Come Little Children

by Melhoff, D.

  Trembling, Camilla reached down and undid her stiletto straps. Slipping them off with a tiny wince, she hooked the shoes in her fingers and tiptoed up the metal steps on the spongy pads of her feet. Stealth and subtlety had never been her strong suits, but if there was ever a time…

  She reached the second level, eyes trained on the place where she’d seen the glint of movement. It was higher up yet. Her heart beat harder as she felt behind her back for the ladder to the catwalk.

  Clang! Her stilettos hit one of the rungs. She froze.

  The catwalk was still.

  When nothing else happened, she broke her gaze and turned around to face the narrow ladder that tracked all the way up to the ceiling.

  The iron rungs were cold on her bare skin and dug uncomfortably into her feet, but she had already come this far and she wasn’t about to turn around now—or look down either. The cement floor was forty feet below.

  The railing stretched up and up until it leveled off with the steel catwalk. Camilla pulled herself onto the platform as quietly as she could and crouched over to gain her bearings. Thankfully, the spot she was bent on was much easier to get to: just a dozen steps straight ahead and then one turn to the left.

  She set down her heels and started forward. The safety railing was no more than a thin bar as high as her waist, and she clung to it for dear life with both sweaty palms.

  The turn was coming up in ten steps, then seven, then three.

  She paused, taking a deep breath to summon enough strength to keep moving.

  Two steps…

  One step…

  Finally she edged around the corner—

  And there was Todd, the Midnight Sun’s photographer, crouched ten feet away against the dead end of the catwalk.

  Except Todd was about half as young as Camilla had expected. He was only sixteen—maybe a baby-face seventeen—and about as scrawny as they come.

  Todd jumped to his feet, his camera joggling on the strap around his neck, and backed up the only inch he had left.

  “Y-You?” He coughed. His voice was like a shotgun going off in a library. “You’re from the wedding. The bridesmaid.”

  “Yes.” Camilla nodded, then appended, “But I’m not a Vincent. I just work there.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Sooo... you’re chasing me why?”

  “I’m not. I’m just—I’m chasing an answer. Please, can I ask you something?”

  “Does it look like I’m going anywhere?”

  Camilla snickered. She hadn’t anticipated a smart-ass.

  “Why were you at their house?”

  “My job. Trust me, I didn’t go for the kicks.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because I’d lose my SLR if the headline was ‘Vincent Wedding Insider’ and there wasn’t a shot to prove it.”

  “No.” She shook her head, indicating that wasn’t what she had meant. “Why is it front page news? What is it about the family that everyone knows but me?”

  Todd perked an eyebrow. “Knows? Nobody knows anything.”

  “Then why don’t you want to go near them!” Camilla blurted. Her patience was wearing thin.

  The newspaper factory fell quiet again with the whirring of the fans. Caged like a skittish animal, Todd looked down, tracing the wire mesh of the catwalk with his black-and-white skate shoes.

  “You don’t have any clue?” he asked. “Living there. They don’t do anything fucked up?”

  “Not them. But…”

  “But?”

  “There have been incidents.”

  “With kids?”

  Camilla’s heart fell into her stomach. She pictured the little boy in the kitchen doorway, then the girl’s eyes in the pond. Scars on their chests. Water rippling down their skin. Staring, staring at her on the gazebo as tiny hands shot out of the pond and grabbed her ankles, pulling her into the water as she kicked and screamed for help while the Vincents stood back, grinning, as she sunk below the bubbling surface…

  Finally she nodded.

  “If I tell you what I know, will you let me leave?”

  “What do you know?” The tone in her voice said neither of them was going anywhere at the moment.

  Todd took a deep breath and rubbed the back of his head. “I guess if you never grew up here,” he started, “you wouldn’t get the little stuff.”

  “Little stuff ?”

  “Like, uh…like, you know…playground stuff…like skipping rhymes and dares and shit.”

  “You’re saying no one’s told you anything either?”

  “Not like that, no. I guess they warned us in Sunday school not to walk by the place. Said going there opens you up to something dangerous.”

  Well? Has anything dangerous happened?

  Todd’s foot stopped tracing the catwalk. Camilla could feel the mystery close to unraveling, like a spool of thread about to fly off a sewing machine.

  “Why do you want to know so bad?”

  “Because I need an explanation.”

  “What if it’s something you can’t explain?”

  Camilla’s heart thumped faster. “Tell me anyway.”

  Todd gave her another once-over, as if he was judging whether or not she was pulling his leg. Finally he shoved his hands in his pockets and slid farther onto the floor, surrendering to the idea that he wasn’t going anywhere until she was satisfied.

  “I think I was seven or eight,” he said. “My dad’s a ranger, so I guess I probably hear stuff other kids don’t. I mean, mom’s pretty good at giving the under-the-table kick when we’re eating or whatever, but the rest of the time he never really…censors himself, I guess?

  “So yeah, I was, uh, I don’t know, in second grade. He picked me up from school and took me to grab a new Spider-Man comic from Jeb’s corner station, but then a call radioed in and told us to stop at this address on the way home. There was already a cruiser parked outside when we pulled up. And dad told me to stay there and read my comic till he got back, so I did. Cover to cover. Five times. But, shit, they were gone forever, and it was like a hundred fucking degrees, so I got out of the car and went up to the house.

  “And, uh, and when I walked inside, there was a—a smell. Like the worst smell ever. Then I heard voices down the hall, so I followed them around the corner into a bedroom.”

  Todd paused. Camilla didn’t say anything, noticing the teenager’s hands clenching and unclenching as he seemed to grapple with what to say next.

  “There were two people hanging from the ceiling,” Todd said coldly. “A mom and her daughter. Little girl my age. Jessica Powell. She used to sit in front of me in class. And there she was, swaying from a boat rope, staring dead ahead with her little black eyes.”

  Camilla shivered at the image.

  “My dad picked me up and took me out of the room while the bodies kept staring…That’s it, that’s what they do, isn’t it? Staring over his shoulder. He put me in the car just as the white van was pulling up—the same van the kids at school told stories about. But that was bullshit, wasn’t it? Well that’s what I told myself anyway. Told myself all night, then all the way to school the next morning. And by the time math class started, I pretty well bought it. Yeah, I bought it for five seconds until little Jessica Powell walked in and sat down right in front of me.”

  A metal slam echoed below the catwalk.

  Camilla and Todd jumped.

  “Hello?” a familiar voice floated up. “Camilla?”

  Camilla looked over the edge of the catwalk and saw Peter staggering into the dark room, his eyes not fully adjusted yet.

  “Liar!” Todd hissed. “You are after me!”

  “No, I’m not. I swear”—

  “Bullshit. You’ve been stalling the whole time.”

  “I didn’t know he was—”

  “Get out of my way!”

  “Please—”

  “Fuck off!”

  Todd jumped to his feet and tried pushing past Camilla. She fell back at an awkward angle, and
her right leg dropped perilously over the edge of the catwalk. Grasping desperately, she yanked Todd’s shirt for balance. He came tripping forward, smacking his gut on the guardrail, and in one fluid motion the teenager’s body tumbled over the edge of the grid. His chilling holler filled the rafters, cut short when his bones hit the cement floor a second later with a crushing, finite thud.

  Camilla watched, paralyzed from head to toe, as Peter stumbled away from the terrifying mass in the center of the room.

  “Camilla! What the hell was that? What’s going on? Camilla!”

  She was screaming inside, but nothing escaped her mouth. The shockwaves had atrophied every muscle in her entire body as a nightmarish terror came flooding in.

  There was no way Todd was still alive.

  None.

  She reeled again, knowing that she could never take back the sickening, abhorrent act that had just occurred. Everything felt scary; even her most trusted sanctuaries of science and medicine were suddenly of no help, having slammed their doors with the cement thud of death. No one knows anything, Todd’s voice echoed in her memory. No! One! Knows! Anything!

  And suddenly she saw him fall again, this time in painstaking slow motion. As he plummeted through the air, his fingers stretching toward the catwalk, eyes gaped in horror, she saw on his face the sudden realization of what was a split second away.

  “Camilla!” Peter’s voice snapped her out of her trance. “For Christ’s sake, where are you!”

  Camilla was trembling. She took hold of the safety railing and slowly leaned over, spying Peter as he kept stumbling for a light switch.

  The thought came quick and frantic—yet at the same time it was almost neat and tidy.

  Whatever had been good or normal about her life was now dead with Todd. And in the face of that petrifying realization, her only hope for survival was to buy in to something desperate, something—according to the late photographer—that no one was able to explain. No one except the Vincents.

  Camilla watched Peter’s hands fumble over a panel of switches. He flipped them all at once, and the dusty lights flickered to life and illuminated the entire warehouse.

  “Damn,” Peter said, “there you are. You had me scared for a second…”

  His voice cut short as his eyes sunk down to notice the growing pool of blood that Camilla was sitting in. Below her, sprawled at an awkward angle, was the photographer’s breathless body.

  “Jesus Christ. What in God’s name…?”

  “He fell,” Camilla said in her straightest tone, battling to keep every fiber of terror from erupting like Mt. Vesuvius. “He fell, Peter. We have to help him.”

  “H-Honey,” Peter stuttered as he approached her, face pale. “He—he’s…”

  Camilla raised her arm as if she needed help getting up. Peter gulped and then reached down, his fingers clamping around the diamond engagement ring that was now glimmering from her left ring finger.

  He cleared his throat again, not mentioning the ring, or perhaps not even registering it. “He’s dead.”

  Camilla took a deep breath. She summoned just enough courage to stand up and make eye contact, and then—half insisting, half pleading—gambled everything she had left by saying the only thought that was still holding her sanity together: “Then bring him back.”

  She hadn’t known if the ring would be enough to seal his trust, nor did she know what she was suggesting or what he would have thought of her for saying it, but she had to try. There’s no other option. This is it, this is the only way to undo it. Please, please undo it.

  They stood there, eyes locked, as Peter massaged the engagement ring for the longest moment of their relationship. Finally he reached in his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. “Bring the van to the back.”

  12

  The Photographer

  The unmarked van pulled away from the alley behind the printing press. Outside, the air was hotter and muggier than it had been twenty minutes before. Every Nolaner had disappeared from town square, sensing full well what nature was brewing and not wanting to get caught in the open when it hit.

  The atmosphere in the van was unsettled too. Peter kept checking his mirrors as they took off from the warehouse, riding down the vacant street with the speedometer straddling the forty-miles-per-hour tick. His foot was shaking on the pedal.

  “How’d you find me?” Camilla broke the silence.

  “Phyllis Beaudry. She phoned up mad as hell saying she saw the redhead who pissed off her family ride away on her mom’s bike.”

  Suddenly it came full circle. That’s where she recognized the cottage that she’d taken the bicycle from; it was the Beaudrys’ house on Stag Crescent—the same place she went to on her first removal call.

  “After that,” he said, “it wasn’t hard. Especially when the hijacker leaves the evidence parked outside their next crime scene.”

  “Peter,” she trembled, still on the edge of hysterics, “you know it was an acci—”

  “I know.”

  She glanced around her headrest and peeked nervously into the back of the van.

  Todd’s body had been thrown on a gurney and shoved inside like a crash-test dummy. His waist was barely strapped down to the bloody stretcher, both arms dangling limp off the metal edges, and as the van hit a bump in the road, the gurney went rattling into the wall like a loose shopping cart. The towels they’d used to mop up the blood were everywhere—smearing the van’s floor a sinister red—and the tandem bike had been chucked in last.

  It sure doesn’t look like a fucking accident.

  Peter reached over and turned her chin forward. He rested a palm on her thigh and laced their fingers together, squeezing tightly, and the engagement ring dug into their hands as his foot pressed harder on the gas pedal.

  The white van tore past the Vincents’ gates and shot up the driveway toward the garage.

  The garage was double-ended, acting as a passageway to the backyard for when the van had to access the rear loading bay. Luckily both ends were standing wide open and the vehicle was able to plunge in one side and out the other in less than three seconds flat.

  The wedding decorations were still up, but the celebration had ended a while ago. All of the guests were gone, and the sky had churned from blue to gray to charcoal as the wind lashed at the altar cloths and a row of chairs went scattering across the yard like tumbleweed. Moira, Brutus, Jasper, and Maddock were dashing around trying to save the decorations from the imminent downpour, and just as the van came speeding in, the first branch of lightning cracked across the troposphere.

  The van lurched to a stop near the back loading bay. Peter and Camilla’s doors batwinged opened and both of them launched outside.

  “Mom!” Peter shouted. The wind howled over his voice. “Mother!” He waved his arms and caught Moira’s attention. “Come here!”

  “Can’t you see I’m busy!” Moira shouted.

  “It’s an emergency!”

  “These chrysanthemums are an emergency!”

  “Mom, please—”

  “No, Peter. Now grab those chairs.”

  “MOM!”

  The desperation in Peter’s voice cut through the wind and finally sunk in. Moira lifted the bottom of her dress and came rushing toward them.

  “There’s been an accident,” he hollered as she approached the back of the van. He pulled the lock-bar up and jerked the handle, swinging the door open to reveal the bloody vignette in the back of the unmarked vehicle.

  Camilla watched Moira’s hands go to her mouth. “Good Lord. Peter.”

  “No one saw us,” he interjected. “This can be easy.”

  “Hold your tongue,” she snarled, shooting a side sneer at Camilla.

  “She knows. She knew on her own.”

  Moira looked between the two of them, seemingly trying to decide whom she should slap first. “You,” she said to Camilla. “Leave.”

  “Let her stay.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  �
��We’re engaged!” Peter shouted over the wind. “She’ll know sooner or later.”

  “That ring,” Moira said, skipping over her warm congratulations, “doesn’t make her part of this family yet.”

  “Laura knew before—”

  “I don’t care what Laura knew.”

  “Well I care about Camilla!” Peter hollered even louder. “And if you care about me, you’ll treat her like part of this family. Not later, now.”

  Camilla had never heard anyone talk back to Moira like that before, and apparently neither had Moira. Her mouth stayed closed this time; seething, she surveyed Camilla head to toe, just as she had on the first night they met. The woman who appeared to hate her now seemed to have no choice but to accept her.

  “Fine,” Moira said, nodding at the van. “Bring them to the basement.”

  Camilla remembered the back hallway from when Peter had given her a tour of the house almost a month before. It was long and stark, and a refrigerated chill crept around their ankles as they wheeled the gurney past the freezer doors where other bodies were being preserved temporarily.

  They reached the plain wooden door with the iron keyhole.

  The basement. It’s gutted, Peter’s voice echoed in Camilla’s memory. Oh really? We’ll see about that.

  Moira fished a necklace out from beneath the collar of her blouse. But as she drew it up, Camilla saw that it wasn’t just any ordinary necklace—it was a gold chain with three antique keys tied on the end.

  Moira slid one of the keys inside the door’s keyhole and gave the knob two special jerks to the right and a slam to the left. The wood crackled and groaned inward, revealing a narrow set of steps descending into the bowels of the house.

  Darkness had never scared Camilla before. The fear of darkness was irrational; whatever dangers existed in the dark existed in the light as well. No more, no fewer. But as Moira stepped downstairs and was swallowed up by shadows, Camilla was suddenly very, very afraid of the dark. And as she took her end of the gurney and stepped backwards through the doorway with Todd’s blood running down her wrists and plopping onto her black-and-white Lolita dress, she felt the terror of the unknown fill her up to her eyeballs until she too was swallowed by the cold, black basement.