Come Little Children (22 page)

“They’re in the garden.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“And, umm, the snake still has legs?”

“Look closer. At Eve.”

Camilla squinted, but she couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. It was a typical illustration of the first sin—the moment when Eve took a bite of the garden’s forbidden fruit.

“I don’t know. She’s taking the first bite.”

“Yes, yes. And what happens next?”

“She tells Adam.”

“Right. ‘On my experience, Adam, freely taste, and fear of Death deliver to the Windes.’ Then what happens to the apple?”

“He eats it.”

“And?”

“I…I don’t know.”

“‘Earth trembl’d from her entrails, as again / In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan, / Skie lowr’d, and muttering Thunder, som sad drops / Wept at compleating of the mortal Sin Original.’” Jasper spoke the entire
Paradise Lost
passage from memory, then added: “In other words, the world turned upside down. But curiously enough, no one pays attention to what happened to that innocuous little apple core in all the chaos that follows. Well, I have my own theory. Believe what you will, of course.”

Camilla’s mouth hovered open as her mind raced to catch up with the wild conjecture.
He can’t possibly have said what I think he just said
. “You believe,” she spoke slowly, “that the apple core landed in Nolan? Right here in your own backyard, millennia before any Vincent set foot here?” Her face contorted even more. “So you don’t consider this a…a biological miracle, but a
biblical
one?”

Jasper closed his hymnal and lined it up precisely with the edge of the piano. “I believe it’s been a long day with a lot to
think about. You’re tired. Please, go and rest. When you wake up, your thoughts will still be with you.”

He held out a hand to help her up, but the only part of her that moved were her eyebrows. They were burrowing deeper than ever.

“Go. I’ll watch the desk.”

Still, she didn’t move. For one thing, a line had been crossed. Her first reaction was the feeling of being cheated; the next was patronization, having been force-fed a cautionary story and told to scoot off to bed—regardless of Jasper’s intent.

At the same time, a different kind of fire was now burning in her gut, and the fuel was a question that couldn’t be answered here.

She stood up, patting down the wrinkles in her pants, and moved for the door.

“Camilla,” Jasper called after her. She paused in the frame and turned back one more time. “Be careful,” he said softly. “You may not believe a word I just said—and you never might—but there’s one thing that’s certain, which is this: you’re outside the realm of science now. I beg you, be careful.”

17

A Chase in the Night

I
t was five minutes to midnight when Camilla heard Peter’s breathing ease into a deeper level of sleep. She’d done her best to tire him out before bed, slyly suggesting positions that demanded purposefully challenging angles from him while keeping things conveniently simple for her, and it was a point of pride that she’d succeeded so quickly; it wasn’t ten minutes later and he was as dead as a wax-less candle, out cold and twice as limp. Still, she wasn’t about to take chances.
Another few minutes, just to be sure
.

As she lay there, her mind wandered back to her discussion with Jasper that afternoon.
You’re outside the realm of science now
, his voice echoed,
be careful
. Their conversation had been looping around her head all day like an overplayed Beatles LP, and that particular sentence caught the needle as much as any scratched track from
Yellow Submarine
or
Rubber Soul
.

He’s wrong. We’re not outside the realm of science; we’re outside the realm of understanding. That’s where science rolls up its sleeves, straps on its steel-toe boots, and goes to work
. She curled over and fixed her gaze on the bedroom door, wiggling her feet restlessly out of the hot
flannel sheets.
It’s about time someone brought a little scientific method to all this madness and set the efficacy record straight
.

A low
gong
rose up from the main floor, followed by eleven others as the grandfather clock tolled its midnight tune. She cocked her head and listened for other noises, but nothing stuck out.

Beside her, Peter’s breath sunk lower while tides of slow-wave sleep washed over him. He sounded as satisfied as a kitten after a bowl of warm milk.

Satisfied. Just like that, lickety-split. A little sex, a little sweat—boom, asleep. Except it wouldn’t always be that simple. One day their lickety-splits would have to produce more than a proper night’s sleep, and that would be the day when he asked for the one thing her body couldn’t deliver. The truth would come out eventually.
And it changes things, even if he swears it doesn’t. The bible agrees: Ignorance is bliss, knowledge sucks—Genesis (paraphrased)
. She bit down.
Well, we’ll see about that
.

She peeled back the comforter and swung her legs silently off the mattress. Snagging her bra from the floor, she hooked it together and continued listening to Peter doze further and further away before rounding up the rest of her clothes and tiptoeing out of the bedroom.

The stairwell was pitch black. Thankfully, Camilla had an eidetic feel for every inch of the staircase by now, including the banisters, balustrades, and even which spots on the seventeen steps whined worse than a teenager being told to get dressed for Sunday mass.

She stepped off the staircase in the dining room and paused. It was colder than it should have been. The curtains by the baby grand were wafting up in a chilly draft—
someone must’ve cracked the window and forgotten to close it
—and pages of Rachmaninov drifted
across the carpet, escaped from a binder that had tumbled off the bench.

Camilla moved across the rug, skirting the sheet music, and ducked into the far hallway that led to the “Employees Only” door at the very end. She pulled the handle and a sharp gust of tile cleaner and cold air rushed past. There were no windows in the dank corridor ahead, and no light switch, so she planted her fingers on the wall and dipped inside, submerging herself in the kind of darkness that hides a person’s own palm when it’s less than an inch away from their face.

Her fingers followed the wall, tracing the network of cracks in the dusty cinder blocks until they slid over a patch of cold stainless steel. She leaned against the metal and pushed into the embalming room.

Bright lights flashed on.

Her eyes pinched shut, shielding her retinas against the hot fluorescents. If there was one room she shouldn’t be groping around in with the lights off, it was this one, no matter how well she thought she knew it by now.
One misplaced scalpel could turn this quiet reconnaissance mission into a hospital fieldtrip
.

Camilla crossed the room to a set of cabinets, finding a row of suturing needles inside, and tested the different lengths with her fingertips. She selected a seventy-three millimeter Hagedorn’s and a sixty-eight millimeter cruciate—the kind that curved up like a fishing hook—then hesitated before plucking out the tinier forty-five cruciate too.
Just to be safe
.

A gust of wind rumbled outside. It echoed through the crematorium chimney like a low, demonic howl, and a shiver slithered up her spine.
Come on, scaredy-cat. Stay focused
.

She returned to the stainless-steel doors—her tools gripped in her sweaty palms—and slipped back into the hall.

With the needles clenched in her fist, Camilla sidled deeper and deeper down the black corridor. Almost immediately, the cinder blocks dropped off around a corner and she had to stop to picture where she was.

The hall on the right led to the freezer rooms.

The hall on the left met up with the loading bay that connected the house to the garage.

But she didn’t want to go left. Or right. The target she was picturing was right in front of her.

She took two steps ahead—still blind as a bat—and reached forward. The old doorknob slid coolly into her palm; it was instantly unsettling, as if the smooth piece of metal had been waiting in the darkness to shake her hand.

She dropped to her knees. The Hagedorn’s needle was first in the keyhole, wiggling up and down, left and right. No good. She swapped in the sixty-eight cruciate and hooked the catch immediately, hearing a quiet
click
echo in the skeleton hole.

This is it
. She gripped the handle.
The real test. Can you do it?

She hadn’t forgotten how hard Moira had joggled the handle to pry it open, and that kind of noise was dangerous, especially given the basement’s significance. Too much was at stake to dismiss it as just another crackle or bump in the night.

Then all at once, standing there—frozen—with her hand on the doorknob, Camilla considered what was at stake for herself.

There are precepts with this responsibility
, Jasper’s voice chided.

(But it’s a chance to change things.)

Using it for children is altruistic. Using it for your own good is—

(It’s
not
selfish, it’s for Peter.)

And the intent informs the outcome—

(For both of us!)

Suddenly her dream washed over her again and drowned everything else out. There was the string of children, giggling, running down the church aisle, and the last little girl—the cute redhead with crooked teeth and black buckle shoes—skipping along the carpet, waving excitedly as she ran past.
See you! See you later, mom!

Hot tears boiled in the crooks of Camilla’s eyes. She had never cried in her adult life, and the tears didn’t spill now, but it was the closest she’d ever come. She saw her life in Nolan flash before her eyes: every happy moment with Peter and all the risks he’d taken for her—the night they snuck into the tree house, the morning he proposed, and the blood (
the blood!
) on his hands as he helped her mop up the scene at the
Midnight Sun
with his voice hollering at his mother that same day.
I care about Camilla! And if you care about me, you’ll treat her like part of this family. Not later, now!
Yet what had she sacrificed for him? These seeds could heal the unhealable, so what if they could heal
her
? Wasn’t it worth finding out? If it worked, life could go on as planned. She wouldn’t have to disappoint the only person she loved, and their relationship would never have to change—ever—for one little gamble, one wager, one single spin of Russian roulette.

The knob rammed twice to the right, then slammed to the left with a dead metal
thud
. She swung the door open and didn’t stop to see if anyone stirred in the night before flying in and yanking it closed behind her.

Camilla stumbled to the floor of the basement, having forgotten how many steps there were in total.

The smell of dirt eked into her nostrils, and the dampness of the forbidden den instantly made her skin crawl. Somehow the lack of light down here was spookier than it was upstairs.

She got up and swam forward with both arms fully extended. Her shoes made the scratchy Velcro sound of sneakers on movie theater floors, only she wasn’t in a movie theatre…and the gunk under her shoes wasn’t Coca-Cola.

Then out of nowhere something stroked her face.

She jerked back, her heart rate rocketing to 120, and seized the assaulter with a strangling grip.

It was nothing but the string from the basement’s solitary light bulb.

She held the thread, breathless, and waited for the world to stop spinning. As much as she wanted to pull it, she was afraid the light might reveal something terrible, like a child carved up on the table in front of her.

Or worse—a child sitting there, staring.

You’re outside the realm of science now
.

Forcing Jasper out of her head again, she tugged on the thread and the light bulb sparked to life, bathing the basement in its dim, amber glow.

The embalming table was bare.

She breathed easier.

See, fear of the dark is irrational. Now hurry up and don’t let this abattoir get to you
.

She rushed for the oak cabinet and tore open the doors. For a second she couldn’t see what she was looking for, but then she spotted it poking off the top shelf.

The chest.

Standing tiptoe, she reached up and edged the wooden box out of the cabinet, bringing it down to the embalming table, and stood back to take in its unremarkable design.
Peter could carve
something a thousand times better
. She examined the keyhole and brandished her smallest needle, the forty-five millimeter cruciate, before feeding it into the clasp.

She poked around the lock’s guts for almost a minute, but nothing happened. No click, no snap. Zip.

Something shuffled behind her.

She dropped the cruciate and spun around before the needle even
clinked
on the cement.

The den was empty. She didn’t budge; her breath stayed lodged in her throat as her eyes peeled around for the source of the patter.
Please be a mouse, please be a mouse, please be a mouse
.

Then it shuffled again, from the top of the staircase.

She scrambled to lift the chest back into the cabinet.

Thump…thump…

Someone was definitely coming downstairs. Panicking, her eyes shot to the side of the den: there was only one other exit, a black hallway that crept deeper through the jowls of the basement.
It might be a dead end
, she weighed.
You could be cornered like an animal!

The steps got closer—
THUMP, THUMP, THUMP
—as a shadow came stalking down the stairs, nearer and nearer, about to round the bend onto the den-facing platform.

Camilla rushed for the only other hiding place she could think of: the space underneath the staircase. She slid behind the support beams and ducked below the treads just as the footsteps thumped directly over top of her.