The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (31 page)

Even the stench of the burning bodies brought a holiness to the spot.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1

Alice Kyeteler had not been idle during those hours between late afternoon and early twilight. Alice, though hardly the witch those in town thought her to be, did believe she had a touch of psychic ability. So when Sam Pratt told her the tale of Jack Templeton’s madness—involving the humping of Sam’s pet python—and when Thad Allen slept so deeply even while Sam and she had been chattering away, Alice had taken it as seriously as if someone had told her that he had a life-threatening disease.

When Sam heard the commotion out on the street, he and Alice had rushed out of the store to the porch of the shop, and had seen much of what had begun to overtake the village. Packs of dogs ran up and down the street. They saw children running, holding up a man who lay on his back trying to turn over and push the children’s hands away from him. They saw others at their windows, too, including Army Vernon above the florist shop. It looked to Alice like he had some kind of gun in his hands, and was ready to pick off anyone who came by. After seeing all this, they had retreated back into Alice’s shop and Alice had locked the door behind them. Thad was still asleep, whispering to himself.

She went back to try to rouse him, but Thad merely shifted position and continued whispering. She squatted down a bit to hear him, but all he said was, “The rooms are filling up.”

She glanced over to Sam. “That’s not normal sleep. He’s dreaming. In his dreams, he’s somewhere else.”

Sam said to her, “It’s Harrow. It’s because of the dead boy I saw there.”

Alice, who took matters of the spirit world quite seriously, wanted to dismiss this. But Harrow was one of the reasons she had decided to live in Watch Point. She had felt that the village was on a magnetic pull toward the property. Her psychic understanding seemed to decrease a bit, living there, and she preferred that to other towns she’d visited, where she had been overwhelmed by the sense of those from the other side trying to communicate with the living. It had nearly driven her mad as a younger woman, and so she had chosen Watch Point because of what she thought of as a “dead area” where she felt comparatively fewer psychic rumblings than elsewhere.

And yet she had always known that she lived in the shadow of a haunt. She had read all the books on Harrow, had followed the career of the young psychic who had died at the house—along with several others in the early 1900s. She had tried to warn a man named Jack Fleetwood who, with his daughter and a woman named Ivy Martin, had opened the house just a few years previous in order to study its psychic field. She had written him several letters to keep any psychics away from Harrow, but they had come anyway, and there had been hell to pay at the house.

But now,
she thought.
It has leaked out. Somehow. That nightwatchman. Spider. Speeder. I knew he was wrong for this place.

She accepted within her mind what she had been prepared for since moving to the village. “I don’t know what to do,” she told Sam Pratt.

She closed her eyes briefly, thinking of Harrow. Thinking of what she knew of it. What she had felt when she’d had the twinges of intuition give her the little shocks she sometimes got when she saw a person or a place that was off-kilter. She got so few of them in Watch Point that they seemed that much sharper here. She tried to call out to the darkness she felt to see if she could find a guide of some kind—whether spirit or other.

She took Sam aside, at some distance from Thad Allen. “You came to me because you think I’m a witch.”

He nodded, looking more scared and more brave than anyone she’d ever known.

“I can’t do anything about this. I’m not a witch. Not like you think. I don’t have magical powers. I get feelings sometimes, Sam. I’ve known about the house. I didn’t know it could leak out like this. But I’ve stayed away from that property because... it would devour me.”

“If it’s leaking, maybe it needs to be plugged up,” Sam said, his dark hair falling over one side of his face, obscuring his right eye for a moment. Suddenly, he looked too young and vulnerable to have to face this.

Alice Kyeteler, at fifty, felt more chickenshit than she’d ever imagined she could be in her whole life. It hit her right there—she had moved to the village at the edge of a dark place to escape the voices in her head that sometimes led her to believe she was slowly going mad. And she had done it because she was in awe of that terrible house. She felt its suction. She felt its pull.

Seeing the streets of the village, as they were now, scared the shit out of her.

“I don’t know what we can do. I can’t work miracles. I’m only someone who
believes
this can happen. I don’t have any ability to fix it.”

“All I know is someone started this,” Sam said. “At that house. I was there that night. We all dreamed about it. All of us who went there. I dreamed about it. I dreamed about rooms in the house. I dreamed about that boy. Arnie Pierson. The one who was dead and cut open. I think I know why it’s leaking. I think someone sacrificed a dead boy, and they should’ve sacrificed a live one.” Sam said it as if he had been keeping a secret from the world that had overwhelmed him with anxiety and guilt, and now it was free. He was free from it.

Alice wanted to hug him, and weep against him as if she were the child and he the grownup. “I can’t go there, Sam. I know you want me to do it. I know you think I have some power. I don’t. That place eats psychic ability. It was safe since the last time. They shut it down, I thought. Even if the man who lives there now performed some ritual, it wouldn’t start it up again, I don’t think. I don’t believe the house is turned on.”

“But you saw what happened in the street!” he shouted. “You saw! How can it not be turned on? You tell me that what we saw on the street is not—”

“I can’t go there. I can’t,” she said back, just as vehemently. “I can’t go there because if I do, this just gets worse. Whatever is here in this village, right now, it gets worse if I go there!”

“It can’t get worse,” Sam said. “It can only—”

In the middle of his sentence, Sam stopped talking. His eyes went wide.

Alice turned about to look in the same direction as Sam.

Behind her, Thad Allen, in his boxer shorts, had sat up on the massage table. “You don’t have to go there, Alice,” he said, his voice a monotone as if he were still asleep. “It’ll come for you.”

“Thad?” Alice went to him, and was about to put her hand on his forehead to check for a temperature because his face was shiny with sweat. Before her hand reached his face, he had closed his hands around her neck and began strangling her.

2

At Norma Houseman’s place, Lizzie Pond and Norma’s own children had spent nearly an hour cutting Norma open in ways that bled her as slowly as possible. Yet Norma did not seem to mind—her eyes fluttered open and closed, as she dreamed of making love to Chuck Waller in a lavish bedroom with a great frosted mirror on the ceiling. Even the floor had a mirror, and she could see herself riding Chuck’s reptilian phallus, riding it and plunging up and down on it, while Mindy Shackleford stood in a corner of the room, watching them as if she were afraid of sex altogether. Norma smiled in the dream that played behind her eyes, and every time her eyes opened, briefly, she saw another one of her children hammering at her kneecap, or twisting a fork into her hand. But the dream was more powerful, and she rode Chuck Waller like she was in the rodeo. Even after he had transformed into an enormous scaly lizard, she continued to buck against him and open up further so that he could fit inside her and grow.

3

As the darkness fell across Watch Point, more and more people moved in small herds away from the village. Sure, they’d grab up anyone they happened to see, or throw themselves at the cars that drove along as a handful of what might be called “survivors of twilight” tried to get out of town. But still, their movements were slow and shambling as they went toward those least-taken roads, up Jackson Avenue, along a narrow winding road through the unkempt brambles of woods that led out to Harrow. Some walked on nearly broken legs; others crawled, dragging themselves with the weapons they’d gathered—knives, trowels, hatchets, or rakes—and still others walked on their hands, for their bodies had been so ravaged by their companions that there was very little to drag behind them. It almost looked like a carnival leaving town, a freak show from some nineteenth-century idea of what a freak might be, as they went with their knives in their mouths, their guns stuffed into their trousers. Even some of the local cops were there, moving slowly forward on their knees as if in prayer. Jeff Funk, who had moved up from deputy to sheriff in a matter of months, pushed a wheelbarrow full of corpses. It was as if he—and the others—were off to plant a special garden in the woods.

If you were alive and watching from your upper floor window, as Army Vernon was, it might look like the most bizarre parade. The lamplight in the street caught the shadowy figures as they dragged and hobbled and walked away from the village.

Army glanced back at his beautiful wife, who had fallen asleep with a terrible fever. She lay on some blankets he’d piled up nearby.

She murmured a word over and over again in her dream. “Winter.”

PART FOUR

REBORN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

1

Kazi Vrabec had spent time wandering the rooms with the mummified dog’s head tucked beneath his arm as if it were one of his beloved stuffed toys.

“I don’t know,” he said aloud.

Kazi stopped walking, as if listening to the dog’s head.

“I guess so.”

Another pause and a listen.

“If she’s in pain, I want to get her help. Where is she?”

Kazi went up one of the staircases. Its banister was a rich, deep wood, carved into shapes of pineapples and grapes with a garland of wood flowers running along it, too. At a landing halfway up, there was a marble-topped table with a vase of dried flowers in it. Above this, an empty faded space as if there had once been a painting there but it had been taken down.

He looked to his left, up the rest of the steps. It looked a long way up, and had no candles along the floor at the top so that it seemed too dark to him. He held the dog’s head up near his ear and cocked his head slightly to the side. Kazi nodded, and began walking to the dark at the top of the steps.

2

Inside his head, the voice of Dog told him all:

This is your house now, Kazi. I know all about how the kids have treated you. But I’m your friend. I’m a boy’s best friend. I know about how you’re feeling, but there’s nothing to be scared of. Can you give me your loyalty, like I’m giving you mine? Because I know what great power you have in you
—
power you don’t even know. That babushka of yours knew, didn’t she? Didn’t she pull you aside when you were three years old and tell your mother that she thought you had the Sight? Didn’t she? If I’m lying, I might as well be dead. She knew, and maybe you don’t even know that it’
s
going to erupt in you in another year when your body changes and you start moving toward manhood. It doesn’t come when you’re a kid. It arrives full-blown when you’re twelve or thirteen, when your voice changes, when you grow hair in places you didn’t think you’d ever grow hair, Kazi. That’s when it jumps out at you and suddenly you start understanding things that you would not have understood a week before. That’s when you start seeing things that might happen, or dreaming them, and then when they happen, you gradually understand you have this ability.

You aren’t even feeling it yet, but your journey has already begun. We like to call it a Hunch. You have a Hunch, don’t you? You came into this house not because you really were scared of Mr. Spider outside with his funny way of talking
—
he was nervous around you, kid. Nervous as hell. Because you’re coming here makes him wonder how much value he offers any of us here. You have more potential Hunch in your little finger than he has in his entire body. Hell, he has to raise demons sometimes to get his power, and you and I know there ain’t no such thing as demons or angels or all that imaginary friend baloney.

You got the Hunch big, my boy. It’ll hit you hard soon enough, but it’s already started coming through. We knew it the moment we saw you. You got a big talent on the way, and it goes back centuries in your clan, maybe back to when people lived in caves and worshipped bears and bulls. Your mama don’t got it. Your daddy definitely was running on empty. But babushka had it and babushka’s grandpa and you got the talent coming your way like a piano player has it or a singer has it or a one-trick pony has it.

Even you and me talking right now. It means you have it, because I don’t just talk to anybody. Only my best friend. My pal.

You.

And your Hunch led you here, and into those rooms where you saw what crazy people do when they stay here too long. But you won’t end up like that. Your best bud won’t let it happen, Kazi. I see big things in your future. I see you maybe taking on a whole new life once we get this engine going.

Did I say engine? You can take the dog out of the pound, but you can’t take the pound out of the dog. I meant to say, this machinery. It’s vast here. Your being here helps grease the wheel a bit and get things moving. And that’s all for the good.

Okay, see how it’s all dark up here? Let’s hang a louie. You know, take a left. You want to meet Mrs. Fly
—
that’s her name, honest
—
she’s down this way, and she probably is in a pickle right about now.

You may be afraid of what you’ll see. Don’t be. There are tricks of the eye and of the mind here, but you just keep on track. Listen to me if you need guidance. I’ll make sure you navigate the rooms here.