Les Enfants Vont Bien - SCP Foundation

Les Enfants Vont Bien

2015

31 October

Montréal: Québec, Canada

It's not fair.

Marie Arsenault was so sick of that thought, she felt like throwing up. So many things were so unfair that she had actually grown tired of acknowledging it, of being upset about it, of letting herself speak or even think the words. Her face felt tight where she'd allowed the warm air to dry her tears, not even bothering to wipe them off her cheeks. Her costume was discarded on the floor in stages — ladybug mask, ladybug suit and ladybug whip, she'd been going as Marinette from Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir — and she'd stuffed the empty pillowcase meant to be bursting with candy into the trash can in an act of desperate defiance. Now she was lying in bed, pouting, with the sounds of cheerful conversation filtering up through the floorboards of their comfortable middle-class home and teasing at her ears.

She clamped her hands over them, and clamped down on the words as they rose up once again to mock her.

It's.

Not.

F—

Something moved, outside the window.

Marie blinked in the dark. Though dusk was settling in outside, the trick-or-treaters were still out in force, but that shouldn't have affected the view from her second storey bedroom. There were trees outside, but no wind. Maybe it was a squirrel? Marie liked to feed the squirrels in Parc La Fontaine. They were bold as brass and numerous enough to overwhelm a child of eight, if they took a mind to it, but her father had showed her how to squeal and stomp until they ran off with their prizes. It was a legitimate case of give-and-take, she thought. It was balanced. It was fair.

The roof outside her window creaked, actually creaked, and she knew it wasn't a squirrel.

She'd spent countless nights sitting by that window, warm milk circulating through her system and keeping her awake — instead of putting her down for the night, the intended effect — while her parents argued in their room at the end of the hall, argued about her. About the doctors. About the problem.

Marie Arsenault had insomnia.

Nobody could explain it. She wasn't afraid of the dark, loved it in point of fact. She didn't wet the bed, never once had. She didn't have night terrors, didn't even know what they were until the patient explanation from Dr. Archambault at Montréal General. She lived an untroubled and carefree life, except for those nights when for absolutely no good reason she simply could not fall asleep.

And tonight, of all nights, she was stuck inside. Because she couldn't sleep, and that wasn't healthy. Because not sleeping, she had learned entirely against her will from a lecture that left her full of cold and impotent fury, made her more likely to get sick. And there was a nasty flu going around right now.

And her father was a hypochondriac — she'd learned that one on the schoolyard, from a kid who couldn't really say it right, but her mother had helpfully though puzzledly clarified when asked — and having mellowed on the topic of his own health, was now imagining bacterial boogeymen in his daughter's system. If Marie couldn't sleep, Marie couldn't go out. That was that.

What made it unfair, what made it unfair, was that she knew he was right.

Again the roof creaked, and the sound was louder. Laughter from below, and the sound of something breaking, and laughter louder still muffled the sound for everyone in the house except Marie. Marie, who was sitting bolt upright in bed now, staring out her bedroom window at…

…at the silhouette outside her bedroom window, pitch black against the rummy wash of sundown colour.

There was someone standing on the roof, and he was looking in on her.

She hadn't slept in two days. Her parents were driven to distraction; she knew they'd be having no fun at all at their own Halloween party, which they'd come within a hair's breadth of cancelling. But they couldn't.

As well as a party, the Halloween masquerade was a fundraiser. They were hoping to send Marie to a doctor in the States, as part of a special study in childhood insomnia. Her father didn't believe in the expertise of the local doctors; he wanted to go home, to Louisiana, where he said they had special medicine to make a sick child well. He'd become very suspicious of late, since it seemed like every day there was someone calling or knocking on their door, offering aid. Offering shots that would cure the condition — precisely the wrong tack to take with Thomas Arsenault, who didn't even know that his wife snuck his daughter to a flu vaccine clinic every year under the pretense of visiting her mother. All that had done was make the stubborn man dig in his heels harder, and that couldn't go on forever. A girl couldn't go every few days without sleep, not without serious complications. She could die. Her parents needed the money, and she needed to see that doctor. There was no way around it.

Just as there was no way onto the roof, except from inside. Whoever this person was, they were…

A master thief. That was the first thing that came to her mind. French-Canadian television alternated between new programming and the truly ancient, and she'd seen more than enough episodes of Night Hood to recognize the silhouette of Arsène Lupin. The cape. The huge tophat. The gentleman adventurer himself was standing outside her window, and that was a problem, because of course Lupin was not real.

It posed a further problem for Marie Arsenault that things which were not real could not, under any circumstances, open her bedroom window. From the outside. But that was precisely what the spectre proceeded to do; knelt down, brushed its long fingers across the outer sill, and…

A strange crackling sound, the turning of a lock, and the window slid upward in silence. The figure ducked down, and walked in.

"Bonjour, Marie." The voice was soft, very soft, not at all sinister. The figure's right hand was swirling in the air aimlessly, and Marie felt calm. Very calm. Not sleepy, but not afraid.

<"Hello,"> she said. <"Who are you?">

<"You're up very late, Marie."> The figure advanced on her, and Marie felt certain she should want to run away. There was a stranger in her room. Her father's worst fears had never gotten this far.

Instead, she found herself nodding. <"I can't sleep. Mom and dad say I need a doctor in America.">

"Tsk, tsk." The figure shook its head, tophat bobbing. <"They want what's best for you, of course, but they don't understand. Marie, you know, you're up far too late. Little girls shouldn't be sitting up in the middle of the night.">

In a rush, Marie remembered someone else who wore a tophat, a cloak, and a thick suit like the one she could see looming over her in the gloom.

"Es-tu le Bonhomme Sept-Heures?"

The figure laughed musically, and removed a small pouch from its cloak. It was made of some coarse, scratchy-looking material, and leaked what looked like red sand. <"The Seven O'Clock Gentleman, I am. Do you know what happens to the children I visit?">

Marie nodded. She knew now to be afraid. She knew what was going to happen. She wondered if screaming would help. <"You eat them.">

<"I do."> The figure poured a quantity of the sand into its palm. <"I am a bad dream, Marie, the very worst of dreams. A waking nightmare. And there's only one way to stop a waking nightmare.">

Marie tried to answer, to ask: What's that? But her throat was dry, and she couldn't. Bonhomme Sept-Heures stood at the foot of her bed, leaned over her, and stretched out its palm.

<"You go to sleep for real, Marie. Like a good little girl.">

The creature's breath was sweet, like a breeze in the poplars at Parc La Fountaine, and the dust smelled like warm cinnamon as it washed over her.

It wasn't fair.

Site-43: Lambton County, Ontario, Canada

The deed was done for another night. These incidents were getting fewer and farther between, which was definitely a good sign; Bonhomme Sept-Heures hadn't had to visit Montréal for nearly a month. It certainly wasn't a pleasant experience, but some things… well, some things couldn't be helped.

Noor Zaman walked in and, as he always did, glowered at the splintered skeleton which sat in a transparent box in the centre of the containment chamber. "Well?"

+ Bonhomme Sept-Heures yawned...

- and examined herself in the chamber mirror.

"She'll sleep tight for a couple days, at least." Dr. Udo Okorie yawned again. "Me too, for that matter. Anti-vaxxers shouldn't breed, poor kid."

« Bury the Survivors | Words of Power and Poison | Graveyard Shift »