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

by Douglas Clegg

  The hallway that greets you is vast, full of statuary and paintings, and before you rises a grand staircase and, going up the stairs, more paintings, more beauty, and it is only the feeling one gets as one enters that causes a panic within. For something is wrong here. One can sense it, particularly if one is sensitive to such things.

  One knows upon entering that Harrow is the mouth of some great beast.

  5

  Cali flipped to another one of the Post-It Notes in the book.

  6

  From The Infinite Ones by Isis Claviger

  ... Aleister Crowley had Rose Kelly on his arm, although Victor always remained nearby—we called him Aleister’s Shadow, and he truly was like a shade, following the proceedings. Crowley had a room at the Memnotoch Hotel; it was one of those lavish places that had gone to ruin, just on the outskirts of Cairo. It was beautifully tiled with a deep red clay and images of papyrus and ibis all along it; a courtyard defined the hotel, with colorful birds flying about at midday, and an enormous fountain at its center. Rose and I often spent languid afternoons with sips of what I was later to learn was laudanum, but at the time, Crowley told us it was anise. The dreams we had on those golden afternoons! Rose never imbibed, but I had no problem filling my thimble-sized cup several times from Crowley’s bottle of what he had told me was a liqueur called Love-in-idleness, amial-sur-colloundria in the language of the C.M., a language I was sure that Crowley himself had made up from bits and pieces of other tongues.

  I spoke with Victor about coming out of the background; it was obvious that he was attached to Crowley, but he told me it was unseemly to be so obsessed with the man known to the psychical societies as the Great Beast. Crowley was anything but beastly; he was a delight, and he was bad in all the ways that you’d want a very refined gentleman to be bad. Soon I grew tired of waiting and demanded to go with Crowley to the club he frequented each evening.

  “It is some diabolical mass?” I asked, straight out.

  He chuckled at this. He was very much old school, and could be condescending to women, but I found him enchanting.

  “Hardly,” he snorted. “Isis, if you were to come with me, do you know what they would say? They would say I was betraying them.”

  “And just who are they?”

  “If you’re clairvoyant, you know,” he said.

  But I did not. It was the laudanum, you see. I didn’t know it at the time, but Crowley was purposefully having me take it. It dulled my sense of the Otherworld, and did not allow me to see much beyond the horizon of my senses. Had I known that I was taking a tincture of an opiate each day, I would have been furious, but I was not aware. Let me say, I do not approve of this powerful stuff. It is the lotus for the idle and wicked and wretched, and I was none of these.

  So I could not go within myself and appeal to my higher consciousness. The drug that I unwittingly took blocked my ability.

  But finally I set a plan to follow Crowley down the narrow streets beyond the hotel. It was Candlemas Eve, and the heat was bitter, with dust storms abounding. Rose was fiercely sick of Egypt and longed to return to England, or at least France. I was more determined than ever to find out why Crowley no longer discussed the Anubis Invocations, and was furious with myself for the exhaustion I felt each evening. I overcame it with tea and an ice bath, a rarity there, but I had managed to bribe a young man in the kitchen to fetch me ice from a not-too-distant icehouse along the river.

  At midnight I saw Crowley leave, and I wrapped myself in as much of a robe as was afforded by the sheet on my bed and followed him.

  It was that night that I was to see the first of the Mysteries, and to hear the Sacred Words of Power.

  But all along I yearned for Harrow, for what I had left behind for the cause of my beliefs, for my search, what I had sacrificed so recently to my journey into the Otherworld.

  I longed for him. I prayed he was well. I wanted to return more than anything in the world.

  But still I ventured into the subterranean tunnels beneath Cairo, into the very heart of the Mystery... .

  And I lost Crowley. He had somehow evaded me, but I found something that night that opened an entire world to me, something that I knew even Justin Gravesend would desire, but more importantly, what I would need to overcome my great sorrow that had never left my heart nor my mind in all those intervening years... .

  I began to see how life and death had no barrier, and I allowed myself to undergo initiation in a cult as ancient as the world itself.

  And through the burning of my soul, I knew that I must return to my Osiris, that I must stop what was evil in that house, that I must close the door to the Infinite in that house.

  For during one of the rituals, I was no longer in the ancient tomb of a Queen of Egypt, but in Harrow again, and I saw—as if I were a ghost—what Justin Gravesend had done, and how I must be the undoing, for even the house of spirits needed cleansing, and I now knew how it must be done…

  I had entered the Dimension of the Forbidden.

  And I had discovered the secret there…

  7

  “Good reading?” Jack asked. Cali glanced up, her eyes refocusing.

  Jack stood over here, a boyish look on his face, as if he’d just fallen in love for the first time. He wore an oversized plaid flannel shirt, the shirttails sticking out, over a pair of brown slacks. He hadn’t shaved, and something about him made Cali think that he hadn’t slept the night before. It might’ve been the dark circles under his eyes.

  “Yeah, old Isis Claviger was pretty spooky.”

  “That wasn’t her real name, of course. Nobody knows who she was, really. ‘Claviger’ generally means caretaker, or something to that effect. Which is interesting, because in some ways, she took care of Harrow while she lived here.”

  “Oh,” Cali said suddenly. “Now I know. I was thinking clavier. From French class. Keys.”

  “I think Claviger is a play on that word. A caretaker is basically the keeper of the keys, no?” Jack said.

  Cali set the book down. “You been up all night?”

  “I couldn’t sleep much,” he said. “I got something on tape.”

  Cali counted to three before she asked. “Urn ... can I see it?’

  8

  “My office,” Jack said, opening the door to a room that was just larger than the furniture inside it. Two computers sat side by side on a low table that filled up most of the space. Each monitors screen was divided into eight separate windows, and different rooms of the house were pictured in each one. “Look at this,” he said, as excited as a kid on his birthday. He sat down in front of one of the keyboards and tapped in a few commands. Suddenly a new window came up on the screen, blocking out the others.

  “Watch,” he said.

  Cali saw an image come up on the screen.

  The room within the image was very dark, with only slight ambient light coming from beyond a slightly closed door. It was enough to make out that someone lay in the bed, tangled in a sheet. Who was it? She moved closer.

  He films us in our sleep. Jesus, I wonder if we have any privacy. The word that had been used the previous night, guinea pigs, came to her. He’s paying us to be guinea pigs.

  Finally, she made out who it was, purely by his size. It was Frost, lying asleep in bed. The camera slowly zoomed in and out. Jack clicked the computer mouse several times, and there, just beside the bed, there was a streak of light.

  Like lightning almost, but it remained there. “That’s a ghost?” she asked.

  “Well, that I can’t say,” Jack said. “It’ll take some more analysis. But it’s something, isn’t it?” She stepped back. “Well.” “Cali?” Jack asked, turning. “We’re just here to be watched, I guess.” “You understood that,” Jack said, and then added, “I hope.” “Of course I did. Of course. It just seems different now. Watching Frost,” Cali said, trying to shrug it off as nothing important. “It seems different, that’s all. Knowing that it could be any one of us.”

&nbs
p; 9

  Cali felt less invaded by the way the cameras were set up several minutes later, and she mulled over the whole situation of staying at Harrow at all in her mind. It was an experiment. They were all well paid. And if she were running this, with this kind of money invested, she’d feel that she owned the subjects for the period of time specified, as well. So, you either leave and give him half the money back, or you stay. And find things out.

  They returned to the library, because Jack had yet another book to show her. This was not a duplicate or reproduction of an older tome—this was the book itself. A leather bound diary.

  “Esteban Palliser kept it,” Jack said. “From the 1920s right up until a year ago. When he died.”

  “You and your Post-It Notes,” Cali smirked.

  “I’ll get you some tea and toast and you just settle in and do some reading,” Jack said. Then he left the room.

  10

  From the diary of Esteban Palliser:

  I am in my room. I am ancient—I feel ancient, anyway. The body is a vehicle for consciousness, one supposes. My brain still has its daily fevers. My hands curl in pain at times, but I will keep writing for whoever comes after. I still smoke unfiltered cigarettes, rolled for me daily. I defy Mr. Death to come take me, although I know Mr. Death will arrive soon enough.

  Still, another smoke, a sip of thick coffee, spattered with cinnamon and nutmeg, and I will write more in my journal of that early time at Harrow.

  I am now looking back on what I considered the prime of my life, although I was probably just around the curve of it at twenty-nine—for I would soon grow serious with the shadows that emerged from Harrow. I have lived through wars and peace and technological furies the likes of which I could not imagine in my youth; I am over one hundred years old. Can you imagine what I saw then? The wonders in the sky—for we had begun what was then a miracle, called Air-Mail, by which an airplane could transport packages and letters from one end of the country to another in a few days, whereas it would take weeks for letters to travel before this marvelous change. And the radio—I was completely mesmerized by it, and would even close the newspaper with my beloved Krazy Kat and the funny pages to listen to the news of the world or the broadcast of a boxing match. And the movies! I was in Harrow one night only and already wished that I could rush out to one of the great movie palaces in Manhattan to catch the latest Charlie Chaplin.

  Certainly we had terrors in the world then, we had the fears and paranoia of menaces and foreign evils, we had serial killers the likes of which would curl your hair, we had all the good and bad that is forgotten and years later sifted through for moments to be relished as quaint and sentimental. There never has been an innocent time in human history—I suppose Harrow, in many ways, stood for that idea alone. There was no innocence in the world, and to pretend so is to bring a veil across one’s face and never look beyond it. The 19205 was no golden age; it was no calm before the storm. We even had boredom and craziness. It was a different time; it was another world; it was beyond anything you can probably imagine, you who are alive and reading this now, and yet, I tell you, it resembled this world, now, near enough to the birth of yet another century.

  These were the years I felt most alive. They were imperfect years; they were years of absolute confusion for me, between the end of my marriage, the losses of both my parents, and the loss of my distant but beloved grandfather. But they were my years, and I won’t give them up without a struggle.

  These were the years I often return to in order to feel that breath on my face again, that tender kiss of all that life takes from us as we grow beyond what life is meant to allow us.

  Yes, I have been accused of clinging to life—but why shouldn’t I?

  Yes, I return in my mind to my discovery of Harrow, my ownership of it, my legacy.

  But in those days I was young in that way in which the last year of one’s twenties is still young. I was nearly as young as the century itself.

  Do you know the Hudson River and its beauty? Have you been there?

  I imagine the beginnings of Watch Point and Harrow—not when it was owned by a Dutch-English family—but in those eras going further into prehistory. The glacial movement creating the wormholes that became the river nearly twelve thousand years ago; the primeval forest, the strange creatures as they appeared ... then something happened—nothing cataclysmic, but something happened, and the land where the house would be built acquired a sense of being unclean.

  There is even a story—though no doubt created by some local wit-that Henry Hudson paused somewhere on his exploration of the river that would later bear his name, and mentioned, “This is a very bad land to fall with, and an unpleasant land to see.” He was, according to local wags of Watch Point—none of whom are to be believed in this—referring to the property that would become Harrow.

  In the 16205, the Dutch West India company sent families to settle the river, but Watch Point was largely overlooked, owing, it was suggested, to the way it jutted into the water and the menace of the natives of the specific area.

  When the land that became Watch Point was first known, it was settled by natives who called themselves Mahanowacks, a variant spelling of what we know as Mohican, but nonetheless, this group was distinct and more closely related to the nearby tribe known as the Wapping and somewhat related to the Schaghticokes. They were distinct from the other tribes of natives in that they were not welcoming to the invader. Warlike and unwilling to transact business with the Dutch, the Mahanowacks along the river by Watch Point ended up being massacred in an event that was all but erased from the history books.

  Some of the survivors, no doubt, went up the river to join with the tribes of Mohicans, some went east to share space with the Pequots and the Mohegans (again, a separate but similar group), others west across the river. Many were killed and one can only suppose this killing took place near Harrow.

  This is purely my own conjecture, from what I know now about the property, and from my grandfather’s collection of artifacts. But I won’t get ahead of myself.

  It was 1926 when I arrived, and it was October, and my body was still strong and invulnerable, and my hair was thick and dark and my skin was perhaps too pale, except where it was ruddy around my face, and I didn’t know that the feeling of being young would ever end. My first full day at Harrow, I woke up late in the morning surrounded by such luxury as I had never before imagined.

  11

  Cali skipped several pages to the next yellow sticky note that Jack had left. This part of the diary seemed to be about Palliser’s childhood at Harrow.

  12

  From the diary of Esteban Palliser:

  That night, I lay back in that treasure box of a bed and began creating imaginary playmates for myself, out of thin air. First I thought of a giraffe with two heads who spoke a quaint version of French—what little I knew of the language—and then I imagined a jaguar from South American jungles speaking perfect English to me.

  I grew thirsty, and was about to call out to Hildy, my nurse, but she snored so loudly and had worked so hard to force feed me her awful cabbage and broth, that I let her rest. My fever was not burning quite so strongly. I marshaled what energy I could.

  I fumbled with my nightshirt, drawing my shivery, scrawny legs over to the floor.

  Catching my balance, I grabbed one of the bedposts and nearly crawled over to the big pitcher and bowl.

  Once I reached the chiffonier, I lifted the pitcher up to my face to drink directly from it. As I did so, I caught a glimpse of my own reflection in the mirror.

  I was parched and burning up again. I had half a mind to pour the entire pitcher over my head in order to cool my blood. The candles in the wall sconces lent a hazy glow to the shadowy room (and my even more shadowy vision), like streetlights through heavy fog. I saw my face, waxy and yellow in the candlelight. My eyes were sunken, my hair greasy and pressed flat against my face, although some of it stuck out at the top of my scalp. My face was puffy from
the bites, and my left eye still looked swollen shut, although I could see fairly well through it.

  I could neither laugh nor shudder at this vision of myself. I felt sorry for it and at the same time, I felt that I looked like someone other than myself: This wasn’t me, after all. It was some other boy who had stepped into a nest of flying monsters, and he looked funny and pathetic.