Harrow: Three Novels (Nightmare House, Mischief, The Infinite)

by Douglas Clegg

  “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “You weren’t meant to be here. It must be some mistake. I know you. You could never have done what they claim.”

  I returned her sad smile with the only words I knew to say, “A greater will than yours or mine will take care of me. Don’t worry, Madeleine. There are those who wait in eternity for me. This time will pass. I will die, but the infinite will open and she will be there – Maggie, and my mother, among others, swarming me in their arms, swarming around me like yellowjackets, blessing me.”

  Madeleine began weeping.

  “Why are you crying?” I asked.

  “Because,” she said, tears in her eyes like jewels. “You have your faith again. You believe. You believe in God. You are saved. You believe.”

  “I do,” I said, knowing that it had come at a great price.

  My faith had returned to me from a journey through the pit of Hell. It was not the faith that she thought, though: it was of a darker variety.

  I had touched the face of the infinite, and returned, burned, but with a genuine faith in the chaos of creation.

  My other visitors – Mr. Crowley and Miss Borden, too, had witnessed the darkness of the house, and many of them called authorities on my behalf to get me an early release, although, in fact, I had no trial.

  It was considered scandalous, what happened to me.

  Through both my grandfather’s money and my grandfather’s many rich friends who understood the nature of Harrow, as well as the Ladies’ League for Justice and Mercy of the Hudson Valley, petitions were circulated, authorities were bought, and public sympathy grew locally for my release from the madhouse.

  I knew a greater hand was at work.

  I knew that nothing less than the indomitable spirit of my mother herself had somehow determined my destiny.

  After several years at Northcastle, I returned to Harrow. I lived in the caretaker’s cottage, with my father’s name on the threshold: Oliver Palliser.

  By then, the deaths at Harrow were old news; the village still whispered, but villages whisper about everyone who has ever transgressed.

  I was one among many with the stink of scandal attached to his name. A true belief was afoot that Harrow indeed was haunted.

  Old Wentworth herself helped end speculation about my guilt or innocence by mentioning the queer things that had gone on there, and by the things she had thought she had heard or seen over the years.

  Alf returned, as I suspected her would.

  I allowed him to take up residence in one of the empty upstairs rooms of the cottage. He was unable to leave Harrow altogether. Sullen and prone to moods, when he spoke to others, they commented on how odd he seemed.

  He told me that his mother called to him since he’d last seen her, and she told him to wait here for her, that she would come again for him.

  “And she told me to tell you something,” he said. “She will wait for you to come to her.”

  “I know,” I said, and did not think it strange, then, to love a woman so strongly who I had barely known in life.

  But in her death, I had touched her where no other man could. And she had touched me, as well. We were bound to each other, we two.

  I waited nightly for her, but neither Alf nor I ventured into the main house at Harrow.

  I contacted Alf’s aunt, who had all but given up on the boy. Because I did not want him to lack for his schooling or social skills, I hired a tutor at the cottage, and, with my inheritance, built additions onto the cottage until its rooms multiplied.

  Alf’s aunt came to live at the cottage— she was a harsh woman, a former schoolmistress, but a good influence on Alf overall.

  As the years went by, and the old reports of the “Nightmare House of Watch Point” faded in memory, Harrow seemed to return to just being a house. None of us ever went used the key to open its wide doors — mainly from fear. But I added the precaution of padlocking the doors, and nailing boards across its lower windows.

  As I grew older, things changed there, and Alf became Alfred.

  After the Second World War, Alfred Barrow returned home to the cottage with big plans. He wanted to turn Harrow into a school.

  I let him have his wish, so long as certain underground chambers of the house were sealed.

  I could not forgot my feelings of horror within Harrow, but I knew that it needed a new life.

  It must rise from the ashes of what it had been.

  We have not seen or heard anything unusual in all those years, and there were times when I wondered if my own mind had played tricks on me, and I had, perhaps, murdered Pocket and Maggie myself, as I had been accused.

  After all, I am telling this story, and no madman who has murdered would ever accept blame for the deaths of two people, would he?

  He might spend his life concocting a story of ghosts and demons to draw attention from the blood on his own hands?

  He might see himself as a victim of forces greater than merely human, that the gods themselves had used him as a tool, or had manipulated through magic and spiritual agencies the world around him.

  I believe the Puritans called this Spectral Evidence, when brought to trial.

  Would I have had any genuine Spectral Evidence had I been, finally, brought to trial for the murders of Pocket and Maggie?

  You will never know, will you?

  All you will know are these things: I am Esteban Palliser. I was born Esteban Gravesend.

  My mother was Matilde Gravesend, and my father was Oliver Palliser, also known as the Hawk with Two Souls.

  And I am still, at the end of my life, waiting for Maggie to come for me, to be there, when I take my last breath.

  She has promised, through her son, that she will wait for me.

  I am the caretaker of Harrow, the son of the previous caretaker, and the true owner of Harrow.

  I live in a different place in Watch Point now, for I am feeble, and even Harrow has changed since I was a young man.

  A nurse wheels me places, and feeds me, and sometimes Alfred comes to visit when he is able.

  As I sit here, cigarette in my mouth, feeling the last days of life flow through me, I think back to my crimes, and I look across the rooftops of Watch Point to the towers of the school that Alfred Barrow founded many years ago, the way he had the land changed, using money I had given him—for he is like a son to me and the only inheritor of the millions of dollars that have grown from my grandfather’s estate over the years.

  I can almost hear Maggie’s voice calling my true, secret name, and it makes me smile for a minute.

  She is still, in my mind’s eye, Our Lady of Shallots, in the Holy Land of my mother’s house, surrounded by the wild cats, in the garden of night. I wait for another night to come.

  A night of darkness, and the feeling of her hand in mine.

  You may say that we cannot love the dead.

  But I know.

  My dreams are there now.

  You can go in any room, any secret chamber, and you will find them—shadows of dreams, like smoke from a fire that has only just died.

  They are no longer with me—I do not dream.

  I live now in stark reality. In light. In a harsh sun.

  Did I leave my dreams behind on purpose?

  No. They were taken from me, by Harrow.

  Harrow is ancient.

  Harrow has existed, for all I know, before the world was ever created.

  Before the world was ever imagined.

  I feel my death coming to me—coming just as Maggie will come to me, like the angel, my mother, comes to me with caresses in the mist of twilight. I was born to the century’s end; I will be born within Harrow to the new century’s beginning.

  Stet Fortuna Domus:

  May the House’s Fortune Stand.

  * * * *

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  MISCHIEF

  Book 2 of the Harrow Haunting Series

  By Douglas Clegg />
  Copyright © 2000, 2012 Douglas Clegg

  Published by Alkemara Press.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Further publisher and copyright information at the end of this book.

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  PART ONE

  CRIME

  Chapter One

  All houses, at one time or another, hold both life and death.

  The house in question stood through years of neglect; the legends of its power waned; only the elderly could recall the story of its early history; it fell into ruins; and then, it began to reform, and grow, spreading over the beautiful valley with new life.

  No one noticed the growth, the towers resurrecting under the loving care of architects and builders; the new additions grafted onto the old halls; the parapets smoothed over with cement and brick; the old glass replaced with new, the fallen stones wedged back into their places; the vines and brambles hacked away with blade and mower.

  But can a house live?

  A boy named Jim Hook would never have thought so, when, years later, he found himself confronted with the place called Harrow.

  When Jim Hook was four, his brother saved him from drowning, even though no one ever knew it but the two of them.

  They’d been playing in a neighbor’s swimming pool when no one was around to watch, and Stephen was doing stunt dives from the board, making his little brother laugh whenever he did a belly flop.

  Jim tried to imitate one such dive from the shallow end of the pool, but when he went down he was too close to the edge and hit his head. Confused for a moment, and feeling the owie on his scalp, he went down into the water, unsure of which way was up, and he was no longer in the shallow end.

  He was a terrible dog-paddler, and he felt himself sinking down, and felt something dark clutch at him in the silky blue water—something with a face, although it was like a mask.

  His brother pulled him up and hugged him tight and told Jim not to scare him like that. They were closer after that, and Jim never forgot his brother’s lifting him out of the water, and the way his brother practically wept for joy when he saw Jim breathing again, spitting water all over the place.

  “How you gonna make your big bro proud?”

  “By doing the best I can,” Jim said at four, then at six, and again at eight, and then at nine, and sometimes, in his dreams, he said it again.

  His older brother’s favorite singer was some old guy Jim never heard on the radio, named Cat Stevens, so Cat Stevens became Jim’s favorite singer, too, and he knew the words to songs like “Tea for the Tillerman” and “Oh Very Young,” even when other kids in school looked at him strangely when they saw his collection of CDs; and his brother liked playing basketball, so Jim had begun to love basketball, and when his brother took up cross-country, Jim took up running as well so he could run behind his brother when he was home for holidays and all summer long.

  His brother slapped on Old Spice some mornings, and then would offer Jim the little white bottle to try out, too. “It’s not the best, Squirt,” Stephen would say, slapping the stuff around Jim’s neck, “but the girls seem to like it fine.”

  “Yeah!” Jim would say.

  When Stephen began dating, Jim would try to tag along for as much of the afternoon or evening as he could, and sometimes Stephen would even let him ride along in the backseat when he took one of his many girlfriends out to the movies, as long as the movie was PG. Some of the girls told him how cute he was, and then told Stephen he was even cuter for dragging his baby brother with him. And Jim would sit in the dark movie theater, and not even care what the movie was, because Stephen would sit next to him and let him hold the big popcorn and the gigantic cup of Coke and didn’t even act embarrassed when other friends of his from school ran into him with his girlfriend and little brother out on a date.

  It was like that with the two of them. Jim was “Squirt,” and Stephen was “Big Bro,” which sometimes became “Big Bear,” and if you had ever told Jim that his brother might one day never come home again, he would’ve sworn you were the biggest and meanest liar on the face of the whole earth.

  When Jim was only eleven, something unusual happened to him.

  This was back when he lived in what he later came to think of as the Big House on the Hill in a town called Bronxville just outside New York City. Contrary to its name—with associations with the Bronx in the city—Bronxville was a one-square-mile showplace village of beautiful houses and perfectly manicured lawns.

  Jim’s family was not considered wealthy in Bronxville, and the house, despite Jim’s later memories of it, was not, in fact, big.

  But to that little boy, it was a mansion of many rooms, and he had grown up in the house knowing his father and mother would always make sure the heat was turned up to keep him warm in the winter, and there would always be someone to take care of him when he was lonely or scared. His world up to that point had consisted of nannies and eavesdropping on his parents and their friends having drinks in the living room and talking about things that seemed sophisticated to him; and of course, his brother, Stephen, the one he looked up to the most.

  Stephen was a junior in a far away high school, the one their dad had gone to, and came home during the winter holidays—Jim felt—to spend as much time with his little brother as possible.

  And the something unusual that happened to Jim happened during one of those bleak winter nights.

  Stephen came to him, in his room, dressed in his usual khakis and starchy cotton shirt, a striped blue and white tie failing in its knot at his collar. His prep school look. He had his big green down jacket in his arms like a baby. A dusting of snow clung to his hair and melted off the lime-green rubber of his Eddie Bauer duck-shoes.

  Jim sat up in bed, setting down the comic book he’d been reading way past his bedtime, and said hi to his older brother. The clock was ticking too loudly—Stephen had given the alarm clock to him for Christmas the previous week, but if Jim wound it too tight, which he did, the ticking was almost like someone walking rapidly up an echoing staircase.

  Jim glanced at the clock.

  It was nearly one in the morning.

  He looked back at his older brother. Stephen offered that lopsided smile that he usually reserved for occasions of goofy misfortune, like when Jim had forgotten and had left the sprinklers running too long, turning the lawn to mush, or the time that Stephen had gotten kissed by a girl years before and had run to tell Jim that it was his first kiss ever.

  Stephen said, “Jimbo, don’t let the bastards get you down,” and Jim gave a raspberry in reply because their father had just been getting after Stephen to tone down his language in front of his younger brother.

  “How you gonna make your big bro proud?”

  “By doing the best I can,” Jim said, pulling the covers up around his neck. “Now let me go to sleep.”

  “That’s all,” Stephen said. “Oh, and whatever you do, just remember, every secret was meant to be told and every door was meant to be opened.”

  “Okay,” Jim said, sleepily, wondering why Stephen was home so soon when it was snowing so bad.

  Stephen and his dad were driving back from the city, but the weather reports were bad, and his mom had asked them to just stay at Gramma’s in Greenwich Village for another night till the snow was through.

  Jim loved the snow.

  Stephen left the room they shared, switching off the light. He said, “Get some shut-eye, Squirt. Mom’ll probably need you tomorrow for all kinds of stuff. Wait for what’ll come.”

  Jim dropped his comic book to th
e carpet and closed his eyes. In his dreams, he saw a big snake eating its own tail, and for some reason this didn’t scare him or bother him. He felt a kind of peace from the dream, but something startled him from his sleep.

  There was some noise in the house, and Jim wasn’t even sure if he was dreaming or not. He got out of bed, tossing the covers nearly to the floor. He went in the direction of the sound, which was coming from upstairs.

  Sometimes, in winter, the wind would blow so hard that it would start things creaking in the house. Jim went up the stairs, and followed the sound—

  Now it was just a scratching.

  Words formed in his mind.

  Words of panic:

  Something’s coming through.

  He stood at the foot of the wooden steps up to the small attic door.

  Something was scratching at the other side of the door. Jim, never fond of the attic, took a few hesitant tiptoes up.

  The scratching became wild. Something was sniffing on the other side of the attic door.

  A wild animal.

  Then, for a second, it sounded like someone was throwing furniture around the attic while a wild animal scratched in desperation at the door.

  Something’s coming through.

  A voice whispered, “Be he alive or be he dead.”

  Or he had imagined someone said it.

  Slowly, his heart pounding in his chest, he took one step after another backward, and when he was in the hall, his feet on the carpet, he turned and ran back downstairs to his bedroom, diving under the sheets, not bothering to pick his comforter back up from the floor. He squeezed his eyelids shut. He didn’t want to be in a world of fear. And this had made him very afraid. He wanted to be in a room by himself. People spoke softly from the other side of the door in the room—it was a room in his head, and he was locked in, all safe, and there was a little window to look out of, but his fear was beyond the window. He was safe inside. The room seemed real. It was the beginning of a dream. He fell asleep again, after a long while.