“Bathroom,” she said.
His landlady let him into the house, and because she trusted him to work on the toilet that probably just needed a little handle-jiggling, she wouldn’t even follow him down to the bathroom, which was right next to her daughters’ rooms.
He would go in there and imagine the girl was with him. She was practically all grown up. As soon as she was ready—the right age was just around the corner, in less than a month she’d be eighteen and then he could have her legally—he intended to keep her quiet somewhere.
Maybe even in the apartment above her home. Maybe tied to the bed with duct tape on her mouth. Maybe, he thought.
Then he’d train her. She’d do what he wanted.
She’d love him.
In her bedroom, he would smell the things in her dresser drawers, then fold them neatly before putting them back.
He would rub himself on the bed until his mind went to the place where the girl also was, and in that imaginary place she’d be holding him, accepting him.
When he was done with Veronica’s room, he’d go to her sister’s room. Sometimes she slept in the bed in the late afternoons. Elizabeth had begun taking naps, and that made him happy to see her with her eyes closed, her breathing heavy and deep in a dream.
He would own them both someday, and they would love him.
He’d bet his life on it.
4
The Love house was not exactly like its name. The family was named Love, which led to many jokes at poor Bari’s expense, as it had for her father years before, and as it always would for anyone with their last name. But the house they lived in was anything but loved. Jim Love didn’t take great care of it because he’d been out of work too much— having been laid off from a plum job in Westchester County a year before, and having only picked up temporary work since then. His wife battled depression, his son seemed obsessed with religion, and his daughter demanded more and more from her father as a result of a distant mother. He still felt the meaning of his last name there—for he was a good man and had love for all of them—but one day in the fall, his daughter came down with a sudden illness and he wondered whether he could handle all that was about to befall him.
Jim pressed his hand against Bari’s forehead. “No fever.”
“I’m just sleeping. Maybe it’s that sleeping illness,” his daughter said. “I saw a show about it. Something bar.”
“You’re too young for Epstein-Barr.” He grinned.
“I heard somebody had it,” she said, and settled back against the pillow.
“Have you been feeling a little down?”
“No,” she said.
“Is this about that boy?”
“What boy?”
“The one who called. The older boy.”
“No, Dad. He’s seventeen. He’s not that much older.”
“Too old to run around with a girl your age.”
She made a lip-fart sound. He knew he wouldn’t win this argument today—not the one about some seventeen-year-old hoodlum calling his daughter, who had only just finished her freshman year a few months before. Too young to date. Bari would not date until she was sixteen, and that was final. But he didn’t want to harp on it too much. He had grown worried about her over the past few days.
“You weren’t with him on Friday, were you?”
“Jesus.”
“Do not talk to me like that, Bari. You know the rules.”
She shot him a glare that probably was meant to be angry, but she just looked exhausted. Her normally bright eyes were encircled with dark smudges, bloodshot. Was she doing drugs? Is that what he had to worry about now? He had hoped by living in a small town and making sure they were in church every Sunday that his kids would avoid all that. Was it that boy? Drugs? Just insomnia?
So many things went through his mind, but he genuinely worried for her. She’d been too tired lately, and in bed too much on the weekend.
“I should never have let you go to that party in June.”
“Nobody drank. It wasn’t like that.”
“I didn’t say they did.”
“Well, you thought it. We just talked. We had a campfire. It was so wholesome it might as well have been the church youth group,” she said, her voice growing faint. “I’m just tired.”
“How’s your throat?”
“Not sore. Fine, Dad. Daddy, I’m not sick. I’m just... really sleepy.”
“Maybe it’s the humidity.”
“I just want to sleep,” she whispered, her eyes fluttering.
“Okay, honey. Tomorrow, if you’re still feeling like this, we’ll take you over to see Dr. Winters. Okay?”
“Sure, Daddy,” Bari said, and then closed her eyes completely.
Jim glanced down at his teenage daughter, and then back to the hallway. His wife stood there, a slightly cross look on her face.
“We should take her to the hospital over in Parham,” Margaret whispered. “When she was four and had scarlet fever...”
“She doesn’t have a temperature,” he said, and walked to the bedroom door and flicked the bedroom light off. “Look, I’ll call the doctor and ask him.”
Just as he’d stepped out of his daughter’s bedroom, he heard her voice again. Mumbling. “Honey?” he glanced back at her sleeping figure.
Her lips were moving, and it was as if she was trying to say something.
“It’s a fever,” Margaret gasped. “She was tired all summer long. I told you there was something wrong. I told you it wasn’t normal for a girl her age to sleep ‘til noon so much. And she’s had flu’s and colds ever since the first of September. We need to take her in. No child sleeps for two days in a row. Not like this.”
“Honey, can you turn the volume down a little?” Jim asked, using a hand motion that always drove his wife nuts.
“Son of a.. .” Margaret whispered under her breath. “She needs to see a doctor now. And what if she’s really sick. Or... or...” As if the sun had come out from behind the clouds of her brain, his wife said, “Dear God, what if she’s pregnant?”
Her husband shot her a harsh look.
“Well, you saw those condoms. It’s not like we can pretend she’s not active anymore,” Margaret whispered, as if the neighbors might hear her.
“She’s not pregnant,” Jim said. He stepped back into his daughter’s room, and turned on the light again.
Bari’s eyes were closed, but her lips were moving rapidly.
“Bari?” He stepped over to her bed.
“Ga—Ga—Ga,” she seemed to be saying.
Jim got down on his knees, and leaned in to try to understand her. He touched her shoulder, then gave it a slight shake. “Honey?” He turned back to his wife. “I guess it’s a—” He was about to say, “bad dream,” when he saw the strange look in his wife’s face in the doorway, her eyes going wide. Jim felt goose bumps along the back of his neck even before he turned back to look at his fourteen-year-old daughter in her bed.
Her eyes were open, and she had somehow sat up without him even knowing she had moved.
“The rooms are filling up fast,” his daughter said, her voice no longer her own. It reminded Jim of the one time he’d ever encountered a rabid dog—it had a snapping snarl to it. Her eyes burned with a fierce intensity.
“Hon? Bari?” Jim felt a strange trickle of fear along his spine as his daughter spoke, not looking at him, but through him.
It was as if she were going to strike at any moment.
“Gets me my hatchets,” she whispered.
“Honey?” her father asked, softly, because he hadn’t heard her well enough—she’d swallowed the last of the words. “What is it? Bari baby?”
“Gets me my hatchets ...”
“Sweetie.” Her father felt like crying, seeing his daughter so helpless and weak.
“Hatchets, hatchets...” she mumbled under her breath.
He leaned into her, wondering if he should take her down to the hospital emergency room to make sure this wasn’t som
ething life threatening. “Bari?”
“Hat-chets, rat shits,” she said into his ear, and it seemed to him that she was shouting and his ear hurt from the sound. “Pussy don’t smell. Hat-chets, rat shits.”
He drew back from her again, and held his hands to the sides of her face, cupping her beautiful, pale, sweat-soaked face, looking into her lost eyes. “Oh dear God, Bari. Honey, are you all right?” Part of him felt sadness for his daughter, who went to church every Sunday and did not believe in using cuss words at all, and had even gotten after him for taking the Lord’s name in vain; part of him felt as if he should make a joke about calling an exorcist before she went all Linda Blair on him; and a little scared part of him was afraid that it was not his daughter’s face he held, but the muzzle of a rabid dog.
“Honey,” he whispered. “Oh my poor little baby.” Tears came to his eyes, and though he rarely wept over anything, the thought of his daughter being taken and ravaged by disease or some bacterial infection inside her made him think of the death of his mother and of all death and suffering. He wanted to call out to God Almighty for the reason for such suffering of the innocents.
“Daddy?” she whispered as if coming through a fevered moment. “Daddy, is that you?”
“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 fourt
een. “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.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 6