“How is this happening?”
“When I was a boy, I saw something up there. At Harrow. Something that might have been the devil himself for all I know. Somehow, it leaked out. Something in that house broke open and leaked out like toxic gas. I don’t think there’s any way to stop it. Please. Veronica. I don’t mind dying. Everyone I loved is dead here. I think you will be, too. Soon. I’m sorry.” Then he made a grab for the hatchet, knocking her off-balance, and she fell across him.
When she looked back up, he had the hatchet in both hands, its blade aimed for his head.
“Goodbye,” he said and then slammed the hatchet down onto his face.
In the same moment, the people standing at the corner moved forward.
The little kid with the metal rake began running toward her, and Ronnie had no time—she grabbed the hatchet, pulling it up with a sucking sound from the middle of Boaty’s face.
She rolled upward, standing on unsure feet. She nearly lost her balance, but she came up swinging the hatchet and caught the hand of a girl who worked at the A & P The hand flew, and blood spurted. Ronnie had already begun running, and the people at the corner watched as the children around the car wreck began circling Howard Boatwright’s lifeless body.
Several people began running after Ronnie. She decided to try to run back down toward the train station.
Run along the tracks. Get the hell out of here.
Lizzie? Lizzie are you okay?
Mom?
She had to pretend they were fine. Fear had gotten hold of her, as well as that primal survival sense, that jungle feeling that the leopards and jaguars would leap out from any branch and the snakes would bite and the insects would devour—that human reaction to severe danger that only clicks into place, if you’re lucky, once before you die.
4
In the Houseman home, Ronnie’s twin, Lizzie, had just begun popping the metal corkscrew through Norma Houseman’s cheek. “Don’t cry out,” Lizzie whispered, her right hand petting Norma’s cheek as the point of the corkscrew poked through her skin. “It may hurt, but this is what you want, isn’t it?”
Norma’s eyes were wide and her face had gone pale as the first drop of blood slid like a tear down to her chin.
Lizzie kissed the drop of blood, then turned the corkscrew around and around allowing it to drill through Norma’s cheek until there was a nice big hole. “I know your dreams, Norma. I know this is what you dream of. Of holes in your skin. Holes all over your body. You’re not afraid, are you? Not really. Not in that deep place inside that knows what you want.”
Norma’s eyes still showed fear, watching Lizzie as if she were some kind of ravenous predator. But even in that fear, Lizzie could smell the need. Norma needed the pain. Norma needed to open herself.
The back door slammed, and Norma glanced past the stairs to the kitchen. Her eldest son, William, who was nearly fourteen years old, trooped into the room, carrying her gardening shears in his hands. Norma wanted to tell him to run away, but she felt a strange eroticism as Lizzie Pond drilled holes in her cheek, as the pain in her shoulder tore at her, pinned as it was to the doorframe by the small kitchen knife. She felt a moisture in the pit of her being—a lubrication as if this excited her.
Even with William cutting at the air in front of him with her gardening shears.
She felt an excitement, and realized that Lizzie was right—this was her dream coming true. A dream of cutting and slicing and drilling. A dream where something opened her up so completely that it was as if her flesh were turned inside out and she was nothing but tingling pleasure, electrical impulses of feelings, feelings, and more feelings.
William, his face shiny and fresh as if he’d just had a bath, clicked the gardening shears like crab claws as he approached her. As Norma closed her eyes, she felt the dream coming on.
It’s taking me. It’s going to open me.
My children. My children are going to open me again, as they did when they were born.
5
In the Ratty Dog Bar & Grille, you could hear a pin drop.
Luke Smithson closed his cell phone after hearing the voice of his dead aunt Danni on it. She had spent nearly ten minutes regaling him with stories of the house where she lived. “It’s beautiful, Luke. I want you to come stay with me. Oh, wait ‘til I show you the room. Your room. You can write your novel in it. It’s perfect for that. The inspiration is all there. The Nightwatchman’s story can be written down, at last, and you can be the famous author that you’ve always dreamed of being, although I think it should be called The Caretaker, because that seems more true, doesn’t it? He’s not really watching anything; he’s taking care of a marvelous home. You can even work on your diary. The room has a beautiful desk made out of mahogany—brought all the way from an estate in London. It was once owned by one of those famous sad writers who killed himself too young but wrote his masterpiece there. If you look closely at the wood, you can see the scratchings he made on it. Like he had already begun to go mad as he was writing his greatest work. You can be like that, Luke. I want you here with me. I have some rooms all ready for us—you can have an office, a bedroom, and your own bathroom. It’s really wonderful.”
He said nothing. He felt a curious numbness go through his body as he watched Pete the bartender keep the shotgun aimed at his face. He watched his old buddy Bish reach into his own jeans and fondle himself while watching the movie on the TV screen. At this point, he and Bish were no longer kissing or making love on the screen, but instead, Luke had begun biting Bish along his throat as if he were a vampire. He drew small drops of blood from Bish’s skin while Bish—on-screen—thrust his arm toward Luke’s mouth so that he might bite along that, as well.
The blonde with the guy kept laughing and now and then pointing over at Luke, until finally, the movie on the television ended with Luke completely devouring Bish, first the fingers and the hand, and then tearing at his lips, and then chewing his face, until the picture faded into black. On the cell phone, Aunt Danni said, “I’m so lonely here without you, Luke. I want you here, and I know you’ll come. It’s hard to describe because it’s not a place like any other in the world, but you want to see all, don’t you? You want to write about everything, from both sides of life and death, don’t you? You could be the greatest writer that mankind has ever known.”
Luke dropped his cell phone. As it clattered to the floor, shattering the momentary quiet, Bish got off the bar stool and came over to Luke. He put his hands up to both sides of Luke’s face. “You want to know why our friendship ended, Luke? Maybe you don’t remember how you humiliated me one day. One day when I told you I loved you. Not ‘was in love’ with you. But loved you. And you laughed at me. You laughed and told me to go to hell. It was the most devastating thing that had ever happened to me. I confided something to you. I was afraid how you’d react. And look at you. You don’t even remember, do you? You wiped it out of your mind like shit off your shoe.”
Bish let go of Luke, then turned to Pete. Pete nodded and passed him the shotgun.
Before Luke could make a move, Bish pointed the gun at Luke, and then swiveled around so that the shotgun came right up to Pete’s head. Bish squeezed the trigger, and Luke closed his eyes before having to see what the blast did to Pete.
Luke staggered backward, some of Pete’s blood having splashed him.
Bish stood there, grinning. “How about them? Those two?” He pointed the shotgun at the guy and the blonde in the corner, who were laughing as if they couldn’t imagine anything funnier. “You want to see what I can do to them?”
“Bish?” Luke asked as if he’d get a reasonable answer. He was beyond the shock of watching the bartender fall to the floor, or hearing his dead aunt on the cell phone, or even imagining the porn movie they’d watched on the television. He just knew he had to survive, somehow, and get out of here. “Bish, calm down. Don’t do it. Don’t do it.”
“You know that movie we watched?” Bish asked, glancing back at him
even as he approached the two at the end of the bar. “You know, the one of you and me making love? It was funny, wasn’t it. It was fucking hilarious. But it’s what my dreams are, Luke. You ever dream about what you can never have?”
Luke glanced around the bar, and decided to grab a chair from one of the tables. He hefted it up and ran toward Bish, and then swung it out and back, catching Bish on the side of the head. As Bish fell the shotgun went off, then skidded across the floor. Luke looked at the couple— the blonde had gotten it in the stomach, and was either doubled over in pain ... or laughter?
Luke looked from her to Bish, who had already scrambled up and gone for the shotgun. “I’m gonna take out everybody in this fuckin’ town!” Bish screamed.
“You gotta get outta here!” Luke shouted to the guy and his girlfriend, but the guy had nudged his girlfriend off the stool. She dropped like a sack to the floor. She emitted a noise that was a cross between moaning in pain and giggling.
“Look at what you can do,” the guy said to her, pointing at her as she twitched on the floor.
Bish had the shotgun again, and turned around to look at Luke. “I’m gonna kill everybody in this town, but I’m saving you for last, buddy.”
Luke felt vomit rise in his throat; he began to feel chills of fear and wondered if he would even be able to stand much longer. He felt like a little boy and wanted to curl up in a ball and hold his stomach until the nausea went away.
Instead, he turned around and went running out of the Ratty Dog Bar & Grille.
6
In the street, he saw an old man in a wheelchair and a bunch of girls, who all looked about thirteen or fourteen, running behind him, pushing him too fast along the street. As he went by, the old man gave a look at Luke that could only indicate that he was terrified. The girls were screaming as if they were on a ride at some amusement park. Across the street, at the Boatwright Arts Center, the banner had been pulled down over the old marquee. Someone had hoisted a woman up by her left foot, and she hung upside down about six feet from the ground. She was completely naked, but her face was covered with what might’ve been a pillowcase that had been secured at her neck. She wasn’t moving.
The sky had dimmed into twilight, and it cast a strangely beautiful light over her naked form.
Luke felt as if he had just stepped from one dream into another. He heard the shouts and cries of villagers on other streets, and when he looked up the road, he saw a fire at the restaurant called The Apple Pie-Man. Flames shot out from the first- and second-story windows, and although there was a fire truck pulled up beside the store, it looked as if the firemen were ... pouring gasoline on the flames.
Luke Smithson felt a sudden overwhelming dread take him over, worse than what he’d felt inside the Ratty Dog. He felt as if some nightmare of his had come alive—some terrible dream he’d had since his aunt Danni had died, and that all these things he saw now had been in that dream, as well. Even the idea of The Nightwatchman had come from a dream, and in his plans for his novel he had thought of a woman hanging upside down from some scaffolding on a building, naked, head covered with a pillowcase, at twilight.
The dread that arose within him made his entire body tense. As he heard more gunshots back in the Ratty Dog, he realized that if he did not start running right that second, he was going to die.
As the memory of that nightmare returned, he remembered a further development. In the nightmare, someone he had never met—a little boy—eviscerated Luke while he looked down at his body and watched his insides twist like steamy snakes as they fell out at his feet.
He ran up and down the streets of Watch Point, thinking that if he ran hard enough and fast enough he would get back to sanity. The dream would evaporate and he’d be in the real world again. But he passed the smoke of the dream at every corner—a pile of dead, burnt bodies in front of the Watch Point Community Bank building. Several shops along the Antique District had their windows busted. Yet there was no sound but the distant squealing of a baby. As he ran, Luke saw a baby stroller near one of the bus stop benches. Worried about the abandoned child, he went over to the stroller and lifted the canopy and thin blanket that covered it. But the stroller was empty, and the baby kept squealing from somewhere nearby. On the side of a building, someone had spray-painted:
The Nightwatchman looked into the hearts of the dreamers, and found their secrets.
This one sentence, scrawled on the side of the Watch Point Pharmacy, made him feel as if he were losing his balance completely.
“Shit,” Luke said.
It’s from my diary. I wrote that in my diary. I know I did. Who could’ve seen it? Who?
“Cynthia,” he said, and glanced up the block. It was two blocks to Hibiscus Lane, and the cottage where Danni had lived. Where Cynthia now lived.
Terrified for her safety, Luke set off in that direction, passing blurs of human beings who stood on street corners, just staring at him. He stopped twice—once when he thought some children had fallen down in the street, but when he slowed to get a look at them, he realized that they were gathered around another child, chewing on his fingers and at his toes. One little boy had nearly gnawed the child’s ear off. The child was dead, and his features had been obliterated so that part of Luke even wondered if it had ever been a boy. At another point, he saw an elderly woman in her front yard. She lifted a shovel and jabbed it down into the neck of a boy of about fourteen. When she had severed the head completely with the shovel, she looked over at him and shouted, “He tried to fucking kill me, the little bastard!” She turned and threw the shovel down and hobbled toward her front door as if she’d sustained some injuries that evening.
Luke ran around the corner of the next street and came to Hibiscus Lane. When he got to the little white picket fence, he pushed his way through the front gate. The door was ajar.
He stopped in the doorway and glanced down the narrow hall. To the left was the living room. On the beige carpeting that ran down the hall were muddy footprints. A child’s footprints.
The smell of lavender and gin that always seemed to accompany Cynthia Marchakis since Luke had known her as a boy. The vague smell of cigarette smoke in the air.
He went into the cottage, and was relieved to see Cynthia lying on the overstuffed sofa beneath the picture window. One arm was behind her head, against a pillow, and the other crossed her chest.
As he got closer, he saw the end of a cigarette between her fingertips, with a thin line of smoke coming up from it and a pile of ash on the carpet. He took the cigarette from her fingers and tamped it out in the glass ashtray on the nearby coffee table.
He listened to her light snores. Relieved that she was asleep, he went to get a blanket to cover her. In her bedroom, he saw muddy little footprints up to the bed. A pile of something dark on the bed. When he went to it, he wrinkled his nose. It was human feces. As if a child had walked in barefoot from the garden, then pulled down his pants and squatted on the bedspread.
The muddy footprints went from the pillow to the open window behind the bed. The screen of the window had been torn open.
Luke decided to get a blanket from the guest bedroom. When he did, he took it back to the living room and covered Cynthia with it. She turned and whispered something inaudible in her sleep. He wanted to wake her, but as he leaned into her, he heard what she was saying in her sleep: “Fucking kill him. Tear his throat out. Save me his bladder. I want to eat his bladder.” She whispered all this as if she were wandering through a happy dream.
He stepped away from the couch. Tried to make sense of any of this. He could not. But he was sure it had something to do with the nightmare he vaguely remembered.
He decided to let her sleep. She’s better off sleeping. Maybe they don’t hurt you when you’re sleeping.
They.
Who is they?
What is they?
Maybe when you’re sleeping, you’re safe. Like you’re in someone else’s dream, if you’re awake.
Like yo
u’re in someone else’s. . . nightmare.
He went to try the telephone. When he picked up the receiver, he heard someone talking as if it were a party line. It was a woman, and she kept talking about “if we open up all the rooms, we can have all the guests stay here, but who’s going to keep it all running? So much of the place is run down at this point.” It was hard to hear her, and she sounded elderly. He tried to break in on her monologue, but she ignored him. He hung up, hoping to get a dial tone, but when he lifted it again, she was still there.
Luke locked all the windows and doors to Cynthia’s cottage on his way out. He didn’t know how he’d get help, but he knew he had to try something.
Outside, just beyond the low picket fence, a man in a suit was running as fast as he could away from a woman dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt holding a pitchfork in the air as she went after him. Following close behind her, a little girl with blond locks tried to keep up. She had a trowel in her hands, and was jabbing it at the air. When she got just beyond the front gate to the cottage, the little blond girl looked at Luke and stopped running. She was panting so hard, he was sure she was going to collapse. But then she looked up the road at the woman with the pitchfork and went running off after her again.
He glanced about among the roses for a weapon of some kind, and saw a metal rake lying just beyond the flower beds. He picked it up and hefted it between his hands to get a feel for it.
Then he took off running again.
He saw a pack of dogs fighting over what looked like a human arm, but he was running so fast he couldn’t be sure.
As he ran along the more deserted streets, just beyond town, he began to slow a bit and catch his breath. There was a low stone wall just up the way a bit. When he went to rest upon it and try to comprehend what he’d witnessed, he noticed the dead birds.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 21
