The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (8 page)

“Oh, baby,” he said, his voice soft and gentle. “You’re back. Oh, my precious little darlin’.”

“Daddy?” she asked again, and it was as if she were blind, or somewhere else within her mind and unable to see him right in front of her face. “Daddy, is that you?”

“Yes, baby, it’ll be okay. We’ll get you down to a doctor and see what this is all about.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead. “It’ll be all right. It’s just a fever, sweetie. It’s just a little touch of something.”

“Rat shit, rat shit,”
his daughter growled.

And then she went for his throat.

5

“I saw the little boy,” the woman said, her voice weak and feeble, barely more than a whisper. “Right where you’re standing. Right there.”

“Oh,” her husband said. “There’s no one else here. Believe me. I’d know.”

“He was. He was right there. He had something in his hands—cupped around it. Like it was a bird. He wanted me to see it. He opened up his little fingers slowly.”

“What was it? What was in his hands?”

“I don’t know. I just knew it was awful. That if I kept watching him while he showed me what he held I’d see something terrible. Something I could never take back. Never forget.”

“It was a dream. Wasn’t it?”

“No,” the woman said, a bit of whimpering in her voice as if she were on the verge of tears. “But I closed my eyes. I pretended it was. He kept touching me. I wouldn’t look. He touched me all over. That little boy. And he kept whispering something, and I wanted to cover my ears but I couldn’t. I had to lie there and hear his vile words.”

“It’s only a dream,” the man said, taking her hand in his. “You need to rest. It’s all been too much, these days here. You’ll see. A little rest and you won’t see him again.”

“Am I dying?” she rasped, her voice gone dry.

He pressed his finger to his lips and whispered, “Shhhh.”

And then he refastened the restraints on the woman’s wrists, and tightened them around the bedpost in the room in the old mansion where they lived, the one outside the village, the one called Harrow.

You are the Nightwatchman,
he told himself.

PART TWO

OH, THE DREAMS YOU'LL DREAM

CHAPTER FOUR

1

The Church of the Vale was built first as a Dutch Reformed Church, and then it became, for a time, Catholic. It then transformed again in a whirl of madness—one year when most of the village’s Catholics ended up going over to Parham to St. Anthony’s after the priest at the Church of the Vale had an affair with one of the parishioners—into an Episcopal Church. Father Alan arrived on the scene. Some former Roman Catholics even attended, but none were as attentive as the acolyte who this very afternoon gazed up lovingly at the statue of Jesus and asked for direction. He was nearly eighteen, and had decided that it was time to think seriously about entering the priesthood. Or at least Divinity School of some kind.

His name, Roland Love. The elder child of the Love household, Roland had known from an early age that he would dedicate himself to his church and to the Lord. He’d spent much of his life preparing for this calling. His blond hair was kept short, almost in a military style. He was six foot one and had sinewy muscles and a strong frame. He’d been working out at the local gym after school because he had been feeling since summer that God was going to call him. He had slept nights in the church pews—having to sneak out from his bedroom window. Once, his dad had caught him and told him if he was going to sneak off to see some girl, to at least be up front about it. Roland couldn’t tell his father that it was God who was his guide. His best friend. And he’d give everything he had to be with God as much as possible.

He felt as if he related more to people who had lived thousands of years in the past—those who had fought and died for the cross. Those who had carried out the orders of God without a second thought. Roland had felt the calling within him since he was a boy, but his parents, while perfectly good churchgoers, had never quite been the type to take it that one extra step further and dedicate their lives to Kingdom Come.

That’s what Roland wanted—he wanted to be a knight of Kingdom Come.

He had trained for it, kept himself pure, and had forsworn the games of other boys his age. He had been dreaming of Kingdom Come since the summer, and had begun to imagine it as a vast cathedral, full of the Angelic Host. In his dream, when he walked across its floor, he could look below his feet and see the sinners in hell as they suffered. He had mercy on them in his dreams—he told the angels that he sought forgiveness, not for himself, but for those poor lost souls beneath him.

Roland was fairly sure his younger sister Bari was one of those lost souls.

He had caught her once in the backseat of Andy Harris’s Mustang, and her bra had been completely taken off, the buttons of her blouse opened, and Andy’s face had been buried against one of her peach-colored breasts like he was a baby sucking.
(Think of the baby Jesus,
Roland had thought then.
Think of the baby Jesus and the purity of Mary. Don’t think of the awful fornication of those sinners. Pray for them. Beg God for His forgiveness so that their time in hell will be brief.)

Roland did his best not to be the kind of person who told others about their own sins. He understood that this was between them and God, and had nothing to do with him. He wanted to be one of the soldiers of the New Temple of the Lord—for Kingdom Come to arise on this earth, for Heaven and Earth to combine. Although he couldn’t quite remember when he’d first felt the touch of God on him, if you were to go back to his sixth year, when his Sunday School teacher had told him the story of Enoch, who had walked with God daily and who was the only man who did not experience death, for God took Enoch up with him—if you could get inside the mind of the little boy that Roland had been, you’d have understood that his religious feelings stemmed from his fear of death. He wanted to be a soldier of God primarily so that God would treat him like Enoch, and take him up without the pain of death.

But his devotion to God had been hard-won. Temptation was everywhere. Girls in school had been throwing themselves at him since he was fourteen. He knew it was his purity—they had a touch of the devil within them, and all that was evil wanted to taint purity. But he would never let the girls touch him. He paid no mind to them, and even when sexual thoughts arose within his body, he bit his hands at night rather than allow them to touch the filth down between his legs.

He was not going to mess this up just because of sex.

He knew the devil was always ready. He had argued with his mother about the devil once, telling her that the devil was real. “He is an angel who rebelled and didn’t submit to God’s word” he told her at fourteen. “And he sends his demons to lie to men so we may become weak and not enter the Kingdom.”

“I am not going to raise some superstitious Jesus freak,” his mother had said, and even though she had stomped off, cursing under her breath, and they’d nearly dropped out of the church altogether, Roland knew that God would come through for them.

And for him.

God told him to lie to his mother. Roland was sure that was the Lord’s wish, for he didn’t feel bad comforting his mother later and telling her he had only been joking. A lie for God was a lie for the good.

All other lies were demonic.

God filled him to the brim. God was his master. God bent him to His will. God brought him to his knees. Roland sought God’s succor, and when he felt God’s presence with him, it was as if he had been opened up and entered by a wondrous strange feeling.

He had always felt God’s touch on his shoulder, and God’s voice spoke to him when all else was silent. What perturbed him this day was that he had lost the feeling of being called at all.

He closed his eyes as he knelt there, and prayed for many things, including his little sister’s recovery from whatever ailed her, and for his mother’s sadness, and his father’s stubborn nature. Then he began to list others in town—the sinners and the saints and those in the world fighting wars and those in heaven or hell who needed redemption. Roland intended to include every single human being in his prayers whenever possible.

He was sure that this would reawaken the feeling that God had called him to this church in particular.

That Jesus wanted him as a soldier in the Army of the Righteous.

Dear Lord, please deliver me from the thoughts of night and from the devil’s hands, deliver me from the nightly images of women who throw themselves around me, deliver me from the desires of the flesh.

Opened his eyes to see Jesus in the loincloth on the altar.

Jesus’s body was like Roland’s. It was sinewy yet strong, despite the pain and torture that had put Him on the cross.

Through your suffering, make me pure.

Then he sat back in the first pew and whispered to no one, “I just don’t feel it.”

He pressed his hands to his face, and began sobbing.
I
want you in me. I want you in me.

And that’s when he got the strange vision in his head.

The impure one.

The one of tying up a girl he knew by the wrists, and tearing her clothes off, then taking his hands and...

Lord, help me. Get these thoughts out of me.

He closed his eyes to resume praying, and that’s when Jesus spoke to him.

At first, he didn’t open his eyes because he was afraid he imagined it. His heart beat rapidly; he felt as if he could barely breathe—the excitement at hearing Jesus was intense.

“Oh, my son, my precious son, you are the one who will bring about the great awakening.”

“Lord?”

“You are the great architect of my cathedral on this earth,” the voice said within him. “You will help lay the bricks and stain the windows. Your body will be scaffolding upon which my cathedral will reach the heavens themselves.”

He opened his eyes.

The statue of Christ stared back at him with sad eyes. And the statue’s lips moved. “You, before all men, will build the Cathedral of Kingdom Come.”

The stone arms moved, and the feet pushed out the spikes that held the statue in place. It climbed off the cross, pulling the large nails with it, and stepped forward to Roland. A halo of green lightning surrounded the statue’s form.

“Do not be afraid, oh blessed boy,” the statue said. “For I bring you great tidings of joy.”

Shivering with fear but excited beyond reason, Roland nodded, tears streaming down his face.

“The enemy is near. Take up the instrument that I shall show you. Take it up, and plow the furrow that my seed might be planted. That you, Roland Love, true Love, eternal Love, will plow the field of blood and iniquity and plant the seeds of righteousness in the world. And on that field, you will erect the greatest monument to the infinite love, the most magnificent citadel since the Tower of Babel itself. It will climb higher than the ladder of Jacob, and you shall be wonderful in my sight.”

A brilliant light seemed to explode from the center of the statue. As it grew and blossomed, it was a blinding light—a light beyond all light, and Roland felt a great wind accompany it as it spread toward him—and it knocked him backward.

He had passed out on the cold floor of the church.

When he awoke minutes later, he felt a terrible pain in the back of his head, and when he reached back to touch it, he felt the stickiness of blood.
St. Paul,
he thought.
On the road to Damascus. I have been visited, just as he was. I have been struck with a vision like lightning. I have heard the voice of the Lord call unto me.

He glanced up at the altar. The statue was again on the cross.

And there, in front of him, was the instrument that the statue had bid him take up.

The plow for the field of blood and iniquity.

Still, his mind couldn’t quite wrap around how this little instrument could plow a furrow, let alone begin the building of the greatest cathedral on heaven and earth.

It was a spike about as long as his own fist, and when he glanced back up at the statue on the cross, he saw the nail that had been thrust between the statue’s feet was no more.

He got down on his knees and crawled to the spike. He touched it lightly with the palm of his hand. It was warm. It crackled with static electricity, and it made him jump slightly when he touched it.

Roland Love carefully picked up the spike and held it to his lips, kissing it in reverence of this miracle he had been brought—his calling back by all that was magnificent, his vision that surely meant he was destined for the life of a saint.

After a while, as he lay prostrate before the altar, the spike in his hands, praying for strength and wisdom and power and authority and the miracles that were known to the Almighty, he went out into the world to begin the work of heaven.

2

Dustin Moody, who ran the Coffee N Book Shoppe in the village, had already been checking flickering fluorescents half the afternoon. He called out to his lover, Nick, “You need to call electric.”

“I am electric,” Nick said, grinning. He was back behind the cappuccino machine that was once again coughing up brown foamy phlegm rather than its usual dark espresso. “You know this machine is like your grandma’s plumbing—it’s all broken down in the between parts.”

Dusty never took well to jokes like that, and ignored Nick while still tapping the edge of the fluorescent lights with the spine of a book. They flickered in and out, all in a row above the Mystery and Romance shelves.

“You bought it all knowing it was crap,” Nick added later, once he brought a hot mug of coffee over to Dusty. “Here, drink some of our brown sludge-a-chinno.”

“What’s it taste like?”

“If I told you, you’d never look at me the same again,” Nick smirked, and then took a sip. “Naw, it’s not that bad.”