Come Little Children (33 page)

Take a good look, girlie. Take a good look at what you did
.

Camilla walked to the porch and up the steps, out of sight from Abigail, and sat on the wicker bench that she and Peter had once rested on while they waited for Todd to return to life. Except now she was alone; completely, utterly alone. No one else in the world—not in the Yukon, not in Nolan, not even in her own family—could be there to hold her head and tell her things would be all right.

She missed Peter fiercely. She missed the days when things were warm and when all they worried about was not getting caught kissing in the old tree house. She looked at the tree across the yard—the only fruit tree in the world that never died, not even in winter—with its green leaves still glittering underneath
the powdery snow. Somewhere in those leaves was the place where she and Peter had first made love. It had been so beautiful that night. She wondered if she would give it up now, knowing that if they hadn’t been there then she wouldn’t have found the apple that brought on this living hell. Was it better to wipe out every happy moment with their daughter from the last seven years, or keep the same decision and face the consequences?

Camilla sat there for an hour and pondered the difficult questions that she had always ignored. Anytime a good memory came into focus, she would suddenly burst into sobs, and when she wanted to cry she couldn’t because her tear ducts were bone dry. The northern lights abandoned the sky, and the moon—the midnight sun—replaced the broiling colors with a ghostly, preternatural glow.

Suddenly the mood shifted.

Camilla straightened on the edge of her seat, staring at the pond.

A little girl’s hand reached out of the hole in the ice, followed by another. Stephanie pulled herself out of the water, then Erica was right behind her, clawing out of the gap with only four fingers on one hand and two on the other.

Camilla stood and walked toward them. Neither girl acknowledged her—they were busy examining their own bodies in the moonlight. One of them cracked her knuckles and stretched her neck while the other felt the hole in her face where her left eye should have been. Everything they did was slow and mechanical, as if they were just learning their motor skills again.

The closer Camilla got, the more she thought something was wrong. They were moving, yes, but they looked like they were stuck somewhere between death and life.

She stopped a few meters away and knelt slowly to the ice.

“Hello. Girls?”

The sisters didn’t acknowledge her. Instead, one leaned over and whispered something to the other.

Camilla couldn’t hear them. She slid closer.

The girls were whispering back and forth now, although there was no expression on either of their faces.

“Girls? It’s time to go home.”

She reached out to touch Erica’s arm, and that’s when it happened—the twins moved like two bolts of lightning and knocked her on her back with surprising force. Her head slammed against the ice and she felt a sudden flash of pain in her arm as she looked over and saw Stephanie sinking a row of sharp teeth into her biceps.

Camilla threw Erica off and pulled on Stephanie’s hair as hard as she could, attempting to toss her away, but Erica latched on again and tackled all three of them to the ice. Camilla screamed, but one of the girls grabbed her cheeks and bashed her head against the ground.

Camilla went limp, pain clouding her vision.

She felt dizzy, like her body was moving even though she was lying flat on her shoulders. Moaning, she blinked back to consciousness and realized that she
was
moving—the twins were dragging her to the hole in the ice—and the rush of a dreadful realization came all too late.

“NOO—!”

Camilla’s head was pushed under the water and forced to stay.

The pond erupted in bubbles as it muffled her hellish screams. From under the surface, she could see her killers sitting on top of her, staring through the jagged hole with moonlight framing their demented faces. She kicked and lashed with
everything she had left, but darkness continued pressing in. Her mind raced faster than it ever had before, and in a final moment of clarity, it told her the only thing it could think of:
stop moving
.

And so Camilla quit moving. The bubbles stopped floating to the surface and her muscles went limp in the girls’ hands.

The one-eyed sister kept Camilla’s head submerged to ensure her victim was dead, but the other twin wasn’t as careful. Her grip relaxed, and all of a sudden—with a hidden burst of life power—Camilla’s arms flew up and then slammed down again on the solid ice. Erica’s brittle fingers shattered and Camilla’s hands flew free, grabbing the girl on top of her and throwing her out of the way.

Camilla’s head burst out of the water and arctic air inflated her lungs. She leaped up, gasping, and ran for the house, but just as she started making distance, she slipped on the ice and her legs gave out beneath her.

The twins were on her again with renewed viciousness. They ripped at her arms and shoulders and scalp…

Then Camilla spotted it ten feet away: the ax she had used to crack open the ice.

If a child goes bad, it must be abolished
.

She jabbed the twins with her elbows and threw herself forward. Her hands landed on the shaft of the ax, and as the sisters leaped up, she spun around and sunk the blade into one of their sides. In another fluid motion, she tore the blade out and clubbed the other sister with the blunt end of the metal, sending her spinning over the ground and sprawling out like an unconscious snow angel.

Camilla drew herself up, panting and wheezing. She looked at the twins’ bodies—the shells that she had tried desperately to save—and watched with horror as they writhed painfully on the
ice. Perhaps she would have felt more remorse if they hadn’t just tried to kill her.

She glanced up at the moon and it stared back, waiting to see what she would do next.

It didn’t take long to find out.

Camilla approached the bodies of the girls and hovered over them. Without a single word, she lifted the ax in the air and brought it down as cleanly as she could. Then she did it one more time.

Twice was all.

25

Closed Caskets

T
he Cory sisters’ funeral attracted nearly half the town of Nolan. More than three hundred people crammed shoulder to shoulder in the pews of the old Anglican church, and another two hundred packed themselves wherever they could find additional space: the balcony, the basement, and along both sides of the crowded sanctuary. Capacity was double what the code allowed, but when the fire chief walked in, he took off his hat with the rest of them and stood solemnly at the back.

Camilla and Laura were standing in the farthest corner of the church dressed in blacks. Abigail was in front of them with her hands politely crossed; she was wearing a black dress with a white ribbon tied into her hair, complete with black shoes and a little black clutch containing all of a seven-year-old’s necessities—lip balm, four dimes, and half a stick of bubble gum. Camilla had dressed her that morning and neither of them had said a word to each other the entire time.

The minister—the same grandfatherly man who had married Lucas and Laura, then Peter and Camilla—entered from the back, clothed in his white funeral vestments. His stole and surplice rippled behind him as he walked somberly up the aisle,
and as he passed each row, a chain of coughs and sniffles rose into the steeple.

The organist began playing the opening hymn as the pallbearers entered with the two miniature caskets. On top of each case was a beautiful casket spray of pink carnations. The pallbearers, four on each casket, were comprised of Mr. and Mrs. Cory, their siblings—all men—and Peter and Lucas for extra support.

Camilla watched her husband and brother-in-law help bring the caskets to the front plinth and set them before the Paschal candle. She saw Peter touch the arm of Mr. Cory, who had tears falling down his face, and Mr. Cory nodded back, mouthing
thank you
.

Camilla had felt sick all morning, but that one gesture—the image of Peter patting Mr. Cory’s tear-stained sleeve—nearly made her keel over. This was wrong. The whole funeral was wrong. Stephanie and Erica would still be alive and the church would have been empty on a Saturday afternoon if she had just handed over her daughter before anything awful came to pass.

Mr. Cory should be the one patting Peter’s arm and offering his condolences, not the other way around
.

But Camilla hadn’t told the truth. She had lied through her teeth, claiming that she had found the girls washed up with the Cory’s canoe when she was out for a walk, and that her presence had scared off a lone timber wolf that, unfortunately, had found the sisters first. It sounded plausible enough—two kids sneak out on the lake, get tossed overboard, and freeze in the water—and no one had any reason to deny it. The parents were too decimated to question whether or not the canoe had been tied to their dock since the debacle began, and so Camilla forged a set of autopsy papers with the coroner’s signature that Jasper
kept on file and the police closed the case the same day, leaving Nolan a few hours later. Finally, she had embalmed the girls herself to ensure that none of the Vincents would see the markings on their chests, and then went so far as to claim the wolf had done too much damage to bring them back the old-fashioned way. Indeed, Camilla and her daughter had both gotten off with the perfect murders.

“We have come here today,” the priest began as the pallbearers took their seats, “to remember before God our sisters Stephanie and Erica Cory, to give thanks for their lives, to commend them to God our merciful redeemer and judge, and to comfort one another in our grief.”

As Peter and Lucas walked along the front pew, Camilla saw half the heads in the congregation turn and follow them.

The tension in Nolan had been getting worse, and the
Midnight Sun
was capitalizing on the atmosphere by churning out stories that increasingly compared the town’s ambience to that of 1989’s. Someone at the prison had leaked information about the inmates being separated for “exhibiting unusually violent tendencies,” and there was a whole spread on how the hospital’s sedatives budget had quadrupled in one month, not to mention an interview from an anonymous nurse who claimed that a majority of the patients in the past three weeks were becoming sicker, not healthier. Even though the Vincents were never explicitly mentioned in any of the articles, they were certainly brought up in the Letters to the Editor section: “Everyone knows who’s behind this”, “Force them to share their registry; have every family checked,” “Either they move or we do. Who agrees?” Some less journalistically-inclined individual even took it upon themself to voice their opinion by throwing a rock through the Vincents’ south parlor window. Since then, Brutus
had taken a strong defensive stance among their day-to-day operations; he moved several of the manor’s gun cabinets into the main hallways and insisted that if anyone left the house, they take a revolver with them for safety purposes. “We’re not the dangerous ones,” he had snarled. “They are.”

Camilla looked around the church. This occasion had been one of the few exceptions to Brutus’s new rule: the only Vincents concealing pistols under their jackets were Peter and Lucas, since as pallbearers they were the largest targets.

“God of hope,” the priest recited, “we come to you in shock and grief and confusion of heart. Help us find peace in the knowledge of your loving mercy to all your children, and give us light to guide us out of our darkness and into the assurance of your love. Amen.”

The congregation echoed a heavy “amen.”

Camilla looked down. She had just heard Abigail repeating the “amen” quietly with everyone else.

Pray all you want, girlie. It’s too late now
.

She looked back at the caskets in front of the altar and stared intensely at the white sidings. Part of her expected the lids to smash open and the Cory sisters to come clawing out, reaching forward with their pruny, strangling fingers to finish her off.

But the caskets stayed still. The twins were dead—for good.

If someone would have unlatched the coffins and unhinged the heavy tops, they would have found both sisters stretched out in their Saturday bests. Camilla had dressed them with brand-new clothes that the Corys had supplied and achieved some of her best reconstructive makeup work since mortuary school. Their wounds were virtually invisible: the places where she’d smashed their skulls in with the ax had been reassembled with putty and concealed by locks of their own hair, and Stephanie’s eyeball
had been replaced with a glass marble before being sutured shut. Thankfully, the pink embalming fluid had put some color back in their cheeks, and by the time Camilla had finished with them, the twins looked just like their cute little selves instead of the demonic monsters that had pinned her to the ice and tried to drown her.

The funeral service lasted only another twenty minutes. There was no eulogy, and when the commendation was finished, the priest looked down at the pews and offered his holy dismissal. “May the love of God, which transcends all understanding, bless and console you, and all who have known and loved Stephanie and Erica, this day and forevermore. Amen.”

One more “amen” echoed in the congregation, and the organ began the closing hymn.

The pallbearers resumed their posts and took the handles of the white caskets. They exited the church with the immediate family following suit, and then everyone else fell in behind, heads hung low, arms draped around loved ones. Camilla noticed a few of them shooting daggers at the crest on her jacket, but otherwise the townspeople were respectful of the situation and left without stirring trouble.

As the crowd trickled out, Moira came down from the balcony and caught Camilla and Laura hovering in the narthex.

“Stop standing there like mannequins,” she muttered. “Start packing up. The candles, the flowers, the mementos—we’re out of here in half an hour.” She clapped her hands chop-chop, and Camilla and Laura took off in separate directions.