The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (30 page)

The kitchen looked as if it had been sprayed with blood.

“They’re so delicious when they’re young,” Mrs. Boswell said.

It was all Dory needed.

She pressed the butt of the rifle beneath her left armpit; her elbow went to her hip for support; she was used to shooting when it came to hunting season. She preferred getting some kind of mount for this kind of shooting, but the rules of the world had ended sometime between that afternoon when she and Benny had discovered that the dogs had gotten loose and the moment she had first opened the back gate to the Boswells’ property.

I guess it’s open season now. If this is a dream, more power
to
it.

If it’s not, well, fuck me twenty ways to Saturday.

Mrs. Boswell leaned over the bubbling pot.

Dory slowly squeezed the trigger.

When Mrs. Boswell fell, she went over and finished Stinky off, too.

When Dory had done her job, she turned off the stove.

And that’s when the little kids in their underwear came running into the kitchen, whooping and hollering, and knocked her completely off her feet. The redheaded kid leapt on top of her and began smashing his fists against her face, while a little girl with blond locks kicked her in the ribs; two other anklebiters actually got down at her ankles and began biting. Dory thrashed out at them; the rifle slid across the slick, wet floor. She had to do something she could not have imagined doing in a thousand years—she began kicking at the kids and when she managed to get up to her hands and knees, she pushed them away from her. Must’ve been six of them all told, and she crawled through and around them trying to get her rifle, but then one of them grabbed it just as she had grazed her fingers against the butt of it.

A blind panic had begun taking her over. She got to her feet and went running across the bloodied floor, through the kitchen door, out the front door. As she went, she heard the blast of the rifle.
Those four-year-olds can shoot that thing?

Running out onto the front lawn, she was sure she’d trip or slide or stumble, but somehow she made it out to the truck. She swung back the front door of the truck—lucky for her, as per usual, Benny had left the keys on the seat. She struggled with the keys and the damn rabbit’s foot he had dangling off the keychain. Then she got the truck started, and as she did she revved it up and tore out of there so fast she nearly hit another car coming in the opposite direction. Although the other vehicle went by in a flash, she was certain the man driving had his eyes closed as if he were sleeping.

She drove through the winding streets along the split-levels and the ranch houses and even though she noticed something was wrong every time she passed by a yard with people gathered in the driveway or near the front door, she didn’t look at them. She let the adrenaline keep pumping inside her. All she knew was that she wanted to get the hell out of the village, out of this place, and drive, drive, drive.

She switched on the headlights as she went, and when she got down near the Riverview Pass, a slim road that ducked out of the suburbs of the village and into a spot of wilderness, she actually began to believe that somehow she had eaten a bad mushroom or someone had slipped her an acid-laced sugar cube for her to have actually believed she’d experienced what she’d gone through at the Boswells’ house.

The highway was dark as she turned onto it, but she didn’t mind. She turned up the radio—playing classic rock—and let Led Zeppelin and then Todd Rundgren and finally some group she’d never heard of called Scorpion Queen take her mind away as she drove, hoping to make it to Beacon if she could, and from there, she’d get police. She’d get help. She’d do something.

She just didn’t want to be in Watch Point that night, and didn’t give a damn if her parents would throw a fit.

She figured that somehow, they’d understand.

As she drove down the highway, she began to feel a little sleepy.
Must be all this. Exhausting. Too much to take. Too much.

Without even realizing it was happening, her eyes closed as if rocks weighed them down. But the dream she entered as she fell asleep was that she was driving in the truck down the highway toward the next town over.

Someone whispered, “You have to wake up, Dory. Wake up. WAKE UP!”

When she opened her eyes, the headlights lit up a large oak tree not more than six feet away. Her hands were barely on the steering wheel, but her foot had come off the accelerator so that the truck drifted lazily toward the tree. She fought back the need to sleep in time to grasp the wheel firmly and turn it to the right. She felt a bump against the truck, and realized she’d gone into a ditch on the side of the road.

At this point, she could not have been more awake. “Jesus,” she gasped. She stomped down on the emergency break and turned the keys, drawing them out of the ignition.

She looked out the windshield. The headlights illuminated nothing but brambles and bushes. When she finally opened the truck’s door, she realized she’d driven well off the road, into the woods themselves.

6

She wandered through the thin woods, trying to find out where she’d been driving
from
without actually having crashed the truck. She saw a light coming from somewhere across the brambles, and she followed this until she reached the edge of a stone wall.

The light came from several windows in a house she had never seen, although she’d heard of it.

It was undoubtedly the grandest house she’d ever seen, and it wasn’t quite the way some of the kids at school had described it. It didn’t look as if it were falling apart at all.

It was a beautiful mansion with towers and enormous windows, columns along its porch and several rooftops along its uppermost ridge.
Harrow.

7

Roland Love had spent his twilight making a big wooden cross down at Harmon Prives’ Village Hardware, just across from the Dairy Queen near the highway. He had to first incapacitate Harmon himself, who at fifty was still as strong as a bull. But Roland had his miracle spike with him, and when Harmon came at him waving his hands in the air, “What the hell are you doing, Roland?” he asked the young man he knew so well from church. “What in God’s name?”

Roland simply blessed him and spiked him in the side of the neck. Since it was near closing time, nobody else interrupted Roland’s work. He went out back to the pathetic pile of planks that Harmon had the nerve to call a lumber yard, and managed to find some heavier wood that looked almost like railroad ties. He went and got some more spikes and nails and hammers from the store, and sat down to make himself a cross to bear.

He listened to the angels all around him as they commanded and spake at him, and when an hour or so had gone by, he had a fine crucifix.

When he dragged it out of Harmon’s store, he felt the weight of guilt and pain upon him.

Roland felt better than good as he carried the cross, dragging the back bit of it as he went along the streets. He felt medieval, and pure. He felt as if flagellants surrounded him, whipping themselves in a frenzy; and incense in the air, sweet smothering incense; and as he went through the village toward the great cathedral that rose up above the treetops, he bore witness to the demons that ran through the village, tormenting the damned before dragging them to hell.

“Iniquities!” he shouted, kicking at the child who crossed his path. “Fornicators!” He felt the impurity of that great world as it sank to the devil. He knew what was coming.
The end of days. The Apocalypse.

Roland was the first to see the white-gray ash as it came down from the darkening sky, like first snow. He opened his mouth to taste of it—and the ash sizzled on his tongue. The wind picked up and the ashes fell as if someone, somewhere were burning trash. Or as if some volcano had erupted far from the village.

First, the plagues come,
Roland thought.
The days of the martyrs are upon us. The plagues, and the fire from heaven and the release from hell of its minions.

“The fire from heaven rains upon us in white ash!” he shouted at those who would listen as he shambled along with his heavy cross. “The blood of the martyrs shall spill! The Great Angel of the Pit will arise and call those who are weak and unholy to its army! But the mighty and the righteous shall not perish, but shall live in the House of Holiness!” His voice no longer seemed like that of a nineteen-year-old. He felt as if he had truly become a man, and he boomed when he spoke as a preacher might, a Man of God who would take away the sins of creation in one magnificent act.

A man by the name of Roland Love—
all Love was he, all Charity and Goodness!

The damnable side effect of this infusion of glory that Roland had begun feeling seemed to manifest itself in a bulging and uncontrollable erection his trousers, and a sense that he had the Divine Creator within him now.

“Multiply across the land,” he said to the ashen air. “Multiply the forces of the righteous, of the Ancient of Days, who have slept so long under the thighs of that Great Whore, Babylon, Mystery, the Bitch of a Thousand Vaginas, who brings forth her children from her mouth!”

He stopped and glanced around him.

There in the dark, others had gathered. They watched him as if he had special gifts.

They know.

They are my followers.

Followers.

Even Harmon Prives, whom he’d bashed to hell back at the hardware store, stood there among the others, his face nothing more than a pasty wasp’s nest of flesh, his right leg turned completely backward. Harmon raised his arms and praised the God of the House, who had brought salvation to the believers of Watch Point.

Only Harmon’s voice was a little messed up on account of the spike that had gone into his throat. It sounded like he was crying out, “Tek-ah-ny-lee-tho-soth!”

A chorus arose around Roland, of these broken and battered people, both the Quick and the Dead, following him, their knight of Righteousness, to the Great Cathedral of the Divine that grew in the woods like the fingers of a hand.

As he moved toward it, his followers all around, light came up within the woods and brambles, and he saw torches lit up and down the driveway of the grand estate.

The House of the Divine,
he thought. He brought the cross up the drive, feeling the terrible weight of it, and his followers brought out electrical cords and ropes and began to whip him as he proceeded on his path to the magnificent place, the seat of all that was holy.

Upon his head, one of his followers (who looked suspiciously like Paula Beauchamp, although he wasn’t sure because she had a mask made of human skin pressed across half her face) put a crown of barbed wire upon his head to complete his move toward martyrdom.

When he reached the front porch of the house, he hefted the cross from his back and shoulders and laid it down.

With the help of his followers, he brought the cross up and pressed it into the earth, leaning it a bit against the porch to support its weight.

Roland drew back, admiring his work.

Knowing that it was the word of the Infinite Knowledge that had brought him here and had commanded this erection of the wood.

The cross was in the exact configuration that had been in his mind when he’d witnessed the glory of the Most High at the Church of the Vale.

It was upside down, pointing toward earth. Roland announced to the gathered throng, “All the treasures that are in Heaven will be here now with us. And all that was in hell will arise to greet the angels.”

If he could’ve moved outside of his own body as he wished to—for the flesh was notorious for error and sin, and the spirit pure—Roland Love would have seen himself and his followers in a way that would have surprised him. For he stood in the torchlight, shining with the blood that had dripped from cuts in his scalp from the barbed-wire crown, his shirt nearly stripped from the whipping of cords at his back and sides, his body long and thinly muscled and yet somehow gaunt and skeletal as if just the walk from the hardware store to Harrow had taken some element of a thriving spirit from him. His face was nearly snow-white from the ashes that had fallen upon him, a whiteness that was only interrupted by the streaks of black-red blood that glistened in the nearby fires.

His followers were a good twelve or so from the village—some children among them. All had been beaten or torn or mangled. Some were nearly dead and seemed to have the translucent glow of the grave to their skin; others looked as if they had never truly been alive.

And yet from behind Roland’s eyes, they were the chosen of the Divine, to come witness Roland’s ascension into the house that contained the essence of all that was both holy and unholy, in a marriage that would produce a new Earth and end the wars between angels and demons.

All around them, bonfires had been lit in the driveway and great torches had been erected, but these were not merely long thick sticks with fire at their tips.

The torches were the trees themselves, and in the trees, what had once been human beings were wrapped with rope and cloth to the heavier branches, or had been nailed to the trunks of the trees. They looked like beautiful fingers of a hand—the bound people who had been smeared with some kind of black tar and set ablaze. Beautiful burning fingers.

Their screams arose and died out as the fires overtook these human torches, as many from the village hoisted up their neighbors and their wives and their children to light the way for all.

It reminded Roland so much of the angel with the sword of fire who protected the garden of Paradise.

The gates of Heaven will open. This is the hour of my becoming,
he thought.

It was from this fire that the white ash had come, spreading across the village, and with each person set ablaze, the trees themselves seemed to sing the praises of the angels to Roland.

He watched the torches burn and wept with happiness.