Read In the Shadows of Children Online
Authors: Alan Ryker
In the Shadows of Children (9 page)
“So what did I do? What could I have possibly done? I was just a kid.”
Bobby looked up through his shaggy bangs in exasperation. “I told you, that’s not it!”
That roar again, smashing into Aaron physically like PA system turned up far too loud.
“Then what?” Aaron asked quietly.
“The thread isn’t that the children are bad. It’s that their parents tell them. They already fear the darkness. They already sense the void. But hearing it from their parents… So when Dad told us the boogeyman was real, you knew deep down it was true, and while I slept, you stared into the darkness. When you did that, you reached out to it. It reached back.”
Aaron sat, stunned. “They couldn’t have known.”
Bobby snorted. “That makes it even worse. They take advantage of a fear the intensity of which they can’t remember because their minds no longer have the capacity to contain it. For what, to make sure their spawn eat all their spinach?”
A thought slammed into Aaron so hard his heart skipped a beat. His eyes widened. His mouth fell open. Unsteadily, he rose to his feet. “What happened to Mom?”
“She never believed us.”
“Dad said it. Dad said it! Mom made him stop.”
“It drained my fifteen years, then dropped me like a flattened juice box. I find Dad is already dead. Mom never believed us. She made us sleep in here. She thought I was just a bad kid. Grounded me to my room. Forced me to fend for myself.” Bobby spoke faster, grew more animated. “But you know what, Aaron? Her death is your fault, too. Maybe I could have forgiven her, but I knew of only one thing that would bring you back here, and I needed you back here, at the one place I can appear like this. We can only take our old forms in the place where we disappeared.” He shook his head in mock solemnity. “So many people have suffered in your place.”
“What the hell did you do?”
“I showed her,” Bobby whispered. Then he rose and stepped toward Aaron, dragging his backpack behind him.
Aaron had settled on the rules. Bobby was a ghost, something to be wary of, but he was trapped within the closet. As Bobby broke that boundary, Aaron stepped back, tripped over the end of the bed and fell to the floor.
The hand Bobby pressed against the film separating him from the real world was small and soft, but when it broke through, it was enormous, gnarled, clawed. He continued to press forward, dragging himself through, unsticking from the darkness, pulling his sack behind him until he had passed the low doorway and unfurled himself almost to the ceiling.
Black pits yawned in the center of his face, trying to draw Aaron in and consume him, trying to fill the emptiness Bobby had become.
He reached forward. Aaron scrabbled back, staring into the black-pitted face. He screamed. He’d been screaming. Finally, he hit the back wall, just beneath the window.
Bobby the sack man stepped forward, then dragged his bag another foot. Step. Drag. Step. Drag.
Aaron stood and fumbled at the window latch, and the boogeyman stopped. They stared at each other for a long moment before the creature slowly backed into the closet, pressing into that tangible shadow, letting it envelop him and transform him into a teenage boy once again in the process.
“I can’t hurt you, bro,” he said, then sneered. “You’re all grown up.”
“But Mom…”
“I never touched her. She fell on her own.”
“After you scared her.”
Bobby nodded. “After I showed her what your children can become when you don’t believe them.”
Aaron stared at the boy, at his fresh face, but he saw now what he’d sensed for days: that it lay over nothing, that it disguised a void. The other face was his true self, the abyss, devoid of rage or sorrow. This thing didn’t want, and it wasn’t hungry except in the same sense that a vacuum is hungry. It consumed because it was a thing made to consume, it was an imbalance, a chasm over the sides of which things tumbled, an unthinking black hole.
“You’re not my brother,” Aaron said.
For the first time since he’d appeared, the look of certainty left Bobby’s face. “Yes, I am. Are you still thinking that you’ve lost it?”
“No, but you aren’t my brother. You’re wearing him.”
“Fuck you. I’m the dear little brother you loved so much that you left him to die. Don’t try to weasel out of this. This is your fault.”
“Bobby was a great kid. He was my best friend. He loved his family, and he would never, ever hurt us, no matter what happened to him.” For all his fear, Aaron scoffed as he watched the effect his words had on Bobby, the baby face growing petulant and confused. “Shit, I thought you knew, that you were trying to trick me. You didn’t know. You actually think you’re Bobby.”
“I am!” The roar pressed Aaron back against the wall, but the voice that followed was quiet, less sure. “You twisted your ankle so bad playing baseball when you were twelve that you had to spend weeks of summer vacation on the couch. I fetched things for you the whole time. Comics, snacks, whatever you asked for. That one winter I walked out onto the ice over the river. You yelled at me, but I didn’t listen and I fell through. You used a stick to drag me to the shore. You told them I’d slipped down the bank. Then that one time—”
“You’re wearing him. You’re wearing his memories. You’re so desperate to be real that you’ll settle for having once been real.” Aaron shook his head. Bobby wasn’t here. Bobby was gone. And Aaron felt a wave of relief and disgust. He slid down the wall and sat on the floor. Got comfortable. He wouldn’t walk past that closet until the sun rose.
They were silent for a long while, Bobby standing, holding his backpack by one strap, his eyes unfocused, his jaw clenched.
Finally, he spoke. “You’re wrong, brother. You called this on us by telling Dad your little story, you abandoned me to this fate that should have been yours, and now you have the gall to deny me, to say that I don’t even exist?” That obnoxious smile returned, sliding across the mask of Bobby’s face. “Well, I won’t soon. The void will let me fade when I bring it a replacement.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“The boogeymen are drained children buying their own release. I stuff a soul in my sack and I’m gone. It’s impossible for me to explain to you what it’s like to linger after being drained, to live a nonexistence. But it will be over soon. They’re done with me except for one more task.”
The fake Bobby’s words threw Aaron. Had it lied about not being able to hurt Aaron? Was it about to try to pull him through? He’d jump out the window before he let it so much as touch him.
“You said adults are immune.”
“You sorry sack of shit,” Bobby said, barking out a vicious laugh. “I died for you, asshole. I died in your place. Mom, too. And you’re still only worried about your own skin. Think back to the one thing that connects all the stolen children in all those stories, and then remember the phone call you made last night.”
Aaron jumped to his feet. Elijah. He’d warned Elijah about the boogeyman.
“No. No. Fuck you, you can’t do this. If you are Bobby, you can’t do this. Not to your nephew.”
Bobby smiled and stepped back into the depths.
“He’s never met you but he feels like he knows you. He looks at your pictures. He asks about you.” Aaron spoke in statements, but he was pleading. Begging.
“Oh, we met. Last night. He might not have recognized me from the old pictures, though. I think I’ll pay him another visit,” Bobby said. He was fifty yards away, the void not changing and yet seeming to grow as the receding teenage boy added perspective.
Aaron ran forward, charging Bobby, who continued to casually back away. Aaron ran through the veil of darkness, meeting with none of the resistance Bobby had struck when he’d pressed out in his monstrous true form. Instead, Aaron ran face-first into the low shelf over the hanger bar, splitting his lip. He ducked, tore aside the clothes, placed his hands flat on the plaster, then pounded at it.
“Why?” Aaron screamed. “Why my boy?
Bobby’s reply was distant, but directionless. “You have the life I should have, and things that don’t exist are envious of things that do.”
Aaron fell out of the closet and watched the last of the darkness swirl away, just able to make out the tiny figure of his lost brother, now turned away, still walking slowly, clutching his backpack.
Aaron pulled his phone from his pocket and dialed Sarah, desperately searching for a way to explain to her that his brother, the boogeyman, was coming for their son.
“Hey, bucko,” Sarah said. “I’m sorry I haven’t called. Elijah passed out early and I’ve been enjoying an evening of adult television. Adult television! Not a talking tree or wise old owl or costumed hero in sight.”
“Elijah’s asleep?”
“Yeah, he had that skating party this afternoon. Ran himself ragged.”
“Sarah, you have to wake him up right now. Get him out of that bedroom.”
“What are you—”
A whistle-pitched scream stopped her short.
“Elijah?” she called out, mouth away from the phone. Aaron heard the pounding of her feet as she ran over their hardwood floor.
“Sarah! Sarah!” Aaron shouted. He needed to warn her, but she didn’t have the phone to her ear.
His breath sat hot in his tight lungs, and he realized he wasn’t breathing, was instead waiting for more screaming, but what he heard were motherly coos of comfort. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. It was just a nightmare. It’s over now.”
Behind that, he heard Elijah’s sobs. Because what Elijah knew, and what Aaron needed to remember once he left his cursed childhood home, what he absolutely couldn’t forget this time, was that the nightmare wasn’t over. It had only begun.
About the Author
Alan Ryker is the product of a good, clean country upbringing. Though he now lives with his wife in the suburbs of Kansas City, the sun-bleached prairie still haunts his fiction.
DarkFuse has published his novels
The Hoard
and
Dream of the Serpent
, and his novellas
Nightmare Man
and
Among Prey
.
You can visit his website at:
www.alanryker.com
.
About the Publisher
DarkFuse is a leading independent publisher of modern fiction in the horror, suspense and thriller genres. As an independent company, it is focused on bringing to the masses the highest quality dark fiction, published as collectible limited hardcover, paperback and eBook editions.
To discover more titles published by DarkFuse, please visit its official site at
www.darkfuse.com
.
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