The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series)

by Douglas Clegg

  The Abandoned

  Book 4 of the Harrow Haunting Series

  By Douglas Clegg

  Copyright © 2005, 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 book.

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  Author's Note

  Dear Reader,

  This is Book 4 of the Harrow series, dealing with a mysterious, haunted mansion in the Hudson Valley. The other novels in this series are Nightmare House, Mischief, and The Infinite. They may be read in any order. The Necromancer and Isis are character prequels to Harrow itself, about the two founders of this bad place.

  Welcome to Harrow – just don’t forget your key to the front door.

  Best,

  Douglas Clegg

  PROLOGUE

  You found the house because you knew of it from your dreams and you read of it in the ancient books.

  It is a sacred place.

  The ritual was simple.

  You recited the words.

  You made the sacrifice.

  You called the thing back to the form of life.

  You were only passing through then, in summer, but the house called to you.

  The boy called to you, as well.

  And even the blood, when it spilled, called out your name.

  Maybe if you’d done it right that summer night, it would be under control.

  Maybe there’d have been no leakage.

  Spillage.

  Seepage.

  A shred of something—like ash—taken on the wind from a fire and spread out to others. It leaks and seeps, slowly reaching out with whispered promises and the dreams that come from within its depths.

  You cannot sacrifice the dead to bring the dead back.

  Such sacrifice only makes the dead hunger for the living.

  You intended to move on before morning; you meant to travel far away with life restored to the one you loved. The great gift was within you, but all of it called you back as if it owned you—as if you were slave to brick and stone and wood from the moment you recited the words and tasted the blood of the sacrifice.

  You journeyed to distant places, but all the while, it called you.

  Because the ash from your fire blew with the wind and entered homes and gardens and backyards and places where even the smallest insect moved—and it even reached you again, nearly a thousand miles away, tapping you on the shoulder, the hint of a whisper seeping into your mind. “Do not abandon me, Nightwatchman.”

  PART ONE

  THE DARK PLACE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Summer Night at the House of Horrors

  1

  “I feel like we’re lost,” Lizzie said.

  “How can we be lost?”

  “If you told me we were about a ten-minute drive from my home, I’d say you must be crazy.”

  “Babe, I thought you knew where this place was.”

  “From the front I do. I know the main roads up here. Just not this back way. It’s too dark. I can barely see the road sometimes. And we had to come the back way because...?”

  “Because we’re breaking the law,” the guy in back said.

  “We’re not breakin’ any laws, dude.”

  “Try checking out one of these ‘no trespassing— violators will be prosecuted’ signs.”

  “Do people ever actually pay attention to those?” Alex, in the front seat, asked. He added with a snort, “Oh, I keep forgetting. You’re a geek. Geeks never trespass.”

  Beyond the windshield, the haze of their headlights interrupted the absolute darkness along an indigo road curving through thick woods. A faint roll of distant thunder was met nearly a minute later with a brief flash of heat lightning far off in the moonless sky.

  The breezeless dark breathed heat and damp down upon them; through a crack in the windshield it seemed to seep into the car’s faulty air-conditioning and touch them with a wilting feeling—that sense of the hothouse river stink which sometimes passed through on steamy summer nights. It brought a drowsy peace to the night, like a deja vu of other humid June nights when the crickets and the cicadas fell silent, when anything might happen and many things would.

  The three teenagers rode in the slightly rundown ‘98 Chevy Malibu that Lizzie’s twin sister had bought with money saved from a variety of odd jobs she’d had since the age of fourteen.

  The car was on loan that night to Lizzie under oath that she wouldn’t drive anywhere that might damage the car (like the bumpy road they were currently on), or let her lips touch a drop of alcohol (like the three six packs of lukewarm Budweiser in the trunk).

  So far, Lizzie, who was nearly eighteen, had kept this promise, but she was fairly sure she’d break it once they reached the party.

  She also had decided that she’d waited long enough, and this would be the night. Half of her friends had already done it with their boyfriends, and she was beginning to wonder whether something wasn’t wrong with her for not having allowed much more than a grope and a feel to the two guys she’d dated so far. Lizzie was fairly certain that boys didn’t want girls who put them off too long. She was fairly sure that Dan Favreau had dumped her sophomore year just because she wouldn’t do more than make out.

  I will become a woman tonight. I will give myself body and soul to him. To Alex.

  She had prepared herself. She had gone with her friend Bari right after their fifth-period class to the pharmacy three blocks from school in Parham and bought some condoms. Bari had said, “You know, they don’t sell these things at our local drugstore.”

  “That’s why half the village gets pregnant by sixteen.” Lizzie laughed, then remembered something about her sister and just couldn’t laugh about it.

  But she was ready now.

  She had waited long enough.

  She knew that it might be a mistake to trust Alex, but she loved him and she just wanted to get it all over with as soon as possible. It wasn’t like it would hurt her rep in school because Alex had already told his buddies they’d done it, and as much as it pissed her off that he’d be such a jerk, it at least meant that she wasn’t doomed to be a virgin-by-legend forever.

  Tonight, we’ll make it real.

  The guy she’d had to bring with them, the guy in the backseat, named Sam, was a logistical problem, but she figured she and Alex could find a private spot somewhere that night. She’d already figured out her alibi with her sister, Ronnie (although Ronnie had told them they’d get caught one way or another), and she wasn’t expected home until the next day—probably not ‘til noon.

  But driving the car with Alex next to her, she began to wonder whether she really could go through with it. There he was, already stinking of his third beer, making fart jokes, blasting the music too loud, and now and then trying to feel her up when he thought she wouldn’t notice.

  “I guess we turn left here,” Lizzie said, after switching off the car stereo.

  “No, right,” Alex said. “Right. Right. The right of righteousness. See?” He
pointed to the hand-scrawled directions as if she could lean over and read them.

  The car light was on inside, and it made Lizzie feel as if they were being watched by the darkness around them.

  “This is like one of those ghost stories,” Alex said.

  “What?” Lizzie asked, exasperation barely concealed in her voice.

  “You know. I heard this story where people are driving on this kind of lone country road late at night. And they see someone by the side of the road.”

  “Nobody’s by the side of the road here,” Sam, the guy in back, said.

  “I know, but it would creep me out if we saw somebody out here. Hey, favorite group?” Alex asked, after he’d made sure he correctly picked the right-hand curve of the road as their direction of choice.

  “I love Smashing Pumpkins,” Sam said. “My dad has these old CDs that just blow me away. I think the ‘90s are my favorite era. Musically.”

  “For me, The Strokes,” Alex said. “For classics, Nirvana.”

  “The Yeah Yeah Yeahs,” Sam said. “I love their stuff, too.”

  “I like some of their stuff,” Alex said, and glanced at the road ahead, and then said, “It’s like Halloween out here.”

  “Halloween in June,” Lizzie said.

  “I mean the movie.” Alex reached up and flicked off the light within the car. “All this backwoods crap reminds me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.”

  “Shut up,” Lizzie said.

  “You ever see it?” Alex asked Sam.

  “Sure.”

  “You like it?”

  “I guess. I like the original one best.”

  “Not me. The chick in the second one’s hot. Tell you what I’d do if I ever came across anybody like that.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Lizzie said. “You’d molest her.”

  “Ha. No. I mean the bad guy. Anybody with a chainsaw comin’ after me,” Alex said, “I’d kick out his frickin’ legs and then I’d grab the chainsaw and cut him in two.” He let out a throaty laugh dried out by too many cigarettes.

  The twin high beams that captured the trees and the stretch of road only reached several feet ahead of the car.

  “I didn’t know it would be this dark out here,” Lizzie said. “I mean, I knew it would be dark. But not like this.”

  “Dark side of the moon,” Sam said.

  “I love Pink Floyd,” Alex said.

  “Take the fork,” said Sam. Nobody knew him well, but he was familiar with the roads up to the house, so they assumed he knew what he was talking about.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Alex asked.

  “Take it,” he said, and pointed ahead to the left. “The fork in the road. Always means left. The other way is just straight.”

  “No,” Lizzie said. “One way’s left, and one way goes right. Taking the fork’ means crap.”

  “You ever see Wrong Turn?” Alex asked, leaning into Lizzie, nuzzling her neck. “I wonder if inbred rednecks live out here. With hatchets and shit.”

  “I saw it,” Sam said. “It was pretty good.”

  “Pretty good? It was frickin’ awesome,” Alex said. “What about The Ring?”

  “I liked the Japanese version.”

  “It was stupid,” Alex said. “A chick comes out of the TV all wonky. BFD, says me.”

  “It was brilliant,” Sam said.

  “Well...” Alex said, letting the word trail off. “I guess if you think a chick with lots of hair coming out of a TV is brilliant, then, yeah, it was a goddamn masterpiece. She wasn’t very hot. Now, the chick in The Grudge. She was hot.”

  “Buffy,” Lizzie said. “I love her.”

  “Sarah Michelle Gellar,” Sam said. “She’s great.”

  “Hot chicks are always great,” Alex said. He reached over and touched the back of Lizzie’s neck. “If we were in a movie right now, I’d play the hero, you’d be the hot babe, and the guy in back here would be the expendable one. You know, the one who always gets killed because he’s not a movie star.”

  “Or they’d make the movie and kill off the famous actor. Like in Scream where they killed Drew Barrymore in the first ten minutes,” Sam said.

  “Well,” Alex said. “First off, you’re wrong. They didn’t kill her first. They killed the guy playing her boyfriend first, and he was just the guy in the backseat, basically. I mean, if you want to get all technical about it.” Under his breath, Alex said, “Geek.”

  The car started churning up dust as soon as it hit the unpaved road to the left.

  “Why’d we have to come out at midnight?” Lizzie asked.

  “Why you think?” Alex asked.

  “Because only stupid people go to haunted houses at night,” Sam said.

  “It’s not haunted,” Lizzie said. “I mean, nothing’s haunted.”

  “You ever been there?”

  “No way,” she said. “But I’ve heard about it since I was a kid. Why aren’t we having the party at the Point? It’s always at the Point.”

  “The Point is old,” Alex said. “The Point is for babies.”

  “I like the Point. You get to skinny dip. I thought you’d like that, too,” Lizzie said. “And at the Point, you can make a big bonfire. And you can dance all night.”

  “We can dance all night here if you want, babe,” Alex said. Looking to the guy behind him, he added, “You probably been here a few times, right? Keggers with the goths?”

  “Maybe,” Sam said. “It’s creepy as hell, believe me. It has a rep for being a real house of horrors.”

  “House of whores, more like it. I bet you jack off there,” Alex said, chuckling. “I bet you go to horror movies and jack off, too.”

  “Shut up,” Lizzie whispered, and then barely audible, her teeth clenched and less than a whisper emerging from between her lips: “He’s my sister’s friend.”

  “Come on,” Alex said. “Everybody does it. You do it. I do it. Your mom does it.”

  “Gross,” Lizzie said, but she giggled a little. “Oh. Disgusting.”

  “Not much else to do in a dead place like this,” Alex said. “Hey,” he turned to glance at the guy. “What you do for fun out here? I mean, I guess you could hop a train and go somewhere else. But what do guys like you do for fun?”

  Sam said, “I guess in Parham everything’s hotter than a monkey in shit.”

  Alex snickered. “I’m just teasing you. I think your town’s cool. I think even these back roads are cool. Hell, I once jacked off at Alien Vs. Predator.”

  “Gross,” Lizzie said. “Is that all guys talk about? Where they jacked off? Am I going to spend the rest of the summer hearing shit like this?”

  “I did it in class one time,” Alex said. “Right in front of Mrs. Armpit-Hair. She was going over the French Revolution. I had a little revolt of my own going on. I put my head in my guillotine and just made it go up and down a lot. I had my shirttails out, so nobody could really see anything. I just unzipped and—”

  “Okay, enough,” Lizzie said.

  “No, it’s a cool story,” Alex said. “It was sort of uncontrollable and then Mrs. Armpit-Hair calls me up to the front to go over something about some French guy and I’m like, ‘I can’t come up there ‘cause I already came up here.’”

  “That’s your cool story?” Lizzie asked. She pulled over the car, and put it in park. “That story is one of the grossest... I think you made it up. And it’s offensive.”

  “Hey, being offended is so bogus, Lizzie.”

  “Funny how only people who are offensive think that.”

  “Well, Joe Davison laughed his ass off when I told him.”

  Lizzie started up the car again, cursing under her breath.

  “Nobody’s got a sense of humor anymore,” Alex said. He drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Smokes?”

  He offered the pack to Sam, who passed on them. Alex lit one, and it nodded up and down between his lips as he spoke. “I don’t know how you guys don’t smoke. It’s like you have a little t
ension, you pop in a smoke, and before you can say ‘jack-shit,’ all tension’s gone.”

  “Maybe it’s the whole lung and heart problem,” Sam said.

  “Eh, I’ll deal with it when I’m fifty. And that’s a long time from now. Anyway, who wants to live that long? I want to go out fast and furious and with a smoke in my mouth and a mouth on my—”

  “Window down, Alex,” Lizzie said. “Alex. Alex?

  “But we lose the air-conditioning.”

  “Down,” she said. “It’s Ronnie’s car. I don’t want it smelling like an ashtray.”

  Alex brought the window down a bit. “My favorite horror movie of all time is probably The Exorcist. I begged my mom to let me see it when I was ten, and she wouldn’t, but I snuck it out of the video store and watched it really late one night. I had nightmares for months. It was... oh damn ... it was like a big fat boner of a movie.”

  “You jack off during that one?” Lizzie asked.

  “Hardy-har-har. Baby, what’s yours?”

  “I don’t know,” Lizzie said, hesitating as she slowed the car down along a particularly bumpy patch.” I don’t really like those kinds of movies much. I like that one with Nicole Kidman. The one where she was all uptight in a house back in a war, and there were things going on in the house. Come on, Alex, you know that movie. What’s it called?”

  “The Others,” Sam said.

  “Thank you,” Lizzie said, glancing in her rearview mirror at the guy.

  “Hey, you,” Alex turned around, cigarette bobbing. “What about you?”

  “I don’t know. Alien was pretty scary, I guess.”

  “Yeah, hmm, that’s true.” Alex turned back around and slipped his hand between Lizzie’s legs. She reached down and flicked his hand away.

  “I like a lot of John Carpenter’s movies, too.”

  “Halloween?” Alex said. “My fave’s Halloween III. With that song in it.”