The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (35 page)

“I wish I could’ve figured out something in my dreams then,” Ronnie said with a slight shiver to her voice. “I wish something in them had prepared me better for this night. My sister Lizzie went in there,” Ronnie whispered. “That night. Last summer. She came home and I felt it. I started dreaming then. I started dreaming about this place then. She was with friends, and they broke into the house and partied a little. Sam was there, I guess, because I made her promise to give him a ride, even though he wouldn’t talk to me afterward. Bari Love was at that party, too.”

“Sam thinks it started that night,” Alice said. “Maybe it did. Maybe that electrical storm we had didn’t help, either. Maybe. It couldn’t have been just the party that set this in motion. But maybe it was that dead boy that Sam saw. The one they found.”

“We’re too scared to go up to the door, aren’t we?” Army asked. “The world is upside down right now and we have watched this town lose its marbles in less than a few hours, and ... well, what isn’t sleeping is murdered. Except for us, I guess. And whoever is in that house.”

“We’re all numb. All of us. But we have to get through this. We’ll turn off whatever got turned on in Harrow,” Alice said.

“Or die trying,” Ronnie said.

“Come on,” Alice said. She held up the gun she’d taken off the body of the sheriff. “Maybe we stop this. Or maybe we don’t.”

“Okay, you two go,” Army said.

“Army?”

“I can’t do it,” Army said. “I can’t. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t. Christ, I’m an old man and I’ve seen some war in my time, but I can’t go in a goddamn house.”

Ronnie and Alice exchanged glances, but Army just started laughing as if he were losing his sanity a little. “We already saw what happens. This is like the meltdown of hell right here in this little piss-ant burg. You try and wake people up, they kill you. You try to talk to people, they try to kill you. How many nine-year-olds did I see chewing on some poor guy in the middle of Main Street? I mean, what’s it gonna take before we all figure out that, yep, that house is gonna eat us all and spit us out, or else everyone we can’t seem to see right now is gonna jump us from behind the trees. But I ain’t walkin’ in to that place. Somebody’s gonna have to drag me. I think it’s a living thing. I think that house,” he pointed at Harrow, “is some kind of organic being with a big fat digesting stomach of the damned or something, and Army Vernon is not about to jump into the belly of the beast. Can’t do it. Can’t. Can’t. Can’t.”

“If we wait here, we’re probably doomed,” Alice said.

“Yeah, well, which is more doomed—over there, or over here? I would rather take my chances and stay right here. We can wait ‘til morning. We can stand guard right here. Look, nobody’s bothered us. Nobody cares that we’re standing here, right? Why not wait ‘til morning? That’s the reasonable thing to do. It’s beyond insane to go into that place.”

“I think it’s afraid of us,” Ronnie said.

“What? Why would
it
be afraid of us?”

“We dreamed about what’s inside it.”

“Others did, too.”

“But they got taken over by the dreams. We didn’t. Why is that?”

Alice nodded. “Ronnie, maybe that’s it. Maybe Harrow is afraid of us.”

“And yet, we end up right here. If it was afraid of us, wouldn’t it chase us the hell away?” Army asked. “Wouldn’t it off us right away? Makes no sense. None whatsoever.”

“It wants us. And it’s afraid of us,” Alice said. “Maybe we’re the only ones it can’t kill. Maybe we’re the only ones who can defeat it.”

“Maybe we’re the only ones it really wants,” Ronnie said.

“How the hell do you defeat... how in hell do you fight a place like
that?
It’s a monster. It’s not even a building. Look how it’s changed. How it’s grown. Shifted. We don’t even know how much of this we’re hallucinating and how much is real. What do we do to kill a house? Can we burn it? Blow it up? I don’t think guns will do it.”

“I suppose it’s like any other living thing,” Alice said. “You find its heart.” 

She paused and thought a little more. “And then, you rip it out.”

Just a second after she’d said this, they heard a scream come from the house. It sounded as if someone’s heart had, in fact, just been ripped from him.

2

Luke Smithson had climbed the stairs and found the room with the writing on the walls. Candles were everywhere in the room, and their flickering light seemed to make the words dance along the walls. He saw the open window where the spectre of his aunt had stood. He even saw what looked like her wet footprints—as if she’d just gotten out of the bath, and had walked to the window to call to him.

The words on the walls were from his diary and his notes, and he wasn’t sure what to make of them. Even while he looked at the words scrawled all over the walls of the room, they shifted and changed slightly, and then they became the words he’d written to her in his many letters as a boy, and the ones she’d written back to him.

Dear Luke,

Of course I want you to come stay with me here in Watch Point this summer. We can take a little boat out on the river if you want, or even take the train down to Manhattan if you want some big city living...

Dear Aunt Danni,

Well, things are worse here at home and I can’t stand these people I have to live with. The Good Woman of Stoughton wants me to stay home this summer and I just want to run away...

Dear Luke,

Did you get the apples we sent? We’re hoping they arrived fresh
—
the farm over in Woodstock certainly assured us they would. . .

Among these letters that he had never shown anyone, now scrawled and scrambled on the walls of the room, new words formed in a blank area, as if someone stood there, some invisible being was still writing out words:

Luke, I can’t ever leave this place, but I’m so lonely here. I want you to stay with me. I came here to kill myself, but when I arrived I got a sense of this place. Of what it could be. It’s like a trapdoor, Luke. It’s a trapdoor to other worlds, and you can go back and forth here. I’m not even really dead. My body fell, but I was a sacrifice to Harrow. I want you to stay here with me. I’m lonely. I can’t see anyone else here. I wander room to room, and I know others come and go.

Luke moved close to the words as they wrote themselves furiously on the wall, and waved his hand near where he estimated the “writer” must be. The scrawl was large and then went smaller and smaller, and there was something about it—a total effect of it—that seemed to him that a mad person was in this room writing. He began to doubt it could possibly be the ghost of his aunt. Something about the words that were being written didn’t seem right for her.

I am so lonely here, Luke. If you could only join me. We could be so happy together. We know about true friendship, and real family, don’t we? I can’t be alone anymore. Not here. It is a lonely place, even when I see shadows of others and forms of those who come and go.

Then the writing stopped.

He hadn’t noticed the wardrobe in the room because he’d been so focused on reading the walls. But once he saw that its door was ajar, he went over to it. Again, he saw the small wet footprints, too small to be his aunt’s footprints.

He swung the wardrobe door back.

Lying under a blanket was his aunt Danni—her hair disheveled, circles under her eyes as if she had not slept in days. She lay there curled up nearly in a ball, looking up at him, completely naked beneath the blanket.

Slowly, she seemed to evaporate like steam—even particles of mist seemed to remain in the air. The blanket was flat, as if no one had ever been there.

In that second or two of seeing her, he had a sense that she truly had gone mad. Even when she looked up at him, there was no recognition in her eyes.

It can’t be her.

He felt something along his belt. He glanced downward.

Something was moving the tongue of his belt slightly.

Some invisible hands unbuckled it, then unzipped his fly.

He held his breath, wanting to pull back and run, but wondering what this was.

What could be doing it?

He felt a hand run along his briefs, feeling his penis and cupping his testicles. On the wall to the left of the wardrobe, the ghost began writing,

Let me take you in my mouth.

Aunt Danni loves her nephew.

Let me take you in my mouth.

Let me.

Let me.

And that was when he let out the bloodcurdling scream that went out through the open window, into the night air, and made Alice Kyeteler wonder who had just been killed.

3

Luke drew back from the invisible hands that grasped at him, but it was more than one spirit. He felt someone behind him, pressing him forward—an unseen presence licked at his neck. He felt the hands again as they reached under his briefs, feeling along his pubic hair, grazing the edge of his dick with warm fingers.

“No,” he gasped, but his voice had gone hoarse from the scream. He pushed at the invisibility all around him, but he felt as if it was a press of flesh at his back and his crotch, at his shoulders and his sides as he felt hands moving up and down his hips. “Please. No.”

Someone was rubbing just beneath his balls, and his jacket ripped off as if someone had a razor behind him and had cut right through it to pull it apart. He looked down at his shirt, and it too became shredded. He felt fingers along his chest, and then a sucking at his nipples. He squirmed to pull away, but could not. On the wall others were writing words—it was not just notes from his aunt.

We want to tear you open.

I am hungry for you.

Take my love. Take it. Take it now.

He squinted as he tried to make sense of what they were writing. The unseen drew his pants down around his ankles, and then that razor feeling of cutting at his briefs, so that he was completely naked.

He felt sucking at his balls and just under them, and the pleasure was too much for him to resist, and yet his terror grew as he struggled against the invisible ghosts. He felt more lips sucking his nipples and under his arms, and when the ministrations to his dick became intense, his mind snapped just a little more, and he began to imagine that they did truly love him, the spirits in this room, they passed him around among them and they kissed his lips. He felt their rough, sour tongues press between his lips, and a gentle whispering at his ear.

He got so hard, and yet he hated every second of it, so he kept fighting them. Yet he kept feeling the love and the tender touching all over his body, in every crevice, every opening, he felt their tongues and their fingers and their breath and then he felt something press against his mouth that seemed all wrong to him, but he opened his mouth to it, and took it in the back of his throat.

Something crawled down inside him through his mouth, and he felt it move along, like an undulating snake, into the pit of his stomach, while all around him, the invisible dead took him every way imaginable.

Even when his skin began ripping—along his chest, just above his nipples—he experienced the complete smothering pleasure of it and his mouth, full of whatever had traveled within it, he was unable to cry out even if he was aware of pain.

4

After the scream, the silence outside the house seemed worse.

But the three of them—Alice, Army, and Ronnie—walked along the driveway, surrounded by trees that seemed to burn without burning up, and when they got to the open door in the front, they did their best to enter Harrow together.

But as soon as they were inside, it was as if they’d each stepped into a separate place.

5

Ronnie Pond held her hatchet up when she saw that the others were no longer beside her.

What she saw in the front entrance within the house:

Her sister Lizzie, sitting on a staircase at the end of the foyer.

Or was it Lizzie?

The girl looked like Lizzie, but her hair obscured her face. She wore the same shirt and skirt that Lizzie had on last time Ronnie had seen her—seemed like a year before, but it had just been that afternoon, on the library steps.

Ronnie took a step toward her sister.

She glanced to the left, and saw an arched doorway with the wooden door slightly ajar. A reddish light came from beyond the door. To the right, there was a brief hall that opened up into a wider area.
Perhaps some kind of living area?

Or dead area.

“Lizzie?” she asked as she took another two steps toward her sister.

The girl on the stairs looked up at her. It was Lizzie, but it was not Lizzie. Ronnie was sure that it was a copy of her sister, and not really her sister. It wasn’t that she didn’t look exactly like Lizzie. In fact, it looked so much like her twin that it bothered Ronnie that she was sure it wasn’t her twin.

Something was missing. Was she drugged?

But it wasn’t like that—Ronnie didn’t feel as if anything was fundamentally wrong with this person who resembled her sister in nearly every particular. The soft cast to the eyes. The full lips. The slightly tanned skin.

And she was fairly sure it wasn’t some robot of her sister.

Yet it seemed like a copy. As if something around the edges of her being was a little bit faint. A run-off from a printer where the toner ink needed changing.

“It’s so Huguenots in the Louvre here,” the Lizzie thing said, using the mixed-up code language that the real Lizzie would use.

As Ronnie watched the Lizzie thing stand up from the stairs, she realized that what was missing from her sister was a certain
aura,
for lack of a better word. It was as if something about her sister’s life force could not be duplicated, even if every mole and freckle and defect was there.

“But you’re here now,” the Lizzie thing said, and she smiled sweetly but sadly, as if she had bad news to tell. “Where are your friends?”