Come Little Children (37 page)

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.

It was a sobering experience, she had suddenly realized, to be among the dead—to really be among them, not as a practitioner or puppeteer of abandoned vessels, but as a humble houseguest. There was something in this place that Camilla couldn’t explain. Presences, perhaps. Or maybe imprints was a better word. Imprints of people who had all known each other and bonded together in life as well as death, leaving some sort of collective stamp on the world that was greater than the sum of its graves. It only made her feel more alone.

Don’t worry, mom. I’ll fix everything
.

Her daughter’s voice echoed over the nightmarish vision of the nooses hanging in the Vincents’ doorframes. Abigail’s innocent tone had Camilla on edge. It had been the kind of tone someone might use to say they’re going to shovel the walk, or take out the garbage.
What was she planning? How was she going to “fix” it?

The horrifying possibilities solidified the inevitable truth: Abigail had to be abolished. That thought was the sharpest and clearest of them all. If Camilla didn’t do anything, she would be risking others’ lives to protect a devil in a cute, curly-haired disguise.

The Vincents had known it. Lucas had known it. Even Peter had known it through his tears of rage and pain. Losing her would be devastating, but keeping her would be worse.

If a child goes bad, it must be abolished
.

It wouldn’t be easy—neither emotionally, nor logistically. The
Midnight Sun
would inevitably run a story revealing her and
her daughter as Nolan’s number one and two enemies, which would make moving around virtually impossible.
Even if I could get around
, she thought,
I have no idea where to begin
.

Camilla’s stomach let out a tiny gurgle. She frowned.
That’s the last thing I need to worry about right now
. But as she looked around the mausoleum, a part of her wondered how long she could keep Maslow’s hierarchy flipped on its head.
I have no food and not much heat. I can melt snow for water, but how long will that be able to keep me going?
Another gurgle escaped, louder this time, and she adjusted her legs, forcing all thoughts of meals as far away as possible.
I’ll worry about it when I worry about it. Until then, I’ve got serious thinking to do
. So Camilla retreated into the warm cocoon of her own mind, suspending her physiological needs, and concentrated on the one thing she wanted most.

Abigail. Where on earth is Abigail?

The time turned out to be much later than Camilla had thought. At two o’clock, the Anglican church bells tolled twice and she sat up, wiping the crystals of frost away from her eyelashes. She leaned back and looked at the floor in front of her—there was a rough sketch of Nolan’s main landmarks etched into the dirt at her feet. She had tried reproducing the town from memory, starting from Main Street and working her way outward to the
Midnight Sun
, the post office, the graveyard, the school, the hospital, the deputy’s office, and finally the Vincents’ house. Most of it was there, reconstructed with a combination of rocks, sand, and dead ants.

“You’re here somewhere,” she muttered, narrowing her eyes over the dirt map. “Where are you, Abigail?”

Suddenly there came the sound of car tires crunching over loose stones. Camilla stood up—the roof was just tall enough
that she didn’t have to hunch—and crossed a row of burial vaults to the far wall. She squatted and peeked through a crack in the cinder blocks.
Hmm
. The fissure was too small. She picked her handgun off the floor and jammed the handle against the stone, chipping a few chunks off, and carved out a wider peephole. She checked again.

The skies had opened up since the blizzard died off during the night, and visibility was greatly improved. Across the cemetery, clear as day, she could see a vehicle entering the iron gates.

But it wasn’t just any vehicle.

It was a hearse.

Camilla shrunk back as the Vincents’ funeral coach slunk toward the neighborhood of mausoleums. It pulled nearer, gliding down the road at an ominous pace, and stopped right outside her crypt door.

The gun was quivering in Camilla’s hand. She had no idea how many bullets it had left, but then she was frightened at herself for even wondering.

Thunk-thump
. A door opened and closed. The Vincents’ town car pulled up behind the hearse and parked with the engine still running.
Thunk-thump, thunk-thump, thunk-thump
.

The whole family was here. Their polished dress shoes crunched over the gravel, and then came the familiar
click
of the coach’s rear door releasing automatically. A shadow passed over the peephole, and for a second Camilla expected Moira’s hawk eye to appear in the crack with a look of bloody, scavenging triumph.
We’ve got you now, you miserable trollop! Come, let us rip you apart
.

But the shadow passed, and Camilla saw for the first time that the structure directly across from the Goodwynns’ tomb bore an ornate
V
insignia carved into its archway.

It was the Vincents’ crypt.

Camilla’s lips trembled as Peter stepped into view. Seeing him in his black suit—looking as dead as she felt—was immobilizing. She was a ghost watching from another plane, unable to comfort him or receive any comfort back.

She watched as Jasper, Brutus, Maddock, and Peter approached the back of the hearse and rolled Lucas’s casket out of the rear compartment.

The casket was strong and sturdy for a strong and sturdy man. Moira unlocked the crypt with the third key on the closely guarded chain around her neck, and then she and Laura helped brace the weight of the casket on their bony shoulders. Once they were balanced, the family moved together, proceeding as one, through the doorway that each of them would reenter in their own time and never return from. Truly, they were a family bound to the end.

Somewhere in the distance a siren went off, but Camilla paid it little attention. She was focused on the crypt, and when the Vincents emerged five minutes later—just as silently as when they’d entered—she watched them return to their vehicles with heavy-laden feet. Laura was being held up by Maddock, Moira by Brutus. Peter walked by himself. Where he once had a father and a brother, a wife and a daughter by his side to prop him up, he was now alone, like Sisyphus with the same circular doom.

How do you stop this?
Camilla reeled.
How do you end the vicious cycle and give this family their peace?

Then out of a dusty corner of her mind, she heard a voice tell her:
Once the fire was out, the murders stopped. Like the bad had been bottled up in that one place
. The voice triggered a thought:
it starts with the sick and spreads from there
. Suddenly more voices and
images were cropping up, faster and faster, as activation spread from one axon of her memory to the next.

News headlines of hospital spending on the rise.

Rumors of patients not getting better.

Pictures of a candlelight vigil.
‘A pair of nurses at the hospital went loony and killed five patients…Thank Christ for the fire—something caught the hospital morgue and burned the whole goddamn thing down.’

Camilla watched the Vincents drive away, and for the first time she noticed the peak of a tall, black structure in the distance.

She looked down at her feet and studied the dirt map of the town with fresh eyes. Then the sound of the distant siren—the wail of an ambulance—came into focus, and everything tied together for the first time that day.

It starts with the sick and spreads from there. That’s where I need to go
.

She leaned forward and stuck her finger determinedly in the dirt, dragging a big, fat circle around the rock that was nestled between the graveyard and the Deputy’s Office. The rock that marked the hospital.

“
Don’t worry, Peter,
”
she whispered her daughter’s words. “I’ll fix this. I’ll fix this for you.”

28

Quarantine

C
amilla had predicted the hospital would be under stricter surveillance since the
Sun
started churning out features about it, but she hadn’t expected a total lockdown.

From a copse of trees across the street, she spied two police cars parked directly in front of the entrance. A pair of officers was stationed by the doors, and every time somebody tried entering the building, the cops would stop them for a thorough pat down and a series of pointed questions. If the arrivals weren’t orderlies, doctors, or administrators, they weren’t getting in. Period.

Around back was the hospital’s loading bay. Camilla slipped into the alley unnoticed and bypassed the ambulance zone for a series of small window gutters along the foot of the wall.

She looked left, looked right, then bent down and stuck her fingers between one of the windows and the frame. Sven, the hospital’s undertaker, kept it propped open so he could smoke inside without setting off the fire alarms. He’d been caught several times, but—being the only licensed pathologist in Nolan—he sloughed off his supervisor’s threats with the safety of knowing that his job was never
really
in jeopardy. “I work with the
goddamn dead,” he once told the Minister of Health and Safety during a formal inspection. “They’re not complaining.”

Sven’s shift was from ten to six, but he usually knocked off half an hour early to make it home for Star Trek reruns. Just to be safe, Camilla had waited until seven to slip out of the Goodwynn crypt and sneak up to the west edge of the graveyard where the hospital was only a block away. She peeked around the shadows and confirmed the room was empty before scooting her feet through the frame and dropping into the abandoned basement below.