The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series)
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But she had never felt as if she had just wandered into someone else’s mind. And yet, there she was—looking out from his eyes. But he was not there with her, his hands at her throat.
He was in a house.
She knew it had to be Harrow. She even heard his thoughts.
Seventeen times twenty-seven equals four hundred fifty-nine.
Behind his eyes, she saw that she was in a long room with a large fireplace that had a marble inlay with a dark wood exterior that was beautifully carved with the faces of children.
A fire burned away within it, and there were charred rounded shapes in it. Stacked along the walls, piles of clothes disturbed Alice to see them. Just piles of clothes. He went to one of the piles, and lifted a man’s briefs, and pressed them up to his face.
She smelled the underwear just as Thad did, in his dreams. It made her gag. Then he dropped the underwear onto the pile. She saw a woman’s blue dress, torn down the back. A white shirt with a large blotchy brown-red stain on it.
He glanced toward a bed opposite the fireplace. As his vision swept the room, Alice saw the piles of bodies in the corner of the bedroom.
On the bed, a young woman who looked almost exactly like the girl in town that Alice knew of as Lizzie, one of the Pond twins. Her sister Veronica sometimes came by the store because she had an interest in books on lucid dreaming and on dream interpretation. Lizzie sat up on the bed and thrust her arms toward Thad.
Thad went over to her.
Seventeen times twenty-eight equals four hundred seventy-six, he thought.
Alice hadn’t seen the bloodied axe that leaned against the bed until he picked it up.
Lizzie Pond looked up at him and said, “When you get to thirty, that should be enough.”
Thad Allen swung the axe, and lopped off Lizzie’s forearm.
She fell back on the sheets, while blood flowed from the stump that was left.
Seventeen times twenty-nine, Thad said in his dream, equals four hundred ninety-three.
Alice was jolted back to her store, as Thad’s grip tightened around her throat.
His eyes were still closed in a dream as he strangled her, and finally, she blacked out.
2
When she came to, she didn’t recognize the man standing over here with the handgun.
When her vision came back into focus, she saw Army Vernon, from across the street, crouching beside her. “Alice? You all right? Alice?”
3
After a minute or so, Alice could sit up. Army had been chattering nonstop since she returned to consciousness.
“I saw him take off. I saw him,” Army said. “I saw him. He had blood all over him, and I couldn’t stay upstairs at my place no more. I had to see if you were okay.”
“Sam?”
Army glanced around the store. “Alice, you need to just rest a little now.”
“Where’s Sam? Army, have you seen Sam? He was a here. A teenager. He was...”
“That must be who I saw,” Army said. “He was taking off. He looked like he was mad as hell. But everybody in this town just went crazy tonight, didn’t they? Everybody’s either dead or sleeping. My wife, she’s sleeping.”
Alice said the first thing that came to her mind. “Don’t wake her up, Army. Don’t wake anybody up who’s sleeping.” Then, “Where’s Thad?”
“Mr. Allen?” Army asked.”! guess somebody got to him.”
Army helped Alice sit up, and that’s when Alice saw Thad Allen lying against a broken display case. Shards of glass studded his body, and his throat had been slit with a large piece of glass.
“That kid Sam. He must be one of them,” Army said.
“No,” Alice shook her head. “He saved my life. I wish there had been another way, Army.” She could not hold back what she felt any longer, and she grasped for Army’s shoulder and buried her face against his neck and began sobbing as if she would never stop.
4
When she had wept herself out, Alice said to Army Vernon: “Sam went to the house. To Harrow. He thinks it can be stopped.”
“Is everyone nuts in this town?” Army asked. “Are you?”
“Maybe I am,” she said.
“Is it really Harrow doing this? I mean, a house can make this all happen?”
“I think so,” she said.
“Maybe we should go burn it down then,” Army said, and Alice felt relief at his simple determination.
She knew that despite any fear she felt, she had to try to end this.
5
Out on the street, Watch Point seemed deserted.
“It’s like a ghost town,” Army said when he and Alice emerged from her shop.
“Maybe it is.”
“Maybe we need to get the hell out of here and get help.”
“I know you think I’m the psychic nut of the world, Army, but after anything you’ve seen tonight, do you really think this is something you—or anyone—can run from? I’m telling you, it’s that house. It’s...”
“Haunted?”
She shook her head. “No. It’s not haunted the way you think. Everything I’ve read about it leads me to believe it’s an opening. A portal. It has things that come through it. And it needs the... well, the energies ... of certain people at particular times... to open it.”
“You really think you’re psychic?”
“Not as much as you probably think I am,” she said.
“You really think that house is at the base of all this?”
Alice nodded.
“I’ve been dreaming about winter,” he said. “Haven’t really talked about it much. But in my dreams, I’ve seen the house, too. Like it’s in a snow globe of winter. Like it’s been waiting for me.”
“I think a lot of people here in town have been having dreams about Harrow.”
“Since that kid. That dead kid was found up there.”
“Maybe. Or maybe before.”
“I don’t believe it’s the devil or anything like that. Some people might think it is. But I don’t believe crap like that. Do you?”
“Not the way they mean,” she said.
Army gave her a sidelong glance that made her think he thought she was full of it. “Okay,” he sighed. “How we gonna close it?”
“I have no fucking idea,” she said, and it nearly made both of them laugh the way she’d said it.
6
When Army and Alice went out onto the street again, feeling both determined and filled with dread, they saw the lone figure of a young woman walking along with a slight limp. Dangling from her hand, a hatchet.
It was dark out, but the streetlamps cast halos of light around, and Army had just raised his gun, pointing it at the young woman as she approached.
“Sure,” Ronnie Pond said, dropping the hatchet to the sidewalk, glaring up at him. She looked like hell—her dark hair nearly covered her face. Her shirt was torn and there was a dark blotchy stain of blood on her left shoulder. Army recognized her, of course, but at the same time he wasn’t really sure it was still her on the inside. Not in her mind. “Shoot me,” she said. “Come on. Do it. I don’t mind. Take me out now before I start chopping up every damn kid in this town.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
1
Mr. Spider, through all the drifting evening hours, had spent much of his time on the front steps of Harrow’s grand, if dilapidated, entrance. He had fallen asleep so that he, too, could be part of the great dream that the house had made for him. In his dream, he was surrounded by Mrs. Fly—and all the Mrs. Flies—and was twisted among their flesh in an orgy Their bodies crawled with small winged insects, and he, too, had transformed into a great spider that spun around Mrs. Fly and Mrs. Fly and Mrs. Fly, and they gave birth to their children who held the mind of another world within their maggoty forms.
When he opened his eyes again, the followers had arrived—those who had been touched in the great dreaming that he had begun when he performed the ritual with the dead boy during the summer.
He went and embraced him and whispered against his ear, “The one you called God is coming in the flesh tonight. You have brought this about with your worship. I want you to close your eyes now. Dream. Bring the dream into flesh.”
2
Roland drew back from the Nightwatchman and looked the kindly man in the face. He reminded Roland a little of a priest—he had that godly look in his face. He had the countenance of glory upon him.
“I want Kingdom Come to come through,” Roland said, looking the Nightwatchman in the eyes.
“There’s one way,” the Nightwatchman said. He led Roland by the hand into a large, wide room. It was as if Roland had stepped inside a great European cathedral— the vaulted ceilings were hundreds of feet in the air. Along the walls great murals were painted. Blue skies filled with angels that had golden wings, and they were naked with both male and female genitals; in their hands, they carried spikes just as Roland did. Intertwined with them were demons of the air—great dragon-winged creatures with scaly bodies and ram and goat horns on their heads. They held small innocents in their arms—little children—and as Roland watched the mural, they seemed to move along it, among the angels. “Heaven and hell are the same place,” the Nightwatchman told him as he saw an angel in the mural bend over so that a demon might fornicate with it. As the angel’s wings spread, the demon grinned and its enormous phallus plunged into the angel’s buttocks. Then all the creatures of heaven and hell began intermingling, as the Nightwatchman began speaking in Roland’s head: All of heaven and all of hell embrace at this spot, Roland. God and devil are here. They love each other. They love you. They called you here to be their greatest achievement.
“Why me?”
There is no why in this place, the Nightwatchman said. All that there is, is.
“How can I serve two masters?” Roland asked as he watched an angel press its member down a demon’s throat.
The mating of the Infinite is here. There are no two. There is only one. The Holy-Unholy.
“What am I to do?” he asked, and looked from the moving murals to the great stone pillars and, ahead of them, a magnificent alter made of gold.
Suffer them, the Nightwatchman said. Suffer the little children.
Beneath the altar, on a marble staircase, there were several wriggling sacks. As Roland approached the altar, feeling the presence of the divine, the warmth and the burning cold of it, he knelt down before one of these sacks and opened it.
He saw the wriggly angel within its membrane. Part of his mind thought it was a maggot the size of a newborn baby, but the part that was moving toward a new understanding of what this sacred place might be saw it as the offspring of demons and angels and man.
He brought the spike up, and pressed it at the neck of the baby angel, slicing through the thick milky outer membrane. A dark, slick, wet creature began to emerge from within, and he brought the spike further down on the outer covering until he had ripped the creature cleanly from its larval pouch.
As the jelly of the creature quivered, being born from the maggoty outer skin, it opened its eyes.
It had the eyes of Roland’s sister Bari. The small face, though dark and lumpy, was like hers as well. Thin strands of blond hair grew from its scalp. Its body lengthened as he took it up in his hands.
The thing opened its mouth, and a gasp of air came out.
He set it down again, and took his spike and went to open the many sacks, the many angel babies who needed to be free of their birth skins.
3
Luke, who had been watching Harrow from his perch on the stone wall, thought for sure he saw Aunt Danni’s face at one of the upper windows of Harrow. While he knew it was an impossibility that she could there, that she could be alive, something deep within him awoke to the impossible.
It’s the Nightwatchman, he thought. He looks into your heart and sees your innermost dream. He saw Bish’s dream. That was the movie. Bish was in love with me, but I’d hurt him. That was what the Nightwatchman saw in his heart. The others in town, from the hanging woman to the children gnawing at the child—they had all of this in their hearts, and the Nightwatchman had simply brought out what was inside them. Out, like a nightmare that nobody could admit to themselves.
Aunt Danni opened the window on the second floor of Harrow and called out to him.
He felt tears stream down his face as he looked up at her.
Don’t do this to me. Don’t do it. I know you’re dead. I know this can’t be.
Despite these thoughts, despite seeing human torches in the trees, Luke stood and began walking toward the house, all the while watching the woman at the open window.
4
Dory Crampton had decided to enter Harrow from the back of the house and avoid all the weird people she saw along the front of it. Some of them had been tearing at each other, and it reminded her of zombie movies that she had never liked and never wished to see again as long as she lived. But in the back of the house, there was a boarded-up door that was easy enough to break through using the butt of the rifle. She had more rounds to shoot off. She had decided—in that insane way that only a teenage girl might who had watched a clown carrying a severed head and a bunch of little kids try to kill her—that she was going to take out whomever crossed her path at this point until she found out what kept all this madness going. She sniffed at the air a bit. The house smelled funny, as if something—some gas leak?—was in the air. Yet she didn’t smell gas exactly—it was more a smell she associated with the dog pound.
The smell of the killing room.
That’s what it is.
It smelled like the little room with the metal table where the dogs went when their time was up.
Something about the smell made her think of other things, as if it had associations for her, and she remembered how her boss, Benny Marais, would snicker at the hapless dogs sometimes and say, “This mutt’s too ugly to ever get adopted out. I think we just need to off him right now.” She had hated Benny at those times, and just that smell had taken her back to a moment when she had managed to snatch an old dog from him before he could take the animal into the killing room. Instead, she took it home and eventually found a home for it out at a no-kill shelter up the river a bit.
With the smell in the house, she began to forget why she was there. Dory, don’t get off-track. This place wants you to forget. Don’t. You’re here because somehow monsters came outta here.
As soon as she went down the back hallway of Harrow, a little boy came around from a room off to the side. She braced herself against a doorframe and pressed the rifle’s butt against her hip, raising it up so that she’d get him right in the face.
He had dark circles under his eyes, and looked sad to her. His hair was dampened along his scalp, and he wore a striped T-shirt and underwear that looked like it had teddy bears on it. He looked up at her, and at the gun, and kept walking.
She was about to squeeze the trigger, but something overwhelmed her about the boy. He didn’t look as if he was about to hurt her. If anything, he reminded her of images she’d seen on news shows about abused and neglected children. This little guy looked as if he’d been starved and tortured in some way, and she felt terrible enough to lower the rifle.
“Are you okay?”
The boy glanced back at her as he passed by, and then turned left into a room.
Dory took a breath. There didn’t seem to be any threat nearby.
She followed the boy into the room. It was a small room and had nothing in it but a pile of blankets and a pillow in the corner beneath a shuttered window. A single bulb hung overhead, giving off enough light so that she could see the walls of the room. They were covered with shit that someone had wipe
d along them as if trying to paint a scene. She could make out stick figures of a man and a woman and a house, and maybe there was a dog and a big shit sun in the wall-sky.
The little boy had crawled beneath the blanket, and she immediately felt that she should help him in some way. She went over, and sat down, and touched the boy’s forehead.
Fever.
She reached to the blankets, which he’d drawn up over himself, and drew them back. The boy’s shirt was open, and she saw an open, festering wound running down the front of his chest.
A memory came back to her: Arnie Pierson.
The boy who had been stolen from the morgue. His corpse had been sliced down the middle by the sicko who had done it.
The little boy lay there, and grinned broadly at her, and she saw what looked like little sharp ends of knives thrust into his gums where his teeth had once been.
He reached down and fingered the gap that divided his chest and stomach. He drew back the flaps of skin.
She felt her tongue go dry in her throat.
Dory thought she could hear her own heartbeat.
Arnie Pierson.
The dead boy.
As he opened the wound, it began to look like something more than a wound, and she hated to think of it, but it looked vaginal. It looked like it had little lips within it, at its edges, and as he opened it she had the awful feeling that somehow she was going to reach inside him, inside that gap, she was going to put her hand inside him because her mind had already begun to wonder what he wanted to show her and what secret thing he could be hiding. Dory Crampton glanced at the rifle that lay nearby and her short-circuiting mind began wondering if she shouldn’t just suck on that thing and blow her brains out rather than dig deep into this opening chasm within the boy’s chest.