Come Little Children

by Melhoff, D.

  “It’s Abigail,” he shouted. “This is Abigail’s doing, not Camilla’s. We’re stopping her.”

  “She betrayed us,” Brutus fumed. “Come here, you!”

  Brutus rushed for Camilla, but Peter let go of his mother and raised his gun, blocking the space between his family and his wife.

  “Move!” Brutus shouted, taking out his own gun.

  “No,” Peter replied. “Get out of here, all three of you. Go.”

  “Brutus,” Moira spat, “for God’s sake, put the gun down. Listen to me, Peter. Listen. She led to this.”

  “Get out, mom.”

  “Peter—”

  “Leave!” He charged ahead, arms outstretched, and corralled his family past the van. They continued hollering, but he forced them to the gate on the gamble that Brutus wouldn’t start firing.

  “We took you back,” Moira seethed, “and this is how you repay us? By choosing the liar—the one who abandoned you? She’s the reason your uncle and brother are dead. Her! If you turn on us, their blood is on your hands too!”

  Peter reached up and pushed his mother through the gates. Maddock shriveled away instantly, but Brutus puffed out his chest and thrust his nephew into the snow. “You runt! You’ll never be half the men your father and brother were.”

  Camilla rushed forward, but Peter raised his gun in the air and fired two warning shots. Everyone froze on the spot.

  “Get out,” he demanded as he got to his feet. His voice was rattled, but loud. “Get out!”

  Brutus and Moira stumbled back, speechless, to where Maddock was standing behind the fence. Peter grabbed the wrought-iron gates and swung them closed, barring his family out of their own yard as they stood on the other side, smoldering.

  “Your father would never turn his back on us,” Moira said with her most acidic tone. Peter flinched as he looped the gate’s chains around the iron rungs and slipped on the heavy lock. “You’re as dead to me as he is. You’re worse—I wish I’d never had you. At least then I might still have one son I’d be proud of.”

  The lock shot home and bound the links together.

  “Mark me,” Moira said. “We’ll be back with half the town. We’re coming for you and her. This gate will fall and we’ll abolish every bit of evil behind it, so help us God.”

  “Good-bye, mom.”

  Peter turned, unable to look at Moira anymore, and went to Camilla. He put his hand on her back—a move his mother cursed—and guided them toward to the house.

  “Good-bye, Peter!” Moira shouted. “I hope you’re happy with your family, while it lasts.”

  Peter and Camilla went behind the fountain and vanished from the view of the Vincents, who had already taken off on foot.

  “I—I’m sorry…” Camilla started, but words failed her. She fell against Peter’s chest and clutched her hands against the back of his shirt. “What do we do?”

  “We keep going,” he whispered. “We’re finishing this. We have to.”

  “How? The moon’s already out. We’re gonna have a mob on either side of us.”

  “We split up. One takes Abigail, one takes the backyard.”

  Camilla looked at the manor and knew immediately what her choice had to be.

  “Abigail.” She bit down. The two of them had started this debacle, and one of them would end it. “I’ll take Abigail.”

  “All right.” Peter nodded. “We can do this. Promise me.”

  “Promise.”

  He surrounded her in a hug. They kissed, and then Camilla watched the only man she had ever loved tear himself away and take off through the hedges beside the house. In a few seconds he scaled the fence to the backyard and was gone. She was alone once more.

  She wiped her nose on her sleeve and ran up the porch. The wind stirred the snow banks as clouds blew across the sky and the moon shed its twilight veil.

  Then for the last time that night—for the last time in her life—Camilla stepped into the Vincent Funeral Home. Inside, the floor of the entrance hall creaked as loudly as it had in her nightmares. The walls snapped and the short corridor suddenly seemed to stretch on and on into darkness toward the faint light of the lobby up ahead. Gun level, at your chest. Keep it up.

  Suddenly she stopped.

  Her eyes widened and her blood turned to ice as something materialized in the shadows a few steps in front of her.

  There, hung in the doorway at the end of the hall, was a recently tied noose.

  So recent, it was still swaying.

  32

  Hide and Seek

  Camilla blinked, but the noose did not disappear this time. It rocked back and forth from the frame of the entrance hall like a homemade gift from a demon kindergartener. Do you like it, mom? I made it just for you.

  She drew closer—where her strength came from, she didn’t know—and put her hand on the rope to stop it from swaying. Through the center of the loop, her eyes settled on the rotunda.

  It was a 360-degree trap. If she stepped into the circular room, there would be no way to cover her back, no matter which way she faced, and Abigail could be waiting in any doorway with her finger on the trigger. But the clock was ticking. She had to book it.

  Go.

  She tucked her chin to her chest and ran.

  The glass cupola appeared overhead like a red, Godly eye, and for a split second she expected it to explode into a million fragments like in her dream. But if it did, she didn’t notice—the sound of her own rushing blood drowned her eardrums as she barreled into the vestibule and rammed herself through the door on the other end, catapulting directly into the lobby outside the chapel.

  Her heartbeat was still filling her ears. She checked the corners of the room for glistening eyeballs—nothing. No flicker of movement, no crackle of noise. The house was stiller than she ever remembered.

  Come out, come out, wherever you are.

  But the silence betrayed neither of them. Not then. It sunk in heavier and heavier, waiting for the first gust of breath or a slight shift of weight to forsake the weaker predator to her prey.

  A mechanical growl erupted out of nowhere.

  Guurrrrvvvv. Clank, CLINK, clank.

  Camilla whipped around and stared down the hallway to the dining room.

  CLINK, CLINK, CLINK. Guurrrvv! Gurrvv, clank, guurvvv.

  The grating got louder—metal rasping against metal—as an electronic hum startled to life and groaned with unoiled hinges.

  Camilla’s knuckles whitened on her handgun. She stepped over the carpet—the metallic racket stifling the sound of her steps—and dipped into the hallway. Her sight disappeared in the darkness as the iron sputtering got louder and louder around her, every clank like the strike of a blacksmith’s anvil, until she erupted into the dining room where moonlight illuminated her surroundings once again.

  CLINK, CLINK, CLINK. Guurrrvv! Gurrvv, clank, guurvvv.

  The clanking was coming from the manor’s two-story elevator lift. Behind a golden accordion gate, the steel cables and iron mechanisms clattered their way down the shaft at an agonizingly slow pace.

  She held up her gun, wavering, and trained it on the lift.

  Suddenly everything stopped. There was a high-pitch ting like the bell on a concierge’s desk, and the accordion doors popped open on loaded springs, slamming into the walls on either side.

  Camilla flinched and hugged her trigger, a pascal of pressure away from firing.

  The elevator was empty.

  She kept the gun cocked and weighed the dare in front of her. So you want me upstairs, do you?

  The elevator waited patiently. It was clear who had the upper hand so far, and she didn’t like it. She crossed the room to the lift and tapped the second floor button with the end of her gun before sliding the golden gate shut and standing back.

  To hell with you if you think I’m actually riding that thing up.

  The machinery whirred back to life, and Camilla rushed for the winding staircase, her footsteps stifled by the clink
, clank, clink of the elevator shaft once again.

  She scaled the stairs two at a time and peeked over the top step just as the lift arrived. There was no one waiting in the open area—no eyes peeking out from behind furniture or between the leaves of the potted ferns—so she crawled to her feet and dipped into the hallway ahead.

  Jasper’s office was the first door on the left.

  Inside was a rat’s nest of filing cabinets and bookshelves packed with catechisms, psalm binders, and rows upon rows of sacred sheet music that put the Vatican’s collection to shame.

  A cramp curled in Camilla’s stomach when she saw a little red light blinking from the answering machine atop the desk. Whatever message was waiting, it would have to wait for eternity. Ninety percent of the person you’ve tried to reach is leaking over his grand piano, and the other ten percent is impaled on top of a water fountain. She glanced around the room—nothing behind the door, nothing between bookshelves—and ducked out again, moving across the hall.

  The showroom, which had once been filled with Peter’s beautiful hand-carved caskets, was much different than the last time she was there. In place of the artful coffins were rows and rows of generic urns stacked along the shelves like Ikea: Funeral Edition. In the middle of the room were cardboard boxes that contained more urns and caskets piled as high as the ceiling. Some of them were taped shut, while others were cracked open and puking out sheets of plastic wrap and packing peanuts all over the floor.

  Something flapped around a wall of boxes.

  Camilla squinted. She moved forward, trying to avoid the packing peanuts, but it was almost impossible. Every time she stepped on one, it banged like a Styrofoam land mine.

  Another flap.

  She stopped. Her right foot hovered unknowingly over another peanut as she craned her head around a wall of boxes and saw a sheet of plastic flapping against a furnace vent. Thank God.

  Gradually—as if in slow motion—she lowered her foot again and detonated the white packing peanut underneath, pinching out a tiny squeal.

  BWOOM!

  The entire wall of boxes thundered down on top of her. She buckled under the landslide and cracked her skull against the floor, feeling a dull coma wash over her as another sensation tightened around her wrists and bound them behind her chest.

  She tried worming away, but the pressure swelled in her head as the fluorescents burst on and amplified her migraine tenfold. Then came the unmistakable swish of shoes wading through the packing peanuts, and the sound of her gun being booted across the floor.

  “Hi, mom.”

  Through the shower of sunbursts floating across her eyes, Camilla saw the outline of Abigail come into focus. The girl’s face was blotted out by the ceiling lights, but draped in her hands was the silhouette of a long, thick rope.

  “No!” Camilla screamed. “NO!”

  She writhed across the floor and watched in horror as Abigail came closer and closer with the serpentine cable. My hands. She winced. She tied my hands. Then another flash of panic hit when she tried to kick out, but couldn’t. My feet are tied too!

  Abigail leaned down, and at last they were face-to-face.

  “What happened to you, mom?” Abigail asked with a twinge of sadness. “What happened to all your hair?”

  “You!” Camilla teared with anger. “You’ve done this to me, Abby.”

  Her daughter frowned, failing to understand. “Don’t worry. I’m fixing it. I’ll bring you back too, then no one can hurt us.”

  “You can’t—”

  “No one will be mean to us.”

  “Stop!”

  “No one will chase us.”

  “I said ‘stop’!”

  Abigail leaned over and looped the rope over Camilla’s pale neck. “Everyone will join us.”

  A bestial scream rose from Camilla’s gut and blasted out of her mouth. She swung her legs with every ounce of energy she had left and caught Abigail’s feet, crashing her into the boxes beside them. Instantly Camilla’s hands shot to her own ankles and yanked the knots apart, then she sprung up and flew out of the showroom like a bat out of hell, her wrists still bound behind her.

  The hall was pitch black. A gunshot exploded off the banister in front of her.

  BANG! The elevator cage.

  BANG! A pot of ferns.

  Camilla threw herself into Jasper’s office and barely missed another explosion in the wall beside her. She whimpered and thrashed around like an animal caught in a trap, but it was no good—her hands were still tied with the heinous cord, and the more she struggled, the more blood she could feel seeping through the raw skin around her wrists.

  Scissors. I need scissors.

  She ran for the desk, but suddenly there came the patter of small shoes running down the hallway. Wincing again, she abandoned the desk and dove behind a bookshelf just as Abigail’s shadow spilled across the office floor.

  There was a small gap between the ground and the bookshelf; a shadow flickered below it, then vanished. Camilla considered her waist size and the width of the gap and concluded it was the only way out: as soon as Abigail stepped around the corner, she would slide under the bookshelf and bolt back through the office door.

  Get ready.

  Camilla dropped to her knees and listened for her daughter’s feet.

  The shoes were gone. The room was silent again.

  She took a deep breath and lowered her cheek against the carpet.

  Abigail’s face was right there, staring at her under the bookshelf with those wild black eyes.

  “Found you.”

  The barrel of the gun came up level with Camilla’s head, and just as it was about to fire, Camilla threw her entire body against the bookshelf in a final heave of desperation. The wood cracked with the sudden force and then splintered, sending the whole shelf crashing down on top of Abigail.

  Camilla scrambled over the heap of destruction—her hands still bound—and jetted for the exit, not stopping to see what became of her girl in the dust and rubble behind her. She emerged in the hallway and shot straight down the staircase, landing on the first floor, and bolted through the back hall to the embalming room.

  The double doors blew open, and Camilla stumbled inside. A gunshot went off somewhere in the house, but it didn’t sound close. Maybe she didn’t see me come this way. I need time—I need to get my hands free. She ran for the scalpel drawer and jimmied it open behind her back.

  Another gunshot blasted out. This time it was closer, somewhere on the main floor.

  Camilla fumbled the blade in her bound hands. She forced the razor edge against the rope and began sawing up and down.

  BANG! BANG! The shots were closer, from the dining room now.

  Camilla felt a moan vibrating in her throat. She struggled with the scalpel in what seemed like slow motion—up and down, up and down—and felt the cords beginning to fray.

  Even if I get this off, she started to think, she’s got a gun. A gun! I’ve got nothing.

  Another door slammed and Camilla pictured Abigail less than thirty feet away, stalking down the hallway.

  She stopped sawing the rope and ran to the only other room she had access to: the crematorium. Forcing down the handle with her forearm, she unlatched the door and shouldered her way in just as Abigail’s shadow crossed underneath the doors to the embalming room. But as the hinges swung open, Camilla jerked to maintain her balance and accidentally dropped the scalpel on the hard linoleum.

  The tinkle of metal was like an atomic bomb going off.

  The shadow in the hallway stopped.

  There was no time to pick up the instrument. Camilla used her last nanosecond to slip inside the crematorium and close the door just as the embalming room’s entrance swung open.

  The crematorium was dark and drafty. Its circular brick chimney stretched up and up to the tallest peak of the funeral home like the inside of a castle turret.

  Camilla backed away from the door, but she didn’t take her eyes off of it. Please
let her miss the scalpel. Please let her miss the scalpel. Please let her miss the scalpel.

  Her hands bumped the oven behind her. There was nowhere left to run—the dead end had finally come—and with both hands still tied behind her back, it wasn’t even a fight anymore. She was up against the firing wall.

  Abigail’s shadow appeared under the door of the crematorium—

  Please let her miss the scalpel. A rivulet of sweat trickled down her forehead. Please let her miss the scalpel. Please let her miss the scalpel.

  —Then came the quiet, heart-wrenching sound of metal being dragged across linoleum. A terrified sob sputtered out of Camilla’s lips as she shook her head in angry disbelief.

  The handle on the crematorium started turning.

  Camilla’s eyes widened in horror…

  And then the door pushed open. Abigail was standing in the frame, a scalpel clutched in one hand and a gun in the other. The little girl looked straight into the crematorium.

  And frowned.

  From Abigail’s point of view, the crematory was empty. No one was there, and there was no exit they could have slipped through.

  Inside the crematorium oven, Camilla bit her lips together so hard they started bleeding. She was lying headfirst on her stomach in the retort chamber, as still as a corpse ready for cremation. She could feel her shoulders and knees were torn up from throwing herself in at the last second, but it didn’t matter—she had made it. She had gotten inside and closed the door not a second before Abigail had burst into the room.

  Camilla stayed absolutely still for what felt like minutes. There was complete silence from outside, and finally she realized—with relief and overwhelming joy—that the trick had actually worked. I fooled her. I fooled the little demon. I can slip out and find another gun, then start the whole hunt over again.

  Suddenly there was a deafening whoomph followed by a deep electrical hum. Before she registered what was going on, a bolt shot home by her feet, and a metallic crank echoed high above her, accompanied by a cold winter draft.

  Camilla screamed.

  She wailed louder than her throat allowed, tearing apart her vocal cords, and kicked the retort door with her weakened, degenerated legs, squirming like a rat caught in a sewer pipe. But it was no use—she was locked inside the claustrophobic crematorium, and as her own screams howled around her, the cold draft that she had felt up until then was slowly replaced with a warm, rising chinook.