THE MURDER NEXTDOOR

chapter 18

1992.

It was summer. Hottest summer Willowdon has ever see. Bright and cloudless. The streets quite. No more little kids running around. Most of them were gone. Vanished from their beds.

Barbra Harper's's twins were also gone. Agatha, Kale's mom, and Agnes were swallowed by the dark. She knew what happened next. What happened soon after a child went missing. The parents always ended up dead. Willowdon wasn't all sweets and sugar now. This was the Willowdon Crisis.

She stood on her front porch. Observing the night with a cigarette pressed between her fingers. A blanket banishing the cold. The nights were freezing. As if on cue for the horrors to begin.

She took another puff. Her hands shaking from the cold while her lips trembled in hesitance, in fear. Either for herself or her girls.

She exhaled the smoke and the breeze carried it away. She shivered in the cold, breaking her concentration. She had fought those tears but this time they would win.

A tear drop flowed from her swollen eyes, cooling her heated cheeks. Then _ she sobbed. For the hundredth time that night, she sobbed. She was so sick of crying. So sick of doing nothing but wait. Hoping her girls would miraculously appear on the lap.

But then. She saw something. A shadowy pair of little girls holding hands. Their hair flowing softly in the gentle breeze.

She focus her vision. Her eyes were socked in tears, she couldn't trust what she saw, but_ it was them. Her girls. Right there across the street. Her heart beamed with light and fear and disbelief and_and so much more.

They turned around, and started walking away. She panicked and leaped into action. Desperately following her daughters where ever they lead her.

She was gonna get them back, her daughters, her marriage_ her sanity. She was going to get it all back.

They stopped in a clearing in the middle of the Weeping Woods. Where the other bodies were found. Guess it was her turn. The kids were just bait. She wanted to face the killer and give him a piece of her now shuttered mind and demand for her daughters back, but there was no one. No one but them.

In the moon light she could see them, clearly. The image sent icy nerves up her spine right before breaking her heart. No mother should be forced to gaze at such a horror.

The girls blonde hair was turning brown with dirt. Tangled, messy and shriveled. Their matching polkadot pajamas were now filthy and torn. They were thin. So thin their gray, wrinkled skin simply hang loose on the bones.

Their pretty little faces were now basically skulls with bulging red spheres for eyes. They were dying. They looked dead.

"Girls," she said and her voice was chocked by the sorrow swelling in her throat, " what are we doing here?" She asked with a smile. Tears flowing into her open mouth.

The girls cocked their heads at the same time and grinded. Showing teeth, black with rot. The decay carving the teeth to look like fangs glued to mushy dark gums.

"He promised us candy if we do this," they said together with chilling calmness. Their sync personality wasn't cute anymore. She should have ran. But she was a mom. You don't get to run when you are a mother. 

"Please," she pleaded," I can get you candy. All the candy in the world. "

The twins looked confused.

"I'll let you have ice cream for dinner," she sweetened the deal," just came home with me."

She didn't know they were basically brainwashed, hypnotized by the sugary sweetness of Candy Clot. They couldn't think. They didn't so much as remember who that woman before them was. They were animals. Someones hunting dogs.