The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) (9 page)

Dusty wanted some caffeine badly, so he reached over and took the mug. Sniffed it. A sip. He spat it back into the mug. “You’ve been serving this crap?”

“All day,” Nick said, shrugging. “Hey, nobody told me how awful it was.”

“We have to throw out that machine. You still have the Mr. Coffee?”

“Did Joe DiMaggio slam balls?” Nick nodded. He thumbed toward the storage room at the back of the store. “Packed away somewhere.”

“It’ll do ‘til we can order another one.”

“Serve regular coffee? Us? Half our customers will migrate to Starbucks up the road.”

“They already have. And after drinking that brown shit, that little mystery is solved. You get the new shipment out on the shelves?”

“Some of them. All the new Nora Roberts and the new Cornwell. What time’s Ronnie coming in?”

Dusty glanced at his wristwatch. “Whenever she feels like it, I guess.”

“Well, that’s about the time when I guess the books’ll all be shelved,” Nick said, “because I feel like a nap, and you know I’m owed at least one today.”

3

Over at the Watch Point Free Library, a small, domed building at the center of a green that might’ve once been called a Commons but was now simply “Watch Point Park,” Ronnie Pond sat on the stone steps out front, reading a copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s
Fight Club.
She glanced up at some starlings that had begun swarming in the sky.

She then looked over at the red Mustang parked near the post office.

“You’re stalking him,” Lizzie said.

Startled by her sister’s voice, Ronnie glanced around. Lizzie stood at the top step of the library, just behind her, nearly invisible by the statue of Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom and war. Lizzie, looking muscled and sweaty from an afternoon workout at the tennis courts, could’ve been a goddess of war herself. “Napoleonic shits,” was all Ronnie said.

They had a secret language that they’d developed since they first learned to speak. As twins, they had been getting away with murder for years, and the language was just the smallest part of it. They looked nearly identical—although Ronnie had a rose tattoo on her shoulder, while Lizzie had opted for a Celtic circle tattoo around her wrist. Ronnie rarely saw herself in her sister—they had done everything in life to be very different in some ways. Whereas Lizzie had become a party girl and a jock in high school, Ronnie had opted for the pale life of books. Even though her glasses were only slightly necessary, they distinguished her further from her sister. Ronnie had begun dying her hair black by the age of thirteen—when her mother finally relented on her endless whines of not wanting to be so damn sandy brown—but had not yet progressed to the stage of wearing extremely different clothes from her sister, simply because it was easier and cheaper just to trade back and forth on shirts and slacks and jeans and skirts, although Ronnie was a jeans girl whereas Lizzie was partial to skirts. The language they’d developed over the years began with a twist on
baw-baw,
their word for “bottle” when they were toddlers. The term now encompassed anything they wanted so badly they were willing to fight for it (thus, at age seventeen, “baw-baw” also became any guy one of them lusted after, despite the other staking a claim). By the time they both entered high school, the secret language had progressed far beyond its childish beginnings and included parallels to history. “Huguenots in the Louvre” became their phrase for “I’m getting my period and it feels like a blood bath.” “Stonehenged” might mean that a person or a sentence someone had uttered was completely unintelligible, or it might simply mean that whoever said it felt lost. “I’m completely stonehenged in Geometry,” Lizzie might say. “Very Trianon” meant that a classmate was living in her own fantasyland. And “Napoleonic shits” was too simple—they’d heard that one of the theories as to why Napoleon lost at Waterloo was that he’d been eating sour green apples the morning of the battle and had to run to the latrine constantly. Thus weakened, he hadn’t been up to snuff for his most important foe. “That’s not the accepted understanding,” their junior-year World History teacher had told them. But for Lizzie and Ronnie, it was enough. So when Ronnie said “Napoleonic shits” to her sister on the steps of the library that afternoon, what Lizzie heard was, “Okay, you caught me, I’m not winning this one, I’ve been going at this all wrong, and life just sucks and I think I’m going to be sick.”

Beyond that, since Lizzie could easily identify the red Mustang, she also heard, “Andy Harris is already going with Bari Love and nobody’s going to break them up, but I can’t seem to stop obsessing about him when I really should be focusing on something important in life, like reading this book or developing my motor skills or even getting extra work at the bookshop.”

“He’s extremely H the Eighth,” Lizzie said, trying to dissuade her sister. “The question’s got to be, are you Anne Boleyn or Jane Seymour?”

“Bari’s definitely Aragon.”

“She’s so Aragon, she’s got an armada in her bra.” Lizzie grinned, sitting down beside her.

“Why’d you and Alex break up? Was it...” Ronnie began, but then stopped herself. She wanted to say,
Was it that night when you changed just a little? Did he do something to you that night to hurt you so badly that you couldn’t see him again? Did he. .. ?

Ronnie didn’t want to have to complete that thought.

“Naw. It was just regular break-up stuff. He freaked me out a little. He was a major perv. And, well, we just weren’t suited. So whatcha reading?”

Ronnie showed her the book.

“Any good?”

“Very.”

“The movie was great.”

“Not as good as this.”

“Want to go grab snacks?”

“No baw-baw” Ronnie said. “I have a knot in my stomach at this point. And I need to get to work.”

“Napoleonic shits are the worst,” Lizzie agreed, “but they’re still better than Huguenots in the Louvre.” She put her arm around her twin’s shoulders, and they watched the red car until Andy came out of the post office a minute or so later. “You need to forget him.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “All boys are best forgotten. But I can dream, can’t I?”

“You still having those dreams?”

They hadn’t talked about the dreams for awhile. Ronnie had stopped telling her about them. They stopped being scary, and Ronnie felt they got boring, too.

It was always about rooms in a house.

Always about hearing footsteps outside the door.

“Not much anymore,” Ronnie lied

She nodded slightly toward the post office. “He dumped you like garbage when you were sixteen. Don’t forget that. You’re just lonely. You’ll meet some cool guy soon.”

“I know” Ronnie said.

“Yeah, but life’s rough,” Lizzie said, leaning against her sister’s neck. “Ooh, you know I’m a little sleepy. I wish we had naptime just like when we were little kids. I could use a nap right about now.”

“You’re a sleepaholic,” Ronnie said, and was about to mention that it was weird that Lizzie never remembered her dreams anymore.

Just as Ronnie had been mulling all this over, sitting with her sister, something startled her—but it was just a little white-haired boy riding by on his bicycle as if he were hell on wheels.

4

There was nothing in the world like a bike if you were about eleven years old and feeling like the other kids in your new school hated your guts on sight. You had your jacket on and were running out the door before your mother could say anything about it, and you knew that once you were on that bike—as lousy as the bike could be—you were flying through it all. Flying through the beginnings of autumn, the leaves that already had been falling down on Macklin Street; flying past those boys who had tried to get you out on the blacktop for what they called the “New Kid Test,” which was the strongest boy in sixth grade daring the new kid in school to a fight. Because other kids in the class—even the girls who had seemed meek and mild not five minutes before, playing games nearby—encircled the two of them, even teachers couldn’t see what was going on in the two-minute ritual. Although in Kazi’s case, it was a ten-second ritual because he knew enough to go down to the blacktop as soon as the big kid approached him.
I
don’t mind losing. I mind getting beat up,
he thought as he stared up at Mark Malanski, who stood over him. He had looked around at the girls and boys who had seemed so distinct in class before—now, in a circle above him, their faces watching him as if they were in a hypnotic trance, they no longer seemed like boys and girls. They seemed like one mob. One body joined together with many heads. Watching him be humiliated.

The New Kid Test.

Pass or fail didn’t matter.

All that mattered was that they saw what you were made of.

At eleven, Kazi Vrabec was made of marshmallow. He even felt the marshmallow inside. His mother, who had come over from Czechoslovakia as a teenager, had told him that his name—Kazimir—meant “Great Destroyer,” and sometimes she even tried to tell him the tales’ of his great-great grandfather, who was an adventurer and conqueror. She had been trying to teach him the language of her homeland, but he’d avoided it as much as possible because it made him stand out too much when she tried talking with him on the street. Everyone stared. He hated feeling like a foreigner. He was born on American soil, and he wasn’t ever going to Prague if he could help it.

But sometimes being in a small town was awful.

And he didn’t feel like a great destroyer—not ever.

He felt marshmallow all over, inside and out, and had not wanted to move to Watch Point, but his mother had insisted after his father had wandered off with the woman his mother called his “kurva” eight months before.

But on the bike, flying, he could throw it out into the wind, that memory, that school event he could never tell his mother about or his new teacher, or anyone. It was that level of childhood he hated, and being too good at math and science and English and social studies was not going to do him well at the sixth grade in Parham’s public school. Even the bus ride home had sucked.

He could forget other days, too, like the time the kids all got him on the blacktop to play dodge ball, and he told them that they weren’t supposed to.

“But that’s another kind of dodge ball,” Bobby Wofford said, grinning. When Bobby Wofford grinned, Kazi had learned, you were screwed. And if he laughed, you might as well kiss it all goodbye. “This is a special game.”

“Yep,” Sandy Houseman chimed in. “This one’s called Get the New Kid.”

“Or Bounce the Czech,” Bobby Wofford began laughing at his own joke, so Kazi thought,
Well, might as well get this over with.

But luckily, Miss Aronson had come out at that moment and scolded the kids for having stolen the ball from the utility closet where they kept all the stuff for games and P E. Whenever one of the kids slyly mentioned dodge ball around Kazi, he panicked. Just the sight of the ball made him want to run and hide somewhere rather than deal with those kids at that awful elementary school. And yet, he didn’t feel he could run to his mother and whine about it. She had told him to toughen up each time they’d moved, and he was sure she’d just yell at him if he came back with another story of being bullied. “You need to fight back, Kazimir!” she’d shout as if he’d done something terrible and wrong. “You can’t just keep taking things from people. You can’t just be a big baby and come running back here expecting me to solve this. I worry that I’m turning you into a little coward. Your grandfather was a great soldier. It’s your father. He’s the coward. You take after him. You have to change this, Kazi. You have to. I didn’t come all the way to America just to have a son who was a cowering dog!”

So he had learned to keep most of this to himself, even if it meant a little humiliation on the blacktops of life now and then.

All the New Kid tortures were getting to him.

But oh, the bicycle—his magic carpet away from the troubles. He could forget the dodge ball fear and the New Kid Test and Bobby Wofford’s throw-up laugh and the way Sandy Houseman sniffed the air when he was around as if he smelted bad. On the bike, he was in another world.

He flew along the streets, avoiding the major traffic areas (of which there was only one, and even then it was only major for twenty minutes, between 4:45 P.M. and 5:05 P.M. weekdays), and finally finding zigzag roads that were full of pot-holes and dips and curves. Eventually it was all trees, and he thought he smelled a lake somewhere—that watery stink that lifted his spirits just with the thought of it—and he rode along a narrow road that went from paved to unpaved, until he came upon a sign that read:

NO TRESPASSING. ARMED RESPONSE.

He squeezed the hand brakes on his bike, nearly toppling over, but managed to steady himself. The dirt road had a thick chain across it and one at about the height of his shoulders. If he hadn’t stopped, he would’ve been thrown.

There was a stone wall some distance beyond the posts that held the chains. And beyond that, he saw the beginnings of a driveway.

A man stood in the driveway. Or maybe it wasn’t a man.

Kazi had the distinct impression that it was a scarecrow, positioned at the open gate between the ends of the rock wall to keep people out.

He dropped his bike near the chains. Then he walked around the posts, tapping the tops of them, touching one of the chains as if unsure whether it was real or not.

He wanted to see the scarecrow. Or the man who looked like a scarecrow.

He began walking up the dirt road until the pavement started again. He glanced back to his bike—it lay on its side, where he’d left it.

The main road he’d zigzagged off seemed a long way behind him. His mother would be calling him for supper soon, but he could be late. She’d live. She never got too mad at him anymore.

He glanced back up the driveway, to the gate at the stone wall. The trees along the edge of the wall were large and fat and thick with golden leaves.

The man who looked more and more like a scarecrow— with a funny straw hat and what looked like hay coming out from under it—waved his arms around, and for some reason this made Kazi grin and giggle a little.