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

by Douglas Clegg

  7

  There were hundreds of them, mostly starlings and crows. They looked as if they’d just fallen from the nearby trees, all at once. Poisoned, perhaps. He didn’t know, but he’d never seen anything like this. There were even a few still flopping around.

  Poison in the air? Could that be?

  Just beyond the stone wall, still at some distance, he saw the house where his aunt had gone to kill herself.

  It looked as it had when he’d seen it once or twice before. A mansion like many others he’d seen—castle-like to some extent, but certainly not as grand as places he had seen in his childhood, crossing the country. This was a crumbling mess of styles and alternated between brownstone and granite and some kind of white stone, and its towers looked as if they might come off in a good strong wind.

  When he closed his eyes for a moment, he saw her again in his mind.

  Aunt Danni. Where are you?

  What is all this? Is the insanity in the family getting to me, too? Is this the beginning of my brain getting ready to explode like yours did?

  And that’s when a voice popped into his head—the same one he was sure he’d heard on the cell phone in the Ratty Dog.

  You know, Luke, you may be on to something. Maybe your brain is being eaten alive right now.

  Or maybe you just want to see the house where she did it. Where she keeled over, gun in her hand.

  I told you I’d show you some sights, bucko. You want to find out about that crazy aunt of yours, why don’t you just go look at the place. It’s a nice enough house. I bet it’s not even locked.

  Why, I betcha the Nightwatchman won’t even stop you.

  8

  Luke wanted to believe that in a day or two, when this had somehow passed, this war that had erupted in the village between people like himself, who expected the normal in life and only accepted the nightmare logic when the lights were out and the eyes were closed, and the people who had become the “Others,” for lack of a better word—he wanted to believe that when it had all passed on into daylight again, that somehow it could be understood. Perhaps even laughed about, after grief and shock and sorrow held sway. After it was over.

  But part of him didn’t believe it could ever be over, any more than the death of his beloved aunt could be over. It would replay in his mind, again and again. A movie that had no beginning, no ending, just this middle of murderous beings and horrible things. An existence that would never go back to what it had seemed earlier in the day. There would be no normal. There would be no balance. All was helter-skelter and skewed and twisted and exposed like the live wires—the hum of barbarity among them—all of it was scraped raw of that veneer of niceness and neighborliness.

  It was an open wound, this world. Open and picked at so that it would never close.

  Still, he felt it was a pretty thought: that later, he and Cynthia and maybe anybody else who survived the night might talk about how they should’ve taken a trip that day, or should’ve just stayed in bed and locked the doors. For some people, surely that had happened. They were out of town or out of touch. They could still wake up to normal.

  He felt old as he sat there at the stone wall and gazed at the house in the darkening twilight. Someone must have had the fireplaces all going, for a white gray smoke rose from the various chimneys of the house as he watched it.

  The world changed today. Voices in my head. My brain breaking down. Maybe I saw what I saw. Maybe none of it is real. Maybe there was no gay porn movie on the DVD player. Maybe Bish didn’t shoot the bartender and the couple in the bar. Maybe there was no woman hanging upside down from the theater. Maybe there were no firemen splashing cans of gasoline on a burning restaurant.

  He hated thinking how he could no longer put on the rose-colored glasses when he looked at the world. He would always see those children gnawing at bodies. Always see the elderly woman cutting down the boy with the sharp edge of a shovel.

  There would be no redemption from this night. Hell had spilled over. And this house had somehow brought it forth.

  He didn’t like Harrow. He didn’t like to look at it and think of Aunt Danni, alone in this lonely place, her brain about to go kaboom.

  9

  As Luke had written in his diary just a handful of days previous to the outbreak of madness that had taken over the village:

  No one is meant to live in a house like this. No one with any shred of reality.

  Only those whose worlds are out of kilter should go there, for it is a house of mirrors and a house of smoke, and when I first saw it as a boy, I thought it a violation against the normal and the sane and the human.

  10

  The Gospel According to Luke

  I had spied the house now and then as a boy, but returning to Watch Point, I needed to get a fresh look at the place that had acquired a small reputation as haunted. Aunt Danni had hated it and often said that it should be torn down. And yet on her last day, it was to Harrow that she traveled in order to end her life. So here I am again, and I wander the place. I think of this novel I want to write called The Nightwatchman, and I suspect this Nightwatchman would watch a house like Harrow. It is one of these Hudson Valley messes—part Victorian shambles, part Georgian crapfest, part Romanesque, part Greek Revival. If you took it and placed it in a city like Manhattan, it would be some museum to an antique age with no logic whatsoever.

  Upon seeing Harrow, one expects a flight of doves in the air; or a grand pool in place of a driveway, with a fountain at one end. It seems as if it was made for grandeur, and has gradually slid into the mere hope of revival. And yet its soul is ugly. Houses acquire souls, I think, after years of incidents. Houses like this one—remnants of a gilded age, a manufactured Machu Picchu for those handful of robber barons of the nineteenth century with too much money and too little sense of the practical—were meant to decay and be abandoned over time, for they are absurd. They are not homes. They are edifices to vanity. Human vanity. Ridiculous consumption of wealth. The architectural equivalent of the empty boast.

  I read in the local library about Justin Gravesend, the man who built Harrow. He had searched the world for occult artifacts to raise the dead or call demons or do some such Faustian activity. His delusions knew no bounds. He brought tragedy to his family, to his children, to his grandson, who inherited the property. All inheritors are doomed (so says the part of me that wished Aunt Danni had left me something tangible of our bond with each other).

  As with all tales of haunts, Harrow’s legend grew as accidents happened or as murders occurred over the twentieth century. To detail them here would be unnecessary, as other writers of occult history have mentioned them in books such as The Necromancers of the 19th Century: An Illustrated History of Spiritualism and the Rise of the Occult and The Infinite Ones, a particularly hard-to-find volume by a spiritualist named Isis Claviger who had lived—and apparently died—within Harrow itself.

  Despite these tales of the place, when I have gone to it, as I have done nearly every day for the past week or so, what I see is a fallen woman of a house. A whore past her glory, who no longer beckons, but simply lies and waits for the end. The windows are mostly boarded up. The doors are similarly locked.

  I met the man who calls himself The Nightwatchman, a man named Speederman, who does not seem anything more than a nervous husband to an undoubtedly nervous wife. “My wife’s having our firstborn,” he said. “Soon. Perhaps tonight. Perhaps next week. Who can say for certain? I hate being this far away from the village when she’s like this.”

  I glanced over at his car, a station wagon that looked like it hadn’t seen a good day since 1972. He must’ve understood why I looked at it. “Oh, sure, we can drive places. She’s just feeling isolated and lonely. I hear women get cranky in their last month.”

  I asked him what it was like there, if the place seemed strange at all. He grinned and shook his head. “One of the nicest houses I ever worked at. Sure, there’s a plumbing problem now and then. We got some leakage, and
the basement’s flooded half the time with all these storms that are going through. But it’s a pretty nice place. Want to see it?”

  And so Mr. Speederman took me in through one of the side doors that led to the kitchen. This was in the late afternoon, a Saturday, and the autumn light had just reached a warm golden glow as it hit the white patchy walls in the kitchen. I must’ve made some comment (probably “Shit!”) because he laughed and told me that people expected it to be as rundown on the inside as on the outside. The kitchen was magnificent—old-fashioned in some respects, but beautifully furnished and with an excellent grill and stove, as well as two large steel refrigerators, side-by-side. “The lady who bought it a few years back was fixing it up,” he said. “She didn’t finish, but what she managed to get done makes it pretty damn nice.”

  “I guess I expected cobwebs and broken floorboards,” I told him, and then followed him down a hallway to the door to a bedroom.

  “The wife sometimes naps,” he said. “Let me check on her first.”

  He gently nudged the bedroom door open and stepped inside, blocking my way. In a soft voice, he said, “Honey? We have a guest. A local teacher. New to the area. You feeling up for a visit?”

  I could not hear her response beyond a muffled murmur. A moment later, he came out again, closing the door behind him. “I’m sorry. She’s not at her best right now. A little testy. It’s exhausting I guess, the last weeks. Waiting for the babies to come.”

  “Babies?”

  He nodded. “Might be twins.”

  This seemed odd to me. Surely he had taken his wife to see a doctor somewhat regularly, and surely he’d know if they were going to have twins or just one child. But I let that go, and I wondered how I would reimagine the Nightwatchman for the book. How I would take Speederman with his rather plain demeanor reminding me more of an old-time farmhand instead of a nightwatchman and caretaker to a decrepit mansion, and how I’d transform him into someone larger than life. Someone who understood the inner workings of others. Someone who watched the night.

  As he escorted me about the house, again by that slim kitchen doorway, I had the unsettling feeling that someone else watched the two of us. His wife? Or another companion who lived with them? Or perhaps it was just my imagination from having read too much about the house and thought too much about who the Nightwatchman of this place would be.

  I went back again a few days later—right after my last class—and was able to see the sun go down over Harrow. I had the uncanny feeling that the house changed nearly imperceptibly at dusk. It was not just the shadows that cloaked it and showed depth, or a slant of the last bit of daylight in some latticework or on the curve of its dome— it looked as if I had stepped into another time and another country. Harrow looked like a medieval fortress to me then, with the dying light. Remembering the reports I’d heard of teenagers and something about the corpse of a boy stolen from the hospital morgue, I wondered about places like this. Do they attract us to them because of the mystery and the beauty? Or are they some kind of organic creature, perhaps not something that moves on feet and hands, but like a Venus flytrap that opens in a kind of spired glory, only to have a hapless fly crawl into its velvet pit and those jaws—those towers and domes and gabled rooftops—closing around whomever had entered. Certainly that was the history of the house.

  What if there is an organic life to stone and wood? What if Justin Gravesend had really built a sort of repository of spiritual matter? It was alleged that he murdered psychics in the house at one point, simply to keep their energy in the walls. It is the stuff of fiction to think this, so I only write here toward researching the novel I want to create. The Nightwatchman, about a man like Mr. Speederman, who perhaps sees into the hearts of those who enter a house. I would set my story somewhere else so that I could include all the eccentric small town Hudson River rats I see in Watch Point and not risk offending them. I might even set the novel in a large city, but I like this idea that a building might become organic when it has devoured enough life force from others. When it has closed its tendrils about victim after victim, year after year, only to have grown a heart, as it were, a soul, perhaps. A life of its own, independent of the lives it has taken.

  And what does life want to do once it has its own being? That really is the existential question I’d ask. To write this novel, I need to explore this. What does Harrow represent, after all? What of Mr. Speederman? His wife, pregnant and ready to bring forth a child unto the great palace on the verge of decay?

  Thinking about this house and this man, I’ve had nearly lucid dreams for several nights. In them, there’s a kind of nightmarish logic to the village. I see some terrible things. Murder, fires, children doing unnatural things to each other. Truly disturbing. But I think it’s my mind’s way of exploring what Harrow suggests to me.

  It is a rich environment for the imagination, I’ll give it that, and I’ve now spent many sleepless nights turning the idea of Harrow over and over again in my mind, and Mr. Speederman himself, who seems not to have noticed how the house changes and turns. Perhaps this is simply because he lives within it and knows its boredom. Whereas I see its possibilities. And its impossibilities.

  This brings me to yet another line of thought. Aunt Danni. Coming out to this property to end her life. She, of course, knew its status as the local haunt, and she must’ve seen her going there as an overly dramatic gesture— almost a message to me. Perhaps this is why the house really fascinates me. Perhaps it’s because I want to know what Aunt Danni was thinking. I want to know her last day.

  Why had she chosen a place of purported haunting in order to end her life? Did she wish to remain in Harrow so that I might one day see her again?

  Is that why I go there every few days at dusk, to watch how the house changes in the dark? It seems to be molten for a few seconds, shifting its form before me (hallucinations perhaps, brought on by the tears I can’t stop when I see the house and when I think of Danni and how much I loved her).

  I need to work on the novel. I don’t know when. I think maybe in a week or two, once I’ve settled more into the routine of lesson plans and grading tests and teachers’ meetings. I need to fully explore what Harrow and Mr. Speederman suggest to me—I need to come up with just what the Nightwatchman watches—is it the house, or the village itself?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  1

  Back in the village, Ronnie ran past horrific scenes beyond imagining. The street lamps seemed brighter than usual, and the sun, falling across some distant westerly place, still shed last light on it all. Some of it was a blur as she ran—the dogs dragging a little girl by the hair; the woman who, gun in hand, began picking off children from her rooftop; the burnt bodies in a pile, still smoking, as if someone had tied them up and set them ablaze not twenty minutes earlier; the old woman sipping tea from a dainty china teacup as she sat on her front porch, her feet resting on a human head. Some of what Ronnie saw made her stop in her tracks—but only for a brief moment before she heard the yapping of dogs or the screeching of a new kill or the “Yi-yi-yi” of the gangs of children and the thunder-beat of those strange people running in a mob around the village. She saw what must’ve been a man skinned alive and still wriggling in a mass of blood and gunk, hung like a human dartboard from the church steps of the Church of the Vale, while four middle-aged women who looked like members of the Altar Guild (Mrs. Calhoun? Is that you? My third-grade teacher?) threw knives at the hapless man in the last moments of his tortured life. Three cars had crashed in front of Junks and Trunks, the antique shop just up from the old train depot. The Saturn had piled up onto the Jeep Grand Cherokee, and somewhere beneath it was an old Ford Festiva. Steam and smoke came up from the cars, but no one was in sight. Yet clothes were heaped up next to the accident site, and what might’ve been bones also had been thrown in a pile.

  Just ahead was the old depot. When Ronnie heard the screech of brakes, she quickly moved up to the sidewalk, mindful of any mad dogs that might be runnin
g around.

  What came around the corner had no effect on her, other than to numb her a little further and nudge her into a part of her brain that accepted far too much horror to process.

  A pickup truck nearly spun out of control as it came up onto Main Street. In the flatbed, Mark Beauchamp and his wife Paula had chains dragging off the back of the truck. Ronnie knew them both—Paula was just two years older than she was and had dropped out of college to come back and marry Mark. She was seven months pregnant with their first kid. They were hanging on to the back of a truck while some crazy driver in a hooded sweatshirt drove. Wrapped up in the chains that dragged along the road behind the truck: two young women whose features were so torn up by the pavement that Ronnie could not clearly identify them. They were also pregnant, and the thought occurred to her that these young expectant mothers were close friends of Paula’s—and might even be in her Lamaze or yoga classes. Paula had been very health-conscious since getting pregnant. Ronnie could even remember Paula coming in the bookstore to get information on natural childbirth and midwifery.

  The truck sped on, narrowly avoiding the three-car wreck halfway up Main Street.

  Ronnie kept running. Put it out of your head. Put it out of your head. It can’t be real. It can’t be real. She swung the hatchet out as she ran in case anyone should leap out at her, and when she made it to the depot, she turned north toward Parham.

  She ran to the train tracks, too scared to look back to see if anyone pursued her. Ronnie ran along the tracks, and felt comforted by the darkness of the woods on either side. She kept heaving for deeper breaths; she tried to block everything she’d just witnessed out of her mind; she tried not to think of her sister or her mother. Maybe they’re safe. Maybe they made it out. Maybe they’re waiting somewhere else. Maybe they went to Parham for supper. Maybe. . .