The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (13 page)

She whispered, her voice nearly like a four-year-old’s, “Are you the Nightwatchman?”

CHAPTER Six

1

“Are you?” Lizzie Pond asked the man who stood before her. She wasn’t in her bedroom at all. She was at the foot of a staircase up through what seemed to be a tower of some kind. The place stank like a swamp, and the man who stood there wore the kind of waistcoat she would’ve thought someone in Victorian times might have worn. His gray hair was badly parted near the middle, high on his forehead, and he had a fishy look to his eyes and mouth. He checked his gold pocket watch. “Oh, my ears and whiskers,” the man said. “I’m late.” Then he looked at her. “The Nightwatchman? I have a watch,” he said, holding the pocket watch up to her as if for inspection. She noticed that the glass face of it was cracked. “But I am no watchman. No, my dear. Hardly. If anything, I’m more of the watchmaker. My question is, what are you doing on the other side of the mirror?”

“I’m dreaming,” Lizzie whispered, almost afraid to admit it. This is the other side?”

“You go through a looking-glass and you come out here,” he said. “I would’ve thought you’d have a room assignment. You’ve been a guest here before, haven’t you?”

Lizzie shook her head, and looked up the staircase because she thought she heard a noise from above.

“Yes, I remember your face,” the man said. “It was in June I think.”

“No,” Lizzie insisted. “I’ve never been here.”

“Well, perhaps you weren’t. But that would be very odd, because you’re here now and the only reason you might be here right now is because you once were a guest. You can’t be a guest if you’ve never been invited.” He glanced down her body. “Do you always walk around like that?”

She looked down at herself. She was almost completely naked except for her panties. Yet because she felt that this was a dream, she didn’t need to fear it. It seemed ordinary to some extent.

“Who are you?” she asked too softly. Then, “Who
are
you?”

“One of many,” the man said. “But you’re here for the child, I suspect. Everyone seems to know about him.”

“I don’t know any child.”

“The boy. The one who’s caused all this uproar here. The rooms are filling up fast, too fast. The door’s closed to everyone, so once the rooms get too full, all kinds of bad things will start. It always leaks out if the rooms get too full. And then more come in.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“It’s like a vacuum. Once you turn it on, it just sucks, doesn’t it? It sucks and sucks and sucks and until someone kicks out the cord or shuts off the electricity, that vacuum will keep sucking.” He shot her a knowing glance. “You still believe you’re dreaming. You think that you’re in your bed right now at home. But you’re not. Since that night, you’ve always stayed here. You’re forgetting too easily. Or you’re blocking the dreams, Elizabeth. We’ve met here before, and you accompanied me upstairs each time.”

She looked up the stairs. “Where do they go?”

“Up,” he said.

He offered her his hand. “I won’t bite.”

She stepped over to him, and he clasped her fingers in his. When she saw his face again, he resembled her father, and the waistcoat and jacket were gone. Instead it was her father in the sweater and slacks he’d worn when he had the car wreck, his head still steaming from the fire, his face a mass of intersecting burns and wounds, but his eyes still gleaming with fatherly love.

“Daddy?” she asked, tears running down her face.

He squeezed her hand again. “We’re going to have to do some butcher work. We have a piggy that needs to go.”

“What?”

“It’s in pain. You’ve got to put animals out of their misery, honey,” her father said. “Come on, I’ll show you. I’ll take you up to the killing floor.”

He let go of her hand. She stepped ahead of him and began walking up to the tower.
It’s only a dream,
she thought.
It can’t hurt me.

2

A slight shivering of her vision seemed to overlay another face across his. The guy named Bert White who lived upstairs. The guy who always gave her the creeps whenever he did any of his handyman work around her home.

Bert’s mouth seemed to open and close slowly, like a fish dying for air.

3

Bert White had tried to draw back from Lizzie as she rose from her bed, grabbing him so tightly around the waist that he could barely breathe. She sniffed like a dog around his face and neck, and it terrified and thrilled him at the same time as he felt his arousal—his fiddle—pressing against her lithe young body.

The pleasure warmth that arose at these times made him confused because she had begun to hurt him with her strength.

“What I’m going to do to you,” Lizzie whispered, “well, it’s a marvel, my love. It’s a marvel of human engineering.”

“Please,” he whispered, feeling terrible pain and even worse pleasure as she held him.

“First, I’m going to incapacitate you. You’ll pass out. While you’re asleep, I will sever your vocal cords so no one can hear you, should you wake during the procedure.”

The effect on him of her voice, a low guttural growl that sounded so little like the teenage girl and so much like a man, strangely did not diminish that pleasure that shot up and down his spine. It was as if he’d wanted this his whole life. His entire life, the fear of those he watched had given him pleasure.

But now, to be held, and told what would happen, it brought him nearly to a climax.

“Then I’m going to take a small sharp blade. Perhaps my mother’s apple paring knife. And I’m going to make a series of twelve incisions along your body. I will pull your bones from your flesh, and you will be alive for as long as you can stand it,” she whispered, and as she said the last word to him he felt her grip about his chest tightening and he began to black out.

4

Lizzie’s mother Margie had just put a frozen dinner into the microwave when Lizzie came up from downstairs. “You looked tired, dear.” Lizzie smiled slightly, and then went past her mother to the sink. Flatware soaked in a pan, and she rooted around in it for a small knife. She turned around and her mother said, “Just you and me tonight, dear. I figured we’d have those enchiladas I got at the grocery store. They’re so good. You know, you think frozen food isn’t very good, and then you find something like these enchiladas, and you think, why even cook when the microwaveable stuff is so good?”

Margie glanced between the microwave and Lizzie, and then looked out the window because it looked like the little Marshall boy was about to skateboard right into a truck that was barreling up the road. “Good Lord,” she said, but as she watched, the boy and the car missed each other. The boy skateboarded down the street, and the truck swerved around the corner of Forsythia Avenue. She sighed a little and then checked the microwave again. “Two more minutes:’ Turned back to face her daughter, who had come closer. “You look a little flu-ish,” Margie said, reaching over to put her hand on Lizzie’s forehead. “Hmm. You don’t feel feverish.”

But Margie didn’t mention what she did feel on her daughter’s skin—a kind of slimy sweat that reminded her a little too much of fish skin.

Margie glanced at the knife in her daughter’s hands. Then back to her daughter’s face.

Lizzie also looked down at the knife in her hand, then at her mother. She started laughing and feeling a little nervous. Her mother began laughing, too.

“What’s so funny?” her mother asked as she came down from the high of laughter.

“Oh, you,” Lizzie grinned. “You were looking at me as if I were going to attack you or something.”

“I know,” her mother chortled. “I know. You looked like something out of
Psycho.
Just for a second. You know that scene? The one in the shower. When he parts the curtains.”

Margie mimed stabbing her daughter as if she also had a knife in her hand.

“Oh, Mom,” Lizzie laughed. “You have to stop watching those scary movies.”

“I know, I know.” Her mother grinned, turning back to the microwave to turn it off before the enchiladas overcooked. “But you know I would’ve never gotten pregnant with you and Ronnie if your father hadn’t taken me to a midnight show of—what was it—
Hellraiser?
Or
Hellraiser 2.
Well, I don’t remember exactly. Your father and I weren’t quite watching the movie. You looking for something?”

Lizzie squatted down by the sink and opened the cabinet doors. When she found the liquid bleach, she drew it out.

“Doing laundry, dear?” Margie asked.

Lizzie got back up, knife and bleach in hand. She set the knife down on the counter, and undid the lid of the bleach bottle. She sniffed it a little. “Can bleach go bad, Mom?”

Margie made a face. “I don’t think so. I wasn’t exactly a chemistry major, though.”

“Here,” Lizzie said. “Sniff. It smells funny.”

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Margie said, opening the little door to the microwave. The spicy scent of enchiladas filled the air. “Target has some of the best frozen food,” she said as if to no one. “You know, your sister loves these enchiladas. I should save her some for later.”

“Come on,” Lizzie said, bringing the bottle to her mother’s face as Margie turned about again, holding the tray of food, the plastic cover still over it. A light steam rose up from the tray.

“Lizzie,” Margie said, exasperation in her voice. “If that bleach isn’t good enough for your gym socks, I’m sure there’s another bottle down in the laundry room.”

“I just want to make sure.”

“Oh. All right.” Margie leaned forward slightly, closed her eyes and sniffed at the bleach.

It smelled fine. Strong, but fine.

“Good grief,” Margie said, as she opened her eyes, but as she did so she saw something that made no sense to her. A fist coming for her face. Lizzie slammed her fist into her mother’s jaw.

5

Margie reeled backward.

Lizzie leapt upon her and brought her down to the linoleum floor. Lizzie had her pinned by the shoulders, and reached back for the bottle of bleach.

“Lizzie!” Margie cried out, but her voice was soon choked by the bleach gurgling down her throat as Lizzie pinched her mother’s nose with her fingers and Margie felt burning in her throat and lungs.

“Get you clean inside and out,” Lizzie said, and waited until her mother swallowed all of it.

6

Bert White awoke a minute or two after he’d blacked out, and he had to lay on the bed and catch his breath for another few minutes before he could sit up. He had a vague sense that he should get the hell out of that bedroom, but he also felt too disoriented to put the thought into action. He looked up at the ceiling. Then over at the window. At the bookshelf with its neat rows of books and photo albums and yearbooks.

His eyes went in and out of focus as he took a few deep breaths. His lungs actually hurt—and he wondered if some bones had been crushed.
What is she? A fuckin’ bear? Jesus H, what the hell kind of bitch is she?

Finally he sat up. The pain in his back and side was intense, and he had to hold his left side with both his hands, feeling around for the origin of the pain.

He heard a noise beyond the open door, and he

glanced into the hall. Besides her sister’s bedroom, there was a small room with the washer and dryer in it, as well as a sink. On the floor were stacks of dirty clothes.

Lizzie was there, and she had her mother slung over her back. Her mother was moaning, and it wasn’t the kind of moan that made Bert feel any safer.

Lizzie switched on the laundry room light, and dropped her mother onto the pile of the clothes.

Then she glanced over at him.

She pointed her finger at him.

You.

He saw the knife in her hand.

Adrenaline shot through him, and he pushed himself up from the bed, but immediately fell to the floor in pain. He cried out, “For the love of God! SOMEBODY HELP ME! HELP!” He kicked his legs out as she walked over to him. “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME, PSYCHO BITCH! GET THE FUCK AWAY!”

She got down on her knees, and combed her fingers through his hair. “It’s okay. It’s okay. Don’t worry.”

She brought the knife up and showed it to him. His eyes went wide, and he whispered, “Please don’t hurt me. Please. I can get you help. I can get you whatever you want. Whatever you need.”

7

Lizzie Pond brought the knife just beneath his chin and made a quick incision to his throat. He grabbed her by the wrist, but that just made it worse as she cut into him, tearing at his Adam’s apple and the surrounding area until she’d cleaned it all out.

And then she went to make the other incisions on his body so that she could pull the bones out from the meat of his flesh.

In another place in her mind, she and her father were in the killing room, and there was a big piggy lying there.

“We have to debone this one completely,” her father said.

“Won’t it hurt him?” she asked.

“Ah,” her father said. “Piggies like to get slaughtered.”

He passed her a knife and she approached the piggy with it. “You pull the bones out, one by one,” her father told her.

As Lizzie did it, cutting messily into the piggy, he guided her hand in finding all the sweet spots.

8

After she was all done, Lizzie dragged the piggy’s bones and set them all in a pile near the skin and the meat.

“Time to clean up,” her father told her, although he wasn’t there with her anymore. Just in her head.

She stepped out into the hallway, taking off her clothes as she went. Completely naked, she walked upstairs to the bathroom. Went in, turned on the shower, glanced at herself in the mirror.

Red girl,
she thought.
Red girl with the pretty eyes. Hello.

Then, she pulled back the shower curtain, and got under the hot spray of water and washed the filth of the meat off her body and listened to what the voices were telling her.