The Raising

  The girl near the radiator huffed loudly this time, and swept a small, cold-looking hand through her tangled dark hair. “That’s a bunch of crap,” she said. “I live in the dorm. There’s these ‘Alice Meyers girls.’ They’re crazies. Cutters. They’re obsessed with Nicole. They go around saying they’ve seen her—”

  “Seen Nicole?” Craig asked, looking at the girl as if he hadn’t noticed her until then. “They think they’ve seen Nicole?”

  The girl shrugged elaborately, rolled her eyes, and said, “Her or Alice Meyers. Who cares? They’re crazy.”

  Craig’s roommate looked at the professor and said, “We have to tell him now.”

  The professor nodded, and Craig leapt to his feet, stepped toward his roommate and said, “Tell me what?”

  “Craig,” the professor said, also standing. She took a step toward him and touched his arm. “Other people have seen her, too. Or they think they’ve seen her.”

  “Jesus Christ,” the girl by the radiator said. “I’m leaving here. This is crazy.” She raised a hand as if she might slap the professor, but then put the hand into the pocket of her sweater. “You’re crazy, Professor Polson. You’re supposed to be teaching us, not fucking with us. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’m done with it. I’m dropping your class, and I’m—” She shook her head, and then she looked from Shelly to Craig to Craig’s roommate, as if trying to find the sane one, and, not finding it, walked quickly to the door, opened it, and slammed it shut behind her.

  They all listened to the sound of her heels on the stairs until it was clear she was long gone, and then Shelly said, “I think someone died that night. But I don’t think it was Nicole.”

  She reached into her bag and took out the little snapshot of Denise Graham that Denise’s mother had given her earlier that day.

  82

  Craig parked the Taurus at the side of the street outside the sorority, but he stayed in the driver’s seat for a few minutes, looking out.

  The sky was clear, and the snow had melted into a wavering, wet carpet on the sidewalks and the street. From where he’d parked, the Omega Theta Tau House seemed to cast its own extra darkness onto the lawn around it. He couldn’t see even a single candle flickering inside. It was as if the house had been abandoned, or never built. Craig shoved Lucas’s car keys in his pocket, got out. Nicole was in there, and he had to see Nicole.

  He crossed the lawn, purposely walking slowly, deliberately, upright, in full view of the house and anyone who might have been watching him from within it.

  Why shouldn’t he?

  He wasn’t a criminal. He was there to see his girlfriend. This was a sorority, not a secret society, not a high-security prison facility. Jesus Christ. He just wanted to see Nicole. Why should he have to crawl on his belly to do it?

  Still, it made him nervous. He could feel his heart racing in his chest. Although the house was dark, and Craig heard nothing but silence emanating from it, he had the distinct feeling that he was being watched. He tried to maintain the slow, determined gait, but he was walking faster the closer he got. His hands were sweating, and when he reached the side of the house, he crouched down in the shadows, hiding.

  He should have worn his jacket. It was that kind of late winter cold that was damp, not solid anymore. Back in Fredonia, you’d be able to feel the thaw in things. But this was a long way from thaw. This was going to be cold like soiled sheets or something. Like sleeping in your own wet laundry.

  Suddenly, crouching in the dark at the side of the OTT house, he felt sadder than he’d ever felt in his life. On his knees. In the dirt. He found himself remembering, stupidly, his mother of all people:

  Her ankles.

  Traveling toward those ankles at high speed on his hands and knees because he couldn’t walk. Because every time he tried to walk he fell on his fucking ass. Because he was a baby. Why wouldn’t she pick him up? He was her baby.

  He shook his head. How idiotic was that? Thinking about his mother? Right now?

  (“I’ve fucked Nicole,” Perry had said. “Half of fucking Godwin Hall has fucked your virgin girlfriend, you stupid, stupid, deaf, blind, fucking idiot.”)

  He was behind familiar shrubbery, he realized—right where he’d been that other night, when he’d gotten tossed out of OTT. He put his face to the little window and looked down (blinking, blinking) at the whole tableau of the basement again.

  This time, he hadn’t really expected to see anyone.

  There was no music. No strobe light. He’d convinced himself that he was right, that the whole house was either an illusion, or empty. There was no way a whole house full of girls all dressed up for their Spring Event could be so still, and silent.

  It took a while for his eyes to adjust to the darkness well enough to make out the scene:

  They were standing so motionless they’d blended into the atoms around them, it seemed. They were as gray as the air.

  Sorority girls made of air, made of shadows. They were all in black, with their heads bowed, and the only bright thing Craig could see at all was the glinting silver handles on the coffin they were standing around. In the darkness.

  But then he pressed his face closer to the window, and he could see that, in the coffin, there was girl. She must have been wearing white, because she was brighter than anything around her, but the darkness was so complete that she seemed to absorb it. She must have been the one they were raising from the dead. (Ridiculous. Pathetic.) He was about to stand up, just leave, when he heard what sounded like vague, dull, stupidly girlish chanting under him.

  Girlish monks.

  He snorted, hearing that.

  Stupid game. Stupid hazing. Stupid him for being here, for caring so much, for crouching down behind a bush trying to catch a glimpse of his girlfriend, who was standing around a coffin in a basement pretending to raise some sorority sister from the dead.

  And then, there that guy was:

  The omnipresent EMT.

  He was standing in a corner, in the shadows, the way he always was.

  Craig remembered Nicole saying, “What’s EMT stand for?” Denying she’d ever even seen the guy before. He heard Perry say it again: “You fucking idiot. You blind asshole.”

  He wanted to walk away, but it was mesmerizing, too—the sound of their voices. It was like music bubbling out of the ground. It was the coldness seeping through his jeans. It sounded ancient, and completely new. He could see it very clearly now, the whole thing in the basement. This was no game. The girl in that coffin was dead. The silky inner lining of the casket they’d placed her in was the same color as her blue-gray, blue-white skin. Yes, she was wearing white, but the white had turned to a deathly nothingness, a bluish absence. Craig stared, and stared, and held his breath. Shit. Had they killed her? Did they know she was dead? Was he the only one who could see clearly from where he looked down at her through the basement window that the girl was actually dead?

  Did they have their eyes closed? Why was the fucking EMT just sitting there in the corner? Were they so caught up in their chanting that they couldn’t see the girl was dead?

  Before he even knew what he was doing, Craig was slamming his fists against the flimsy glass until he’d broken it, and was falling into it, and the girls were all screaming and running and shrieking, just like the time before when he’d run down the basement steps, except this time the screaming had nothing to do with him.

  Part Five

  83

  “Something happened to him,” Perry said, “after the accident. I know Craig. He can be an asshole, but he’s one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. He remembers everything. He can tell you all the presidents in order, their terms of office. He won’t admit it, but he can. He’s not going to forget what happened on that night.”

  Jeff Blackhawk’s car rattled around them disconcertingly, but Mira felt oddly comforted by the rattling, and the smell of it: the Krispy Kreme doughnuts and old French fries. When they’d left her apartment Jef
f was watching Sesame Street with the twins, a show Clark insisted was the opiate of the masses. (“This shit’s supposed to turn parents into asexual zombies,” he’d said when Mira suggested that a minimal amount of PBS might help the boys with some language acquisition.) “Look!” Jeff was shouting at the television, pointing. “It’s Elmo!”

  “Elmo!” the twins shouted back, as if it were a name they’d known all their lives and had only been waiting until this moment to call out.

  Jeff wouldn’t even let Mira thank him—not for lending her his car, not for watching her children. “Just get some great material for your book,” he’d said, “and thank me in the acknowledgments. It’ll be my claim to fame.”

  Now Perry Edwards was sitting beside her, directing her to the lanes she needed to be in to get to the exits they needed to take to get to Bad Axe to find the mortician who’d accepted the mangled remains of Nicole Werner, and who had slid them into the white coffin Perry had helped to carry down the aisle of the Bad Axe Trinity Lutheran Church on the day of her funeral.

  Mira said, “Of course, there are head injuries that will cause selective amnesia—”

  “But there were no head injuries,” Perry said. “They did a CT scan. They did ten CT scans.”

  Mira stared out Jeff’s cracked windshield. It was a small crack on the left side, making its way across the glass slowly but perceptibly enough that she could gauge the progress it had made since the last time she’d been in the car. Two inches. In four weeks, at this rate, it would traverse the windshield.

  She tried to think.

  Mira had seen skulls.

  Plenty of them. Skulls in Romania. Skulls in morgues. Skulls in long, chaotic piles and heaps in the Paris catacombs:

  Walking through that underground full of bones, Mira had been amazed. So many dead. She’d let her hand drift over the hundreds and thousands of skulls, breathing in the smell she knew was theirs (must, dust) while the dank ceiling dripped ancient water onto her head, and she’d let it sink in how truly flimsy that helmet that protected everything was. That fragile container of dreams and memories and longings and desire. Of everything. One well-placed blow with a tree branch could shatter it all.

  The impression had never left her. When she was seven months pregnant with the twins, she’d told Clark (who’d rolled his eyes), “I want them to wear helmets when they’re old enough to ride bikes. And they won’t ever be playing soccer.”

  But, if there’d been no head injury?

  There was nothing, Mira knew, that a CT scan couldn’t show. If there was no head injury, no brain damage, how was it that Craig Clements-Rabbitt remembered nothing of the accident that had killed Nicole?

  “Well,” Mira finally said, “there are substances. Drugs. Injectables. There’s something called the ‘zombie drug.’ Scopolamine. At high doses it kills you, but at lower doses it induces amnesia. Prostitutes have been known to use it to drug and rob their customers. In some countries they claim it’s used to drug mothers and take their babies, traffic them to adoption agencies. They say it makes people so docile they’ll help you burglarize their own houses—and long after the drug is out of their systems, they still have no recollection of the events at all.”

  Perry was running his hand over his head. Mira had noticed the buzz cut was growing out. It was as dark as she’d thought it would be.

  “They used to give Scopolamine to women during childbirth,” she went on. “Probably your grandmother was given it—just woke up, and they told her she’d had a baby. It completely blocks the formation of memory. You can’t even hypnotize the person to help them remember what happened, the way you can with date rape drugs, because the memory is simply never recorded.

  “They think it’s been used for voodoo for centuries in Haiti. It’s given to victims who are then buried alive and then dug up and told they’ve died and been exhumed as zombies—and they believe it. They’re willing to live the rest of their lives as slaves or prostitutes or servants because they’re convinced they died and were brought back to life.”

  Perry had stopped rubbing his head. Now he was drumming his fingertips on his knee. The jeans he was wearing were creased so nicely Mira thought maybe he’d never worn them before. It was hard to imagine a boy his age ironing his own jeans, but if any boy would, Perry Edwards would be the boy. He said, “Before he left that night, in Lucas’s car, we had an argument. No,” he interrupted himself, “we had an actual fight. A fight that ended up with him with a bloody nose and us on the floor. He never said a word about it again, either like it never happened or, like after everything else that happened, it didn’t matter. I’ve never known if he just doesn’t remember. How do you know about this drug?”

  The good students, they always questioned you in the end. They would accept your word for it only so far.

  “Well,” Mira said. She went on to tell Perry how, while working on her master’s thesis, she’d traveled to Haiti with the help of a small summer grant that she and another graduate student had received together for a proposal they’d made to meet with a woman the Haitian newspapers had tried unsuccessfully to debunk as the “Zombie of Port au Prince.”

  The woman’s family had claimed she’d been kidnapped by neighbors who tried to extort money from them, and that when they were unable to produce the money, the kidnappers strangled the young woman and left her dead body at the side of a road. Passersby put the body in the trunk of their car and drove it to the police station. When the trunk was opened, the young woman’s eyes were open, so she was returned to her family. But her family refused to take her back. When they saw her they said it was clear that she was missing her soul.

  When word got out that this zombie was being moved from her hometown, where they’d have nothing to do with her, to an institution in Port au Prince, the institution employees resigned, and mayhem ensued among the other patients. By the time Mira and her fellow student learned about her and applied for the grant, the zombie was living in foster care—the fourth foster care she’d been placed in. It didn’t help matters that she herself had insisted that she was a zombie.

  It seemed like such a promising research opportunity, and Mira’s advisors had been excited and supportive, but Mira and her research partner, Alexandra Durer, got only as far as the airport in Port au Prince, where they were refused entry into Haiti because riots had broken out. Americans had been killed. Armed rebels were said to have taken over the capital. Mira and Alex were boarded right back onto the plane they’d arrived on—and, after a lot of fruitless imploring and phone calls, they just gave up and got drunk on a bottle of duty-free rum they bought at the airport.

  That winter, the Zombie of Port au Prince died of pneumonia.

  Before they left for Haiti, Alex and Mira had done extensive research on the zombie drug, and their loose hypothesis had been that the woman had been drugged by her kidnappers, and that her ‘rescuers’ had mistaken her drugged state for death, and that the reaction to her return from the dead had been so influenced by the Haitian zombie culture that the victim herself, having no recollection of what had actually happened to her, had been willing to believe that she was a zombie.

  “It’s not unheard of,” Mira said, “to find Scopolamine on college campuses—date rape, of course, but other uses, too. Hazing?” She shrugged. She’d never heard of this, but it seemed far from outside the realm of possibility. “Nicole might have known Greeks with access to the drug. Were she and Craig experimenters?”

  Perry shook his head. “He smoked dope. A lot of dope. Probably other stuff, back in New Hampshire. I don’t know about her. I always thought she was against all that, but there were other things I thought about her that turned out to be wrong.”

  He seemed disinclined to go on. He turned his face to the slushy scenery outside the passenger window, and put a hand against the dashboard, the heat vent. It couldn’t have been more than forty degrees in Jeff Blackhawk’s car, and Perry’s fingers were very white, the fingernails tinged with blue
. Mira would have offered him the gloves she was wearing, but she was afraid that without them she’d be unable to drive.

  “Zombie drugs,” Perry said after a long pause. He tucked his hands between his knees, paused again, and finally said, “All Craig can remember about the accident is what they told him, and what was in the reports: that Nicole was so badly injured and burned they could identify her only by the things she’d been wearing, and that he’d left the scene of the accident without bothering to try to help. That’s our exit.” He pointed to a green-and-white sign up ahead that read, BAD AXE.

  84

  Shelly’s answering machine was blinking so rapidly and chaotically that she didn’t bother to count the number of messages it must have recorded. She hit Play, and then she pulled a kitchen chair up next to the phone table, sat down, and began to unlace her boots.

  “We know about you,” the first message said, followed by a beep. A young feminine voice. Not familiar, but not a total stranger’s, either. Shelly stopped unlacing the boot and put both feet next to each other on the floor.

  “We know about you. You don’t know about us. We’re smarter than you think we are. You can’t trace these calls.”

  An amused-sounding laugh, followed by a beep, and then:

  “We’ve got a surprise for you. A whole bunch of surprises.”

  Beep.

  “Shelly? This is Rosemary. Are you okay there, honey? I felt so worried after our last talk. Things will get back to normal, I promise you, but how about, until things settle down, you come stay with us for a while? I told the kids I was inviting you, and they’re excited. Please?”

  Beep.

  “Surprise!”

  But it was a different female voice this time. Lower. Sexier. Quieter.

  Beep.

  “Maybe you should have a look around your house. There’s a present for you. It’s in the bedroom. We know that’s where you like to get your presents.”