The Unwanted (Black Water Tales Book 2) (26 page)

Blaire blinked her weighted eyelids slowly.

“How are you feeling?” Anya asked, peeking her head in the door.

Blaire blinked harder as her memory came back to her in soft waves like water on the shore in summer. “Okay.”

“I’m sorry about having to give you that shot.”

“How’s Travis?” Blaire asked as she lifted herself halfway off the bed to see him.

“No change. I’ll get you some water, and then I need to finish setting up for the party,” Anya told her.

“The party? How can you still have a party?” Blaire asked. In her view there was nothing to celebrate.

“What do you want us to do? I know Travis is a friend, and I hate that he is sick,
but
—” “He is not sick!” Blaire’s frustration returned with new venom. “He is dying!”

A still incredulous Anya answered in her practical way. “We are doing all that we can, and as soon as we can get him help, we will. Besides, it’s not much of a party anyway, just some costumes, sweets, and a little music.”

“Sweets?” Blaire said in a broken whisper as she continued chasing full consciousness.

“Blaire, these children don’t get much, and in the years that I have been here, we have never had a party, not for a holiday or a birthday or anything. They are so excited, and I can’t let them down.”

“But it was them. They killed everyone.”

“What are you talking about?” Anya was suddenly exasperated as well.

“When those murders happened, it was the children that murdered the workers, not the workers that murdered the children.”

Anya sat on the bed thoughtfully. “Really? How do you know?” Her eyes glazed over momentarily. “Yes,” Blaire confirmed. “I read it in reports that were in the basement.”

Anya thought for a moment and sighed. “Well, so what?”

“So what?” Blaire asked.

“Something terrible happened here many years ago. People were murdered. It was the children. It wasn’t the children. I don’t care anymore, Blaire! I have known these children for years, and they are harmless.” Anya’s resolve was revealed in her face.

Blaire looked to Travis.

“Is that what this is about? You think that just because of what happened here years ago, Natalka is trying to poison Travis? That is ridiculous. There is no rat poison in Natalka’s drawer.”

“But there was,” Blaire countered softly.

“Even if there was, we do have rats, maybe it somehow got into her drawer, but that doesn’t mean that she was serving you cookies laced with rat poison. You’re not sick.”

“I don’t eat sweets.”

“It’s just not true,” Anya said before leaving the room.

After locking the door, Blaire riffled through her drawers until she found a cigarette. She had not smoked in weeks, but today it was a necessity. She cracked her bedroom window and lit up, allowing the high of the cigarette to overlap the euphoric remnants of whatever tranquilizer Vesna had used on her earlier. She stared out at the sea. Everything was covered by a thick white blanket of cold death, but one golden light peered out from under the white solid heaviness.

It was Marko.

CHAPTER FORTY

A
warm orange light burned inside the window of Marko’s cottage. Blaire’s heart jumped with a pinch of excitement, but she quickly realized that there was little that even Marko could do.

A hint of soft music came up through the vents from the first floor. Blaire put out her cigarette and headed down to the party. Anya was right that all of the children did not deserve to be ignored because this was not their fault. But more importantly, Blaire wanted to keep her eyes on them.

The playroom was full of movement and warmed by roaring flames from the fireplace. Hardly anyone in the room noticed Blaire’s arrival, and she preferred it that way. For a moment the music died, and then “Dream a Little Dream” began to play loudly, reviving the record player as if set specifically for her entrance. Anya waved to her, a sympathy wave for the basket case making pathetic progress. One of the children greeted her happily and led her to the sweet table, so she could help herself to cupcakes, specially made for the occasion. Blaire held a cupcake up to her nose, sniffed it, and then returned it to the table once the attention of the child was directed elsewhere. Andre was dressed as a king, flaunting a colorful paper crown on his head, which he designed himself. He led her to the couch where she sat and watched the odd festivities. She scanned the room for Lorna, but the little girl was not here, and she never had been.

Anya was now on the other side of the room, playing a game with a group of children. It looked like Ring Around the Rosie, and suddenly it seemed as if time moved slowly. At a table close by, a
screw
-faced Vesna worked diligently painting the kids’ faces with simple works of art like balloons and stars. The work, shoddy as it was, seemed nothing less than masterpiece quality in the eyes of the children. Standing in front of Blaire, Danya grabbed her teacher’s hands and tossed them lightly in an attempt to initiate play, but Blaire was hardly able to join in the merriments. Blaire seemed to be watching everything in the room through blurred spectacles. Danya’s hair was in two messy pigtails, and her nose was painted a bright red. Blaire looked around to locate Danya’s match and found Dariya dressed as a
strange
-looking pig. Blaire’s eyes covered the room once, twice, and once more…but Natalka was missing.

Where is she?

The room spun in sinister laughter.

Ring around the rosie…
all of the
made
-up faces and masks of the children were a blur.
Pocket full of posies…
the ubiquitous whispers crawled up out of the vents and into her head.
Ashes, ashes…
Blaire looked down at her own traitorous body, rocking back and forth, back and forth.
We ALL fall down…

She gasped in shock.

No! No, not me.

A thunderous shiver rolled through her body like a surge of electricity, and she fought it off with her hands as if small rodents were scampering all over her flesh. She looked up, and her eyes found the small boy who sat across the room in the window, staring out into the creeping nightfall. Ivan turned and looked deep into her eyes.

For the occasion his hair was been slicked back. The little black mustache that he made sat slightly crooked on his top lip, and somewhere inside of Mrs. Andrich’s boy was Dmytro Prada. Blaire fumbled to her feet and ran out the door, up the stairs to her room.

She locked the door and pressed the dresser in front of it before going to check on Travis. His condition had not changed. Blaire peeked outside to see that the snow continued to fall burying them all deeper. From the top shelf of the closet, Blaire retrieved the files that she had taken from the basement, and she crawled into bed. As she shuffled through the reports, she tried to piece together the strange happenings of that terrible night years ago.

“What on earth,” Ida said to herself as she made her way down the hall to the third floor bathroom where she heard scuffling and a muffled moaning. “Felina,” she said as she pressed the door open. Three boys stood over Felina, who they had pressed under water in the bathtub. Ida began to scream. The boys looked up and in an instant two of them were chasing her down the hall. Ida dashed into her room, locking the door behind her and shoving the dresser in front of it. She ran to the window, but it was a long way down, and even if she could somehow escape, there was nothing but a cold white death awaiting her. The tears welled as she slid down onto the floor and began rocking back and forth, humming softly to herself in order to drown out the sound of the wild boys banging at the door.

In previous weeks, she started to hate her job, and more recently began sleeping with the drawer pressed up against the door. The children were changing. Every night she would hum until she could fall asleep, because she could no longer stand the whispers of the children that invaded her room through the vents, and tonight it had all just come apart. When at one time she had hummed to calm the children to sleep at night, she now hummed to calm herself, to calm all of them. She needed only to make it through the night.

Eventually, the pounding stopped, and somehow she managed to doze off in the dark hours of early morning and woke to the sound of tiny footsteps coming down the hall.

Something stood just outside the door. Ida heard a low snarl, and then a whimper. Someone was crying. It was one of the children, and Ida listened to the soft crying on the other side of the door, and suddenly she heard three slow and deliberate knocks.

“Miss Ida,” she heard a voice call out and knew instantly that it was Lorna, an adorable little girl who always wore fire engine red overalls and who carried a beautiful blonde doll named Dolly.

“Lorna?” Ida called.

“Miss Ida, please help. They hurt me,” the little girl said, crying. Terrified, Ida didn’t want to open the door, but she could not just leave the girl out there. “Miss Ida,” the voice cried out again.

Ida got to her feet and pushed the dresser out from in front of the door. Her hand shook as she reached out to turn the knob. Ida opened the door and stepped onto the threshold. The storm had blown out the electricity and the emergency hall lights cast an eerie green glow on the white walls.

“Lorna,” Ida whispered into the hall. She heard stealthy shuffling all around and her heart began pounding furiously. She crossed the hall and crashed her fist through the glass of the red axe box and wrestled the small weapon from its secure place. Ida heard something behind her breathing and snarling. She tightened her grip on the fire axe, and then whipped around to face the shadowy darkness. But there was no one there.

“Lorna,” the woman called out again. Ida screamed as she felt a searing pain dig into her foot. She looked down, and the girl with the dirty
fire
engine overalls was biting hard into her ankle. Ida kicked the depraved girl off of her and managed to stumble back into the room, tripping on her own feet along the way. Ida scooted herself into the center of the room. Her entire body was trembling with fear as her eyes searched the hall, wide and terrified. At once they all came pouring through the door and descended upon her before she ever had a chance to lift her weapon.

Blaire drifted back into reality and placed the report back into the folder, thinking it was colder than it had ever been inside St. Sebastian. After rubbing her shoulders, Blaire pulled out another report to find a picture of Dmytro staring back at her. The report stated that he had been lured into the basement and beaten to death with blunt objects beyond the point of recognition; he had been made faceless.

“Ida?” Dmytro yelled as he stepped off the elevator into the basement. He heard muffled cries, but could hardly see anything, as his eyes were having trouble adjusting to the sudden darkness.

“Ida? The children told me that you needed help down here,” he said squinting into the darkness. Dmytro screamed and hit the dirt floor of the basement hard as something plowed into the meaty flesh of his calf. A pair of gleaming scissors stuck up out of his white pant leg, which was quickly turning red with the spread of his blood. Looking around, he spotted Ida and Felina, sitting on the floor tied to one another. Tape covered their mouths and blood covered the rest of them. Little shapes shifted all around the room, and he heard the giggles of little girls and the hearty laughter of the boys.

“No,” he cried just as something came speeding toward his face, instantly, everything was black.

When Dmytro woke up he was being dragged. Only one eye worked properly now, and the other saw mostly blackness, although he managed to make out blurred images and detect movement with it. He tried hard to blink in hopes that he could somehow make his sight better, but a sticky substance made even blinking difficult. The children worked diligently gathering Dmytro up against their two other captives and wrapping them all in rope; the cowboys captured by the Indians. All three of them were shoulder to shoulder with their backs facing one another. Dmytro could hear his own labored breathing and the cries and moans of the women to whom he was attached. He blinked to focus his eyes, and when he looked up again, the three of them were surrounded by the children.

“Do you want to play a game?” one of the boys asked, and the smaller children yipped in a naïve excitement. The workers sat silent in response to the question, except Felina who was crying hysterically now. Dmytro was weak, and it seemed that Ida was barely conscious. The children began moving in a circle as they sang,
Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes, we all fall…
Just as they were to fall down, Dmytro watched as an arsenal of weapons came from behind their backs, rising into the air. Within moments the weapons came crashing down into the three bodies of the helpless workers. Blood sprayed the room. Dmytro watched what seemed to be his own blood splatter across the rungs of a broken baby’s crib. He did not feel anything anymore. He prayed that the women to whom he was tied could no longer feel anything either, as the children, with carefree cackles, found their starting places once again.
Ring around the rosie
…

Blaire looked up from the file to check on Travis, who seemed no better.

The morning following the massacre, one of the workers arrived at St. Sebastian for her scheduled shift. Upon discovering the bodies, she ran back to the village, where one of the first people that she saw was Ida’s husband. News spread through Boraslav quickly, and before the meager authorities could assemble, a mob of angry family members had arrived at St. Sebastian. On finding the disfigured bodies of their loved ones, they became enraged and turned their anger toward the children responsible for the heinous crime, cornering them at the back of the building in front of the steps that led to the basement. They began beating the children in a bizarre and brutal scene. By the time the authorities arrived, the child considered the leader was a bloodied mess and taking only sporadic, shallow breaths in his unconscious state, as his
crimson
-colored blood gently spread through the snow all around him.

We all fall down.

Blaire heard someone moving just outside of her door. The heavy dresser slid across the floor under the hand of some unforeseen power, the lock flipped, the doorknob turned, and the door swung open.