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

by Douglas Clegg

  Guys who wanted to believe in things.

  Mojo held a candle up.

  Someone behind him—Wilson?—hoisted him up on his feet, steadying him. The aches in his shoulders and back and knees still roared through him, but it felt good to move, if only slightly. He was aware that he stood there in his socks and briefs, but he could not seem to feel the floor beneath him, nor did he feel cold or embarrassed.

  Jim pleaded with his eyes, but was relieved just to breathe more clearly. His vision was blurred from tears.

  “You have passed two of the tests of our Order, Adept. And now you will be reborn within the Corpse Society. Tonight that which we call Mischief Night will begin. The gauntlet you must run is one of danger to both your body and your soul. We have been a secret and sacred society within Harrow Academy since the first year this hallowed institution began. Every Corpse is connected to every other Corpse in the brotherhood. We will protect and serve one another until the end of our days. No matter where you go, you will be a brother. Tonight, you will be inducted into the secret vows of our Order, and you will be initiated into the final test. The test of faith, the most important test of any of the Corpses.” Mojo had never spoken like this. How could he have been a stoner and a counterculture icon for so long and be part of something so strangely like a conspiracy? That’s what it felt like.

  They’re not a group, they’re conspirators, Jim thought.

  And I’m one of them.

  Christ, I’m here. I have the brand. I went along with their tests. I didn't ‘t get away when I could’ve.

  I’m part of this.

  Mojo brought something out from his robe. It looked like some small gold coin.

  “This is our symbol of eternal life, the ankh. It is an ancient mystery that represents for us the bridge between life and death and rebirth, for through our tests of trust, fear, and faith, you will have died, been buried, and resurrected again into life, newly born as a brother Corpse.”

  Mojo took the ankh, which seemed a rusty brass in the candlelight, and pressed it beneath the gag in his mouth. Jim tasted the metal on his tongue. “You will hold your ankh in secret, forever, and you will protect it and never let another take it from you, for it is your life which is held within it. It is the coin of the realm from the passage to death and life, and in the ancient world, a Corpse had to have a coin on its tongue to pay the ferryman in order to reach the Underworld. This ankh is your coin. You must not lose it at any cost.”

  Wilson, behind him, said, “You will remain here for two more hours, Brother Hook. We will blindfold you, just as when we are born, we are blind to the ways of the world. And you will not move, just as when we die, we are locked within our body. And you will wait in darkness for what will come.”

  And then Mojo blew his candle out, as did someone else in the room who Jim hadn’t seen, and he stood there, the bitter taste of metal draining in his throat, his arms drawn behind him, his ankles tied together.

  And all he could think was:

  Please God don’t leave me alone in the dark. Don’t leave me alone in the dark.

  I don’t want to crack up and I don’t want those things coming after me, those dead things, those visions of a seventh grader getting disemboweled or of the shadow of some man with a spike and a hatchet coming after me to grind my bones to make his bread.

  Some part of him remembered what a psychiatrist had once said to him about imagining things, about a room with pads on the walls, and how he could put himself there if he wanted to, but if he wanted to live, he had to face things.

  That’s a Corpse motto, too.

  Face everything.

  Those dildos.

  Face everything. Test of trust, fear, and faith.

  It was medieval.

  It was like the Six Salient Points of the Holy Crusades.

  It was like the damn Knights Templar with their secrets and rituals and hidden treasures and blasphemies.

  Then, he began to think of Lark, and he felt better. Lark was probably back at St. Cat’s, telling Jenny all about how she felt that maybe Jim was cracking up, but “I’m going to be there for him. He’s having such a rough time this semester, but I just know he can do it.” Jim imagined her faith in him like it was the sweetest thing he could dream up, and so an hour or two passed, and although he was beginning to see other things in the darkness, and although he tried to rest against something, every time he tried, someone pushed him away so he could only stand in the dark and think about Lark and how she would be with him and he would be with her.

  And then, he was somewhere, some jumble of a room, walking through it. Boxes and old sleds piled in a corner, and lampshades torn, and a great steamer trunk; he stepped over and around them all, until he came to a short door. He tried the knob, but it was locked. He had to get out. He was someplace where he shouldn’t be, and part of him knew it was a hallucination and part of him believed it was real.

  And he pressed at the door, but it wouldn’t give. He shouted at it, but his gag kept him from making more than what seemed to him to be the snarls of an animal—

  So he began kicking at it, and then scratching, and he thought he smelled a little boy on the other side, and he started saying, “Something’s coming through! Jim! Beware! Something’s coming through and it’s almost here! You have to run! Something’s coming through and it’s something that you can let out, but you can’t let it out, you can’t let it out, Jimmy, because if you do then it will devour you and everyone you know and care about, and it’s been waiting at Harrow for you, ever since it knew from your brother that you were born, your dead brother, it drank him up and spit him out, and they learned about you that night. Jimmy, how you could make them come out if you wanted to because you’re the key to it, you’re the thing that has this house awake, and you almost know it because ever since you’ve come here, they’ve been coming through, only they needed to push you to the edge, they needed to scramble your mind and fuck with your brain, and now they’ve done it and you can’t control it, Jim, and you’ve woken this whole house up.”

  In the dark again. Hands tied. Gagged. Legs shackled with rope.

  The bitter taste in his mouth.

  That metal thing.

  The ankh.

  Glad he hadn’t swallowed it. Just thinking of swallowing seemed to parch his throat. Then he began swallowing compulsively, over and over again. Can’t swallow that ankh. Don’t. You’ll choke. Don’t swallow it. You don’t want to have that thing cutting through your throat and stomach and gut, poisoning you as it goes, and then out it comes again, cutting through your sphincter with its eternal life.

  Sometime later, the light came up again in his prison room.

  All six of the Corpses were there, in purple robes and hoods, looking a little like demented choir boys. Each held a candle, and each held the small metal twist that he knew was an ankh.

  “And now, the final ritual of your initiation,” Trey Fricker said.

  Two of the boys scooped him up by the arms, and he shuffled along, feeling every inch a prisoner about to meet his doom.

  They took him into a room that was filled with a hundred candles. The yellow flames cast shimmering shadows along the walls.

  In the center of the room, a body.

  “This was a boy who died centuries ago,” Fricker said. “Mummified through the years, he is the embodiment of the Corpse Society, of life eternal, of the ankh which is our symbol.”

  “The ankh which is our symbol,” the others repeated.

  “You will partake of his body as the final test of faith with us, a faith which cannot be broken.”

  “Faith which cannot be broken,” the others echoed.

  They dragged him to the center of the room.

  The body was small, and not wrapped as Jim thought a mummy would be. It was dried and shriveled, and to have imagined that it ever was a boy was well beyond him. It looked more like papier-mâché, and this gave Jim a glimmer of hope.

  Of course they d
idn’t have a real corpse.

  They were just guys like him, screwing up their lives in innocuous ways.

  They untied his hands from behind his back. He tried to struggle against them, but he felt too weak.

  Then they raised up the dried body, its eyes long sunken and dried into the gourd of its skull, and its teeth all but missing; the shriveled and tattered skin along its arms was ragged against the bone.

  They wrapped the ropes around him, binding him to the skeletal remains.

  “You will learn faith with this test, Brother Hook,” Fricker said.

  LeCount pulled off the gag.

  Jim tried to talk, but he had forgotten about the ankh. He spat it out. It clanged on the floor. “Fricker, everybody, don’t do this to me, there’s something wrong with Harrow, there’s something wrong with me, I won’t make it through this, I’m making something happen here that I don’t want to—”

  One of the guys laid a hand on his shoulder. Another picked up the ankh.

  Fricker squatted down in front of him and looked him in the eye. “Don’t be afraid. Don’t. It’ll all be all right. It’s just the last test. You’ve been pushed to the limit here, we know that. We had to rush this.” Then he placed a new gag over his mouth—a long shred of purple cloth. “It’s only until you experience the ritual.” Fricker tapped the skull. “The original Corpse Society found this little guy years ago,” he whispered. “Apparently, he had been buried in one of the rooms. The guy who had owned the house had once collected mummies and relics and bones of saints. The first Corpses found this guy. And he became a symbol for us. You will partake of him and then it’s over, Hook. In the morning, it’s over, and you’re one of us, and you will be surprised at the changes that will happen. Once you’re on the inside, once you’re one with us, you will find you have brothers that you never imagined you had. We will leave your shirt and jeans and shoes here for you. When you emerge from that room in one hour, you will feel differently about all of this. LeCount here was your brother’s Little Brother in the Corpses.”

  Andy LeCount nodded, grinning. “I was in middle school when I joined five years ago. I was getting beat up regular by some of the juniors and practically failing math. Your brother— my Brother—tied me to the Corpse on my Mischief Night.”

  “It’s a spiritual experience,” Shepard added. “You’ll see. It’ll change you.”

  “Yeah,” Mojo said. “There’s something more to the Row than just books, Hook. There’s something deeper. You’ll feel it tonight.”

  “Now,” Fricker said patiently. “Do you promise not to shout or scream, Hook?”

  Jim nodded.

  Fricker undid the gag again. “All right. Here.” He went behind Jim and pressed the ankh into his hand. “Hold it. Don’t let it go. It is your life and your light. No one can take it from you. You must not voluntarily give it up. It is your eternity.”

  “Something I have to tell you, Trey,” Jim said, his voice hoarse. He felt a strange calm come over him. He was weary without being sleepy. He felt as if he’d been dragged through mud and brainwashed and spit out and still he was going to get through it.

  He was going to get through it like Stephen had.

  How you gonna make your big bro proud?

  Trey Fricker leaned closer to him. “Yeah?”

  “Something’s coming through,” Jim whispered.

  Tears soaked his face, and he felt a shivering go through him as they dragged him, tied to this creature, this dead boy, this skeleton, this pile of bones and rotted cloth—

  And took him to a small door at the other side of the room.

  “You will spend one hour in the Red Chamber together,” Fricker said. “And then, when you return to us, you will be born again into our brotherhood.”

  The Red Chamber was not red but brown— brownstone—and just barely big enough to fit both him and the bones, which he now thought had just crackled as he pressed against them.

  Four lit candles were situated in small alcove shelves slightly above his shoulders. He glanced around the small room—his head bumped the ceiling. But he saw a hint of shadows farther on. It wasn’t a small room at all; it was more like a tunnel.

  He looked at the skull with its emptiness and then noticed that the rib cage of the boy had been broken as if by some force.

  Who are you? How long have you been dead? Are you Miles? Is that who you are?

  Am I going insane? he asked, although he was no longer sure if he opened his mouth or not.

  One hour. That’s all this is.

  One hour in the Red Chamber.

  With some ancient corpse.

  I can do that.

  I know I can.

  The Red Chamber wasn’t really a chamber. It was like a slim path between walls.

  Someone had built a passage between rooms here.

  A secret passage.

  All secrets were meant to be told.

  A way to get around Harrow without being noticed, he thought.

  A way to hide things.

  Things like this. He glanced at his new partner. His bosom buddy. Ha!

  One hour, that’s all.

  You can take one hour, can’t you, Hook? An hour with some old dust-farting mummy and then you can make it through this hellhole called Harrow and your mom won’t spend her nights crying like she did after Stephen and Dad died, and you can be something more than just what you are, you can be better, you can make him proud.

  And then the skull began to move slightly, as if with wind flowing through it. First to the left, and then to the right. The candlelight flickered and swept the shadows.

  A wind? A wind in this airless place? This Red Chamber with its arcane ritual that reminded him too much of what he had been reading in Isis Claviger’s book, The Infinite Ones, with its stories of ghosts and demons and how the man who built the original part of Harrow had a plan to imbue it with psychic phenomena, no matter the cost? How Claviger alluded to treasures plundered from every corner of the earth, the sacred and the profane, the blasphemous and the saintly, all in an effort to create something at Harrow that had never been matched in history. How silly it had seemed when he read it, the way that stories of devils and demons seemed silly in books on the occult, until one was sitting with a demon, tied to a corpse, in a small red room that was no room at all, but a narrow corridor between walls, a living burial, even if it only lasted for one hour.

  And then, as he tried not to let it all get to him, the candles went out and he was plunged into total darkness.

  “Fricker? Mojo? Guys?” he asked the small door, a door that had held just enough space to shove him through cramped up into this rat tunnel. Red Chamber. Rat Chamber. Rat Changer. Why did he think of Rat Changer? It was what they had done—the Corpse Society. They had put him through sensory deprivation, hog-tied, and then standing there in the dark for the longest time—he had read about how brainwashing went in a spy book. He was their rat. They took away sensory input for a while to break you down. That’s what they’d done. He was broken down.

  Don’t be afraid.

  It’s only the dark.

  Please, Jim, don’t be afraid.

  “Jim,” Miles said to him in the dark, the dead boy’s breath like sour vomit; he felt the boy’s hands reach around his back. “You always had a way to bring me back. I’ve been waiting so long. All of us have. Lark’s here, too, and we’ve been playing with someone who tried to hurt you. He was bad, but there are ways to keep him alive for as long as we need to until we’ve fed long enough.”

  “Why are you doing this?” Jim whispered, and he knew he had long ago crossed over into madness.

  “You opened a door here, Jim. We’ve been waiting all this time. A long, long time, for someone to come here and open the door and let us out. Many are buried here.”

  “Do they know you?”

  “You still don’t understand, Jim. It’s all from you. You woke me up. You woke the others up. And now, we have you.”

  Sma
ll fingers grasped the ankh that Jim held in his left hand, and tugged it free.

  The ropes fell from his hands and feet, and a green light came up in the tunnel. Jim began to see Miles more clearly, his face pale, his eye sockets bleeding and empty of his eyes, and his stomach torn open through the rags he wore. “We will never let you go now, Jim. We want you here always, with us. We’ve waited here within these walls for you, now you can come see your brother. Your real brother. He’s been here waiting for you. The finger you found, with his class ring. That was a gift from us. That was what was torn from him the night he died. He wanted you to have it.”

  “I want him back,” Jim said, almost involuntarily. “More than anything. I want Stephen back.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Jim crawled down the tunnel, skinning his knees as he went. He could still hear Miles’s voice taunting him. Something animal within him moved him, even though his first reaction to the phantom had been to drool and feel as if he were going into that room in his mind, that hospital room from which there was no escape.

  Don’t be afraid. It’s not real. It can’t be. It may even be some kind of game.

  But everything within him told him that Miles was as real as the ghost of his brother.

  And the ghosts had seemed more real than the guys in the Corpse Society. Were they part of it? What in good goddamn is going on here, he heard his father’s voice say in his mind. What kind of mess are you in now, Jimmy? he could hear his dad say, almost over his shoulder and years ago.

  The tunnel’s ceiling rose, and the light was brighter. He found he could stand, and he began running down the narrowness, between the walls that seemed to move closer and closer together as he ran, until he came to the end of the passage.

  An even narrower door stood there.