Mischief (Harrow House Series #2) by Douglas Clegg

From Barnes & Noble

Horrormeister, Douglas Clegg, tones down the gore and ratchets up the suspense in his latest nightmarescape, Mischief. This time out, Clegg chooses a setting ripe with explosive potential: Harrow Academy, a private boy's school located inside in old, haunted mansion. Yet ghosts are only part of the problem in this tale of tragedy, psychological manipulation, and horror.

Young Jim Hook is spending his first year at Harrow Academy, a prestigious private school for boys located along the Hudson River in upstate New York. Jim's older brother, Stephen, also attended Harrow, though he never finished, having died in a tragic car accident along with Jim's father not long ago. On the eve of their deaths, Jim was visited by the ghost of his just-deceased brother, as well as something else—something that tried to come through from the other side but didn't quite make it.

Or did it?

Now that only he and his mother are left, Jim is determined to follow in his brother's overachieving footsteps and graduate from Harrow Academy. The honor code at Harrow is considered inviolable and transgressions are generally met with expulsion, so when Jim is caught cheating on an exam, his future at the school looks grim. A trial is set but before it happens, Jim is approached by a mysterious group of students who are all part of a secret cabal called the Cadaver Society. They want to induct Jim into the group, promising in return that he will not suffer for his violation of the honor code. At first, Jim is skeptical, but then things happen -- horrible things -- that suggest the group is very real and frighteningly powerful. The hazing process he endures at the hands of the Cadavers nearly pushes him over the edge. But there is something else at Harrow, something far more powerful and terrifying than this human cabal. It is something that needs Jim, wants Jim, and will do anything to get him.

With Mischief, Clegg proves himself a master of both psychological suspense and otherworldly horror, digging deep into the darkest corners of the mind and often letting subtle suggestion and clever inferences create the terror. This is intelligent, satisfying fiction -- a lively and unforgettable tale that manages to horrify and delight all at once.
—Beth Amos
Beth Amos is the author of several novels, including Second Sight, Eyes of Night, and Cold White Fury.

From the Publisher

Douglas Clegg, Bram Stoker and International Horror Guild award-winning writer, has begun a story of haunting -- and something in a dark house that has been awakened...

The mansion overlooks the Hudson River, just outside the town of Watch Point, New York. It has been empty for decades, but now, it's a private school for boys. And one of the boys, Jim Hook, should never have come to Harrow Academy...

For, within the walls, something horrifying awaits him...a haunting more disturbing than any other...

A group of misfits and malcontents want Jim in their dark fraternity...

And the house called Harrow is hungry.

The new novel of terror from Douglas Clegg, author of You Come When I Call You and The Nightmare Chronicles.

Publishers Weekly

In a banner year that has already seen his supernatural horror opus You Come When I Call You in mass market plus his dark suspense thriller Purity (Forecasts, June 5), Clegg now tallies a contemporary occult mystery. Harrow, a prep school housed in a converted mansion in the upper Hudson River Valley, seems "a solidly mediocre addition to the roster of private schools for boys." But its disturbingly dissonant architecture and shadowy history--which includes a legacy of student suicides--suggest a singularly malign spirit. Its newest victim is teenager Jim Hook, who's abducted into the byzantine bowels of the school by a cloaked coven of students who call themselves the Cadaver Society. Desperate to be saved from shame, Jim consents to join them and endures ghoulish initiation rites that apprise him of the school's historical link to celebrity Satanists as well as stoke psychic trauma dating back to his childhood. Clegg introduces more characters and subplots than can be satisfyingly woven into this slim spooker--which is the second episode in a projected trilogy whose prequel, Nightmare House, is an e-serial evolving at the Harrow Haunting Web site (www. ehaunting.com). But despite the tale's lack of resolution, he draws eerily plausible parallels between the arcane rituals of academic institutions and esoteric occultists, and imbues Harrow with an atmosphere of menace thick enough to support further flights of dark fantasy. Given its Web connection and Clegg's growing reputation, the Harrow Haunting trilogy could be Clegg's most popular work yet. Simultaneous publication in mass market paperback by Leisure. (Oct.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Product Details

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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

by Douglas Clegg

Prologue

“What do you want more than anything else in the world?”

“You know. I already told you.”

“Say it.”

“You can’t bring back the dead.”

“There’s a way to do it.”

“It’s a game,” he said, mostly to himself. “It’s only a game, right? Like a room in my mind. It is a game.”

“If you say so. Believe what you want. No one ever said you couldn’t.”

“It has to be,” he said. “It’s some kind of game. A test. Part of the initiation.”

The wind brushed through his hair as he stood at the open window, looking down.

It was a hell of a long drop. He stood on the ledge at the top of the tower. He imagined dropping a water balloon and counting til ten before it hit the pavement. That’s what it would be like. He’d drop and then it would all be over.

“Every game has its rules. I just need to know what the rules of this one are,” he said, hoping the other boy would tell him something – anything – that would give away this game.

He kept feeling the tug of the earth – not gravity, but the need to be there, the need to leave the tower and return to the ground again. He couldn’t keep from looking down.

The more he looked at the distance between where he stood and the earth below, the more interesting it became. It didn’t seem like a fall, it seemed like he could just step over into it, as if…his eyes were playing tricks on him…but it was as if it wasn’t a long way down at all.

The other boy stood behind him and whispered, “It’s just like a corridor, isn’t it? You look down and see the drive and the stones and the fountain, but it changes when you watch it, the edge of your vision wraps around it, and it becomes a long corridor and it makes you feel as if you could just step out into it, and walk that long way to its end, to find out what waits there for you. You can’t go back because you know what waits for you there. You can’t stay where you are. You must go forward.”

“What’s there?” he asked.

“What you want. More than anything.”

“No,” he said.

“Go on. You’ll see. You can’t stay on the ledge, can you? You can’t go back. You know what’s there. You can only go on. You want to, I can tell.”

“What’s there?” he repeated his previous question.

But the boy behind him didn’t answer. He may have stepped away.

“It has to be a game,” he said. “This can’t be real. This can’t be.”

He stood alone at the top of the tower.

And then, he stepped off the ledge.

Copyright 2000 Douglas Clegg. Used with permission.