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

local high schools put on a series of celebrations thirteen nights after the last day of school. The police asked local high school kids questions, but no one had a reasonable answer as to what happened that night up at Harrow.
    Most of the teenagers told of the wild parties out along the Point, a strand of dock and sand and rock that extended into the Hudson River—the usual place for the parties. Bari Love, the head cheerleader from Parham High, told the authorities nearly everyone she knew had been at the Point that night. “Why would anybody go up to that old house? That place gives me the creeps.”
    The incident had happened on Midsummer Night, and rumors quickly attributed it to a pagan rite associated with the equinox. The holy-rollers at Church of the Vale declared that devil-worshippers were back.
    “What sickos would do this?” they asked. Well, they being Margaret Love and Norma Houseman, with Norma adding, “I think it’s the occult. All these kids read about it. It’s in children’s books, for God’s sake. I wish ...”
    “You wish what?” Margaret asked.
    “I wish sometimes they’d just start burning these people. These kinds of people. Sometimes I think the olden days were right. You get rid of people who do this kind of thing.
    You lock ‘em up, ship ‘em out, and burn ‘em off the face of the earth. That poor little dead boy. Poor little dead thing. It’s shameful is what it is.”
    “Disgraceful,” Margaret Love added. “What kind of sicko would do a thing like this?”
    “I’ll tell you what kind,” Norma said. “The same kind that’s ruining this country and sending it to hell. The kind that’s for marriage of... homosexuals... and the kind that’s against everything America does ... why, back in the early 1960s, things were so much nicer. I think the so-called civil rights movement started this trend. Believe me, no rights could have been less civil than those, and then things went downhill. I was only a girl then, a little girl, but I saw how the cities burned on TV, and I saw how the leftist media kept pushing their message the same time they were pushing drugs on my friends. Comedians on television using words I wouldn’t even think let alone say. The Roman Empire fell because of things like this. We can’t fall. We can’t. God doesn’t want us to fall. What this country needs is a good dose of old-fashioned stick-to-itiveness. We need to burn out everything that doesn’t fit in right. If you don’t burn them, they just keep multiplying and coming at you. What kind of sicko does this?” she asked again at the end of her tirade.
    “Yes,” Margaret Love repeated. “What kind of sicko does this?”
    Although even as Margaret said this, she wondered if her friend’s prescriptions had been adjusted lately. Norma was, after all, the Pharmaceutical Queen of the Block, besides being Mother of the Year and still looking like Miss Hudson Valley of 1980 all over again.
    They both said all this in front of the journalist from the Parham News Record, a miniature tape recorder clutched in his hand, a grin on his face because he had been afraid there’d be no good quotes and no real story. He wrote up a half-baked article about the history of the house in Watch Point and how eerie things happened there and how it had murders associated with it and now “devil worship.”
    If the journalist had not used the words “devil worship” it might not have gotten out to three other newspapers and the Internet. That summer a bunch of kooks and nuts might not have shown up in the village with their camcorders, looking to go all Blair Witch on the house and the village.
    Finally, signs were posted, and a police patrol went around the property and did what they could to keep outsiders from trampling all over it in order to get their picture taken near what they were calling the House of Spirits.
    By late June, a sixteen-year-old girl went missing in town. No one thought to find out that