“But he wasn’t dead?” Thad asked a little too blithely. Thad, in his mid-forties, the single most unambitious man of the entire Allen clan (from Albany), had spent most of his youth frittering, and so an afternoon with the local witch on her front shop porch seemed the right thing to do on a day when he had no classes to teach, and only a handful of papers to grade.
“No,” Alice said. Again, she was sewing—this time, putting buttons on one of Thad’s shirts for him as a favor for lifting some heavy boxes for her earlier in the week. “He wasn’t dead. Not yet. But he had the beginnings of a ghost in him. It was... it was as if he had made a choice, and it had burned through him ... like he was a photographic negative.”
“What did he want? Why did he ask about autumn?” Thad asked, a bit puzzled. He sipped his coffee—a buck twenty-five for a cup at the bookstore just a few doors down, and it never tasted as good as it looked. “I mean, who asks about the fall as if there’s going to be a reasonable answer?”
“Oh,” she said, softly. “I don’t know. I barely heard him. I think it was all that aura around him that kept me confused. I got a bit light-headed. That happens sometimes when I’m near the dead.”
“Or soon-to-be-dead,” Thad said, trying not to grin. “Still, I’d love to know what he wanted. Who asks about fall like that? I mean, who?”
“He applied for the night watchman job, up at You-Know-Where,” she said. “You know, he even called himself that. He said he was the Nightwatchman, as if it was a job like being mayor or king. But he said it softly. He spoke so softly, almost—and I know this is an odd thing to say—in a womanish way, not like me, but like those women who have small velvety voices.”
Thad knew this about Alice—she avoided what she called Trouble Spots. In this case, the Trouble Spot was also called You-Know-Where. “I thought they hired someone.”
“That guy quit,” she said. “Sometime during the summer.”
“Because of all that stuff?”
“That stuff. No. Because he found a better job in Beacon.”
“All the good jobs are in Beacon these days.” Thad grinned. He meant it as a slight joke, but Alice’s emotions remained veiled. She was often flat and oh-so-serious like that, and it could annoy him to no end, unless he found her humorous.
“Lighten up,” he said.
“You didn’t see what I saw. He had a halo of night.”
“But you think it’s about You-Know-Where.”
She retained that flatness of spirit as he took another sip of the god-awful coffee. His love for the idea of coffee often overcame the taste of the stuff itself.
“Alice, it has always puzzled me. You come here to live and open shop. Yet you believe that house is haunted and you’re too scared to go there.”
“You should be, too.”
“I’m sorry. I’m stuck in rational mode, I think anything that seems haunted is simply... well, some natural phenomena we can’t quite pinpoint.”
“I don’t completely disagree,” she said. “But that doesn’t make it less haunted.”
“Well, enough people believe it about that place. Just not me.”
“You’ve never been there either.”
“Of course I have. Once or twice. Wandering the property. It’s quite beautiful. A bit falling apart lately. But after the fire and half-assed rebuilding, I can’t expect much. And then the owner deciding to board it all up like that... well, it’s no worse than some of the houses I’ve seen along the river that nobody really cares about anymore. Grande dames of houses from the gilded age. The one in Peekskill is a museum now. Maybe we should make Harrow a museum. Show off all the crocheting and crap like Norma Houseman’s Mother of the Year trophies or Jack Templeton’s Speedos. Or lack thereof.”
“So I’ve heard.” Alice smiled slightly. “You know, Thad, for a middle-aged man, you’re quite the gossip.”
“It’s the only hobby I’ve got, besides all the others. But it may be a bit saner than yours. It’s just a house. Every village along the river has one like it.”
“It’s hideous, that place,” she said. She set down the shirt and the needle and thread, and brought her hands up to her eyes as if wiping them of an annoying memory. Her face was wide, yet with a certain long hangdog quality. Thad had always guessed she was about fiftyish, although she had let her hair—a bird’s nest with a braid jutting out the back—just go gray so that she looked much older.
“How’s the coffee?” Alice asked, when she glanced over at him again.
“Like the nastiest socks soaked in lukewarm water after having been left in a junior high gym bag for six weeks. How’s the button coming?”
She glanced at his wrinkled shirt. “You know, when you sew for yourself it’s fun and thrifty. When you do it for someone else, it makes you feel like a grandma.”
“Is Grandma gonna leave anything to me in her will?”
Alice grinned. “You can always take my mind off my worries. For ten seconds.”
“This Nightwatchman worry you?”
She nodded. “It was so quiet after. You know, when you teach, all that you teach, don’t you see into it at all?”
“Mythology?” he asked. “I see the psychological significance.”
“You don’t see anything deeper?”
“Human psychology seems pretty damn deep to me. I know you feel there’s more, Alice. If this all speaks to you about a deeper relationship to the universe, go for it. I see it as human irrationality. The part of us that can’t face the way things are. Just as dreams aren’t real, but are about the human brain and repression and desire. The idea of hauntings seems to me to be about those exact same things.”
“I think you’ve just insulted me for the twentieth time this week,” she said, on the edge of being irritated. “You love clinging to your so-called rationality. I wish I could.”
“Give it a whirl some time,” he said. “All you have to do is look things in the face and accept that there’s logic to all of it.”
“That’s exactly what I do.”
He began talking about myth and Jung and world beliefs and the idea of afterlife as a comfort for those who face death. After a few minutes, he realized he’d begun to drone.
“Look at Army,” Alice said suddenly, as if she’d become bored with their talk.
I’m a windbag, Thad thought. A forty-six-year-old greasy, graying, chubby windbag.
Thad glanced out on the street—across the way, Army Vernon had begun rolling up his awning over the rows of flowers in white plastic pots. The first sign of fall on its way—the awnings would come down. Then the smell of beer in the air—for some reason, it wafted out of the Watch Point Pub during the cooler months. And finally, the young women in their smart raincoats when the skies turned dark; the men in sweatpants as they jogged by; the children dragging themselves home from the bus stop on brisk afternoons. He loved fall in the village. “So?”
“What’s he doing?”
“What he always does this time of day. The ritual flower murder.” Thad chuckled.
“He was the first person I ever read. He was at the carnival, and he stood in line all eager just like he was one of the kids. I told him what I saw—not that I’m going to tell you now—and he laughed at me. Most people don’t believe what I believe,” Alice said. “I don’t expect them to. But I do not expect to be laughed at.”
“Did you read him at all? The Nightwatchman,” Thad asked, saying the word “night watchman” as if it were a joke. “Was he easy?”
“You don’t believe any of it.”
“Well, I believe you believe. Did you?”
“He had a block, but somehow I got through some of it. Something about his son. Something about the girl in the car.”
“There was a girl in a car?”
“More darkness. Nightwatchman. Bui his name came to me. While we were talking. He has a German name, I think. But I’m not sure. It sounded like Spider.”
“Spider?”
“Or Spee
der. I’m not sure.”
“Tell me about the girl. Are we talking over twenty or under?”
“Over, but not by much. She is tied to him in a way I don’t understand.”
“You read all this by being near him?”
She laughed lightly, breaking the dark mood that had descended. “No, I saw her. She was in the old station wagon, parked right in front here. She looked twenty-two. Maybe. I can’t tell anymore.”
“How old was he?”
“Fifty, easily. He looked almost like a farmer. Why did I think that, I wonder? He wasn’t wearing any clothes that were like a farmer’s.”
“But he had the farmer’s daughter with him. Maybe she’s his daughter? Or else she’s his son’s girlfriend or wife.”
“Oh. That never occurred to me. Maybe. She’s pregnant. They’ve been running for awhile. Trying to find work.”
“Okay, so a guy takes his pregnant daughter, whose boyfriend has run off, and tries to get a job for himself so he can support her. You think he’ll be the caretaker?”
“I hope not,” she said. “I suggested he leave. I told him about a job working for a church—as a janitor. In Poughkeepsie. Better pay, I’d guess. Free room.”
“‘The Nightwatchman,’” Thad said, nodding. “I should put that in a book. I should write a book called The Nightwatchman and I bet everyone would want to read it.”
“If only you could write a book.”
“I tried once,” he said. “You never know, I might try again. There’s a new teacher in town who wrote a book. I met him the other day. Young and all full of himself. Still has the damn rose-colored glasses of life on him. That’s who writes books about nightwatchmen. Men like me simply read them.”
“Oh, I hate those kinds of people,” Alice said, mildly. “Those happy-outlook people. I much prefer seeing shadowy, scowly people who drink bad coffee.”
“I could not agree more,” Thad said, and then closed his eyes, feeling a slight headache coming on. In the darkness behind his eyes, he saw a purplish-yellow image forming and then it became the mansion—Harrow, with its spires and towers and domed roof and many gables, not decayed and overgrown as he knew it to be, but with a shine to it. He opened his eyes, shot a sidelong glance to Alice, but didn’t mention the thought that had come to him.
“Someone has to take care of that place,” Thad said. “I think legally they have to. If someone fell in a hole over there or something, there’d be hell to pay. People sue all the time. And you know how kids go up there at Halloween.”
“They’re stupid, those children.”
“Maybe, but someone needs to be there to chase them off.”
“It’s a terrible place,” she said. “I was here through all that. When the school had its trouble. And a few years ago, those people. So crazy to go there.”
“I heard a lot of it was just made up,” Thad said. “Some writer blew it all out of proportion and made it sound like we were out of a Shirley Jackson story.”
“Who?”
“You never read “The Lottery”? The Haunting of Hill House? She wrote a book about a haunted house. But it’s all fiction. It’s irrational to think it happened, simply because if it had happened, no human being could’ve stopped it. And supposedly it stopped.”
“No,” she said. “Nothing can stop it. Just a momentary end to an eternal struggle.”
“Alice, come on. I’ve been at the house,” Thad said. “I’ve never seen a ghost.”
“That’s how it tricks you, Thad. Someone has to spark it. Ignite it. That’s how this is. I can’t go there. I have a little bit of the ability. If I were to walk up to its door, it would devour me alive just to get that spark. The man who stepped up here. The Nightwatchman. The worst thing about him was I got the impression that he knew how frightened I was feeling of him. He had that darkness all around him. He was going to bring it to the house. He is a flint.”
Then she turned to other topics, more pleasant, less bizarre, about the spring storms, about the politics of the world and of the village. Thad began to wonder if she might be a little unhinged simply because of what had happened to her as a little girl—as he too was unhinged a little by what had happened to him just a handful of years back when he let go of someone he loved.
Life is a doorway, you’re the door, and sometimes you get unhinged. The longer you live, the more the hinges squeak and then begin to separate a little.
All of us, he thought. Unhinged. Slightly broken. Grasping at anything that makes us feel the world still has wonder and mystery.
And Thad Allen said, his voice a bit dry from the air and the coffee, “You know, Alice, you’re probably my best friend in town.”
“Feeling’s mutual.”
“Do you ever read me?”
“Impossible,” she said. “You have the biggest block of all.”
“Honest?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in this.”
“Well,” he said, “I always believe in keeping the window open a crack to let the fresh air in.”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m just crazy. But, Thad, I don’t think so. Not about this. Something bad is brewing. I know it. It’s like—well, you know how sometimes you smell a fire before you see it? Like there’s smoke coming from somewhere and you can’t quite figure out where and it’s still kind of faint and you think maybe you’re just imagining it? That’s what it’s like. Meeting that guy. And him asking about that place. It’s like a little smoke and it’s either nothing or it’s going to become a fire when nobody’s looking because it’s too late if you ignored the smoke all along.”
“So maybe he won’t even get the job. He’ll probably just take off again.”
“Thad, it was weeks ago when he came by here. He got the job. They hired him. He’s been there for at least three or four weeks. And I haven’t seen him in the village at all. In all that time. Hasn’t come to Mighty Mart for groceries, hasn’t rented a DVD, hasn’t grabbed a dinner anywhere, and hasn’t even gone for a walk off that property. Nothing.”
“He might just be going to Beacon for groceries. Or Parham. Their shopping district ain’t too shabby.”
“No, I don’t think so. He’s either dead or he struck a match over there.”
“Oh,” Thad said. “Gee, wonder if his daughter’s had her baby yet?”
“Had to. That girl was so big she looked like she would’ve popped right then and there in the car,” Alice said. She tried to push her fears out of her mind. She offered to make a fresh pot of coffee in the back of her shop so that he wouldn’t have to suffer through another one of those dirty sock cups from the bookstore. As they got up from the porch chairs and turned to go into her shop, Alice glanced back to the street and the stores across the way.
She thought she saw some man who shouldn’t be there. She said to Thad, “Who’s that?”
Thad turned about, glancing to where she pointed her finger. “Ah. Well, I’ll tell you about him once I get a little more caffeine in my system.”
“A malingerer. I don’t like him,” Alice said, and as she drew back the door to her shop, she wondered if it might not be time to leave this town.
3
Across the street, not looking over at the shops at all, Bert White leaned back against the Parham Bank, near the ATM machine by the front door, so as not to be noticed. Twenty years old, Bert was small and wiry and took on the odd jobs in town nobody else seemed to want, whether it was a storm drain cleanup, shoveling snow, laying asphalt or repairing a rooftop or two. He was a guy who just got by, and that was fine by him because it allowed him to pursue his favorite hobbies.
Watching and waiting.
He watched her pass by.
Ronnie Pond.
Veronica. He liked the name Veronica better. She was a twin. Twins were hot. Twins had all kinds of possibilities.
It was as if he were invisible to her, although he figured it probably was because she seemed to be in a hu
rry. She was headed toward the post office. She was lookin’ good and she’d never understand how he liked her pretty hair so much when it swung back and forth like it did.
He liked to follow the teenager wherever she went, and when he could, he made himself as invisible as possible. He hid behind the columns at the post office, or he slipped into a shop like the bookstore and just watched her from the front window. Some nights, he went to her home and stood outside her window to watch her. Sometimes she’d just be reading in bed. Or she’d have headphones on, listening to some rock group on her CD player, and she’d dance around her room as if she’d forgotten where she was. Now and then, she seemed to look right at him through the window, and it would make him catch his breath—and then he’d remember that she probably couldn’t see him at all out in the darkness. He would be just another inky shadow among the shadows of bushes and trees that were in the yard.
Back at his place, his mother had written him letters, and he flipped through them, hoping there’d be some money. By the third letter, he’d found just under a hundred bucks. It made him feel that his luck had changed a little. Things were going damn good, and only the thought that he might not get the girl alone anytime soon ... well, that thought drove him a little wacko, and he realized that she was the one at fault because he had tried talking to her once upon a time about how it felt all over his insides, all runny and gooey for her and yet terrified that she’d say something to hurt him at the same time. She had pretended he hadn’t even been there. That was worse than if she’d been mean.
How could she be such a bitch and still the love of his life?
After pocketing the money his mother sent him and tossing out her letters, he went outside again, down the back stairs of the house where he rented the room, then knocked on the back door.
His landlady eventually came to the door. “Glad to see you, Bert.”
“Bathroom or kitchen?”
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 5