Little Girls

by Ronald Malfi

  Laurie got out of the car. The air was acrid with pollutants from the steamships and the factories. Beneath her feet the ground seemed to rumble with the pulse of invisible machinery. Her ears picked up a motorized whine emanating from someplace nearby; her mind flashed images of great earth-moving cogs and wheels, of a system of pulleys and ropes just below the surface of the earth, keeping nature in harmony with itself. One careless move on her part could upset the whole balance of the universe. As it was, she felt as though she had inadvertently stepped through a tear in the fabric of space and time—that she was both simultaneously in the past and the future, watching herself from various different angles all at once.

  It was silly, of course. She was standing in the woods at the cusp of a rundown industrial park with a key in the hip pocket of her jeans and an old photograph in her hand. The only thing momentous about all of this was the fact that she would have to explain her whereabouts to Ted when she eventually came home. She folded the photo and stuffed it in her back pocket. Crouching down, she crept beneath low branches while snagging her feet on brambles. Things very close to her that had been hiding in the woods took to their feet—or hooves—and trampled through the underbrush. One of them sounded disconcertingly large.

  The opening in the fence was indeed large enough for her to pass through, though she did so heedful of the broken, rusty corkscrews of metal that practically hummed with tetanus. She didn’t see the small ravine on the other side of the fence until she planted one foot down into it. She managed to grab a handful of the fence before she fell. Cold water instantly soaked through her sneaker, her sock, and the cuff of her pant leg.

  By the time she climbed up out of the ravine, grasping at tangles of weeds for handholds, and onto the solid ground of the parking lot, she already felt bested. Invisible flies droned around her head and she was sweating profusely. Although she was thin for her size, she rarely did any cardio and was already wheezing for breath. Yet here she was: She had been allowed admittance.

  The walk across the parking lot felt like it took forever. Her footfalls were hollow thuds that seemed to echo out over the bay while her labored respiration found a rhythm similar to the underground droning of machinery. I’m being assimilated. Once, she thought someone was following her. When she stopped and looked around, she could see no one—she was the solitary island in the sea of black asphalt—but she was still not one hundred percent convinced. If Sadie Russ could come back as Abigail Evans and murder her father, was anything truly off limits?

  The factories loomed over her as she approached. They were tremendous beasts, spewing fetid breath from smokestacks into the black night while glaring at her from blinking red and green eyes. At the end of the parking lot, a second fence circumnavigated the factory grounds. This fence was lower and she could have climbed over it easily enough if she had to, but she decided to walk its length and see if there was an easier way in.

  There was—an open gate through which passed a stamped concrete walkway. She went through the gate and followed the walkway between two skyscraper-tall buildings. The buildings may have looked abandoned and out of use, but she thought she could hear electrical currents pulsing behind their steel and brick walls. Old buildings have ghosts, too. Machines are living things with souls. They’re in there right now, crying out to me. They’re no different than people. For whatever reason, this made her think of Sadie Russ’s headstone in the cemetery behind the park.

  The walkway emptied into another parking area. There were storage sheds along the far side of the lot, and beyond the sheds she could see the silhouette of the Key Bridge backlit by a lavender sunset. She took the photo from her pocket and examined it again. Frowning, she realized the walkway had led her around to the wrong side of the building. Well, she was here now, so she continued in the direction she had been headed. She passed large sunken bays at the bottom of a concrete slope. There were old tractor trailers here, tagged with graffiti and leprous with rust. The windows along this side of the building were pebbled and situated behind wire meshwork. Over one iron door, a faded sign read LOADING. Over a similar door . . . well, the sign was missing, but she assumed it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility that it had at one time read UNLOADING.

  Out of nowhere, she felt giddy. Christ, she almost felt good.

  The row of garage doors began halfway down this side of the building. There were sodium lights above some of them, casting sickly yellow puddles onto the ground. The first garage had a 12 on the door—faded but still legible. It was followed sequentially by 13, 14, 15, and the like. She had no idea what had happened to 1 through 11, but didn’t waste time worrying about it. Some had padlocks on the handles and some didn’t. Seeing the garage doors in real life, something occurred to her that she hadn’t realized when she’d first seen them in the photograph. The doors were about the same size as a standard garage door on a house, but these sons of bitches looked like they were made of corrugated steel. They looked heavy. Even if the key in her pocket fit the padlock on door 58, she doubted her ability to open it on her own.

  At door 22, the walkway gave way to a swampy pool of dark, stagnant mud. She climbed overtop a series of propane tanks and dropped down onto gritty cement on the other side. Along the coastline, great steel crates were stacked like monstrous Legos. Directly above her, long metal chutes that reminded her of log flumes deviated from a single iron turret. There was writing on the side of the turret but she couldn’t make it out in the dark. The chutes crossed the gap from this building to the surrounding ones, to include a structure that looked like a water tower emblazoned with graffiti.

  A shadow retreated from the walkway and disappeared into the darkness. Laurie caught it in her peripheral vision and whipped her head around to follow its retreat. But the darkness was too great to see beyond the pooling sodium lights.

  “Abigail?” she said, her voice shaking. She would have thought speaking the child’s name aloud in this place would have made her feel foolish, but it didn’t. She was frightened. “Is it . . . Sadie?”

  No figure emerged. No sounds came through the dark.

  It’s my overworked imagination. That’s all.

  She hoped.

  On the far side of the building, the numbers on the doors jumped from 32 to 45. This was just fine with Laurie, since the muscles in her legs were beginning to ache. Overhead, the looming smokestacks had once again assembled themselves into position so that they looked just like their counterparts in the old photograph. Laurie felt something flutter at the back of her throat. She walked across metal steam grates—she could hear industrial pumps working far down below, reminding her of the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine—and passed through an assemblage of concrete bollards before she found the door she had been searching for.

  Garage 58 was no different than all the others, with one exception—the padlock looked newer. The other padlocks she had seen had been great hulking blocks of rust that probably wouldn’t open to any key in the known universe. While the padlock on 58 had suffered from some exposure to the elements, there was still some shine to it. Laurie felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. At that instant, she knew with certainty that the key in her pocket was not the key meant to fit this lock.

  Regardless, she took the key from her pocket, slipped it into the padlock . . . and turned it.

  The lock popped open.

  It was the kind of door that slid open from left to right on a track. The track was corroded and uncooperative. And Laurie had been right—the door was heavy, but she was able to pry it partway open by administering incremental jerks on the handle. She stopped when the muscles in her arms felt like rubber. The door had opened only about a foot and a half. It was enough for her to squeeze through, even though the thought of doing so made her heart beat faster. Lightheadedness overtook her. When a cargo ship unleashed a bleat on an air horn far out on the bay, she nearly leapt out of her skin.

  Once she had sufficiently calmed down, she
turned back to the foot-and-a-half opening. The darkness inside was nearly a solid thing. Silently, she cursed herself for forgetting to bring a flashlight. What had she suspected, anyway? But then she remembered the fob on her keychain, the one she had gotten a few years ago from First National Bank of Hartford. It was a whistle—Ted called it a rape whistle—equipped with a tiny LED lightbulb. She fished the keys from her pocket and pressed the button that activated the light. She couldn’t remember the last time she had used the light and she had never changed the battery, so she was fairly surprised when the light blinked on and carved a pencil-thin path through the opening in the garage door.

  She squeezed through the opening and moved the miniscule beam of light around. The room itself was not much wider than the door. It was maybe twenty feet deep, though she couldn’t tell for sure due to the amount of clutter in the place. Boxes and wooden crates were stacked nearly to the ceiling. Amputated machine parts lay strewn about like the bones of dinosaurs. Musty sheets made shapes in the gloom, causing her to guess at the items beneath. The whole garage stank of grease; she could actually taste it at the back of her throat.

  I have no idea what I’m looking for....

  Had the key not worked—had it not fit the lock—she could have turned around and gone home, satisfied that this had all been one big conspiracy in her head, and that she was imagining everything. There would have been comfort in such a notion, even though it simultaneously put her sanity on the firing line.

  She ran a hand along the wall, found the light switch, toggled it. Nothing happened.

  Of course.

  Her sneakers scuffed along the cement floor as she approached the nearest stack of boxes. The cardboard was brittle and shimmered behind a gauzy veil of cobwebs. When she opened the flaps of the top box, a spider the size of a silver dollar scuttled out and dropped to the floor. Laurie shrieked, her keychain jangling. The spider darted between the slats in a crate and Laurie toed the crate off to one side, grimacing.

  The box was filled with tools. The boxes on either side of it were filled with stacks of papers so old that the pages were as brittle as autumn leaves and the print had all but vanished. She spent the next twenty minutes peering inside containers, lifting the lids off wooden crates, and getting on her hands and knees to gaze beneath sheet-covered antiquities. Nothing she found struck her as out of place. After a bit, she went by the opening in the door where the night air cooled her. She coughed into one cupped hand and it felt like she’d purged her lungs of a clot of sawdust.

  There was a dusty leather album wedged between several rusty aluminum paint cans. The album itself wouldn’t have garnered her attention had she not made out the clear but faded name running down the spine—LAURIE. She felt something flutter in her chest. As she approached it, the light shook. She remembered the album from her youth. The pages were construction paper on which she had drawn her earliest pictures. It had been her first art book, and when she and her mother had moved out of the house on Annapolis Road, Laurie had thought it was lost forever.

  Why is it here and not in the house? And then on the heels of that, she thought, Is this what I was meant to find out here?

  She pried it off the shelf amidst a plume of dust. There were orange rust stains on both the front and back covers. Propping the album on one of the sheeted monstrosities, she opened the cover. The drawing on the first page was of a family—a father, a mother, a little girl. Big ear-to-ear smiles spread across all their faces. In the background was a house with a belvedere on the roof. The next few pages showed similar drawings. Then there came a parade of animals—sheep, cows, dogs, pigs, mice, horses. Ponies, she corrected her adult self. Those aren’t horses, they’re ponies. The clumsy print at the bottom of the page said LAURIE, AGE: 7. It’s true—I’ve stepped through a time warp. Hello, Alice, welcome to the rabbit hole.

  She turned the next page and found a drawing of two little girls. The drawing was crude—just a few levels above stick figures—but she knew the girls in the drawing as sure as she’d recognize her own reflection. One of the girls was her, the sandy hair made with jagged scribbles, the eyes too far apart on the circular head, the clothes sensible and drab. The other girl was Sadie. Sadie’s hair had been done with both a brown and red crayon, blended to create a luxurious russet color. Sadie’s dress was a blue-and-white checkerboard pattern. It was the same dress Abigail Evans had been wearing when Laurie first saw the girl running across the backyard.

  Laurie turned the page, but there were no more drawings. If this was what she had been meant to find, its significance was lost on her. Just as she was about to close the scrapbook and slide it back onto the shelf, she realized that there was a manila envelope clipped to the inside back cover. She unfastened the clip, her fumbling fingers carving streaks through the layer of dust that coated the envelope. It was sealed, so she tore it open. A plume of dust wafted out.

  She shook the items out onto the cover of the album—a series of photographs of various sizes, some taken with a Polaroid camera, others developed into eight-by-ten glossies, though these had dulled considerably with age. The photo that landed on top appeared to be a candid shot of a young girl, perhaps five or six years old, perched on a bench in a park or playground. The girl wasn’t looking at the camera—her head was turned away so that her face was in profile—and something about the composition of the shot made Laurie uncomfortable. She did not recognize the girl in the photo . . . yet the cheap plastic doll the girl held in her lap was readily identifiable, even if all its features were now melted away, its nude plastic body veined with mold.

  Laurie sifted through the other photos and found a similar theme in each of them—candid shots of little girls. They played in sandboxes, they climbed trees, they bounced up and down on seesaws. There were close to fifty photographs in all, many of the girls appearing in several photos. What was even more disturbing was that in these reappearances the girls were wearing different clothes, had their hair done up in a different fashion than the picture before. They weren’t taken on the same day.

  She began to feel ill. Hastily, she swiped the photos back into the envelope and was about to stick the envelop back inside the scrapbook, when her elbow struck one of the tin cans on the shelf. It fell over and rolled to the floor. The sound it made as it struck the cement was like a gunshot. She peered over the sheeted machine parts and saw the can roll in a half circle along the floor before it came to rest beside a faded tarp bound with rope. Laurie squeezed between the sheet-covered machine parts and kicked the can out of the way. The light from the key fob caught a constellation of mouse turds arcing across the concrete floor. Laurie bent down and pressed on the tarp. It crinkled but gave little resistance. Whatever was beneath it was soft.

  The ropes were thick, but mice had been to work on them for some time, and they were held together by mere strands in places. Laurie used the Volvo’s ignition key to saw through the remaining fibers. She tossed the ropes away, lifted one corner of the tarp, and directed the small beam of light beneath it.

  More mouse droppings, dead crickets—the big striped ones with the arched backs that Ted called super crickets, or “sprick-ets” for short—and dried patches of what looked like motor oil littered the floor. When something shifted beneath the tarp, Laurie froze. It’s just a mouse, it’s just a mouse, it’s just a—

  A fat brown mouse scurried out from under the tarp, darted toward the tin can, then continued on toward the dark web of shadows behind the shelving unit. Watching it scurry away, Laurie felt herself breathe again. She turned back to the tarp and found a layer of quilts underneath. They were black with mold and stank like death.

  She stood and took a step back. One of the ropes had gotten tangled around her right ankle, and when she took another step, she pulled the rope and another section of tarp with her. At first, the thing that was revealed looked like the twisted root of a tree jutting out between the bundles of quilts. When Laurie realized it was the skeletonized hand of a human being
, she cried out.

  PART III

  IN THE HOUSE OF MANY WINDOWS:

  Sadie

  Chapter 26

  The girl’s name was Tanya Albrecht, and she was eleven years old when she disappeared in 1989. School photographs showed a pretty but shy child, her plain brown hair done up in pigtails while owlish glasses exaggerated the largeness of her gray eyes. She wore braces. In two separate school photos taken a year apart, Tanya Albrecht wore the same floral-print dress with the rumpled lace collar. Her family did not have much money.

  She was the third child in a family of five. Her father, Hal Albrecht, worked at one of the mills in Sparrows Point, and her mother, Hillary, had her hands full with the children. They lived in a row home in Dundalk, where the playgrounds were nothing but asphalt prison yards and the nearest elementary school had been repeatedly defaced by vandals. Their tiny row house had bars on the windows and Hal Albrecht had put up a BEWARE OF DOG sign on both the front and back doors, even though the Albrechts did not have a dog.

  When she was nine, Tanya Albrecht had fallen out of a tree while trying to retrieve a Frisbee that had gotten snared in the branches. She broke her arm in two places. Had she been older, doctors would have mended the injury with metal plates and screws, but since Tanya was just nine years old and still growing, they hadn’t wanted to impede the bones’ growth. Tanya’s arm was set in a cast that went from the base of her fingers all the way up to her shoulder, and she stayed in that cast for nearly four months. After it healed, she often complained to her father that the arm was sore, particularly on cold and rainy days, but she never seemed depressed about it. Aside from her inherent shyness, Tanya was no different than any other girl her age. She joined a Brownie troop with her sister June and they sold cookies door-to-door throughout the rundown Dundalk neighborhood to earn badges for her brown sash. Her grades were average and she had a few friends who would sometimes ride the school bus home with her so they could play in the Albrechts’ postage-stamp backyard, or across the street in the salvage yards. The salvage yards were off limits to kids, secured behind twenty-foot chain-link fences adorned with signs warning that ALL TESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED! These signs, which were riddled with bullet holes, didn’t keep out the neighborhood kids—and a few of the neighborhood drunks, too—and there were plenty of interesting things to find while hunting around the salvage yards. When Tanya disappeared in the spring of 1989, the salvage yards were the first place local cops went to search for her body.