The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (29 page)

Just ahead was the old depot. When Ronnie heard the screech of brakes, she quickly moved up to the sidewalk, mindful of any mad dogs that might be running around.

What came around the corner had no effect on her, other than to numb her a little further and nudge her into a part of her brain that accepted far too much horror to process.

A pickup truck nearly spun out of control as it came up onto Main Street. In the flatbed, Mark Beauchamp and his wife Paula had chains dragging off the back of the truck. Ronnie knew them both—Paula was just two years older than she was and had dropped out of college to come back and marry Mark. She was seven months pregnant with their first kid. They were hanging on to the back of a truck while some crazy driver in a hooded sweatshirt drove. Wrapped up in the chains that dragged along the road behind the truck: two young women whose features were so torn up by the pavement that Ronnie could not clearly identify them. They were also pregnant, and the thought occurred to her that these young expectant mothers were close friends of Paula’s—and might even be in her Lamaze or yoga classes. Paula had been very health-conscious since getting pregnant. Ronnie could even remember Paula coming in the bookstore to get information on natural childbirth and midwifery.

The truck sped on, narrowly avoiding the three-car wreck halfway up Main Street.

Ronnie kept running.
Put it out of your head. Put it out of your head. It can’t be real. It can’t be real.
She swung the hatchet out as she ran in case anyone should leap out at her, and when she made it to the depot, she turned north toward Parham.

She ran to the train tracks, too scared to look back to see if anyone pursued her. Ronnie ran along the tracks, and felt comforted by the darkness of the woods on either side. She kept heaving for deeper breaths; she tried to block everything she’d just witnessed out of her mind; she tried not to think of her sister or her mother.
Maybe they’re safe. Maybe they made it out. Maybe they’re waiting somewhere else. Maybe they went to Parham for supper. Maybe. . .

But she knew it was all wishful thinking.
They’re probably dead. There’s nothing you can do.
She finally stopped running a quarter-mile out of Watch Point, and she leaned forward, her hands on her knees as she took great whooping breaths. She then lost it—and vomited over the tracks. Nausea overcame her senses, and she stepped off the tracks and went to lie down in the grass at the edge of the woods. Lying back, looking up at the darkening sky, she wondered if she should just go to sleep. Just like Boaty had wanted to do. Just like Nick had done. Just fall into a deep sleep and maybe when she woke up, it would all be some kind of dream.
Sleep.

Sleep is the enemy.

You sleep, you will die. There’s no way around it. You sleep, they come for you. Or...

She remembered Nick in the store room, and how Bari had fallen asleep with her nose torn open.

If you sleep, you become one of them. They’re dreaming. They don’t wake up.

“I have to,” she whispered as she pushed herself up out of the grass. She picked up the hatchet. “I have to.”

She cut through a section of the woods to get back to the village. The darkened woods were at peace. No children running with growling mutts to tear up some old lady. No one dying in the woods. The trees felt safe.

Trees don’t dream.

Yet even the straggly trees were too silent. She wondered why she couldn’t hear the chatter of squirrels or the night calls of birds.

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 holes 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.