Come Little Children (21 page)

Crackle, pop!
“Down go the walled cities!”
Pop! Pop!
“Down go the strongest battlements!”
Crackle, swish!

The whole church was shaking. Every quart of blood in Camilla’s veins was ice-cold as she watched the puppet stalk closer.

She groped desperately for the gold handles again, but she couldn’t take her eyes off the rat’s twitching whiskers—that’s what it was, a
rat
, not a mouse. A rabid, thrashing rat that was closing in fast, its razor sharp teeth drooling saliva down its rubber chin onto its gray, dishcloth body.

“
PULVIS!
Your blood will be poured into the dust, and your body will lie there rotting on the ground!”

No! Stay away!
Camilla tried screaming, but the words were lodged in her throat. She suffocated as the crone’s arm drew nearer, now within five feet.

“Yes!”

No!

“Yes!” The head of the rat gnashed at her with its dripping, jagged teeth. She slammed her head against the door and finally let out a full-bore scream.

The rat lunged for her neck and plunged its fangs up to its rotten gums. Shrieking, Camilla looked up and saw the old crone standing above her, staring down with two holes where her eyes should have been.

The old woman screamed, “KEEP!”
Pop, Pop!
“YOUR!”
Crackle, swish!
“COMMANDEMENTS!”
Pop! Pop! Pop!

As the old woman bore down, the stained-glass wall behind her grew brighter and brighter, then finally the colors merged into one dazzling white light seconds before the whole world was swallowed up in the crone’s gaping black eye sockets.

16

Jasper’s Parable

C
amilla was in the Vincents’ rotunda, her head against the tough leather padding of the secretary’s chair, when she gasped back to consciousness, coughing and clutching the side of her neck as her jugular thumped harder than a thirty-pound jackrabbit’s foot.

She wiped the sweat off her forehead and sat up, looking left, right, back, forward. Good. No one was there.

No mouse puppets either
.

The nightmare was still seared on the insides of her eyelids. When she blinked she saw the old woman coming at her again, closer and closer, as the
pops
and
crackles
drowned out the organ music in the background.

Camilla raked her fingernails through her hair and kept massaging the sore spot on her neck. Finally the dream started to blur in the hazy grog of consciousness; her heartbeat went from Mach ten to five to point-five in less than thirty seconds, then leveled off at an even 110 beats per minute. The pounding in her ears faded away too, bringing attention to the one part of the dream that wasn’t dissipating: the church music. A soft hymn was still floating through the air, casting a quiet, happy
dissonance against the backdrop of horrific images that she had just witnessed.

Pushing the nightmare away, she got out of the chair—a little wobbly at first, then sturdier after a good breath—and followed the music out of the room.

Jasper was at the Steinway in the north parlor. His fingers were pressing the chords of #447 from an old leather-bound hymnal, performing for a nonexistent audience.

Camilla appeared in the doorway, hovering, unsure if he noticed her standing there. Without glancing up, Jasper tipped his head toward a chair by the window. She obliged.

The tune was unfamiliar. It was soft and dulcet; the simple melody in the right hand paired nicely with the broken chords of the left, then the two wandered off in counterpoint and repeated a couple bars later.

As Camilla sat and listened, smoothing out the wrinkles in her pants, her mind wandered back to her nightmare. The faces of the children had seemed so real—and so close, too, like she could have reached out and touched them. She saw them running by again, their tiny shoes pattering past her on the carpet, and the last little girl appeared with remarkable precision: her hair was much richer than Camilla’s current mop of burgundy—
just like when I was little
—and her black buckle shoes could have been straight out of Camilla’s own closet when she was six or seven.

She sniffed, rolling her eyes.
Silly details
.

Except they weren’t silly. Not at all. The girl—
my daughter
—was familiar. As familiar as she was a stranger.

An arpeggio ran up the piano. “So.” Jasper coughed. “Do you play?” He finished off the song with a glissando.

She looked across the room and shook her head.

“Bah. There goes my last hope for a duet partner.”

“It’s pretty. I’ll listen any time.”

“Mm. Good music makes for good reflection, especially when there’s a lot to, umm, mull over.” His fingers began fiddling around with a springy march next. “Speaking of, what was that all about?”

“Pardon me?”

“You were mumbling at the desk. I thought I’d play a little tune to wake you up before my sister came along and, well, did so less peacefully.” He winked to let her know it was their little secret.

“Thank you.”

“So?”

“I…I can’t remember,” she fibbed. “Something about someone in my family. They’re sick.”

The piano notes rode a scale to a higher octave. “Will they be all right?”

“Doctors say no.”

“My condolences.” Jasper frowned. “On the bright side, we Vincents have marvelous genes. Your own children will live long and healthy lives—I guarantee it.” The piece hopped back to the lower octave and kept bouncing along in two-four time.

Camilla swallowed her mewl. She looked at the family portrait above the mantelpiece and thought,
marvelous genes, maybe, but terrible track record
. She studied the two rows of Vincents standing in the painting and took in their ghostly canvas smiles. It was an eerie image to anyone who knew what would happen to them.

The four boys in the front row, killed overseas.

Their father, descended to madness.

Their aunt, consumed by a mysterious addiction.

“Would you mind if I ask a few questions?” Camilla said pointedly.

“By all means, constable.”

“I’m sorry—”

“No, no, that’s fine. Try me.”

Her eyes were still on the family portrait. “Which one is Warren?”

“The one on left,” Jasper said without looking up. The person he indicated was a burly, barrel-chested man with a moustache the size of a dust-pan broom. At what Camilla guessed was six foot five and more than 300 pounds, he was the largest man in the family by far, and undoubtedly the most intimidating. He towered over his miniature wife—assumedly the matron in the tight, schoolmarm dress standing beside him—and Camilla had to stop herself from trying to solve how those two geometrically opposed shapes had ever procreated successfully, and at least four times at that.

“Peter said he ran the experiments that led to the discovery. Did he document them?”

“Not to my knowledge. Warren wasn’t…Well, he wasn’t an academic. Clearly. In any case, documentation would be extremely dangerous.”

“But useful,” she muttered.

The piano music stopped. “Pardon me?”

“From a medical perspective, I mean. What if the seeds have other properties? Imagine they were brought into a lab and used to develop vaccines for, I don’t know, entire strains of illnesses.”

Jasper took both of his hands off the piano. He turned and fixated his gaze intensely on hers.

“There are precepts with this responsibility, Camilla.”

“That’s my point,” she said, stirring in her chair. “Where do the rules come from? Some”—she pointed at Warren and had to refrain from using the first couple of words that came to mind—“
lumberjack
in the middle of the woods? I mean, right from the start: rule one. Only children. Why?”

She knew she had blurted too much. She felt it in the sudden coldness of the room; the last vibrations of the piano strings had become still, and the faces above the mantelpiece stared down, motionless, like disapproving specters.

“If people could build on what he did,” she spoke more softly, “imagine what the world would be like.”

“I’m afraid to,” Jasper said. “Come here.”

He beckoned her forward like a wiry grandfather. She stood up and crossed the room to the piano while he turned his hymnal toward her. As he flipped through its pages, colorful illustrations started flying by: Bethlehem at advent, Calvary at Lent, Golgotha at Easter. This was a much nicer hymnal than the old tattered ones Camilla remembered from the pews of St. Teresa’s.

Jasper kept flipping backward, past the hymns, past the creeds, past the sacraments—even past the copyright and publishing inserts—and finally stopped with only one piece of paper left. Slowly, his long fingers rolled the page over to reveal an illustration of the Garden of Eden. Underneath, embossed in gold lettering, was the phrase
In the beginning…

“People claim Christendom is shrinking,” Jasper said, stroking his chin, “but if I had to guess, most of those people haven’t found their first gray hair yet. As the saying goes, ‘No atheists in foxholes or old folks’ homes,’ hmm?” He waved his hand in the air. “Neither here nor there. Now tell me. Is this parable familiar to you?”

Camilla nodded.

“Good. And what’s that at the center there?” he asked, tapping the colorful Garden of Eden.

“The tree of knowledge?”

“Or life, depending which theologian you ask. ‘Here grows this Cure of all, this Fruit Divine,’” he quoted Milton’s
Paradise Lost
. “And what was the only instruction given to Adam and Eve?”

“Don’t eat the fruit.”

“And what did they do?”

“Ate the fruit.”

Camilla half expected him to pull out a creepy mouse puppet and continue quizzing her like the crone from her nightmare.

It was a good metaphor, she had to admit. The tree of life to a tree that gave life with its fruit; Eve’s fall of temptation to her own curiosity.
All that’s missing are a couple of cherubs and seraphim... unless Brutus and Moira count, in which case there are two fiery beasts who round off the comparison quite nicely
.

“I know where this is going,” she said. “Human nature. Avarice. Our curiosity curses us—”

“I’m not a preacher,” he cut in. “I’m merely answering your question.”

Camilla bit down. She wondered which, exactly, of her multitudinous questions he was referring to, and how it could possibly be answered with a biblical picture book.

“According to the Good Book, the fruit exposed Adam and Eve to sin,” Jasper continued, “so that every child thereafter would be born into a world of sin, and lead sinful lives, and die sinful deaths. But understand that the older a person gets, the more sin they encounter and spread themselves. Planting our tree’s seeds in adults is like planting in bad soil. The life might grow back, but it won’t be nearly as strong and healthy
as it should be. By planting in good soil, the soil of those less exposed to the world’s wrongs—children—we sow better lives.

“Of course, some fruit will always rot. It’s the nature of, well, nature. But since one bad apple can indeed ruin a bushel, rule three is ultimately necessary. Grim, yes, but necessary.”

Camilla remembered the third rule—
if a child goes bad, it must be abolished
—and pictured a few “bad children” she had known throughout her lifetime. Little Carson Myers had smacked three baseballs through Old Man Atchinson’s windows before his tenth birthday; Becky Marsdon, six, and Mary Thompson, seven, were caught taking off their clothes for each other in the elementary girls’ bathroom; and Chad Parker, the schoolyard’s self-proclaimed kingpin, once punched a kid in the stomach so hard that the poor sucker puked blue Kool-Aid all over the jungle gym. (Chad also peed down slides and carved penises into the playground equipment, but something about the Kool-Aid incident was particularly colorful in Camilla’s memory.) Suddenly, she pictured Jasper towering over these children with a double-edged ax, its blade flecked with the blood of other bad children from over the years.

As if reading her mind, Jasper clarified. “A ‘bad’ child is more than misbehaved, especially in this sense. They don’t
think
right—their moral compasses are demagnetized. Trust me, they might look like children but they’re extremely dangerous.”

Camilla couldn’t imagine a brat worse than Chad Parker, but Jasper was suddenly a lot paler than before, as if remembering stories that he’d rather not talk about. She decided to steer the conversation in a different direction.

“Peter said your family used to eat the apples.”

“
Used
to,” he sniffed. “I can’t say any of us has had one. Though I suspect he was talking about mother?”

She nodded. “They kept her arthritis down? And even cured colds and flus?”

“Hard to say. Once our family understood the magnitude of what they were dealing with, not to mention potential consequences, no one, not even Warren, tested it on himself. Using it for children is altruistic, but using it for your own good is selfish. As with anything, the intent informs the outcome.”

“So even if the seeds could cure anything—Alzheimer’s, Asperger’s, blindness…”
Infertility
. “…you wouldn’t use them?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s the first lesson we were ever taught. Do not eat the fruit. And
that
is not some silly Vincent rule; it comes from a much higher authority.”

Camilla caught his eyes scanning the hymnal.

“This isn’t Eden—”

“Isn’t it?” Jasper leaned in. His voice was barely above a whisper now. “Consider, even for a fraction of a second, that the garden existed. That this isn’t a parable, but a factual account.”

Camilla laughed so fast that the gust of air made her snort. “You’re saying the Garden of Eden is in your backyard?”

“No.” He frowned. “Not unless you see a flaming sword floating around the veranda.”

“Then what are you—?”

“That perhaps there’s a part to the story that’s gone unnoticed.” He tapped the hymnal again. “Look closely. What do you see?”

“Adam and Eve?”

“What else?”