The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

Point.”
    Bari glanced back at him. “In the fucking rain? No fucking way.” She grinned as she leaned back into the window. “Sometimes you see things in the dark when you’re drunk and you have no idea what they really are, and sometimes they’re just nothing.”
    Lizzie looked at Bari Love as if she didn’t even know her. What had gotten into her? As bitchy as Bari might get, she was handling all of this way too well, keeping her cool at a time when Lizzie felt like pitching a fit.
    And yet something within Lizzie herself had changed. In some way she couldn’t even fathom, she had begun to disbelieve herself. She wasn’t sure ten minutes after she saw the naked middle-aged man with the markings on him that she hadn’t just imagined it. Zack had told her he’d spiked her beer with something she’d never heard of, and she got all freaked out that it might be roofies or some other drug that might put her at risk in some way. She began to think that maybe she had imagined the man, and the more she tried to reimagine him, the less she could. She couldn’t remember what he was doing with himself, and she wasn’t even sure he was naked anymore. She had a sinking feeling that by morning she might not even remember seeing anyone other than her classmates at Harrow.
    And worse, it felt all right to forget. It felt like a sedative to forget, to put aside the trembling fear she’d felt.
    Glancing in the rear-view mirror, she was even beginning to wonder if Sam Pratt might not forget seeing a dead kid, strung up and cut open, up at the private graveyard on the property.
    Or if everything they had seen might not just be some kind of hysteria, the way she’d learned in school that sometimes you can’t even trust your own senses, sometimes you are prepared to see something that isn’t there, out of fear or just a rush of adrenaline.
    Part of her was happy to be losing the image of the man that had been put in her mind, as if it were some dreadful thing that she could’ve gone her whole life without witnessing.
    As if her mind was settling now after going a little haywire.
    “ What’d Zack put in my beer?” she asked Bari, but Bari just grinned and went back over to Andy’s Mustang and got in.
    The rain continued its downpour as the lightning zapped a distant tree.
    “You can’t tell anyone,” Lizzie said.
    Sam just watched her from the backseat, and then told her which way to go to get back to the village.
    When they got back to town, and Lizzie pulled over at Sam’s front door, he said, “We should at least call the cops.”
    “No, we can do that,” Lizzie said. “I’ll call them when I get home.”
    “If you don’t, I will,” Sam said.
    But the funny thing was, neither of them ever told anybody, and when the storm had run its course, the night itself seemed like a drunken brawl of a dream. Sam felt safer the less he thought about it.
     

12
    When Lizzie snuck in through the back door of the small house, by way of the garden gate, her twin sister was waiting. The first thing Ronnie did was smell her breath and say, “You’re never driving my car again.”
    The second thing Ronnie did was feel Lizzie’s forehead. “You’re a little warm. You’re not much of a drinker.”
    “Yeah,” Lizzie said. “I’m sorry.”
    “Forgiven. But you’re still not driving my car again. At least not to any parties.”
    “Understood. Please, I just need to go lie down.”
    “You look different” Ronnie said, softly, but let the thought die as she spoke it out loud. She wasn’t even sure what she meant by it.
     

13
    That night, Lizzie Pond dreamt about opening the kitchen drawers at her home and wondering why she couldn’t find a corkscrew and why the smell of bleach was in the air; Bari Love, when she finally hit the sack at four A.M., began dreaming almost immediately that she had walked into her father’s workroom in the garage and found a hatchet that was soaked in red with bits of hair on it; Sam