Sarah Sparrow - A Guide for Murdered Children

Daniel’s eyes were fully open now.

“Do you know who that ‘associate’ might be? Because that’s another surprise—can you guess the identity of my partner in crime? Oh come on, at least try . I’ll give you a hint: she’s old and she’s dying and her personal hygiene leaves much to be desired… oh, and she serves treats on a train. Or used to. That’s right, it’s the Porter! Little Orphan Annie! She’s betrayed you! She betrayed us all!” He laughed like a hyena and then grew contrite. “Just kidding. Not that it wouldn’t have been a genius idea, but… I didn’t have time to pull it off.”

He had trouble negotiating the stony path leading to the street but Roy stayed close, holding him up as if helping a friend who had too much to drink.

“And for the record,” he said as they walked, “I fucking hate gummy bears. Even green ones, especially green ones. And when I say ‘I,’ I mean me, Roy , Roy Eakins hates ’em , ’cause I’m the only one left . That’s right! I’m afraid my tenant’s sailed off into the wild blue yonder— Dabba Doo has left the building. Which is why it’s a puzzle to me that I still crave that sticky shit. Never touched the stuff until that dodo Dabba Doo came along.”

He saw two shadows in the front seat.

As they got closer, Daniel assumed the woman on the passenger side was Lydia and hoped she hadn’t been hurt. He couldn’t bear to see Maya or Lydia suffer—

But it wasn’t her.

The windows were open and a man with a deranged smile sat behind the wheel. Roy said, “Christian soldier? I am pleased to introduce Solomon Grundy and his knocked-up angel, my daughter-in-law, Laverne.”

He opened the back door and pushed Daniel in while his son turned in his seat, tasing the deputy into unconsciousness.

1.

The image of the landlord filled the television screen. The Porter knew her as Violet but the man on the news called her something else: Sarabeth Ahlström. The thirty-five-year-old IT worker at a large insurance firm lived alone and had been raped and murdered in her town house in Dearborn Heights. Police were reaching out to the public for help.

At least it explained Annie’s distressing, premonitory dream of some days ago, when Violet jumped from the train into the void. In her experience, the “death” of a landlord before its child-tenant could achieve his or her moment of balance had never occurred. (The concept of a “second,” simultaneous death of a landlord and its child-tenant seemed the ultimate conundrum.) If one were to apply logic, which of course would be absurd, not only did the reanimation of the dead make no sense, but the presumption that landlords could remain “intact” long enough to serve their vengeful purpose made none either. It stood to reason—and statistics—that a small percentage would be destroyed by fire or accident, even homicide, thus subverting the moment of balance . But it was madness to apply rules of probability to the paranormal… Annie had always held her mentor’s mantra close: that nothing made sense, in this world or the next, nor ever could. That her kids would succeed was inviolable and axiomatic, a part of the Great Mystery she happily took for granted. Perhaps, she thought, this horrific departure from all that she knew was part of the mystery as well.

It had to be…

The mess leading up to that other unheard-of event—the suicide of the landlord Honeychile—brought what the Porter euphemistically called “a new wrinkle” to the heretofore tidy, time-honored equation: the children of the train now seemed capable of botching their moment , not only by killing the wrong party but by killing themselves . But the death of Sarabeth Ahlström was even more disturbing—it felt dark and malignant, somehow proactive. She wondered exactly who was to blame for such an aberrant thing, if anyone at all: tenant or landlord? The children, of course, were the original victims… yet might their landlords be inclined to “call” victimhood as well? Could it be that in such cases of complete system failure that the fault lay in the emotional makeup of the landlord, in the genetics and neuroses of the organism itself? Annie had grown used to thinking of those bodies as tools and vessels, a means to an end, but what if they were capable of postmortem volition, a kind of kamikaze free will that led to their own deaths or the deaths of others?

What if landlords could be corrupted by the arrival of their tenants or were already corrupt at the moment a child entered them—

More “wrinkles” came, furrowing space-time and Annie’s brow. There was the matter of Willow having known Maya and Troy before they were murdered—and the additional twist of both children’s landlords working for the new Porter in their day jobs! She supposed it to be plausible, statistically speaking, but it was bewildering nonetheless.

Her thoughts returned to landlords; the nature of those beings who had died, only to become the reinvigorated weapons of their tenants. Was it possible for hosts and parasites to become mutual contaminants? You’d have to be a scientist to answer that one… perhaps combatants , not contaminants, was the better word. Could one act like a cancer upon the other? And if so, was this a symptom of “haywire”? Or had it always been that way, and she’d simply been lucky enough not to have encountered such scenarios? Was there now a cancer in that world, like the cancer killing Annie in this one?

It chilled her to the bone.

She turned off the TV. She closed her eyes and in moments was on the train again. Far away, in the middle of the car, a small boy nervously stood at the same window Violet had leapt from. Annie sprinted toward him, at times slicing straight through fog-clumps of loitering Subalterns. As in a classic nightmare, each time she got close, the corridor elongated and she was forced to start over, impossibly redoubling her efforts.

She drew near enough to see that it was Troy.

2.

Willow lay in bed, staring out at a piece of the living room wall. Dixie was asleep beside him. He left the blinds open because he liked the way the moonlight shone on the mural, making the train iridescent.

He finally understood why people turned to painting late in life. Willow used to scoff at that, especially when he read about old movie stars becoming born-again artistes . Now it made perfect sense. Call it a hobby, call it a whatever, but he believed he had real talent. Though maybe everyone who took up the brush long after their shelf life expired felt the same. Maybe you kind of had to.

He looked over—Dixie was gone from the world. It was uncanny but amid the chaos and insanity of his predicament, Willow could still see a future with this woman. A selfish worry came with that thought: he wondered just how much time he had left. Being a painter was a voluntary pastime; being a Porter wasn’t. The fifty-seven-year-old out-of-shape detective was convinced he’d have a much better shot at living to a ripe old age if he and Annie Ballendine had never met. She’d taken him by force and now he was saturated in unspeakable secrets and death, far more than his natural abilities had ever shown him, steeped in the morbidity and despair of tiny souls in transit. He was certain he would be injured by that world, regardless of the Porter having extolled the so-called power of his gifts (easy for her to say, and ironic too, because she was dying). And why was she dying? Who was to say the cancer taking her out wasn’t a direct result of all those years she’d midwifed the dead, giving shelter to the slaughtered innocents whose lives had been pornographically cut short?