The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (38 page)

Dory hated girls that cried over anything, but she couldn’t help it. As she wiped her eyes, trying to peel back the glue that had nearly sealed her eyelids, she could not stop weeping. She felt like that little girl, holding her mother’s hand again,” and that unusual bitter smell was in the air. And tears flowed.

But as she sobbed, now in a corner, balled up to protect herself, she began to see a little from her left eyelid.

The tears.

Between wiping at her eyes and crying, the glue had unsealed a little. Taking her sharpest fingernail, she put it between the lids of her left eye and further separated it. She had her left eye open.

It was enough.

9

Ronnie felt exhausted after she finished chopping up the last of the thing that had not been her sister Lizzie but had been a perfect imitation of her. Blood soaked her clothes and her face, and she clung to the hatchet like it was an amulet protecting her in all things.

Ronnie felt as if she had changed in the past several hours, from everything she had seen in the village until now.

She felt like a warrior, and even her arms felt muscled and tight. She glanced back at the corpse of the Lizzie thing. When she’d split it open, it had been nearly hollow inside. It reminded her of a cicada she’d seen cut open once—where it was all black and ridged on the inside, but nearly hollow. This thing was like that, too—it was an exoskeleton, with no interior, although a black bilelike substance oozed from what had been the Lizzie-thing’s head.

When she crouched down to examine it more closely, she saw tiny, feathery feelers on the inside of the flesh. And she couldn’t help herself—she had to see the rest. She looked at the Lizzie-thing’s genitalia—it had two thin black spurs coming from an opening that was neither anus nor vagina. Just above this, on her lower belly, there were two red points that dripped with a viscous liquid.

Like a spider. Holy shit.

She glanced up the stairs and back toward the front door. The door had changed, and Ronnie had come to fully expect that whatever was in the house was going to fuck with her mind. But the door had shimmering white silky strands across it.

As she touched the banister of the staircase, she felt something sticky, and drew her hand back. It didn’t budge—and the silky strands roped across the banister as well. She had to jerk her hand away from the banister, and even then the stickiness tore the thinnest layer of skin from the palm of her hand.

Spider’s web.

Ronnie heard a high-pitched squeal from up the stairs, as if someone were scratching a nail along a blackboard. She stepped back from the stairs, clutching the hatchet. She held it up, but took another step back, over the dead Lizzie-thing.

She saw the shadow of something huge moving— almost flitting—along the walls.

Coming for you.

Coming.

She glanced back over at the web that covered the door.
If I chop through it, I can get out. I can get out and come in another way.

She looked down the hall to her left. It was pitch black that direction.
Not sure I have many choices. Upstairs,
something’s coming down for me. The web
—
could try to chop my way through, but I could get caught in it, and then I’m screwed.

Ronnie looked into the darkness, hoping she’d distinguish some movement or get some sense of how far the corridor went.

“Shit,” she said. She kept her back to the wall as she went and held the hatchet up defensively. She moved slowly along the wall, down the corridor, into darkness.

At first, she felt a tickling along her ankles. She glanced down but couldn’t see anything. She looked back to the entryway and thought she saw various shadows moving there near the door.

She looked ahead into the dark.

Held her breath for a second, dispelling fears.

You can get through this. You have strength. You’ll kill them all if you have to.

She moved farther along and felt the tickling again.

Ignore it. It’s nothing. It’s not hurting you. It’s not stopping you. Just go.

She swung the hatchet into the air, hoping to keep anything that might be coming after her at bay.

You’II get through this. You’II get through it.

As she moved along the wall, she saw that the windows of this hallway were all covered with the webbing, but they began to let in a speck of light. It was just enough for her eyes to adjust to the dark and see a little bit.

She went rigid, and pressed herself to the wall when she saw the forms moving in the dark.

They were clumps of movement, as if small children— impossibly small—moved in groups together and then separated and reformed other groups.

Behind her, as she moved along, she felt a doorframe.

Thank God. I’ll get through this. Nothing’s hurt me yet. Nothing can. Nothing will.

She brought one arm behind her back, while she chopped the hatchet through the air in front of her. The dark things moved along by the webbed windows and scurried down the hall; others regrouped, then split off from their groups. She still could not make them out, but she assumed they must be like the Lizzie-thing in some way.

She turned the doorknob, and the door opened behind her.

Light from this room flooded the corridor.

She stood there, the rectangle of light from the room illuminating the dark things.

No longer dark.

Jesus.

They were beetles with iridescent green backs, moving along dead bodies—six or seven bodies that lay there. Beetles as large as human fists were scurrying all over them, covering them and making Ronnie believe the bodies had moved slightly. But the beetles were quickly devouring the flesh of the corpses so that ribs stuck out from the torso of a woman, and a man’s skeletal hand thrust from his fleshy wrist.

The light seemed to get the insects’ attention, however, and although she felt it was the height of madness, Ronnie was nearly certain that they had turned their attention away from the flesh feast to look at her. Their antennae moved, and she saw some of their wings lift as if they were about to take flight.

They’re going to eat me alive.

They’re flesh-eaters, and I’m next.

Behind her, in the room, she heard a noise that sounded like a
sh-sh-sh-sh.

She felt the small hairs at the nape of her neck rise up, and she swore that she could’ve peed standing up right then—

Ronnie Pond turned to see her dead father standing there, in his boxer shorts, his face as smashed from the car wreck as she had remembered it being that day so many years ago.

Beneath his feet, the floor seemed to be covered with a dark, thick liquid, almost like moist asphalt, that rippled like the surface of a just-disturbed pond.

No. No.

Something within her mind snapped, as if it hadn’t been snapping all day. Something snapped big, and she began shouting inside her head.
YOU ARE NOT GOING TO FUCK WITH ME, HARROW YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DRIVE ME INSANE WITH DREAMS AND THEN PUT ME DOWN IN SOME WASP NEST AND SHOW ME EVERYONE I EVER LOVED WHO DIED.

“Fuck this,” she said, and pulled the door shut again, stepping back into the darkness as the beetles flew at her and began tearing at her skin. She swung the hatchet out, and ran as fast as she could toward a feeble glow of light she saw. As she reached it, she saw it was the beginning of more stairs up, lit by jars full of candles.

In the flickering candlelight, the beetles had vanished. Glancing back from where she’d come, Ronnie saw them moving in their thick swarms, heading back to the piles of corpses.

Under the stairs, a doorway.

Locked.

And that’s when she heard Dory Crampton’s ear-piercing scream in an upstairs room.

10

Alice Kyeteler had entered the glorious cathedral that was Harrow. She saw the altar up ahead, and the bodies that had been split open and pinned back along the great pillars. She decided that it was going to be easier to ignore the trappings of this place—that the glamour Harrow projected was simply another way of trapping souls within it.

You didn’t live this long to get caught like this.

Yet part of her said to herself,
You stupid, stupid woman. You lived here for years and knew never to come to this one spot. This one place. This is the only thing that will destroy you for what you have.

A man stepped out from behind one of the pillars. He wore a wide red cape, and for a moment she thought he was dressed as a cardinal.

Cardinal of Hell, of course.

She didn’t recognize Roland Love, but that was because the house had changed him since entering it. He had been tearing open the birth sacs of the reborn ones, and had shepherded them along in their pupal stages of growth. But during this process, their claws and pincers had torn at him—for even though he used his spike to tear at the outer white maggot, the dark creatures within still had to pull their way out into the world and feed upon something. Roland had been that feeder, and the marks of the creatures were upon him in gashes and gouges. His face, though still strikingly handsome, was now sliced along the cheek and forehead. The barbed wire crown had been pressed farther down into his skull until his own flesh had covered over it, marrying to the barbed wire so that the barbs thrust out of his now-bald head. His eyes had sunken back a bit so they seemed smaller and darker, and the insanity of the house had pulsed in his blood long enough that he as much resembled a nightmare as he did a dream. His bloodred cap flowed over him, hiding the more obvious scourges to his body, but he had come through it all, a servant to Kingdom Come.

Alice saw all this—feeling the gentle fever of her psychic ability on the surface of her skin as she touched him. She had not felt such a strong charge since she’d first come to Watch Point.

The house owns this one,
she thought.

“We can hear your thoughts here,” Roland said. “No need to hide them with your mind.”

“I suppose you speak for Harrow.”

He nodded. He swung his arm out to suggest that they walk farther along the ancient stones toward the altar. “The Kingdom is at hand.”

Alice showed no fear. She walked with Roland Love toward the great golden altar that looked as bright as the sun. As they neared it, she saw the worshippers on their knees, gazing up at the statues around the altar.

Roland stopped, and smiled. “Do you see what we can accomplish? If all are here?”

She reached over and touched his wounded hand, lightly pressing against the large gash just beneath his thumb. “You had visions, once.”

“I am a visionary.”

“No, you believe God spoke to you. But this is no god here. This has perverted your belief and twisted it so that it could devour you.”

He shook his head lightly. “I was told you were a scorpion in our midst. I was told that no matter how you seemed like someone’s mother with your graying hair and your granny braid and your granola charm, that you had a stinger waiting to come out.”

She gazed up at him, at his eyes. “You’re in a dream. You’re sleepwalking through it. This place has done it to you. But you and I, we’re just electricity for it. That’s all. It’ll use me, and use you, and then the lights will go out again.”

“Do you see the reborn?” Roland said, taking her over to the worshippers.

There may have been forty of them in the first pews and along the altar, and when they turned to look back at Alice, her fear finally returned. “How could you be part of this?”

“I will be reborn, as well,” he said.

She looked at the others there. Ordinary people from the village.

She had already known that some of them were dead. But these were not the dead.

These had vestigial wings in their backs, and the women’s breasts had fine dark hairs all over them: She gasped at one of the men because she was sure it was Army Vernon, but not really him.
It’s a second one of him. He’s dead. The house got him.

She also saw Thad Allen, big as day, naked, squatting near the altar, looking at her...
the way an insect would. As if there’s nothing to be seen. A praying mantis, a cockroach.
His eyes were not yet fully formed and had a milky discharge in them.

Beyond all these worshippers were maggot creatures that wriggled and hummed, and some of them had begun tearing with pincers through their larval covering.

A young man with a beautiful face and a flop of sandy brown hair, as naked as all the rest of them, got up from a pew and began bounding toward them.

It was Roland himself, but not exactly him. The imitation’s eyes were more human than the real Roland’s eyes had become. His skin was flawless, and his sinewy muscles showed off a vibrant, strong physique. Only his penis would’ve betrayed a difference, for there were three prongs hanging downward that looked almost like a fly’s proboscis.

“It’s a nightmare,” she said. “That’s all.”

“The village has sacrificed much to the marriage of the Holy and Unholy tonight,” Roland said, raising his arms to embrace his other self. The naked Roland went to the caped Roland, and they held each other for several seconds. The caped Roland began squirming in the other’s arms, and Alice gasped when she saw that his other self had begun chewing at his neck, taking away a thin strand of skin.

The other Roland looked at her, sniffing, but returned to the throat of his origin.

“It is beautiful,” the real Roland said, his voice turning to a rasp as his other sucked at his earlobe, taking a shred of his ear and part of his scalp down its throat.

Roland opened his cape, and others came to him— children with their teeth gnashing and the fine hairs on their stomachs quivering, old women Alice had passed every day in the village, recreated but for a change or two in their bodies or the discharge from their eyes and mouth.

Beneath Roland’s red cape, he, too, was naked. They came to him, and he covered them with his cape. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head as their ministrations to his body sent him into a state of delirium. He gasped and moaned as if he were climaxing, but Alice watched in horror as the others tore at his flesh, and then began to draw the flesh apart.