Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  At the counter beside the sink, she looked down on the corroded items that still soaked in the acid bath. In the pot, the water had turned a milky greenish-yellow. She strained the water into the sink, then placed the cleaned items on the paper towel beside the others. The decapitated doll head glared blindly at her from the countertop. Laurie’s hands shook. The metal backing of the brooch looked newer from the bath, but the cameo picture was gone forever; the blank white bulb on which it had been etched looked like a single eye, blind with cataract. The keys had come clean as well, though there were still remnants of calcification along the teeth and stuck in the grooves. Yet of all the items, it was the key with the number 58 engraved on it that held her attention.

  When she returned to the parlor fifteen minutes later, the lights were off and the room was empty. She went down the hall and looked up the stairwell to the second-floor landing. The door to the master bedroom was shut, which meant Ted had gone to bed. Bully for him. She returned to the parlor to sleep on the sofa, but first she made sure all the doors were locked and all the windows were secure. She went upstairs and made sure the padlock was still on the belvedere door. If Abigail was getting in through the busted window, she at least wanted to make sure she couldn’t get into the rest of the house. She checked the lock on the side door, too. Teresa Larosche’s words ghosted up through the fog of her brain—something about locking up the passageways, that passageways let it in and out like a turnstile. He actually said that—like a turnstile.

  Passageways. In her mind’s eye, she saw Sadie scaling the tree and crawling out on the limb to peer down into her father’s greenhouse. She saw her lose her balance and swing down off the limb, falling, falling.... The sound she made crashing through the glass roof of the greenhouse was like two automobiles colliding.

  My secret is that I was happy you died, Sadie. You Hateful Beast, what do you want from me now? Have you come back to torture me some more? She peered out the window in the door, expecting Abigail to emerge from the darkness, her hair done up the same as Sadie’s, wearing the same oversized and outmoded clothes, and pointing a damning finger at her.

  The dreams that plagued her that night as she slept on the sofa were unforgiving in their brutality. Sadie made a guest appearance in a few of them, the flesh flayed from her face in gray and red ribbons. Her eyes were gelatinous white orbs that wept snotlike yellow fluid that congealed in her lashes. She wore one of her outdated checkerboard dresses, just as she had in real life. As Laurie gaped at her, the girl hiked the hem of the dress up to her chest. Her belly was a flat white canvas lacerated with startling crimson hash marks. Like Christ on the cross, a rib-exposing wound gaped along her left side. It suppurated a fluid as dark and fibrous as menstrual blood, the nearly black streaks ribboning down her hip, thigh, calf. A blackish discharge dribbled down her inner thighs.

  I want to touch you and I want you to touch me, the Sadie-thing said, and if you don’t, I will wish horrible things to happen to your parents. I will wish them to die and you’ll have no one left. You’ll go to an orphanage, Laurie, and you’ll be all alone for the rest of your life.

  And then Ted was there with Sadie, the two of them copulating like beasts, Ted’s dark skin in perfect juxtaposition against the slick colorless white of Sadie’s flesh. Ted humped and his back arched, each notch in his spine cut in sharp relief beneath his sweat-slickened flesh. As Laurie looked on, horrified, Sadie turned her head and grinned at her. Her teeth had been replaced with sparkling diamonds. Her eyes were black onyx stones.

  I feel it in me, Sadie said just as a swarm of white moths burst from her diamond-encrusted mouth. I feel it in me and it hurts, Laurie. It hurts. The laughter that followed was not of this world.

  Laurie made the grand discovery the following afternoon, just as Mr. McCall’s movers were upstairs in the master bedroom disassembling the bedframe and a gnomish woman carried out the Wedgwood china, each piece individually wrapped in brown paper, from the curio in the dining room. The house was slowly being liberated of its last remaining clutter, leaving behind woundlike spaces where furniture had previously been. Laurie chose to think of it as a holy cleansing, a rebirth, a baptism.

  Susan was out playing in the backyard. Alone. Abigail Evans hadn’t come by and Laurie was silently grateful. Ted had left early that morning, while Laurie pretended to be asleep on the sofa, dressed in his running gear. He had been gone for hours now. He went running more frequently when he was having a difficult time with his writing, but also when there was trouble between them. That was preferable to his excessive drinking, which was his other crutch. She found she didn’t care, and was thankful that the son of a bitch had taken to the streets while she’d slept instead of trying to confront her again. With them both gone—and with the exception of McCall’s movers shuffling about upstairs while the gnomish woman (whose name Laurie had forgotten) scuttled back and forth from the dining room to the front door—the house was mostly silent. The business card for Harmony Simmons, Liz’s realtor friend, was still on the refrigerator. Laurie considered calling the number, if only to prove Ted wrong, and even went as far as picking the phone up off the wall, but then decided against it.

  To hell with Ted. To hell with him.

  One of McCall’s men poked his head in through the kitchen door. He was a sturdy-looking dark-skinned fellow with the muddy black eyes of a hound. “We got the bedframe loaded in the truck, Mrs. Genarro. We’re just gonna take the cabinet and then we’ll be out of your hair.”

  McCall had decided to purchase the liquor cabinet as well, so Laurie had spent some time removing the liquor bottles—most of which were now empty—and placing them in a rough metropolis on the top of the piano. Laurie came out into the parlor and watched McCall’s men work. One man—this one blond guy with hypnotizing blue eyes—tipped the cabinet into the waiting arms of the other man. Together, they maneuvered the item around the sofa, the loveseat, the piano, and out into the hall. Something clattered on the floor in their wake but the men didn’t seem to notice. Laurie peered over the couch and saw it was the shattered picture frame and the folded photo of her father and his two business companions, which Ted had found in the sleeve of one of the record albums.

  “Ma’am,” one of the men called to her from the foyer.

  Laurie hustled down the hall in time to open the front door for the two men. They grunted as they negotiated the cabinet out the door and down the porch steps. She followed them out—the day was overcast and the trees seemed to reach up and claw at the sky, desperate for rain—and tipped them four dollars each. When the truck pulled away, Laurie saw the Wedgwood woman standing behind it, peering down the open throat of the well. Ted hadn’t closed it back up after his spelunking expedition. Laurie approached the woman—Martha? Marsha?—and saw the almost hypnotic appearance of her face.

  She reached out and gently touched the woman’s arm. “Are you okay?”

  “This,” said the woman as she jabbed a finger at the open well, “is very dangerous.”

  “Is it?”

  The woman’s pinched face turned toward her. Their noses were less than five inches apart and Laurie jerked her head back.

  “You have a young daughter, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Susan.”

  “Very dangerous to keep this open like that,” said the woman. “You should shut it up.”

  “We had a lid on it until yesterday. . . .” Laurie waved a hand over the plank of wood and clumps of bricks that lay strewn about in the grass beside the well.

  The woman winced and turned her head away from the well’s opening. “Smells like death down there, dear. It would be a smart idea to put the lid back on.”

  “Yes. Okay.”

  A smile suddenly creased the old woman’s face. Her teeth looked like coffee beans. “I’ll let you know how the china sells,” said the woman. She was taking it on consignment and hadn’t paid anything for it upfront.

  “Thank you,” said Laurie. She realized the woman only
had her father’s phone number and address, but she didn’t give the woman her cell number or contact info for the house in Hartford. I don’t care if that china sells for a billion dollars, she thought. Once I leave here, I want to cut all ties and not look back. Leave no tethers behind.

  “Good day,” said the woman. She waddled to her car—a Ford Escort whose backseat was crammed with boxes—and drove away.

  Laurie looked back down into the well. It had begun to fill back up with water, a cruddy brown soup ringed with frothy white bubbles. And it did smell like death—a rancid, raw sewage odor that stung her nose. Feeling cold, Laurie bent and replaced the cover on the well, setting the bricks down around the perimeter to secure it. When she was done, she went around the side of the house to check on Susan. The girl was playing by herself with some Barbie dolls, kneeling in the tall grass. Daisies bloomed all around her and Laurie suddenly wished she had brought her painting supplies. It would take her mind off things.

  Back in the house, Laurie gathered up the broken picture frame and the folded photograph and set them both down on the piano top beside Ted’s beloved liquor bottles. She contemplated dumping the remaining liquor out in the sink, the ancient bottles in the trash, then decided against it. There was a brownish watermark on the back of the old photo—a perfect stamped circle. She fingered it, then unfolded the photo. Her eyes were drawn to the same things as before—the three men standing before a row of garages while, in the background, the smokestacks of the mill rose up into a monochromatic sky. But then she noticed something she hadn’t before . . . or, rather, she attributed more meaning to what she had previously seen. Maybe it was coincidental. Maybe it meant nothing at all. She couldn’t tell for sure . . . yet her eyes were drawn to it nonetheless....

  The garage doors were all numbered—big numbers stenciled on the corrugated metal doors in white paint. There were seven garage doors depicted here, the numbers on the bay doors ascending until they disappeared off the edge of the photograph. The door on the far right was cut in half by the frayed edge of the photo, but she could still make out the number painted on it, just as clearly as she could make out the chunky padlock on the door’s handle. The number on the door matched the number engraved on the key she had found in the body of the baby doll. Fifty-eight.

  She waited until after dinner to leave. There were a few reasons for this. To begin with, she didn’t want to get caught in rush hour traffic along the Key Bridge, and although Derrick Rosewood had mentioned that much of Sparrows Point was an empty wasteland, she didn’t want to run into anyone working out there who might question her trespass. Also, she feared she might look like a lunatic sprinting out of the house the second Ted came home from his run. More than that, she didn’t want to make it look like she was fleeing from him; she didn’t want him to think she was being a coward. So she went about the rest of the day like someone who had been granted a peek into the future on the pretense that she couldn’t share what she had seen with anyone else. Susan was back to her old self—children have short memories—but Ted had been cold to her since their argument last night. She found herself wanting to hate him, but she was only capable of hating herself.

  After dinner, Ted and Susan settled together on the sofa to watch a DVD. Laurie pinched the car keys from the kitchen counter and told them she was going out for a while. On his third drink of the evening, Ted had given up trying to rationalize with her. His response was merely an acknowledging nod of his head to show that he had heard her.

  Chapter 25

  Laurie took 695 East and found herself encroaching on the tail end of rush hour. At one point, she pulled onto the shoulder of the road and cried into a wad of tissues. The spell lasted just a few minutes, but when she finished she was completely exhausted. All her strength had been siphoned from her.

  It was already a quarter to eight when she got off at the Sparrows Point exit. Beyond the raised concrete ramps of the beltway, sunlight speared through the trees and between the row homes as the sun sank slowly on the far side of the Chesapeake. The commercial shopping centers, restaurants, and housing developments that had flanked various portions of the beltway had vanished; she was now surrounded by sloping gravel pits, cyclone fences, and the occasional bulldozer tucked beneath an exit ramp like a slumbering dragon.

  The road narrowed to a single lane. To her right, behind a chain-link fence capped in concertina wire, stood a single-story concrete building with unmarked white trucks in the parking lot. The only sign was a blinking red neon notice behind a panel of smoked glass that read DEPOT CLOSED.

  The air smelled fishy. She rolled up the windows and turned on the A/C. Up ahead, orange road cones rose up on the shoulder of the single-lane road. As she approached a slight incline, she could see construction signs dotting the horizon. Yet as she crossed up and over the crest of the road, there were no road crews at work. The construction equipment that stood in the grassy median looked like it had been expediently evacuated in the moments before a nuclear holocaust.

  Directly ahead was the wasteland industrial park of Sparrows Point. Along the shore were cargo ports crowded with dark ships that belched smoke into the air and, at the horizon, Laurie could make out the schizophrenic jumble of ductwork and pipes. On the other side of the road stood a complex of redbrick apartments with bars on the windows and a fire escape zigzagging from window to window all the way to the ground. Blinking red lights told Laurie which side roads were off limits. She continued driving until the factories rose up to greet her. They stood like medieval fortresses along the ramparts of the bay, their smokestacks like prison towers, their massive parking lots the color of moat water in the fading daylight. Beacons winked intermittently from the tops of the smokestacks, a warning to careless low-flying aircraft.

  Laurie pulled along the shoulder and put the car in park. Her purse was beside her on the passenger seat. She opened it, took out the old photograph, and unfolded it. She wasn’t sure exactly where this particular lot was located, and she had no addresses to go by. Instead, she held the photo up and peered past it through the windshield at the crenellated silhouettes of factories along the cusp of the water. She wasn’t sure if the water itself was the Chesapeake Bay or one of its tributaries, though with dusk creeping up over the east, it looked expansive enough to be the goddamned Atlantic Ocean. Cargo ships were black specks dotted with Christmas-colored lights far off in the distance.

  She thought she recognized the same arrangement of smokestacks in the photo down one of the closed-off access roads. There was an arm-bar blocking the gravel road and a construction barrel equipped with a blinking orange hazard light on the shoulder, but she thought she could hop the grassy hillock beyond the barrel and make her way around it. She switched the Volvo back into drive, spun the wheel, and eased the vehicle up the slight grassy incline of the shoulder. It was a tight squeeze maneuvering the boxy Volvo between the construction barrel and a chain-link fence woven with leafy veins of ivy, but she managed. When she cleared the barrel and the arm-bar, she negotiated back onto the roadway to find the surface bumpy and irregular. The Volvo’s steering wheel vibrated in her hands. She tightened her grip on it.

  To her right, the factories’ smokestacks seemed to have repositioned themselves. She continued along the roadway, slowing down each time a dirt road branched off from it, cutting through the shallow scrim of trees toward the factories and ports. Any one of those dirt service roads could lead her to where she wanted to go. For all she knew, the road she was currently on might dead-end at the cusp of the bay.

  She cranked the wheel to the right and took the service road. It proved even bumpier than the previous road. Tree limbs reached down and scraped the Volvo’s hood. Through the tangle of branches she could see a thumbnail moon surrounded by many stars.

  Just when she thought she had made the wrong choice—that the service road was actually a conveyor belt in the middle of the cosmos on which she could drive and drive and never reach a destination—the trees parted and the
Volvo’s headlights fell upon a NO TRESPASSING sign the size of an interstate billboard. Beyond the sign stood a high fence dressed in more concertina wire. Beyond the fence, and at the end of a paved parking lot that looked like the reflection of the night sky, were the rambling concrete structures of the factories themselves. The ones in the distance still trailed white gossamer from their smokestacks, but the ones here along the point—with the exception of the red and green blinking lights at the top of the stacks—looked desolate. They could have been factories on the moon, for all Laurie could tell.

  Again, Laurie compared the photograph to the factories on the other side of the fence. A series of smokestacks midway through the rank of stacks matched up to the ones in the photo.

  Bingo.

  The fence was locked, the gates wrapped up in a tight ball of industrial chain and several padlocks. But age or vandals—or a combination of the two—had seen fit to smash a ragged hole in the meshwork a few yards from the entry point. The opening didn’t look large enough to accommodate the Volvo—not without submitting the vehicle to potential damage, anyway—but she could certainly pass through it on foot. Yet the thought of doing so frightened her. The parking lot itself looked at least a quarter of a mile long, and while there were industrial-sized vapor lamps at intervals throughout the parking lot, none of the lamps were working. It was as dark as infinite space. And once she reached the factories themselves . . . what hideousness might be lying in wait for her there? After all, it had been Sadie—Abigail—who had led her out here. Was she willing to trust the child?

  The Vengeance, she thought. The Hateful Beast.

  Still, she believed she had found that key at the bottom of the well for a reason. The fact that the number carved onto it matched the garage number in her father’s photograph—a photograph her father had deliberately hidden in the sleeve of a record album—couldn’t just be coincidence.