The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (11 page)

Norma Houseman made daily trips to the post office, even though the Watch Point mail delivery to homes was excellent. But she had a special post office box for her maiden name, Spretz, which seemed to collect more mail than the usual. As little Cathy went and looked at the framed stamps on the wall, Norma retrieved her special key from her purse, and went to check the oversized box she rented each year, paying cash, under the name “N. Spretz.”

Three letters were inside the box, and she drew them out. Each had return addresses. She opened the first one. It was from a Mrs. Marshall Allen of Eastbrook, New Jersey. A brief note within, and five crisp one hundred dollar bills. The second, from a Mr. Matthew Schwartz, also of New Jersey, held a total of three hundred and fifty dollars in cash. And the third had a money order from someone named B. Little in the amount of $2,300 with a note that read, “I’m sorry it’s late.”

She folded the money and the order in half and pressed them deep into her purse. Then she went to drag Cathy over to the bank before it closed.

Afterward, at home, whiney little Cathy had her mouth washed out with soap during which she cried the whole time and Norma had to ask her over and over again, “Is this boring? Do you think this is boring? You bored, Catherine? You bored? This boring to you?”

Once her boy William the Conqueror (as she called him because he was so responsible and smart and good-looking, like her side of the family) came in and made his mommy her favorite kind of apple martini to help take the edge off the day, she called Chuck at his place. Only he wasn’t there. This was the third time this week, and it was beginning to piss her off. The last time she’d seen him was when they took a few days over on the New England coast, leaving William in charge of his brothers and sisters.

How Norma had loved those days on the Cape—long nights of wonderful passion, days spent walking barefoot on the beach, and lobster and clams and champagne for dinner, all courtesy of some of the people with whom she conducted her mail-order “business,” which had very little to do with business, but much to do with mail.

“I want you to call me,” Norma said in an annoyed tone, hoping that he checked his messages soon. “Norma’s had a rough day and needs her Chuck.”

Then she hung up the phone.

3

Chuck Waller was so deep inside Mindy Shackleford that he felt like he was diggin’ for clams. Ah, he loved it, loved the feeling of banging her, the thumpity of the hump (he liked to make up words around “the slappy whap of the ugly tap,” as he called sex) and she clung to him like a monkey on the bars of the zoo. He loved reaching the heights of pleasure as it all just ran away from him—the thudding, thumping drumbeat of lust pounding out against flesh.

Chuck was never happier than at these moments, and even though he didn’t like Mindy too much in any other department, she was a vacuum cleaner of a lonely middle-aged housewife whose husband was always away, and whose kiddies never were around when she brought him into the house and had him make love on her teenage daughter’s bed.

He had this whole routine of servicing some of the lonely and horny and sometimes single mothers in the village who were just a little bit older than he was and looking for a little fun when the kids were off somewhere else.

Slap, slam, thank you ma’am, you know baby I don’t give a damn.
He let it all out—a growl, a moan, a gruff deep “oh yeah,” and then something happened that had never in his entire adult life happened before. He began to float a little. Not really him. Just something in him. His mind. His consciousness. He felt as if he were
whooshed
up behind himself, watching the lurches and jackrabbit
thwack
of his buttocks as he went with the old in-out, and he had never noticed how hairy his back had become over the years, now that he was in his thirties, and how he had a little bit of back fat and a spare tire, too. It all jiggled as he plunged into her depths. It was a sensation he didn’t like. He should have been watching her face for that wonderful sign that she knew he had her pinned, like a butterfly in a little glass case, but instead he watched the back of himself—his round small bald spot almost like a monk’s tonsure, the freckles on his shoulders, and even worse a bit fat zit on his rear end, which made him think he was ugly and kind of gross, not the king of the world as he had been feeling.

I
am the king,
he thought, and he still felt that buzzing pleasure in his loins, but looking at himself he felt nasty and dirty. Then he noticed her face, from the distance where his consciousness floated—she wasn’t enjoying it. He saw her eyes—she was somewhere other than beneath him. She didn’t love it. She wasn’t an animal in heat. She was just some woman in her early fifties who dreamed of the past too much. She was just thinking she was a teenager again, thinking of another time and another bedroom where maybe she felt loved and taken care of.

But not under him.

Then
whoosh! Again
he felt a hammer crack his head as darkness enveloped his mind, and he was right back in his body again, looking down at her.

Only she was different.

She was dead.

A dead body.

For some reason, he remembered something that Mindy had told him once, something silly and affectionate when they’d been groping each other down at the multiplex in Poughkeepsie, “My fuck place is a little bit worn out, sugar.” She still clung to that Southern accent even after twenty years in New York State without one visit to Georgia since her first child had been born. When she’d said it during a showing of
The Ring,
he had laughed out loud because he’d never heard her be quite so specific and blunt about anything regarding sex, even though their relationship mainly consisted of bouts of the old in-out.

And those words came to him as he looked down at her corpse.

My fuck place is a little bit worn out, sugar.

He was sure of it.

Eyes were all blank and staring and her mouth was agape, and her skin was somewhere between pale white and light blue.

My fuck place is a little bit worn out, sugar.

In his memory, her voice was like pulled taffy from a Deep South candyman in Savannah—
Mah fuck playice is a leeddel bit who-wen ow-et, shu-gah.

He felt different on the inside now, and something about the way the room around him wavered a bit like a flickering candle flame made him realize that he’d entered a dream.

He drew back from Mindy’s body, and lay on his side using his elbow to prop up his head.

Your fuck place, Mindy? Worn out?

Hell yeah,
he thought.
What the hell, it’s beyond worn out.

It’s split up the middle.

Shu-gah.

Mindy was definitely dead—her breasts had begun rotting, and half her torso was split up the middle as if someone had taken the Jaws of Life to her and just cut her open. He held tight to the idea that this was a dream, but as it went, he became more convinced that it was—for the room was no longer Mindy Shackleford’s daughter’s bedroom with its posters of Justin Timberlake and other boy band pop stars of the moment.

It was a much larger room, more elaborate, with a large gold harp in a far corner, and a door that looked as if it had been carved by master craftsmen in some Italian mansion; the four-poster bed they lay upon was long and wide and had a thick blanket of deep red over snow-white sheets. Above them, a canopy as blue as heaven itself.

Wake up,
he said within himself.
Wake up. You’re dreaming too much. Something might happen.

What might happen?

Something. I’m afraid.

He hated admitting fear in real life, but in a dream Chuck Waller had no problem being scared shitless.

Narcolepsy,
came the word. He hated the word. He suffered from it and he hated it and no matter what medication he tried, none of them worked. And he’d been trying them since he’d been nineteen, when he’d first begun experiencing the sudden sleepiness. The latest round of amphetamines he was using must’ve triggered this—this too-vivid vision.
That’s it. It’s the drugs. Too high a dose. I still fall asleep, but I get this bizarre psycho dream where Mindy’s been cut open and I’m in some rich man’s bedroom.
But usually he simply blacked out into sleep and awoke a few minutes later.

Now and then, he’d experience hypnogogia—that hallucinatory half-dreaming, half-waking state ... but it was never like this.

His tongue felt dry in his mouth. His limbs, sore. He even felt sleepy in his own damn dream, which scared him, because how could he be a narcoleptic within the dream itself?

Yet his mind was trying to shut down—to sleep. He pushed himself up to a sitting position, feeling sick to his stomach. Half the bed was soaked with dark blood, and his thighs were covered with it. Not his blood, but hers.
It’s a dream. Don’t be afraid.

As he sat there, fighting sleep, feeling an urgency to wake up back in Mindy Shackleford’s house and not in this place, he began to hear a
tap, tap
beyond the great wooden door. Not precisely a rapping at the door. But a tap that echoed slightly, as of someone walking.

Footsteps.

Light footsteps.

He stared at the door.

There was a key jutting out from the keyhole. An old-fashioned kind of mechanism.

If you turn the key, you lock the door,
he thought.

The tap tap tap of little feet. Fitter patter. It’s a child out there, running toward the door. Running down a long hall.

Fighting sleep, he rubbed his eyelids with his fingers.
Don’t sleep, someone’s coming.

But he closed his eyes—within the dream itself—and for just a second saw blackness. Then he was beyond the bedroom door in a long hallway full of other doors. He ran like a young child down the hallway.

Fitter patter of feet. Coming for your door.

Opened his eyes again, and he was sitting up in the bed of blood next to dead Mindy Shackleford.

He looked at the door.

At the key in the lock.

If you get up now, you can lock the door be fore he comes in. Before that wicked little boy who is pittering and pattering toward you comes in. Get up, you oaf.

He leaned forward to stand, but the falling darkness in his head—that spiraling downward into the feather bed of sleep—kept him on the edge of the bed.

He looked down at his feet.

Just stand up. Put one foot on the floor and stand up.

Tap tap tap
in the hallway as a little boy ran toward the door.

If you don’t reach the door before he does, he will kill you.

That’s ridiculous,
he thought.
A little boy running to this room is not going to kill you.

But the irrational belief had taken hold—that beyond this door, there was a malevolence—a boy who ran toward him, and who would have a great jagged cutting instrument in his hands. Giant scissors perhaps, or the Jaws of Life, or even giant teeth in his little round mouth that could cut into human flesh the way that Mindy had been sliced up her center like a big
V.

V is for Vaginal Cutting.

Now that was a voice in his head he’d never heard before. It wasn’t his own voice, but a variation of someone else’s voice. He felt he knew that voice, the one that said the V word to him, but he couldn’t quite place it.

Then the voice spoke again in his mind:
I
know that voice. I do. It’s somebody, oh, somebody on the tip of my tongue, but I swallowed it.

His feet touched the floor. The floor was icy cold, and his feet, bare, felt like lead weights.

Chuckawalla, you ever swallow anybody on the tip of your tongue?

He felt a gentle thumping in the little blue vein above his right temple that always meant he was too tense and one of those big hammering headaches would come on.

They never come on in dreams,
he thought.
All righty then, we’re back to my own voice in my head. Yay for me. No strange voice that’s disturbingly familiar. This is just a dream. A dream with an extra voice.

This is no ordinary dream, Chuckawalla.

Don’t call me that.

You are a Chuckawalla.

That’s stupid. That’s what kids called me. It’s nothing.

Chuckawallas run on their hind legs through water. They bloat up and they run and if you grab their tails, the tails fall off and wriggle.

Shut up. Is this a dream about fourth grade? I haven’t been called that since I was ten.

Hey, is that a lizard in your pants, or are you happy to see me? Oh, wait, damn, it’s a lizard. Chuckawalla, don’t let what’s on the other side of the door in.

He just wanted to stop and sleep on the floor, but he saw the doorknob turn slightly.

That little bastard is testing. He wants to see if he can get in without you knowing. Go turn the key and lock the door.

He took another step forward.

He glanced at the doorknob. It slowly turned to the left.

Then slowly to the right.

He stepped forward, but had to bend over, his hands clutching his knees. He wanted to drop right there and sleep.

The little bastard is coming. He’s coming back to cut you open. He’s coming back to tear you apart.

Took a deep breath. Better. Feel better.

Stood up again, stretching. Another step forward.

He heard the boy’s voice in the hall. A high-pitched little voice. “Please. Hurry.”

The little bastard wants you to come to the door, but the question is: Will you get there before he does?

That is the million dollar question, Chuckawalla. Will you race like the lizard that is your totem? Will you puff up and bloat and race across that floor and turn that key before he can turn the knob and push his way in?