The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (2 page)

“Maybe,” Sam said. “It’s creepy as hell, believe me. It has a rep for being a real house of horrors.”

“House of whores, more like it. I bet you jack off there,” Alex said, chuckling. “I bet you go to horror movies and jack off, too.”

“Shut up,” Lizzie whispered, and then barely audible, her teeth clenched and less than a whisper emerging from between her lips:
“He’s my sister’s friend.”

“Come on,” Alex said. “Everybody does it. You do it. I do it. Your mom does it.”

“Gross,” Lizzie said, but she giggled a little. “Oh. Disgusting.”

“Not much else to do in a dead place like this,” Alex said. “Hey,” he turned to glance at the guy. “What you do for fun out here? I mean, I guess you could hop a train and go somewhere else. But what do guys like you do for fun?”

Sam said, “I guess in Parham everything’s hotter than a monkey in shit.”

Alex snickered. “I’m just teasing you. I think your town’s cool. I think even these back roads are cool. Hell, I once jacked off at
Alien Vs. Predator.”

“Gross,” Lizzie said. “Is that all guys talk about? Where they jacked off? Am I going to spend the rest of the summer hearing shit like this?”

“I did it in class one time,” Alex said. “Right in front of Mrs. Armpit-Hair. She was going over the French Revolution. I had a little revolt of my own going on. I put my head in my guillotine and just made it go up and down a lot. I had my shirttails out, so nobody could really see anything. I just unzipped and—”

“Okay, enough,” Lizzie said.

“No, it’s a cool story,” Alex said. “It was sort of uncontrollable and then Mrs. Armpit-Hair calls me up to the front to go over something about some French guy and I’m like, ‘I can’t come up there ‘cause I already came up here.’”

“That’s
your cool story?” Lizzie asked. She pulled over the car, and put it in park. “That story is one of the grossest... I think you made it up. And it’s offensive.”

“Hey, being offended is so bogus, Lizzie.”

“Funny how only people who are offensive think that.”

“Well, Joe Davison laughed his ass off when I told him.”

Lizzie started up the car again, cursing under her breath.

“Nobody’s got a sense of humor anymore,” Alex said. He drew a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “Smokes?”

He offered the pack to Sam, who passed on them. Alex lit one, and it nodded up and down between his lips as he spoke. “I don’t know how you guys don’t smoke. It’s like you have a little tension, you pop in a smoke, and before you can say ‘jack-shit,’ all tension’s gone.”

“Maybe it’s the whole lung and heart problem,” Sam said.

“Eh, I’ll deal with it when I’m fifty. And that’s a long time from now. Anyway, who wants to live that long? I want to go out fast and furious and with a smoke in my mouth and a mouth on my—”

“Window down, Alex,” Lizzie said. “Alex.
Alex?

“But we lose the air-conditioning.”

“Down,” she said. “It’s Ronnie’s car. I don’t want it smelling like an ashtray.”

Alex brought the window down a bit. “My favorite horror movie of all time is probably
The Exorcist.
I begged my mom to let me see it when I was ten, and she wouldn’t, but I snuck it out of the video store and watched it really late one night. I had nightmares for months. It was... oh damn ... it was like a big fat boner of a movie.”

“You jack off during
that
one?” Lizzie asked.

“Hardy-har-har. Baby, what’s yours?”

“I don’t know,” Lizzie said, hesitating as she slowed the car down along a particularly bumpy patch.” I don’t really like those kinds of movies much. I like that one with Nicole Kidman. The one where she was all uptight in a house back in a war, and there were things going on in the house. Come on, Alex, you know that movie. What’s it called?”

“The Others,”
Sam said.

“Thank you,” Lizzie said, glancing in her rearview mirror at the guy.

“Hey, you,” Alex turned around, cigarette bobbing. “What about you?”

“I don’t know.
Alien
was pretty scary, I guess.”

“Yeah, hmm, that’s true.” Alex turned back around and slipped his hand between Lizzie’s legs. She reached down and flicked his hand away.

“I like a lot of John Carpenter’s movies, too.”

“Halloween?”
Alex said. “My fave’s
Halloween III.
With that song in it.”

“Sure. But I meant more like
The Thing.”

“Holy mother of shit,” Alex said, nearly spitting his cigarette out.

“What’s wrong?” Lizzie asked.

“This guy and me, we got
way
too much in common,” Alex said. He puffed the last of his cigarette, letting the ash fall on his jeans, then flicked it out the window. “I loved
The Thing.
I mean, loved it. I saw it like ten times. Kurt Russell. I mean, that Thing.”

“I loved
The Shining,
too.”

“Oh yeah. Classic Nicholson. ‘Give me the frickin’ bat!’” Alex said, chuckling. “Doesn’t get much better than Nicholson. And that kid. Chillin’, that kid. And those little bug-eyed girls. And that bitch in the tub. Holy crap. But here’s the thing about horror movies. They always have these stupid people doing stupid things. I mean, ultimately. You don’t go after your kitty cat if the alien is on the ship. I mean, screw the kitty. Right? You don’t go doing the laundry when a damn killer’s on the loose. That kind of stuff.
Texas Chainsaw
—you don’t go to the rundown place with human teeth on the ground and stick around.”

A passing moment of silence in the car while they heard the shriek of what must have been some kind of night bird. Then Alex pointed off to the left.

“You see that?”

“What?”

“A kid. Standing there,” Alex said, “by the side of the road. He was just standing there. Staring at us. Staring.”

“Yeah, right,” Lizzie said.

Sam laughed. “I didn’t see the kid, either.”

“You guys are no fun,” Alex said. Then, more quietly, “I’m sort of not joking. I thought I saw a kid standing back there.”

“So, why are we going to this place?” Lizzie asked.

“Baby?”

“
We’re
the stupid people. We’re going to Harrow, the haunted house.”

“Aw,” Alex said. “Those are movies. This is real life. You know there’s no boogeyman in real life, right? I mean, you don’t believe in that kind of crap.”

“There’s people, though,” Sam said.

“Huh?”

“Like Ed Gein. Or Dahmer.”

“Who?”

“Dahmer’s the guy who tortured and killed younger guys, then ate some of them,” Sam said. “Ed Gein, he lived in Plainfield, Wisconsin. He used to dig up corpses of women and skin them and dress up in their skins.”

“Like in
Silence of the Lambs,”
Lizzie said, but had a slight clip to her voice as if she wished she hadn’t uttered this.

“Baby, nobody’s going
Silence of the Lambs
on us. You know there’s no crazy chainsaw killer out here. You’re not scared, right?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s dark, there’s no moon out, and this whole idea of getting together with people out here seems stupid at this point.”

“I’m gonna protect you with my love, Lizzie,” Alex said. “Come on, it’s all fun. We get together with some of the guys from school, we party some, we stay out late and ... well, we have fun.”

“She’s right,” Sam said. “We’re just like the stupid people in horror movies.”

A momentary silence in the car.

“You know” Alex began, “In
Dawn of the Dead,
when—”

“That’s it,” Lizzie said. “No more horror movies. I don’t want to hear about another one. If you bring up one more horror movie I’m going to put you out of the car and you can walk.”

“You just a teensy-weensy bit scared, baby?”

“No,” she said, but her voice was a little too soft.

2

“All these damn trees,” Lizzie said, as she swerved around rocks in the road and narrowly avoided a ditch on the far left, only to hit a major bump in the middle of the road. The road kept turning and winding and bumping.

Then, they all felt it—a jolt beneath the tires.

“We hit something?”

“No way,” Lizzie said. “I didn’t see anything.”

“Jesus, we hit something?” Alex asked again.

“Probably chains,” Sam said. “There are chains up around here to keep people out, but they get pulled down all the time.”

“It felt like more than that,” Lizzie said, but somehow the idea of chains across the road made sense to her. “I guess maybe it could’ve been.”

“Or we hit a rabbit,” Alex said. “Lots of rabbits out here. And cats.”

“I didn’t hit a cat,” Lizzie said.

“It was nothing,” Sam said. “There’s crap all over this road. I’m sure it was just a chain. It wasn’t that big a bump.”

“Isn’t there a main road?” Alex asked, turning around to face the guy. Alex barely remembered his name—he wasn’t someone who people really noticed at school, and it wasn’t as if they ever hung out together.

“Yeah,” Sam said. “But sometimes it gets patrolled.”

Lizzie and Alex quickly exchanged a glance.

“It’s because of break-ins,” Sam said.

“We’re not breaking in,” Lizzie said, as if to confirm something.

“Look, I know this place. Don’t worry. The back road’s the best way in. The chains across the road are all over the place when you come in from the town side of things. They always forget to string ‘em back up on this side.”

“So says you,” Lizzie said as they hit another bump. It felt like the frame of the car rose up while the axle stayed low to the ground. Alex got jostled around because he refused to wear a seatbelt.

“See? Look,” Sam said, again pointing.

Lizzie glanced into the headlights, and there she saw what seemed to be a stone wall with a break in it. Not quite a gateway, but almost.

“This calls for a drink,” Alex said, and drew the flask from his letterman’s jacket. He took a swig and passed it to Lizzie.

“Get it out of my face,” she said. She slowly drove the car up the last bit of unpaved road to the driveway.

3

They parked near the front porch, then got out.

Alex shouted, “Goddamn, when you said these people were rich, I didn’t know you meant stinkin’
rich.
I mean, goddamn! How come we never got up here before? Who the hell owns this place? It’s a frickin’ palace is what it is.”

“Quit yelling,” Lizzie said. She looked from the turrets to the gables. It was so dark, and she had already turned off the headlights so it was as if the place were an inky angular shadow of darkness against a darker woods with sky on each side and above it.

Harrow loomed like a shadow that had grown in darkness.

Night against a backdrop of endless night.

The place looked like a castle, and Lizzie felt less safe than she had in the car.

She had seen Harrow once or twice growing up, but never liked it. It had always reminded her of her dad when he lay dying in the road.

The car wrapped around a tree, and Ronnie kneeling over him, and Lizzie getting out of the car, a little eight-year-old running to her sister and her father’s side, only to watch his last breath turn to mist in the chilly winter air.

The house reminded her of death like that.

The dread of death, coming.

Its silhouette, like dark fingers stretching into shadow.

Lizzie caught her breath and felt that strange shiver run through her that she remembered from childhood. The shiver both she and Ronnie had spoken of between them—as if something had touched them on the inside the moment their father had died.

Touched us and never let go.

“It looks like Bannerman’s Castle, sort of,” Alex said. “You know, that island in the river, and there’s that castlelike thing there. Or the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park.”

“Or a big fat mausoleum,” Lizzie said. “I wish we hadn’t come here. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You were thinking a wild time for Thirteenth Night. Where’s the par-tay?” Alex asked.

Sam said, “The others said they’d be in the graveyard.”

“Graveyard?” Lizzie asked.
“Graveyard?”

“Cool,” Alex said, taking another swig. “Frickin’ cool. Par-tay with the dead.”

“It’s over there,” Sam said, pointing off into a further darkness. “I bet the party’s already started. There’s a path up.” He switched on a small flashlight. It barely lit more than a few feet in front of them. “So we all going now?”

“You sure it’s empty?” Lizzie asked, glancing window to window, balcony to porch. “Why is it all boarded up? I mean, nobody lives here, right?”

“Not for a few years. It’s practically condemned.”

“Let’s break in,” Alex said, turning to Sam. “Come on. Please? Come on.” He had a drunken, stretched-out plea to his words.

“I’m never going inside that place,” Lizzie said.

But within a few minutes, she and Alex had slipped through a broken board at the back door, leaving the other teenager (of whom Alex whispered to Lizzie, “Why the hell did we bring the big loser along?” and she whispered back, “I promised my sister, and anyway, because you didn’t want to come earlier, it’s lucky we had him for directions or we’d just be driving all over the place”) to trek up to the other party-goers on the hillside for some big drunkathon bonfire thirteen nights after the school year had ended.

Inside the house, Lizzie and Alex began making out. When Alex’s flask fell from his back pocket, Lizzie pulled away from him and said, “Did you hear that? Jesus, how come you didn’t bring a flashlight, too?”

Alex grinned, glancing around at the shadowed room they’d found. “Baby, it was just my flask. That’s all. I dropped it.”

“Shh,” she said, and then tried to focus on the dark itself. But no matter how much she tried, it seemed to get darker by the second. She wasn’t sure why this was happening. She had usually experienced the opposite—that if she was in the dark long enough, some slight light could be detected, her eyes would adjust to the darkness, and she’d at least be able to make out shadows.