There was only silence from the room. But somewhere on a floor below, she could hear someone playing electric guitar, fast, hot riffs.
Robin turned, listening. After a moment, she stepped through the stairwell door and followed the sound down the dark stairs. She moved with the sound into the second-floor hall and stopped, as she had somehow known she would, outside the door with the NO MINORS sign.
She stood outside Cain’s room for a long time without moving, then raised her hand and knocked.
There was no answer, just the music. Robin had an image suddenly: an electric guitar plugged into an amp…the sound surrounding Cain through the headphones he wore, shuddering through him in the dark as he played furiously, obsessively, his eyes dark and strange…
Robin stood in the dark outside the door for longer than she knew, the guitar searing through her cells, vibrating her bones, somehow eerily familiar. And then she recognized it.
The sickening, delirious feeling of the energy through the planchette.
Robin backed away, turned, and ran down the hall toward the stairwell.
Flushed but calmer, she stopped off at Lisa’s room on the way back and knocked on the door
with the desert moonscape. There was no answer. She thought briefly, longingly, of going to Patrick’s room, but chances were dismally good that Waverly would be with him, and there would be no explaining what Robin was doing there. Waverly was suspicious enough (of orgies, ritual sacrifice, Robin wasn’t sure) without any prompting.
In the end, she simply went to bed and lay in the dark, listening to the swirling wind, watching the trees bend outside the dark glass of her window, thinking of the other four, the group of them. Not friends, not even companions. But she’d shared something with them more profound than anything she’d ever experienced. Now she didn’t have the first idea how to approach them, or even if she had the right to—but she knew it wasn’t over.
It was a long time before she fell asleep.
And the last thought that kept running through her mind in the dark was: Five.
There were five of them, too, in 1920. Zachary and the others.
And they all died.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“‘Each one of us is not even master in his own house, but must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind…’”
In the top tier of the psychology lecture hall, Robin barely heard Professor Lister’s lecture. More Freud. Endless Freud.
Her mind was on the oversized book in her backpack, the newsprint images of the attic fire.
Suddenly, students all around her were standing, collecting belongings. Robin realized the period was over.
She looked over the wave of departing humanity, searching for Martin. She’d looked for him at the beginning of class, but he hadn’t been there…and still wasn’t.
Robin stood, but lingered at her seat looking down at the white-haired professor on the dais, who was arranging his notes on the lectern for the next class. Do it, she ordered herself. She started down the stairs toward him.
Lister glanced up as Robin approached the dais. She hesitated, and he smiled down at her like some kindly Greek philosopher from the mount.
“Something I can help you with?”
Robin took a breath. How could she say it without sounding like a complete nutcase? “I wondered…what Freud had to say about ghosts.”
The professor raised his eyebrows. Robin hurried on, “I mean, people did see ghosts back then…in Vienna?”
“And since the beginning of recorded time,” he agreed. He took off his glasses, polished them. “Freud said ghosts are a manifestation of hysterical repression—deep wounds of the psyche slipping past the mind’s censor.”
He put his glasses back on, and must have caught the blank look on her face, because he elaborated. “At the risk of sounding simplistic, what haunts us is what is haunting us.”
Robin frowned. “So, basically, he was saying ghosts are all in the mind.”
“Not exactly. I believe he was saying that ghosts are the things we have buried in the mind—coming out.”
Students were filing into the hall for the next class. Robin shifted. “But Jung believed in real ghosts.”
The professor half-smiled. “Jung believed in ghosts utterly.”
He was so matter-of-fact. Robin stared up at him. “What do you think?”
He studied her, an appraising look. “I think the question is, What do you think?”
It felt like more than a question. But someone cleared his throat behind Robin, breaking the moment. She turned and saw a lanky, hawkish grad student standing behind her, balancing a briefcase and a stack of files. He looked pointedly at the stairs she was blocking. Robin stepped aside and muttered, “Thanks” in Lister’s general direction as the grad student brushed past her, and then she hurried for the aisle.
Outside the lecture hall, she stood on the mosaic marble tiles under the domed rotunda of the psychology building.
No help at all, she thought irritably. “What do you think?”
The truth was, she’d expected him to dismiss the idea of a ghost outright. Almost hoped it. Instead, this maddening ambiguity.
“Do our demons come from without, or within us?”
She felt unbalanced by the notion that Zachary could be something inside her coming out.
She certainly didn’t recognize the spirit as something from her. Or did she? Could she have made Zachary up? A student like her, lost like her, reaching out?
She could almost believe it was from her mind—if not for the book of newspapers in her backpack. Zachary lived here. He died here.
She was suddenly aware of a prickling on the back of her neck, an unmistakable sense of presence behind her.
She went cold, whirled on the floor.
Martin stood above her on the sweeping staircase, looking down from the shadows. “God,” she gasped.
“I need to talk to you,” he said flatly. His voice was hollow in the vast rotunda.
She breathed out. “I need to talk to you.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The north side of campus was built on a hill. A set of terraces connected by staircases descended to the main plaza, each terrace leading off to different paths and buildings, like an elaborate vertical maze.
Robin and Martin walked down the staircases, under oaks and maples, an occasional tall pine, as Robin recounted the coffeepot episode. “It was just like the mirror—that night. It felt the same. This…tension— and suddenly the coffeepot shattered in her hand.”
“And this happened with just you and Marlowe present.”
“And Waverly.”
Martin stopped on a terrace, leaned against the base of a statue to write rapidly in a spiral-bound notebook.
Robin debated telling him about the yearbook moving from its spot under her bed, then decided against it. He seemed perfectly convinced already; she was gratified that he didn’t question her experience at all.
Robin looked down the walkway, lined on one side with brooding Greek statues on stone pedestals. The wind blew her hair in her face and she brushed it away.
“I think he’s still around. Zachary. I think he has been—since that first night we talked to him.”
Martin stopped his scribbling. “A ghost again?”
Robin bristled. “What else?”
“Purely psychological. Taken one at a time, each incident can be rationally explained. But taken together…well, we all bought into something bigger. We fed it energy, if you will.” He looked up, out over the layers of clouds on the horizon, beyond the tops of the trees. There were high red spots in his cheeks from the cold. “And physical manifestations occurred. The mirror did shatter. There were rappings. And now, with the coffeepot breaking, peripheral manifestations.”