Suffer the Children

by John Saul

  “I suppose the family would have forgotten about it, except that a couple of days later one of the old lady’s sons, who would have been my great-uncle, I think, walked into the house carrying a dead rabbit. Then he proceeded to jump off the cliff behind the house.”

  “You’re kidding,” Elizabeth breathed.

  Jack shook his head. “If I am, then your grandfather kidded me when he told me the story.”

  “But why did he do it?” Elizabeth asked.

  “No one ever found out” Jack shrugged. “Or if they did, they never told anybody. Anyway, when the old lady heard about it, she wasn’t surprised. Apparently she said she’d been expecting it. And from then on until she died, she told everybody who was going to die, and when. She said she had gotten all the information in a dream she had while she’d been sleeping those two days.”

  “And she was never wrong?” Elizabeth asked doubtfully.

  “Who knows? You know the way stories grow. She could have been wrong most of the time, but the only thing anybody would remember and pass along would be the times she was right. She probably predicted everybody’s death every day, so sooner or later she hit the nail on the head. It’s like astrologers. They say so much that some of the things have to be right.”

  “Then what’s the big deal?” Elizabeth said.

  “Well, the last straw came just before she died. She claimed she’d had a vision.”

  “A vision? You mean like angels or ghosts?”

  “Not quite. A vision, but not of angels. She claimed that in the vision she had been taken to a cave in the embankment. Inside the cave, she was shown a shaft that led straight down. Her ‘angel,’ or whatever it was supposed to be, told her that the shaft was the gates of hell. According to the old lady, all sorts of awful things were supposed to happen if anybody ever went through the gates of hell. Or, I suppose, down the shaft. Anyway, she told the family that she had seen visions of horrible things in the future, and that the only way to keep them from happening was to see to it that no one went near that cave. She made everyone in the family swear never to go near the embankment where the cave is supposed to be. Then she died.”

  Elizabeth stared at him silently for a minute before she spoke. He could hear incredulity in her voice.

  “Is there really a cave there?”

  “I don’t have any idea.”

  “You mean they believed her?” Elizabeth said. “You mean nobody ever even went to look for it?”

  Jack licked his lips uncomfortably. “Someone did,” he said slowly. “My grandfather.”

  “Did he find it?” Elizabeth asked eagerly.

  “No,” Jack said. He hoped he could leave it at that, but Elizabeth wouldn’t let him.

  “Well, what happened?” she demanded.

  “No one knows about that, either. He announced one day that he was going to find the cave, if there was a cave, and headed off by himself. When he didn’t come back, a search party went to find him.”

  “Did they?” Elizabeth asked. “Find him, I mean?”

  “They found him. They found him at the bottom of the embankment. His foot was wedged between two rocks, and he had apparently drowned when the tide came in.”

  An expression of horror came over Elizabeth’s face. “What an awful way to die,” she said softly.

  “Yes,” said Jack, “it is. The odd thing was that they couldn’t figure out exactly what happened. His foot was caught, but not tightly. He should have been able to get it loose without any trouble.”

  “Maybe he fell,” Elizabeth suggested.

  “Maybe, but they didn’t find any bruises that would have indicated it. Well,” he finished, “that’s it. Whatever the truth of it, the whole family has always respected the old lady’s dying wish. Except for my grandfather. If nothing else, it gives us a reason for staying away from a dangerous place. I hope you’ll respect it as much as the rest of us have.”

  Elizabeth was very quiet, and when she spoke her voice was low. “Daddy,” she said. “Do you believe it?”

  Jack considered the question, and could find no answer. He had lived with the legend for so long that it never entered his mind to question the truth of it. Now, looking at it in the cold light of his daughter’s ice-blue stare, he shook his head.

  “No,” he said, “I don’t suppose I do, really. On the other hand, I don’t believe it’s bad luck to walk under a ladder, but I still don’t walk under ladders. So maybe, deep down inside, I do believe the legend.”

  Elizabeth seemed to digest this for a minute, and Jack was about to lean over to kiss her when she asked another question.

  “What about the little girl?” she said.

  “What little girl?” Jack asked blankly.

  “I’m not sure,” Elizabeth said. “It seems to me that I’ve heard somewhere that there was a little girl in the legend.”

  Jack reviewed the story in his mind, then shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “Not that I know of.”

  “Well,” Elizabeth said, “there should be. Let’s make one up.” Now Jack could see the glint of mischief in her eyes.

  “You do that,” he said. “And tell me about it over dinner. See you downstairs in thirty minutes.”

  He kissed her, then left the room. As he descended the stairs, he heard her calling after him.

  “I’ll ask the Ouija board about it,” she said.

  He heard her laugh as she went back to the playroom.

  10

  “What exactly did you tell her?”

  Rose spoke in the dark, and her voice seemed to bounce off the walls and come back at her more loudly than she desired. Beside her, she felt Jack stir. She was sure he wasn’t sleeping, but it was almost a minute before he answered her. In the silence, she began counting the ticking of the grandfather clock. She had reached forty when Jack finally spoke.

  “The whole thing,” he said. “The idea was to keep her away from the embankment, wasn’t it?”

  “I suppose so,” Rose said unsurely. “How did she take it?”

  She heard Jack chuckle in the darkness. “How would you take a story like that in this day and age? I’m not sure family legends and curses count for much any more.”

  “But a lot of it happened,” Rose said.

  “Some of it happened,” Jack countered. “Granted that the old lady slept for a couple of days, that someone jumped off the cliff and someone else drowned. It still doesn’t add up to much. And, of course, the old lady’s vision at the end was probably nothing more than senility.” He rolled over. “Still, it makes a good spooky story, and it’s sure kept us all off the embankment for a lot of years.”

  “How did she take it?” Rose repeated. “Didn’t she say anything?”

  Jack smiled in the darkness. “She wanted to know about the little girl.”

  “Little girl?” Rose said. “What little girl? I never heard of a little girl before.”

  “Of course not There isn’t any. It just struck Elizabeth that there ought to have been a little girl involved in the legend. She said she thought she heard about one somewhere, but couldn’t remember where. She said she’d consult the Ouija board.”

  Rose felt herself begin to shudder, but fought it off. “Ouija board,” she said. “I’m not sure we should let her play with such a thing. Children are too suggestible.”

  She rolled over and nestled against her husband. She felt his body stiffen. Sighing, she moved away from him.

  In her room, Elizabeth lay in her bed, listening to the murmur of her parent’s voices. As the voices died away, the girl’s eyes closed; then her breathing evened out and grew deeper. As the clock struck, her eyelids began to flicker. A sound struggled from her throat, then died away on her lips. She turned, and the covers fell to the floor. Her knees drew up, and she wrapped her arms around herself.

  And then she rose from the bed.

  She padded on her bare feet across the floor of her room and out into the hall. She moved, trancelike, to the atti
c door and stretched upward to take the key from the ledge above. Avoiding the loose third tread, Elizabeth glided up the steep stairs into the attic, unaware of the silent Sarah, who stood quietly watching the ascent.

  After Elizabeth disappeared into the upper reaches of the house, Sarah returned to her bed, where she lay staring blankly at the ceiling.

  Elizabeth stayed in the attic for an hour, but what she did there, and what she saw, didn’t register on her memory.

  Lying awake, Rose felt as if she were suffocating. She tried to ignore the feeling, but it persisted. Finally, in frustration, she left her bed and went to sit by the window. Moodily, she sat and smoked and peered out into the night. There was a full moon, and shadows played across the field. It was peaceful, she thought, and she considered going for a walk. The cliff would be beautiful, with the light dancing on the sea, and the surf, turned silvery by the moon, crashing below her. And then, as suddenly as the feeling of suffocation had come over her, it left her. She crushed the cigarette out and went back to bed. In a moment she was asleep.

  Had she stayed by the window, she might not have returned to her bed, for she might have seen the shape moving across the field.

  Elizabeth crossed the porch at the moment that Rose went back to bed. She moved slowly, carefully toward the field, as if feeling her way with her feet. Then, suddenly, she turned and began walking quickly toward the old barn that stood a few yards from the garage. She let herself in by the side door and moved to the tack room. She picked up a bag and a strange coil of rope and wood. She slung the coil over her head, grasped the neck of the bag, and left the barn. Then, her step no longer cautious, she moved across the field toward the wood. Soon she was enveloped in its black shadows.

  The dress Elizabeth wore was old—much older than any of the clothes she kept for playing in the field. Its ruffled hem caught on branches as she drew nearer the woods, but the ancient material gave way with so little resistance that she felt no pull. Her blond hair, flowing over her shoulders in an old-fashioned way, caught the moonlight and, from a distance, seemed to form a halo around her head.

  She moved surely and gracefully, her eyes staring directly ahead into the blackness before her. There was no path or trail, but she advanced as easily as though the way had been paved. Though the shadows were deep, and the underbrush thick, her feet found the places where no branches waited to trip her, or stones to bruise her foot, or vines to ensnare her.

  And then Elizabeth emerged from the woods, and stood on the top of the embankment, staring out across the sea. It was gentle that night, and the surf murmured below, softly, invitingly.

  Elizabeth began moving eastward along the edge of the embankment, slowly, as if waiting for some sort of signal to tell her she was at the right place. Then she stopped again, and stared once more out to sea. Finally she began moving down the steep face of the embankment, her small feet finding holds that would have been useless to a larger person. Occasionally her free hand moved out as if to steady herself, but most often it stopped short of touching anything. She moved steadily downward, disappearing now and then from the moonlight, then reemerging a few feet lower than before. Finally she disappeared into the shadow of a boulder, and crept into a hole that lay hidden in the blackness. Fifty feet farther down, the surf pounded against the Point.

  Elizabeth crawled through the tunnel of the cave, pulling the long skirt up every few minutes, then creeping farther forward until the dress grew taut as she crawled across it. Then she would pause again, and pull the material from under her knees, spreading it once more before her. She felt her way forward, pushing the bag carefully, as if it would disappear if she pushed it too far. Then she stopped, crept as far over the bag as she could, and felt the floor of the cave in front of her. At the end of her reach she felt the lip of a shaft She moved a little closer to the edge and poked around in the depths of the bag. Her hand closed on a flashlight, and she drew it out. She tested it a couple of times, flashing the narrow beam on the walls that closed in around her. The tunnel widened into a room around the shaft, and the shaft itself appeared to be a well in the center of an oval room whose floor was littered with boulders.

  Elizabeth removed the coiled object from around her neck, and, still clutching the flashlight, moved to the edge of the shaft. She pointed the light downward and stared into the depths. Far below, she wasn’t sure how far, the light glinted on something that lay on the bottom of the shaft.

  She laid the flashlight carefully in a cleft of stone, and jiggled it a little to be sure it was secure. Then she began uncoiling the object she had carried from the barn. It was a rope ladder that had once provided primitive access to the loft. For years it had lain in the tack room: the loft was no longer used, and the ladder had been deemed a danger to playing children. Elizabeth began wedging the ends of the rope into cracks in the boulders, chinking the rope tighter with bits of stone that lay scattered across the cavern floor. Finally she tested the ropes, pulling on them as hard as she could, bracing her legs against the boulders. The rope held.

  She pushed the rest of the coil over the lip of the shaft. It clattered against the side of the shaft, then caught She pulled it back to the surface and carefully untangled it. The second time, as she fed it carefully over the edge, it fell straight to the bottom. She felt a slight vibration as the bottom rung struck the floor below.

  She picked up the bag and dropped it over the edge. She heard a soft thunk as it too hit the bottom. Then she worked the flashlight loose from its crevice, put it in a pocket of her dress, and began making her way down the ladder.

  It was slow going, but Elizabeth didn’t seem to notice the slime that rubbed off the walls of the shaft as she crept carefully from rung to rung, nor did the darkness frighten her. She felt the cool stone touch the sole of her foot as she found the bottom of the shaft. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the flashlight.

  The yellowish beam flickered around the chamber at the bottom of the shaft. It was very much like the chamber above: smaller, and with a lower ceiling, but oval, and with a flat, rock-strewn floor. The shaft opened almost in the center of the small chamber.

  Elizabeth played the light over the floor of the cavern, and the object which had glinted from above suddenly flashed once more. It was a gold bracelet, set with a small opal.

  It was still on the wrist of its owner.

  The skeleton lay directly below the opening of the shaft, sprawled in the position in which it had lain through the decades. Here and there small pieces of rotten cloth still clung to it, but they disintegrated into dust when Elizabeth touched them. The sack lay near it, where Elizabeth had dropped it, its impact having scattered some of the ribs across the floor. Elizabeth retrieved the bag and set it aside. Then she played the light over the skull. She picked up a rusted metal barrette that lay next to the skull and examined it carefully. She nodded to herself.

  “I knew you were here,” she whispered. “Everything will be all right now. You’ll see.”

  She left the skeleton for a moment and found a new resting place for the flashlight. She left it on and trained it on the spot where the ancient bones gleamed palely in its light.

  Elizabeth worked slowly, moving the bones carefully. She laid them out at one edge of the chamber, close to one of the walls. She found a small flat rock to cushion the skull, and when she was finished the remains lay on their back, the arms folded peacefully over the rib cage. Elizabeth smiled at the corpse, and there was a strange light in her eyes as she removed the bracelet from the fleshless wrist and slipped it onto her own.

  She began moving some of the rocks around, wrestling a large one with a fairly flat surface into the center of the cavern. Then she moved four other, smaller rocks to form stools around the rough table. She placed the bag on the table and sat down on one of the stools.

  From the bag she began removing a set of doll’s clothing: a small blue dress, tiny stockings, and a pair of miniature patent-leather Mary Janes, together with a pair o
f white mittens and a small ruffled bonnet.

  Then she opened the sack and Cecil lay on the rock slab, his body limp, his head at a strange angle from the broken neck that had killed him.

  Elizabeth began dressing the dead cat in the doll’s clothes, carefully working the dress over his head, front legs, and torso, forcing the forepaws through the sleeves, and meticulously buttoning the dress up along his spine.

  Then she worked the tiny socks over his hindpaws, and forced the stockinged paws into the miniature shoes. She slipped the mittens onto the forepaws and, finally, put the bonnet on Cecil’s head, tying the strings securely under his chin.

  “Pretty baby,” she murmured as she finished. “Aren’t you my pretty baby?”

  She set the grotesquely costumed animal on the rock opposite her and watched as it collapsed to the cavern floor. She tried to set it up twice more, but each time it fell. Finally she collected a number of small rocks and built a small pile of stones that would support the weight of the corpse. Eventually the dead Cecil sat propped across from her, its bonneted head lolling weirdly to one side. Elizabeth seemed not to notice the unnatural pose.

  “And now well have a party,” she said. “Would you like some tea?”

  Her right hand picked up an imaginary teapot, and she skillfully poured from it into an equally invisible cup that she held steadily in her left hand. She set the imaginary cup in front of the dead cat.

  “One lump or two?” she asked politely, offering her guest a bowl of sugar. Without waiting for an answer, she mimed placing two lumps of sugar in the cup that was not on the table.

  “Well,” she said, smiling brightly, “isn’t this nice?”

  Elizabeth waited, staring across at the tightly closed eyes of the cat.