Held her breath for a second, dispelling fears.
You can get through this. You have strength. You’ll kill them all if you have to.
She moved farther along and felt the tickling again.
Ignore it. It’s nothing. It’s not hurting you. It’s not stopping you. Just go.
She swung the hatchet into the air, hoping to keep anything that might be coming after her at bay.
You’II get through this. You’II get through it.
As she moved along the wall, she saw that the windows of this hallway were all covered with the webbing, but they began to let in a speck of light. It was just enough for her eyes to adjust to the dark and see a little bit.
She went rigid, and pressed herself to the wall when she saw the forms moving in the dark.
They were clumps of movement, as if small children— impossibly small—moved in groups together and then separated and reformed other groups.
Behind her, as she moved along, she felt a doorframe.
Thank God. I’ll get through this. Nothing’s hurt me yet. Nothing can. Nothing will.
She brought one arm behind her back, while she chopped the hatchet through the air in front of her. The dark things moved along by the webbed windows and scurried down the hall; others regrouped, then split off from their groups. She still could not make them out, but she assumed they must be like the Lizzie-thing in some way.
She turned the doorknob, and the door opened behind her.
Light from this room flooded the corridor.
She stood there, the rectangle of light from the room illuminating the dark things.
No longer dark.
Jesus.
They were beetles with iridescent green backs, moving along dead bodies—six or seven bodies that lay there. Beetles as large as human fists were scurrying all over them, covering them and making Ronnie believe the bodies had moved slightly. But the beetles were quickly devouring the flesh of the corpses so that ribs stuck out from the torso of a woman, and a man’s skeletal hand thrust from his fleshy wrist.
The light seemed to get the insects’ attention, however, and although she felt it was the height of madness, Ronnie was nearly certain that they had turned their attention away from the flesh feast to look at her. Their antennae moved, and she saw some of their wings lift as if they were about to take flight.
They’re going to eat me alive.
They’re flesh-eaters, and I’m next.
Behind her, in the room, she heard a noise that sounded like a sh-sh-sh-sh.
She felt the small hairs at the nape of her neck rise up, and she swore that she could’ve peed standing up right then—
Ronnie Pond turned to see her dead father standing there, in his boxer shorts, his face as smashed from the car wreck as she had remembered it being that day so many years ago.
Beneath his feet, the floor seemed to be covered with a dark, thick liquid, almost like moist asphalt, that rippled like the surface of a just-disturbed pond.
No. No.
Something within her mind snapped, as if it hadn’t been snapping all day. Something snapped big, and she began shouting inside her head. YOU ARE NOT GOING TO FUCK WITH ME, HARROW YOU ARE NOT GOING TO DRIVE ME INSANE WITH DREAMS AND THEN PUT ME DOWN IN SOME WASP NEST AND SHOW ME EVERYONE I EVER LOVED WHO DIED.
“Fuck this,” she said, and pulled the door shut again, stepping back into the darkness as the beetles flew at her and began tearing at her skin. She swung the hatchet out, and ran as fast as she could toward a feeble glow of light she saw. As she reached it, she saw it was the beginning of more stairs up, lit by jars full of candles.
In the flickering candlelight, the beetles had vanished. Glancing back from where she’d come, Ronnie saw them moving in their thick swarms, heading back to the piles of corpses.
Under the stairs, a doorway.
Locked.
And that’s when she heard Dory Crampton’s ear-piercing scream in an upstairs room.
10
Alice Kyeteler had entered the glorious cathedral that was Harrow. She saw the altar up ahead, and the bodies that had been split open and pinned back along the great pillars. She decided that it was going to be easier to ignore the trappings of this place—that the glamour Harrow projected was simply another way of trapping souls within it.
You didn’t live this long to get caught like this.
Yet part of her said to herself, You stupid, stupid woman. You lived here for years and knew never to come to this one spot. This one place. This is the only thing that will destroy you for what you have.
A man stepped out from behind one of the pillars. He wore a wide red cape, and for a moment she thought he was dressed as a cardinal.
Cardinal of Hell, of course.
She didn’t recognize Roland Love, but that was because the house had changed him since entering it. He had been tearing open the birth sacs of the reborn ones, and had shepherded them along in their pupal stages of growth. But during this process, their claws and pincers had torn at him—for even though he used his spike to tear at the outer white maggot, the dark creatures within still had to pull their way out into the world and feed upon something. Roland had been that feeder, and the marks of the creatures were upon him in gashes and gouges. His face, though still strikingly handsome, was now sliced along the cheek and forehead. The barbed wire crown had been pressed farther down into his skull until his own flesh had covered over it, marrying to the barbed wire so that the barbs thrust out of his now-bald head. His eyes had sunken back a bit so they seemed smaller and darker, and the insanity of the house had pulsed in his blood long enough that he as much resembled a nightmare as he did a dream. His bloodred cap flowed over him, hiding the more obvious scourges to his body, but he had come through it all, a servant to Kingdom Come.
Alice saw all this—feeling the gentle fever of her psychic ability on the surface of her skin as she touched him. She had not felt such a strong charge since she’d first come to Watch Point.
The house owns this one, she thought.
“We can hear your thoughts here,” Roland said. “No need to hide them with your mind.”
“I suppose you speak for Harrow.”
He nodded. He swung his arm out to suggest that they walk farther along the ancient stones toward the altar. “The Kingdom is at hand.”
Alice showed no fear. She walked with Roland Love toward the great golden altar that looked as bright as the sun. As they neared it, she saw the worshippers on their knees, gazing up at the statues around the altar.
Roland stopped, and smiled. “Do you see what we can accomplish? If all are here?”
She reached over and touched his wounded hand, lightly pressing against the large gash just beneath his thumb. “You had visions, once.”
“I am a visionary.”
“No, you believe God spoke to you. But this is no god here. This has perverted your belief and twisted it so that it could devour you.”
He shook his head lightly. “I was told you were a scorpion in our midst. I was told that no matter how you seemed like someone’s mother with your graying hair and your granny braid and your granola charm, that you had a stinger waiting to come out.”
She gazed up at him, at his eyes. “You’re in a dream. You’re sleepwalking through it. This place has done it to you. But you and I, we’re just electricity for it. That’s all. It’ll use me, and use you, and then the lights will go out again.”
“Do you see the reborn?” Roland said, taking her over to the worshippers.
There may have been forty of them in the first pews and along the altar, and when they turned to look back at Alice, her fear finally returned. “How could you be part of this?”
“I will be reborn, as well,” he said.
She looked at the others there. Ordinary people from the village.
She had already known that some of them were dead. But these were not the dead.
These had vestigial wings in their backs, and the women’s
breasts had fine dark hairs all over them: She gasped at one of the men because she was sure it was Army Vernon, but not really him. It’s a second one of him. He’s dead. The house got him.
She also saw Thad Allen, big as day, naked, squatting near the altar, looking at her... the way an insect would. As if there’s nothing to be seen. A praying mantis, a cockroach. His eyes were not yet fully formed and had a milky discharge in them.
Beyond all these worshippers were maggot creatures that wriggled and hummed, and some of them had begun tearing with pincers through their larval covering.
A young man with a beautiful face and a flop of sandy brown hair, as naked as all the rest of them, got up from a pew and began bounding toward them.
It was Roland himself, but not exactly him. The imitation’s eyes were more human than the real Roland’s eyes had become. His skin was flawless, and his sinewy muscles showed off a vibrant, strong physique. Only his penis would’ve betrayed a difference, for there were three prongs hanging downward that looked almost like a fly’s proboscis.
“It’s a nightmare,” she said. “That’s all.”
“The village has sacrificed much to the marriage of the Holy and Unholy tonight,” Roland said, raising his arms to embrace his other self. The naked Roland went to the caped Roland, and they held each other for several seconds. The caped Roland began squirming in the other’s arms, and Alice gasped when she saw that his other self had begun chewing at his neck, taking away a thin strand of skin.
The other Roland looked at her, sniffing, but returned to the throat of his origin.
“It is beautiful,” the real Roland said, his voice turning to a rasp as his other sucked at his earlobe, taking a shred of his ear and part of his scalp down its throat.
Roland opened his cape, and others came to him— children with their teeth gnashing and the fine hairs on their stomachs quivering, old women Alice had passed every day in the village, recreated but for a change or two in their bodies or the discharge from their eyes and mouth.
Beneath Roland’s red cape, he, too, was naked. They came to him, and he covered them with his cape. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head as their ministrations to his body sent him into a state of delirium. He gasped and moaned as if he were climaxing, but Alice watched in horror as the others tore at his flesh, and then began to draw the flesh apart.
They were turning him inside out.
The noise itself was unbearable. She covered her ears to block it out, but the slurps and the squishes seemed to reach her, and she cried out because Alice Kyeteler, at last, had given up.
She fell to her knees, not in worship, but in the utmost terror she’d ever felt.
The others continued to draw and quarter Roland Love, and he groaned and grunted as the doorways and passages of his flesh and organs were pried apart until the meat and bones and blood of him was all on the outside.
11
Trying to follow the source of the scream, Ronnie Pond raced along the upper hallway, looking in the open rooms as she went. All the lights were on bright, and she passed rooms in which she saw a man who looked like he had somehow transformed into a large lizard, tearing a woman apart between her legs, while she laughed; in another room, she saw a man with a bloodied crotch with what looked like a python halfway down his throat, its head poking from within the skin at his collarbone; passing another, she saw a mass of blood and bones and organs, like a man skinned alive, writing madly on the walls of a room, talking to himself; in others, she saw more of what she’d seen in the village—the madness of human beings possessed by malevolence. She followed a second stairway up, and found room after room of dead, torn women. It was purely by luck that she found a very naked Dory Crampton in a room, fighting a man in a long striped shirt who needed to find a good set of trousers himself, while a strange-looking little boy jumped up and down and kept making a strange whistling sound.
12
Ronnie didn’t hesitate, despite the green scum all over the floor. She raced into the room, and brought the hatchet against the guy’s right arm. The little boy went running out of the room making yet another weird sound, like a clacking.
The man she’d hit fell over onto the floor, moaning and screeching about “The days of judgment are at hand! You can’t stop it! It’s a force to be reckoned with!”
Ronnie shouted at the other girl, whom she recognized from school. “Dory! Get the hell up! Now!”
Dory Crampton looked up at her and said, “Holy shit. You’re not another one of them.”
“No time to talk. Those yours?” She pointed to the overalls and shirt that lay in a clump by the door. “Get dressed and let’s get the hell out of here. We need to find the others.”
“Who?”
“We’ll know when we see “em,” Ronnie said.
13
When Ronnie reached out to pull Dory up, they both felt it at once. It was like a play of lightning between them. A recognition went through both of them. Before Mr. Spider could get up, Ronnie slammed the hatchet into his thigh, and again he fell. Blood spurted from him this time, and it splattered on her already blood-stained clothes.
Once out of the room, Ronnie began pulling Dory down the hallway.
“It’s us,” Ronnie said, nearly out of breath. “You know that.”
“Us?”
“Harrow wants to keep us separate. You have it. I have it. Alice has it. Army must have it. It killed everyone else.”
“Did you see the monster?” Dory asked.
“What?”
“There was this thing. I didn’t get a good look at it. It sort of was all smushy and had tentacles and ...”
“No.” Don’t be afraid, Ronnie thought.
Her voice passed into Dory’s mind. She nodded.
We have to destroy this place, Ronnie told her in her mind.
They thought they both heard something moving toward them from the far end of the corridor, so Dory and Ronnie raced to the staircase at the large mirror. Dory stopped suddenly, seeing something in the mirror.
When Ronnie looked up at it, she too saw it—wisps of what might’ve been people they’d never seen before, like ghosts trapped in the mirror, reaching out for them.
She remembered the words Alice told her about the place.
Harrow traps souls. It harvests those with psychic ability and it uses them up. It sucks at them.
Ronnie hauled back and swung the hatchet at the mirror, breaking it. “Well, if any souls are trapped there, we just set ‘em free.”
But when the mirror shattered, they both saw it: Behind the glass and the frame, it looked like there was an entrance to an entirely different house.
“You want to go see what’s there?” Ronnie asked.
“No fuckin’ way,” Dory said. “Let’s just find your friends and get the hell out.”
Dory nearly tripped down the stairs getting to the first floor. When the front door was in sight, a naked blond girl with stringy hair stood in her path. The hair nearly obscured her face and was all damp and matted. When Ronnie came up behind her, she gasped. “Shit. It’s Bari Love. I thought I’d killed her. Or at least put her out for awhile.”
Ronnie raised her hatchet as if to attack, but stopped.
Bari Love’s eyes were milky white and dripping a substance like cottage cheese down her face. Her blond hair was too thin, and showed her scalp in places. She opened and closed her mouth as if trying to say something, but there was no sound.
“It’s like the Lizzie-thing,” Ronnie said. “She’s all hollow on the inside.”
She swung the hatchet and caught Bari just above the jaw. The hatchet got stuck there, and flew out of Ronnie’s fingers. The Bari-thing fell to the floor, the hatchet still caught from her ear to her mouth.
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.
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.
The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) Page 30