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

somebody had started. Since it was the first time in all his school years that he finally felt included in something the “cool” kids generally did—get drunk, go a little wild, and pretend to have fun for a few hours—he jogged most of the way up the path, through the woods, until he reached the entrance to the old graveyard.
     

5
    Back inside the house, the lights up, Lizzie felt a shock go through her.
    But not from fear.
    It was just the beginning of anger mixed with surprise mixed with a little pissed-offedness.
    They were all there:
    Bari, Mac, Andy, Nancy, Terry, Zack—all her friends from school who lived in Watch Point, a couple of guys from Parham, a girl she didn’t know—and Alex, too. Of course Ronnie wasn’t there. Ronnie never went out anymore. Lizzie had given up on dragging her sister to the parties.
    She reined in her anger a bit and began laughing with them as they passed around a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine. They were laughing too hard to hear the scream of the other guy, the guy Lizzie only knew as a friend of her older sister’s, and he needed a ride, and he’d show them the way to the house—the one who had gone up to the graveyard.
    But when they stopped laughing, Lizzie heard it first and said, “What the hell is that?”
     

6
    Sam’s mouth was open as wide as he’d ever opened it. The noise was all around him, and he couldn’t even tell that it was coming from his own throat.
    He stood in the little graveyard, just beyond the small fire someone had started in a circle of old moss-covered stone markers. The feeble light of the flashlight pointed forward as he looked at the little boy who had been strung upside down and gutted like a deer. The small fire behind him cast flickering yellow shadows. The scream finally died in Sam’s throat, which went dry—he felt parched and wasn’t sure he could even speak after that scream.
    He felt like a six-year-old again, stepping into a nightmare. The smell of cool summer rain filled the air, just seconds before the downpour began.
    Sam dropped the flashlight, and it rolled until it came to a dead stop at one of the stone markers.
    He heard the distant rumble of thunder. Heat lightning played along the darkness above the trees, then cracked open into a great split of light that illuminated all the graveyard—the hanging boy, and a dark figure that stood back behind several stone markers, more shadow than human being.
     

7
    Seven miles away in the village of Watch Point, three streets up from the railroad tracks, above the rocky ledges that curled over the Hudson River, Lizzie’s twin sister, Veronica— or Ronnie, as she’d always been called—awoke from a deep sleep. The lightning beyond her bedroom window flashed white and made her mother’s garden look as if it were covered with snow for a moment.
    Ronnie rose up from bed, and went to look out the window as the storm broke above the village. Rain tapped at the window, and she lifted it up to smell the fresh air.
    The lightning seemed green and blue as it danced among the dark clouds before it crashed into a white streak beyond the trees and houses of the village.
    For a split second, she thought she saw the vague features of a child’s face in the piercing light.
     

8
    “Is that Pratt?” Alex asked, laughing. “Is that Pratt screaming like a bitch?”
    The screaming beyond Harrow had stopped, replaced by the rumble of thunder and a rickety-tickety of rain on the house.
    Alex kept laughing. “Oh frickin’ hell, I remember in seventh grade when he wet his pants in gym and just stood there pretending he hadn’t. Jesus, he’s a little baby. A little teeny-tiny baby geek.”
    Zack joined. “Thou shalt not suffer a geek to live.”
    “I don’t get it,” Alex said. “That a joke?”
    “It’s biblical.” Zack kept laughing at his own wit. “God said kill all the geeks.”
    “Maybe God’s killing one right now up at that graveyard,” Alex grinned.
    “We