“I don’t get it,” Alex said. “That a joke?”
“It’s biblical.” Zack kept laughing at his own wit. “God said kill all the geeks.”
“Maybe God’s killing one right now up at that graveyard,” Alex grinned.
“We better see what’s happening up there,” Lizzie said, moving toward the door. Alex grabbed her hand and pulled her back to him. She didn’t resist much, and he wrapped his arms around her and planted a big wet sloppy kiss on her lips. He licked right up to her eyelid and kissed there, then slid his lips to her ear and whispered, “Come on. We can make out here. That’s why we’re here.”
“He might be hurt,” Lizzie said, and then realized the back of her head felt a little funny. Too much wine. The room had begun spinning a little bit.
“He’s fine,” Alex insisted. “He’s fine. He probably just got freaked by the lightning.”
Bari Love held up a nearly empty bottle of wine. She chugged the last of it down, giggling, and said, “I got the bottle. Who wants to play?”
9
“He’s out there in the rain,” Lizzie said, but even that came out a little slurred because she’d already had one beer.
They all sat in a circle, and it was Andy Harris’s turn to spin the bottle in the center.
The bottle seemed to spin and spin, and it made Lizzie a little light-headed as she watched it go around and around.
Then it stopped.
Pointed directly at her.
Andy wore a big shit-eating grin on his face and nearly smacked his lips. Lizzie felt as if she were betraying Ronnie because her sister had briefly dated Andy during sophomore year and then had been dumped unceremoniously by him before he took up with Bari.
But it’s the game. Stupid Spin the Bottle. We’ve been playing it since ninth grade, and for some reason the guys always like it just a little bit more than the girls do.
And still, we play it.
Andy crawled across the floor toward her. Lizzie glanced at Alex, who was so drunk it looked like he couldn’t recognize anything let alone feel jealous that another guy was going to kiss her. She looked at Bari, but Bari was practically hanging off Zack after their last bottle-induced kiss.
When Andy got close, his breath all cigarette ash and warm beer, she drew back from him. She gave him a peck on the cheek. “Sorry,” she whispered.
He pawed at her, but she managed to push him away.
“Bitch,” he whispered under his breath.
“Bastard,” Lizzie whispered back.
She stood up unsteadily. “I want to see what’s going on with Sam.”
“He screamed for his mommy,” Zack said, laughing.
“Maybe he got hit with lightning,” Nancy Withers said. “There must be a God after all!”
“I think someone’s in love with Sam,” Bari said. “Hey, Alex, Lizzie’s got the hots for the geek.”
Alex swung his head around slightly, his blond hair falling over his eyes. “What?” Then he swung around again to look at Lizzie. “Hey baby. Bay-bay.”
“Hey,” she said. What the hell am I doing with these jerks? Playing drinking games. Practically girlfriend-swapping. Ronnie’s right about all of them. They think they’re the winners of life, but they missed the boat completely.
She ignored all the jeers, and went toward the door leading to the narrow corridor.
As she opened the door, she felt as if her heart froze.
A middle-aged man, scrawny and tall, stood there before her.
Naked.
His body covered with red paint as if he’d been drawing on himself—circles and lines and pictures.
His teeth were smeared with some brown-red color, and he parted his lips as if he were in the middle of saying something. His hands were down between his legs, furiously stroking himself.
She opened her mouth to curse, but felt as if the breath had been sucked out of her.
Lightning flashed outside, and the tall windows along the corridor seemed to light up so white it made her think of a nuclear explosion.
The light in the room flickered.
Then the entire house was plunged into darkness.
10
Lizzie stood still for a few seconds, catching her breath.
In the dark, there didn’t seem to be a naked man at all.
Instead, she felt utterly alone, as if even those behind her in the room had vanished.
Someone struck a match.
She turned back around.
For just a second, she thought she saw her dead father’s face—his features twisted, but she knew it was him—in the brief glow of the match.
The match extinguished.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
But no one said a word.
Is this all a joke? Are they doing this to me? Are these people who are not my friends—not realty, not the way friends realty are—are they doing this?
Then, Alex near her. She felt his warmth. “It’s all right, babe,” he whispered. He struck another match, and it was Alex. Thank God. Thank God.
“I was scared,” she whispered. “It got so quiet.”
“Heh,” he grinned. “I think they’re all just taking advantage of the dark.”
He blew the match out, and she felt his lips against hers. Her heart was pounding. She didn’t want to kiss him at all, but his mouth had a kind of suction that kept her there. She pushed him away, but his arms surrounded her.
She felt his arousal as he pressed against her, and she tried to draw back but could not. She felt his hands go around her back, stroking along her spinal column. It only made her shiver—she felt uncomfortable. Even if they are all making out. Even if I only imagined seeing things. Even if that scream meant nothing. I want out. I want out now.
Then she felt other hands, smaller hands, along her ankles, as if a little child were pulling at her.
Instinctively, she kicked out, then brought her knee up to what she estimated in the dark to be Alex’s groin. As she drew back from him, she felt others touching her in the dark. She had to fight her way through them to move toward the one crack of light she saw in the doorway, the light from outside that came through the open window at the end of the corridor.
She ran blindly down the dark hall, found the open window onto the back porch of the house, and crawled out. She didn’t know what had happened to the man, or to the others, but a primal fear had entered her, a sense of death and terror she had never before felt, and her heart thumped too rapidly in her chest. Once she made it to the car, she put her hand over her heart as if to calm it.
Breathe.
Breathe.
A flashlight shone in her face. She couldn’t see who held it until Sam Pratt spoke.
“Something bad’s going on here tonight,” he said.
11
“You imagined it,” Bari told her when the others all came out of the house, trooping out in the rain to get to their cars.
“No. I saw him. I saw him. He was ... playing with himself ... and then I saw ... Alex... I... saw...”
“Jackin’ off, was he?” Alex said, winking at her and wrapping his arms around her. “I’ll protect you from the Jack-Off Monster. Should I kick him in the balls or just beat him off?”
She shrugged free of his arms. “And what about Sam? What about what he saw?”
Bari gave her an innocent look. “I have no idea. That’s Sam’s problem. Maybe he’s a liar. You want to go up and check it out?”
Lizzie shook her head.
“Yeah, me neither. If Sam wants to call the cops, let him.” She leaned into the car and glanced back at Sam Pratt, who stared straight ahead. “But if you decide to tell the cops anything, you’re not going to include any of us in it. You’re going to be the one who might get arrested for trespassing. Not me. Not the rest of us. You got that, geek?”
Sam looked up at her, but didn’t say anything.
“It’s okay, Sam,” Lizzie said, sliding into the driver’s seat. “It’s all goi
ng to be okay. Maybe ... maybe it was just some trick.”
“Yeah,” Bari said, opening the front passenger door to shove Alex inside the car. Alex fell in like a wet dog; he was too drunk to keep his head up. “It probably was some trick. Some asshole from school who didn’t get invited tonight who’s just being nasty and stupid.”
Andy Harris, revving the engine of his Mustang, called out, “Come on, Bari! We can still party down at the Point.”
Bari glanced back at him. “In the fucking rain? No fucking way.” She grinned as she leaned back into the window. “Sometimes you see things in the dark when you’re drunk and you have no idea what they really are, and sometimes they’re just nothing.”
Lizzie looked at Bari Love as if she didn’t even know her. What had gotten into her? As bitchy as Bari might get, she was handling all of this way too well, keeping her cool at a time when Lizzie felt like pitching a fit.
And yet something within Lizzie herself had changed. In some way she couldn’t even fathom, she had begun to disbelieve herself. She wasn’t sure ten minutes after she saw the naked middle-aged man with the markings on him that she hadn’t just imagined it. Zack had told her he’d spiked her beer with something she’d never heard of, and she got all freaked out that it might be roofies or some other drug that might put her at risk in some way. She began to think that maybe she had imagined the man, and the more she tried to reimagine him, the less she could. She couldn’t remember what he was doing with himself, and she wasn’t even sure he was naked anymore. She had a sinking feeling that by morning she might not even remember seeing anyone other than her classmates at Harrow.
And worse, it felt all right to forget. It felt like a sedative to forget, to put aside the trembling fear she’d felt.
Glancing in the rear-view mirror, she was even beginning to wonder if Sam Pratt might not forget seeing a dead kid, strung up and cut open, up at the private graveyard on the property.
Or if everything they had seen might not just be some kind of hysteria, the way she’d learned in school that sometimes you can’t even trust your own senses, sometimes you are prepared to see something that isn’t there, out of fear or just a rush of adrenaline.
Part of her was happy to be losing the image of the man that had been put in her mind, as if it were some dreadful thing that she could’ve gone her whole life without witnessing.
As if her mind was settling now after going a little haywire.
“ What’d Zack put in my beer?” she asked Bari, but Bari just grinned and went back over to Andy’s Mustang and got in.
The rain continued its downpour as the lightning zapped a distant tree.
“You can’t tell anyone,” Lizzie said.
Sam just watched her from the backseat, and then told her which way to go to get back to the village.
When they got back to town, and Lizzie pulled over at Sam’s front door, he said, “We should at least call the cops.”
“No, we can do that,” Lizzie said. “I’ll call them when I get home.”
“If you don’t, I will,” Sam said.
But the funny thing was, neither of them ever told anybody, and when the storm had run its course, the night itself seemed like a drunken brawl of a dream. Sam felt safer the less he thought about it.
12
When Lizzie snuck in through the back door of the small house, by way of the garden gate, her twin sister was waiting. The first thing Ronnie did was smell her breath and say, “You’re never driving my car again.”
The second thing Ronnie did was feel Lizzie’s forehead. “You’re a little warm. You’re not much of a drinker.”
“Yeah,” Lizzie said. “I’m sorry.”
“Forgiven. But you’re still not driving my car again. At least not to any parties.”
“Understood. Please, I just need to go lie down.”
“You look different” Ronnie said, softly, but let the thought die as she spoke it out loud. She wasn’t even sure what she meant by it.
13
That night, Lizzie Pond dreamt about opening the kitchen drawers at her home and wondering why she couldn’t find a corkscrew and why the smell of bleach was in the air; Bari Love, when she finally hit the sack at four A.M., began dreaming almost immediately that she had walked into her father’s workroom in the garage and found a hatchet that was soaked in red with bits of hair on it; Sam Pratt didn’t sleep all night, but instead stared out the window as if half expecting someone to come for him; Alex Nordland, who had passed out on Andy Harris’s bedroom floor, dreamt of screwing the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, although they all had the faces of the teachers—male and female—at Parham High; Andy Harris dreamed about driving a sports car nearly a thousand miles per hour down a long dark highway and feeling as if he owned the world; and Ronnie Pond simply dreamt of her father because she always dreamt of him when she was feeling a little sad.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Some said it arrived by water—because some basements flooded and the sewers overflowed that night.
Others thought it must’ve come in like germs, on people’s fingers.
But it would be many months before anyone even knew what it was or where it had originated.
Things changed slowly, as they always do in small towns.
But in the case of Watch Point, a Hudson River whistle-stop in New York, things did not change for the better.
It began after a bad electrical storm late one night in June. The whisper of terror would stretch out that summer into a scream, but a scream that only a handful of people heard, mostly the teenagers at first. Fallen branches in yards; floods in basements; a live wire that shivered and spat sparks until the utility department shut down the power lines; the whispers among schoolchildren of weirdness and superstitious mumbo-jumbo, and fingers pointed at the unusual and different children among them; the screech of a car along the main thoroughfare, long after midnight, in the gasp of calm after the storm; the lights that came on all at once in the village at the precise hour of the early morning, it was rumored, when the act took place out on the bare plateau that overlooked the river far below it.
The child’s body they found.
The small cemetery had moss-covered stones that went back to the early 1800s, was on a hillside surrounded by straggly trees, one of which recently had been felled by lightning.
The remains of a bonfire of some kind.
Marks on the corpse indicated someone had tied it up and strung it, and then had brought it down.
The boy’s parents and the authorities were notified. The boy’s name was Arnie Pierson, and he’d died of some gastrointestinal ailment just a day or so earlier. The body had been grabbed at the morgue in the county hospital just outside the village, so there was a freshness to the corpse disturbing to view.
Someone had torn the corpse open.
It was a ritual, many thought. A ritual of a sick and twisted mind.
The corpse-stealing episode brought further grief for his family and cast a new cloud upon the village to add to the others that were forming. The authorities did their half-assed version of an investigation and came up with the culprit—one of the lab assistants at the morgue had claimed he took the body home to work on it (which was as far-fetched an explanation as any) and that somehow, someone then stole it from him. But when horror novels and forensics books and videotapes of crime scenes were found in his apartment—along with sliced bits of human flesh in jars—it was assumed he was completely nuts, and he was thrown in jail until it all got sorted out. From jail he went up north to one of the hospitals for the criminally insane, but that would not be until the end of summer.
But all who knew of the stolen corpse suspected others were involved.
At the estate itself, authorities found evidence of drinking—broken bottles of cheap wine—and someone had scrawled words on some of the old gravestones using spray paint, in a strange language that looked as fake as it looked archaic. It was a well-known night among the high
schoolers of the area—a special night of parties and mayhem, particularly for those about to enter their senior year. It was called Thirteenth Night, and the tradition had begun in the mid-twentieth century when the local high schools put on a series of celebrations thirteen nights after the last day of school. The police asked local high school kids questions, but no one had a reasonable answer as to what happened that night up at Harrow.
Most of the teenagers told of the wild parties out along the Point, a strand of dock and sand and rock that extended into the Hudson River—the usual place for the parties. Bari Love, the head cheerleader from Parham High, told the authorities nearly everyone she knew had been at the Point that night. “Why would anybody go up to that old house? That place gives me the creeps.”
The incident had happened on Midsummer Night, and rumors quickly attributed it to a pagan rite associated with the equinox. The holy-rollers at Church of the Vale declared that devil-worshippers were back.
“What sickos would do this?” they asked. Well, they being Margaret Love and Norma Houseman, with Norma adding, “I think it’s the occult. All these kids read about it. It’s in children’s books, for God’s sake. I wish ...”
“You wish what?” Margaret asked.
“I wish sometimes they’d just start burning these people. These kinds of people. Sometimes I think the olden days were right. You get rid of people who do this kind of thing.
You lock ‘em up, ship ‘em out, and burn ‘em off the face of the earth. That poor little dead boy. Poor little dead thing. It’s shameful is what it is.”
“Disgraceful,” Margaret Love added. “What kind of sicko would do a thing like this?”
“I’ll tell you what kind,” Norma said. “The same kind that’s ruining this country and sending it to hell. The kind that’s for marriage of... homosexuals... and the kind that’s against everything America does ... why, back in the early 1960s, things were so much nicer. I think the so-called civil rights movement started this trend. Believe me, no rights could have been less civil than those, and then things went downhill. I was only a girl then, a little girl, but I saw how the cities burned on TV, and I saw how the leftist media kept pushing their message the same time they were pushing drugs on my friends. Comedians on television using words I wouldn’t even think let alone say. The Roman Empire fell because of things like this. We can’t fall. We can’t. God doesn’t want us to fall. What this country needs is a good dose of old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness. We need to burn out everything that doesn’t fit in right. If you don’t burn them, they just keep multiplying and coming at you. What kind of sicko does this?” she asked again at the end of her tirade.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 3