The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (34 page)

The smell of the killing room.

That’s
what it is.

It smelled like the little room with the metal table where the dogs went when their time was up.

Something about the smell made her think of other things, as if it had associations for her, and she remembered how her boss, Benny Marais, would snicker at the hapless dogs sometimes and say, “This mutt’s too ugly to ever get adopted out. I think we just need to off him right now.” She had hated Benny at those times, and just that smell had taken her back to a moment when she had managed to snatch an old dog from him before he could take the animal into the killing room. Instead, she took it home and eventually found a home for it out at a no-kill shelter up the river a bit.

With the smell in the house, she began to forget why she was there.
Dory, don’t get off-track. This place wants you to forget. Don’t. You’re here because somehow monsters came outta here.

As soon as she went down the back hallway of Harrow, a little boy came around from a room off to the side. She braced herself against a doorframe and pressed the rifle’s butt against her hip, raising it up so that she’d get him right in the face.

He had dark circles under his eyes, and looked sad to her. His hair was dampened along his scalp, and he wore a striped T-shirt and underwear that looked like it had teddy bears on it. He looked up at her, and at the gun, and kept walking.

She was about to squeeze the trigger, but something overwhelmed her about the boy. He didn’t look as if he was about to hurt her. If anything, he reminded her of images she’d seen on news shows about abused and neglected children. This little guy looked as if he’d been starved and tortured in some way, and she felt terrible enough to lower the rifle.

“Are you okay?”

The boy glanced back at her as he passed by, and then turned left into a room.

Dory took a breath. There didn’t seem to be any threat nearby.

She followed the boy into the room. It was a small room and had nothing in it but a pile of blankets and a pillow in the corner beneath a shuttered window. A single bulb hung overhead, giving off enough light so that she could see the walls of the room. They were covered with shit that someone had wiped along them as if trying to paint a scene. She could make out stick figures of a man and a woman and a house, and maybe there was a dog and a big shit sun in the wall-sky.

The little boy had crawled beneath the blanket, and she immediately felt that she should help him in some way. She went over, and sat down, and touched the boy’s forehead.

Fever.

She reached to the blankets, which he’d drawn up over himself, and drew them back. The boy’s shirt was open, and she saw an open, festering wound running down the front of his chest.

A memory came back to her:
Arnie Pierson.

The boy who had been stolen from the morgue. His corpse had been sliced down the middle by the sicko who had done it.

The little boy lay there, and grinned broadly at her, and she saw what looked like little sharp ends of knives thrust into his gums where his teeth had once been.

He reached down and fingered the gap that divided his chest and stomach. He drew back the flaps of skin.

She felt her tongue go dry in her throat.

Dory thought she could hear her own heartbeat.

Arnie Pierson.

The dead boy.

As he opened the wound, it began to look like something more than a wound, and she hated to think of it, but it looked vaginal. It looked like it had little lips within it, at its edges, and as he opened it she had the awful feeling that somehow she was going to reach inside him, inside that
gap,
she was going to put her hand inside him because her mind had already begun to wonder what he wanted to show her and what secret thing he could be hiding. Dory Crampton glanced at the rifle that lay nearby and her short-circuiting mind began wondering if she shouldn’t just suck on that thing and blow her brains out rather than dig deep into this opening chasm within the boy’s chest.

She felt as if she were watching herself at a distance as she leaned over him and lowered her hands to press them into the dead boy’s body.

When she did, the pleasure that came over her was intense, as if she had never known that tingling sensation before. He was wet and warm in a way she’d never felt anything, and her hands found his beating heart that throbbed as she squished at it with her fingers.

It has you. The house has you. You have to stop. You have to just leave. Just get the hell out,
she thought.

But part of her liked milking the dead boy’s innards, and as she found other organs, and little tiny bits of mushy yellow fat, she wanted to put her face inside his open stomach and smell what the insides were like and maybe she would find out why he had this power over her, to make her do this. To make her do this nasty, humiliating act.

This dead boy with his knife teeth.

She played with the dead boy for a long time, and perhaps she dreamed of less repugnant things, but you could not tell it by looking at her.

The Nightwatchman stood in the doorway, and when he felt Dory had reached a pinnacle of unadulterated pleasure at the touching of the dead, he went and took her up in his arms and whispered, “Mrs. Fly. We have a place for you upstairs.”

5

Sam Pratt had been nearly out of breath the whole time he’d been running toward Harrow. He thought of Thad, and Jack Templeton, and the people he saw lying dead in the street. He couldn’t take it anymore—he had to stop all of it from happening. He felt the pressure of guilt for having been there the night that the boy’s corpse had been torn open by someone to start a ritual from hell that launched this night.

As he went, he saw others along the roadside—he saw kids he went to school with, and women who had been his elementary school teachers, and he saw men and women who lived on his block, people he avoided normally, people he ran into at the drugstore, the postman who always had a quick hello for him whenever Sam had to sign for a package ... and they were part of it.

Somehow, they had gotten taken over.

Somehow, Harrow had gotten into them.

Possessed.

He ran between all the praying people and the burning trees, screaming that he was going to stop this once and for all.

But just as he got to the door of Harrow—it was open and he could see an incredible yellow and red light from within as if it were lit with a thousand candles—a little girl with a pitchfork jabbed him in the chest.

Sam looked down at her. He wasn’t sure, but it looked like the little sister of a friend of his from down the block. He had seen her playing jump rope with some of the other kids now and then.

The girl looked up at him, her black braids swinging side to side and her grin nearly an infection as she twisted the pitchfork deep into his chest.

Sam fell to the ground, struggling to breathe. He saw the little feet—the feet of other children gathered around him. He turned over on his back, and the little girl drew the pitchfork back out of his chest.

Sam looked up at the children. One boy had a metal rake, and he pressed this down onto Sam’s stomach until it punctured the skin. Two other boys began spitting in Sam’s face as he fought to stay awake.

He felt his life flowing from him, and knew he had perhaps only minutes, left.

And during those minutes, these children who played on the front porch of Harrow were going to tear him apart.

6

“Put your gun down, Army,” Alice Kyeteler said, reaching over to touch Army Vernon lightly on the shoulder. “That’s Ronnie Pond, from up the way.”

“No,” Ronnie said, tossing her hatchet onto the road. Its clatter echoed in the curious quiet of the night. “Shoot me. Take me out.”

“Stop that,” Army said. “Life’s sacred. Even if it doesn’t seem like it right now.” He lowered his arm, and tucked his gun into his jacket pocket.

“All right then. If you’re not killing me, I’m going up to that house,” Ronnie said wearily. She squatted down and picked up the hatchet, hefting it between her hands.

Alice was amazed, looking at her. It was as if she had seen the exact moment when a teenage girl had become a young woman.

Not just a young woman.

A young warrior.

“We’re coming with you,” Alice said.

7

It took them nearly forty minutes to get to Harrow. They walked slowly, cautiously, along the streets of the village. It was so empty and silent that it seemed to keep the three of them from talking at all. Dead bodies lay in piles along the shop doors. Houses down the little lanes looked as if they’d been abandoned.

“The lost colony” Alice said.

“What?” Ronnie asked.

“In Roanoke. It just disappeared.”

“People didn’t disappear here,” Army said. “But I get your drift.”

“Is everyone dead?”

Alice shook her head. “From what I can tell, if they’re sleeping, they’re alive. If they haven’t woken up.”

“How come? How come they’re sleeping?”

“Who knows,” Alice said. “Maybe the ones who wake up from sleep are living their nightmares in some way. Maybe the ones who sleep are ...”

“They’re in Harrow,” Ronnie said. “That’s what Mr. Boatwright said. He said ...” But she let the thought die. She closed her eyes, and Alice put her arm around her. Ronnie shrugged her away. “I saw my mother dead. I haven’t found my sister. She must be dead, too. A girl I know—Bari Love—attacked me. She went back to sleep after she did it, but she was bleeding bad. I’m sure she’s dead now, too. And Dusty. And Nick. People I cared about. Everybody’s gone. This is a heartless place. What’s the point in living?”

Alice exchanged a glance with Army, who shrugged. “I don’t have answers.”

“I dreamed I was in that house,” Ronnie said. “All summer I’ve had dreams. My sister was there. And others. A little boy who seemed to be behind everyone’s face. Like they were masks. A little boy who seemed ... the ... well, absolute evil. I hate that word evil. It seems stupid. But whatever this is, it’s utterly evil.”

“When you dreamed of the house,” Alice began, “what was unusual? Besides the strangeness. Was there some quality to the dream that you hadn’t noticed in any dream before?”

Ronnie stopped in her tracks. “Yeah. There was. It was more real. That’s what bothered me about the dreams. They were hard. Around the edges. The rooms in Harrow were ... how can I put it? They were ... solid. The floor was solid. I felt the floor. I never feel myself on a floor in a dream.”

“It had the same quality as real life,” Alice said, nodding.

“More than that. It was like real life was the dream. And the dream was more real.”

Finally, they left the last of the buildings in the village and stepped out onto the narrow road that would be the beginning of their travel into the woods to find the house. They grew silent again as they saw the distant fires in the trees.

They thought they heard chanting in the chilly air, as if some ceremony were taking place outside the house—a revival of some kind, with the ecstatic cries of participants and that kind of nonmelodic singing that reminded Alice of her studies of ancient religions, where bloodthirst was the rule.

Yet when they reached the stone wall that marked the entrance to the property, the place had gone silent. And though the trees still burned, the three of them saw no one in front of the Harrow at all.

“Shit,” Ronnie said, when she looked up the drive to the house.

Alice could not even find the words to say it, but Army had no problem. “It’s... grown. Jesus
Christ,
has it grown.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

1

Ronnie glanced at Alice. “How could it happen?”

“Don’t ask me,” Alice said.

Harrow was no longer the Victorian monstrosity of the Romanesque and the Greek and the Georgian and its other influences. It had reached higher into the sky—its towers were now buttressed and it had arches coming off them. 

“It looks like Constantinople, Jesus H.” Army said.

“Or Notre Dame,” Alice added. “They’ve turned it into a cathedral.”

“We’re dreaming this,” Ronnie said. “Somehow, it’s making us see this. ‘Cause this can’t happen. It can’t.”

Alice whispered, “Anything can happen here. Tonight. I don’t think we’ve seen the worst of this yet. Somehow, it’s gotten its fuel. Somehow, those with sparks of psychic ability have given themselves to Harrow.”

“We could just run away,” Army said, but it didn’t sound like he meant it.

“Those in the village who are still dreaming, are dreaming all this for us,” Alice said. “Somehow, Harrow has crossed over from dreams into reality. This reality. Like Ronnie’s dream. Hard reality, within a dream.”

“But how?”

Alice reached pressed her hand lightly on Ronnie’s scalp. She closed her eyes and tried to summon what she called “the stream,” which was something she felt between other psychics whenever she met them. She felt a faint tingling along her hand. Alice opened her eyes again. “You have a little something, Ronnie. I think most people do but don’t necessarily know it. Maybe they have more powerful dreams than others. Maybe they make good guessers, and aren’t aware that maybe other people can’t guess that well.”

“If I have some kind of psychic ability, it sure as hell is buried deep,” Ronnie said.

“Why us?” Army asked. “Why aren’t we either dreaming or asleep?”

Alice shrugged. “I wish I had the answers.”

“Some psychic.” He said it to try and lighten her mood, but somehow Army knew it didn’t come out right.

“I’m supposed to be. But it hasn’t really been working much lately.” She said this last bit as if she didn’t care if they heard her or not. In a slightly more audible tone, she said, “Harrow collects souls. But it needs that psychic spark for fuel. It must already have one or two with the ability. Sometimes I feel it in the village—a slight tension in the air. Like a static charge. And then I get the sense that someone who has it is nearby—maybe just passing by on their way to school, or work, or out for a walk with a dog. I was attracted to this village. Until tonight, I thought it was because it had a certain pull that reduced my abilities a bit. I liked that. It’s not always fun and games to see things others can’t. But after tonight, I think I came here the same way that others with the ability, or the genetic disposition to it, might come to Watch Point. Harrow is the pull. It’s not anything but this house. It was consecrated for evil, and it will always remain so. But I was sure it had been turned off. Yes, hauntings can be shut down, and it was... for awhile.”