The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (40 page)

Alice felt a desert hot breeze pass by her, almost as if there were a fire just beyond the walls and a blast of its heat had burst through.

Then where the wind had come through—what Army must’ve meant by the “cosmic vacuum cleaner”—a gap in the stone wall of the cathedral.

It was about as tall as a man and wide enough to fit through, but as she got up to go look at it, she noticed it was shrinking as if filling with sand.

She rushed over to it and squeezed her way through the gap before it closed.

20

Alice nearly lost her balance in the next room—it was a small, plain room with a mattress in a corner and several jars full of lit candles around its walls. She first noticed the stench—it was a smothering belch of human gas in her face.

On the mattress, the corpse of a little boy wearing the kind of suit that a little boy might be buried in—the dark tie and gray suit with shorts and black socks that went nearly to his knees.

She went over to the corpse, covering her face with her hands and trying to breathe through her mouth.

His face was rotted nearly to the bone. His teeth had been pulled by someone, and lay beside the corpse.

She knew who it was without having to think twice.

Arnie Pierson.

She went over to the window near the body, and peeled back the shutters that had been badly nailed in place. Then she opened the window to let in the chilly air. She looked out at the night—it was simply darkness with no lights to be seen whatsoever. And yet above she saw the pinprick of stars in the fabric of night and she thought, briefly, of things other than Harrow and death.

When she turned around from the window, she saw the closed door behind her and the peeling wallpaper of the area from which she’d come.
A dream of a cathedral. Someone else’s dream. Stolen by Harrow. The mind of Harrow. The devouring soul of this place.

A dead boy, his soul still inside his body, sacrificed to this house.

Stealing dreams from sleepers, and making nightmares come through others.

On the wall behind Arnie’s head, someone had scrawled:

The Nightwatchman looked into the heart of the dreamers, and found their dark secrets.

Despite everything she’d seen that night, Alice could no longer hold back. She sat down beside the rotting corpse and began weeping. She didn’t weep for herself or for Thad Allen or Sam Pratt or for those she’d seen who had died and those she had not seen who had died.

She wept for Arnie, who had died before any of this had begun.

Even dead, the house had taken him.

The house is unrelenting.

The house is pure fury.

Harrow is alive and insane, and it sucks the dreams and the souls.

It must be stopped now.

She got up after a few minutes of sitting with the corpse and went to the doorway, opening it to the hall. Then she returned to the dead boy’s body, and lifted it up. She had gotten used to the stink of it, and no longer saw it as a putrefying corpse, but as a little boy who needed to be buried somewhere far from Harrow.

21

In the hallway, Alice saw that the house had somehow turned itself down. Images of stone and wood flickered a bit, as if there had been an energy drain. She didn’t know what it meant, but she carried the boy along the corridor. When she came to a staircase, she saw Ronnie Pond and Dory Crampton and a little boy named Kazi who had a mummified dog’s head in his hand.

“Thank God,” Ronnie said. “Alice, you made it.”

Dory glanced at the middle-aged woman with the braid and then at the dead boy in her arms. “What if she’s part of the house?”

“No,” Ronnie said. “She’s not.”

Alice laid the corpse on the floor. She looked at the others. “This is Arnie Pierson. Even after death, Harrow’s kept his body.”

She went over to Kazi Vrabec. A light around him shimmered with a whiteness that she hadn’t seen in anyone in years.

He’s got power in him he doesn’t even know,
she thought.
He may be a source.

“We need to leave now. Right now. With you,” she said to him. “Will you take my hand?” She offered her right hand to him.

Kazi looked down at the dog’s head and then at her hand. He glanced over at Dory and Ronnie. He glanced at the corpse, as well, as if it would talk to him.

Then he put out his hand and let his fingers touch the edge of Alice’s palm.

As he did so, Alice said to him, “We have to find the heart of Harrow.”

22

Alice closed her hand around Kazi’s fingers and felt a surge within her. Not a surge that brought her anything. Not the kind of surge she felt when she sensed another “sensitive” nearby.

This surge sucked at her. Took what she had within her and began to drain her of any ability she’d felt.

She looked at the boy, shocked. As she did, it was no longer Kazi, but Arnie Pierson himself, with metal knife-points for teeth that overbit his lips and sunken, hollow eyes. He parted his lips and said, “You will never find the heart of the house, Alice Kyeteler. I
am
the house.”

The dog’s head in his left hand began snapping as if alive, and the boy raised it up toward her.

23

Dory saw the look on Alice’s face—her eyes widened and her skin had gone chalk-white as if she were being drained of blood. Alice still clutched the boy’s right hand. The boy pressed the dog’s head up to Alice’s lips.

24

Ronnie lifted her hatchet, defensively, ready to swing at anything she saw, but all she saw was a little boy pushing the tattered dog skull at Alice’s face.

25

Alice saw something entirely different.

26

Her eyes began to turn up into her skull, and she felt her breathing going too rapidly, but she could not control it. She tried to tell herself that what she saw was nothing, just another nightmare of Harrow, but she couldn’t get it from her mind—

It was the other world that Harrow guarded, the doorway into something more fierce than Alice had ever been able to imagine. And when she tried to make sense of what the little boy showed her, she felt her throat clutch, and her heart begin to burst inside her chest.

27

As Alice fell, dying, Kazi Vrabec dropped the dog’s head and turned to face Ronnie and Dory.

Alice’s body twitched and spasmed as her face contorted into a rictus of pain. As she died, she did what she could to send a message to the others. But in her last seconds, she knew her mouth could not form the words.

28

Even so, Ronnie thought she heard a distant voice, weak, as if a phone signal were being lost even as the words were cried out. And then, a terrible silence.

But Ronnie had heard the words.

In flesh.

Kazi turned toward her, tears streaming down his face. “Please. Help me. Get me out of here. Take me somewhere safe.”

He reached his arms up to Ronnie like a child needing its mother.

Superimposed over his face, she saw the other little boy with the knife teeth.

In flesh. What did it mean? What was it?

The house is in the flesh.

He is the flesh of the house.

Flesh is weak.

Flesh is corruptible.

He is the heart now.

“Please,” the boy whimpered. “I feel sick. Something bad is happening. Please. Hurry. Take me. Take me out of here.”

“Are you Harrow?” she asked, her voice full of calm even when she raged within her body.

He glanced up at her, his eyes flashing almost like a wild animal’s. “You wouldn’t hurt a child.”

Without hesitating, Ronnie swung the hatchet around and caught Kazi Vrabec squarely in the chest.

Dory screamed, but she might’ve been screaming ever since Alice had fallen—Ronnie had blocked everything but her focus on the boy.

Kazi Vrabec looked down at the hatchet embedded in his chest and the blood that burst from it.

29

The little boy fell over, dead.

Ronnie went to draw her hatchet from his body.

Dory listened to the sound of what seemed to be a hundred doors slamming open and closed, and windows slamming shut, and the sound of breaking glass upstairs and down the hallway.

Above it all, she heard the man she knew was Mr. Spider screeching from some upstairs room as if he were being tortured to death.

30

From the open wound in Kazi Vrabec’s chest, what looked like a swarm of flies came up, buzzing and humming in a small cyclone that grew until the room itself seemed blackened. The sound became deafening, and Ronnie covered her ears against it.

They flew toward the ceiling, and then up the stairs.

When the house went silent again, Ronnie looked back at Dory and said, “It’s done.”

31

“We need to take him far from this place,” Ronnie said after several minutes had passed.

She and Dory had simply become numb from what they’d experienced in the house, and they stared at the bodies that lay before them for too long, bewildering thoughts going through both of their minds.

“We need to take him to some kind of sacred ground. Jewish, Christian, Muslim, pagan, doesn’t matter. It has to be someplace where this house can’t ever touch him again.”

“But he’s dead,” Dory said. “Isn’t he?” She went to kneel beside Kazi Vrabec.

“Not him,” Ronnie said. She pointed to Arnie Pierson’s rotting body. “Him. He’s the one who set this in motion. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I don’t give a damn. But we have to take him out of here. Whoever dug him up from his grave knew that the ritual the night my sister and her friends were here put power in his bones and flesh. Woke something up, and put some to sleep. I don’t know who Arnie Pierson was. I know nothing about the kid. But whatever was in his bones or body is still in them. And he can’t be near this house ever again.” She knew this must be true, and that the words she heard from Alice’s mind had been an indication. “We all have some minor ability, Dory. Maybe a lot of people do. This kind of psychic bullshit. I don’t really even believe it, but for Alice’s sake, I’ll play along for now. I wouldn’t have believed everything we’ve seen tonight, either. But I can play along with it while I’m still scared shitless. So let’s get Arnie out of here now. Then we’ll see if we can get help, and if there’s a way to burn this house down.”

Dory nodded, and they both went to pick up Arnie Pierson’s body. “Uh,” Dory said, as she lifted his legs.

Ronnie had a grim look on her face. “Ignore the smell. We just need to get him out.”

They carried him along the hall, past another door or two, but Harrow was completely ordinary again.

Nothing to fear.

The switch was off. The house was dead. Or if not dead, sleeping. Ronnie only felt a whisper of something lingering, like the smell of ozone after a machine that’s been running too long shuts off.

Harrow’s front door was open wide, and although it was still night, both she and Ronnie could see faint traces of purple light along the treetops as they brought Arnie Pierson out.

Dory looked at the corpse and let out a gasp.

Ronnie looked down as she carried him by his shoulders.

The face of the boy had plumped up when it met the outside air, and it was not the face of Arnie Pierson at all.

“How the hell...” Ronnie said.

It was Kazi Vrabec’s face. Eyes closed.

They set the body down at the edge of the driveway, and looked back up at the open door of Harrow.

“Harrow’s playing tricks on us,” Ronnie said.

“You want to go back in there?” Dory asked, a tremble to her voice.

“No way in hell,” Ronnie said. “I’d rather just go find explosives and blow it up.”

“Does this mean it’s still going?”

“Maybe. Maybe it’s just a shred of something. A whisper. I think we shut it down. Even if it has a little energy right now, it would not have let us out,” Ronnie said. “I guess objects in that house are closer than they appear.”

Dory gave her a funny look, as if she didn’t quite understand what Ronnie had meant.

And even if she didn’t completely believe it, Ronnie Pond didn’t care. She looked up at Harrow, with its towers and gabled rooftops and its stone and wood and glass, and she uttered a curse upon it as if curses could actually work.

“I feel like it’s over,” Ronnie said. “Maybe that’s all that matters.”

They carried the body down the driveway.

When the sun finally came up, they were still walking with the boy in between them, along the narrow unpaved roads back toward the village. Dory kept dropping his feet, until Ronnie decided that she’d just carry the boy and deal with the weight of him, but she too was exhausted. When they found an abandoned car with the keys in the ignition but the driver missing, they decided that they’d drive up to Parham. “We can tell the cops,” Ronnie said. “We can get some rest. And they can deal with all this.” She didn’t want to have to mention all the dead. She didn’t want to have to even remember all that she and Dory had seen the previous night.

She just wanted it to be over, and for the shock and numbness to begin.

She opened the back door of the car, and laid the boy’s body down as gently as she could.

Dory got the car started, and said, “Well, at least whoever abandoned this one left us a little bit of gas.”

32

They drove out along the bumpy roads as the sun broke from over the hills, and they ran over some chains that had fallen in the road from “No Trespassing” signs on each side of it. The roads that they took twisted through woods and across fields, and Dory was glad she’d taken the back way so they wouldn’t even see the rooftops of the village again.