And that’s when the little boy with the dog’s head came out into the foyer.
“Who the hell are you?” Dory asked.
“Kazi?” Ronnie asked. “Kazi Vrabec?”
The boy nodded.
“I babysit him sometimes,” Ronnie said. “We’re friends, aren’t we? Are you okay?”
Kazi nodded, and held the dog’s head up for her to see.
“How do we know it’s really him?”
“I just know,” Ronnie said.
Ronnie took the dog’s head from him, and grimaced as she looked at it with its pasty gauze and bits of fur and leathery skin at the muzzle and around the ears.
“He’s my friend,” Kazi said. “My only friend.” Then he pointed down the dark hallway behind him. “Mr. Vernon died down there. Of fright.”
14
The three of them stood in the empty room and looked down at Army Vernon. His eyes were open so wide they nearly had burst out. His mouth was stretched in a final scream to the point that it looked like he had a dislocated jaw.
Ronnie was the first to see the gun, lying a few feet away from him. “Know how to shoot?”
Dory nodded, and went to retrieve the gun.
Kazi Vrabec said, “There’s another little boy who lives here.”
Ronnie and Dory looked back at him.
“His name is Arnie. He can’t talk with his mouth. His tongue got tore out. And his teeth got pulled one by one. And his insides all went on the outside. But he can talk in here.” Kazi tapped the edge of his head. “Arnie’s one of the doorways.”
“Doorways?” Dory asked.
“You know, like a door. He lets them in. He told me with his mind that I can start to let them in, too.”
“Who?”
“Others,” Kazi said, almost as if it were an embarrassing thing to admit. “But I bet you can be doorways, too. He said people like us keep the doorway clear and the door open and unlocked. He talks to me in my head, just like my buddy does.” He went and took the head back from Ronnie, and cradled it in his arms.
I can talk to you in your head, too, Ronnie said, hoping he’d hear her.
Kazi nearly dropped the dog’s head, and looked up at her.
15
Don’t trust them, kiddo. They’re bitches. lean smell a bitch a mile away, and they even hurt Mr. Spider, which was really mean, the dog’s head told him.
“But they seem nice,” Kazi said aloud, still watching the two young women.
Nice? Hell, kiddo, one’s covered with blood and one was a Mrs. Fly only now she’s Mrs. Flyshit. You can’t trust those types, Kazi. They’re not like you. Sure, maybe they could be doorways, but what kind of doorway are we talkin’? The kind that that creaks and makes you trip and the door’s locked just because they feel like locking it. They’re like the old man. You saw what was in his heart. You saw it. He was ice cold inside and he would’ve shot you if he’d had half a chance, you know that, kiddo. We hated him. All of us.
Kazi cocked his head to the side, listening to the voice of the dog.
But tell you what kid, let’s take them to see Arnie. Arnie’ll know what to do with them. Maybe the two of you—Arnie and you together—you’ll come up with a way to incapacitate the bitches.
“I don’t like when you call them that,” Kazi said, looking up at both Ronnie and Dory. In his mind, he asked the dog, Can they hear what we’re saying?
Only when you open your mouth, kiddo. They’re not the power source that you are. They’re like little candles. You’re our pint-sized nuclear power plant, Kazi.
Ronnie Pond watched him as if she knew what the dog was telling him, but all she said was, “Well, let’s go find Alice. If she’s still alive.”
Then she went to pull the hatchet out of the Bari-thing’s skull.
16
Alice lay down on the cathedral stones and looked up at the great murals that moved with the demons and angels, and the dome above that had strange creatures painted upon it, with tentacles and wings like dragonflies, wrapped around women. From the women’s bodies came other creatures of varying weirdness.
Harrow can create all this from the dormant psychic spark in a handful of people.
Harrow can draw even from me to create this.
Can draw from anyone—from Ronnie Pond and Army, who probably didn’t even know he had some ability, however slight.
Why now? Why here?
She thought of the dead boy who had been found mutilated on the grounds, and she knew that had been the point of awakening. Even the dead boy—freshly dead— had something within him that Harrow had wanted.
And the Nightwatchman.
Why destroy the village? Why leak out like that?
She heard the humming of the worshippers, and felt safe from their rabid hungers. The house wants me. That much I know. It will take me dead, but it won’t kill me. It wants me, but it’s scared of me.
And then, Alice Kyteler knew. She knew with a conviction that could not be shaken.
The ones in town still sleep. Their dreams are fueling this. We’re fueling this. The house without us is nothing. It doesn’t want us to die, but we’re frail. We may die. It wants our awe. Our allegiance.
It wants to convert us to. .. opening the portal. Where is my ability? What can I bring to this to shut down this house? Where is its heart that I might rip it out?
17
And that’s when Alice heard Army Vernon’s voice. He wasn’t speaking to her in her head. He said, “It doesn’t have a heart, Alice.”
18
Alice sat up and glanced around. The cathedral had grown fuzzy around her as if it were a watercolor melting in the rain. But as it shimmered, she saw the bare walls of the house again. Still, the great cathedral came back into focus, and she saw the worshippers as they strung the meat and bones and sliver of face of Roland Love up to a makeshift cross at the altar.
There, sitting in a pew not more that six feet from her was Army Vernon.
19
He was as insubstantial as morning mist, but his face moved as it would have in life, and unlike flesh and blood, it gave off no aura for her to see.
“You’re dead,” she said, no longer afraid of the idea of death because she had already begun assuming that death would come for her.
“Be that as it may,” Army said, “the house has no heart, Alice. You can’t kill what isn’t mortal.”
“How do I know you’re not just part of the house now?”
“I guess you don’t,” he said. “I guess I am part of the house at this point.”
“Is it bad?”
“Being dead? Not as bad as being alive, let me tell you. Now here’s all I know. There’s a kid here.”
“Arnie Pierson. His spirit?”
“He didn’t tell me his name. But this kid, well, he has power you can’t even imagine. He showed me something pretty damn bad, Alice. I watched a real horror show in that kid’s face. I don’t know how he did it, but it was like he was reaching inside my chest and giving a good juicing to my heart. Those girls found me.”
“Ronnie?”
The spirit nodded, with wisps of evaporating particles of his flesh moving in the wake of the nod. “Her and some other girl. The one who works with Benny down at the pound. They found me and they can probably tell you that it didn’t look like I had a good time in my last seconds. But I will tell you that it’s worse than that. When that kid shows you what he has inside him, believe me, you can’t live past that point. It will stop anybody’s heart.”
Alice watched as he raised his hand slightly, and then bits of his misty fingers slowly drifted away from his form like milkweed floating in the air. “All this,” he said. “This cathedral nonsense. It’s just a distraction. There’s a...” As he spoke he looked to his left as if he’d just heard a noise. “Oh shit. It’s coming again.”
“What? Army?”
“I think of it as the cosmic vacuum cleaner. It’s going down the halls of this place sucking u
p the dead. Listen, I’d better go. All I can tell you is I’m stuck here. Nothing you or I can do about that. But that kid has to be stopped. He has something bigger than you or anyone here has ever had, and I can’t even call it psychic ability. It’s not that minor. The house gave him a big gift, and it’s the gift of madness. All I can tell you about it is it’s bad. Mean bad.” And then, his eyes still glancing to the left, he rose and his particles spread apart until they were a fine mist on the air. Then there was nothing to be seen other than the pews and the great stone pillars.
Alice felt a desert hot breeze pass by her, almost as if there were a fire just beyond the walls and a blast of its heat had burst through.
Then where the wind had come through—what Army must’ve meant by the “cosmic vacuum cleaner”—a gap in the stone wall of the cathedral.
It was about as tall as a man and wide enough to fit through, but as she got up to go look at it, she noticed it was shrinking as if filling with sand.
She rushed over to it and squeezed her way through the gap before it closed.
20
Alice nearly lost her balance in the next room—it was a small, plain room with a mattress in a corner and several jars full of lit candles around its walls. She first noticed the stench—it was a smothering belch of human gas in her face.
On the mattress, the corpse of a little boy wearing the kind of suit that a little boy might be buried in—the dark tie and gray suit with shorts and black socks that went nearly to his knees.
She went over to the corpse, covering her face with her hands and trying to breathe through her mouth.
His face was rotted nearly to the bone. His teeth had been pulled by someone, and lay beside the corpse.
She knew who it was without having to think twice.
Arnie Pierson.
She went over to the window near the body, and peeled back the shutters that had been badly nailed in place. Then she opened the window to let in the chilly air. She looked out at the night—it was simply darkness with no lights to be seen whatsoever. And yet above she saw the pinprick of stars in the fabric of night and she thought, briefly, of things other than Harrow and death.
When she turned around from the window, she saw the closed door behind her and the peeling wallpaper of the area from which she’d come. A dream of a cathedral. Someone else’s dream. Stolen by Harrow. The mind of Harrow. The devouring soul of this place.
A dead boy, his soul still inside his body, sacrificed to this house.
Stealing dreams from sleepers, and making nightmares come through others.
On the wall behind Arnie’s head, someone had scrawled:
The Nightwatchman looked into the heart of the dreamers, and found their dark secrets.
Despite everything she’d seen that night, Alice could no longer hold back. She sat down beside the rotting corpse and began weeping. She didn’t weep for herself or for Thad Allen or Sam Pratt or for those she’d seen who had died and those she had not seen who had died.
She wept for Arnie, who had died before any of this had begun.
Even dead, the house had taken him.
The house is unrelenting.
The house is pure fury.
Harrow is alive and insane, and it sucks the dreams and the souls.
It must be stopped now.
She got up after a few minutes of sitting with the corpse and went to the doorway, opening it to the hall. Then she returned to the dead boy’s body, and lifted it up. She had gotten used to the stink of it, and no longer saw it as a putrefying corpse, but as a little boy who needed to be buried somewhere far from Harrow.
21
In the hallway, Alice saw that the house had somehow turned itself down. Images of stone and wood flickered a bit, as if there had been an energy drain. She didn’t know what it meant, but she carried the boy along the corridor. When she came to a staircase, she saw Ronnie Pond and Dory Crampton and a little boy named Kazi who had a mummified dog’s head in his hand.
“Thank God,” Ronnie said. “Alice, you made it.”
Dory glanced at the middle-aged woman with the braid and then at the dead boy in her arms. “What if she’s part of the house?”
“No,” Ronnie said. “She’s not.”
Alice laid the corpse on the floor. She looked at the others. “This is Arnie Pierson. Even after death, Harrow’s kept his body.”
She went over to Kazi Vrabec. A light around him shimmered with a whiteness that she hadn’t seen in anyone in years.
He’s got power in him he doesn’t even know, she thought. He may be a source.
“We need to leave now. Right now. With you,” she said to him. “Will you take my hand?” She offered her right hand to him.
Kazi looked down at the dog’s head and then at her hand. He glanced over at Dory and Ronnie. He glanced at the corpse, as well, as if it would talk to him.
Then he put out his hand and let his fingers touch the edge of Alice’s palm.
As he did so, Alice said to him, “We have to find the heart of Harrow.”
22
Alice closed her hand around Kazi’s fingers and felt a surge within her. Not a surge that brought her anything. Not the kind of surge she felt when she sensed another “sensitive” nearby.
This surge sucked at her. Took what she had within her and began to drain her of any ability she’d felt.
She looked at the boy, shocked. As she did, it was no longer Kazi, but Arnie Pierson himself, with metal knife-points for teeth that overbit his lips and sunken, hollow eyes. He parted his lips and said, “You will never find the heart of the house, Alice Kyeteler. I am the house.”
The dog’s head in his left hand began snapping as if alive, and the boy raised it up toward her.
23
Dory saw the look on Alice’s face—her eyes widened and her skin had gone chalk-white as if she were being drained of blood. Alice still clutched the boy’s right hand. The boy pressed the dog’s head up to Alice’s lips.
24
Ronnie lifted her hatchet, defensively, ready to swing at anything she saw, but all she saw was a little boy pushing the tattered dog skull at Alice’s face.
25
Alice saw something entirely different.
26
Her eyes began to turn up into her skull, and she felt her breathing going too rapidly, but she could not control it. She tried to tell herself that what she saw was nothing, just another nightmare of Harrow, but she couldn’t get it from her mind—
It was the other world that Harrow guarded, the doorway into something more fierce than Alice had ever been able to imagine. And when she tried to make sense of what the little boy showed her, she felt her throat clutch, and her heart begin to burst inside her chest.
27
As Alice fell, dying, Kazi Vrabec dropped the dog’s head and turned to face Ronnie and Dory.
Alice’s body twitched and spasmed as her face contorted into a rictus of pain. As she died, she did what she could to send a message to the others. But in her last seconds, she knew her mouth could not form the words.
28
Even so, Ronnie thought she heard a distant voice, weak, as if a phone signal were being lost even as the words were cried out. And then, a terrible silence.
But Ronnie had heard the words.
In flesh.
Kazi turned toward her, tears streaming down his face. “Please. Help me. Get me out of here. Take me somewhere safe.”
He reached his arms up to Ronnie like a child needing its mother.
Superimposed over his face, she saw the other little boy with the knife teeth.
In flesh. What did it mean? What was it?
The house is in the flesh.
He is the flesh of the house.
Flesh is weak.
Flesh is corruptible.
He is the heart now.
“Please,” the boy whimpered. “I feel sick. Something bad is happening. Please. Hurry. Take me. Take me out of here.”
/> “Are you Harrow?” she asked, her voice full of calm even when she raged within her body.
He glanced up at her, his eyes flashing almost like a wild animal’s. “You wouldn’t hurt a child.”
Without hesitating, Ronnie swung the hatchet around and caught Kazi Vrabec squarely in the chest.
Dory screamed, but she might’ve been screaming ever since Alice had fallen—Ronnie had blocked everything but her focus on the boy.
Kazi Vrabec looked down at the hatchet embedded in his chest and the blood that burst from it.
29
The little boy fell over, dead.
Ronnie went to draw her hatchet from his body.
Dory listened to the sound of what seemed to be a hundred doors slamming open and closed, and windows slamming shut, and the sound of breaking glass upstairs and down the hallway.
Above it all, she heard the man she knew was Mr. Spider screeching from some upstairs room as if he were being tortured to death.
30
From the open wound in Kazi Vrabec’s chest, what looked like a swarm of flies came up, buzzing and humming in a small cyclone that grew until the room itself seemed blackened. The sound became deafening, and Ronnie covered her ears against it.
They flew toward the ceiling, and then up the stairs.
When the house went silent again, Ronnie looked back at Dory and said, “It’s done.”
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Thriller, Supernatural), #4 of Harrow (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 31