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

by Douglas Clegg

  “Yes,” Margaret Love repeated. “What kind of sicko does this?”

  Although even as Margaret said this, she wondered if her friend’s prescriptions had been adjusted lately. Norma was, after all, the Pharmaceutical Queen of the Block, besides being Mother of the Year and still looking like Miss Hudson Valley of 1980 all over again.

  They both said all this in front of the journalist from the Parham News Record, a miniature tape recorder clutched in his hand, a grin on his face because he had been afraid there’d be no good quotes and no real story. He wrote up a half-baked article about the history of the house in Watch Point and how eerie things happened there and how it had murders associated with it and now “devil worship.”

  If the journalist had not used the words “devil worship” it might not have gotten out to three other newspapers and the Internet. That summer a bunch of kooks and nuts might not have shown up in the village with their camcorders, looking to go all Blair Witch on the house and the village.

  Finally, signs were posted, and a police patrol went around the property and did what they could to keep outsiders from trampling all over it in order to get their picture taken near what they were calling the House of Spirits.

  By late June, a sixteen-year-old girl went missing in town. No one thought to find out that she’d simply run away from home to New York City to stay with her cousin. The legend grew that the house, once again, had begun to draw the unsavory elements of the world. A middle-aged man, a teacher at the local high school, went onto the property one night in the middle of July and shot himself in the face. The rumor mill went into full throttle with this one, and suddenly there were parents who claimed he had spent too much “alone time” with their children.

  When the owner of the house—a young woman of twenty who had inherited it from the previous owner— died in a car accident in Manhattan in early September, and the news reached the village of Watch Point, there were those who said that the curse of Harrow could not be stopped simply by sealing the house.

  “Someone should burn it,” said some—Norma Houseman, in particular. While others (like Fitz, Mike Fitzgerald who ran a local construction company) said, “Someone should demolish it. Put a few sticks of kaboom around it and give it a lit fuse and then it’s all blowed up in about less than a day.”

  There were those who felt the rumors were all a big nothing, exploited by a couple of journalists and “those kind of people who like to make it sound like we live in a world of spirits and demons,” so said Army Vernon, who ran the florist shop and whose only employee was Norma Houseman, who had spent half the summer talking about the evil in town and how it should be torched. “Hogwash from the hogs,” Army said.

  Howard Boatwright, known by his friends as “Boaty,” made the suggestion that they hire someone to check out the property now and then until the details of the will— and who inherited the house next—were settled. “It’ll cost the village a little bit, but maybe it’ll discourage all this crap,” Boaty said at the meeting of the town council that was mainly concerned with the rezoning of the streets off Main Street. “Plus, we can charge it against the estate. Whoever inherits the place is bound to be rich. In the long run, it’s gonna cost us nothin’.”

  A caretaker would be hired to patrol the grounds at night, to scare off any delinquents who might use the property for their drunken rituals. A police patrol was commissioned in town to drive out once a night, after midnight, to further the aim of keeping the badness away.

  August was fairly quiet; the heat rose; the humidity soared; the trees thickened with deep green leaves; a little boy made news in town because he pulled his baby sister out of that big honkin’ hole on Sycamore Boulevard that the village hadn’t yet plugged up; and later, some supposed that if the dreams hadn’t been taking them over— the bad dreams where people thought they were inside the house called Harrow—it might’ve turned out to be a fine summer.

  The dreams were like wolves, howling through their sleep.

  They dreamed of the windows and the floors, and of how the walls seemed to stretch for miles.

  Most of the people who dreamed of Harrow had never set foot within it.

  But some had.

  2

  Ronnie Pond awoke in the middle of the night, crying out from a dream. She had begun doing this far too often, and she knew that her sister Lizzie was growing tired of her nightly outbursts.

  “What is it?” Lizzie asked, having rushed to the open door of her bedroom.

  “Something’s started.”

  “Ronnie? You were dreaming. That’s all. Must’ve been a doozy.”

  “No, I feel it. Something’s changed,” Ronnie said, and though she was seventeen years old, she felt as if she were a little girl again, afraid of the dark, waiting for a far-off dawn to arrive. “That house. That night.”

  Her sister thought a moment and then nodded, but closed her eyes briefly, as if wishing a memory away.

  Ronnie had promised not to ever tell anyone about that night.

  “I was there, Lizzie. In this dream. I was in a long hallway. I heard ... I heard someone screaming. And I kept moving toward the scream, and every time I opened one of the doors, I saw...”

  “What? What did you see?”

  “I saw people from town. In the rooms. As if they were waiting for me to find them. Only they weren’t right. They looked the same as they always do, but something about them was different.”

  “Different—how?”

  Ronnie looked at her twin sister and shook her head slightly. “It was as if it was Halloween night. And they all had masks on. Then they took the masks off.”

  “Were the masks scary?”

  “No. The masks were their faces. It was what was beneath their faces. They had pulled the skin of their faces off and they showed me what was underneath,” Ronnie said. “And then I found one room. Zack was there. And Bari. And Alex Nordland. Others from school. All in a room giggling like I’d walked in two seconds after a joke had been told about me. You were there, too. I went over to you. I said, ‘Lizzie? You okay?’ I didn’t hear you say anything, but your lips were moving. It was as if you couldn’t see me. And then, you took off your mask and showed me.”

  Lizzie tried to grin, but something in her sister’s tone frightened her a little. Ronnie had a little bit of the bizarre lurking within her, and even though she and Lizzie were identical twins it was as if they saw things completely differently. Ronnie could creep her out sometimes with some of the things she said. “What’d I show you? Was I wearing a skull or something?”

  Ronnie shook her head. “No. You were the same. Under the mask of your face. It was almost like you. Only I knew I didn’t know you. I knew it was somebody else who had your skin. Somebody else was wearing your skin and they started giggling, only your lips didn’t move and I knew it was another mask. So I reached up to grab it and pulled it off.”

  “Oh,” Lizzie made a perplexed face. “What a dream. And underneath that mask, there was another one?”

  “No,” Ronnie said, unable to look her twin in the face. “It was a little boy. He was playing with the skin of your face. He had it in his hands. And when he looked up at me, his eyes weren’t there. Just dark holes. His eyes stayed inside the mask. I had ripped his eyes out when I pulled the mask away.”

  3

  You can just see it, sometimes, over the tops of the trees, if you’re on one of the hillsides or if you’re out on the river in a boat. Not the whole thing, but the spires and the turrets, and the way the treetops seem like fingers clutching its uppermost windows.

  But few venture up the road to it, to the long private drive, overwhelmed with brambles and high grasses of summer and the fences and “no trespassing” and “hunting not allowed” signs posted along the way.

  Some overcome the fears and the legends and the stories and the signs and the fences.

  Some go there, because there are always those people—usually very few—who are called to places lik
e this house.

  The rooms of the house remained empty of life for the most part. Windows had been boarded up. The underground to the house had been sealed for several years. None of the local field mice had ventured within the place to make a nest; no wasp had spun a home of paper in its eaves; the local starlings did not huddle beneath its chimney; and it was said by those in the nearby village that someone had been poisoning the local cats that roamed too near the property.

  Within the house, heavy curtains remained drawn tight in the rooms that still had furnishings. Unfurnished rooms had been closed off with plywood. Darkness was the only resident in the house, and although light might permeate a crack in a board or come under a doorway, it was quickly snuffed by the inky black of shadow.

  With a house like this one, they say it is a shame: that such a beautiful mansion from the late nineteenth century should begin to fall, slowly, inexorably toward the earth, merely from neglect and the passing judgment of time over all that may die.

  But the house has been known to others. It has a history of darkness, and like all houses of shadows, like a flytrap, it draws those to it who are most attracted to its petals, and upon whom it can most feed.

  In the late 1800s, occult ceremonies took place in this house; in the 1920s, sensational murders occurred here; over several years of the last century and into the twenty-first, it acquired the taint of bad things, more so than other houses of its age. Like a psychopath who begins slowly and picks up steam, the murders associated with this house began to be exposed to the world beyond its walls.

  In the more than 100 years of its existence, the house had attracted spiritualists and investigators, the ordinary and the extraordinary. It had been a private home, a school, and a laboratory to a group of psychics. This particular summer, a teenage girl named Veronica Pond, a girl who had already begun to think of herself as a woman, had begun dreaming about it, imagining its slowly opening doors like gently smiling jaws.

  It is called Harrow, and it waits, within the old brick and stone of its flesh, for what will come.

  It is a castle on a sloping hillside overlooking the Hudson River. A man named Justin Gravesend, who allegedly had been a member of a cult of necromancers, built it in the late 1800s and had, himself, murdered spiritualists and buried them in the walls. There was a rumor, too, that he had walled up his own daughter alive in the house, but that she had lived for many years, wandering behind the walls in search of a way out before she finally died in that tomb.

  But those things happened long ago.

  Long before the summer and fall of this year, when something seeped from beneath the ground of Harrow itself.

  Harrow waits with a hunger.

  4

  The village of Watch Point had not changed much in nearly a century, which is to say that it was very much like other towns and villages along the slender roads and byways that snake along the edges of the Hudson River north of Manhattan. The new train depot looked very much like the old one, although in recent years, two old and elegant train cars not in use since the 1950s sat side-by-side next to the tracks—one a small restaurant and the other a Visitor’s Center. But once off the train, looking up the hill to the village, one might squint and imagine the same town a hundred years before.

  The crossroads of Main and Macklin was called the Antique District, although there were only two antique shops to be had (one called Junks and Trunks, and the other called Timeless, Etc., and neither one open to the public very often, their windows cloudy with dust and grime). The bookstore, the florist, the shoe and dress shop, Erica’s Steaks & Seafood Grill, The Apple Pie-Man, Caniglia Frame and Crafts Store, The River Roaster, the Ratty Dog Bar & Grille, and the usual suspects from the larger world, including McDonald’s and Subway and a banner over a closed-up shop that read “Coming Soon! Starbucks to open here.”

  As the streets spread out, the shops continued and eventually bled into more residential areas. All the shops on Main, up to Macklin, looked as if they’d seen better days, but still there was something bright and shiny about these streets. The Boatwright Arts Center, which had once been the Majestic Theater, anchored Main Street up one side, and had a big banner over its marquee that read, “Watch Point Players in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Three Nights Only, To Benefit the Renovation of the Gaskill Creek Bottle Factory.” The box office booth had a big hole in its glass where some teen had lobbed a brick at it many years earlier. Very little got fixed in town once it broke. The Watch Point Community Bank Building, a Georgian-looking brownstone on the opposite corner, held the south side of the street at bay. Other shops had squeezed into the streets, including the little psychic shop that some in town called “that witch store,” although few said it with malice.

  And on this particular day, the shop was open but empty of customers. Out front, a middle-aged woman sat in her rocking chair reading John Grisham’s A Time to Kill, and was not sure why her toes and fingers had begun tingling.

  One might imagine that the woman named Alice Kyeteler who sat upon the front porch of her shop had not dreamed that this day would one day come to pass. That the moment would come when she would whisper to herself, “You haven’t been aware enough,” as if whatever she was afraid of was like a teakettle left too long on the stove, and the whistle had just begun to blow with steam.

  The autumn day when someone would come to her and ask about entering the dark place.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1

  In the early 1980s, a carnival had arrived at the village of Watch Point, New York. It was nothing special—the trucks brought the carnies and the rickety Ferris wheel, the Whirligig, the funhouse, the sideshow, the rows of arcade games that blew in on an October night and blew out a few nights later as if the wind had swept the village clean.

  But the woman who had been the fortune teller at the carnival’s seedy sideshow decided she liked the village, and she camped out there—first in a motel off the highway just outside of town, and then in a little apartment above a bookstore on the main drag of the village.

  Her name was Alice Kyeteler, and she became both a massage therapist and owner of a small “Fortune Tarot” shop down near the train station. Rumor went that she was a witch, but Watch Point was a sophisticated enough Hudson River town to deal with her little salon and its books on psychic phenomena, candles and perfumes. Although if she didn’t have a background in Reiki and Reflexology massage, she might’ve gone out of business in her first year.

  After the fire at the school called Harrow, and the bizarre circumstances of the psychic investigators and the murder that also went on at the house, she had all but closed her storefront and would just sit on the porch, people-watching. The village had lost some residents after the commotion and those seeking souvenirs of the house had left. Some who had the means to move decided that Peekskill and Ossining and Beacon might be a better place to live. A book or two had been written about the house, and an old diary had been published, written by a man who had lived in the house in the early part of the twentieth century. The house, whether truly haunted or not, had acquired an unpleasant reputation, and its only glamour was held by local kids who felt it was a proper place to scare each other on October nights or boring winter afternoons. Alice disliked the place intensely, and despite her lifelong devotion to the psychic and the spiritual, she had no interest in ever setting foot on the grounds of that place, which was just beyond the village itself, and yet distant enough to be forgotten on lazy afternoons.

  Now and then she saw a ghost, but she preferred not to talk about it with strangers—and despite having lived in Watch Point for more than twenty years, most of the people there were still strangers to her.

  2

  One day, near noontime, a man with a soul like midnight walked up to her and said, “I’d like to know what’s going to happen this fall.”

  The village had begun growing dark early with autumn, and the dusky winds blew along its leaf-littered streets; by the afternoon, any glow of
the sun was gone, and daylight became tempered with the early twilight; along the trees, swarms of birds flew, telephone to tree to rooftop to tree, nearly ready to go farther south as the winds grew colder and the twilight seeped with a purple haze.

  Alice glanced up from her sewing—she hand-repaired most of her clothes, and at that particular moment had been working on an old pair of jeans that had ripped right in the crotch not two days before when she’d been squatting to clean up some broken glass off the floor. She was so startled that she nearly pricked herself with the needle. She hadn’t noticed the man a second before. She felt her heart beat a bit more rapidly, and she took a deep breath to calm down. He had the aura of death around him. It was a black, shrieking aura—that was the best Alice could describe it when she was asked later about it. “He had a head like a two-dollar avocado, all round at the top and narrow near the bottom, and it looked a little soft, too, and ripe,” she told Thaddeus Allen, the part-time professor at Parham College who lived above her shop. “He had that darkness all around him. I could practically touch it. It was like black smoke, but it was heavy, too.”

  “But he wasn’t dead?” Thad asked a little too blithely. Thad, in his mid-forties, the single most unambitious man of the entire Allen clan (from Albany), had spent most of his youth frittering, and so an afternoon with the local witch on her front shop porch seemed the right thing to do on a day when he had no classes to teach, and only a handful of papers to grade.