I didn’t rent the little apartment until September, when I felt too uncomfortable staying with Cynthia—the cottage seemed heavy with something other than grief and remembrance. It seemed not to suit me, and I’ve always preferred living alone, anyway.
Besides, getting back to my novel is important, and it was hard to focus living at Cynthia’s place. I want The Nightwatchman to be a really great novel—not the Great American Novel, but a novel like Wouk’s Youngbloode Hawk or Styron’s Sophie’s Choice—a novel about everything, about the world. I want to encompass the world— the day and the night. I want the character of the Nightwatchman to be fascinating, and on the edge of something wonderful. The more I think about it, the more dreams I’m having that seem to be bits of what the novel might become. Sometimes a ten-minute nap will bring me the dreams—and I suddenly see the Nightwatchman himself, with his narrow lips and the way his eyes widen as he speaks, and I see the plaid shirt he wears beneath his uniform. The Nightwatchman must have a uniform—it’s important for his sense of self. I see a green-gray uniform and a hat and in his belt I thought there’d be a gun, but in the dreams, I see a row of little knives, and I’m not sure what that means, but it seems to suit the Nightwatchman to have them.
Maybe this novel will be about murder. Maybe the Nightwatchman witnessed a murder on his rounds. His rounds? I still don’t know what he’s watching. What he’s protecting. Is he looking through windows? I need to develop this novel further before I write too much in it.
Maybe he’s watching a mansion, like Harrow. But I don’t want to write about Harrow. I don’t want even to think about that place. No, I think the Nightwatchman would be in a bustling city, but spending his nights in a lonely building—a factory perhaps. A factory of dreams—what would that be? A movie studio? A sweatshop? A department store? What does he watch? I’m still unsure.
If I didn’t have my own place, I don’t think I could be planning this novel out so much, and I bet it gets published. It feels so real. It feels as if it could happen.
I’d have worked on the novel more, but after doing some errands and helping out with a neighbor in slight trouble, I decided to go back and just look at the cottage again. Remember Aunt Danni. Wish I could recapture the past in that moment.
Why was it all lost? Why did time have to move forward?
I saw Cynthia inside with a few friends—probably enjoying life, even while I watched from the outside. I felt too much like a voyeur, as if all my life had become about watching and waiting and remembering the past, clinging to it and my childhood as if it could somehow fix all my dreams and desires in the present.
I turned, finally, and was walking back into the village center to grab a bite, with the early winds of October farting out leaves and leaf mold that made me sniffly and sleepy, when I saw the dead man.
Dead to me, anyway.
Or maybe I was dead to him.
His name was Bish—short for Bishop—McBride, and he and I had been friends on my summers and holidays to Watch Point. He wasn’t officially dead, but he might as well have been because the last time I saw him he told me that I could go fuck myself and that if he ever saw me in this town again he’d make a point to get his gun and plow me down and no jury would convict him.
And maybe he was right.
I had hurt him in a way that I guess you’re not supposed to hurt somebody, particularly when you’re best friends and you’re teenagers and you know the Rules of Friendship.
I had betrayed his friendship by stealing his girl, then telling him later that she had meant nothing to me.
But then, sometimes, when I tried to remember it, I think I got it wrong.
Sometimes I felt like Bish had a thing for me.
2
“Bish,” Luke said, nodding slightly.
Bishop McBride had gotten a little chubby, but only in that frat boy way that meant he probably had too many beers and now and then forgot how many fries he’d scarfed down and how many ice cream cones he’d had in the summer. He looked like he’d been living the good life—his cheeks were rosy and round and his hair was a thick flop across his forehead and his untucked white shirt was starched and his jeans looked brand new.
All in all, he hadn’t changed that much.
“Luke. I’d heard you’d moved here.” His eyes lit up briefly, as if he expected a big hug and “Missed you, old fart!” from Luke, and then that little hope seemed to extinguish. Still, he kept the grin and added an arched eyebrow. “Been avoiding me?”
“Yeah, well. Not really.”
“You should’ve dropped me a line, buddy.”
“I figured I’d see you around.”
“Want to get a beer?”
“Sure, but...”
“Us as kids? Don’t be ridiculous,” Bish McBride said. “Long time ago. I was stupid. I lost a good friendship over nothing. How dumb is that?” He stepped over to Luke Smithson and slapped his shoulder. “Goddamn, it’s good to see you.”
While Luke and his old buddy Bish wandered up and over to Macklin Street, to the Ratty Dog Bar & Grille, each feeling as if something great had just happened—a reunion that was long in the making, a new beginning for an old friendship that had nearly been like brotherhood once upon a time; and while Ronnie Pond started looking for the box cutters so she could start unpacking all the boxes of books in the back of the store; and while Jim Love tried to tear his daughter Bari away from chewing more of his face off; and while Chuck Waller pressed his weight down on Mindy Shackleford’s neck so she couldn’t scream and could barely even breathe and then turned around on her throat and leaned back over, trying to find a way to tear her lower half open with his bare hands; and while Thad Allen stripped to his boxers and laid down on Alice Kyeteler’s massage table so that she could “relax the most uptight man in three counties,” and as Alice rubbed scented oil on the palms of her hands and thought of that phrase from Shakespeare’s Macbeth—”By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes. Open locks, whoever knocks!”—and began to wonder why she was feeling so sleepy; eleven-year-old Kazi Vrabec walked up the driveway of the house called Harrow to see the man who looked like a scarecrow.
CHAPTER NINE
1
“Here’s the thing,” the man on the property said to Kazi Vrabec. “It’s completely nuts, but I locked myself out of my own house and my wife is in some kind of trouble in there. I only just started on this job a few nights ago, and I can’t really get on the cell and call my employer because they’d see me as completely incompetent and I’d get fired. Only I can’t get fired, and I don’t mean it’s because they won’t fire me, it’s because I’m screwed if I get fired—you don’t mind language like ‘screwed’ do you?”
“No,” Kazi said.
“Good, well I’m fucked six ways to Sunday if I have to call my employer for the keys and I think a little boy like you—well, you might be able to help me out of this predicament,” the man said, taking a breath.
Up close, he didn’t look like a straw man at all—he had big dark circles around his eyes, and he definitely had some hay or something in his hair, under his hat, but that might’ve been from mowing—half the lawn beyond the stone wall looked like someone had been cutting grass, while piles of high weeds and sticker bushes that had been torn at the roots lay alongside the stones.
“I don’t know if I can help,” Kazi said.
“What’s your name, boy? Casey?”
“Kah-zee.” Even as he said it, Kazi wondered how the man would have guessed “Casey,” since that was what he was called sometimes by substitute teachers who didn’t know any better.
Did I just tell him my name and not remember I did it?
“Well, look K-Z, all you need to do is crawl through a little gap. That’s it. See, I can lift you up to this window on the second floor and there’s this little gap for getting in. My wife, she’s in some kind of trouble. I can’t get in at all. Doors are locked, windows sealed up on the first floor. It’s a g
oddamn fortress, and I dropped my damn key somewhere. The front door locks and the back door’s all barred up and closed and padlocked, and it’s because I either lost the fucking key or I left it inside although I don’t know shit about how that could’ve happened,” the man said. “Hey K-Z, am I mumbling?”
Kazi shook his head slightly. He knew to give grownups respect; his mother had told him to never give lip and always treat adults as his betters.
“If I’m not mumbling,” the man said, leaning down toward him so that his face was nearly next to his, “then why in hell are you looking like you don’t understand me. No habla een-gless? You a furrinor?”
“Mister?”
“A furrinor.”
Then Kazi understood. He nodded. A foreigner. “I’m not. But my mother and father are from Czechoslovakia. They came over before I was born.”
“Yeah,” the man said, his eyes squinting a little, sniffing at the air. “You smell like one of them. You a Jew?”
Kazi wanted to tell the truth, but he was a little afraid. “Not really.”
“What’s that mean? Not really. Jew’s a Jew, no questions asked.”
“My grandfather is Jewish. But my mother and father think religion is made up to make people feel good about death.”
“Worse than a Jew,” the man said, straightening up. “A goddamn atheist unbaptized baby boy. You know what some folks do with the unbaptized, Mr. K-Z Slovak? Some people throw ‘em in a pot and boil ‘em down and use their fat to slick up their naked bodies and fly on broomsticks stuck up their twats to witch Sabbaths.”
Kazi took a small step backward. The little voice in his head that he knew must be his conscience was telling him that something was wrong here. More than that, it was practically screaming inside him, SOMETHING’S WRONG HERE. And yet he was afraid to turn and run. He knew that dealing with the straw man might be the same as dealing with a snake, and you had to walk very carefully away from a snake. His mother had told him about irregular people—”They look like anybody else, but they got bad stuff inside them. You just keep away from them when you can.”
Kazi took another step back.
“They slap all that little unbaptized boy fat on their bodies and slide it all over their tits,” the man said as he stepped a little closer. “They look like greasy old hags with snatches like gumless grandmas. And then they fly off to the devil and dance for him and kiss his smelly culo, as they say in the Southern climes.” Then the man roared with laughter.
Kazi would’ve liked to turn and run then, but instead, something really stupid happened inside him. He began to shut down a little—and he froze on the spot.
“It’s a joke, K-Z. It’s a joke. Nobody does that. People used to, maybe, but you don’t believe in the devil, do you? I mean not if your Slovak mama and papa don’t believe in God. You a commie?”
Kazi didn’t even quite understand the question. “A what?”
“A comm-a-nist,” the man said. “You believe in the Soviet dream? You a Havana buttboy? When I was a boy I used to know a lot of people who believed in it. All of them, godless. You godless like that? You taking calls from Castro and quoting Marx in the parks in the darks for the larks? What I mean to say, K-Z, is are you a patriot of the U.S. of A., or are you one of those immigrant leeches who comes over to take up all the welfare and medical suckage you can get and still you keep trying to knock ol’ Liberty down and make sure that God stays good and buried under your red, red feet?”
Kazi stared at the man, but all the while he was wondering if he could run fast enough back to his bike and jump on and get the hell out of there before the man could go running after him. The straw man was old, after all, older than Kazi’s mother, and Kazi could run really fast and he could bike faster.
The man seemed to leap forward—almost like a dog. He landed down on his haunches in front of Kazi so they were at eye level. Kazi held his breath and peed his pants when it happened.
“I told you my wife was in trouble and I need somebody to help. You gonna help?” the man said. Then he looked up at the sky. “You think it’s gonna rain later? Looks like a storm up there. Up there in heaven.”
2
“What kind of trouble?” Kazi asked. He hated the feeling in his underwear and trousers—that just-peed nasty stickiness and the smell. He hadn’t done this since he’d been in kindergarten, so he found that troubling, too.
The man had grabbed him by the left arm and locked his hand around his wrist in such a way that it felt like a handcuff. A powerful grip—and though Kazi didn’t struggle as much as he thought he should’ve, it would’ve been tough to pull away. Truth was, Kazi knew this from the schoolyard New Kid Test to any number of other tests that had been thrown at him in his eleven years, that sometimes struggling was worse than just playing along until you had a chance to run.
And something else, too. Something about the man, as soon as he touched Kazi, it scared him less. He didn’t know why he was less frightened than he had been just seconds before, but the man drawing him onto the property by the arm—it took away some sense of fear for the boy.
It’s not right. I should be running away. I should be screaming. But I feel... like I know him already. I feel like he’s all talk.
“What do you mean?” the man asked.
“Your wife. Mrs....”
“Mrs. Fly,” he said.
“Mrs. Fly. Like a housefly?”
“A little different,” the man said. “There are all kinds of flies in the world. Some sting. Some have big mandibles. You know what a mandible is?”
Kazi shook his head.
“Jaws, kid.” The man grinned. “Mrs. Fly’s jaws are so big she can’t seem to keep ‘em shut most of the time.”
“You said she’s in trouble,” Kazi said, his voice a whisper. He had the twin feelings of fear and curiosity. There was something about the man that was like a tickle along his spine—scary, but somehow it felt as if Kazi needed to go with him, and he felt as if he were picking at a scab to see what was underneath. “Is she in bad trouble?”
“Ah yes. This time of day, she gets that way,” the man said, still dragging Kazi along. They went up the long drive, with tall trees on each side of it, all full of gold and red and brown leaves, many of them having already fallen in drifts along the grass. As they rounded a corner, Kazi saw it at some distance.
The house.
Harrow.
He knew its name even though he’d never been there. All the kids told stories about it at one time or another. He had heard it was a castle. He had heard it was a fortress. One little girl told him that it was the biggest house, bigger than the Empire State Building; and a boy in school told him not to believe that girl. “She lies all the time,” the boy had said. “It’s not so big. It’s like any other house. It’s big. It’s just not so big.”
But Kazi’s first view and reaction to the house was not that it was big or monstrous or even creepy.
But that it looked a little sad.
It was like the picture of his grandmother from Prague— a little bit bigger than normal, a little bit older than you’d think, and a little bit on the edge of falling apart if you looked at her the wrong way, and a little bit pissed off that that she was stuck where she was. That was the house. It didn’t seem scary at all to him—any more than the image of his grandmother did—but it looked very sad and very much in need of fixing up.
It was bigger than any house he’d ever seen, and it looked like it had towers and windows that went off in the distance—as if it were as big as the village itself.
“See?” the man said, tugging him forward. “See the spires and the turrets? Oh, you little Commie boys probably don’t know about turrets on houses. It’s too budgie-wa. This is the kind of house rich people live in, K-Z. In America, if you work hard, you can own a place just like this.”
“I’m an American,” Kazi said too quietly.
“What’s that? You’re a what?”
“An American.”
>
“Ha. You don’t smell like an American, and you don’t look like any Americans I know, kid. You look a hundred percent Russkie to me. I bet you can even speak the Old Tongue. Can you?”
Kazi didn’t look up at him, but watched the house as they approached it. It began to loom as only old houses can—its dimensions seemed to grow from the pile of brick and stone and wood from the distance, into a mansion that looked as if it had been messed with by too many architects and too many people trying to tear it down.
“Je pozde litovat,” the man said.
Kazi stopped in his tracks, and so did the man. The man grinned so broadly he was like a jack-o-lantern with all his teeth in place. “What?”
“You heard me,” the man said. “What, you think I can’t talk like your mama? I’m smarter than you’ll ever be, K-Z, and smarter than your mama and smarter than your daddy and you stink like you peed yourself. Did you? Did you? Chlapec je jako obrazek.”
Kazi glanced up at him. “Who are you?”
“I’m the guy who takes care of this place. Also, handyman and sometimes the electrician and sometimes I get to pee my pants just like you did. Look at your crotch, K-Z, you really yellowed it. You get scared or something? It wasn’t me, was it?” the man said, tightening his grip. “I bet it chafes down there. Peeing your panties is what girls do, you better hope none of your friends sees you on the blacktop like that, K-Z the Commie, because if they do, they’re gonna laugh at you like there’s no tomorrow and • you’re just gonna have to sit there in your own filth and take it. Little pissy panties boy. And just remember, milk, milk, lemonade, ‘round the corner fudge is made.”
Kazi tugged hard to get his wrist out of the man’s hand, but he couldn’t. The man just held tight, and he leaned over and slapped Kazi hard on the side of the face.
For a second Kazi was about to cry, but the man snarled, “And don’t let me hear the big baby whimper, either. You pee your panties, don’t start being a little girl about discipline, K-Z. Crybaby. You a crybaby? Crybaby K-Z. You’re here to help. My wife’s in trouble.”
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 13