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

by Douglas Clegg

  Harrow: Three Novels

  Contains the complete books Nightmare House, Mischief and The Infinite

  By Douglas Clegg

  Harrow: Three Novels Collection Edition Copyright © 2012 Douglas Clegg

  Published by Alkemara Press.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Further publisher and copyright information at the end of this ebook.

  Author Note

  Dear Reader,

  This three-in-one edition of the first three novels of the Harrow Haunting series includes Nightmare House, Mischief and The Infinite. It does not include The Abandoned, which is available separately as an ebook, nor does it contain the two prequel novellas, The Necromancer and Isis.

  In the case of hauntings, they never die – so there may, in fact, be more Harrow novels someday. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy getting acquainted with the house that sits just outside the village of Watch Point, along the Hudson River in New York state.

  Just don’t forget your key to the front door. Harrow has been expecting you.

  Best,

  Douglas Clegg

  p.s. If you enjoy these novels, be sure and leave a review with your thoughts at your favorite bookseller. A good word from a great reader is much-appreciated.

  Nightmare House

  Book 1 of The Harrow Haunting Series

  By Douglas Clegg

  Copyright © 2000, 2012 Douglas Clegg

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  * * * *

  But who hath seen her wave her hand?

  Or at the casement seen her stand?

  Or is she known in all the land,

  The Lady of Shalott?”

  —Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Lady of Shalott

  Prologue

  Stet Fortuna Domus.

  It was the carving above the keystone of the house: May the House’s Fortune Stand.

  The old man had stolen that phrase from another Harrow, but it fit this place. At least it fit his wishes for his Harrow.

  A telling moment: when I was six years old and on one of my infrequent but wonderful stays at my grandfather’s estate, he told me that there were three things to watch for in the world.

  While I could not — ten minutes later — remember a single one, what I remember now is the warmth of his hand, the musty smell of the ill-fitting suit that must’ve lived most of the year within a mothballed closet, and the way he could not stop looking at me as if I were the most important child in the world even with my lies and games and pouts and stolen gingerbread men from the kitchen. It was the only time I felt this in my childhood.

  I never forgot that moment.

  Even now, I can’t judge him beyond knowing that my grandfather loved me and wanted all of this for me. It was the house. What the house held. I would never call a work of architecture evil; nor would I suggest that a house could be anything but a benign presence; it is always the human element that corrodes the stones and the wood and the brick and the foundation. It is the human heart that bends the floors and burns the rooms and imbues the structure with the spirit of error and false remembrance.

  Imagine this house, this estate, this property: the acreage, the river, the trees, the gardens, the entire world captured within a home.

  It sits on a slope, surrounded by woods; beyond the house, a village, and beyond the gently sloping hills and the woods and the village, the Hudson River. It was built over many years, unfinished in some respects even after my grandfather’s death. All anyone really knew of the property was what they’d heard of the rumors and the gossip and the newspaper accounts now and then of an eccentric collector living up the Hudson.

  The house had a name, and as with everything that possesses a name, it possessed a personality, as well.

  Rumor had it that treasure was buried within its walls; rumor had it that screams had come from it more than once; rumor had it that a madman had built it for his own tomb; rumor had it that no one willingly remained overnight in the house; and rumor had it that a child could still be heard keening from within on an October night.

  The year was 1926 when I arrived at Harrow and claimed my birthright.

  My name is Esteban, and lest you think I’m from some fascinating heritage, I will tell you what I knew of my parents. My father was from solid New England stock that could trace its line right back to Cornwall and what was not English was French, from my grandmother’s side; my mother, whose maiden name was Juliet Chambers, similarly was from an English-Irish-Germanic background.

  Esteban, they said, came from a promise my mother said she had made to someone at my birth—a midwife, my mother told me—who had rushed to her side when the carriage she’d been riding in overturned and nearly killed her.

  The midwife delivered the baby - which was, of course, me - and asked my mother to name it Esteban, for a saint, which was enough of an aristocratic sounding name that my father begrudgingly allowed it.

  My mother told me that without this mysterious woman, I would never have burst into the world with all my limbs attached, nor would she have lived beyond my first cry. Esteban sounded romantic to her ears, and seemed a very suitable and exotic name for someone who had the dark hair that neither parent possessed, although a maternal great-grandmother - who had been Irish had those looks as well.

  My mother often told me that she wanted to name me Zebedeiah, and given that as an alternative, I was more than happy to be known as Esteban. My father apparently wanted to Anglicize the name to Steven, but fate intervened: other children could not pronounce “Esteban,” so, since the age of four or so, I’d been briefly known simply as Easton, another unusual name but falling on the Anglo-Saxon side of the chain for my father. I mispronounced the name with my childhood lisp as “Ethan,” and when my father got hold of that name he ran as far as he could with it. It was to become official. It was New England; it was Old England; it was acceptable to him, although my mother was noticeably irked, and would occasionally, right up until her death, call me Esteban now and again.

  Thus, by third grade I finally had a name with which everyone (but my mother) felt comfortable, and one that didn’t raise the specter of some family scandal purely by its foreignness to Bostonians.

  But Esteban has been my secret, true name, so you must know it and remember it.

  So, Ethan I became.

  My young life was uneventful save for my naming.

  My mother, since the accident that had precipitated my birth, had been sickly much of her life. She claimed a weak heart, and her many medications were famous among us: she could not leave her bed without a spoon of some remedy; she could not kiss my father good morning without some wee dram of medical potion to get her heart to its normal capacity; and she often spent months at Spas in Saratoga and across the sea - leaving me with a nanny and my father, neither of whom I had particular fondness for. Once, I saw her laugh and nearly run across the rocky shoreline, but I felt immediately afterward that I must have dreamed this, for I never saw this burst of energy again. I joked with her that her doctor was her real family, and I learned quickly never to make that kind of ins
ensitive joke again.

  But mostly I remember her remaining in the shuttered room of Balmoral, the house along the Cape that my father inherited after his mother had died. I knew little of the world other than of Boston and Cape Cod and the Hudson Valley and all the intermediate destinations, until I took a trip to New York City when I was nineteen; then, I wanted to be in no other place in the world than that exciting citadel to ambition, power, and promise. Boston began to seem small and provincial to me.

  After my mother died, my father disinherited me over a minor skirmish regarding what he felt, as a son, I should be doing with my life; he felt I should be playing politics and amassing a fortune by taking advantage of “deals” and “opportunities” and “the way the world works for men” and such. I felt I should be pursuing my dreams and ambitions. I went to live in New York, and my life as an adult began.

  But I had only seen Harrow in brief spurts of summer vacations or spring weekends. It was the house my grandfather owned and lived in along the Hudson River; I remembered it in flashes and in shadows of thought, of a few moments as a child when my father and I had gone there on short and - as far as my father was concerned - unpleasant visits.

  I remember my grandfather intensely.

  I remember wanting to be there in my dreams.

  To me, it had seemed like a magical place, a palace of wonder and confusion.

  To me, Harrow was Mystery.

  PART ONE

  THE INHERITOR

  “There is a real world, but it is beyond this glamour and this vision...You may think this all strange nonsense; it may be strange, but it is true, and the ancients knew what lifting the veil means...”

  —Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan

  Chapter One

  1

  My dreams are there, now. You can go in any room, any secret chamber, and you will find them—shadows of dreams, like smoke from a fire that has only just died. They are no longer with me—I do not dream. I live now in stark reality. In light. In a harsh sun. Did I leave them on purpose? Of course not.

  They were taken from me, by Harrow.

  You know the place; you read of it in the papers, in the pulps, the little legends that have grown there. They are calling it Nightmare House now, in the papers, but then, it was just Harrow.

  Once, one can suppose, there was some innocence here, on this land, but my research has shown that the earth from which the stones were taken was bloody ground, that not a window—not a piece of glass—was added without some knowledge of the glass’s history, of the wood and stone’s prior existence as tree, as cave, as lair.

  And the abbey.

  My grandfather liked that kind of touch. Smuggling artifacts and entire structures from the Old World to the New.

  He liked owning ancient things.

  Harrow was ancient.

  Harrow existed, for all I knew, before the world had been created.

  2

  And the world was still young to me, then.

  I was born to the century’s end; 1897 to be precise; I was born to the Modern Age.

  Soon, men could fly, could live dozens of stories above the earth, and could speak to each other through a tube or wire. By the time I was ten, I had already seen automobiles begin to replace carriages; while still a teenager, I had gone to war in Europe, and returned having seen only the slightest bit of action. I had my grandfather to thank for that, for he arranged that I should be an ambulance driver, and he had the connections for it; I had always suffered small strokes of ill health since battling pneumonia as a child (a weakling, my father had said, from the beginning), and I was not quite fit for battle. I married by the time I was 23, worked at a book publisher’s in the city called Foxworth & Sons; although I was not a Foxworth, I had grown up with the “& Sons” and they rewarded me with the sheer glamorous drudgery of publishing books on what was then the hot item: crossword puzzle books. I made a good living. In fact, I thought I was happy until Madeleine, my wife, left me.

  And then, Harrow changed my life.

  My grandfather died in May of 1926, but it took me until October of that year to find my way to his house along the Hudson Valley, to a town called Watch Point—it grew as if the river had washed up the stones in just such an arrangement. Thee place looked ancient and quaint and saddened me—just looking at it.

  Justin Gravesend, my grandfather, had been first a wealthy businessman and then a wealthy antiquarian. This means, as my father had always said, he collected ancient things and did not much of anything his entire life. This was not entirely true, since in his youth, my grandfather had commanded railroading and shipping interests, but once a fortune had been made, he happily sold off his businesses and retired to the country.

  I had not seen the house since I was very young. Now that both my father and grandfather were gone, and I, the sole heir, it was my duty to make the day’s drive up from the city to go through things, to decide what to sell, and what to keep, and to find just what my grandfather had been up to in the last years of his life—those years when my father and he had refused to patch up their differences.

  Now, they were both dead.

  I had to stop to turn the crank only half-a-dozen times in the course of the trip — the car I owned had been my father’s and was still of the old-fashioned variety of my childhood. We called them jalopies, then; my father had paid a pretty penny for that Model T when I was a child, adding to it with whatever were the most modern accessories as the years went on, until it resembled a mess more than a Model T, but the wipers my father had added in 1920 worked well and I was thankful for them. This, despite the fact that everyone on the road seemed to be driving the new Chrysler, the McLaughlin Buick, the Overland, or the newer Ford touring car, so that my tin lizzie looked like a throwback to the age of dinosaurs. Still, it did the job, with more bumps and a good deal more bother then another car, yet, as long as I could get out of the city, I was happy.

  The day began full of good omens. This included the money I now had in my grubby little fingers—more wealth than some of my superiors at the publishing house even had. It felt good to be alive, and free, and on the road. The weather was magnificent and balmy for the last days in October, but by the time I found the Hudson Valley on muddy roads in areas where people apparently had not yet discovered pavement or cobblestone, driving slowly through villages and towns with no markers (I have always been a fool with a map or directions, I admit, my wife never failed to point this out), a summer storm was brewing along the horizon.

  Driving to Watch Point, with its scattered stone houses surrounding what I can best describe as a hamlet, became nerve-wracking as sheets of rain came down, my wipers barely drawing off one spray of water when another blinded my view, my jacket soaked, all a blur—and by the time I found the narrow muddy road that led to Harrow, and the beginning of the wooded enclave that was the invisible fence surrounding my grandfather’s property, I was sure I’d be skidding off the road into some rocky ledge.

  A chill descended with the rain.

  I should have taken a train up, and then hired a car to Harrow, I thought, as the water soaked into my shirt and trousers, through the cracks and gaping wounds in the old jalopy. You are a fool, I heard my father’s admonition in my head. You will always be a fool.

  A queer sort of folk occupied Watch Point—even as a child I had noticed their difference, their eyes, which seemed too far apart by a quarter inch or so, their complexions too olive and ash—and their bodies mostly covered with an oily sort of cloth. The closest material I could imagine would be sealskin, but knew, even as a child, this might not be possible. In the rain, they milled about, a dozen or so of these creatures (all right, these people, but there were times, in these small villages, isolated by thirty miles and a hundred years from the rest of civilization, that they seemed to have nothing in common with those of us from the city, as if they had once been fish flung from the river below). They went about their business as if the storm were not battering at them,
as if the flashes of lightning were nothing. “Queer folk,” my mother had pronounced when I was a child and we had come through to spend one of the holidays.

  And then, the woods, a golden darkness within the storm, branches waving violently, entire trees listing to one side or another with the sudden winds, brilliantly-colored leaves like flags battering at the windshield—

  And then, the house, in the dark of the storm, illuminated by a lightning flash.

  The house I had not seen in so many years.

  Even in the blinding rain, I could see it. I wept. I wept, as I hadn’t even for my father, who had died two years before in an automobile wreck outside Boston. I wept, as I hadn’t in many years; and the feeling I had was that someone had just kicked me in the gut, that something at the very core of my being had been pummeled.

  I remembered some happiness, here, at this great house, this English Manor House that my grandfather had built to remind him of his native England.

  Although he had been raised a poor boy, circumstances had changed in his 20s, and it had been as if money could not avoid him in his prime as he amassed wealth.

  He had a mania for old things; he had gone on strange expeditions throughout the ancient and modern world, with men with names like Schliemann and Kempler and Orinda; he had managed to find a crumbling abbey in France, located through one of his many collectors—and he was rich enough to bring that building over, stone by stone, until he had—not a beautiful, lovely complete structure, but again, a crumbling abbey, within which he could wander and grow his gardens, and be alone, as he had been since my grandmother had died.