Come Little Children (4 page)

Suddenly something glinted to the left.

It was one of the swings, rocking by itself in the wind.

Except it couldn’t have been the wind, because only one of the two swings was moving.
Someone was just there and must’ve taken off when they saw us coming
.

Camilla squinted harder, but the shadows hid too much. All she could distinguish were a few paper bags caught in the playground’s fence and an empty bike rack curled up like a skeleton’s rib cage.

Her stomach gurgled.

The thoughts of the playground were immediately replaced with thoughts of food, and she wondered if dinner would be waiting when they arrived. Just in case it wasn’t, she forced herself to finish “The Hearse Song” in an attempt to lose—or at least suppress—her appetite.

“Your stomach turns a slimy green and pus pours out like whipping cream. You spread it on a slice of bread, and that’s what you eat when you are dead.” She nodded, done, and put the thought of food completely out of her head.

Next the hearse passed a tiny chapel with a cemetery situated on the side. Headstones and cenotaphs lined the tidy rows, and farther back was a chain of old family crypts. Camilla’s eyes picked apart the plot arrangement efficiently, noting the areas where the wealthier families were buried versus poorer families and immigrants. It was always intriguing, she thought, to see how social segregation continues separating humans in the afterlife, even when death reduces them to identical heaps of dirt.

But the hearse wasn’t stopping at the cemetery today. It drove to the end of Alpine Street and took another turn onto a muddier road.

Camilla could feel they were getting close. She put her textbook in her suitcase and zipped it shut, then started scratching her fingernail polish again.

This was it. This was what all her nerves had been building up to over the last seven days.
What if it’s not what I expected? I’ve given up so much—more than I ever thought I would—and what if it’s too grueling or too different from school or too much at once…

As her fears ricocheted in her skull, she looked down and started humming “The Hearse Song” again to try to summon support from her faraway friends. By the last couple of lines, her thoughts were clear and her heartbeat was back to normal.
Finally she took a deep breath and looked up just as the hearse rounded a bend and the Vincent Funeral Home appeared through the spruce in the darkness.

Set back from the road was an old Victorian mansion with a porch that wrapped around the right side of the house. Eight-foot-high hedges circled the yard, and a grand fountain gurgled in the very center, its water spilling off its different layers like a stone wedding cake. A wrought-iron fence enclosed the whole plot with evenly spaced
V
insignias curled into the metal, and the main gate stood wide open to welcome its masters home.

As the hearse pulled through the gate, Camilla was transfixed. Her humming began to fade away as they crept past the impressive fountain and through the topiary, until finally, just as they arrived at the front steps, the last two lines of the foreboding song were nothing but a distant echo in the back of her mind.

Oh never laugh as the hearse goes by
,

For you may be the next to die
.

3

The Vincents

T
he rear doors of the hearse clicked and hovered open automatically. Camilla crawled out feet-first onto the driveway and turned around to grab the handles of her suitcases.

“Leave them,” a voice barked from the front of the vehicle.

Camilla peeked around the door and saw a man in his early sixties rolling out of the driver’s seat. At five three, 240 pounds, his BMI was off the charts, and from the sounds of his panting so was his blood pressure. He had on a three-piece suit, but the jacket and vest were undone (either for improved airflow or because the buttons couldn’t reach).

“Follow me,” he said.

Camilla watched him waddle up the steps of the porch and fell in close behind. The planks bent under their feet as a breeze rustled by and tossed a few leaves onto the veranda.

“Damn,” the man muttered. “Just swept that.”

He reached forward and gripped one of the double door’s handles, jostling it back and forth, and pushed into the foyer.

Camilla stepped inside and stopped to let her eyes adjust to the dimness.

She was in a short hallway with a tall entrance arch waiting six feet ahead. The man was already at the end of the hall, half gone around the corner, and as Camilla followed along she passed through the same archway into an open rotunda.

The man had vanished, but Camilla barely noticed. She had come to a full stop—spellbound with pupils as big as dinner plates—beneath the estate’s entryway.

The rotunda was beautiful. It was an octagonal room with a reception desk situated against the farthest wall. Along the edges, a series of eight columns supported the roof with incredibly ornate capitals on top, and below, the buffed marble floor looked just about clean enough to eat off of. Each of the walls had a decorative niche that displayed carefully arranged vases, and above, the sunset shone through a stained-glass cupola that fractured the red light into hundreds of kaleidoscopic shards.

Spectacular
.

There were three doorways that split off toward different directions of the house, and as Camilla peeked into the room beside her, the man’s voice boomed from the opposite arch. “Keep up!”

Camilla darted through door number two and into an upholstered sitting area. The rugs and furniture smelled freshly shampooed—not an atom of dust in sight. She noticed another door labeled “Chapel”.
This must be the narthex for the wake services
.

“Ahem.”

Camilla spun to see the large man tapping his pocket-watch down the hall.

“It’s dinnertime, giddyap.”

“Sorry.” She doubled her pace and hid a smile behind her hand.
So there is a meal
.

She stayed in tandem as they wound their way through the halls toward the intensifying smell of something delicious. Still, it was hard for her not to pause every three feet. Massive portraits hung on the walls, candelabras decorated the credenzas, and stone busts watched them go past from every dark cavity. This wasn’t just any McFuneral Home—it was a cache of heirlooms steeped in history, and Camilla was barely able to contain her excitement. Her anxious nerves were completely replaced with eager ones.

The hallway opened up on a large dining room. Four people, all formally dressed, were sitting at the long dinner table with only a few scraps of food left on their plates and a splash of red in each of their wineglasses.

“Brutus.” A woman, late fifties, stood at the head of the table. Her tight charcoal hair and pursed lips made a stern impression.

The coachman nodded and crossed the room.

“I knew you’d make it back,” said another man in his sixties. His frame was almost as thin as his wiry silver hair. “The engine belt held up then, I assume?”

“Barely,” Brutus barked. “Almost broke down in Arlington again. Goddamn landau.”

“Belongs in a museum, really. It’s a piece of history.”

“I’ll tell you what it’s a piece of, it’s a piece of sh—”

“Not at dinner,” the first woman cut in.

Camilla snickered from the edge of the room. No one had acknowledged her yet—she was still hovering in the shadows—so she inched forward while folding her hands nervously into her armpits.

Suddenly the old woman called out, “Laura! Brutus is home!”

“Coming!” a voice responded from another room.

“Lucas, take your uncle’s jacket.”

“Yes, mother,” a young man replied.

There was a sudden fluster of activity at the table. A strong-looking man in his early thirties stood and took Brutus’s jacket while the others rushed to tuck a napkin into the fat man’s collar and pour him a glass of Shiraz. Out from the kitchen came a young woman, barely thirty, balancing a silver tray, a basket of buns, and a gravy boat in her arms. She set it all in front of Brutus and ladled a creamy sauce onto his potatoes, then disappeared back into the kitchen.

Camilla’s stomach growled.

The family’s conversation was quite loud now. As Brutus shoveled forkfuls of lamb into his mouth, Camilla thought to herself that business must have been going well.
Lamb shanks and scallops, Shiraz and crème brûlée. God grant me the leftovers
.

The kitchen door sprung open again and the woman named Laura came out carrying a smaller tray. She set it down in front of an empty chair and then ran to see how Brutus was doing.

Camilla gulped, stomach gurgling, and walked over to the empty seat.
I guess I’ll help myself then
. She sat down and unfolded the cloth napkin beside the tray, laid it in her lap, and picked up a polished fork.

Suddenly the room was silent.

Camilla looked down the table to see all six family members staring at her like she had just committed a crime.

“S-Sorry,” Camilla apologized. “I…uh…I thought this plate was for me.”

“Yours?” the old woman said. She got up and crossed the room, staring Camilla down as she passed over the rug. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s Prim’s and Proper’s.”

“Prim and Proper?”

Below, a couple of synchronized meows answered Camilla’s question. She looked down to see two black cats arching their spines against her chair.

“Oh, I’m—I’m sorry.” Camilla jumped out of the seat, and the two cats hopped on.

The old woman reached forward and lifted the lid off the silver tray to reveal a block of Fancy Feast. “We didn’t want Brutus eating alone.” The cats dove their noses in and Camilla turned bright red, hunching over unattractively to try and make herself seem as small as possible.

“You’re Camilla?” another voice asked.

Camilla looked down the table and made eye contact with a man about her age. He was the only one who hadn’t spoken yet, clearly the youngest, with a boyish face and the kind of sensible haircut from the fifties that sort of just fell into place, like Anthony Perkins’ in
Friendly Persuasion
or
The Matchmaker
.

Camilla nodded, and there was a moment of silence when neither of them said anything else.

“Enough pleasantries,” the old woman announced. “Dinner’s over.”

“Shouldn’t we introduce ourselves?” Laura asked.

“Why? She’ll forget our names anyway.”

“Actually,” Camilla piped up, then added timidly, “I think I’ve got them.”

No one said anything.

Camilla hated the silence, so she raised a shaky finger and began pointing out the people at the table one by one, starting with the old woman.

“You’re Moira; you interviewed me. Brutus picked me up. Jasper’s still wearing his director’s name tag. You’re Laura and
you’re Lucas—married, I assume, because of the matching wedding bands. And”—she stared at the boy with the young face and Perkins haircut, narrowing her gaze—“you’re the only one I didn’t catch.”

“Peter,” said the boy.

“Peter. Nice meeting you.”

Lucas, Peter’s broad-shouldered brother, grinned across the table. “Impressive!”

“Yes, impressive,” Moira dismissed with a wave of her hand. “But dinner’s over. Back to work.”

“Work?” Camilla whispered under her breath, checking her watch.

“Yes,” Moira hissed. She perked an eyebrow to emphasize that her hearing was razor sharp. “You brought company, didn’t you?”

A door opened up to a wide corridor. Moira led Camilla inside, her high heels clacking down the hall at a brisk pace. This part of the house was different: the decor had shifted from polished-wood panels and warm rugs to bare white walls and cold tiling.

“That one.” Moira pointed to a set of swing doors with porthole windows. “I’ll bring the gurney.”

As Moira disappeared around a corner, Camilla put her hand on one of the double doors and pushed inside.

The space was dimly lit and steeped with the unique embalming room scent of bleach and formaldehyde. There were two washing stations—each equipped with a long porcelain table, a vintage Turner embalming machine, and an instrument cart—and along each of the walls was a series of handmade drawers and cabinets with the same white-on-wood finish found in Protestant kitchens and wartime medical clinics. There wasn’t
a mote of color in the whole place. It actually
felt
desaturated, as if everything but gray had been hosed down the drain in the center of the room’s floor.

It might not have been the most modern facility Camilla had ever laid eyes on, but it was here and it was real, making the whole arrival feel real too.

And then she saw it.

In the far corner, lying across a table, was Camilla’s first body in the Vincents’ embalming room.

It was a man. His eyelids were already closed—either sealed together with eye caps or glued shut—and his arms were stiff at his sides. She walked closer, her eagerness getting the best of her, until she was hovering directly over top.

Her first impression was that he was poorly dressed for a corpse. His dress shoes weren’t polished and his white shirt was partially untucked in the front; he was young too, maybe thirty-seven or thirty-eight, and there were no signs of trauma to his head or neck, nor any visible wounds. Personal hygiene clearly hadn’t been his life’s priority, as evidenced by his half-inch fingernails and wiry nose hairs, but at least he had good skin for a desiccate corpse.

This is too cool
.

She reached down to tuck the man’s dishevelled shirt into his pants, but as soon as her fingers slipped inside the crotch, the man’s eyes popped open and he let out a murderous scream.

Camilla’s eyes popped too, and she stumbled into the cart behind her. There was a loud crash as the cart smashed to the floor and metal and glass went flying across the linoleum. The man hopped off the far end of the table and lunged for a twelve-inch bone saw, holding it out in front of him.

“Molester! Help!”

“I-I’m
…
” Camilla coughed as she straightened up, trying to regain her bearings. “I’m not a—”

“Stay back! One step—
one step
, and I’ll hack that hand clean off.”