The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (39 page)

They were turning him inside out.

The noise itself was unbearable. She covered her ears to block it out, but the slurps and the squishes seemed to reach her, and she cried out because Alice Kyeteler, at last, had given up.

She fell to her knees, not in worship, but in the utmost terror she’d ever felt.

The others continued to draw and quarter Roland Love, and he groaned and grunted as the doorways and passages of his flesh and organs were pried apart until the meat and bones and blood of him was all on the outside.

11

Trying to follow the source of the scream, Ronnie Pond raced along the upper hallway, looking in the open rooms as she went. All the lights were on bright, and she passed rooms in which she saw a man who looked like he had somehow transformed into a large lizard, tearing a woman apart between her legs, while she laughed; in another room, she saw a man with a bloodied crotch with what looked like a python halfway down his throat, its head poking from within the skin at his collarbone; passing another, she saw a mass of blood and bones and organs, like a man skinned alive, writing madly on the walls of a room, talking to himself; in others, she saw more of what she’d seen in the village—the madness of human beings possessed by malevolence. She followed a second stairway up, and found room after room of dead, torn women. It was purely by luck that she found a very naked Dory Crampton in a room, fighting a man in a long striped shirt who needed to find a good set of trousers himself, while a strange-looking little boy jumped up and down and kept making a strange whistling sound.

12

Ronnie didn’t hesitate, despite the green scum all over the floor. She raced into the room, and brought the hatchet against the guy’s right arm. The little boy went running out of the room making yet another weird sound, like a clacking.

The man she’d hit fell over onto the floor, moaning and screeching about “The days of judgment are at hand! You can’t stop it! It’s a force to be reckoned with!”

Ronnie shouted at the other girl, whom she recognized from school. “Dory! Get the hell up! Now!”

Dory Crampton looked up at her and said, “Holy shit. You’re not another one of them.”

“No time to talk. Those yours?” She pointed to the overalls and shirt that lay in a clump by the door. “Get dressed and let’s get the hell out of here. We need to find the others.”

“Who?”

“We’ll know when we see “em,” Ronnie said.

13

When Ronnie reached out to pull Dory up, they both felt it at once. It was like a play of lightning between them. A recognition went through both of them. Before Mr. Spider could get up, Ronnie slammed the hatchet into his thigh, and again he fell. Blood spurted from him this time, and it splattered on her already blood-stained clothes.

Once out of the room, Ronnie began pulling Dory down the hallway.

“It’s us,” Ronnie said, nearly out of breath. “You know that.”

“Us?”

“Harrow wants to keep us separate. You have it. I have it. Alice has it. Army must have it. It killed everyone else.”

“Did you see the monster?” Dory asked.

“What?”

“There was this
thing.
I didn’t get a good look at it. It sort of was all smushy and had tentacles and ...”

“No.”
Don’t be afraid,
Ronnie thought.

Her voice passed into Dory’s mind. She nodded.

We have to destroy this place,
Ronnie told her in her mind.

They thought they both heard something moving toward them from the far end of the corridor, so Dory and Ronnie raced to the staircase at the large mirror. Dory stopped suddenly, seeing something in the mirror.

When Ronnie looked up at it, she too saw it—wisps of what might’ve been people they’d never seen before, like ghosts trapped in the mirror, reaching out for them.

She remembered the words Alice told her about the place.

Harrow traps souls. It harvests those with psychic ability and it uses them up. It sucks at them.

Ronnie hauled back and swung the hatchet at the mirror, breaking it. “Well, if any souls are trapped there, we just set ‘em free.”

But when the mirror shattered, they both saw it: Behind the glass and the frame, it looked like there was an entrance to an entirely different house.

“You want to go see what’s there?” Ronnie asked.

“No fuckin’ way,” Dory said. “Let’s just find your friends and get the hell out.”

Dory nearly tripped down the stairs getting to the first floor. When the front door was in sight, a naked blond girl with stringy hair stood in her path. The hair nearly obscured her face and was all damp and matted. When Ronnie came up behind her, she gasped. “Shit. It’s Bari Love. I thought I’d killed her. Or at least put her out for awhile.”

Ronnie raised her hatchet as if to attack, but stopped.

Bari Love’s eyes were milky white and dripping a substance like cottage cheese down her face. Her blond hair was too thin, and showed her scalp in places. She opened and closed her mouth as if trying to say something, but there was no sound.

“It’s like the Lizzie-thing,” Ronnie said. “She’s all hollow on the inside.”

She swung the hatchet and caught Bari just above the jaw. The hatchet got stuck there, and flew out of Ronnie’s fingers. The Bari-thing fell to the floor, the hatchet still caught from her ear to her mouth.

And that’s when the little boy with the dog’s head came out into the foyer.

“Who the hell are you?” Dory asked.

“Kazi?” Ronnie asked. “Kazi Vrabec?”

The boy nodded.

“I babysit him sometimes,” Ronnie said. “We’re friends, aren’t we? Are you okay?”

Kazi nodded, and held the dog’s head up for her to see.

“How do we know it’s really him?”

“I just know,” Ronnie said.

Ronnie took the dog’s head from him, and grimaced as she looked at it with its pasty gauze and bits of fur and leathery skin at the muzzle and around the ears.

“He’s my friend,” Kazi said. “My only friend.” Then he pointed down the dark hallway behind him. “Mr. Vernon died down there. Of fright.”

14

The three of them stood in the empty room and looked down at Army Vernon. His eyes were open so wide they nearly had burst out. His mouth was stretched in a final scream to the point that it looked like he had a dislocated jaw.

Ronnie was the first to see the gun, lying a few feet away from him. “Know how to shoot?”

Dory nodded, and went to retrieve the gun.

Kazi Vrabec said, “There’s another little boy who lives here.”

Ronnie and Dory looked back at him.

“His name is Arnie. He can’t talk with his mouth. His tongue got tore out. And his teeth got pulled one by one. And his insides all went on the outside. But he can talk in here.” Kazi tapped the edge of his head. “Arnie’s one of the doorways.”

“Doorways?” Dory asked.

“You know, like a door. He lets them in. He told me with his mind that I can start to let them in, too.”

“Who?”

“Others,” Kazi said, almost as if it were an embarrassing thing to admit. “But I bet you can be doorways, too. He said people like us keep the doorway clear and the door open and unlocked. He talks to me in my head, just like my buddy does.” He went and took the head back from Ronnie, and cradled it in his arms.

I
can talk to you in your head, too,
Ronnie said, hoping he’d hear her.

Kazi nearly dropped the dog’s head, and looked up at her.

15

Don’t trust them, kiddo. They’re bitches. lean smell a bitch a mile away, and they even hurt Mr. Spider, which was really mean,
the dog’s head told him.

“But they seem nice,” Kazi said aloud, still watching the two young women.

Nice? Hell, kiddo, one’s covered with blood and one was a Mrs. Fly only now she’s Mrs. Flyshit. You can’t trust those types, Kazi. They’re not like you. Sure, maybe they could be doorways, but what kind of doorway are we talkin’? The kind that that creaks and makes you trip and the door’s locked just because they feel like locking it. They’re like the old man. You saw what was in his heart. You saw it. He was ice cold inside and he would’ve shot you if he’d had half a chance, you know that, kiddo. We hated him. All of us.

Kazi cocked his head to the side, listening to the voice of the dog.

But tell you what kid, let’s take them to see Arnie. Arnie’ll know what to do with them. Maybe the two of you
—
Arnie and you together
—
you’ll come up with a way to incapacitate the bitches.

“I don’t like when you call them that,” Kazi said, looking up at both Ronnie and Dory. In his mind, he asked the dog,
Can they hear what we’re saying?

Only when you open your mouth, kiddo. They’re not the power source that you are. They’re like little candles. You’re our pint-sized nuclear power plant, Kazi.

Ronnie Pond watched him as if she knew what the dog was telling him, but all she said was, “Well, let’s go find Alice. If she’s still alive.”

Then she went to pull the hatchet out of the Bari-thing’s skull.

16

Alice lay down on the cathedral stones and looked up at the great murals that moved with the demons and angels, and the dome above that had strange creatures painted upon it, with tentacles and wings like dragonflies, wrapped around women. From the women’s bodies came other creatures of varying weirdness.

Harrow can create all this from the dormant psychic spark in a handful of people.

Harrow can draw even from me to create this.

Can draw from anyone
—
from Ronnie Pond and Army, who probably didn’t even know he had some ability, however slight.

Why now? Why here?

She thought of the dead boy who had been found mutilated on the grounds, and she knew that had been the point of awakening. Even the dead boy—freshly dead— had something within him that Harrow had wanted.

And the Nightwatchman.

Why destroy the village? Why leak out like that?

She heard the humming of the worshippers, and felt safe from their rabid hungers.
The house wants me. That much I know. It will take me dead, but it won’t kill me. It wants me, but it’s scared of me.

And then, Alice Kyteler knew. She knew with a conviction that could not be shaken.

The ones in town still sleep. Their dreams are fueling this. We’re fueling this. The house without us is nothing. It doesn’t want us to die, but we’re frail. We may die. It wants our awe. Our allegiance.

It wants to convert us to. .. opening the portal. Where is my ability? What can I bring to this to shut down this house? Where is its heart that I might rip it out?

17

And that’s when Alice heard Army Vernon’s voice. He wasn’t speaking to her in her head. He said, “It doesn’t have a heart, Alice.”

18

Alice sat up and glanced around. The cathedral had grown fuzzy around her as if it were a watercolor melting in the rain. But as it shimmered, she saw the bare walls of the house again. Still, the great cathedral came back into focus, and she saw the worshippers as they strung the meat and bones and sliver of face of Roland Love up to a makeshift cross at the altar.

There, sitting in a pew not more that six feet from her was Army Vernon.

19

He was as insubstantial as morning mist, but his face moved as it would have in life, and unlike flesh and blood, it gave off no aura for her to see.

“You’re dead,” she said, no longer afraid of the idea of death because she had already begun assuming that death would come for her.

“Be that as it may,” Army said, “the house has no heart, Alice. You can’t kill what isn’t mortal.”

“How do I know you’re not just part of the house now?”

“I guess you don’t,” he said. “I guess I am part of the house at this point.”

“Is it bad?”

“Being dead? Not as bad as being alive, let me tell you. Now here’s all I know. There’s a kid here.”

“Arnie Pierson. His spirit?”

“He didn’t tell me his name. But this kid, well, he has power you can’t even imagine. He showed me something pretty damn bad, Alice. I watched a real horror show in that kid’s face. I don’t know how he did it, but it was like he was reaching inside my chest and giving a good juicing to my heart. Those girls found me.”

“Ronnie?”

The spirit nodded, with wisps of evaporating particles of his flesh moving in the wake of the nod. “Her and some other girl. The one who works with Benny down at the pound. They found me and they can probably tell you that it didn’t look like I had a good time in my last seconds. But I will tell you that it’s worse than that. When that kid shows you what he has inside him, believe me, you can’t live past that point. It will stop anybody’s heart.”

Alice watched as he raised his hand slightly, and then bits of his misty fingers slowly drifted away from his form like milkweed floating in the air. “All this,” he said. “This cathedral nonsense. It’s just a distraction. There’s a...” As he spoke he looked to his left as if he’d just heard a noise. “Oh shit. It’s coming again.”

“What? Army?”

“I think of it as the cosmic vacuum cleaner. It’s going down the halls of this place sucking up the dead. Listen, I’d better go. All I can tell you is I’m stuck here. Nothing you or I can do about that. But that kid has to be stopped. He has something bigger than you or anyone here has ever had, and I can’t even call it psychic ability. It’s not that minor. The house gave him a big gift, and it’s the gift of madness. All I can tell you about it is it’s bad. Mean bad.” And then, his eyes still glancing to the left, he rose and his particles spread apart until they were a fine mist on the air. Then there was nothing to be seen other than the pews and the great stone pillars.