“You’re freezing.” Anya said, touching Blaire’s shoulders. “I’ll get you some tea.” She took the blanket from Blaire’s bed, wrapped it around the shoulders of the young woman, who was still sitting in the chair by Travis’ side, and disappeared from the room.
As the leftover fragments of Blaire’s sleep faded into the room around her, Blaire thought of Latif. He could help them.
No, she remembered.
He had gone off to Kerchaviv and left her to weather the storm alone. How could he have left her, after she shared so much with him? Blaire wondered to herself when her eyes fixed on the bottom drawer of her dresser that was slightly ajar. Blaire pulled the drawer out onto the floor and rifled through it until she found the rolled up pair of pink socks, unrolling them rapidly to find that there was nothing there. Her diamond earrings were gone along with her gold watch. Blaire threw the empty socks aside and began rummaging through the drawer, opening nearly every pair of socks she had, but her belongings were gone, most likely to the city with Latif. He was the only one that knew about them. Blaire would have cried if she had any more tears, but she didn’t, and suddenly there was a strange giggling in the room that soon mutated into garish, cackling laughter. It was the same laughter that she had heard while standing in the backyard of St. Sebastian on her first day, and she was even more frightened when she realized that the laughter was coming from her. She laughed until she was out of breath and could not laugh anymore.
Blaire pulled open her top drawer and found her cell phone. Even half a world away, there had to be something that Emma could do. Blaire powered the phone up, and as soon as the screen came to life, she punched in Emma’s number. The phone rang once, then twice. There was a click as if someone was picking up, and then she heard the death blow—silence.
“Hello?” Blaire called. She looked at the screen, and it had gone blank.
“No, no, no, no, no!” she chastised the phone. Blaire turned to the window over her bed and looked out at the cold, white world that was developing around them. The sea tossed gallons of dark glacial water on the shore every few seconds in the stark wintery landscape.
There was no escape. The world seemed without life, no birds or small animals scampering around. Everyone retreated inside to find shelter from the storm, but there was no retreat when the storm on the inside was harsher than the one outside.
Blaire forced the window open and was almost knocked from the bed by the forceful winds that rushed inside. Against the wind, Blaire forced herself through the window, placing the phone as far away from the building as possible in what she knew was probably a vain attempt to get a signal. She squinted and pushed further until she was hanging dangerously from the third floor window. The screen of the phone brightened to alert her of a signal.
“BLAIRE!” a voice called, startling her, and she whipped around to see Anya standing in the doorway with a cup full of a steaming liquid. When she turned back to the window, her hand was empty and her fingers so numb that she had not felt the phone slip from her grasp. Blaire pressed both hands against the ledge and lifted herself to peer down the side of the building just in time to see the phone disappear into a large mound of snow.
“No!” Blaire yelled as she hopped out of the bed and shot down the hall.
“You can’t go out there!” Anya yelled after her.
Blaire raced down the stairs and rushed quickly by the children that were playing in different places throughout the hall. She nearly toppled Danya, who was bumped into a wall as Blaire pushed passed her, the girl’s bundle of distorted photographs flying across the floor.
Blaire caught Danya’s glare as the girl bent to pick up her belongings, her dark eyes heating Blaire’s blood until it was almost boiling over. Blaire unlocked the massive door and turned the knob slightly, and it replied by blowing open violently. All of the children shivered and ducked out of the path of the hateful squall. Blaire struggled to push herself out the door and labored to close it behind her, but caught a glimpse of Anya coming down the stairs chasing after her.
Outside everything moved in slow motion, as Blaire studied her surroundings. An unreasonable amount of snow had fallen in a short period of time, and she felt as if she were lost in a snow globe, struggling to see things that were right in front of her.
Blaire maneuvered around the building through the ice on the ground and the heavy curtain of snow. Just as she found her bedroom window along the back wall, her breath was getting short.
Cold. Numbing, cold.
Blaire dove into the snow and began searching wildly.
Her chest was aching now. Hearing her name on the wind, she looked back, but saw nothing, only a veil of whiteness. Blaire quickly refocused on finding her phone.
Her head became crowded with thoughts of how cold she felt. She dug and dug, but the more snow she swept away, the more it was replaced. On her knees, the snow was up to her chest, and she couldn’t feel her fingers anymore. Blaire was dizzied by the rapid chatter of children. She looked around, whipping her head in every direction, and it was just her in the boundless white, but children were singing to her somewhere.
Ring around the rosie, pocket full of posies, ashes, ashes…the voices sang on as Blaire looked around trying to figure out from which direction they came. She sucked in a huge breath when she saw Dolly’s naked, headless body lying at the top of the stairs that descended into the basement.
“Dolly,” Blaire heard her voice cry out, and she began to crawl toward the steps but quickly stopped. Rich, ruby colored blood traveled out of the depths and up the staircase until it surrounded Dolly in a sea of red. Blaire watched in morbid awe as the white snow became infused with brilliant red, like sweet, flavorful juice being poured upon a snow cone. A ferocious growl erupted from the sunken steps and a tiny arm clothed in a bright yellow fabric reached out and snatched Dolly back into the depths.
“Lorna?” Blaire whispered.
Another soft growl exploded from the steps just as Blaire heard her name again. Anya was running toward her.
Ring around the rosie…
The playing and laughter of the children rose up and died down until there was a moment of complete silence, and then Anya approached.
“Are you completely out of your mind?” Anya screamed, hoisting Blaire from the white mounds. Yes, I think that I am, Blaire thought to herself, but she could not answer. She was dizzy from the cold and drunk on snowflakes.
“Lorna?” Blaire spoke in a whisper that was lost in the blustery weather.
The children watched in awe as Anya dragged Blaire back through the front door.
“We have got to get out of here! Help me!” she babbled wildly. Vesna came toward her with a large, archaic-looking needle that spit drops of thick, yellow liquid from its tip.
“No! No!” Blaire screamed as Anya did her best to keep the young woman still. “Blaire, please, calm down!” Anya told her. “We are not trying to hurt you!”
Blaire looked around to see more children, odd-looking spectators, coming out of their holes. “No!” Blaire yelled again as she railed against the staff of St. Sebastian, but Anya was too strong. The moment the needle plunged into her arm a dense warmth flooded her body with locomotive power and purpose. Her legs began to fold involuntarily, as she allowed Anya to guide her up the stairs without resistance. Nothing mattered anymore; she was limp and free from fear. Her feet were heavy like bricks, and she labored with every step. Her sight was weakening, and there was a vague visual of her room with Travis on the bed in the corner, and then darkness.
Blaire blinked her weighted eyelids slowly.
“How are you feeling?” Anya asked, peeking her head in the door.
Blaire blinked harder as her memory came back to her in soft waves like water on the shore in summer. “Okay.”
“I’m sorry about having to give you that shot.”
“How’s Travis?” Blaire asked as she lifted herself halfway off the bed to see him.
“No cha
nge. I’ll get you some water, and then I need to finish setting up for the party,” Anya told her.
“The party? How can you still have a party?” Blaire asked. In her view there was nothing to celebrate.
“What do you want us to do? I know Travis is a friend, and I hate that he is sick, but—” “He is not sick!” Blaire’s frustration returned with new venom. “He is dying!”
A still incredulous Anya answered in her practical way. “We are doing all that we can, and as soon as we can get him help, we will. Besides, it’s not much of a party anyway, just some costumes, sweets, and a little music.”
“Sweets?” Blaire said in a broken whisper as she continued chasing full consciousness.
“Blaire, these children don’t get much, and in the years that I have been here, we have never had a party, not for a holiday or a birthday or anything. They are so excited, and I can’t let them down.”
“But it was them. They killed everyone.”
“What are you talking about?” Anya was suddenly exasperated as well.
“When those murders happened, it was the children that murdered the workers, not the workers that murdered the children.”
Anya sat on the bed thoughtfully. “Really? How do you know?” Her eyes glazed over momentarily. “Yes,” Blaire confirmed. “I read it in reports that were in the basement.”
Anya thought for a moment and sighed. “Well, so what?”
“So what?” Blaire asked.
“Something terrible happened here many years ago. People were murdered. It was the children. It wasn’t the children. I don’t care anymore, Blaire! I have known these children for years, and they are harmless.” Anya’s resolve was revealed in her face.
Blaire looked to Travis.
“Is that what this is about? You think that just because of what happened here years ago, Natalka is trying to poison Travis? That is ridiculous. There is no rat poison in Natalka’s drawer.”
“But there was,” Blaire countered softly.
“Even if there was, we do have rats, maybe it somehow got into her drawer, but that doesn’t mean that she was serving you cookies laced with rat poison. You’re not sick.”
“I don’t eat sweets.”
“It’s just not true,” Anya said before leaving the room.
After locking the door, Blaire riffled through her drawers until she found a cigarette. She had not smoked in weeks, but today it was a necessity. She cracked her bedroom window and lit up, allowing the high of the cigarette to overlap the euphoric remnants of whatever tranquilizer Vesna had used on her earlier. She stared out at the sea. Everything was covered by a thick white blanket of cold death, but one golden light peered out from under the white solid heaviness.
It was Marko.
CHAPTER FORTY
A warm orange light burned inside the window of Marko’s cottage. Blaire’s heart jumped with a pinch of excitement, but she quickly realized that there was little that even Marko could do.
A hint of soft music came up through the vents from the first floor. Blaire put out her cigarette and headed down to the party. Anya was right that all of the children did not deserve to be ignored because this was not their fault. But more importantly, Blaire wanted to keep her eyes on them.
The playroom was full of movement and warmed by roaring flames from the fireplace. Hardly anyone in the room noticed Blaire’s arrival, and she preferred it that way. For a moment the music died, and then “Dream a Little Dream” began to play loudly, reviving the record player as if set specifically for her entrance. Anya waved to her, a sympathy wave for the basket case making pathetic progress. One of the children greeted her happily and led her to the sweet table, so she could help herself to cupcakes, specially made for the occasion. Blaire held a cupcake up to her nose, sniffed it, and then returned it to the table once the attention of the child was directed elsewhere. Andre was dressed as a king, flaunting a colorful paper crown on his head, which he designed himself. He led her to the couch where she sat and watched the odd festivities. She scanned the room for Lorna, but the little girl was not here, and she never had been.
Anya was now on the other side of the room, playing a game with a group of children. It looked like Ring Around the Rosie, and suddenly it seemed as if time moved slowly. At a table close by, a screw-faced Vesna worked diligently painting the kids’ faces with simple works of art like balloons and stars. The work, shoddy as it was, seemed nothing less than masterpiece quality in the eyes of the children. Standing in front of Blaire, Danya grabbed her teacher’s hands and tossed them lightly in an attempt to initiate play, but Blaire was hardly able to join in the merriments. Blaire seemed to be watching everything in the room through blurred spectacles. Danya’s hair was in two messy pigtails, and her nose was painted a bright red. Blaire looked around to locate Danya’s match and found Dariya dressed as a strange-looking pig. Blaire’s eyes covered the room once, twice, and once more…but Natalka was missing.
Where is she?
The room spun in sinister laughter.
Ring around the rosie…all of the made-up faces and masks of the children were a blur. Pocket full of posies…the ubiquitous whispers crawled up out of the vents and into her head. Ashes, ashes…Blaire looked down at her own traitorous body, rocking back and forth, back and forth. We ALL fall down…
She gasped in shock.
No! No, not me.
A thunderous shiver rolled through her body like a surge of electricity, and she fought it off with her hands as if small rodents were scampering all over her flesh. She looked up, and her eyes found the small boy who sat across the room in the window, staring out into the creeping nightfall. Ivan turned and looked deep into her eyes.
For the occasion his hair was been slicked back. The little black mustache that he made sat slightly crooked on his top lip, and somewhere inside of Mrs. Andrich’s boy was Dmytro Prada. Blaire fumbled to her feet and ran out the door, up the stairs to her room.
She locked the door and pressed the dresser in front of it before going to check on Travis. His condition had not changed. Blaire peeked outside to see that the snow continued to fall burying them all deeper. From the top shelf of the closet, Blaire retrieved the files that she had taken from the basement, and she crawled into bed. As she shuffled through the reports, she tried to piece together the strange happenings of that terrible night years ago.
“What on earth,” Ida said to herself as she made her way down the hall to the third floor bathroom where she heard scuffling and a muffled moaning. “Felina,” she said as she pressed the door open. Three boys stood over Felina, who they had pressed under water in the bathtub. Ida began to scream. The boys looked up and in an instant two of them were chasing her down the hall. Ida dashed into her room, locking the door behind her and shoving the dresser in front of it. She ran to the window, but it was a long way down, and even if she could somehow escape, there was nothing but a cold white death awaiting her. The tears welled as she slid down onto the floor and began rocking back and forth, humming softly to herself in order to drown out the sound of the wild boys banging at the door.
In previous weeks, she started to hate her job, and more recently began sleeping with the drawer pressed up against the door. The children were changing. Every night she would hum until she could fall asleep, because she could no longer stand the whispers of the children that invaded her room through the vents, and tonight it had all just come apart. When at one time she had hummed to calm the children to sleep at night, she now hummed to calm herself, to calm all of them. She needed only to make it through the night.
Eventually, the pounding stopped, and somehow she managed to doze off in the dark hours of early morning and woke to the sound of tiny footsteps coming down the hall.
Something stood just outside the door. Ida heard a low snarl, and then a whimper. Someone was crying. It was one of the children, and Ida listened to the soft crying on the other side of the door, and suddenly she heard three slow and deliberate knoc
ks.
“Miss Ida,” she heard a voice call out and knew instantly that it was Lorna, an adorable little girl who always wore fire engine red overalls and who carried a beautiful blonde doll named Dolly.
“Lorna?” Ida called.
“Miss Ida, please help. They hurt me,” the little girl said, crying. Terrified, Ida didn’t want to open the door, but she could not just leave the girl out there. “Miss Ida,” the voice cried out again.
Ida got to her feet and pushed the dresser out from in front of the door. Her hand shook as she reached out to turn the knob. Ida opened the door and stepped onto the threshold. The storm had blown out the electricity and the emergency hall lights cast an eerie green glow on the white walls.
“Lorna,” Ida whispered into the hall. She heard stealthy shuffling all around and her heart began pounding furiously. She crossed the hall and crashed her fist through the glass of the red axe box and wrestled the small weapon from its secure place. Ida heard something behind her breathing and snarling. She tightened her grip on the fire axe, and then whipped around to face the shadowy darkness. But there was no one there.
“Lorna,” the woman called out again. Ida screamed as she felt a searing pain dig into her foot. She looked down, and the girl with the dirty fire engine overalls was biting hard into her ankle. Ida kicked the depraved girl off of her and managed to stumble back into the room, tripping on her own feet along the way. Ida scooted herself into the center of the room. Her entire body was trembling with fear as her eyes searched the hall, wide and terrified. At once they all came pouring through the door and descended upon her before she ever had a chance to lift her weapon.
Blaire drifted back into reality and placed the report back into the folder, thinking it was colder than it had ever been inside St. Sebastian. After rubbing her shoulders, Blaire pulled out another report to find a picture of Dmytro staring back at her. The report stated that he had been lured into the basement and beaten to death with blunt objects beyond the point of recognition; he had been made faceless.
The Unwanted (Black Water Tales Book 2) Page 24
