“Halloween?” Alex said. “My fave’s Halloween III. With that song in it.”
“Sure. But I meant more like The Thing.”
“Holy mother of shit,” Alex said, nearly spitting his cigarette out.
“What’s wrong?” Lizzie asked.
“This guy and me, we got way too much in common,” Alex said. He puffed the last of his cigarette, letting the ash fall on his jeans, then flicked it out the window. “I loved The Thing. I mean, loved it. I saw it like ten times. Kurt Russell. I mean, that Thing.”
“I loved The Shining, too.”
“Oh yeah. Classic Nicholson. ‘Give me the frickin’ bat!’” Alex said, chuckling. “Doesn’t get much better than Nicholson. And that kid. Chillin’, that kid. And those little bug-eyed girls. And that bitch in the tub. Holy crap. But here’s the thing about horror movies. They always have these stupid people doing stupid things. I mean, ultimately. You don’t go after your kitty cat if the alien is on the ship. I mean, screw the kitty. Right? You don’t go doing the laundry when a damn killer’s on the loose. That kind of stuff. Texas Chainsaw—you don’t go to the rundown place with human teeth on the ground and stick around.”
A passing moment of silence in the car while they heard the shriek of what must have been some kind of night bird. Then Alex pointed off to the left.
“You see that?”
“What?”
“A kid. Standing there,” Alex said, “by the side of the road. He was just standing there. Staring at us. Staring.”
“Yeah, right,” Lizzie said.
Sam laughed. “I didn’t see the kid, either.”
“You guys are no fun,” Alex said. Then, more quietly, “I’m sort of not joking. I thought I saw a kid standing back there.”
“So, why are we going to this place?” Lizzie asked.
“Baby?”
“We’re the stupid people. We’re going to Harrow, the haunted house.”
“Aw,” Alex said. “Those are movies. This is real life. You know there’s no boogeyman in real life, right? I mean, you don’t believe in that kind of crap.”
“There’s people, though,” Sam said.
“Huh?”
“Like Ed Gein. Or Dahmer.”
“Who?”
“Dahmer’s the guy who tortured and killed younger guys, then ate some of them,” Sam said. “Ed Gein, he lived in Plainfield, Wisconsin. He used to dig up corpses of women and skin them and dress up in their skins.”
“Like in Silence of the Lambs,” Lizzie said, but had a slight clip to her voice as if she wished she hadn’t uttered this.
“Baby, nobody’s going Silence of the Lambs on us. You know there’s no crazy chainsaw killer out here. You’re not scared, right?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But it’s dark, there’s no moon out, and this whole idea of getting together with people out here seems stupid at this point.”
“I’m gonna protect you with my love, Lizzie,” Alex said. “Come on, it’s all fun. We get together with some of the guys from school, we party some, we stay out late and ... well, we have fun.”
“She’s right,” Sam said. “We’re just like the stupid people in horror movies.”
A momentary silence in the car.
“You know” Alex began, “In Dawn of the Dead, when—”
“That’s it,” Lizzie said. “No more horror movies. I don’t want to hear about another one. If you bring up one more horror movie I’m going to put you out of the car and you can walk.”
“You just a teensy-weensy bit scared, baby?”
“No,” she said, but her voice was a little too soft.
2
“All these damn trees,” Lizzie said, as she swerved around rocks in the road and narrowly avoided a ditch on the far left, only to hit a major bump in the middle of the road. The road kept turning and winding and bumping.
Then, they all felt it—a jolt beneath the tires.
“We hit something?”
“No way,” Lizzie said. “I didn’t see anything.”
“Jesus, we hit something?” Alex asked again.
“Probably chains,” Sam said. “There are chains up around here to keep people out, but they get pulled down all the time.”
“It felt like more than that,” Lizzie said, but somehow the idea of chains across the road made sense to her. “I guess maybe it could’ve been.”
“Or we hit a rabbit,” Alex said. “Lots of rabbits out here. And cats.”
“I didn’t hit a cat,” Lizzie said.
“It was nothing,” Sam said. “There’s crap all over this road. I’m sure it was just a chain. It wasn’t that big a bump.”
“Isn’t there a main road?” Alex asked, turning around to face the guy. Alex barely remembered his name—he wasn’t someone who people really noticed at school, and it wasn’t as if they ever hung out together.
“Yeah,” Sam said. “But sometimes it gets patrolled.”
Lizzie and Alex quickly exchanged a glance.
“It’s because of break-ins,” Sam said.
“We’re not breaking in,” Lizzie said, as if to confirm something.
“Look, I know this place. Don’t worry. The back road’s the best way in. The chains across the road are all over the place when you come in from the town side of things. They always forget to string ‘em back up on this side.”
“So says you,” Lizzie said as they hit another bump. It felt like the frame of the car rose up while the axle stayed low to the ground. Alex got jostled around because he refused to wear a seatbelt.
“See? Look,” Sam said, again pointing.
Lizzie glanced into the headlights, and there she saw what seemed to be a stone wall with a break in it. Not quite a gateway, but almost.
“This calls for a drink,” Alex said, and drew the flask from his letterman’s jacket. He took a swig and passed it to Lizzie.
“Get it out of my face,” she said. She slowly drove the car up the last bit of unpaved road to the driveway.
3
They parked near the front porch, then got out.
Alex shouted, “Goddamn, when you said these people were rich, I didn’t know you meant stinkin’ rich. I mean, goddamn! How come we never got up here before? Who the hell owns this place? It’s a frickin’ palace is what it is.”
“Quit yelling,” Lizzie said. She looked from the turrets to the gables. It was so dark, and she had already turned off the headlights so it was as if the place were an inky angular shadow of darkness against a darker woods with sky on each side and above it.
Harrow loomed like a shadow that had grown in darkness.
Night against a backdrop of endless night.
The place looked like a castle, and Lizzie felt less safe than she had in the car.
She had seen Harrow once or twice growing up, but never liked it. It had always reminded her of her dad when he lay dying in the road.
The car wrapped around a tree, and Ronnie kneeling over him, and Lizzie getting out of the car, a little eight-year-old running to her sister and her father’s side, only to watch his last breath turn to mist in the chilly winter air.
The house reminded her of death like that.
The dread of death, coming.
Its silhouette, like dark fingers stretching into shadow.
Lizzie caught her breath and felt that strange shiver run through her that she remembered from childhood. The shiver both she and Ronnie had spoken of between them—as if something had touched them on the inside the moment their father had died.
Touched us and never let go.
“It looks like Bannerman’s Castle, sort of,” Alex said. “You know, that island in the river, and there’s that castlelike thing there. Or the Vanderbilt Mansion in Hyde Park.”
“Or a big fat mausoleum,” Lizzie said. “I wish we hadn’t come here. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“You were thinking a wild time for Thirteenth Night. Where’s the par-tay?” Alex asked.
Sam said, “The others said they’d be in the graveyard.”
“Graveyard?” Lizzie asked. “Graveyard?”
“Cool,” Alex said, taking another swig. “Frickin’ cool. Par-tay with the dead.”
“It’s over there,” Sam said, pointing off into a further darkness. “I bet the party’s already started. There’s a path up.” He switched on a small flashlight. It barely lit more than a few feet in front of them. “So we all going now?”
“You sure it’s empty?” Lizzie asked, glancing window to window, balcony to porch. “Why is it all boarded up? I mean, nobody lives here, right?”
“Not for a few years. It’s practically condemned.”
“Let’s break in,” Alex said, turning to Sam. “Come on. Please? Come on.” He had a drunken, stretched-out plea to his words.
“I’m never going inside that place,” Lizzie said.
But within a few minutes, she and Alex had slipped through a broken board at the back door, leaving the other teenager (of whom Alex whispered to Lizzie, “Why the hell did we bring the big loser along?” and she whispered back, “I promised my sister, and anyway, because you didn’t want to come earlier, it’s lucky we had him for directions or we’d just be driving all over the place”) to trek up to the other party-goers on the hillside for some big drunkathon bonfire thirteen nights after the school year had ended.
Inside the house, Lizzie and Alex began making out. When Alex’s flask fell from his back pocket, Lizzie pulled away from him and said, “Did you hear that? Jesus, how come you didn’t bring a flashlight, too?”
Alex grinned, glancing around at the shadowed room they’d found. “Baby, it was just my flask. That’s all. I dropped it.”
“Shh,” she said, and then tried to focus on the dark itself. But no matter how much she tried, it seemed to get darker by the second. She wasn’t sure why this was happening. She had usually experienced the opposite—that if she was in the dark long enough, some slight light could be detected, her eyes would adjust to the darkness, and she’d at least be able to make out shadows.
But the room they were in seemed to be growing darker, like an ink stain seeping outward.
For just a moment, she thought she heard her sister’s voice, and it scared the hell out of her.
Lizzie? You okay?
Ronnie? She felt as if she were talking to herself in her mind.
“Where’s the door?” Lizzie asked the darkness.
“Huh?” Alex said.
“Is it behind you? Is that where we came from?”
“Maybe.”
“Check.”
“Okay. Okay. Hold your horses. Okay... Nope, no door here.”
“Quiet. Shh. Just for a second,” she said. She wasn’t so scared that she trembled, but something in her mind had just begun thinking irrational thoughts about where they were and the stories about the house and about the kinds of people who had lived there in the past and what had happened to them. Within seconds, she had to swallow a sense of panic that seemed nearly natural to her—as if her body had decided that fear was its only response to this dark place.
And then she heard breathing.
Not Alex, not his wheezy breathing when he was trying to keep quiet. She held her breath to make sure it wasn’t from her own nostrils.
Someone else was in the darkness with them.
She felt someone’s breath on the back of her neck.
She froze, and was about to move toward Alex, but when she reached forward to touch him, he wasn’t there.
“Alex?” she whispered, and realized it came out as a whimper. She felt a cool sweat break out on her forehead. “Alex?”
She reached around in the darkness, feeling as if she were completely blind. It was as if all light in existence had been doused, or as if she could not open her eyes at all, as if they’d been glued shut.
Her fingers touched something.
Just the tips—touched what felt like warm flesh.
Instinctively, she stepped forward, although part of her wanted to recoil from whomever this was.
Alex? Alex? Is it you? Please God, let it be Alex.
Her hands wrapped around arms. His arms. She was sure it was Alex.
“Alex,” she whispered, wanting to scold him for scaring her in the dark.
She felt him, thank God, she felt him and he never felt so good. She leaned into him to hug him close to her, but he was wet all over and smelled coppery and dirty. As she felt his wetness clinging to her, she began to realize that the thick liquid on him was blood. AH the horror movies he and the guy in the backseat had been talking about the whole damn trip suddenly came at her in a rush of images she wished she could forget. She let out a scream and would not stop screaming until somebody turned on the lights.
She closed her eyes, not wanting to see.
4
The guy who had been sitting in the backseat of the car the whole way was seventeen years old and was named Sam Pratt. He was chunky, with thick black hair that barely concealed a scar across his forehead from an accident he’d had when he was about four. He had a tongue-piercing and three piercings in his left ear. He had dreamed since nearly his birth that he would one day get out of Watch Point and head for New York City. He had applied to NYU for college, and he was hoping that would get him out soon enough. He tended to wear black, and although he didn’t consider himself a “goth” by any stretch of the imagination, he knew that others at school thought he was. Many of them were sure he was into some mystical mumbo-jumbo and weirdo pursuits and that he might be one step away from going all Columbine. But in fact, he was just a fan of horror movies and rock music and couldn’t really help being who he was—any more than Lizzie could help being a cheerleader and Alex could help being a pseudo-jock who cheated on his history tests.
And despite his sometimes off-putting exterior, Sam had been thrilled to think that he’d finally end up at a party with kids from his school because he’d never been to one before.
As Sam found his way along the side path through the straggly wooded area, he thought he heard some of the others from school up ahead, although it sounded less and less like guys and girls his age than it did some old guy cackling over some joke.
He saw the campfire somebody had started. Since it was the first time in all his school years that he finally felt included in something the “cool” kids generally did—get drunk, go a little wild, and pretend to have fun for a few hours—he jogged most of the way up the path, through the woods, until he reached the entrance to the old graveyard.
5
Back inside the house, the lights up, Lizzie felt a shock go through her.
But not from fear.
It was just the beginning of anger mixed with surprise mixed with a little pissed-offedness.
They were all there:
Bari, Mac, Andy, Nancy, Terry, Zack—all her friends from school who lived in Watch Point, a couple of guys from Parham, a girl she didn’t know—and Alex, too. Of course Ronnie wasn’t there. Ronnie never went out anymore. Lizzie had given up on dragging her sister to the parties.
She reined in her anger a bit and began laughing with them as they passed around a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine. They were laughing too hard to hear the scream of the other guy, the guy Lizzie only knew as a friend of her older sister’s, and he needed a ride, and he’d show them the way to the house—the one who had gone up to the graveyard.
But when they stopped laughing, Lizzie heard it first and said, “What the hell is that?”
6
Sam’s mouth was open as wide as he’d ever opened it. The noise was all around him, and he couldn’t even tell that it was coming from his own throat.
He stood in the little graveyard, just beyond the small fire someone had started in a circle of old moss-covered stone markers. The feeble light of the flashlight pointed forward as he looked at the little boy who had been strung upside down and gutted like a deer. The small fire behind him cast flicker
ing yellow shadows. The scream finally died in Sam’s throat, which went dry—he felt parched and wasn’t sure he could even speak after that scream.
He felt like a six-year-old again, stepping into a nightmare. The smell of cool summer rain filled the air, just seconds before the downpour began.
Sam dropped the flashlight, and it rolled until it came to a dead stop at one of the stone markers.
He heard the distant rumble of thunder. Heat lightning played along the darkness above the trees, then cracked open into a great split of light that illuminated all the graveyard—the hanging boy, and a dark figure that stood back behind several stone markers, more shadow than human being.
7
Seven miles away in the village of Watch Point, three streets up from the railroad tracks, above the rocky ledges that curled over the Hudson River, Lizzie’s twin sister, Veronica— or Ronnie, as she’d always been called—awoke from a deep sleep. The lightning beyond her bedroom window flashed white and made her mother’s garden look as if it were covered with snow for a moment.
Ronnie rose up from bed, and went to look out the window as the storm broke above the village. Rain tapped at the window, and she lifted it up to smell the fresh air.
The lightning seemed green and blue as it danced among the dark clouds before it crashed into a white streak beyond the trees and houses of the village.
For a split second, she thought she saw the vague features of a child’s face in the piercing light.
8
“Is that Pratt?” Alex asked, laughing. “Is that Pratt screaming like a bitch?”
The screaming beyond Harrow had stopped, replaced by the rumble of thunder and a rickety-tickety of rain on the house.
Alex kept laughing. “Oh frickin’ hell, I remember in seventh grade when he wet his pants in gym and just stood there pretending he hadn’t. Jesus, he’s a little baby. A little teeny-tiny baby geek.”
Zack joined. “Thou shalt not suffer a geek to live.”
“I don’t get it,” Alex said. “That a joke?”
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 2