“Chuck? Stop it. What’s this about?”
“Come on, my baby, come on my honey, come on my ragtime gal, it won’t hurt,” he said. “It’s a secret. Only you and me will know what it is.” Again, he patted his knee. “Pretty please with shu-gah on top?” he asked. “With cocoa buttah and mmm-mint jellaay and cah-reem cheese and grits and ham biscuits and pig’s knuckles spread all over it?”
“You’re being ... silly. Chuck?”
“Just a sit down here with me, my little honey chile,” Chuck said, and when she stepped away instead of coming toward him, he got up and began moving toward her in a funny way—as if he were shambling along, as if one of his legs was hurt. His jaw seemed to drop. “You woke me up, little shu-gah cube,” Chuck said. “And now ah need to make y’all go sleepies so that weezuns can be all comfy-cozy and get tucked in good, tucked all tight and good, tucked really deep and warm. Shu-gah honey pie lamb.”
Mindy Shackleford had never screamed before—never in her life. Well, perhaps when she’d given birth, but she’d never screamed from fear or as an alarm to others. But now she heard a scream, and surprise of surprises, it came from deep within her, rising up her throat into her mouth. Although it sounded distant to her, it was right there, coming from her, as she watched Chuck shambling toward her.
She stepped back toward the door, but something about Chuck’s eyes didn’t frighten her. She saw that warm lost little boy look in them, the same look she’d seen when he’d confessed what had happened with his father so many years before, and the mother instinct—that same instinct that might drive a woman to hell and back for her own flesh and blood—compelled her to move forward instead of back, to go hold this broken and sad and frightened little boy that she saw inside the thirty-year-old man.
She wrapped her arms around him, whispering, “It’s okay. It’s a dream you came out of, Chuck. That’s all, it’s just a terrible dream.” She felt his fingers digging into her sides as if... as if he were trying to cut her open with his bare hands.
“Y all’s fuck play-ee-ice is awl wohen ow-et, shu-gah,” he said.
5
Lizzie crawled into bed, feeling a little feverish. Her mother called out for her, but she was too sleepy to respond. “Bert’s here, working on the plumbing!” her mother called down to her, but Lizzie was so tired the words made no sense to her.
She stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, trying to imagine emerald islands and diamond skies, images that helped her drift into a dream, but instead, she closed her eyes and she was out like a light.
Even when she felt the man’s breath on her face, she remained in darkness.
Yet she felt him.
6
In the darkness behind her eyes, in what might have been sleep or might have been another reality that Lizzie visited too often when she felt sleepy, the man she had come to think of as the Nightwatchman took her by the hand and led her along the dark corridor.
The windows were boarded up, but cracks of light broke through at the edges, leaving a thin blue-white outline of a window.
She passed by room after room. Many of the doors were closed, but some were open.
She only had a moment to glance in one, and there was the man from town who ran the florist shop—a man old enough to be her grandfather, she thought—and he was down on his knees in front of Andy Harris, who sat naked in a large velvet chair, his arms lazily up behind his head, the whites of his eyes showing as the old florist spread Andy’s legs apart, and then glanced back at Lizzie.
The old man winked at her, and she saw his chin ran with blood that soaked his shirt.
Andy’s entire groin area was bloodied.
Behind Andy, Bari Love lay on a bed, her legs wrapped around a Doberman pinscher’s thighs. Bari opened her mouth as if to scream, but instead she began barking like a little yappy dog.
And still, the man who tugged at her hand in the darkness, took her along the corridor, past other rooms.
7
Bert White leaned over the sleeping girl.
Elizabeth Pond.
So sweet.
She wasn’t quite as intriguing as her sister, but this one would do. She slept through anything. He could kiss her lips, and she would barely wake up in the middle of it. She was that deep a sleeper, and since the beginning of summer, she’d taken nap after nap as if she couldn’t get enough sleep.
Or maybe she’s faking. Maybe she wants you to touch her, he thought. Maybe she’s just lying there with her eyes closed, too afraid to tell you how much she wants you to tear her clothes from her, to kiss her in every place she has, to taste the salt of her sweat running down the small of her back.
This was the first he’d gone beyond just tapping her lightly when he found her asleep. He felt an exquisite shiver as his lips brushed against hers.
Her breath was sweet and a little sour, and he longed to part her lips with his tongue, but he was too scared to do it.
If you do it, she might welcome your tongue. She might invite you into her. She might show you how much she appreciates you.
Being the local Peeping Tom had been no picnic for Bert, but the Ponds had presented him with a unique opportunity to go beyond staring through bedroom windows while he “played his fiddle” as his grandmother had called it when she’d caught him as a boy fiddling outside his cousin’s bedroom window. I’m gonna whip you so bad your fiddling days are through, she’d said. But all the beatings he’d received made him want to fiddle more and more.
Until he’d reached this—the pinnacle.
Actually kissing a real live girl.
A real Hue sleeping girl.
Like a prince in a fairy tale, he thought. Every girl dreams of a prince kissing her while she’s asleep. Awakening her. Every girl.
He sniffed around the girl’s face. Such aromatic loveliness—some cheap teen girl perfume, so simple and light and fruity.
He watched her, his face so close that she was practically out of focus.
This is my dream come true. This is what I want. I want her like this. Sleeping. Unaware. I want her to not know what I might do to her.
Suddenly, the girl’s eyes opened.
She reached up and grabbed him swiftly behind his head, holding him there with great strength while he tried to pull away. She brought his face closer to hers, and then moved her lips to his ear. He tried to shake her off, but she had a grip that overpowered him far too easily.
She whispered, her voice nearly like a four-year-old’s, “Are you the Nightwatchman?”
CHAPTER Six
1
“Are you?” Lizzie Pond asked the man who stood before her. She wasn’t in her bedroom at all. She was at the foot of a staircase up through what seemed to be a tower of some kind. The place stank like a swamp, and the man who stood there wore the kind of waistcoat she would’ve thought someone in Victorian times might have worn. His gray hair was badly parted near the middle, high on his forehead, and he had a fishy look to his eyes and mouth. He checked his gold pocket watch. “Oh, my ears and whiskers,” the man said. “I’m late.” Then he looked at her. “The Nightwatchman? I have a watch,” he said, holding the pocket watch up to her as if for inspection. She noticed that the glass face of it was cracked. “But I am no watchman. No, my dear. Hardly. If anything, I’m more of the watchmaker. My question is, what are you doing on the other side of the mirror?”
“I’m dreaming,” Lizzie whispered, almost afraid to admit it. This is the other side?”
“You go through a looking-glass and you come out here,” he said. “I would’ve thought you’d have a room assignment. You’ve been a guest here before, haven’t you?”
Lizzie shook her head, and looked up the staircase because she thought she heard a noise from above.
“Yes, I remember your face,” the man said. “It was in June I think.”
“No,” Lizzie insisted. “I’ve never been here.”
“Well, perhaps you weren’t. But that would be very odd, because
you’re here now and the only reason you might be here right now is because you once were a guest. You can’t be a guest if you’ve never been invited.” He glanced down her body. “Do you always walk around like that?”
She looked down at herself. She was almost completely naked except for her panties. Yet because she felt that this was a dream, she didn’t need to fear it. It seemed ordinary to some extent.
“Who are you?” she asked too softly. Then, “Who are you?”
“One of many,” the man said. “But you’re here for the child, I suspect. Everyone seems to know about him.”
“I don’t know any child.”
“The boy. The one who’s caused all this uproar here. The rooms are filling up fast, too fast. The door’s closed to everyone, so once the rooms get too full, all kinds of bad things will start. It always leaks out if the rooms get too full. And then more come in.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“It’s like a vacuum. Once you turn it on, it just sucks, doesn’t it? It sucks and sucks and sucks and until someone kicks out the cord or shuts off the electricity, that vacuum will keep sucking.” He shot her a knowing glance. “You still believe you’re dreaming. You think that you’re in your bed right now at home. But you’re not. Since that night, you’ve always stayed here. You’re forgetting too easily. Or you’re blocking the dreams, Elizabeth. We’ve met here before, and you accompanied me upstairs each time.”
She looked up the stairs. “Where do they go?”
“Up,” he said.
He offered her his hand. “I won’t bite.”
She stepped over to him, and he clasped her fingers in his. When she saw his face again, he resembled her father, and the waistcoat and jacket were gone. Instead it was her father in the sweater and slacks he’d worn when he had the car wreck, his head still steaming from the fire, his face a mass of intersecting burns and wounds, but his eyes still gleaming with fatherly love.
“Daddy?” she asked, tears running down her face.
He squeezed her hand again. “We’re going to have to do some butcher work. We have a piggy that needs to go.”
“What?”
“It’s in pain. You’ve got to put animals out of their misery, honey,” her father said. “Come on, I’ll show you. I’ll take you up to the killing floor.”
He let go of her hand. She stepped ahead of him and began walking up to the tower. It’s only a dream, she thought. It can’t hurt me.
2
A slight shivering of her vision seemed to overlay another face across his. The guy named Bert White who lived upstairs. The guy who always gave her the creeps whenever he did any of his handyman work around her home.
Bert’s mouth seemed to open and close slowly, like a fish dying for air.
3
Bert White had tried to draw back from Lizzie as she rose from her bed, grabbing him so tightly around the waist that he could barely breathe. She sniffed like a dog around his face and neck, and it terrified and thrilled him at the same time as he felt his arousal—his fiddle—pressing against her lithe young body.
The pleasure warmth that arose at these times made him confused because she had begun to hurt him with her strength.
“What I’m going to do to you,” Lizzie whispered, “well, it’s a marvel, my love. It’s a marvel of human engineering.”
“Please,” he whispered, feeling terrible pain and even worse pleasure as she held him.
“First, I’m going to incapacitate you. You’ll pass out. While you’re asleep, I will sever your vocal cords so no one can hear you, should you wake during the procedure.”
The effect on him of her voice, a low guttural growl that sounded so little like the teenage girl and so much like a man, strangely did not diminish that pleasure that shot up and down his spine. It was as if he’d wanted this his whole life. His entire life, the fear of those he watched had given him pleasure.
But now, to be held, and told what would happen, it brought him nearly to a climax.
“Then I’m going to take a small sharp blade. Perhaps my mother’s apple paring knife. And I’m going to make a series of twelve incisions along your body. I will pull your bones from your flesh, and you will be alive for as long as you can stand it,” she whispered, and as she said the last word to him he felt her grip about his chest tightening and he began to black out.
4
Lizzie’s mother Margie had just put a frozen dinner into the microwave when Lizzie came up from downstairs. “You looked tired, dear.” Lizzie smiled slightly, and then went past her mother to the sink. Flatware soaked in a pan, and she rooted around in it for a small knife. She turned around and her mother said, “Just you and me tonight, dear. I figured we’d have those enchiladas I got at the grocery store. They’re so good. You know, you think frozen food isn’t very good, and then you find something like these enchiladas, and you think, why even cook when the microwaveable stuff is so good?”
Margie glanced between the microwave and Lizzie, and then looked out the window because it looked like the little Marshall boy was about to skateboard right into a truck that was barreling up the road. “Good Lord,” she said, but as she watched, the boy and the car missed each other. The boy skateboarded down the street, and the truck swerved around the corner of Forsythia Avenue. She sighed a little and then checked the microwave again. “Two more minutes:’ Turned back to face her daughter, who had come closer. “You look a little flu-ish,” Margie said, reaching over to put her hand on Lizzie’s forehead. “Hmm. You don’t feel feverish.”
But Margie didn’t mention what she did feel on her daughter’s skin—a kind of slimy sweat that reminded her a little too much of fish skin.
Margie glanced at the knife in her daughter’s hands. Then back to her daughter’s face.
Lizzie also looked down at the knife in her hand, then at her mother. She started laughing and feeling a little nervous. Her mother began laughing, too.
“What’s so funny?” her mother asked as she came down from the high of laughter.
“Oh, you,” Lizzie grinned. “You were looking at me as if I were going to attack you or something.”
“I know,” her mother chortled. “I know. You looked like something out of Psycho. Just for a second. You know that scene? The one in the shower. When he parts the curtains.”
Margie mimed stabbing her daughter as if she also had a knife in her hand.
“Oh, Mom,” Lizzie laughed. “You have to stop watching those scary movies.”
“I know, I know.” Her mother grinned, turning back to the microwave to turn it off before the enchiladas overcooked. “But you know I would’ve never gotten pregnant with you and Ronnie if your father hadn’t taken me to a midnight show of—what was it—Hellraiser? Or Hellraiser 2. Well, I don’t remember exactly. Your father and I weren’t quite watching the movie. You looking for something?”
Lizzie squatted down by the sink and opened the cabinet doors. When she found the liquid bleach, she drew it out.
“Doing laundry, dear?” Margie asked.
Lizzie got back up, knife and bleach in hand. She set the knife down on the counter, and undid the lid of the bleach bottle. She sniffed it a little. “Can bleach go bad, Mom?”
Margie made a face. “I don’t think so. I wasn’t exactly a chemistry major, though.”
“Here,” Lizzie said. “Sniff. It smells funny.”
“I’m sure it’s fine,” Margie said, opening the little door to the microwave. The spicy scent of enchiladas filled the air. “Target has some of the best frozen food,” she said as if to no one. “You know, your sister loves these enchiladas. I should save her some for later.”
“Come on,” Lizzie said, bringing the bottle to her mother’s face as Margie turned about again, holding the tray of food, the plastic cover still over it. A light steam rose up from the tray.
“Lizzie,” Margie said, exasperation in her voice. “If that bleach isn’t good enough for
your gym socks, I’m sure there’s another bottle down in the laundry room.”
“I just want to make sure.”
“Oh. All right.” Margie leaned forward slightly, closed her eyes and sniffed at the bleach.
It smelled fine. Strong, but fine.
“Good grief,” Margie said, as she opened her eyes, but as she did so she saw something that made no sense to her. A fist coming for her face. Lizzie slammed her fist into her mother’s jaw.
5
Margie reeled backward.
Lizzie leapt upon her and brought her down to the linoleum floor. Lizzie had her pinned by the shoulders, and reached back for the bottle of bleach.
“Lizzie!” Margie cried out, but her voice was soon choked by the bleach gurgling down her throat as Lizzie pinched her mother’s nose with her fingers and Margie felt burning in her throat and lungs.
“Get you clean inside and out,” Lizzie said, and waited until her mother swallowed all of it.
6
Bert White awoke a minute or two after he’d blacked out, and he had to lay on the bed and catch his breath for another few minutes before he could sit up. He had a vague sense that he should get the hell out of that bedroom, but he also felt too disoriented to put the thought into action. He looked up at the ceiling. Then over at the window. At the bookshelf with its neat rows of books and photo albums and yearbooks.
His eyes went in and out of focus as he took a few deep breaths. His lungs actually hurt—and he wondered if some bones had been crushed. What is she? A fuckin’ bear? Jesus H, what the hell kind of bitch is she?
Finally he sat up. The pain in his back and side was intense, and he had to hold his left side with both his hands, feeling around for the origin of the pain.
He heard a noise beyond the open door, and he
glanced into the hall. Besides her sister’s bedroom, there was a small room with the washer and dryer in it, as well as a sink. On the floor were stacks of dirty clothes.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 10
