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

by Douglas Clegg

  He dropped his bike near the chains. Then he walked around the posts, tapping the tops of them, touching one of the chains as if unsure whether it was real or not.

  He wanted to see the scarecrow. Or the man who looked like a scarecrow.

  He began walking up the dirt road until the pavement started again. He glanced back to his bike—it lay on its side, where he’d left it.

  The main road he’d zigzagged off seemed a long way behind him. His mother would be calling him for supper soon, but he could be late. She’d live. She never got too mad at him anymore.

  He glanced back up the driveway, to the gate at the stone wall. The trees along the edge of the wall were large and fat and thick with golden leaves.

  The man who looked more and more like a scarecrow— with a funny straw hat and what looked like hay coming out from under it—waved his arms around, and for some reason this made Kazi grin and giggle a little.

  People were friendly in Watch Point. He knew that much. The kids sucked, but grown-ups were all pretty nice to him.

  Something inside Kazi made him want to turn around and get back on his bike and hightail it out of there. Something, almost like a little voice, whispered about how he wasn’t supposed to talk to strangers, let alone walk up a lonesome road in the middle of nowhere to see if they were a man in costume as a scarecrow.

  He knew about scarecrows. His mother had told him for years about a man and woman made of straw. They were named Dadko and Morena, and they brought disease and pestilence and must be burned. When his family had lived in the farmland when he was only five or six, he saw scarecrows in the field, and his mother had warned him they were images of Dadko. “They scare more than birds, Kazi,” she warned him. “When I was a girl, we burned them, but I always was scared when I saw the man and woman made of straw.”

  The man in the driveway had started to come toward him a little, too.

  Just a few steps beyond the gate.

  Then a few more.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1

  Ronnie Pond usually stopped by home first before she went to work, but she was so late that she figured she better skedaddle and at least make a good show of being at the bookstore as close to the hour as she could. As soon as she went in the front door, Dusty called out from one of the shelves, “That better be Ronnie.”

  “Guilty,” she said, and immediately went to the cash register to get to work.

  “Well, look who’s here. Veronica Pond. There’s a pile of returns under there. Whenever Nick wakes up in the back, I want you to go and start getting the new shipment out on the shelves,” Dustin called out without leaving the nonfiction section.

  “Gotcha,” Ronnie said as she crouched down to pick up some of the hardcovers that had to go back to the distributor. When she rose from the counter, Boaty Boatwright stood there.

  “Mr. Boatwright,” she said.

  “Has it come yet?”

  “It?” Quickly, she pulled up the accounts on the computer screen and tapped through the alphabet to his name. “Not yet.”

  “How hard is it to get a book that’s been out for months?”

  Ronnie glanced at the screen. Peter Straub’s In the Night Room was listed. She’d read and loved that book. Part of her felt like just telling him she’d get him her copy from home at some point if he promised to return it. But that wasn’t business. She’d done it once before and Dusty had been none too happy about it, although he and Nick had had a good laugh over it at the time. “The order’s there. The book’s available. Maybe the mail’s slow this week.”

  “Ah,” Boaty said. “Fear of terrorists.”

  “Sir?” Ronnie asked.

  “They may be checking all packages. You know the way the world is now. Bad things come in small packages.”

  Ronnie grinned, “You mean good things.” He had a blank look on his face, so she added, “You know, ‘good things come in small packages.’”

  “That’s not always true,” Boaty said. “Bad things do, too.”

  “Well, look, the book should be in by this weekend. Want me to just run it out to you when it’s in? Save you a trip?”

  Boaty nodded, but looked none too happy. Grudgingly, he said, “Thanks. Sure. That’d be great.” Then, in a mousy voice that could barely be heard, he added, “I really wanted it tonight.”

  “Sir?”

  “The book,” he said, a bit more loudly. “I’ve been waiting for it. I really wanted to read it tonight. Nothing good’s on TV. I have the place to myself for a few hours. All by my lonesome. I just wanted to start in on it.”

  “It’s a good one,” she said. Then she leaned over the counter. He drew closer to her. She mostly mouthed the words with the barest whisper accompanying her lip movements. “I’ll get you a copy. After work. I’ll drop it off.”

  Boaty grinned, glancing back toward Dusty, who had begun walking to the front counter with a stack of books. “Good. Goody. Thanks. You’re a good egg, Ronnie. That’s a compliment, even though it doesn’t sound like one. It’s amazing to see how you’ve grown into such a smart, beautiful woman.”

  Ronnie smiled. “Thank you.”

  Just as Boaty was stepping away, he drew back again. “You guys sell reading glasses?”

  “Absolutely,” she said, and took him over to the carousel of glasses near the magazine racks. “Getting a little blurry?”

  “Well, you hit your forties and eye strain starts to take its toll,” he said. He spun the carousel a bit and tried on a few pairs before buying one.

  “Those look quite good on you,” Ronnie said as he put on the smallish pair with a tortoiseshell rim. She passed him a paperback with particularly small print. “Try it. Read a few lines and see if they help.”

  Boaty flipped through the book a bit. “I guess these are the right ones. Thanks so much. I guess this’ll have me reading a bit more.”

  “Well, they print such tiny fonts in some of these books,” Ronnie said. “I’m about to tackle Bleak House, and let me tell you, I need to find the large-print edition myself.”

  Boaty grinned and gave her a little wink. “You’re the best, Ronnie.” He bought three hardcovers in stock that she recommended, and when he had left the store, Dusty said to her, “He doesn’t bother you, does he?”

  She gave him a quizzical look. “Bother?”

  “Well, I think Boaty’s hot for you, kid,” Dusty said. “I don’t like customers who seem to be hitting on high school kids.”

  “No.” She grinned, shaking her head. “No way. He’s just friendly.”

  “Gives me the creeps, sometimes. But hey, you got him to buy something. That’s pretty amazing since he hasn’t spent a dime in here since he found out about online bookstores.”

  “I’m a miracle worker,” she said. “So how about that raise?”

  “Soonish,” Dusty said. “Okay now, let’s go wake Nick up and tackle the stock in the back. How late can you stay?”

  “Just ‘til eight. I’ve got double-duty tonight.”

  “Babysitting on a school night?”

  “Dusty,” she said, nudging him slightly in the shoulder. “I do my homework when I babysit, don’t worry.”

  “What brat are you with tonight?”

  “Make that brats. The Housemans. And they drive me nuts, but she pays the best.”

  “Ugh.” Dusty made a face at the mention of the name. “Those little monsters.”

  2

  Two doors up, at the Watch Point New Lady Style Shop, a particular customer became annoyed with the girl trying to sell her the wrong pair of shoes.

  “I want the one with the red straps,” Norma Houseman said. She’d been feeling better ever since the Cadlomyx had kicked in. Cadlomyx was the new wonder drug her doctor in Parham had prescribed for her. It made her smarter, although that’s not quite what the doctor had said about it. She had a pill to help her get to sleep, a pill to keep her asleep, a pill to wake her up, and a pill or two to keep her awake and alert during the day,
to say nothing of her daily anxiety pills that kept away the cobwebs for her.

  She wished she had a pill to make this sales clerk go away.

  “They only come in blue,” the sales clerk at the dress and shoe shop said, pointing out the three styles of elegant heels.

  “I saw in the catalog that they have red straps, too.”

  “These are all we have in stock,” the young sales clerk said.

  “For three hundred dollars, I think I can have the color I want. Can you order the red straps?”

  “It may take six weeks.”

  “I could drive to Manhattan tomorrow and be back by two P.M. with the ones with the red straps.”

  The sales clerk sighed and bit down into her smile. “Let me call our Ossining store. Maybe they’ll have them.”

  “Please,” Norma said. “And thank you.”

  She felt a gentle tug at her sweater, and glanced down at her youngest daughter, Cathy.

  “Let’s go.”

  “Mommy’ll be just a few more minutes.” Norma tried to keep an aspect of sweetness to her voice. The one thing about her new medication was it sometimes took away what was sweet and kept her a bit on edge. Part of her wanted to take her thumb and forefinger and flick little Cathy on the back of her head in hopes of jogging her daughter’s brain a little. Maybe kickstart it for once.

  “I’m bored,” Cathy whined, ever so quietly, as if she were telling her mother she needed to go to the little girl’s room.

  “We’ll go soon,” Norma said, and reached down to brush her hand over her daughter’s silky blond hair.

  The sales clerk was on the phone, talking in a low voice, back toward the stock room door, stretching the phone cord as far as it would go.

  Norma glanced at the shoes on the counter. But could I just use the blue? No, it’s for the family picture. I’ll be in front, with my legs crossed. I need to have the red straps. My red dress, my red shoes, my red straps.

  Norma Houseman was a shoe freak, and had been since she was a young woman training to be a ballet dancer. Instead she had ended up marrying an idiot and giving up on her dreams. She loved the way shoes made her legs look. She loved the rich feeling she had in a pair of Manolo Blahniks or Jimmy Choos. Most of her shopping was done by catalog or on her once-every-two-months trip to Manhattan when she got to leave the kids with Lizzie and Ronnie Pond for an overnight, and go down to check in to the Plaza Hotel for one heavenly night. She would spend two full days doing nothing but shopping and drinking—both of which were heaven to Norma, and her little secret from the village, who all seemed to think she was Maria Von Trapp or something.

  But sometimes she was stuck having to buy a new pair of decent shoes in the only shop in town that ever got anything passable in.

  Every three years, she took a family picture, and she had to look magnificent in it.

  Or she’d just die.

  The family picture meant that much to her—she intended to gather all five of her children around, from William who was nearly thirteen all the way to Cathy, who was barely four. A perfect family picture meant a perfect family.

  It’ll show that rat bastard who the winner is, she thought. I’ll be sexy and beautiful, surrounded by my loving children. And he’ll get it two months before Christmas in his lonely little world where he sleeps with every other slut who likes Chivas, and he’ll cry and hate me and hate himself and then I’ll have won. I’ll have the love of my children and my looks and my youth—I’m only thirty-five. I still look late twenties. He looks like a rat bastard of fifty if not more.

  Norma Houseman had to win in life, and it didn’t matter whether it was winning the battle of wills with the stupid twenty-year-old sales clerk at the shoe store; or the surge of victory she felt when she’d gotten her problem child, Frankie, to finally admit that Mommy was always right on things like life and math, and that whatever Frankie thought was always wrong; or whether it was the charges she brought against her husband to make sure he’d never have custody of his kids again and would have to pay through the nose to clothe and feed them until the end of time. She won. That’s all that she cared about, and she even won with Chuck, the man she saw sometimes, the man who gave her some pleasure in those brief lonely moments when the love for her family didn’t quite cut it for her.

  The sales clerk turned around again, and went to hang up the phone. “We can get them in by tomorrow.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “Mrs. Houseman,” the clerk said. “I’m very sorry.” She still looked like she was biting down on her own smile. “That’s really the best we can do.”

  “Your best is anyone else’s not-so-good,” Norma said. “I suppose I’ll take my business elsewhere in this case.”

  “We’re sorry,” the clerk said.

  “Oh, sorry, of course you are,” Norma said. And then, she asked to see the girl’s supervisor. After sitting with the supervisor for nearly half an hour, Norma realized she’d won again. The girl was going to get fired—after all, she’d been rude and insolent to a customer, and Norma had stretched the truth slightly and embellished a bit so that the sales clerk would have more to answer to once Norma and Cathy had left the store. Norma smiled politely as she left the shop, and thanked the sales clerk who had no idea that ten minutes later she wouldn’t have a job.

  “Let’s go home,” Cathy said.

  “No, we have some errands to run.”

  “I’m bored,” Cathy said.

  Norma stopped, and let go of her daughter’s hand. “Well, if you’re so bored, why don’t you go run into the street and get hit by a car?”

  “Mommy?” The little girl looked up at her.

  “That’s what bored little children do. They put themselves in harm’s way,” Norma said. She turned Cathy around to face the street. Although traffic was fairly slow, a car passed by every few seconds in the shopkeepers’ district. Norma nudged her daughter toward the curb. “Come on, you’re bored. Why not give it a try?”

  “Mommy” Cathy said, looking out at the street and then down at her feet.

  “Well, it’ll cure that boredom right away,” Norma said. “And being bored is just so boring, isn’t it? Being with your mother on a nice day out shopping is just the most boring thing in the world, isn’t it?” She nudged her daughter between her shoulder blades. “Little girls get hit by cars all the time. Nobody thinks anything of it. You land in the hospital with a broken pelvis, sweetie, believe me, you’ll know real boredom.”

  “All right,” Cathy said, her voice going soft and apologetic. “I’m not bored, Mommy. I promise I’m not.”

  “I once knew a little bored girl,” Norma said. “She lived in a big city and the people who took her from her mommy put her in a teeny-tiny room, so small she couldn’t move, and whenever they brought her out they hurt her every way they could. You don’t want to get hurt do you?”

  Cathy shook her little blond head.

  “Then why don’t you just put all the words you want to say into that piggy bank in the back of your mind and don’t speak until someone speaks to you first,” Norma said, and grabbed her hand again. “And when we get home, I want you to clean up your room. It’s an absolute sty. First, Mommy needs to go to the post office to check the mail.”

  Norma Houseman made daily trips to the post office, even though the Watch Point mail delivery to homes was excellent. But she had a special post office box for her maiden name, Spretz, which seemed to collect more mail than the usual. As little Cathy went and looked at the framed stamps on the wall, Norma retrieved her special key from her purse, and went to check the oversized box she rented each year, paying cash, under the name “N. Spretz.”

  Three letters were inside the box, and she drew them out. Each had return addresses. She opened the first one. It was from a Mrs. Marshall Allen of Eastbrook, New Jersey. A brief note within, and five crisp one hundred dollar bills. The second, from a Mr. Matthew Schwartz, also of New Jersey, held a total of three hundred and fifty d
ollars in cash. And the third had a money order from someone named B. Little in the amount of $2,300 with a note that read, “I’m sorry it’s late.”

  She folded the money and the order in half and pressed them deep into her purse. Then she went to drag Cathy over to the bank before it closed.

  Afterward, at home, whiney little Cathy had her mouth washed out with soap during which she cried the whole time and Norma had to ask her over and over again, “Is this boring? Do you think this is boring? You bored, Catherine? You bored? This boring to you?”

  Once her boy William the Conqueror (as she called him because he was so responsible and smart and good-looking, like her side of the family) came in and made his mommy her favorite kind of apple martini to help take the edge off the day, she called Chuck at his place. Only he wasn’t there. This was the third time this week, and it was beginning to piss her off. The last time she’d seen him was when they took a few days over on the New England coast, leaving William in charge of his brothers and sisters.

  How Norma had loved those days on the Cape—long nights of wonderful passion, days spent walking barefoot on the beach, and lobster and clams and champagne for dinner, all courtesy of some of the people with whom she conducted her mail-order “business,” which had very little to do with business, but much to do with mail.

  “I want you to call me,” Norma said in an annoyed tone, hoping that he checked his messages soon. “Norma’s had a rough day and needs her Chuck.”

  Then she hung up the phone.

  3

  Chuck Waller was so deep inside Mindy Shackleford that he felt like he was diggin’ for clams. Ah, he loved it, loved the feeling of banging her, the thumpity of the hump (he liked to make up words around “the slappy whap of the ugly tap,” as he called sex) and she clung to him like a monkey on the bars of the zoo. He loved reaching the heights of pleasure as it all just ran away from him—the thudding, thumping drumbeat of lust pounding out against flesh.

  Chuck was never happier than at these moments, and even though he didn’t like Mindy too much in any other department, she was a vacuum cleaner of a lonely middle-aged housewife whose husband was always away, and whose kiddies never were around when she brought him into the house and had him make love on her teenage daughter’s bed.