Suffer the Children (34 page)

He made his way into the tunnel, and found that there was enough room to crawl comfortably. He eased forward, feeling his way in the darkness.

Behind him Elizabeth took the flashlight from its hiding place, but she didn’t turn it on. She followed along behind Jeff. Sarah followed Elizabeth.

Jeff wasn’t sure how far they had gone in the tunnel, but in the blackness it seemed like a long way. He was beginning to get frightened, and was on the verge of telling Elizabeth that he thought they had gone far enough when he felt a change around him. Though he could see nothing in the blackness, it felt as though there was more space around him than there had been. He reached out and realized that he was right. He could no longer feel the close walls of the tunnel. He wondered how large the cavern they were now in was, and crept cautiously onward. His hand felt the lip of the shaft, and he stopped. He felt around in the darkness, trying to determine how deep the drop was. He felt Elizabeth bump into him. He drew himself up and crouched in a squatting position next to the shaft.

“There’s something here,” he said. “It drops off. I can’t tell how deep it is, or how wide.”

And then he felt the push from behind him, and he grabbed wildly in the dark. But there was nothing for him to grab on to, and he felt himself falling through the darkness. He hit the bottom before he could scream, and the blackness deepened. Jeff Stevens lay still on the floor of the pit.

In the upper cavern, Elizabeth turned on the flashlight and moved to the edge of the shaft She shined the light downward. It illuminated Jeff’s inert form sprawled by the large flattish rock that she had used as a table for her tea parties. She could see nothing else in the pool of
light, and after a moment she set the flashlight down and began uncoiling the rope ladder. Behind her, Sarah emerged from the tunnel and sat cross-legged, trembling, watching her sister. Elizabeth lowered the ladder into the shaft, and a moment later, the flashlight glowing dimly in her coat pocket, she disappeared down into the blackness below. Sarah crept forward and peered into the depths.

The candles still stood wedged into the cracks where she had left them, and the cigarette lighter still lay in its crevice beneath one of the candles. When she had lit the candles, Elizabeth turned off the flashlight and looked around.

Kathy Burton lay where she had fallen, her forehead badly discolored from the blow of the rock. Her eyes were open, and her face was beginning to bloat Elizabeth poked at her curiously, and when there was no movement Elizabeth tried to close the eyes. They wouldn’t close.

Jimmy Tyler lay naked, huddled against the wall of the cave. His eyes, too, were open, but they held the expression of a small and terrified creature. He was whimpering and shivering. When Elizabeth approached him he seemed not to see her, and there was no reaction when she touched him. He was clutching the torso of the dead cat to his chest, as if it were a teddy bear. The smell of death filled every corner of the cavern, and Elizabeth breathed deeply of it She smiled at the skeleton that lay against the wall.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she whispered. “Look, they’re all here now. Mommy and Daddy and their baby. And your father, Beth. I brought your father to visit you today. Do you want to talk to your father?”

She dragged Jeff Stevens’s unconscious body over to the skeleton and laid it out next to the fleshless bones. She moved the arms of the skeleton so that Jeff lay in its cold embrace.

Slowly Elizabeth began setting up another tea party,
the last tea party. She dragged the body of Kathy Burton from the spot where it lay and wrenched it into a sitting position on one of the small stones that surrounded the table. It pitched forward and lay face down on the larger slab of rock. Then Elizabeth began working the torso of the cat loose from Jimmy Tyler’s grasp. He fought with her mindlessly, unaware of what was going on but not wanting to be disturbed in whatever place his mind had taken him to. He fought passively, his small arms trying to hold on to the body of the cat, but he did not try to kick out at Elizabeth. He fought silently, against a force that no longer made any sense to him. The cat slipped loose from his grip, and his arms closed on the empty space.

She propped the cat up once more, but was not able to make the head balance on the rotting shoulders. She watched it roll off, and let it lie where it came to rest, a no-longer-recognizable object in a soiled blue bonnet.

Then she began moving Jimmy Tyler. He didn’t resist; he didn’t realize that anything was happening to him. With nothing left to hold on to, he seemed to give up, and Elizabeth was able to prop him up, his vacant eyes staring blankly off through the flickering candlelight.

Elizabeth began talking, but her speech was incoherent. Her voice kept changing pitch, and it was as if she were two people, first one and then the other.

As she talked she began to grow angry. She demanded that the objects of her anger respond to her, and when they didn’t her rage only increased.

“Answer me,” she cried, and the voice was not her own. “I want to know why you did it! Why did you leave me here? It’s dark here, and it’s cold. It frightens me. Why do you want to frighten me? Why can’t I come out of here and be with everyone else?”

There was a silence, as she waited for an answer. But there was no answer.

“You’re all alike,” she hissed. “All of you. None of you have ever changed. You love
her.”
She kicked at the body of the cat, and it fell at the base of the cavern wall. “You always pay more attention to her. Why can’t you pay attention to me, too?”

And then she seemed to change again, and she stared down at the unconscious Jeff. “You’re where you want to be now, aren’t you? I wouldn’t help you that day, would I? So you put me down here, by myself. But I knew you’d come back. And you’ll stay with me this time. This time you’ll stay. You and
all of them.”

Elizabeth snatched the knife from the ledge where it had long lain hidden and whirled to face the children.
“You’ll all stay with me now!”
she screamed.

She fell upon the body of Kathy Burton, hacking at it with the knife, chopping wildly, tearing at the flesh of the corpse. When it lay dismembered, she turned to Jimmy Tyler.

He screamed as the knife plunged into his stomach, then fell gurgling to the floor of the cavern as she drew it out again and stabbed at his throat. He wriggled beneath her, his body responding reflexively as the knife cut at him. Elizabeth lay on top of him, the knife flashing in the yellow light of the candles as she continued to slash at him. In her fury she did not hear the low moans that came from Jeff Stevens as he slowly regained consciousness.

He was trying to remember what had happened. He’d been in the dark, and somebody had pushed him. He’d been falling. In the cave. He was in the cave. But it wasn’t dark any more. Instead, there was a yellowish glow, as if candles were burning. And sounds. Strange, gurgling noises. He opened his eyes and tried to move his head.

He saw Elizabeth. His stomach heaved as he realized what she was doing. She was stabbing at something, but there was so much blood he couldn’t see what it
was. He heaved himself to his hands and knees and looked again. It was a little boy. Elizabeth was stabbing a little boy.

“No!” he cried out. He tried to get to his feet, but he was too dizzy. He saw Elizabeth turn, and heard her speak.

“You!” she cried. “You made me do this, Daddy. You did it to me, and now I’ll do it to you. You’ll stay here with me, Daddy. You won’t leave me alone again.”

He knew then that she was insane, and he tried to protect himself, but there was nothing he could do. His mind, still numb from his fall, seemed incapable of deciding which muscles to move, and his arms and legs wouldn’t respond properly. Through hazy eyes he saw the knife flash out at him, but he felt nothing. He only saw the blood gush from his arm. Again he tried to move away, or raise his arm in defense, but he felt paralyzed. Terror welled up in him, and the knife was flashing at him. Again and again. Soon he saw nothing. He wondered why he felt no pain. It should hurt, he thought; dying should hurt. But it did not hurt, and Jeff Stevens drifted slowly into death. As the fog began to close over his mind, Jeff began to pray.

Elizabeth continued to slash at him long after he died, and when she was done his body was no longer recognizable. It lay in pieces, scattered across the floor of the cavern, mixed with the dismembered corpses of Jimmy Tyler and Kathy Burton. And then her rage was spent, and Elizabeth sat in the midst of the gore and stared curiously around her.

“Why did you do that?” she said softly. “I don’t understand why you had to do it They didn’t do anything to you. They were your friends. And besides, it all happened so long ago. So very long ago.” She crawled across the floor of the cavern, and knelt over the skeleton.

“You shouldn’t have done it, Beth,” she said, her voice a little stronger. “You should have left them
alone. They weren’t who you thought they were. He wasn’t your father. Your father died a long time ago. And the others. They weren’t my parents, and that cat wasn’t Sarah. It was only a cat, Beth. A poor, helpless cat Why did you make me do it? I don’t hate them, Beth. I don’t. It’s you who hate them. It’s you who hate all of them. Why can’t you leave them alone? They didn’t do anything to you. None of them did.
None of them.
” And she was angry again, but now she was angry at Beth, poor Beth, who had died so long ago.

Elizabeth grabbed one of the arm bones and raised it over her head.

“Die!”
she screamed.
“Why won’t you die and leave us alone?”
She brought the bone down, crushing the skull. “Die,” she whispered once more. “Please die, and leave me alone.”

And then it was over. Elizabeth stood up and walked to the rope ladder. She didn’t blow out the candles; they would die of their own accord. Nor did she pull the ladder up from the shaft. There was no need to now; she would not be coming back, nor would anyone use the ladder to escape. Elizabeth crept through the tunnel and emerged from the hole in the embankment She began climbing upward, away from the cave.

In the darkness, Sarah stared down into the flickering yellow light below. Then, slowly, she began making her way down the ladder.

Sarah worked slowly in the pit, trying to fit the pieces back together. When she was finished, she found the canteen of water she had dropped down the shaft so long ago. She put the mouth of the bottle to the lips of each of the dead children, and tried to make them drink.

Then she sat down, and looked around her.

She sat for a long time, waiting.

It was four thirty when Dr. Charles Belter wound up the meeting with Jack and Rose Conger. He was not convinced that anything had been accomplished, nor was he convinced that anything needed to be accomplished. He had spent the better part of the afternoon not in attempting to second-guess the direction that Sarah’s illness might be taking, but in reassuring her worried parents. That was half the battle, he had discovered, in dealing with a case like Sarah’s. The parents read too many books, and of the wrong sort. They were convinced that their children were turning into some sort of monsters, and no matter what happened, they projected the worst. His job, he had found, was not so much to treat the child as to calm the parents.

And he had succeeded. As they drove home through the rain they felt better about everything. Dr. Belter had told them not to worry. They had faith in the doctor; they wouldn’t worry. The rain came down harder, and they could feel the temperature dropping.

“Early winter this year,” Jack commented as he turned off the Conger’s Point Road. “This could turn into snow any time.”

“I always like the first snow out here,” Rose said. “Sometimes I think the house was designed for winter. The snow seems to soften it somehow.” She looked through the rain to the old house, looming up ahead, and felt a strange sense of foreboding. It’s the weather, she thought. Rain always makes the place so gloomy.

The phone started ringing as they opened the front door.

“Got it,” Jack called, and picked up the receiver with one hand as he unbuttoned his dripping coat with the other. “Hello?”

“Jack? Barbara Stevens. We just got home from playing golf—”

“In this weather?” Jack said, disbelieving.

Barbara chuckled. “Some of us will play in anything. But I’ll tell you something, just between us. That old shack that serves as a clubhouse needs a new roof.”

“It needs a new everything, but there aren’t enough members to do it Besides, I doubt that anybody but you would be out there on a day like today.”

“It was pretty wet,” Barbara admitted. “Anyway, I was just wondering if Jeff is over there. He was supposed to be home all afternoon, but he isn’t here. And since he doesn’t really know anyone yet except you, I thought he might be playing with your kids.”

“We just got in ourselves,” Jack said. “Hang on, and I’ll find out if he’s here.” He set the receiver on the table and turned to Rose, who was watching him curiously.

“Barbara Stevens,” he said. “She’s wondering if Jeff is here.”

Rose felt a sinking sensation in her stomach. She was remembering a similar telephone call, a call that had come from Kathy Burton’s mother only days ago. How many days? She couldn’t remember. Her feeling of foreboding increased.

“What’s wrong?” Jack asked his wife, seeing her face lose its color.

“Nothing,” Rose said. “I was just thinking—” She broke off. “Nothing,” she said again. “Ill call Elizabeth.”

She stepped to the foot of the stairs and called upward, her voice echoing through the house. In a moment they heard a door open and close, and footsteps approaching
the head of the stairs. Then Rose saw her daughter.

“Hi,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t hear you come in. I was reading.”

“Didn’t you hear the phone ring?” Rose asked curiously.

“Yes, but when it stopped after the second ring I figured Mrs. Goodrich had gotten it. Is it for me?”

“No,” Rose said. “It’s Mrs. Stevens. Is Jeff here?”