The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (25 page)

No one else was around.

He was tempted to turn around again and turn on the television.
But if you do, what if something worse shows up? I mean, come on, kid, the mummified head of a dog ain’t so bad. It could be worse. It could be the whole dog, alive, ready to tear you apart.

Go ahead. Pick it up. It’s a gift from the house. To you. Look at the handiwork. It’s like ancient Egypt, kid. You don’t know about the ancients? They’d take beloved pets or sacred animals, and when the head of the household died, they’d just slaughter ‘em all because they believed they could take them to the afterlife with them. Didn’t know that, Kazi? Well, welcome to the world of “history is fun.” Stick with me, kid, and I’ll show you the sights. You know, for all you know, this is Anubis, God of the Underworld. And maybe he’s just gonna be your best friend from here on out.

Kazi knelt in front of the chair, and looked all around the dog head. It was grizzled and shriveled, with matted fur sticking out where the thin bandages had come loose. It almost looked like someone had used oatmeal to bind the gauze to the fur.

“You want to go for a walk?” Kazi asked the head. He asked it as if the dog had already told him it wanted to explore the house a little.

8

As Kazi explored the rooms of Harrow, the mummy head stuck beneath his arm, a Mason jar candle in his hand, Ronnie Pond had just avoided the slice of Bari Love’s hatchet.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1

Ronnie Pond had been dodging and kicking Bari Love for nearly an hour, rolling around on the floor, until she finally got hold of Bari’s wrist and tightened her fingers around it until Bari dropped the hatchet. But the hatchet refused to simply drop—instead, it flew from Bari’s hand and whizzed over the romance bookshelves and narrowly missed hitting a bust of Shakespeare on the Classics counter not far from the cash register.

“What the fuck are you doing!” Ronnie cried out, nearly breathless, but able to bring her knee up between Bari’s legs and push hard there until she saw a grimace of pain on Bari’s blood-spattered face.

Bari snarled at her in reply and smashed her left fist into the side of Ronnie’s face.

Ronnie groaned in pain and fought the dizzying feeling that made her wonder if she would black out. She knew if she did, she’d be dead meat. She remembered her sister’s excellent advice about backhand in tennis, and reached over to a fallen hardcover—a Janet Evanovich novel—and brought it up, whapping Bari as hard as she could in the face with it.

“Fucking bitch!” Bari growled. She grabbed an omnibus edition of Dean Koontz novels off the shelf and brought it down against Ronnie’s skull. Ronnie nearly yipped in pain, but used the moment to knock Bari to the side; and then she rolled over on top of her.

She pinned her to the ground with her knees to Bari’s chest, then swiftly grabbed each of her wrists and held it down.

Bari’s face was practically between Ronnie’s knees as she tried to crawl under her to get out of the position.

Suddenly, Bari grinned and parted her lips. Her tongue darted out and touched the edge of Ronnie’s left thigh. Ronnie recoiled in disgust, and Bari shoved her in a split-second body slam. Ronnie fell backward against the bestseller racks, which gave and crashed to the carpeted floor.

Ronnie quickly glanced at the lower shelves—the only thing approaching a weapon was a thin metal bookend. She grabbed it and swung wildly at Bari, who had just leapt toward her again. She cut Bari clean across the nose and face, taking out her left eye.

Bari screamed in pain, and rolled to the floor, covering her left eye—or what dangled from the socket—as blood rushed down her cheeks.

Ronnie scrambled to her feet and ran to get the hatchet. Then she picked up the phone by the register, but it was dead.

Outside, several dogs with bloody paws leapt at the floor-to-ceiling glass windows and door.

She thought she heard a scream from the apartment above the bookstore.

She grabbed some of the twine that Nick and Dusty used to tie up books at times. Using the hatchet, she cut off lengths of the twine. Just enough for wrists and ankles. Then, the hatchet held high, Ronnie, confused and terrified but completely prepared to use it to defend her life, went to tie up Bari Love.

Bari’s face was nearly obliterated with the first gushes of blood. Bari lay there, curled up like a kitten, snoring lightly, little bubbles of blood popping at the gash just above her nostrils.

2

Ronnie sat beside the sleeping, bloodied girl, and first wrapped the twine around her ankles. The pain in Ronnie’s shoulders—from where Nick had jabbed her with the scissors—now seemed like a distant thunder of hurt.
You will get through this. You will, Veronica Pond. You were a Girl Scout. You can handle wounded and wild animals.
Then she thought the most ridiculous thing, given the situation:
I
want some peach tea.
She and Lizzie had a ritual on bad nights when everything seemed to be going wrong. They’d take showers and get in their big bathrobes and make a pot of peach or blueberry tea, and just sit and chat about the five or six things bugging them. Their silly language would come through most at those times. Even the phrase “peach tea” was something they’d say to each other in school if it was a particularly hellish day.

But nothing’s as hellish as this.

Lizzie, where are you when I need you?

Where’s anybody when I need them ?

It’s peach tea time, and I don’t have a teapot to piss in.
Ronnie giggled when she thought this. She said it aloud, as if to affirm that she still could talk. “Teapot to piss in.”

She glanced at the fluorescent lights overhead, and then at the line of books—the bestseller shelves on one side, the romance section behind her, and somewhere beyond all this the occasional growl and scratch of a dog at the door. It was as if they wanted to come in here and finish what Bari and Nick had begun.

She glanced at her watch—the face had gotten smashed in the fight and the watch had stopped at 5 P.M.

It would be dark outside; it felt dark inside to her, too.

She watched Bari’s face.
Is she faking? How does she fall asleep with her face all gashed up? Why did Nick wake up and kill Dusty? Why?

More questions came at her, and none of them had rational answers. It was as if they had rabies.
Can people get rabies fast, like this? Or maybe there was a truck full of toxic crap that overturned out on the highway. Or maybe it’s one of those viruses that mosquitoes carry
—
even though there aren’t any mosquitoes around anymore. Or maybe there’s some kind of brain swelling going on. The water supply. Terrorists? Maybe they picked Watch Point
to ...
No, that’s bullshit.

It’s something awful. That’s all you know. It’s something terrible.

Ronnie could not express, even to herself, the way her conception of life had just changed in a matter of seconds. She had lived a fairly quiet, sheltered existence, and had never had to deal with a life-and-death situation except for when she watched her father die in a car wreck. But even that hadn’t left her feeling unprotected. She knew about cars and how they could have accidents and somehow knowing that it happened in the world to other people had softened the idea of his death.

This
is different. This is like… like a plague just came down.

The dogs. Bari. Nick.

God, who else? Are there others dealing with this?

She sifted through dozens of scenarios to explain why Nick would kill his life partner, and why mad dogs would be trying to break into the bookstore, and why Bari Love, who truly may have had the bitch gene in her but still—
a hatchet?

“It’s like they’re possessed,” she said aloud.

As soon as she said it, she wanted to take back the thought. The word.

The ridiculous word.

Possessed.

Like some gooney idea of devils and demons.

Possessed by some infernal agent of hell.

Witchcraft. Demons. Supernatural.

All crap. All ridiculous. All irrational.

Like those dreams you’ve been having. The ones that started the night Lizzie made you promise to tell no one that she had been at the house.

Harrow.

Beyond the village, up and down the streets that sank farther into the woods, beyond those “No Trespassing” signs.

Harrow. One of the oldest houses in Watch Point. Falling apart. Nearly abandoned.

You once knew some boys who went there when it was a prep school. You read about the murders that had happened there when a new owner bought it a few years back, but you didn’t really believe many of those stories going around because . . .

Because it’s all so fucking irrational.

Possessed. Ridiculous.

Possessed.

It seemed so medieval to even think it. And yet, it was the word that stuck with her as she wrapped twine around Bari’s ankles. She knotted it up as tightly as she could get it without cutting off the circulation in Bari’s legs. Then she took Bari’s limp hands and bound them behind her back. To do this, Ronnie had to turn Bari to the side. She held her breath, certain that Bari would wake up at any moment.

In the impression in the carpet where Bari’s head had lain, a spattering of more blood.

Ronnie felt sick to her stomach as she laid Bari’s head back again.

Taking the hatchet with her, she rose and began walking back toward the storeroom.

Each step felt like an eternity, and she began to have a feeling of deja vu, although she wasn’t quite sure why. Somehow it reminded her of dreams she’d had in the summer, but she could not for the life of her remember the specifics of any one dream. Yet images flashed before her as she went, dreading the door itself. Like movie clips in her brain, she remembered masks coming off faces. And behind the masks, the face of a single child. Behind every mask, that little boy who had no eyes and whose teeth shone like metal.

Ronnie took a deep breath and held it for four seconds before letting it out.
Calm down. Calm down. You’re alive. You have a cut in your shoulder, but you can get to the Emergency Room later. Worst thing that’ll happen is you get a tetanus shot and some penicillin. You’ll live. This will all turn out okay somehow. Somehow.

She reached the door to the storeroom, and got out the keys. She put the key in the lock, her fingers trembling.

When she opened the door, the puddles of blood had become dark stains.

Dusty lay where he’d fallen, a mass of bones and blood and flesh and torn clothes. She quickly looked away.

Nick had gone back to the cot and lay down again.

Asleep.

When she went into the storeroom, she locked the door behind her. She walked through the room, feeling numb and gulping back a genuine need to scream which had begun growing within the pit of her being. She held the hatchet in midair, ready to bring it down on Nick’s head as she looked down at him.

His nostrils flared slightly, then sank inward; his eyes

were closed but fluttering in sleep; his lips moved slightly as if he were talking in a dream.

She glanced around the shelves and boxes as if sure that someone else might be lurking there. Then she began walking toward the back door of the building, hoping that there were no dogs or girls with hatchets on the other side of that door.

3

Ronnie emerged into the dusky twilight—the sun had begun going down and a chilly dark had set in. She stood in the gated alleyway and for just a moment sent a prayer up to whatever god might be listening.
I
don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you are. I don’t care if you’re going to own my soul. Just please keep my mother and sister safe. And my friends. And please let this have been just a hallucination on my part. Please don’t let this be real. I don’t want real.

The silence of the moment was interrupted by the piercing shriek of a woman—
no, it’s a man, he’s just screaming like a girl
—from a building down the block.

She saw little boys up on a housetop, and they had a woman with them. It looked like they were holding her hands. There were four of them—and although she wasn’t sure who they were, she was fairly certain that the house was the Moldens’. She babysat those boys all the time.

She watched as the boys pushed the woman—
their mother?
—off the roof.

Ronnie clutched the hatchet, and went through the back gate into the alley behind the shops. She glanced each way along the narrow street, noting its green plastic trash cans and cars parked on each side. Fences along the other side of the alley defined the beginning of a neighborhood.

She had to get home. She knew she had to get home and make sure her mother was okay. She began walking down the alley toward the side street that spilled into Main Street.

Ronnie held the hatchet above her head. She walked slowly at first. She glanced behind a pile of garbage, and wasn’t sure but thought she saw a child’s hand there among the discarded McDonald’s bags and withering vegetables. But she didn’t inspect it further—she just did not want to know.

Lizzie, are you okay? Lizzie?

“Please let me be
crazy,”
she muttered to herself, as if it were a prayer. “Let me be insane. Let me be insane.”

She began walking faster as a new fear took over—the fear that whatever had gotten into Bari and Nick would creep into her next.
Is it passed through blood? How? How does it go? What is it? Is it a plague that comes at you from getting bitten? Do the dogs have to bite you first?

As she turned left, she saw a man in a business suit running between the buildings as if trying to escape from something. Seconds later, a pack of mutts followed him, snapping and growling.