She used flat stones to step across a brook that ran alongside some dying berry vines, and then up a low hill. Finally, she saw the backyard of a house, with its chain-link fence and its barbeque pit and an above-ground pool and the house lights up bright as if they’d been set automatically. She wasn’t sure whose house it was, but she knew that children lived there, for there was a tricycle and a scooter leaning against the house.
Wonder if they’re still alive.
Is anybody?
She walked unsteadily over to the fence. She felt the absurdity of how she looked. How unreal she herself must seem. If the homeowner looked out his back window and saw in the floodlights a teenage girl with a hatchet and her shirt stained black and red with blood, her hair a bird’s-nest tangle, her face smudged and her eyes wild with both fear and fury.
But when she looked up at each window, no one was there.
All gone.
Ronnie Pond cut through the backyard next to the house with the chain-link fence, and went up onto the side streets of the village to find out if her mother and sister had survived this ordeal.
Once home, she found the remains of Bert White— although she could not possibly identify him by the pile of bones and meat—and she found her mother’s body in the kitchen.
Standing over her dead mother, whose eyes stared up at her, and whose throat was slit, with an empty bleach bottle lying next to her, something in Ronnie began to switch over, from absolute fear and shock to a different horror than even what she saw before her.
She had dreamed it in the summer. It was one of her many dreams that she’d had.
Ever since Lizzie had gone with her friends to that house.
Ever since that night when Ronnie began having the terrible dreams about things to come.
2
Others in the village had been dealing with their own gauntlets while Ronnie Pond had been either running from or returning to Watch Point. About the time that Ronnie had been wrestling with Bari over who got the hatchet, Dory Crampton was looking up a staircase at the Boswell home and seeing a clown carrying Benny Marais’s head.
Dory knew she was up shit’s creek and the only paddle she had was in the back of Benny Marais’s truck. The rifle. You get the rifle, and maybe you make it out of here. You get the damn rifle and you blow these fuckers away.
But she’d felt frozen to the spot.
There stood the clown. Not eight feet away from her. Just Mr. Boswell in his Happy Clown DayCare uniform that he entertained the kids with on their birthdays or on special holidays. Gee, what holiday is it today? Rabid dog day?
Here was the thing about Dory, and she could admit it to herself and she had right then and there: You are one tough bitch. But are you tough enough for this gonzofuck of a crapmare? Are you, Dor? Are you? Or are you just little
Dorothy from the back of the classroom who doesn’t raise her hand for fear of being noticed. You got a psycho clown staring at you with your boss’s head in his mitts. Red nose. Big red and blue smile. Little funky hat with a wilted flower in it. The classic clown collar and the big baggy bright-colored clothes and the long floppy shoes. What does a tough bitch do with a psycho clown draggin’ a human head by the scalp?
Dory Crampton did the only thing she could figure out to do. The only thing that had ever worked for her when the kids all ganged up on her in school, before she learned how to use her fists.
The only way to beat this is to out-psycho the psycho.
So she started laughing. Laughing and pointing. “Hey, Benny, how’s it going? Man, I love clowns. You’re a cool clown!”
Even she thought it sounded ridiculous, but Mr. Boswell-the-Psycho-Clown-from-Hell cocked his head to the left as if trying to figure her out. Then the makeup on his face wrinkled up a bit and she saw his teeth. He was smiling. Or grimacing, she wasn’t sure.
“We’re making soup,” the Mr. Boswell clown said. He stepped down the stairs one at a time as if he were afraid of falling.
She kept giggling, and the worst thing about it was that she wondered if she was starting to lose it as he got closer to her. Wondered if she was going a little nuts after seeing what had gone on in the backyard with the dogs that had escaped from the pound. She was damn sure she saw what must’ve been remnants of kids’ bodies. And she knew those little kids in the ball pit of the playset were scared shitless, wondering when those dogs were going to break down the see-through divider.
Dory wondered if her plan to giggle and laugh and sound as psycho as the clown must be feeling inside was just a cover up because she was headed for the looney bin herself and might be dressing up as a clown pretty soon, too. It all hit her again and again—this is not real. It can’t be real. This is the world turned upside down. This is your brain on drugs. This is the world on drugs.
The clown got to the bottom step and was just a foot or so from her. He smelled like rotting shit with a fart thrown in for good measure. Dory got that funny feeling that she sometimes did when she was smoking pot with her friends—that paranoid sense that her own brain was short-circuiting on her and that she somehow had begun to lose track of the ground beneath her feet. She had that floating sensation as the clown glanced her way.
Clearly, it was Mr. Boswell. Yet she had begun to think of him as Stinky the Clown. And this made her giggle even more.
“You like soup?” Stinky asked. Mr. Boswell seemed to have developed an aristocratic English accent in his clown outfit.
Dory shrugged. “Depends,” she said, her voice softer than she wanted it to be. Don’t show him any weakness. Be a tough bitch. Tough as nails. Out-psycho the psycho.
“My wife makes an excellent soup. A young, vibrant soup. Greasy. Fatty. But delicious.” He said this in a wistful way, as if he hadn’t had her soup in quite some time. He brushed against Dory’s right elbow as he continued down the hallway toward what Dory could only guess might be the kitchen.
As soon as the kitchen door opened, Dory thought she saw Mrs. Boswell completely naked, bent over what might’ve been Benny Marais’s headless body. But then the door swung back and shut after Stinky the Clown took the head into the kitchen.
She held her breath as she stood there. Glanced up the staircase, and down the other one.
Then Dory Crampton ran like hell out of that house.
3
She got the rifle out of the truck. It was a hunting rifle, and Benny used it both for shooting deer in the off-season and for shooting mad dogs. In her time working for him—two years part-time so far—he never had hit anything with it.
But she knew about guns. She knew how to aim and shoot.
All she thought about were those kids trapped out in the ball pit in the backyard, surrounded by rottweilers and corgis and chihuahuas and mutts of all kinds.
She loaded the rifle.
She looked at the houses across the street and thought she saw a man taking his lawn mower and going over and over some kind of stump in the middle of his yard. It was getting shadowy, and she wasn’t quite sure why he kept going back and forth over the spot. It was a lump. It was something other than the stump of a tree. It moved. Her mind had not quite wrapped around the idea that it might be ... it might be ... a very, very, very small person.
Don’t think baby.
Then she heard the children wailing in the backyard.
Took the rifle up. Turned.
“What the hell,” she said. “Kill or be killed.”
4
Dory unlatched and drew back the high wooden gate. A small yorkie lay dead near it, having bashed its head against the wood one too many times. She glanced toward the ball pit.
It was empty.
No kids at all.
Maybe they’re hiding in all the balls.
Stranger still, no dogs to be seen.
She went into the backyard, pointing the rifle at what she considered strategic targets—the trash cans, the playset, the back door to the screened-in porch.
The dogs had been digging ho
les all over the yard. She watched each step as she went, turning to the right and then left to make sure she did not miss a dog’s hiding place. She glanced in each hole in the ground, but there was nothing. She reached the ball pit, but the red and blue balls definitely hid nothing. The children had somehow gotten out.
Although there was some blood and a few pieces of torn shirts and a shoe, she was fairly sure she had seen those in place when she’d been out there earlier.
She glanced around at the fence—and saw a large gap in the back fence.
They got in that way. And out.
Good.
But the kids? Where are the toddlers?
Then she began to suspect. She thought of the time it had taken her to close the gate behind her. To see Benny step into the house. To go into the house herself after he’d been in there awhile. To see Stinky the Clown with Benny’s head.
A young, vibrant soup. Greasy. Fatty. But delicious.
The image of Mrs. Boswell naked, her pendulous breasts hanging down, and she was doing something to Benny’s corpse.
Something nasty.
Then she saw the clothes of the children piled by the back door. Little red sweatshirts. Little tiny shoes for little tiny feet. Socks. Jumpers. A blue jacket like the one she had seen a little redheaded boy wearing.
Greasy.
Fatty.
A young, vibrant soup.
Dory took a deep breath.
Hang on. It can’t be happening. This doesn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen. Benny Marais is alive. Mr. and Mrs. Boswell are not psychos from hell who cook children in soup.
Those dogs. They don’t corner children.
They don’t.
But they did.
You can’t leave this to fate, Dory. Can’t. Better to die right here than to risk those kids.
5
She went in through the screened-in porch. The back door was unlocked, and then she stepped into a little alcove that had been used to hang up the children’s coats. The smell of that soup was fragrant and meaty.
She pointed the rifle directly ahead to meet whoever might be coming for her.
As she stepped into the kitchen, she heard a slurping sound. On the stove were three large pots. She assumed they were like her mother’s lobster pots. Steam came up from them, and Mrs. Boswell stirred one with a long wooden spoon. She glanced at Dory and smiled slightly. Over at a kitchen table beyond the stovetop, Stinky the Clown was slurping the soup back and sucking on some kind of marrowbone when he wasn’t slurping.
The kitchen looked as if it had been sprayed with blood.
“They’re so delicious when they’re young,” Mrs. Boswell said.
It was all Dory needed.
She pressed the butt of the rifle beneath her left armpit; her elbow went to her hip for support; she was used to shooting when it came to hunting season. She preferred getting some kind of mount for this kind of shooting, but the rules of the world had ended sometime between that afternoon when she and Benny had discovered that the dogs had gotten loose and the moment she had first opened the back gate to the Boswells’ property.
I guess it’s open season now. If this is a dream, more power to it.
If it’s not, well, fuck me twenty ways to Saturday.
Mrs. Boswell leaned over the bubbling pot.
Dory slowly squeezed the trigger.
When Mrs. Boswell fell, she went over and finished Stinky off, too.
When Dory had done her job, she turned off the stove.
And that’s when the little kids in their underwear came running into the kitchen, whooping and hollering, and knocked her completely off her feet. The redheaded kid leapt on top of her and began smashing his fists against her face, while a little girl with blond locks kicked her in the ribs; two other anklebiters actually got down at her ankles and began biting. Dory thrashed out at them; the rifle slid across the slick, wet floor. She had to do something she could not have imagined doing in a thousand years—she began kicking at the kids and when she managed to get up to her hands and knees, she pushed them away from her. Must’ve been six of them all told, and she crawled through and around them trying to get her rifle, but then one of them grabbed it just as she had grazed her fingers against the butt of it.
A blind panic had begun taking her over. She got to her feet and went running across the bloodied floor, through the kitchen door, out the front door. As she went, she heard the blast of the rifle. Those four-year-olds can shoot that thing?
Running out onto the front lawn, she was sure she’d trip or slide or stumble, but somehow she made it out to the truck. She swung back the front door of the truck—lucky for her, as per usual, Benny had left the keys on the seat. She struggled with the keys and the damn rabbit’s foot he had dangling off the keychain. Then she got the truck started, and as she did she revved it up and tore out of there so fast she nearly hit another car coming in the opposite direction. Although the other vehicle went by in a flash, she was certain the man driving had his eyes closed as if he were sleeping.
She drove through the winding streets along the split-levels and the ranch houses and even though she noticed something was wrong every time she passed by a yard with people gathered in the driveway or near the front door, she didn’t look at them. She let the adrenaline keep pumping inside her. All she knew was that she wanted to get the hell out of the village, out of this place, and drive, drive, drive.
She switched on the headlights as she went, and when she got down near the Riverview Pass, a slim road that ducked out of the suburbs of the village and into a spot of wilderness, she actually began to believe that somehow she had eaten a bad mushroom or someone had slipped her an acid-laced sugar cube for her to have actually believed she’d experienced what she’d gone through at the Boswells’ house.
The highway was dark as she turned onto it, but she didn’t mind. She turned up the radio—playing classic rock—and let Led Zeppelin and then Todd Rundgren and finally some group she’d never heard of called Scorpion Queen take her mind away as she drove, hoping to make it to Beacon if she could, and from there, she’d get police. She’d get help. She’d do something.
She just didn’t want to be in Watch Point that night, and didn’t give a damn if her parents would throw a fit.
She figured that somehow, they’d understand.
As she drove down the highway, she began to feel a little sleepy. Must be all this. Exhausting. Too much to take. Too much.
Without even realizing it was happening, her eyes closed as if rocks weighed them down. But the dream she entered as she fell asleep was that she was driving in the truck down the highway toward the next town over.
Someone whispered, “You have to wake up, Dory. Wake up. WAKE UP!”
When she opened her eyes, the headlights lit up a large oak tree not more than six feet away. Her hands were barely on the steering wheel, but her foot had come off the accelerator so that the truck drifted lazily toward the tree. She fought back the need to sleep in time to grasp the wheel firmly and turn it to the right. She felt a bump against the truck, and realized she’d gone into a ditch on the side of the road.
At this point, she could not have been more awake. “Jesus,” she gasped. She stomped down on the emergency break and turned the keys, drawing them out of the ignition.
She looked out the windshield. The headlights illuminated nothing but brambles and bushes. When she finally opened the truck’s door, she realized she’d driven well off the road, into the woods themselves.
6
She wandered through the thin woods, trying to find out where she’d been driving from without actually having crashed the truck. She saw a light coming from somewhere across the brambles, and she followed this until she reached the edge of a stone wall.
The light came from several windows in a house she had never seen, although she’d heard of it.
It was undoubtedly the grandest house she’d ever seen, and it wasn’t quite the way some of the kids at school h
ad described it. It didn’t look as if it were falling apart at all.
It was a beautiful mansion with towers and enormous windows, columns along its porch and several rooftops along its uppermost ridge. Harrow.
7
Roland Love had spent his twilight making a big wooden cross down at Harmon Prives’ Village Hardware, just across from the Dairy Queen near the highway. He had to first incapacitate Harmon himself, who at fifty was still as strong as a bull. But Roland had his miracle spike with him, and when Harmon came at him waving his hands in the air, “What the hell are you doing, Roland?” he asked the young man he knew so well from church. “What in God’s name?”
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.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 23