Free The Abandoned - A Horror Novel (Horror, Thriller, Supernatural) (The Harrow Haunting Series) by Douglas Clegg

the orders of God without a second thought. Roland had felt the calling within him since he was a boy, but his parents, while perfectly good churchgoers, had never quite been the type to take it that one extra step further and dedicate their lives to Kingdom Come.
    That’s what Roland wanted—he wanted to be a knight of Kingdom Come.
    He had trained for it, kept himself pure, and had forsworn the games of other boys his age. He had been dreaming of Kingdom Come since the summer, and had begun to imagine it as a vast cathedral, full of the Angelic Host. In his dream, when he walked across its floor, he could look below his feet and see the sinners in hell as they suffered. He had mercy on them in his dreams—he told the angels that he sought forgiveness, not for himself, but for those poor lost souls beneath him.
    Roland was fairly sure his younger sister Bari was one of those lost souls.
    He had caught her once in the backseat of Andy Harris’s Mustang, and her bra had been completely taken off, the buttons of her blouse opened, and Andy’s face had been buried against one of her peach-colored breasts like he was a baby sucking. (Think of the baby Jesus, Roland had thought then. Think of the baby Jesus and the purity of Mary. Don’t think of the awful fornication of those sinners. Pray for them. Beg God for His forgiveness so that their time in hell will be brief.)
    Roland did his best not to be the kind of person who told others about their own sins. He understood that this was between them and God, and had nothing to do with him. He wanted to be one of the soldiers of the New Temple of the Lord—for Kingdom Come to arise on this earth, for Heaven and Earth to combine. Although he couldn’t quite remember when he’d first felt the touch of God on him, if you were to go back to his sixth year, when his Sunday School teacher had told him the story of Enoch, who had walked with God daily and who was the only man who did not experience death, for God took Enoch up with him—if you could get inside the mind of the little boy that Roland had been, you’d have understood that his religious feelings stemmed from his fear of death. He wanted to be a soldier of God primarily so that God would treat him like Enoch, and take him up without the pain of death.
    But his devotion to God had been hard-won. Temptation was everywhere. Girls in school had been throwing themselves at him since he was fourteen. He knew it was his purity—they had a touch of the devil within them, and all that was evil wanted to taint purity. But he would never let the girls touch him. He paid no mind to them, and even when sexual thoughts arose within his body, he bit his hands at night rather than allow them to touch the filth down between his legs.
    He was not going to mess this up just because of sex.
    He knew the devil was always ready. He had argued with his mother about the devil once, telling her that the devil was real. “He is an angel who rebelled and didn’t submit to God’s word” he told her at fourteen. “And he sends his demons to lie to men so we may become weak and not enter the Kingdom.”
    “I am not going to raise some superstitious Jesus freak,” his mother had said, and even though she had stomped off, cursing under her breath, and they’d nearly dropped out of the church altogether, Roland knew that God would come through for them.
    And for him.
    God told him to lie to his mother. Roland was sure that was the Lord’s wish, for he didn’t feel bad comforting his mother later and telling her he had only been joking. A lie for God was a lie for the good.
    All other lies were demonic.
    God filled him to the brim. God was his master. God bent him to His will. God brought him to his knees. Roland sought God’s succor, and when he felt God’s presence with him, it was as if he had been opened up and entered by a wondrous strange feeling.
    He had always felt God’s touch on his shoulder, and God’s voice spoke to him when