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

the instrument that the statue had bid him take up.
    The plow for the field of blood and iniquity.
    Still, his mind couldn’t quite wrap around how this little instrument could plow a furrow, let alone begin the building of the greatest cathedral on heaven and earth.
    It was a spike about as long as his own fist, and when he glanced back up at the statue on the cross, he saw the nail that had been thrust between the statue’s feet was no more.
    He got down on his knees and crawled to the spike. He touched it lightly with the palm of his hand. It was warm. It crackled with static electricity, and it made him jump slightly when he touched it.
    Roland Love carefully picked up the spike and held it to his lips, kissing it in reverence of this miracle he had been brought—his calling back by all that was magnificent, his vision that surely meant he was destined for the life of a saint.
    After a while, as he lay prostrate before the altar, the spike in his hands, praying for strength and wisdom and power and authority and the miracles that were known to the Almighty, he went out into the world to begin the work of heaven.
     

2
    Dustin Moody, who ran the Coffee N Book Shoppe in the village, had already been checking flickering fluorescents half the afternoon. He called out to his lover, Nick, “You need to call electric.”
    “I am electric,” Nick said, grinning. He was back behind the cappuccino machine that was once again coughing up brown foamy phlegm rather than its usual dark espresso. “You know this machine is like your grandma’s plumbing—it’s all broken down in the between parts.”
    Dusty never took well to jokes like that, and ignored Nick while still tapping the edge of the fluorescent lights with the spine of a book. They flickered in and out, all in a row above the Mystery and Romance shelves.
    “You bought it all knowing it was crap,” Nick added later, once he brought a hot mug of coffee over to Dusty. “Here, drink some of our brown sludge-a-chinno.”
    “What’s it taste like?”
    “If I told you, you’d never look at me the same again,” Nick smirked, and then took a sip. “Naw, it’s not that bad.”
    Dusty wanted some caffeine badly, so he reached over and took the mug. Sniffed it. A sip. He spat it back into the mug. “You’ve been serving this crap?”
    “All day,” Nick said, shrugging. “Hey, nobody told me how awful it was.”
    “We have to throw out that machine. You still have the Mr. Coffee?”
    “Did Joe DiMaggio slam balls?” Nick nodded. He thumbed toward the storage room at the back of the store. “Packed away somewhere.”
    “It’ll do ‘til we can order another one.”
    “Serve regular coffee? Us? Half our customers will migrate to Starbucks up the road.”
    “They already have. And after drinking that brown shit, that little mystery is solved. You get the new shipment out on the shelves?”
    “Some of them. All the new Nora Roberts and the new Cornwell. What time’s Ronnie coming in?”
    Dusty glanced at his wristwatch. “Whenever she feels like it, I guess.”
    “Well, that’s about the time when I guess the books’ll all be shelved,” Nick said, “because I feel like a nap, and you know I’m owed at least one today.”
     

3
    Over at the Watch Point Free Library, a small, domed building at the center of a green that might’ve once been called a Commons but was now simply “Watch Point Park,” Ronnie Pond sat on the stone steps out front, reading a copy of Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club. She glanced up at some starlings that had begun swarming in the sky.
    She then looked over at the red Mustang parked near the post office.
    “You’re stalking him,” Lizzie said.
    Startled by her sister’s voice, Ronnie glanced around. Lizzie stood at the top step of the library, just behind her, nearly invisible by the statue of Athena, Greek goddess of wisdom and war. Lizzie, looking muscled and sweaty from an afternoon workout at the tennis courts,