks or earmarked for automatic admission to the Ivys, but guys who aspired to things beyond sports and university. Guys, like Jim, who wanted depth to what they went through.