The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (16 page)

“I know. I understand. Can I ask one thing? What did she have?”

Cynthia placed her hand on her scalp. “Up here. Brain stuff. It was messing with her mind a little. Worse was, she knew how it would go. She said it was going to be bad. I guess now I don’t blame her. But I did for a few years there.”

“We were lucky to know her,” I said.

“Yep,” Cynthia said, finishing off her glass.

“I wish she hadn’t killed herself,” I said, suddenly, as if it had been on my mind for years and I could not shake the thought. “I wish she’d called me. I would’ve been there for her. I’d have come to the hospital and made it like a home.”

Cynthia arched an eyebrow. “Luke, she didn’t kill herself. She wanted to. That was her intention. She got out to this abandoned property and she just was about to set this thing in motion, but whatever was inside her got her. Right then. Nobody was around. She fell. She died. Her gun never went off.”

I took a nap in the guestroom bed, a little drunk and a lot confused. When I woke up, feeling sweaty because Cynthia didn’t like to turn on the air conditioner during the daytime, I had a headache to murder all other headaches. It was from a dream I’d had. And I wanted to write the dream down, so I pulled out my laptop and started writing, “The Nightwatchman looked into the hearts of the dreamers, and found their secrets.”

It’s because of
Harrow. The house. They hired a nightwatchman, and I saw him once. Briefly. In town. He was just getting into his car—an old dusty station wagon that looked a lot like the one my parents had when I was little. I guess that’s why I noticed him. It was that Ford station wagon, so dusty I couldn’t even see through the windows. I barely saw his face, but what I saw of him wasn’t important. It was when Cynthia said, “Oh, that guy. He just got hired. He’s the nightwatchman up at Harrow.”

And I said to her, “You mean caretaker.” A nightwatchman would imply that there was something to watch at night, but a caretaker—someone who’d fix the place or make sure everything ran that was supposed to run— made sense to me. She said, “Oh, of course. He’s the caretaker.”

But her word stuck with me.

Nightwatchman.
It conjures so many thoughts, and makes me wonder what a nightwatchman does all night long.

So, I wrote, “The Nightwatchman looked into the hearts of the dreamers, and found their secrets.”

It was just one sentence, but I knew it would be a novel someday. I felt better, just having gotten it down, even while the dream evaporated in my head. That will be the novel.
The Nightwatchman.
Sometimes it comes like that—inspiration from a dream.
The Nightwatchman
will be a story about a man who must take care of others, but he will find out too much about those he has to watch. Somehow I find this intriguing, and I’m hoping it’s an upbeat tale of the human condition.

I went to take a shower, and afterward, being my normal snoop self, I opened the medicine cabinet. There was the dental floss I’d last used at fifteen. I could identify it by my initials on the side of the little plastic box (the good woman of Stoughton always marked my stuff). This meant, to me, that Cynthia just had not done much to change the house or her life since Aunt Danni’s death. I felt the burden of death in the little house and decided to take a walk back into town, grab a sandwich or something, and just think about all this overload of information.

I didn’t rent the little apartment until September, when I felt too uncomfortable staying with Cynthia—the cottage seemed heavy with something other than grief and remembrance. It seemed not to suit me, and I’ve always preferred living alone, anyway.

Besides, getting back to my novel is important, and it was hard to focus living at Cynthia’s place. I want
The Nightwatchman
to be a really great novel—not the Great American Novel, but a novel like Wouk’s
Youngbloode Hawk
or Styron’s
Sophie’s Choice
—a novel about everything, about the world. I want to encompass the world— the day and the night. I want the character of the Nightwatchman to be fascinating, and on the edge of something wonderful. The more I think about it, the more dreams I’m having that seem to be bits of what the novel might become. Sometimes a ten-minute nap will bring me the dreams—and I suddenly see the Nightwatchman himself, with his narrow lips and the way his eyes widen as he speaks, and I see the plaid shirt he wears beneath his uniform. The Nightwatchman must have a uniform—it’s important for his sense of self. I see a green-gray uniform and a hat and in his belt I thought there’d be a gun, but in the dreams, I see a row of little knives, and I’m not sure what that means, but it seems to suit the Nightwatchman to have them.

Maybe this novel will be about murder. Maybe the Nightwatchman witnessed a murder on his rounds. His rounds? I still don’t know what he’s watching. What he’s protecting. Is he looking through windows? I need to develop this novel further before I write too much in it.

Maybe he’s watching a mansion, like Harrow. But I don’t want to write about Harrow. I don’t want even to think about that place. No, I think the Nightwatchman would be in a bustling city, but spending his nights in a lonely building—a factory perhaps. A factory of dreams—what would that be? A movie studio? A sweatshop? A department store? What does he watch? I’m still unsure.

If I didn’t have my own place, I don’t think I could be planning this novel out so much, and I bet it gets published. It feels so real. It feels as if it could happen.

I’d have worked on the novel more, but after doing some errands and helping out with a neighbor in slight trouble, I decided to go back and just look at the cottage again. Remember Aunt Danni. Wish I could recapture the past in that moment.

Why was it all lost? Why did time have to move forward?

I saw Cynthia inside with a few friends—probably enjoying life, even while I watched from the outside. I felt too much like a voyeur, as if all my life had become about watching and waiting and remembering the past, clinging to it and my childhood as if it could somehow fix all my dreams and desires in the present.

I turned, finally, and was walking back into the village center to grab a bite, with the early winds of October farting out leaves and leaf mold that made me sniffly and sleepy, when I saw the dead man.

Dead to me, anyway.

Or maybe I was dead to him.

His name was Bish—short for Bishop—McBride, and he and I had been friends on my summers and holidays to Watch Point. He wasn’t officially dead, but he might as well have been because the last time I saw him he told me that I could go fuck myself and that if he ever saw me in this town again he’d make a point to get his gun and plow me down and no jury would convict him.

And maybe he was right.

I had hurt him in a way that I guess you’re not supposed to hurt somebody, particularly when you’re best friends and you’re teenagers and you know the Rules of Friendship.

I had betrayed his friendship by stealing his girl, then telling him later that she had meant nothing to me.

But then, sometimes, when I tried to remember it, I think I got it wrong.

Sometimes I felt like Bish had a thing for me.

2

“Bish,” Luke said, nodding slightly.

Bishop McBride had gotten a little chubby, but only in that frat boy way that meant he probably had too many beers and now and then forgot how many fries he’d scarfed down and how many ice cream cones he’d had in the summer. He looked like he’d been living the good life—his cheeks were rosy and round and his hair was a thick flop across his forehead and his untucked white shirt was starched and his jeans looked brand new.

All in all, he hadn’t changed that much.

“Luke. I’d heard you’d moved here.” His eyes lit up briefly, as if he expected a big hug and “Missed you, old fart!” from Luke, and then that little hope seemed to extinguish. Still, he kept the grin and added an arched eyebrow. “Been avoiding me?”

“Yeah, well. Not really.”

“You should’ve dropped me a line, buddy.”

“I figured I’d see you around.”

“Want to get a beer?”

“Sure, but...”

“Us as kids? Don’t be ridiculous,” Bish McBride said. “Long time ago. I was stupid. I lost a good friendship over nothing. How dumb is that?” He stepped over to Luke Smithson and slapped his shoulder. “Goddamn, it’s good to see you.”

While Luke and his old buddy Bish wandered up and over to Macklin Street, to the Ratty Dog Bar & Grille, each feeling as if something great had just happened—a reunion that was long in the making, a new beginning for an old friendship that had nearly been like brotherhood once upon a time; and while Ronnie Pond started looking for the box cutters so she could start unpacking all the boxes of books in the back of the store; and while Jim Love tried to tear his daughter Bari away from chewing more of his face off; and while Chuck Waller pressed his weight down on Mindy Shackleford’s neck so she couldn’t scream and could barely even breathe and then turned around on her throat and leaned back over, trying to find a way to tear her lower half open with his bare hands; and while Thad Allen stripped to his boxers and laid down on Alice Kyeteler’s massage table so that she could “relax the most uptight man in three counties,” and as Alice rubbed scented oil on the palms of her hands and thought of that phrase from Shakespeare’s
Macbeth
—”By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Open locks, whoever knocks!”—and began to wonder why she was feeling so sleepy; eleven-year-old Kazi Vrabec walked up the driveway of the house called Harrow to see the man who looked like a scarecrow.

CHAPTER NINE

1

“Here’s the thing,” the man on the property said to Kazi Vrabec. “It’s completely nuts, but I locked myself out of my own house and my wife is in some kind of trouble in there. I only just started on this job a few nights ago, and I can’t really get on the cell and call my employer because they’d see me as completely incompetent and I’d get fired. Only I can’t get fired, and I don’t mean it’s because they won’t fire me, it’s because I’m screwed if I get fired—you don’t mind language like ‘screwed’ do you?”

“No,” Kazi said.

“Good, well I’m fucked six ways to Sunday if I have to call my employer for the keys and I think a little boy like you—well, you might be able to help me out of this predicament,” the man said, taking a breath.

Up close, he didn’t look like a straw man at all—he had big dark circles around his eyes, and he definitely had some hay or something in his hair, under his hat, but that might’ve been from mowing—half the lawn beyond the stone wall looked like someone had been cutting grass, while piles of high weeds and sticker bushes that had been torn at the roots lay alongside the stones.

“I don’t know if I can help,” Kazi said.

“What’s your name, boy? Casey?”

“Kah-zee.” Even as he said it, Kazi wondered how the man would have guessed “Casey,” since that was what he was called sometimes by substitute teachers who didn’t know any better.

Did I just tell him my name and not remember I did it?

“Well, look K-Z, all you need to do is crawl through a little gap. That’s it. See, I can lift you up to this window on the second floor and there’s this little gap for getting in. My wife, she’s in some kind of trouble. I can’t get in at all. Doors are locked, windows sealed up on the first floor. It’s a goddamn fortress, and I dropped my damn key somewhere. The front door locks and the back door’s all barred up and closed and padlocked, and it’s because I either lost the fucking key or I left it inside although I don’t know shit about how that could’ve happened,” the man said. “Hey K-Z, am I mumbling?”

Kazi shook his head slightly. He knew to give grownups respect; his mother had told him to never give lip and always treat adults as his betters.

“If I’m not mumbling,” the man said, leaning down toward him so that his face was nearly next to his, “then why in hell are you looking like you don’t understand me. No habla een-gless? You a furrinor?”

“Mister?”

“A furrinor.”

Then Kazi understood. He nodded. A foreigner. “I’m not. But my mother and father are from Czechoslovakia. They came over before I was born.”

“Yeah,” the man said, his eyes squinting a little, sniffing at the air. “You smell like one of them. You a Jew?”

Kazi wanted to tell the truth, but he was a little afraid. “Not really.”

“What’s that mean? Not really. Jew’s a Jew, no questions asked.”

“My grandfather is Jewish. But my mother and father think religion is made up to make people feel good about death.”

“Worse than a Jew,” the man said, straightening up. “A goddamn atheist unbaptized baby boy. You know what some folks do with the unbaptized, Mr. K-Z Slovak? Some people throw ‘em in a pot and boil ‘em down and use their fat to slick up their naked bodies and fly on broomsticks stuck up their twats to witch Sabbaths.”

Kazi took a small step backward. The little voice in his head that he knew must be his conscience was telling him that something was wrong here. More than that, it was practically screaming inside him, SOMETHING’S WRONG HERE. And yet he was afraid to turn and run. He knew that dealing with the straw man might be the same as dealing with a snake, and you had to walk very carefully away from a snake. His mother had told him about irregular people—”They look like anybody else, but they got bad stuff inside them. You just keep away from them when you can.”

Kazi took another step back.

“They slap all that little unbaptized boy fat on their bodies and slide it all over their tits,” the man said as he stepped a little closer. “They look like greasy old hags with snatches like gumless grandmas. And then they fly off to the devil and dance for him and kiss his smelly
culo,
as they say in the Southern climes.” Then the man roared with laughter.

Kazi would’ve liked to turn and run then, but instead, something really stupid happened inside him. He began to shut down a little—and he froze on the spot.