Roland simply blessed him and spiked him in the side of the neck. Since it was near closing time, nobody else interrupted Roland’s work. He went out back to the pathetic pile of planks that Harmon had the nerve to call a lumber yard, and managed to find some heavier wood that looked almost like railroad ties. He went and got some more spikes and nails and hammers from the store, and sat down to make himself a cross to bear.
He listened to the angels all around him as they commanded and spake at him, and when an hour or so had gone by, he had a fine crucifix.
When he dragged it out of Harmon’s store, he felt the weight of guilt and pain upon him.
Roland felt better than good as he carried the cross, dragging the back bit of it as he went along the streets. He felt medieval, and pure. He felt as if flagellants surrounded him, whipping themselves in a frenzy; and incense in the air, sweet smothering incense; and as he went through the village toward the great cathedral that rose up above the treetops, he bore witness to the demons that ran through the village, tormenting the damned before dragging them to hell.
“Iniquities!” he shouted, kicking at the child who crossed his path. “Fornicators!” He felt the impurity of that great world as it sank to the devil. He knew what was coming. The end of days. The Apocalypse.
Roland was the first to see the white-gray ash as it came down from the darkening sky, like first snow. He opened his mouth to taste of it—and the ash sizzled on his tongue. The wind picked up and the ashes fell as if someone, somewhere were burning trash. Or as if some volcano had erupted far from the village.
First, the plagues come, Roland thought. The days of the martyrs are upon us. The plagues, and the fire from heaven and the release from hell of its minions.
“The fire from heaven rains upon us in white ash!” he shouted at those who would listen as he shambled along with his heavy cross. “The blood of the martyrs shall spill! The Great Angel of the Pit will arise and call those who are weak and unholy to its army! But the mighty and the righteous shall not perish, but shall live in the House of Holiness!” His voice no longer seemed like that of a nineteen-year-old. He felt as if he had truly become a man, and he boomed when he spoke as a preacher might, a Man of God who would take away the sins of creation in one magnificent act.
A man by the name of Roland Love—all Love was he, all Charity and Goodness!
The damnable side effect of this infusion of glory that Roland had begun feeling seemed to manifest itself in a bulging and uncontrollable erection his trousers, and a sense that he had the Divine Creator within him now.
“Multiply across the land,” he said to the ashen air. “Multiply the forces of the righteous, of the Ancient of Days, who have slept so long under the thighs of that Great Whore, Babylon, Mystery, the Bitch of a Thousand Vaginas, who brings forth her children from her mouth!”
He stopped and glanced around him.
There in the dark, others had gathered. They watched him as if he had special gifts.
They know.
They are my followers.
Followers.
Even Harmon Prives, whom he’d bashed to hell back at the hardware store, stood there among the others, his face nothing more than a pasty wasp’s nest of flesh, his right leg turned completely backward. Harmon raised his arms and praised the God of the House, who had brought salvation to the believers of Watch Point.
Only Harmon’s voice was a little messed up on account of the spike that had gone into his throat. It sounded like he was crying out, “Tek-ah-ny-lee-tho-soth!”
A chorus arose around Roland, of these broken and battered people, both the Quick and the Dead, following him, their knight of Righteousness, to the Great Cathedral of the Divine that grew in the woods like the fingers of a hand.
As he moved toward it, his followers all around, light came up within the woods and brambles, and he saw torches lit up and down the driveway of the grand estate.
The House of the Divine, he thought. He brought the cross up the drive, feeling the terrible weight of it, and his followers brought out electrical cords and ropes and began to whip him as he proceeded on his path to the magnificent place, the seat of all that was holy.
Upon his head, one of his followers (who looked suspiciously like Paula Beauchamp, although he wasn’t sure because she had a mask made of human skin pressed across half her face) put a crown of barbed wire upon his head to complete his move toward martyrdom.
When he reached the front porch of the house, he hefted the cross from his back and shoulders and laid it down.
With the help of his followers, he brought the cross up and pressed it into the earth, leaning it a bit against the porch to support its weight.
Roland drew back, admiring his work.
Knowing that it was the word of the Infinite Knowledge that had brought him here and had commanded this erection of the wood.
The cross was in the exact configuration that had been in his mind when he’d witnessed the glory of the Most High at the Church of the Vale.
It was upside down, pointing toward earth. Roland announced to the gathered throng, “All the treasures that are in Heaven will be here now with us. And all that was in hell will arise to greet the angels.”
If he could’ve moved outside of his own body as he wished to—for the flesh was notorious for error and sin, and the spirit pure—Roland Love would have seen himself and his followers in a way that would have surprised him. For he stood in the torchlight, shining with the blood that had dripped from cuts in his scalp from the barbed-wire crown, his shirt nearly stripped from the whipping of cords at his back and sides, his body long and thinly muscled and yet somehow gaunt and skeletal as if just the walk from the hardware store to Harrow had taken some element of a thriving spirit from him. His face was nearly snow-white from the ashes that had fallen upon him, a whiteness that was only interrupted by the streaks of black-red blood that glistened in the nearby fires.
His followers were a good twelve or so from the village—some children among them. All had been beaten or torn or mangled. Some were nearly dead and seemed to have the translucent glow of the grave to their skin; others looked as if they had never truly been alive.
And yet from behind Roland’s eyes, they were the chosen of the Divine, to come witness Roland’s ascension into the house that contained the essence of all that was both holy and unholy, in a marriage that would produce a new Earth and end the wars between angels and demons.
All around them, bonfires had been lit in the driveway and great torches had been erected, but these were not merely long thick sticks with fire at their tips.
The torches were the trees themselves, and in the trees, what had once been human beings were wrapped with rope and cloth to the heavier branches, or had been nailed to the trunks of the trees. They looked like beautiful fingers of a hand—the bound people who had been smeared with some kind of black tar and set ablaze. Beautiful burning fingers.
Their screams arose and died out as the fires overtook these human torches, as many from the village hoisted up their neighbors and their wives and their children to light the way for all.
It reminded Roland so much of the angel with the sword of fire who protected the garden of Paradise.
The gates of Heaven will open. This is the hour of my becoming, he thought.
It was from this fire that the white ash had come, spreading across the village, and with each person set ablaze, the trees themselves seemed to sing the praises of the angels to Roland.
He watched the torches burn and wept with happiness.
Even the stench of the burning bodies brought a holiness to the spot.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1
Alice Kyeteler had not been idle during those hours between late afternoon and early twilight. Alice, though hardly the witch those in town thought her to be, did believe she had a touch of psychic ability. So when Sam Pratt told her the tale of Jack Templeton’s madness—involving the humping of Sam’s pet python—and w
hen Thad Allen slept so deeply even while Sam and she had been chattering away, Alice had taken it as seriously as if someone had told her that he had a life-threatening disease.
When Sam heard the commotion out on the street, he and Alice had rushed out of the store to the porch of the shop, and had seen much of what had begun to overtake the village. Packs of dogs ran up and down the street. They saw children running, holding up a man who lay on his back trying to turn over and push the children’s hands away from him. They saw others at their windows, too, including Army Vernon above the florist shop. It looked to Alice like he had some kind of gun in his hands, and was ready to pick off anyone who came by. After seeing all this, they had retreated back into Alice’s shop and Alice had locked the door behind them. Thad was still asleep, whispering to himself.
She went back to try to rouse him, but Thad merely shifted position and continued whispering. She squatted down a bit to hear him, but all he said was, “The rooms are filling up.”
She glanced over to Sam. “That’s not normal sleep. He’s dreaming. In his dreams, he’s somewhere else.”
Sam said to her, “It’s Harrow. It’s because of the dead boy I saw there.”
Alice, who took matters of the spirit world quite seriously, wanted to dismiss this. But Harrow was one of the reasons she had decided to live in Watch Point. She had felt that the village was on a magnetic pull toward the property. Her psychic understanding seemed to decrease a bit, living there, and she preferred that to other towns she’d visited, where she had been overwhelmed by the sense of those from the other side trying to communicate with the living. It had nearly driven her mad as a younger woman, and so she had chosen Watch Point because of what she thought of as a “dead area” where she felt comparatively fewer psychic rumblings than elsewhere.
And yet she had always known that she lived in the shadow of a haunt. She had read all the books on Harrow, had followed the career of the young psychic who had died at the house—along with several others in the early 1900s. She had tried to warn a man named Jack Fleetwood who, with his daughter and a woman named Ivy Martin, had opened the house just a few years previous in order to study its psychic field. She had written him several letters to keep any psychics away from Harrow, but they had come anyway, and there had been hell to pay at the house.
But now, she thought. It has leaked out. Somehow. That nightwatchman. Spider. Speeder. I knew he was wrong for this place.
She accepted within her mind what she had been prepared for since moving to the village. “I don’t know what to do,” she told Sam Pratt.
She closed her eyes briefly, thinking of Harrow. Thinking of what she knew of it. What she had felt when she’d had the twinges of intuition give her the little shocks she sometimes got when she saw a person or a place that was off-kilter. She got so few of them in Watch Point that they seemed that much sharper here. She tried to call out to the darkness she felt to see if she could find a guide of some kind—whether spirit or other.
She took Sam aside, at some distance from Thad Allen. “You came to me because you think I’m a witch.”
He nodded, looking more scared and more brave than anyone she’d ever known.
“I can’t do anything about this. I’m not a witch. Not like you think. I don’t have magical powers. I get feelings sometimes, Sam. I’ve known about the house. I didn’t know it could leak out like this. But I’ve stayed away from that property because... it would devour me.”
“If it’s leaking, maybe it needs to be plugged up,” Sam said, his dark hair falling over one side of his face, obscuring his right eye for a moment. Suddenly, he looked too young and vulnerable to have to face this.
Alice Kyeteler, at fifty, felt more chickenshit than she’d ever imagined she could be in her whole life. It hit her right there—she had moved to the village at the edge of a dark place to escape the voices in her head that sometimes led her to believe she was slowly going mad. And she had done it because she was in awe of that terrible house. She felt its suction. She felt its pull.
Seeing the streets of the village, as they were now, scared the shit out of her.
“I don’t know what we can do. I can’t work miracles. I’m only someone who believes this can happen. I don’t have any ability to fix it.”
“All I know is someone started this,” Sam said. “At that house. I was there that night. We all dreamed about it. All of us who went there. I dreamed about it. I dreamed about rooms in the house. I dreamed about that boy. Arnie Pierson. The one who was dead and cut open. I think I know why it’s leaking. I think someone sacrificed a dead boy, and they should’ve sacrificed a live one.” Sam said it as if he had been keeping a secret from the world that had overwhelmed him with anxiety and guilt, and now it was free. He was free from it.
Alice wanted to hug him, and weep against him as if she were the child and he the grownup. “I can’t go there, Sam. I know you want me to do it. I know you think I have some power. I don’t. That place eats psychic ability. It was safe since the last time. They shut it down, I thought. Even if the man who lives there now performed some ritual, it wouldn’t start it up again, I don’t think. I don’t believe the house is turned on.”
“But you saw what happened in the street!” he shouted. “You saw! How can it not be turned on? You tell me that what we saw on the street is not—”
“I can’t go there. I can’t,” she said back, just as vehemently. “I can’t go there because if I do, this just gets worse. Whatever is here in this village, right now, it gets worse if I go there!”
“It can’t get worse,” Sam said. “It can only—”
In the middle of his sentence, Sam stopped talking. His eyes went wide.
Alice turned about to look in the same direction as Sam.
Behind her, Thad Allen, in his boxer shorts, had sat up on the massage table. “You don’t have to go there, Alice,” he said, his voice a monotone as if he were still asleep. “It’ll come for you.”
“Thad?” Alice went to him, and was about to put her hand on his forehead to check for a temperature because his face was shiny with sweat. Before her hand reached his face, he had closed his hands around her neck and began strangling her.
2
At Norma Houseman’s place, Lizzie Pond and Norma’s own children had spent nearly an hour cutting Norma open in ways that bled her as slowly as possible. Yet Norma did not seem to mind—her eyes fluttered open and closed, as she dreamed of making love to Chuck Waller in a lavish bedroom with a great frosted mirror on the ceiling. Even the floor had a mirror, and she could see herself riding Chuck’s reptilian phallus, riding it and plunging up and down on it, while Mindy Shackleford stood in a corner of the room, watching them as if she were afraid of sex altogether. Norma smiled in the dream that played behind her eyes, and every time her eyes opened, briefly, she saw another one of her children hammering at her kneecap, or twisting a fork into her hand. But the dream was more powerful, and she rode Chuck Waller like she was in the rodeo. Even after he had transformed into an enormous scaly lizard, she continued to buck against him and open up further so that he could fit inside her and grow.
3
As the darkness fell across Watch Point, more and more people moved in small herds away from the village. Sure, they’d grab up anyone they happened to see, or throw themselves at the cars that drove along as a handful of what might be called “survivors of twilight” tried to get out of town. But still, their movements were slow and shambling as they went toward those least-taken roads, up Jackson Avenue, along a narrow winding road through the unkempt brambles of woods that led out to Harrow. Some walked on nearly broken legs; others crawled, dragging themselves with the weapons they’d gathered—knives, trowels, hatchets, or rakes—and still others walked on their hands, for their bodies had been so ravaged by their companions that there was very little to drag behind them. It almost looked like a carnival leaving town, a freak show from some nineteenth-century idea of what a freak might be, as they we
nt with their knives in their mouths, their guns stuffed into their trousers. Even some of the local cops were there, moving slowly forward on their knees as if in prayer. Jeff Funk, who had moved up from deputy to sheriff in a matter of months, pushed a wheelbarrow full of corpses. It was as if he—and the others—were off to plant a special garden in the woods.
If you were alive and watching from your upper floor window, as Army Vernon was, it might look like the most bizarre parade. The lamplight in the street caught the shadowy figures as they dragged and hobbled and walked away from the village.
Army glanced back at his beautiful wife, who had fallen asleep with a terrible fever. She lay on some blankets he’d piled up nearby.
She murmured a word over and over again in her dream. “Winter.”
PART FOUR
REBORN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
1
Kazi Vrabec had spent time wandering the rooms with the mummified dog’s head tucked beneath his arm as if it were one of his beloved stuffed toys.
“I don’t know,” he said aloud.
Kazi stopped walking, as if listening to the dog’s head.
“I guess so.”
Another pause and a listen.
“If she’s in pain, I want to get her help. Where is she?”
Kazi went up one of the staircases. Its banister was a rich, deep wood, carved into shapes of pineapples and grapes with a garland of wood flowers running along it, too. At a landing halfway up, there was a marble-topped table with a vase of dried flowers in it. Above this, an empty faded space as if there had once been a painting there but it had been taken down.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 24