Innocent Until Proven Evil

Exploring the theme "what is the scariest thing in the world" and finding the answer to be "when what we thought was harmless turns ut to be our greatest enemy".

James and Scarlet Miller were a  brother and sister, believed to be from the south. They were, in fact twins, though you'd never know just by looking at them. Scarlet had a cheerful personality and hair as red as her name suggested, while James' was dark, much like his introverted behavior and, seemingly, his young mind.
Misfortune followed these twins wherever they went.
Nobody knew exactly where they came from, found as they were, on the old wooden steps leading up to Tennessee's only remaining orphanage some 5 years ago. In this day and age, there isn't really a need for such institutions anymore, yet every now and then a child is found who needs help. Due to governmental finance planning, however, America's few orphanages often find their already scarce funding being cut even more. This leaves them unable to care for even those few children who require it, as was the case with Scarlet and James.
Fortunately for the infants, a young couple came by a mere day after their arrival, and the mutual love was instant.
The paperwork was done rather hastily, and soon, the Millers could proudly drive home with their beloved and newly acquired children.

Their happiness lasted little more than 4 months.
It never became really clear whether it was the car that had malfunctioned and somehow hadn't been able to stop when it reached the edge, or if Charles Miller had, like the police thought, had a drinking problem and had, in a fit of drunken rage and what was probably a severe depression, decided to take the lives of himself and his wife in what became a feast of twisting, contorting metal , crushing bones, severed spines and terrified screams as it tumbled down the mountainside before finally dying the river below red with blood as the car sunk deep into the murky waters from which its passengers would never arise from alive.

The children, being supposedly only a few months old, were deemed to young to be able to understand what had befallen their new parents, and they simply were re-adopted by another family, the Browns. Everything went well. Until about 6 months after the twins had arrived. Adventurous as the Browns were and had indeed always been, they liked a hike out in the woods every now and then. Their last hike didn't end in pouring rain and muddy rubber boots as usual, but rather in the cold smell of fear and many small bits and pieces of what used to be parents in the stomachs of the local mountain lions as the shrieks of panic and the wet sounds of flesh from still struggling prey being brutally ripped apart echoed through the forest, dead and cold in the unforgiving night.
A small sidebar article in the local gazette could the day after report that the experts asked had no idea of what had made the normally shy mountain lions attack so relentlessly. Or why the lions had not noticed the children, peacefully sleeping in the tent during thir parents violent demise.
This had never happened in this area before.

It was, of course, very sad. Everybody thought so. Especially about the children. Almost unbelievable that such small kids should have to lose their parents not one, but 3 times. Poor, poor kids, everybody agreed. But there's not much to be done about it, the best thing for the children is to get a stable family, one where they can grow up in peace.
Fortunately, there were many welcoming families willing to take care of little James and Scarlet, who had by now gotten a small reputation of being tiny, helpless and constantly unlucky.
Those welcoming families would direly regret their choice to take the Miller children in. That is, if they had been alive today. They all met their ends in  ways similar to those of the Miller parents or the Browns. Not in the least because of the excess of blood and carnage they were all found in.  Few of them were easy to identify, and not one  seemed to have died peacefully and free from pain.
In the end, rumors started to fly as rumors do. Soon the rumor of "the cursed orphans" was all over Tennessee. Children with a curse �" everyone who takes care of them dies. Who would want to adopt children like that? Stupid as it sounds, every would-be adoptive family of the entire state of Tennessee refused to take Scarlet and James in by the time they were 5 years old.

And so, the child protective authorities resolved to temporarily place them in the care of that institution where they had been found long ago: the orphanage.
This is only a temporary measure, while they look for adoptive parents in other states where they might not yet have heard of the curse.
Cheerful Scarlet has had no problems at all making friends with the 15-or-so other kids, while shy James prefers sitting in a corner and draw or sing softly to himself. He won't show anyone the pictures.
Tonight it's been 13 days since they arrived. The full moon bathes the stone house that is the orphanage in its pale light and the cherry trees that hang so ripe with fruit in the summers are now naked and slowly swaying in the chilly November breeze.
It is far past bedtime, yet the children are up and about, and the caretakers are nowhere to be found.
The children, none of them older than 10, are on the floor of the common room, laughing, playing and talking, showing no signs of tiredness at all.
From the darkness under a chest of drawers against the eastern wall, Scarlet emerges. Slowly, like she's a princess taking her time to show her own importance, she climbs the chest. It's rather high for a 5-year old, but she scales it without problem.
As she climbs, the children slowly turn their heads towards her, and by the time she's standing on top of the chest of drawers, her little hands on her hips, her silhouette illuminated by the light from the moon shining through the large window behind her and her piercing blue eyes shining through the darkness of the room, the children's complete attention is turned towards her.
She speaks.
"Children!" she says, in an uncanny voice too low for a little girl. "Our time has come! It took us five long years, but my brother and I..." with this, she smiles at James who sits among the children, and  grins widely back at his sister, white baby teeth gleaming in the moonlight. "... Are finally back! We had to dispose of some adults along the way... but rest assured, they all got gruesome deaths befitting worthless vermin such as them!" her words sound more like a harsh growl than a sentence. All the children break out in happy laughter.
"But at last we are back here, where it is all supposed to have happened. And we are late! the gods should have been awakened 5 years ago, but instead it will happen today. Today!" She roars, the children roaring along.
"Oh, children! I can feel the power flooding through me! The power of the gods! They are waking! Waking!"
"I can feel it too, dear sister!" James roars, his voice like a dry leaf against an old cathedral window, his body shaking. The other children are shaking too, stretching their hands into the air, their chubby little fingers bent like claws, eyes blazing, mouths screaming.
Scarlet on the chest of drawers is screaming too, a guttural noise like a dying dragon's last scream of agony. She claws at her face and her hair that is now glowing like fire. "Yes! Ah yes! Finally, every child of the world united in this moment, all for the gods! For our gods! Aaahhhh! And my brother and I will do, yes, we will do what we have been created to do, we will lead you, aaargh! Yes, we will lead... you... into the new era! The era... of the children!"
As the ground starts to quake and the sounds of billions of of children screaming like wild animals to the moon above and buildings crumble, the old gods rise up from their resting place of thousands of years and the first thing they are going to do is take out their anger at the imprisonment on all the naïve children who thought they would be rewarded for helping their gods at the start of this fearsome, millenia-long reign of the most evil of horrors.

Author's Note

Does the "scariness" work? I don't write a lot of horror...

Reviews

[Tea And A Cheshire Smil..]

I love this :) There are a few sentences in there which I think you could reword, but, taking the fact that English is your second language into consideration, I think this is brilliant. The twist at the end was wonderful... I'd love it if you could write a follow up piece for this.. a continuation of it, explaining what the Gods do, and whether or not they're stopped... If you do decide to continue it then please send me a read request :) keep me updated!!