Then the writing stopped.
He hadn’t noticed the wardrobe in the room because he’d been so focused on reading the walls. But once he saw that its door was ajar, he went over to it. Again, he saw the small wet footprints, too small to be his aunt’s footprints.
He swung the wardrobe door back.
Lying under a blanket was his aunt Danni—her hair disheveled, circles under her eyes as if she had not slept in days. She lay there curled up nearly in a ball, looking up at him, completely naked beneath the blanket.
Slowly, she seemed to evaporate like steam—even particles of mist seemed to remain in the air. The blanket was flat, as if no one had ever been there.
In that second or two of seeing her, he had a sense that she truly had gone mad. Even when she looked up at him, there was no recognition in her eyes.
It can’t be her.
He felt something along his belt. He glanced downward.
Something was moving the tongue of his belt slightly.
Some invisible hands unbuckled it, then unzipped his fly.
He held his breath, wanting to pull back and run, but wondering what this was.
What could be doing it?
He felt a hand run along his briefs, feeling his penis and cupping his testicles. On the wall to the left of the wardrobe, the ghost began writing,
Let me take you in my mouth.
Aunt Danni loves her nephew.
Let me take you in my mouth.
Let me.
Let me.
And that was when he let out the bloodcurdling scream that went out through the open window, into the night air, and made Alice Kyeteler wonder who had just been killed.
3
Luke drew back from the invisible hands that grasped at him, but it was more than one spirit. He felt someone behind him, pressing him forward—an unseen presence licked at his neck. He felt the hands again as they reached under his briefs, feeling along his pubic hair, grazing the edge of his dick with warm fingers.
“No,” he gasped, but his voice had gone hoarse from the scream. He pushed at the invisibility all around him, but he felt as if it was a press of flesh at his back and his crotch, at his shoulders and his sides as he felt hands moving up and down his hips. “Please. No.”
Someone was rubbing just beneath his balls, and his jacket ripped off as if someone had a razor behind him and had cut right through it to pull it apart. He looked down at his shirt, and it too became shredded. He felt fingers along his chest, and then a sucking at his nipples. He squirmed to pull away, but could not. On the wall others were writing words—it was not just notes from his aunt.
We want to tear you open.
I am hungry for you.
Take my love. Take it. Take it now.
He squinted as he tried to make sense of what they were writing. The unseen drew his pants down around his ankles, and then that razor feeling of cutting at his briefs, so that he was completely naked.
He felt sucking at his balls and just under them, and the pleasure was too much for him to resist, and yet his terror grew as he struggled against the invisible ghosts. He felt more lips sucking his nipples and under his arms, and when the ministrations to his dick became intense, his mind snapped just a little more, and he began to imagine that they did truly love him, the spirits in this room, they passed him around among them and they kissed his lips. He felt their rough, sour tongues press between his lips, and a gentle whispering at his ear.
He got so hard, and yet he hated every second of it, so he kept fighting them. Yet he kept feeling the love and the tender touching all over his body, in every crevice, every opening, he felt their tongues and their fingers and their breath and then he felt something press against his mouth that seemed all wrong to him, but he opened his mouth to it, and took it in the back of his throat.
Something crawled down inside him through his mouth, and he felt it move along, like an undulating snake, into the pit of his stomach, while all around him, the invisible dead took him every way imaginable.
Even when his skin began ripping—along his chest, just above his nipples—he experienced the complete smothering pleasure of it and his mouth, full of whatever had traveled within it, he was unable to cry out even if he was aware of pain.
4
After the scream, the silence outside the house seemed worse.
But the three of them—Alice, Army, and Ronnie—walked along the driveway, surrounded by trees that seemed to burn without burning up, and when they got to the open door in the front, they did their best to enter Harrow together.
But as soon as they were inside, it was as if they’d each stepped into a separate place.
5
Ronnie Pond held her hatchet up when she saw that the others were no longer beside her.
What she saw in the front entrance within the house:
Her sister Lizzie, sitting on a staircase at the end of the foyer.
Or was it Lizzie?
The girl looked like Lizzie, but her hair obscured her face. She wore the same shirt and skirt that Lizzie had on last time Ronnie had seen her—seemed like a year before, but it had just been that afternoon, on the library steps.
Ronnie took a step toward her sister.
She glanced to the left, and saw an arched doorway with the wooden door slightly ajar. A reddish light came from beyond the door. To the right, there was a brief hall that opened up into a wider area. Perhaps some kind of living area?
Or dead area.
“Lizzie?” she asked as she took another two steps toward her sister.
The girl on the stairs looked up at her. It was Lizzie, but it was not Lizzie. Ronnie was sure that it was a copy of her sister, and not really her sister. It wasn’t that she didn’t look exactly like Lizzie. In fact, it looked so much like her twin that it bothered Ronnie that she was sure it wasn’t her twin.
Something was missing. Was she drugged?
But it wasn’t like that—Ronnie didn’t feel as if anything was fundamentally wrong with this person who resembled her sister in nearly every particular. The soft cast to the eyes. The full lips. The slightly tanned skin.
And she was fairly sure it wasn’t some robot of her sister.
Yet it seemed like a copy. As if something around the edges of her being was a little bit faint. A run-off from a printer where the toner ink needed changing.
“It’s so Huguenots in the Louvre here,” the Lizzie thing said, using the mixed-up code language that the real Lizzie would use.
As Ronnie watched the Lizzie thing stand up from the stairs, she realized that what was missing from her sister was a certain aura, for lack of a better word. It was as if something about her sister’s life force could not be duplicated, even if every mole and freckle and defect was there.
“But you’re here now,” the Lizzie thing said, and she smiled sweetly but sadly, as if she had bad news to tell. “Where are your friends?”
Ronnie didn’t respond. She was watching this copy to see if she could find seams or if she’d see through her like a ghost at some point. And yet this Lizzie was in the flesh, moving toward her as relaxed and normal as her sister might.
Still, when the Lizzie thing got close enough that she reached over to try to touch Ronnie on the side of the face, Ronnie drew her hatchet up and tore into her sister as if she were a creature from hell.
6
Alice clung to Army Vernon’s hand, even though she could not longer see him. “Are you still there?” she said as she squeezed what were now invisible fingers.
He squeezed back.
Alice saw the great cathedral entrance, with its gargoyles and statues of martyrs at its doorway. “Somehow, it’s separated us. I suppose it has the power over our minds. I suppose that’s the penalty for stepping into its mouth.”
Then she felt Army’s fingers tug away from hers, and she wondered if they’d ever find each other again. It was as if he had just slipped through a veil of mist—and had faded, a ghost, into Harro
w.
7
Army Vernon had not told Alice or anyone other than his wife that he had been dreaming about winter, about an icy death on some frozen tundra. Army was the kind of guy who kept it to himself.
When he let go of Alice’s hand, it was because of the cold. Not just cold—the kind of bone-chilling cold that reminded him of the worst winter of his life. The mother of all snowstorms that had come down on Watch Point in the fall of 1957, as if out of the blue. He had been a young man then and had run through the village wondering why no one was taking shelter. And then, he’d known: He had somehow been the only one to see the snowdrifts and feel the icy winds. It had been his mental state, and although he spent his next year at the VA hospital a few hours away, in the psych ward, he still believed he had seen the snow and ice.
As he walked down what he assumed to be a hallway, he wondered if he hadn’t gotten a little bit of Harrow in him. If the house had not reached out and touched him without his knowing about it.
If the madness that had taken him over that day was not just a preview of the madness he walked among at this very moment. The entire house, which looked just as it had when he’d once gone there as a young man, had a layer of ice and frost over the walls and along the floors. Up the staircase, there were snow drifts as if it were February and the place had no rooftop.
You went here around then. Before your insane day when you thought snow and ice had smothered the village. You came over here to the house. It was a school in those days. You had someone you wanted to see here, and you shouldn’t have been seeing her. She wasn’t the woman you’d married just a few years earlier. She was a teacher named Betsy who you’d seen at the Frostee Freeze one summer night, and you’d chased her like a greyhound after a rabbit. You couldn’t not chase her. She was young and happy and beautiful, and she was the opposite of that wife of yours, who had begun to nag and annoy you in those first years of marriage, after the honeymoon had crystallized into rock. Betsy was not like the other women in Watch Point—she was from Boston, and had come down to the boys’ prep school to teach for a few years but wanted to finish her master’s degree and maybe get a job at Vassar or even Parham College in history. She was better than you. You even knew that then. Smarter, more witty. She had talent and loveliness, and she would reach into your unbuttoned shirt and slide her arms around your back and your chest would rub against her bra before it came off, and you felt free again.
And one day, after Harrow Academy had let out, and her classroom was empty with its blinds drawn, you had taken her there. Even though she had tried to stop you, you fulfilled that childhood fantasy of making love to a beautiful teacher on one of the student desks.
And you thought you were a clever young man, Army. Clever and sexy and ahead of the game.
You returned to your wife, and you forgot about Betsy, once you had her, but Harrow was watching you. Harrow had entered your mind.
And when you saw the snowstorm in the middle of September, in the late 1950s, you didn’t even know that somewhere, laughter could be heard.
Somewhere, the house had begun to make ready for you to return to it.
Beneath his feet, a thickening glaze of ice and frost, as if he were not on a floor but on a frozen river. He squatted down and reached to the ice floor to rub away some of the frost. He thought he saw something beneath it.
Something moving.
He had brushed away a bit of the frost—beneath the layer of ice, he saw faces looking up at him.
People from the village he had known most of his life— the face closest to the surface was Jeff Baer, a contractor who had cleaned out the rot along Army’s old house, and then when work needed to be done on the kitchen, Baer had been the one to spend days there. Another face near Baer’s—the Mitchell girl, who lived two doors down. At thirteen, she had been like a granddaughter to him, coming over and helping out when Army had been laid up with back problems. Edna Loniker had her mouth open in a frozen scream, but he was almost positive her eyes had life in them. Then he checked the Mitchell girl—was her name Alison? Or Alicia?—and her wide-eyed stare seemed not to be that of a dead girl. Other people, too, some he had known, some he had spoken with now and again, some who were occasional customers who came into his shop for Christmas and Easter floral arrangements, and they all looked up at him, their eyes open, frozen in that frozen river beneath his feet.
When he rubbed away more of the frost, he thought he saw a tongue moving slightly at the edge of one of their open mouths.
Jesus. They’re still alive.
It’s an illusion. It has to be. Harrow can’t change like this. It can’t. It’s a trick it’s playing on you, just like the trick it played on you as a young man. It’s a trickster place, this house. It’s a shapeshifter. It gets inside your mind and fucks with you.
Still, he reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and withdrew a Swiss Army knife. Popped a blade up, and began scratching at the surface of the ice. After a few seconds, he’d cut down to what seemed to be slush, and when he thrust his finger into this tiny hole, it touched ice-cold water.
Then the Mitchell girl moved the pinky of her left hand. So slightly he wasn’t sure if he had just imagined it.
It’s insanity. It’s madness. This house is madness. It’s not real. They can’t be alive. They’re not even here. There’s no river. No ice. It’s in your mind. You know them because it’s using your mind to make the pictures. It’s making you insane, and when it has you, it’s going to open you up like a gutted fish.
Army felt compelled to keep scratching at the small tear in the ice that he’d made, and after widening it a bit, the blade of his Swiss Army knife broke off. But it had done enough damage to the ice that a crack began running out from it on the ice. Then another and another. Small cracks, but they opened the hole further to the slush of water.
Army pressed his hand into the slush and reached beneath it into the water. As chilling as the temperature was— his hand swelled up a bit with hives as it went beneath the surface—he wanted to reach the little Mitchell girl. He wanted to make sure she was really moving. As his fingers touched the palm of her hand, she closed her ringers around his, quickly. It felt as if a fish of some kind had grabbed at a line when she did it. And then he felt a heavy tug on him. She was heavy, and more hands closed around his wrist. When he looked down, he saw the frozen people all moving toward him beneath the ice, all pressing their mouths to his wrist or to each other like ... like thick heavy eels... trying to pull him down.
He used all his strength to draw his hand back up, and nearly fell backward on the ice when they let go of him.
He looked down at the little Mitchell girl—her hands had broken the surface, and others began beating against the ice above them.
When he looked down at the ice, the Mitchell girl had her head above it, and other hands were pushing at the cracks that Army had begun with his knife.
They’re coming for you. They’re coming. They have winter in their souls. They’re gonna kiss you with permafrost. They’re gonna drag you beneath the ice. Flash frozen and eyes wide open.
He moved back along the wall, careful not to slip on the ice. He could not take his eyes off them.
The Mitchell girl had come up above the cracked ice, though some below seemed to be trying to drag her back down. Her skin was blue, and her damp hair was filled with crystals of ice. She crawled toward him slowly, and the ice beneath her began to give way, but she kept moving forward. And the others there—Jeff Baer, his dark hair falling over his eyes, a woman named Kathy Swanson who sometimes stopped in for the yellow roses at his shop, a young man named Sebastien Pharand who had worked summers sometimes mowing lawns, whose taut, muscled body seemed to ripple as he moved, snakelike, alongside the others coming up from the cold water.
They all broke more of the ice as they came, and Army Vernon began backing down the hall. The sound of the ice cracking echoed, and he could still hear the breathing of someone or something as if t
hey were just around the corner.
He passed by the open door of a room where men and women had been stripped naked and were hanging by meat-hooks from the ceiling. The ice seemed to be growing along the walls as if it were getting colder and colder by the second. As if winter itself, the mind of winter, moved along the corridors of Harrow. All memory of any other life became blocked for him, just as it had when he’d gone crazy for a time as a young man. It took over his thoughts. He no longer felt as if he could escape the temperature drop headed his way, like a fine mist of frost moving in a nearly invisible wind toward him. That’s what’s breathing.
Harrow itself.
It’s breathing winter here.
The rooms to the left and right of him were blocked at their doorways by ice.
The frozen people from beneath the ice floor crawled toward him, some of them moving up to scale the ice walls. Even the Mitchell girl scrambled along the walls and then to the ceiling, moving toward him like a predator that had cornered its prey.
This is not happening. It can’t be happening. It is your mind. Focus your mind, Army. Just do it. Focus. Frozen people do not hunt humans. It’s psychological warfare from Harrow. It’s your brain sputtering and spitting out this, because you had gone over the edge once before.
Yet fear clutched at him as he looked behind him at his possible escape route—the end of the hall was sealed with ice.
He shivered, thrusting his hands in the pockets of his coat. He felt the gun, and he put his hand around it as if to keep from losing it.
He didn’t like standing there, waiting.
He glanced back to the doorway that went into the room full of the hanging people.
Might be a window. Might not. But you’re never gonna know unless you try.
Army Vernon drew out his gun, pointing it at the Mitchell girl who, on the ceiling above him, was about to drop on him like a spider.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 28