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

by Douglas Clegg

  20

  Cali let the anger and fury take her over. She pointed the gun at Mira. “You move, I shoot. Look at Frost, Mira. The house didn’t save him. Whatever the house did to you, fight it. Fight it now. You can’t be weak. You can’t give in to it. Whatever thing the house did to you—whatever it made you do—we have the power within us to fight it. I know we do. I know it,” Cali said, but she wondered if she was just spouting bullshit or if it was true.

  Ned, help me. Be here. Give me strength. Let me get through this.

  “Fuck you, bitch,” Mira spat and rose to her full height. A white-hot aura surrounded her. “I am goddess here and you are meant to give your life and blood for my worship.”

  “You are a little girl,” Cali said. “You are sixteen and you killed your dog and you are somehow locked inside your mind, but I am going to let you out. and you know how I’m going to do it?”

  Mira seemed about ready to pounce, and Cali felt she only had seconds before she would have to shoot Mira—and she did not want to do that at all—so she let the girl pounce on her, and it was like a beast of prey coming down on her, but Cali held her ground.

  And closed her eyes.

  And embraced Mira as if she were one of the objects she had to read.

  And she let her mind—her ability—take her down into the terrible and twisted tunnels of Mira’s inner world.

  21

  Cali saw Mira shivering in the shed as her own pet dog came at her, teeth bared, a lustful power within the animal, and she saw how things in the dark scraped at the animal as it mounted Mira’s body, and how she fought and tried to cry out, and Cali saw the spirit of evil that had entered the dog, and that entered Mira as she clawed at her own pet to save herself.

  And then Mira had gone into another shed—a shed within her mind, and she was locked there.

  Like the boy in the closet.

  Like Cali’s brother. None of them could fight, so they allowed something awful to use them and their ability.

  Not this time, Cali said.

  And within the night of the mind, Cali gave up some of her own strength to Mira and led her out of her own trapped mind.

  22

  “My father’s dead,” Mira said, but there were no tears in her eyes. It was as if she was in a trance, and not completely on the surface of her being yet.

  “Let’s go,” Cali said, “Let’s get out now.”

  23

  In the hall the doors were slamming open and shut and the walls were melting and there were people, as if at a great party, but just standing there, watching them—Cali saw soldiers holding the head of some bearded man—

  And boys, dressed in dark robes, with faces partially burned—

  A little girl of six or seven in a smock, holding the hand of a woman with blond hair and a dress from—perhaps—the early twentieth century; and Ivy was there, as well, Ivy, blood pouring from her—

  And others, too, people who seemed real and insubstantial at the same time.

  It’s all illusion. It’s all us making it happen. It’s just the portal. It’s not the people themselves.

  It’s the energy.

  She tugged Mira by the hand as they slowly walked through the crowd of spirits, to the staircase that seemed to be made entirely of human bones; the wallpaper dripped blood; the skin of the house breathed in and out.

  And there, in the foyer, stood Chet—

  But it was not Chet anymore. It could not be.

  He looked as if he had transformed, as if his face had melted across itself and turned his features downward.

  Without wanting to, Cali was sucked into his dream, into the world he saw, into his mind. It had taken over all of them. It had won.

  24

  The Wolf was gone. It had left him as if it had other urgent business to take care of.

  Chet was alone, and his bat had been taken, and he knew that he had done something terrible—but it had been like a dream, a dream of a World Series game, a dream of Cal Ripkin, Jr., batting a ball out of the stadium. And he was alone, but the house had changed—it had grown into a medieval castle, and the night sky above was lit by a perfect moon that emerged through wispy clouds. It was freezing, and he could not remember why he was here. Chet wasn’t sure if it was Harrow at all, for the walls seemed to stretch up all the way to the sky, and the ground was flooded with shiny black water. He stood on the third step up from the water (although, when he thought about it, he wondered just how many steps down there might be beneath its blackness).

  He glanced forward and up—there looked like a thousand steps more going up to the top. He thought he saw a woman waving to him from the other side of what he now knew was a river (river of night, river of night). She wore a long white dress and her hair, though soaked to her scalp and shoulders, was long and honey-blond. She called to him, although her voice echoed a bellowing nothingness, as if she could not form words.

  This is the empire of my mind, Chet thought and took another step up. The water rushed by, nearly touching his toes. His feet were bare, and a bit of water slushed along his toes—it was freezing. He went up another step.

  “Whose kingdom is this?” he shouted to the woman, who continued waving, as if for help.

  The Kingdom of Dreams, someone whispered, but it was not a woman’s voice. It was an old man’s feeble words. The Kingdom of the Infinite, The human underworld beneath the world of life.

  The woman on the far wall bellowed, and yet no words accompanied the noise. She sounded something like an ox—it made him smile to think of it, for he had never really seen or heard an ox before, except when he thought of the Bible and the parts where oxen were mentioned, or where Jesus was born and the ox and lamb lay down before the Savior. He shrugged off that thought. The woman was something bad—that was what she must be, he thought. She’s some kind of protection from me. She’s not from Harrow, I can feel that. She’s from inside me. He tried to think of women he’d known, but his mind was blank, and the icy water came up to his feet again, so he had to advance one more step up.

  The smells came to him again—this time it was a slimy stink, like rotting algae. Could be the walls—the stones were wet and slick. He reached out to touch the stone, and his hand felt as if it were touching a slug. He drew it back instinctively, and then noticed what seemed like tiny gray buds along the walls. He touched them, and they felt more like warts. They were fleshy. Nearly vulnerable. The stones themselves were soft to the touch, and he pushed at one of them.

  His hand went through, and something grasped his wrist on the other side of the wall.

  The water below splashed against his ankle, and he looked down. The dark water was nearly touching his toes. He tugged his arm, to pull free of the spongy wall, but something on the other side—or within the wall itself?—held him fast. Tugging some more, it began to feel like razor blades were slicing his wrist each time he tried to draw his hand back. He felt an overwhelming weakness, and he glanced across to the woman with her arms raised.

  It was no longer a woman, and he could see her from the distance as if she was near him—as if his eyes had become telephoto lenses and she stood before him, but a mile away.

  It was Isis Claviger, he thought. At least she looked like Isis Claviger from the picture that had been in the book that Ivy had shown them. But she had transformed in this vision (vision of the house’s? Can a sleeping house envision something and plant it inside me?). She had a thin, aquiline nose and eyes that were translucent blue. Her golden hair (no longer honey blond, but golden like gold, like shining gold in plaits along her shoulders, now untouched by the rain), her white dress that was like a wedding gown. Wedding gown, he thought. Wedding. Wetting. Wetting gown; Chet began giggling. Was he saying any of this aloud? He wasn’t sure—there were no voices in this realm. He thought he heard the distant cry of something. A baby?

  No, a sheep. A bleating sheep.

  “Bleeding sheep,” he said, or thought he said.

  Isis watched
him as if she were a calm within the storm, a private place for him to go within the raging of the wind and water.

  It’s up to my ankles and freezing now. The river’s rising.

  The bleeding sheep began crying out again, and he saw that Isis carried the sheep as a shepherdess would. (No, I don’t know any shepherdesses, it’s the little porcelain figure, from my bedroom. She’s here. She’s Isis.) Isis tried to say something to him, but her voice was filled with oxen’s laments, and then a bray like an ass came from her, and the water had risen within a few moments until he could feel it at his calves.

  He looked down into the water and saw what could only be snakes drilling like rain around his ankles, just beneath the surface of the river. Dozens of long, thin, wormlike snakes—perhaps they were worms. He tried to focus on them, but the rain kept coming down and the wriggling things encircled his knees now as the water rose.

  He gave his hand one last tug, but it was stuck, and he could no longer see Isis and her bleeding sheep on the far wall. I'm alone with this place. I am within it; it is within me. I can’t go anywhere. Why struggle?

  He had the sense that the water continued to rise, but the feeling was gone from his legs completely, and he wasn’t aware that there was anything beneath his torso. My balls are gone? Are they? He reached down with his free hand; there was nothing. The water and the drizzling snakes were causing him to vanish as they rose.

  A memory came to him, like a breath of chilly air sucked back into his lungs: strong and clear. He was five, and his hand was caught in a mousetrap. It had come down hard on his knuckles and he was crying. He had just begun living at Rustic Acres with the Dillingers. and this was one of the first pranks that one of the Big Boys played on him. His fingers were bruised from the mousetrap, and he tried to get it off him before the Big Woman came and got mad at him for playing with the traps. All right, this Is my mousetrap, Chet considered. The water covered his stomach, and he felt as if he truly did not exist down there. The snakes encircled him with their thin bodies, and he wondered if they were eels after all—

  In his mind, he saw a man with a wriggling eel thrust down his throat.

  My God.

  He saw the man in the water, not in his mind. It was beneath the dark waves that were becoming more translucent. It was Fleetwood, and he lay there, floating, staring up at Chet, a big fat eel thrusting and squirming in Fleetwood’s wide-open mouth. And then small eels began to come from Fleetwood’s eyes, and even thinner ones from out of his nose.

  “Nest of eels,” someone said, and Chet felt his hand come free of the wall, only he was completely submerged under water now, and the water was neither cold nor warm. It was almost like air, although it became murky, and soon he saw others there, shapes and forms of people within the water, all turning gently in the current. He didn’t recognize them, although there were boys of about fifteen or so, and a little girl (or so he thought), and then more, an army of those who floated in this strange underwater world in which Chet found he could breathe perfectly well.

  And then someone said, “Chet.”

  It was annoying, this voice. He turned to find its source, but all he saw were the lifeless bodies turning in the water.

  “Chet,” someone said. Was it the woman in white? “Chet,” she said. It was an achingly familiar voice. “Chet, the Wolf's at the door.”

  25

  “No!” Cali cried out, reaching as far as she could across the chasm. “No! Chet, don’t!”

  “I have to!” Chet shouted. “The Wolf's at the door! I can’t let it out! Someone has to shut the door to the Infinite!”

  And then he stretched his left leg across into the milky whiteness, the light that was brighter than daylight, with the white birds floating in it as if they were trapped underwater.

  The faces, too, not human at all, but like curdled skin surrounded eyes and maw, and the eyes like—the Devil, the thought came to her, but it wasn’t the Devil, and it wasn’t anything wonderful either, Cali knew now—it was the Mystery beyond knowing. Brilliant wings like a dragon’s rose up, slapping at the air, and Chet began floating upward into the whiteness, into the absolute whiteness of the Infinite. Hands and arms grasped at him, tugging at his face and arms and stomach, tearing off his shirt and then clawing at his skin until it was red with scratches of blood.

  The birds swooped down—small snow-white doves—pecking at his face and eyes—

  Through it all, a tornado wind swept through the milk of the Infinite, turning it, splashing it—

  Chet cried out once, and then again, but Cali could not make out the words. They sounded ancient and foreign, and she wondered if these were the very words of creation that Justin Gravesend had learned once upon a time, and that the gods themselves had inspired in priests and mages in a world dead thousands of years—the words of ritual.

  The words of closing.

  Cali clung to the edge of the large stone and only looked down once into the depths beneath her; the wind began tearing at her, shredding her shirt, and her hair felt as if it would be ripped from her scalp.

  And then, through the storm that lived at the heart of this place, she saw Chet, his eye sockets empty, his mouth open impossibly wide, hanging as if his jaw had been broken, his arms and legs twisted at unnatural angles.

  One last cry came from him. This sounded like “Ay-alar-yii—”

  And then a howl came from somewhere within Chet’s body, not merely from his lips, but from somewhere within his blood and flesh, a howl that was painful to hear and that echoed against the distant stones.

  Cali felt something hard slap against her—some invisible thing—and she began weeping uncontrollably, weeping and laughing both, and it was as the shadow of a great beast had bounded into the milky fog. Where Chet’s body had been were a thousand multicolored objects, like tiny shards of painted glass, as if a cathedral window had burst and yet still hung in the shape of a man.

  And the colored glass became winged and flew—butterflies? Were they butterflies?

  And then they were gone.

  A sucking sound arose, as of an enormous vacuum cleaner turned on full blast.

  And then the whiteness grew smaller—it was being pulled back into something.

  The portal’s closing. He did it. Oh, God, he did it. Chet, you did it.

  And they were again in the foyer of the house and Chet lay on the moist floor that was no longer flesh but oak.

  “You’re still here,” she said, happiness surging within her. “You did it, Chet. You did it.”

  He looked up at her—his eyes were completely white. His skin was shiny and pale, and she could see through his skin to the bone and meat of him—he was translucent. His lips were sewn shut. He grabbed her hand in his and held her tight. In her mind, he said, It’s inside me. The Infinite is inside me. You have to kill me now. It’s the only way.

  “I can’t,” Cali whimpered. “I can’t. No, not now. I just—”

  You must. If I live, it will open itself using my flesh. If I live, it will all come back. I am the portal now. It has to be closed. This is the only way.

  And she knew it was true, and it destroyed her, then, what she must do. It burned away her love for life in a single moment.

  Kill me. It will bless me and send me home to where I need to go. Please. As long as I live, it will open again.

  He let go of her hand.

  Cali glanced at Mira, who stood, in some catatonic state, behind her. She looked down at the gun in her hand.

  Cali closed her eyes as she knelt beside him again, praying to God that this did not have to happen, that she did not have to kill this boy who had barely been allowed to live. When she opened her eyes he was still there. He touched the edge of her face.

  It is growing stronger inside me, Cali. Please. I won’t be going anywhere horrible. It’s not evil, not where it’s supposed to be. It’s Creation itself, I think. The Infinite breaks through here, but it’s not evil. It’s how human souls twist it, how it was
brought to this house, that did that. Let me go, kill me, and I’ll be there. But there’s one thing I want you to do for me.

  “Anything,” she whispered, her tears blinding her to the way his body was shimmering. “Anything.”

  I want you to look in my knapsack. After I’m gone. Something for my mother. I want you to find her. I think you can do it. There’s something of hers there. A letter for her. Hold it. Find her. And give her what I want her to have. Remember our talk?

  “Yes, my love. I do.” She could barely see for the tears in her eyes.

  Thank you. Now, please. In my heart. Then it will be over. Cali, I love you. You are the soul I love. If the Infinite is there for the dead, then I’ll see you there and we’ll laugh about this. I’ll wait and you won’t feel bad about this, then. I promise.

  “I can’t,” she wept.

  Now, Cali. Now. It’s starting to burn inside me. It’s starting to take me over. Don’t let it. Don’t let it.

  Cali, feeling as if the world was hell itself, raised her gun and then lowered it, pressing it against his chest. She shut her eyes. One last prayer, she thought. Dear God, forgive me for this.

  She opened her eyes and kissed him on the edge of the cheek.

  Cali fired the gun into him.

  26

  Cali rested beside his body, not caring if the others had gone to Hell. She felt as if she lived in Hell now, and there was nothing but hatred within her.

  She had been forced to kill the boy who loved her, loved her despite the impossibility of his love. And she had killed a boy who had never really lived beyond a misery and a pain. She had killed Frost. She had killed Chet. To the world, she was now just a killer.

  She lay down on the floor. She felt as if a freeze were setting in, within her.