by Melhoff, D.
The more he spoke, the faster his words spilled out. His stream of consciousness was in overdrive to stop him from registering the magnitude of what had just occurred.
“We need to go!” Peter pleaded. “No time. We need to go right now before more people catch it. It’s our job.” Another wave of fear flooded his face. “Our job, our job. To keep people safe when we fuck with the dead.”
“Peter—” Moira moaned.
“Why are you all waiting!” he screamed, choking back tears. “We have to hurry—”
“Peter—”
“Come on!”
“Peter, it’s Abigail!”
Moira was standing now, towering over her dead son. Everyone in the room except Camilla peered dreadfully at Abigail, who was standing by the chapel’s doorway looking just as cute and innocent as ever.
“No.” Peter shook his head. “No. Impossible. It’s not Abby.”
“Impossible?” Moira said. “What’s impossible, Peter, is your wife” —she spat the term like it was a swear word—“getting pregnant when she’s infertile.”
An expression of confusion clouded over the hysteria in Peter’s face. He looked at Camilla and neither of them said anything.
“Tell him!” Moira demanded. “Open your liar’s trap and tell everyone the truth.” When Camilla stayed silent, her mother-in-law screamed, “She stole a seed! A SEED, PETER!” The old woman pointed a crooked finger at Abigail. “That little girl is not yours.”
The air in the chapel turned cold. Peter’s eyes dragged from Moira to Abigail to Camilla. With barely any strength left in his voice, he asked, “Is she telling the truth?”
Camilla forced herself to make eye-contact. Then she spoke for the first time since arriving, her voice cracking with the walls of the house. “Remember that night of the picnic? When I went to the hospital? I couldn’t say anything because—”
“Is she telling the truth?” Peter repeated, slowly and clearly. The tears were welling up fresh again.
The wind boomed against the roof.
Camilla looked away. “I did it for our family.”
“You are not part of this family,” Moira hollered. “You’re a stain on our name. I might have loved that little girl, but so help me my heart is already broken. The Lord shows no mercy on souls like the two of yours, and neither will we.”
Brutus and Jasper stalked forward. Their faces were tortured and miserable, yet decisively set in stone, like two gargoyles closing in.
Camilla stepped back, blocking Abigail from the encroaching harm. She didn’t know why. Abigail was dangerous; she should have given her up. But some hardwired impulse refused to let them take her away. Abby is all I have now.
“Stay back,” she said, pushing Abigail behind her legs.
“I’m sorry,” Jasper said. “We have no choice.”
The two men got closer—too close for her and Abigail to turn and run—when Camilla felt her daughter slip something cold and heavy into her hand behind her back. Her stomach sunk as her palm rubbed against the handle of the gun and her finger teased the trigger.
Camilla took a deep breath and brought Lucas’s gun in front of her.
Jasper and Brutus stopped as everyone’s eyes widened.
“Haven’t you killed enough already?” Moira razed.
Camilla ignored her mother-in-law and looked straight at Peter. Straight into his prostrate, grief-stricken eyes. “Come with us,” she whispered.
“Son!” Moira bellowed. “That is not your family. They are Satan’s—see what they’ve done!” She collapsed over Lucas again and opened her hands above his body. “See what they’ve made you do!”
Peter was frozen in the center of the room, his wife and daughter on one side—the side closest to the door—and the rest of his family at the altar. The emotional tug-of-war was so palpable that there could have been a rope pulling him in either direction.
“Daddy?” Abigail whispered. “Come with us. Please.”
Peter looked down at Abigail, who was peeking out from behind Camilla’s legs. Tears spilled down his cheeks and he lowered his chin to his chest, shaking his head once and only once.
Camilla bit down. The decision was made. “Run, Abby. Go.”
Abigail bolted away. Jasper and Brutus flinched, but Camilla cocked the gun again and they kept their distance. Then slowly she backed out of the chapel herself, all the while keeping her weapon level with her own family, until she was through the doorway and into the lobby. Finally she turned and took off as fast as she could run.
The door of the funeral home banged open and Camilla threw herself into the raging blizzard. Blinded by snow and relying purely on memory, she torpedoed across the porch and down the driveway to where Abigail was already waiting at the front gate.
“Keep running!” She grabbed her daughter’s arm and dragged her away from the Vincent grounds, glancing back as the manor disappeared in a sea of white. Then suddenly a pair of orbs shone through the storm and Camilla realized that the family had wasted no time in getting to their van.
Her feet swished faster and faster through the rising snow. It was up to her heels now—past her shins, past Abigail’s knees—and as they fought their way from the house, they were engulfed in a total whiteout.
Camilla clutched Abigail’s arm, knowing that if she let go they would be separated instantly in the storm. Abby wasn’t even wearing a jacket; her bare skin was red and raw, and her black dress was swathed in so many snowflakes that it appeared pure white.
Outrunning the vehicle was impossible, so instead of following the gravel road, she pulled Abigail ahead and made a leap of faith into the dense woods. The surrounding trees blocked the wind and afforded a fraction more visibility; behind them, they could see the van’s headlights crawling through the manor gates and turning right, away from their trail for now.
“Mom! Where are we going?”
I don’t know. Anywhere warm, anywhere away from here.
Camilla started off deeper into the forest, Abigail’s arm in one hand, the gun in the other. As the two of them ran, she remembered this route from when she had once chased Todd—the wedding-crasher-slash-Sun-photographer—over the same terrain almost a decade before.
Suddenly the image of Lucas’s dead body flashed into her mind—
But she pushed it away. Concentrate on running, she told herself. Find someplace safe, we need to find somewhere warm, we’ve got to get to shelter...
The trees began peeling away and they came upon the backs of the cottages on Stag Crescent. Camilla spotted the Beaudrys’ yard and boosted Abigail over their five-foot fence, then scaled the boards herself. They ran alongside the house and out the front yard when she spotted their best chance of survival directly across the street.
Nolan’s graveyard.
Anywhere else would have been too public—they couldn’t risk being seen—and this was one of the few places where the current inhabitants wouldn’t go tattling on a couple of fugitives.
Camilla pulled Abigail across the street and was suddenly thankful for the ferocious blizzard; it was ample cover from Nolan’s ever-watchful eyes.
They ran through the graveyard’s gate and up a knoll toward the cemetery’s collection of crypts. Camilla stopped at the closest mausoleum on the grid and took in the name inscribed above the entryway: Goodwynn. She examined the edifice and ran her fingers carefully over the door, testing the frailty of the wood by tapping a few places along the edges, and then rapped on the iron grill and listened for an echo. Anyone home?
She peeked over her shoulder to double check that no one was watching, and then thrust her gun against the side of the doorframe. The butt of the pistol beat down on the pegs that held a strip of brass sealant in place, then the pintles snapped off and the strip came crackling loose. The door jerked open with a brittle snap!
“Hurry,” she shouted, raising a foot and kicking the entrance open a sliver more. Abigail dashed ahead without any qualms and Camilla followed suit
, shutting the door behind her and sealing them inside with the mice and the Goodwynns.
The tomb was dark, soundless.
Camilla’s face was still pressed against the door. Her shoulders heaved up and down, her throat wheezed for breath.
“Mom?” Abigail’s voice sounded stony and hollow.
Camilla didn’t turn around. She stayed against the door, silent, with her fists ground into the frame as a pair of shoes shuffled up behind her.
“Mom? Are you OK?”
“Get away!”
Abigail startled, tripping backward, and fell flat onto the dirt floor.
“No one’s OK,” Camilla quivered. “I’m not OK. The Corys aren’t OK. Your uncle is not OK. Everyone is devastated because of us and nothing can fix it now. Nothing!” She turned around, mopping up tears with her palm. “I hope you took a better look at your father than I did, because we’ll never see him again.”
Fear washed over Abigail’s features and her bottom lip began to tremble. “Why?”
The mountain of ignorance packed into the one-word question was astounding.
“Because he hates us. How about that? And he’s got every right to. You’ve ruined our lives, Abigail. You’ve ruined so many lives, but at the end of the day those murders hang over my head.”
Camilla’s memory flashed on the Cory girls: Stephanie’s squashed eyeball, Erica’s missing fingers, the rips in their cute little dresses.
She gave her daughter a look of utter contempt. All the questions she had been afraid to ask now fought on the tip of her tongue to be the first to blurt out. She needed to know how Abigail had gone through with it—how she had lured the sisters into the shed and murdered them, unnoticed, while their parents were up at the house—and how long it had taken, and how she had managed to clean herself without anyone seeing. Yet one question overshadowed everything else. Ironically, it was the same question she had just answered for Abigail.
“Why?”
The wind howled through the cracks in the crypt. It seemed like no matter where they went, the screams of nature followed.
“Why did you do it, Abigail? Why did you kill the Cory sisters?”
“They were mean.”
Camilla closed her eyes. She felt like she was going to be sick. “How?”
“They said mean things about our family.”
“Is that it?”
“They had dumb rhymes about me. They were always whispering rumors that weren’t true, and they called you and dad witch doctors.”
“You should have come to me!” Camilla wailed, mortified at the realization that two girls had been mutilated over a bout of teasing.
“You wouldn’t have done anything.”
“I wouldn’t have killed them, if that’s what you mean.”
“Then they would have kept doing it.”
“So what! So what if you had to hear it again and again and again. Did you ever think of the consequences your actions might have? That we would be chased into a crypt? That your uncle would be dead? That the whole town’s going to be hunting us until we’re dead too? No. No, you didn’t. You don’t think like a person at all. You look like a little girl, but you’re not, you hear me? You are not my daughter.”
Camilla swallowed the painful lump that was caught in her throat and stared, stone still, at Abigail. She flinched when the little girl got off the floor and moved closer.
“I’m sorry.” Abigail sniffled, hugging her mom’s leg. Camilla didn’t move. “But you’re wrong, mom. It’s not over. I promise I’ll take care of it. I’ll fix everything.”
“Abigail—”
But Camilla didn’t get another word in. Abigail swung behind her and turned the handle on the crypt door, which flew open in the ferocious wind.
“Abigail!” She lunged for the little girl’s arm, but it was too late. The seven-year-old bolted outside and vanished in the white of the storm.
27
Among the Dead
For the first time in her life, Camilla cried herself to sleep. The cold floor did little to comfort her while she lay against the tomb and sobbed for the loss of not only Peter and Abigail, but for her whole family. It was a kind of loss that she had seen so often in the faces of those who had swept through the funeral parlor over the last eight years, but it wasn’t until now that she finally felt it tug her own heart to the ground. If anyone had been walking by that night, it would have been a chilling thing to hear the soft sound of weeping coming from inside the crypt, but the grief that coursed through Camilla was venom for which the only purge was tears. The wind wrapped her in an icy shroud and coldness sunk into her bones until she was nothing but a hunk of frozen flesh on the sepulchre floor.
Her eyes drifted shut, then suddenly Camilla was running.
She emerged from the darkness into the Vincent manor. The house was different somehow. Dim and muted. Unsettled.
As she dashed down the dark hallways, she saw nooses hanging in every doorframe, swaying like someone had just finished tying them. Hovering in the alcoves were pairs of eyes watching her run by, and as she emerged in the dining room, she saw the Vincents sitting at their dinner table facing the other direction.
The family craned their heads around—
And they were severely deformed. All of them had long, stretched-out faces with hollow eyes and gaping black mouths, and when they saw Camilla they started to scream.
She bolted away, bursting through the embalming room, and slipped on a pool of blood, falling down…
Down…
Down…
Down through darkness, down through pain and pressure…
And landed with a smack! on the basement floor.
Then she was running again. She raced along the dark corridor that Maddock had once chased her through and dragged her hands along the walls, feeling the iron bars of the makeshift cells rippling under her fingertips.
Except the cells weren’t empty this time. The rooms caged the entire progression of dark experiments from the Vincents’ murky history.
A deer with bullet holes in its forehead bucked against the bars.
Two men hanging by their necks screamed obscenities at each other.
A decapitated torso walked in circles in one cage, and its severed head muttered nonsense in the next cell over.
Camilla reached the doorway at the end of the hall and burst through, stumbling into the chapel upstairs.
A hauntingly familiar gunshot fired, and she saw Lucas drop to the floor. The Vincents, who were already huddled beside him, turned around again with their demented, transmogrified faces and started screeching. More gunshots fired, and as she turned and ran, she felt the sharp sting of bullets pepper her body.
There it is! The exit! she thought, running for the front door. But as she crossed into the rotunda, the stained-glass dome exploded above her with a sonic BOOM!
Glass hailed down like a jagged tsunami. She kept her head down, continuing to run, but her legs were freezing up. Each foot felt like it gained twenty pounds with every step, yet still she grunted, staying fixated on the front entrance as it inched closer and closer and closer.
The exit was twelve feet away.
Then ten feet…
Then five…
Camilla reached out and pawed the handle. Her legs couldn’t move, and she cried out in frustration as the tips of her fingers batted empty air. She let out a scream and threw herself forward with everything she had left.
The door flung open and her legs could suddenly move again. She burst through the frame, elated, but the feeling was quickly dashed.
She hadn’t escaped—she was in her bedroom upstairs.
Laughter assaulted her eardrums. She looked around in terror, realizing that all the skulls on the surrounding shelves were shrieking from under their elaborate hats.
She turned around—the door was gone. She turned back and the room was suddenly silent. The skulls were no longer roaring with laugher; they were motionless again, dead as they
should be.
The only way out was the window at the far wall. As she tiptoed over the rug—past her bed, past the closet—the hairs on her neck tingled with the feeling that she wasn’t alone. She paused beside the vanity table and looked into its deep, glassy mirror.
She saw her own reflection…
And Abigail standing right behind her. Her daughter was wearing a bright-white dress covered in blood.
“Don’t worry, mom. I’ll fix it. For you.”
Camilla spun around. Abigail wasn’t there.
The reflection had lied.
She turned to the mirror again and shrieked. Her face was long and demented, and her eyes were gaping black holes, just like the Vincents’ had been. A rope was cinched around her neck and it pulled on her throat while she screamed murder and whorled into the air, writhing and suffocating, as her whole existence faded to a pinprick of light, then went godlessly black.
Camilla’s eyes popped open in the tomb. Her fingers were clawing at her neck, trying to tear off the invisible rope, and her legs kicked up a small dust storm on the mausoleum’s foundation.
Her hands shot to her head and felt for her eyes and mouth. Other than the fact that her cheeks were as cold as two slabs of meat in a butcher’s freezer, she was still herself.
I’m fine. I’m all right. I’m OK.
Eventually her breathing leveled. She sat up and massaged her head, which felt twice as full of fluid as it normally did. “Anybody in here have ibuprofen?” She moaned around the crypt. “No? Fine.”
She lied down again, too exhausted to start thinking or strategizing, but too terrified to fall asleep. She sat back up and leaned against the wall. As her breath formed cold, condensed clouds, she crossed her arms and sniffled against the freezing cinder blocks.
Morning light had begun streaming through the cracks of the crypt. It must be seven or eight, she thought, but there’s no way of telling. As she looked around the space, something sent a shiver up her spine that had nothing to do with the cold.