The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (21 page)

She grabbed them up again, quickly sorting through them to find the storeroom key.

The doorknob turned again.

She pressed her left shoulder against the door. The pain of the wound in her upper shoulder felt like pincers tearing at her; holding the key with her right hand, she pressed it into the lock beneath the doorknob, and turned it.

It locked.

The keys hung there.

She stared at the doorknob.

No movement.

“Let me out,” Nick said, on the other side.

“No way in hell,” she spat.

“Please. Oh God. What happened? There’s so much blood, Ronnie? Blood! What did you do?”

Ronnie stood there, taking deep breaths.

“Please, Dusty needs a doctor, Ronnie,” Nick said. “I don’t know why you did this. I really don’t. But please. Please, he’s gonna die. His blood is” everywhere. Blood! Ronnie! Blood!” Ronnie felt his fists beating against the other side of the door—the thuds sent vibrations through her that confused her even further.

Phone. Call. Get help.

On the other side of the door, Nick rattled the doorknob.

Ronnie dropped the scissors, and ran as fast as she could—but it seemed feeble and slow to her, until she reached the phone by the cash register. She picked it up.

Dead.

“He’s dying back here!” Nick shouted from the storeroom, pounding on the door. “You killed him, you bitch! Blood! Everywhere! You killed him! Oh sweet mother of fuck! He’s gushing. He’s gushing all over the books! All over the bestsellers, Ronnie!”

Ronnie wiped her hands on her shirt, a thousand thoughts going through her mind at once, and she went around the counter and toward the front door of the shop. She drew back the front door—

Bar! Love, a girl she couldn’t stand from school, stood there, completely naked, soaked red, and in her hands, she held a hatchet.

“Let him out,” Bari said, raising the hatchet up and pushing her way through the door, into the bookstore.

Ronnie fell backward, and a lightning bolt of pain shot through her shoulder. She began screaming uncontrollably, “Help! Help me! God!
Somebody!”

Even as she screamed at the top of her lungs, Ronnie thought she heard gunshots going off somewhere out on Main Street, and the sounds of car alarms going off, and maybe even the shouts of other people—

But she had known instinctively in these moments since Nick had stabbed Dusty to death that she couldn’t wait for someone else to help her.

“Chippity-chop, choppity-chop,” Bari Love sang an off-key tune. “Okay, here’s the deal, Veronica, I’m going to axe you a question. Now, don’t say anything. Nothing at all. No answer need reply. But I need to know.” Bari raised the axe up and sliced at the air just above Ronnie’s face.

Ronnie thought she heard dogs barking and scratching at the front windows and door. For just a split second she looked between Bari’s legs and saw a Rottweiler and two Chihuahuas at the door, their paws bloodied as they scraped at the glass door, trying to get in.

Then she heard the
whoosh
of the hatchet as it came down for her head.

CHAPTER TWELVE

1

“Mrs. Boswell, please calm down,” Benny Marais said into the phone.

“You—you get your truck out here now. You get this... these mongrels... and you get them now!” she shouted on the other end of the line.

“Mrs. Boswell, please. Are you sure you haven’t been ...” Benny Marais didn’t want to say what he was thinking.
Hitting the sauce.
He was sure of it. Nancy Boswell was drinking again, and now she was hallucinating.

“If I have to, I’ll have the police out here and after they shoot them, they can arrest you,” the woman said on the phone.

“I’m not the dogcatcher.”

“You run the pound,” she said. “And these are yours. I got calls from half the neighborhood that wild dogs were roaming the streets. You tell me. Are you missing any dogs? Are you, Mr. Marais?”

Benny Marais decided it was best to shut up about anything that might incriminate him in some way—just in case something happened. He tried to keep his voice even. “Just do what you can to keep them safe. I’ll be over. I’ll take care of this.”

“What the hell?” Benny Marais asked no one, although Dory Crampton stood right next to him. He scratched the back of his head and put the phone down. “That was Nancy Boswell, and she’s up in arms because she said six mangy dogs are in her backyard growling at kids.”

“I don’t know her,” Dory said.

“She runs a day care up on Macklin. In her backyard. You must’ve seen it. Her husband always dresses up as a clown when she’s trying to get people to dump their brats with her.”

“Oh.” Dory grinned. “Yeah. We used to egg him sometimes. Me and my friends. We’d drive by and egg the clown.”

Benny glared at her as if she were at the bottom of all this.

“You’re acting like it’s something I did wrong.”

“She’s got seven three- to four-year-olds over there on the playset in the backyard, scared shitless because a pack of wild dogs is terrorizing them. And just who left the damn cages open?” he said, his hands going to his hips, which made Dory snicker a little because Benny had wide hips and it reminded her of her grandmother when he got all high and mighty like this.

“I didn’t let the dogs out. And how does Mrs. Boswell even know the mutts in her yard are from here?”

“All I know is I need to get my rifle.”

“You’re gonna
shoot
the dogs?”

“She said they’re growling. If I can’t bring ‘em in, then yeah, I’m gonna shoot ‘em.”

“You are so not gonna shoot those dogs,” Dory said, and by the time they’d gotten the rifle and some leashes and thrown them in the back of Benny’s pickup, she had begun laughing at the whole thing and telling him that Mrs. Boswell probably was rabid herself.

But she stopped laughing when she opened the back gate at the Boswell place and saw the blood.

“Holy shit,” she whispered.

The Boswell Clown-A-Round DayCare had a bright yellow and blue and red playset in back with a twisty slide and a rope ladder climb and what looked like plastic monkeybars and a ball pit full of plastic balls with a plastic window on one side. About six little tots were inside the ball pit, up to their necks in the blue and red plastic balls, looking out, bawling to high heaven for their mommies.

Surrounding the playset were six dogs—all of them she’d seen at the pound.

A Doberman, a pit bull mix, a collie, a German shepherd, a spotted mutt, and a pug.

All of them were digging in the dirt beneath the ball pit as if they could dig their way into where the little kids were.

As if they wanted to eat those kids.

That was the thought that came to her.

They want those kids. They want those kids the way they usually want a milkbone.

For a moment, she felt a strange tugging in her brain as if the world had just changed its rules and nobody had told her. As if she were confused and hallucinating and not completely sure that she really was seeing anything the right way.

Blood was spattered all over the backyard, and pooled in small round pits that made it look like the dogs had already been digging holes.

Already been burying something.

She didn’t like to think it, but she was nearly certain that she saw a child’s sneaker sticking up from one of the just-covered-over holes the dogs had dug.

Near one of the holes, a clump of what she had thought was hay ...
but it couldn’t be.

Her mind fought what it tried to make sense of—that the clump was hair.

A child’s scalp.

The pit bull started leaping up at the thick plastic that protected the children sitting in the ball pit.

Dory had never seen children’s eyes go so wide.

What the hell is this? What could make them do this? You have to stop the dogs. You have to stop ‘em.

Dory felt as if she were frozen to the spot. Staring at the children whose faces poked up from among the little blue and red plastic balls.

The rifle.

Benny had a rifle in the truck.

The dogs scratching at the play area. It’s impossible. This can’t be happening. Even a mad dog would leave those children alone. No dog would do this. Not like this.

As if a hundred miles away, she heard a
ding-dong
sound.

Benny.

He’ll know what to do. He knows everything about dogs. He’s even mean to them sometimes. He knows how to control them. He’ll get the rifle. He’ll stop these dogs. Must be rabid. Must be sick. Something must’ve gotten to them. Someone must’ve poisoned them.

Her mind spun a mile a minute as she tried to reason through what could be happening. As she tried to believe that she must be seeing things wrong, that she must be misinterpreting what was right in front of her face, that her own brain was going haywire.

She glanced to the right to see if she could signal Benny in some way.

Benny Marais rang the front doorbell not more than fifteen feet away from her, and an instinct within her wanted to step back from the open gate, and close it and latch it and then run the hell back to the truck.

2

Mrs. Boswell answered the front door, and when she glanced over to Benny again, he was already inside the house.

3

The six dogs kept scratching. One of the little girls inside the ball pit saw Dory and pointed toward her. The girl started jumping up and down and screaming, “Help! Help, lady! Help! Help!”

A little boy cried out, “I want Mommy! Mommy! I want Mommy!”

As if it understood, the pug glanced back, looking at Dory.

Dory felt goose bumps along her arms when it looked at her.

The other dogs kept digging to get down beneath the plastic shield of the ball pit. Dory wondered what the hell Benny was doing in the house, and the pug turned and trotted over to her.

Its muzzle, spattered with blood.

Gristle of some kind in its teeth.

When it reached her, it began growling.

Dory took a step back.

Then another.

The pug advanced toward her, down on its haunches as if getting ready for a full-on attack.

Dory reached for the gate. The dog lunged. Dory jumped backward as best she could, and began to slip on the grass—she kicked out and managed to shut the gate as the pug leapt for it.

She heard its
thud
as it hit the gate and fell back into the fenced-in area.          

The kids inside the ball pit began shrieking even louder.

She lay there on the ground, staring at the wooden gate. She couldn’t see anything beyond it, but she heard the pug digging in the dirt beneath the gate.

It’s coming for me. It saw me. It wants me.

It knows you know about it.

That dog has your smell now. He’s sighted you. He’s not going to let you go.

The thoughts jumbled around her mind, and she felt as if she were reaching a short-circuit point.

She heard someone with a low pitched voice whisper, “Bitch.”

You’re imagining things now. You’ve been pushed. You’re imagining the pug on the other side of the gate just said that.

Finally she pushed herself up and wiped her hands on her overalls. She went around to the front door, which was slightly ajar.

She pushed it open.

The front hallway had dark wood floor with a Persian carpet runner that stretched past the living room to another door at the end of it. To her left, a mirror and a high table, stacked with mail and two rolled-up newspapers. Beyond the table and mirror, a staircase up, and a staircase down.

“Hello?” she asked.

She could barely hear the shrieking children—it was quiet in the house.

As she stepped farther inside the house, other thoughts occurred to her:
Why wouldn’t the neighbors be here? And the cops? Why wouldn’t Mrs. Boswell simply have the cops and the fire department out here to help? Why wouldn’t she have opened the back gate to let the dogs out? To try to shoo them away from the kids? Didn’t she have a garden hose? She could’ve tried that.

She called out to Benny, but only silence greeted her. She glanced in the living room. It was a perfect living room, the kind that would be in a magazine layout, magazines like
Martha Stewart Living, House Beautiful, City Home, Modern Mansions,
or any number of magazines Dory flipped through on her twice-weekly trips to the public library when she dreamed of getting away and living in some more sophisticated place; where she imagined a better family than the one she had, and finer things, and a kind of homespun happiness that came from the perfection of the home environment. The Boswells had that kind of living room. The sofa was wide and inviting; the drapes, though drawn shut, were thick and a bright yellow; the rugs were tastefully laid overtop the dark floor; and there was an upright piano at one end with several unlit candles upon it.

It seemed curiously unsuitable for day care, and she wondered if Mrs. Boswell always kept the children from playing in the house.

And now they’re trapped in the playset.

She passed by the living room, and as she glanced to her left, up the staircase to the second floor of the house, she saw the clown.

He was standing there with what might’ve been Benny Marais’s head in its hands.

And the worst part was, Benny had a big goofy smile on his face as if he’d just heard the best joke of his life.

4

Norma Houseman went to the door as soon as the doorbell chimed. Opening it, she looked out onto the porch.

“Veronica?” she asked.

“Ronnie couldn’t make it,” Lizzie Bond said.

“Oh. You two look so much alike.”

“Twinsies,” Lizzie said, smiling. “She had an accident.”

“Did she?” Norma said. “Well, this is unusual.”

“I’m as good a sitter as she is,” Lizzie said, glancing around to see behind Norma. “Where are the little rascals?”