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

Pratt didn’t sleep all night, but instead stared out the window as if half expecting someone to come for him; Alex Nordland, who had passed out on Andy Harris’s bedroom floor, dreamt of screwing the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, although they all had the faces of the teachers—male and female—at Parham High; Andy Harris dreamed about driving a sports car nearly a thousand miles per hour down a long dark highway and feeling as if he owned the world; and Ronnie Pond simply dreamt of her father because she always dreamt of him when she was feeling a little sad.

CHAPTER TWO
     
     
    Summer Storms
     

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    Some said it arrived by water—because some basements flooded and the sewers overflowed that night.
    Others thought it must’ve come in like germs, on people’s fingers.
    But it would be many months before anyone even knew what it was or where it had originated.
    Things changed slowly, as they always do in small towns.
    But in the case of Watch Point, a Hudson River whistle-stop in New York, things did not change for the better.
    It began after a bad electrical storm late one night in June. The whisper of terror would stretch out that summer into a scream, but a scream that only a handful of people heard, mostly the teenagers at first. Fallen branches in yards; floods in basements; a live wire that shivered and spat sparks until the utility department shut down the power lines; the whispers among schoolchildren of weirdness and superstitious mumbo-jumbo, and fingers pointed at the unusual and different children among them; the screech of a car along the main thoroughfare, long after midnight, in the gasp of calm after the storm; the lights that came on all at once in the village at the precise hour of the early morning, it was rumored, when the act took place out on the bare plateau that overlooked the river far below it.
    The child’s body they found.
    The small cemetery had moss-covered stones that went back to the early 1800s, was on a hillside surrounded by straggly trees, one of which recently had been felled by lightning.
    The remains of a bonfire of some kind.
    Marks on the corpse indicated someone had tied it up and strung it, and then had brought it down.
    The boy’s parents and the authorities were notified. The boy’s name was Arnie Pierson, and he’d died of some gastrointestinal ailment just a day or so earlier. The body had been grabbed at the morgue in the county hospital just outside the village, so there was a freshness to the corpse disturbing to view.
    Someone had torn the corpse open.
    It was a ritual, many thought. A ritual of a sick and twisted mind.
    The corpse-stealing episode brought further grief for his family and cast a new cloud upon the village to add to the others that were forming. The authorities did their half-assed version of an investigation and came up with the culprit—one of the lab assistants at the morgue had claimed he took the body home to work on it (which was as far-fetched an explanation as any) and that somehow, someone then stole it from him. But when horror novels and forensics books and videotapes of crime scenes were found in his apartment—along with sliced bits of human flesh in jars—it was assumed he was completely nuts, and he was thrown in jail until it all got sorted out. From jail he went up north to one of the hospitals for the criminally insane, but that would not be until the end of summer.
    But all who knew of the stolen corpse suspected others were involved.
    At the estate itself, authorities found evidence of drinking—broken bottles of cheap wine—and someone had scrawled words on some of the old gravestones using spray paint, in a strange language that looked as fake as it looked archaic. It was a well-known night among the high schoolers of the area—a special night of parties and mayhem, particularly for those about to enter their senior year. It was called Thirteenth Night, and the tradition had begun in the mid-twentieth century when the