Chapter Text
For Mr Clark it all started with a call.
Working at a funeral home, Stuart Clark received some strange calls from time to time, his customers - for the most part griefing, sometimes even in deeper emotional distress- did have a tendency to act strange.
If Mr Clark had been the type to joke a lot with his friends about his professional life he would have said that a good mortician also much like a good barkeeper took on the role of a therapist in ways hard to understand for the uninitiated but Mr Stuart was neither the kind of man to joke about his profession nor did he have any friends.
Mr Clark was an orderly man, not good looking but not bad looking either and he was starting to lose his hair now in his mid fifties which he thought was a long time for one to keep his hair.
He was a good mortician (and he would have been a great barkeeper too) professional to a fault but always ready with tissues and warm words for his customers about their departed loved ones. The only thing that was less professional about him were the suspicious jobs he sometimes got from a local excentrical billionaire but he didn't like to dwell on it.
Mr Clark though wasn't a very brave person and so to everyone who knew him the events that took place in October of 1994 seemed very strange.
Though to everyone who didn't know him they would also seem strange.
The events that day were simply rather strange.
“Clark funeral parlor, how can I help?”
“Hello?” the voice was young, Stuart realized that at once and he would probably have done well telling the young person on the other end to either hang up, get a parent or stop bothering hard working people in any other way but he was in some good mood after getting a large sum of money from his last clients and so he didn’t do either.
“Yes? Can I help you?”
“You do… burying? Of dead people and stuff?”
“That is one of my jobs,” Stuart said and realized that the child on the other end was probably in a bit of a spooky mood, what with it being October and thought that calling a funeral parlor might scare them. Though Stuart thought further, the kid, who did sound very young, must have been put up to it by an older child, most likely a sibling. Yes, he thought he might be hearing multiple voices whispering in the background.
Stuart who had also especially suffered during Halloween under his older sister felt some kinship to the child with the trembling voice and decided to be kind but boring teaching the poor thing the important lesson that like everything in the world of adults death was a fact of life and maybe making it immune to any scary stories the older children might tell them. He was just about to start when the child spoke up again.
“ ‘cause then we need your help.”
“I…” Stuart started and another theory sparked. This was about someone the child loved, a lost pet or maybe even a family member. He had heard ages ago from a colleague a particularly sweet attempt of a then 7 year old to pay for the grandfather’s funeral with all of his Christmas money after hearing his mother complain how they couldn’t afford it. Maybe this was a similar situation. “Listen, is there a parent somewhere? I’m sure we can figure it out.”
“No, no…” the child suddenly sounded very troubled. “He’s not… he’s… and Mom can’t, she doesn’t take phones and… and…”
Suddenly there was another voice. “Give me that, One, you’re doing it wrong… Hello!” another child, not much older than the other one but with more confidence in their voice. “We need you here, can you or can you not come?” There was a sharpness in the tone that Stuart thought was very ill-fitting for a young child but he imagined might at least be somewhat imitated from an adult around them rather than it really being the natural of his caller.
“I would really like to talk to an adult,” Stuart said and now he was losing a bit of his good nature from before. Were these children simply pranking him?
There was silence for a moment then the child spoke up again. “There is no one, though, no one you could talk to,” they sighed and added then with light annoyance: “That’s what we need the burying for, in the first place.”
“What?” Stuart was not one to panic usually, he worked with the dead, he had seen gruesome things before in his life but it was rather shocking to have a young child declare rather matter of factly to you, a mortician, they were in need of your services, as a mortician, because there were no adults around. It was for all that Stuart could guess at that moment the culmination of a tragedy and he who earned his bread and butter with tragedies felt he didn’t want to be part of it.
“It’s our Dad,” the child said, clicking their tongue. “We need our Dad buried.”
Whispers in the background some excitement. “Ask about the bad guys, we don’t want them.”
“Shhh, I’m getting to it. Can you do bad guys too? You can have them. We don’t need them, you can maybe… maybe use them? There’s three of them. And our Dad. So four. But you can have all three bad guys. Maybe you can burn them? We’d pay and everything!” the child sounded now more like a child. “We found money. Promise.”
“Listen, child, I think we should call the police, can you give me your address? I’ll send some officers and they will…”
“Three!” The child screeched and then the phone was given over to someone again and he had a new child’s voice in his ear.
“ I heard a rumor that you just came here!”
Then they hung up.
Well, that was certainly a strange call, Stuart thought to himself. A bunch of silly children calling him and demanding he come to wherever they were as if he could know that, sighing and shaking his head he got up to go back to his living room maybe read for a bit and bring his affairs in order before bed but his feet didn’t seem to walk in the direction he wanted them to go, instead they went to his door. Stuart tried to turn around but nothing seemed to work and so he watched helplessly as his feet carried him to the front door where he put on his shoes and coat before he left the house.
He had no idea where he was going but his feet were walking without his involvement and he couldn’t do anything but let them carry him through the city.
This, Stuart thought to himself, was most unusual. His feet usually responded quite well to him and now they were disobeying him in such a way. In his profession he’d heard of all sorts of weird and disturbing illness and injuries, so he thought it quite possible that he was sick. He should consult a doctor at the next best possibility. But, thought Stuart then, how was he going to go about that without his leg’s obedience? It was going to be extremely hard to go to a doctor or just to pick up the phone if the act of walking alone was what was seemingly affected.
Before Stuart could find a solution to that problem his feet came to a hold in front of a building he did indeed know.
It was the residence of Reginald Hargreeves, maybe the most famous resident of the city.
Hargreeves was the exccentrical billionaire that Mr Clark had taken well paid jobs on, like I said the man didn't like to dwell on it but standing in front of the house dwelling was exactly what he did.
Since around 1990 Stuart and some other colleagues were called to that place from time to time, with extra money promised for letting bodies vanish that just seemed to accumulate in the place, some of the more superstitious and naive colleagues whispered about those bodies being in direct relation with the children Hargreeves adopted after the event of October 1st 1989, but Stuart really couldn’t believe that babies, even ones born under odd circumstances, could in any way be responsible for the amount of bodies that Hargreeves was bringing their way. Instead he speculated that they were dying in some new experimental invention of the man who was after all a famous inventor but not, in Stuart’s opinion, the most morally sound person. Whatever the case may have been, Stuart had gotten good money from working for and with Mr Hargreeves so he didn’t often pay the reason for their arrangement much mind.
Though now that he was in front of it once again he did think of all of that at once concerned that it was his guilty conscience that had his feet carried him to this of all places.
Though Stuart wasn’t musing about this guilt he had apparently hidden from himself for such a long time for long when the door to the building opened and two children marched out.
A girl and a boy in matching school uniforms, the girl had straight brown hair that ran down her back and bangs under which she seemed to hide as she looked at him shyly while the boy examined him with an open suspicion that he had never seen from a child that young.
“Is that him?” the boy asked and the girl nodded her head. “Where’s the dead people's car? You said last time he came with a special dead people car.” The girl shrugged and bit her lip. She seemed close to tears. The boy seemingly used to his friend’s (or sister? because surely these were two of Reginald Hargreeve’s famed adopted children, their age would match at the very least) sensitive nature turned to Stuart now with an accusatory expression. “Did you forget your dead people's car? How are we supposed to take the bodies of the bad guys away?”
“I…” Stuart realized from his tone that the boy must have been the second child he had been on the phone with, that really didn’t help the situation and he tried desperately to get his composure back. These were children after all they shouldn’t be that hard to deal with. So Stuart, who was, I’m afraid to say, a terrible know-it-all decided that the best course of action would be to teach the children about his profession. “Well, first of all, young man, the car you mean is called a hearse and secondly I’d really like to know what is going on. I need to speak to your father.”
The boy frowned at him. “Did you not listen when we talked on the phone? Dad’s dead!” And now for the first time his voice did actually sound like it belonged to a child, an unhappy, scared and panicked little boy who was looking at him now with big eyes threatening to overflow with tears any time.
Stuart frowned, he was pretty sure by now that the children weren’t playing a trick on him and that something had actually gone wrong with the old man. Something that deeply disturbed the children and had them calling a mortician.
He might just have fallen, Stuart thought to himself. Fallen and gone unconscious, children have a bad habit of being overly dramatic after all.
And if that was the case Stuart had the duty to help, no matter how silly he felt being commanded around by little children. For the moment he forgot all about the weird circumstances that made his legs walk towards the mansion and concentrated on the task at hand.
“Well, bring me to him then,” he said to the boy he’d keep watch for a telephone inside the house so that he’d be able to call an ambulance as soon as possible. Also, he thought there must have been somebody attending the children. A maid, some teacher. He didn’t think Hargreeves was the kind of man to take care of his children by himself (especially if his memory served him right and there were well over the two children that had welcomed him or even the three more he’d been on the phone with inside that house).
The children led Stuart inside the house and down the hallway to a room he remembered from his times there as a large living area.
Before they opened the door together the little girl who hadn’t yet spoken a word to him turned to him and with a very quiet voice said: “It’s a really big mess… but it wasn’t any of ours fault!”
The boy nodded. “It was the bad guys, we already told him, Seven,” he said calmly and took the girl’s hand in an apparent attempt to calm her.
Stuart felt that he had wasted enough time engaging the children’s whims. There was clearly something wrong here and he as the adult had to take care of it.
He opened the door and the room that he saw behind it was nothing like the room that was comfortable but with the permanent reminder that he was in the room of a very rich powerful man, now the room was covered in blood and in a corner he spotted a small pile of what he first mistook for old clothes until he saw that there were people inside those clothes but in the middle of the room on the couch Stuart had sat upon himself was Reginald Hargreeves surrounded by the rest of the children. When he entered a blond boy at the end of the couch jumped up and looked at him with big blue eyes that were slightly red rimmed. His hands and uniform were also bloody as if he’d been attempting to clean the room all by himself.
“Hello, Sir,” he said. “You gotta help bury our Dad.”
Stuart looked around, looked at the man on the couch, who he was now realizing was in fact just the remains of Reginald Hargreaves, the children surrounding him, the blood covered boy, the two kids behind him still holding hands and the small pile of bodies in the corner.
“I… is…”
“Oh and… we didn’t ask on the phone,” another girl next to the blond kid spoke up now. “But do you do monkey funerals too?”
“Ape,” the blond boy corrected her. “Pogo is an ape,” his voice was strained and watery as if he was going to cry again but he seemed to feel obligated to continue. “A chimpanzee. So not a big one so… can… can you…”
“If he doesn’t want to I’ll rumor him, One,” the girl told him as if it was the best comfort and patted her brother's arm.
“Rumor?” Stuart asked with a frown.
“Like how you got here,” the boy behind him said. “So you can bury Dad.”
“I…” Stuart shook his head. These children weren’t making any sense. He needed to call the authorities. Needed to involve the police but for that he needed to move away from the children. “Is there another adult here?” he asked, trying to make his voice sound friendly and appropriate for children.
“Mom’s taking care of Two ‘n Four,” another small boy next to the blond boy and the girl said, biting his nails. “But I dunno if she counts.”
Stuart found that even more confusing, why wasn’t their mother looking after the rest of the children? Why was seemingly nobody looking after them after what he imagined must have been a rather traumatic event? Who was this woman the boy had called ‘Mom’? And what was that about numbers? Before he could think of which of these questions might have been the most important to ask first, the boy that had greeted him at the door spoke up again with a tone of incredible impatience: “Why aren’t we getting to it already? It’s getting late anyway. And One gets whiny when he doesn’t obey bedtime.”
“Don’t,” the blonde boy muttered.
“You do,” the second girl said and petted his back. “Everybody knows.”
The boy still seemed to disagree but whatever more protest he wanted to voice he didn’t get to it because Stuart had at that point finally had enough of these silly children.
“Listen! You will either bring me to your mother or whatever other adult is in the house or you will show me to a phone!”
The girl with the curly hair looked at the boy from the entrance. “Should I…”
“Wait!” the other girl told her and then leaned over to the boy that was seemingly the leader of the operation to whisper something in his ear.
The boy frowned and looked up at Stuart. “Do you need help with the burying? Other grown ups? Seven says it’s usually lots of people helping with the burying.”
That was not in fact what Stuart had been getting at but he guessed that maybe if he pretended to be going along with what they wanted they wouldn’t give him any more issues.
“Yes,” Stuart agreed. “I need to call some people to help me.”
“Fine…” the boy said and made a face.
Stuart walked back into the hallway and took the phone from the wall and called 911.
So, it all started with a call.
Two calls in fact.
Calls that changed the life of a lonely, old mortician and seven young chuldren.
But what happened before the children called and let to their father's early death was what changed the world.