Come Little Children (20 page)

She shifted her eyes to the old-fashioned rotary on the glossy plane of the desk. It hadn’t rung once. There wasn’t a single paper on the in/out tray either, and not a speck of dust on the neatly typed labels of the rolodex or the silvery surface of the Tensor lamp.

She looked at the clock—10:05 a.m.—and then at the phone again.
You have reached the Avalon Park Center for Psychiatric Care. Our reception hours are between nine a.m. and four thirty p.m
.

She reached over and picked up the receiver, then immediately put it down.

It’s 12:05 where she is. They’re probably out to lunch
. She caught herself and giggled.
Isn’t
that
the perfect answering message? “You’ve reached the Avalon Park Center for Psychiatric Care. Sorry, we’re all out to lunch. Phone again never.”

Her hand pulled away from the phone. Now wasn’t a good time. No, she had to be patient. After all, what if she was on the line and missed a call for the funeral home? Or worse, what if Moira walked in and found her gabbing away on their long-distance plan without (heaven forbid) using a toll-free number? No, it would just have to wait. Her mom didn’t
need
to know she was engaged right this particular nanosecond anyway.

Depending on which mom it is today, she might not even care
.

The reality was, Camilla had four or five mothers—all in the same body. Diana Carleton was Avalon’s first confirmed case of Dissociative Identity Disorder since the fall of 1992, when the previous patient with DID had to be transitioned to another facility after stabbing an orderly with a pair of crinkle-cut scissors at crafts time. But luckily—if there was any luck to be had living with such a debilitating disease—the same symptoms that awarded you a public exorcism only a century ago now earned you a warm bed with a stateroom view and three square meals a day, thanks in no small part to something much more powerful than divine providence: the holy trinity of disability insurance, alimony, and Canadian healthcare.

Diana’s personalities had no knowledge of one other. It was like there were multiple people stuck inside one vessel, each with her own set of memories and idiosyncrasies. Only one of them was in control at any given time, but the vehicle changed
drivers often and without warning. Some days she was distant and comatose, other days she’d start launching swearwords like Shrike missiles and need to be sedated. Her stranger identities included a little boy who called himself Scotty, as well as an old swami who communicated in a throaty language that no one else could understand. It was sad and frightening for anybody to witness, let alone her own daughter.

Camilla opened the bottom desk drawer to try and busy herself, but it was completely bare. She leaned over and checked the wastebasket— zilch. Not even a tissue.
Somebody give Laura some Valium. Geez
.

With no distractions, Camilla’s mind wandered back to her mother.

I wonder how bad it’s getting
.

Their relationship wasn’t always as rocky as it had been during the last four years, but that wasn’t saying much.
When you’re five years old and your mother stops making your grilled cheese to tell you she doesn’t know who you are, then screams to get out of her ‘fucking kitchen’, you learn how to fend for yourself pretty quick
. Ever since she could remember, Camilla had dressed herself and walked fourteen blocks to school, through back alleys and demolition sites, to hide her lack of supervision, and little did her ignorant parents know, it was clever moves like that which kept them under the radar of Child Protection Services for so long.

Camilla’s eyes were on the receiver again.

Suddenly she was glad that it wasn’t ringing. Very glad. A call to this desk meant ten-to-one that somebody had just bit the big one, and in all likelihood, their loved one would be inconsolable.
That
, Camilla cringed,
is another heap of emotional baggage I’d rather not handle right now. I’ll take the boredom, thank you very much
.

She leaned back and stared up at the stained-glass cupola in the ceiling, studying how the sunlight colored the tall, circular dome. It was just as pretty as the evening she first arrived.

She began counting the individual panels of glass. It reminded her of going to church when she was little, around ages five and six, before things got really bad with her mom (Diana had always insisted on Sunday morning services if she was in the right frame of mind). Everyone else would be paying attention to the sermon or the scripture readings—or pretending to, at least—while Camilla counted the pieces of glass that made up the large window behind St. Teresa’s front altar. Occasionally she became so lost in the individual building blocks that when she sat back and took in the whole again, the geometry of the glass and the waves of Sunday morning light would suddenly overwhelm her all at once. It was physics at its most beautiful.

She blinked slower and slower.

Eighty-eight, eighty-nine…

Even slower.

Ninety…ninety-one…

In the distance, she swore she heard a hymn start playing as her eyelids came together and sealed off the quiet lobby.

When she opened her eyes again, she was sitting in the back of St. Teresa’s church.

Her shiny black buckle shoes dangled over the edge of a wooden pew, and her mother was perched beside her, dressed in a pair of skin-tone leggings underneath a blue paisley skirt.

She looked up at the sanctuary.

There was a row of children sitting on the steps to the altar. In front of them was the oldest, frailest woman she’d ever seen. The elder was sharing a lesson about Moses with the help of
her theological assistant—a tattered mouse puppet, which had clearly seen better days. It wasn’t a friendly looking animal, or a furry one either. It had a gray dishcloth for a body and a small rubber head with two beady black eyes and a plastic mouth. The old lady was as quiet as a church mouse herself—about as fragile as a communion wafer too—and as she spoke, her soft words were muffled by the $100,000 sound system that every church seems to own, yet none have ever learned how to properly operate.

Crackle, pop! Pop!
“Can anybody tell me”—
crackle, swish
—“what God gave to Moses?”
Swish, swish, pop!

Camilla watched as two of the shier children looked down and quietly started plucking the burgundy carpet below their feet. A pack of mini von Trapps scrunched up their faces and checked to see if their siblings knew the correct answer, but all six of them seemed utterly stumped. They glanced at their parents in the congregation but received no help from them either; the adults were all leaning forward in their seats, having missed what the old lady had mumbled through the hissing lapel mike. Camilla snickered.
Can’t have the word of God coming in too loud and clear, or Christians might actually start questioning it
.

“Do
you
know?” a timid voice piped up.

Camilla looked toward the lectern and saw a little girl staring at her from the altar steps. Unblinking.

“Sure she does,” said another voice. “Tell us.”

“Come on, help us out.”

Camilla blinked, and suddenly every kid at the front of the church was staring at her. Their mouths weren’t moving, but their voices were whispering from somewhere deep inside her head.

Tell us, quick
.

She doesn’t know—

Yes she does. She just doesn’t want to help
.

Why won’t she help us? Why?

Pop! pop!
“What’s that, Ms. Mousey?”
Crackle, swish!
The old crone held the puppet up to her ear and pretended to hear it whisper the answer she was looking for.
“
God gave Moses”—
crackle, swish, swish
—“commandments.”
Pop! Pop!

The old woman continued talking about Moses, but her voice was drowned out by the increasing whispers of the little children. They were all looking inquisitively at Camilla in the back pew.

Why are you sitting back there?

Are you different than us?

My mom makes me sit up here, why doesn’t yours?

Are you really shy?

Camilla gulped and shook her head. Shyness had nothing to do with why she never went up for the children’s lessons. The truth was, she
hated
being patronized. That’s all it was: just a bunch of Christian mollycoddling where chatty, conditioned children were praised like precocious geniuses and the quiet ones were talked down to like two-year-olds. To cap it off, the mere thought of having to recite answers for old Methuselah and that dumb rodent, Ms. Mousey, made her blood boil (of course, the questions were never that difficult—if you answered “Jesus,” “the cross,” or “for our sins,” you had a ninety-five percent chance of getting it right—but back then it was all about the principle).

Pop!
“Amen.”

The pop twitched the whole church like a TV station going haywire, then coming back stable. None of the kids were staring at Camilla anymore—if they ever had been—and the old
woman was beginning to back away, having just finished the children’s prayer and dismissed them for Sunday school.

As the organ began playing again, the children raced down the aisle for the back of the church where the classrooms were. Camilla watched their cute faces rollick by, not a care in the world, and then looked around at the other people in the congregation. The parents were all smiling too, proud, content, watching their sons and daughters gambol down the aisle. Everyone seemed so happy.

Come on, come on!
The children grinned as they flew past. Their lips still weren’t moving.

Come with us!

It’s fun, we promise!

As they flashed by, Camilla’s heart thumped faster. A wave of excitement washed over her and she reached for her mom’s legs to ask if she could go along too.
I’ve changed my mind, mom! I want to go with them!
But all she felt was the glossy varnish of the pew.

She looked over. Her mother was gone.

Glancing down, she noticed her feet were suddenly touching the ground, and that she was now wearing skin-tone leggings with a paisley skirt.

She looked back at the string of kids running downstairs, but they were all gone—all except one. The last girl, a cute redhead with crooked teeth and black buckle shoes, came skipping down the carpet, waving excitedly as she ran past. It was like seeing a younger reflection whiz by. “See you! See you later, mom!” Then
whoosh
, she was gone.

Mom?

Camilla leaped out of the pew just as the narthex door wafted shut.

Her hand lunged for the handle and gave it a firm pull, but it didn’t budge. It was locked. She peeked through the door’s windowpane and caught a fleeting glimpse of the girl’s back disappearing down the lobby stairs, then a second later the girl was out of sight.

“Come back!” Camilla shouted, smacking the door with both hands. “Come back! Come open the door!”

She wrung her fists around the golden handles and pulled as hard as she could, but her muscles were suddenly Jell-O. The more she tugged, the weaker she felt, as if every tendon and ligature were melting around her bones.

“Help,” she grunted. “Someone…help…open this door!” She turned to the congregation.

But everyone was gone.

The families and the minister had all disappeared. The organist was gone too, even though a soft hymn was still creeping through the choir screen, filling the air along with the smoke that wafted off the suffocated candle wicks.

The only other person in the sanctuary was the old woman standing at the bottom of the altar steps. She still had Ms. Mousey draped over her right hand, and the two of them—the puppet and the puppeteer—were like statues, staring down the aisle with black, pupil-less eyes.

“Can you help me?” Camilla asked. But as soon as she spoke, she wished that she could take the words back. There was a terrible feeling in her gut that she didn’t want the old woman getting any closer.

The woman didn’t move.

Camilla tested the door handle behind her waist again; it didn’t budge.

She took a deep breath and spun around, putting her lips against the small crack between the two handles, and called out, “Anyone there! I’m stuck in here!”

She turned her head and put her ear to the crack, listening, but no one answered. The whole building was silent except for the chords of the slow nocturne echoing in the carillon tower.

Camilla checked over her shoulder again: the old woman was still at the other end of the aisle, staring at her. She hadn’t moved an inch.

Except…Wait—was she at the second pew before? Or the bottom of the altar?

All of a sudden the pot lights went out.

A feeling of panic welled up in Camilla’s throat as the room was swallowed by darkness. The only remaining light came from the stained-glass wall at the front of the church, which cast a long, distorted shadow of the old woman down the center aisle.

Pop! Pop!

The speakers above crackled like bullet fire and Camilla jolted, instantly letting go of the door. Her eyes were fixated on the old woman—and the old woman’s on hers—which made the hairs of her neck stand on end.

The gut-wrenching screech that followed was half-human, half-static.

“
PLAGA MAGNA!”
The speakers crackled like flames. “The Lord has prepared his people for a great slaughter!
ELECTI CARNIFICUM!
He has chosen their executioners!”

Camilla recoiled against the door. Bits of dust crumbled from the ceiling onto the crown of her head as the volume shook the bolts of the speaker cases.

“It is a day of ruin and desolation!” the old woman’s voice scraped. “A day of darkness and gloom, of clouds, blackness, trumpet calls, and battle cries!”

The mouse puppet moved forward, pulling the crone down the aisle like the head of a small beast attached to a crooked arm. Its oil-drop eyes glinted in the darkness, coming closer and closer as the woman screeched though the blazing sound system.