Come Little Children by D. Melhoff

Peter cocked one back.
    She turned to the wall again and perused the selections like a shopper hunting for the right pair of shoes. She reached up with two hands and took down a chest with carvings of female aristocrats laced in corsets and carrying parasols.
    “Good,” Peter said. He picked up an urn that was resting beside him. “Now follow me.”
    “What? Where? I’m—I’m not…”
    “What?”
    “I’m exhausted. I need sleep.”
    “It’s eight o’clock.”
    “I’m not feeling fantastic right now.”
    “I know. Now stop making excuses and follow me.”
    The Vincents’ crematorium was a small antechamber attached to their embalming room. As Camilla stepped inside, a cold draft blew through and sent goose bumps rippling up her arms. She looked around at the cement walls and noticed there wasn’t a single window.
    “Your oven vent is open,” she said when Peter entered the room.
    “Maddock’s airing it out.”
    Fair enough
, she thought. “How’s he related to you again?”
    “That’s a good question,” Peter said, placing his urn on a workbench and moving to the giant brick oven. “Our family adopted him before Luke and I were born. It’s a sad story, actually. His mother was in a car accident when she was still pregnant, but the paramedics arrived in time to save the baby. Uncle Jasper had known her quite well, I think, so he stepped in before the orphanage did. Everybody at home agreed to the adoption,but I’m pretty sure my uncle signed the papers, so technically that makes Maddy my cousin. Only cousin, actually.”
    Peter reached through the retort door and pulled out the sliding hopper, a retractable plank used to charge caskets into the shaft at the right time and temperature, and picked up a small cardboard box that was resting on top. “Hello, Ms. Beaudry.”
    “As happy as cremains usually make me,” Camilla said, “I can’t say this is helping.”
    “It’ll take two seconds,” Peter replied as he carried the ashes to the workbench.
    While he emptied the human soot into the urn, Camilla sauntered over to the oven and examined the blood-red bricks in the edifice.
    “You know,” she said, “if I crawled in, you could flip the switch and it would solve a lot of problems. Your mom would approve.”
    “Funny,” Peter said, tapping the last of Ms. Beaudry—the chronic chain smoker—into her eternal ashtray. “I used to crawl in there when me and Luke played hide-and-seek. God that was, like, fifteen, almost twenty years ago.”
    “Really?”
    “Really. And the doofus never caught me. I tied a rope to the roof and hung it down the chimney so when I heard him coming I’d be able to crawl away.”
    Camilla stuck her head in the smoke shaft and stared up at the tall, dizzying darkness of the crematorium. “That’s at least fifty feet to the ceiling.”
    “Yeah, and the rope got greasy after a few months. I doubt it’s even there anymore.”
    “If your mom knew—”
    “She would have murdered me. But dad would’ve thought it was genius.”
    A little different from my own dad
, Camilla snickered. He used to call her a genius too, but only facetiously.
Hey, genius, grab me a beer. Go wash the trailer, genius. Yeah, genius, change your clothes, you look like a fucking Christmas elf
.
    From the crematorium, Peter led them back to the outer hallway, then down another stark corridor until they reached a heavy steel door.
    “The freezer,” Peter said, pointing. “Holds close to thirty on the racks.”
    He opened a closet beside the freezer room and set Ms. Beaudry’s urn inside. Camilla heard the closet jimmy shut again, but she wasn’t paying attention to Peter anymore; she was busy examining another door, a plain, splintered surface with an old iron keyhole.
    “Where does that go?” she asked.
    “The basement. It’s gutted.”
    Camilla’s hand hovered over the doorknob. She wanted to open it—wanted to keep exploring every corner of the house—but she couldn’t