Date: 2014-12-31T23:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Speculative Fiction; Horror; Paranormal; Supernatural; Psychological; terror; evil; gory; Lovecraft; kealan patrick burke; lovecraft horror
Description: At first glance, Phil Pendleton and his son Adam are just an ordinary father and son, no different from any other. They take walks in the park together, visit county fairs, museums, and zoos, and eat overlooking the lake. Some might say the father is a little too accommodating given the lack of discipline when the child loses his temper in public. Some might say he spoils his son by allowing him to set his own bedtimes and eat candy whenever he wants. Some might say that such leniency is starting to take its toll on the father, given how his health has declined. What no one knows is that Phil

Sour Candy

Kealan Patrick Burke

Copyright © 2015 by Kealan Patrick Burke

All rights reserved.

Cover Design by Elderlemon Design

License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author

Visit the author at http://www.kealanpatrickburke.com

Four months to the day he first encountered the boy at Walmart, the last of Phil Pendleton’s teeth fell out.

1. The Scream

When the child started screaming, Phil Pendleton had his arms loaded with chocolate bars and his girlfriend cooing in his ear. Later he would think of the moment prior to that klaxon-like intrusion as one of utter bliss, a rare occasion in which his customary concerns were in absentia.

It was a Saturday, so he was off work and had woken up pleasurably late after a night of equally pleasurable lovemaking. And while he had briefly considered doing some much-delayed yardwork today (if only to stave off the disapproving looks of his neighbors), Lori had convinced him to actually take the day off and join her in doing nothing more taxing than lounging before the TV with a veritable stockpile of chocolate. As the invitation had been extended while she stood in the bathroom doorway wearing nothing but her pink silk underwear, and with the memory of her uncharacteristic sexual abandon still fresh in his mind, he hadn’t needed to be asked twice.

His mission was a simple one: procure as much chocolate as possible and return home, a task which saw him standing in the candy aisle at Walmart, Lori doling out her requests over the phone in between bouts of sexual innuendo as he tried to focus on the overwhelming selection on the shelves before him.

Yes, he would have said the day was a fine one indeed.

Then the scream had come, so abrupt and so unexpected, Phil’s whole body jerked as if someone had punched him between the shoulder blades. Jamie Lee Curtis had screamed like that in Halloween. Loons did too. A half dozen or so chocolate bars rained from the cradle of his arm to the floor, smacking against his feet. Only his quick reflexes kept his cell phone from joining it. This last was a relief. As Lori was so fond of reminding him, he’d had to replace the phone twice this year already due to natural clumsiness.

“What in God’s name was that? The fire alarm?” Lori asked. In the fright, the phone had slipped down to his cheek. Only luck had kept it pinned there. Now, hands unexpectedly free of candy, he grabbed it and put it back to his ear.

“No. Someone’s kid.” As he said this last, he looked to his right, to the source of the sound.

There were a half dozen or so shoppers wandering the aisle. Many of them were making concentrated efforts not to look at the thin woman standing midway down the aisle, or the towheaded child currently tugging at the hem of her unseasonably heavy coat. On the faces of the shoppers, Phil saw his own emotions reflected back at him: irritation, pity, and relief.

Irritation at the obnoxious introduction of such a hostile and unwelcome sound into the general lazy-Saturday ambience of the store.

Pity at the sight of the browbeaten woman forced to accept responsibility for her child’s misbehavior.

And relief that the child belonged to someone else.

This last was particularly relevant to Phil. Infrequent paternal impulses notwithstanding, he had never wanted children. Indeed his first and only marriage had ended for that very reason. Despite the agreement that they remain childless and therefore free to live their lives untethered by such suffocating obligations, over time his ex-wife’s position morphed into mourning that she would never be a mother. Seeing the naked sadness in her eyes whenever they were around the sons and daughters of their friends, Phil had agreed to consider altering his own stance on the subject. But his heart had never been in it. His own childhood had been a train wreck, and rather than emerge from that endurance test better prepared for parenthood, he suspected it had probably ruined such prospects for life. Whatever the case, he wasn’t in any great hurry to find out. His hope had been that, given time, Stacey would realize the limitations a child would impose upon their lives and bury her maternal need. She hadn’t. Instead, her impulses bred anger and resentment toward him, rendering him little more than an obstruction to the natural course of her life. Even so he might have stood a chance of pleading his case if not for the unwavering, and often openly hostile support of her friends, few of whom had cared for him from the beginning. Their dissolution had been a cold one, and despite halfhearted efforts to stay in touch, they never did unless the topic was a practical one, such as ownership of certain items discovered in the basement of the house they’d once shared.

Now, as Phil looked at the child with the runny nose and puffy eyes, his clothes remarkably pristine and oddly old-fashioned, he wished Stacey were here if only so he could use the kid as an example of why he had never conceded to her wishes. “This,” he would tell her, “is just a taste of what we’d have been forced to put up with.”

Aware that he was staring but unable to stop, drawn to the sad tableau as one might be to the interaction of animals in an enclosure, Phil moved his gaze back to the mother and immediately felt a pulse of guilt for his uncharitable thoughts.

“Honey?”

“Yeah, babe,” he said into the phone.

“What’s going on?”

“I think you can guess.”

The woman might once have been beautiful. All the elements were there, but appeared to have been sullied by hardship and filtered by distress so that to find them, one had to look harder than her appearance invited. Her dirty blonde hair was in disarray, as if she hadn’t bothered to brush it after getting out of bed, or had, in some fit of rage or desperation, tried to pull it out. Or perhaps that was the child’s doing, for in his eyes, behind the shimmering tears, Phil thought he detected a glimmer of glee, as if nothing gave the kid greater pleasure than the reaction his histrionics wrought from his suffering mother. Indeed there appeared to be the slightest upward curve at the corners of the child’s bow-shaped lips.

In contrast to her son’s rosy complexion, the woman was pallid and drawn, cheekbones pushing against her waxy skin like hangers beneath a sheet. The cold fluorescents did her no favors either. She looked lost, her focus not on the child yanking at her threadbare brown coat, but on the riotously colorful bags of Gummi Bears, Cola Bottles, and sour candy suspended on hooks before her. She stared as if the secret to some elusive quandary might be hidden within. Phil estimated the woman to be in her mid- to late forties, but suspected her Thrift Store sense of dress, general unkemptness of her appearance, and the obvious weathering of the child’s attention probably made her look a decade older than she actually was.

“That kid has a hell of a pair of lungs on him,” Lori said.

As if he had somehow heard her, or maybe just because his attempts to get his mother’s attention had proved unsuccessful, the kid clenched his little fists, tilted his head back, opened his mouth, and let loose another scream. Throughout the aisle, people flinched, winced, and abandoned all pretense of obliviousness to the root of the awful sound.

“Fuck sake,” exclaimed one shopper, a heavyset man in coveralls and a dark red beard that looked like lichen moss eager to reclaim his face. He had a six-pack of Miller Lite in one hand. He was flexing the other. He glared, not at the kid, but at the back of the mother’s head. Her focus on the candy did not waver.

The kid fell silent. The slight smile remained.

None of the shoppers left the aisle, and now all of them were openly staring at the child and his mother.

“Jesus,” Lori said.

A manager appeared.

“I think I’ll try Giant Eagle instead,” Phil said into the phone. “I’m actually starting to fear I’ll go deaf.”

“Good idea.”

But he didn’t move.

The manager, a balding man with spectacles and bad skin, looked only marginally less stressed than the woman to which he had been summoned. Lost inside a forest green suit, he resembled a turtle none too enthused about coming out of his shell.

“What’s happening?” Lori asked.

Again the kid looked in Phil’s direction, and the feeling that somehow he was hearing Lori’s side of the phone conversation intensified. But as there was at least ten feet separating Phil from the boy and his mother, this was highly unlikely.

“The store manager’s on the scene,” he told Lori, quietly.

The manager reached the woman and her son and joined his hands together before him as if his intent was not to chastise them but to lead them in prayer.

“I’m sorry…Miss?”

The woman did not move. Phil’s impression of her graduated from one of pity to concern. Given the pallor of her skin, dazed eyes, and reluctance or inability to move, the only thing suggesting that she wasn’t a statue was her presence there in the middle of the candy aisle. He wondered if maybe she’d had a stroke.

“Miss?” The manager looked as if he might disappear back inside his suit and scuttle away. “Do you mind if we have a word?”

The shoppers were watching, and while Phil found himself wishing they’d move on, he felt similarly enthralled.

“Miss?”

The kid spun on a heel to face the manager. For a brief moment, he just smiled at the man, but just when the manager started to return it, encouraged perhaps by any acknowledgment at all, the kid screamed a third time. Startled, eyes bugging from their sockets, the manager staggered backward and almost collided with an old woman who had been watching, her gnarled hands clamped around the handle of her shopping cart.

“I’m going to go,” Phil told Lori. “I’ll see you at home.”

“Just when it was getting interesting. Pick me up a bag of Dove darks too, will you?”

“Will do.”

Phil hung up and pocketed the phone. Up until now, curiosity had kept him rooted to the spot—and clearly he was not alone in feeling that way—but now he felt uneasy, the awkwardness and weirdness of the situation registering as a quiver in the pit of his stomach. And while he was rarely the kind of man to intervene or contribute to situations he deemed none of his business, the words were up and out of his mouth before he could think to stop them.

“Maybe someone should call an ambulance?” he suggested, his words aimed at the manager, who was gathering himself with great difficulty, his face the color of a beet.

And then the mother moved. In a motion better suited to a machine, she reached out and snapped free of its hook a bag of sour candy. Her other hand came up and she ripped the plastic bag wide open. Candy flew on both sides of her. Like a seagull hovering above a school of mackerel, the kid inspected the colorful debris, and then dropped to the floor to retrieve them.

The woman turned, her gaze like a lighthouse beam as it swept over the onlookers before settling on the nervous face of the manager.

“Miss, I’m going to have to ask you to l—”

With both hands, and hard enough that her knuckles made a hollow thwock sound as they mashed her upper lip against her teeth, the woman crammed two fistfuls of the candies into her mouth.

As if helpless to do anything but mimic her, the manager’s mouth dropped open. With the spell broken by repulsion and maybe the same note of trepidation that had insinuated its way into Phil’s stomach, a few of the shoppers at last began to make their way out of the aisle. Phil started to follow, but then the child, hands full of multicolored candy, rose and once again stared at him.

Inexplicably unnerved—it’s a kid, for Christ’s sake—Phil composed a smile he was sure must have looked as plastic and insincere as it felt. “Hey, kid.”

Propelled by impotent outrage, the manager hurried away, no doubt to fetch someone with a steelier disposition.

Phil felt abandoned.

Overhead, one of the fluorescents flickered and dimmed.

The mother stopped chewing and turned her empty eyes on Phil.

He nodded. “Hi there.”

Both of them were staring at him now, neither one of them moving.

Then the child extended his arms to offer Phil the candy.

2. Collision

“Did you take some?”

Stopped at the light at the intersection of Lincoln and Mulberry, the afternoon sun blazing down on the windshield, Phil smirked at Lori’s words on the speakerphone. “Well yeah, it seemed like the polite thing to do. Tasted like shit though. I hate those things. Never saw the point in taking a perfectly nice piece of candy and ruining it.”

Now that he had put some distance between himself and the store, or more accurately the woman and the child he had encountered there, he felt better, and in truth, more than a little ridiculous. Weren’t shopping giants, Walmart in particular, famous for the types of people who patronized them? He’d seen more than one meme floating around the web showing pictures taken in the aisles of zany characters and fancifully dressed oddballs. The store claimed to offer the best prices on household goods and groceries, so why wouldn’t it attract all walks of life?

Still though, the majority of those images were shared with the intention of eliciting humor from the viewer. He could find nothing funny about what he’d seen today.

“Did you get my Doves?” Lori asked.

“Yep. And everything else you asked for. Oh, except for the caramels. They didn’t have them at Giant Eagle.”

“Rats.”

“Sorry.” He looked up and out at the red light, willing it to change.

“Eh, I’m not. And my thighs won’t regret the loss of them either.”

“Don’t mention your thighs while I’m stuck here at the light.”

Her laugh was a wonderful sound and chased away the last lingering stain the incident at the store had imprinted on his mind.

“You wouldn’t be nearly so turned on if they were twice the size.”

He grinned. “Hey now, I have no such prejudices against women with big thighs or anything else.”

“Right. That’s what every guy says until it happens.”

Finally the stop light turned green, and he eased his foot off the gas, allowing the Chevy to drift out into the intersection.

“Yeah, but in my case I happen to m—”

An explosion of light and sound and Phil was slammed forward into the steering wheel, the hard rubber fracturing his ribs and crushing the air from his lungs, and then back into his seat, his neck cracking painfully as the vehicle juddered to a halt.

“Jesus Christ…” he moaned. Stars whirled in his vision.

“Phil?”

“Okay…I’m okay,” he said, not yet sure if this was the case, but retaining enough sense to know that panicking Lori was something best avoided. “Fender bender. I’ll call you back.”

“Wait!”

Glass tinkling around him and the smell of burning rubber clogging his nose, he jabbed with a trembling forefinger the button to end the call and took a deep breath, which he immediately regretted. It felt as if someone was stabbing hot daggers into his sides. “Shit.” Hissing air through his bloodied teeth, he fumbled for the door handle, noticing as he did so the glass from both the door and windshield were gone and that people were amassing around the car.

The door opened with a tortured shriek and the space was filled with daylight splintered by backlit figures.

“You okay buddy?” someone asked.

“Move back folks, give him some room,” said another.

“I’ve called 911,” said a third, and indeed Phil thought he could hear sirens in the distance, though it could just as easily have been the ringing in his ears. As he allowed his shadowy benefactors to gently extricate him from the car, the cell rang behind him. Lori, freaking out, he imagined. He realized he couldn’t leave it too long before he called to let her know he was okay. Maybe by then he’d know if that was the truth.

The good Samaritans helped him across the street and sat him down on the curb where he regulated his breathing as much as his injured ribs would allow. Horns honked around him; people yelled.

After some indeterminate amount of time, and with his whole body trembling, he blinked cold sweat from his eyes and inspected the damage.

He’d been following a PT Cruiser into the intersection when another vehicle had slammed into him from behind, in turn forcing his car into the Cruiser. The PT didn’t appear to be too damaged. Phil’s Chevy had absorbed the worst of it. The backend had accordioned inward, his trunk gaping open, one rear wheel bent inward.

The offending vehicle, a grey Toyota, had suffered similar damage to its front end. Through the steam and smoke from the ruptured engine block, he tried to make out if the driver had escaped unscathed. He could see that the windshield was cracked and starred but still in place. If there was anyone still inside they were invisible to him.

The sirens were closer now.

“Can I get you anything?” a young woman in athletic gear asked. She was standing over him, her face writ with concern.

“No, thank you, I’m okay. Just need to stay off my feet for a minute. But thanks. You’re very kind.”

“Anything you need,” she told him. As he watched her vanish into the crowd he was reminded of an old Ray Bradbury story he had read once about people who showed up all-too-quickly at the scene of traffic accidents. In that story, they’d been a sinister bunch, but he was glad of their help today.

The door of the Toyota swung open, and though Phil could not yet make out the driver, he took it as a good sign that they were at least uninjured enough to exit the vehicle.

Until he saw who it was and his heart froze in his aching chest.

“The fuck…?” he muttered, his voice a mere croak.

It was the woman from the store. She staggered free of the car and the haze of smoke, her lifeless gaze and the nasty gash running like red lighting from her hairline to the bridge of her broken nose making her look like something from a zombie movie. Blood made a scarlet mask of her face. She paused, her body weaving to and fro, and fell to her knees. Phil thought he heard one of them crack like kindling.

“Oh God,” someone said and hurried over to attend to the injured woman, but when they reached her, she had strength enough to shove them aside. It quickly became apparent as more people tried to help and were rebuffed, that no matter how severe the woman’s injuries, she was moving with a singular purpose.

And that purpose was Phil.

She rose, her eyes fixed on him, and resumed walking toward where he sat paralyzed by the surreal aspect of what he was witnessing. A number of thoughts flickered through his addled mind, each one more panicked than the last:

She hit me on purpose.

She’s insane.

She’s going to try to kill me.

Yet still he could not move, was afraid to try. The bones in his chest felt like shards of broken glass and he feared if he stood, he’d shatter into pieces.

“Jesus, I thought she was dead,” said an onlooker to his right.

Still, despite it all, a worse thought than the potential malevolence of the woman’s intentions occurred to him, resolving itself from the fog much like the woman had.

“There’s a kid,” he said.

The young man who had spoken looked at him. “What was that, buddy?”

“In the car. There’s a kid. She had a kid with her.”

He looked from Phil to the encroaching woman, who was still resisting the best efforts of the crowd to assist her, to the car. “I’m pretty sure—”

“Check,” Phil told him.

The young man nodded and set off, giving the woman a wide berth as if afraid she might attack him. Phil didn’t blame the guy. Despite her injuries, she looked capable of anything. There was a madness in her eyes of a kind Phil had never seen before. It chilled him to the core and he knew he would be seeing it again, all of this, for many sleepless nights to come.

“Ma’am, you should probably sit down,” an older gentleman said, his wrinkled hands extended to catch her if she should fall again. She ignored him and the man moved away, perhaps assuming she was simply going to sit down beside Phil to await the paramedics. One look at the lightless holes where her eyes should have been should have told him otherwise.

Phil’s body tensed in anticipation of a blow. He waited to see a knife or a gun, or just her hands hooked into claws meant to flay him or pluck out his eyes, all while she screamed at him that he would never understand the humiliation she had endured at the store.

Remembering his first and only encounter with the woman prior to the accident summoned once more fear for the wellbeing of the child and he looked past the woman to the young man by the car, who looked back at him and gave a shrug and a single shake of his head.

No kid here, buddy.

Phil swallowed and looked up into the terrible face of the wounded woman as she loomed over him. He was too weak to defend himself, too dazed to understand all that had happened in the past few minutes, and was happening still. Somewhere along the line his life had jumped the tracks and he had found himself in a nightmare, and like the worst kind of nightmare, he could not move, the people around him too busy chatting, redirecting traffic, or filming the scene with their iPhones to realize the very real and possibly dangerous drama taking place on the edge of it.

The woman looked down at him. This close he could see that the side of her face was swelling, darkening, and her lower lip had split almost down to the cleft in her chin, exposing the dots of blood on her gums. Nausea rose in his chest and he prayed he wouldn’t vomit, for surely the violence of that response would further aggravate his own injuries.

“Don’t,” was all the self-defense he could muster.

“Yours now,” the woman said, though her split lip made it Yoursh now, her voice the sound of a rake through dead leaves, each word forcing the rent in her chin to widen like some strange vertical second mouth. Blood spattered her feet and speckled Phil’s shoes.

“What is?” he asked, and flinched as she held out her fist as if she were indicating solidarity, and then opened it.

Something fell into his lap and he grimaced, aware only that whatever it was, it was covered in her blood. It appeared to be one of her teeth.

When next he looked up, she had wandered away from him, off through the crowd to the intersection.

The paramedics and the police arrived within minutes of each other. Any relief Phil might have felt at escaping a more violent encounter with the woman—assuming the accident itself had not been violent enough—fled a few moments later when a shrill scream erupted from the crowd. He heard people yelling, a car horn, and then a thump and the prolonged screech of tires as a vehicle struggled to stop after colliding with something. Phil could not see what happened, his view blocked by the immobilized vehicles and the crowd that had filled the spaces between them. The screaming intensified as the police hurried through the crowd and out into the intersection. A moment later their radios crackled and Phil learned that the woman from the store, the woman who had rammed her car into his at high speed, had walked out into traffic where a taxi had ended her suffering.

“I…I almost had her,” someone said, and Phil knew by the haunted tone of their voice that whoever it was would also not be sleeping soundly for a while.

“Jesus,” said the paramedic, who had just dropped to his haunches before Phil with the intention of attending to him. “Will you be okay here for a few minutes?”

Phil nodded, convinced now more than ever that none of this was really happening, that it was in fact a bizarre dream.

“Thanks, buddy.” The paramedic hurried away.

Phil looked down at himself and plucked the bloodied object from the crease of his jeans. Blinking away the tears from the smoke and the pain, he turned the thing over in his fingers and found to his considerable relief that it was not at all a tooth. No, it was much too soft, much too rough for that.

It was a piece of sour candy.

3. Acquisition

They removed the body, leaving Phil mired in a chaos of questions he did not think himself fit enough to answer. The paramedics gave him a thorough once over and concluded that his injuries were not life-threatening, mostly bruises and mild abrasions, though his cracked ribs would need monitoring for the next month or so. Relieved that he wouldn’t have to add a trip to the hospital to the calamity his day had become, he found that the police were not nearly so eager to dismiss him.

About half an hour after the woman apparently committed suicide-by-taxi, a pair of detectives showed up on the scene. A male and a female, they seemed predisposed to find Phil guilty of something, and while it was not unusual for him to feel intimidated in the company of police, he had never experienced such barely veiled hostility on top of it.

“You were driving the Chevy?” the woman, Detective Marsh, asked. Though attractive, she looked like the very definition of severity. Tall and slender, dressed in gray slacks and jacket, her auburn hair swept up and pinned into a bun, she regarded Phil with a coldness he was sure he hadn’t earned.

“Yes, I was.”

“And you say the driver of the Toyota hit you from behind?”

“Yes.”

She scribbled this down in her notepad, though he had already told them the circumstances surrounding the accident twice already.

Her partner, Detective Cortez, a bullish man with small eyes, badly pockmarked skin and yellow teeth, inspected the crash site for the tenth time and shook his head before looking back at Phil. “And you say you know the deceased?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“I mean, I don’t know her name or—”

“Alice Bennings,” Cortez said.

Phil nodded. He hadn’t needed to know her name. Hadn’t wanted to, and now that it had been given to him, it somehow made it worse. A line from a book he’d read in highschool popped into his mind: The nameless are easier to bury.

“Mr. Pendleton?”

“I didn’t know her. I saw her for the first time at the store earlier. Her kid was causing a bit of fuss.”

The detectives exchanged glances. Phil tried to read the look but it was lost on him.

“She had a kid?”

“Yes. That’s what I tried to tell the other policeman. She had a kid with her at the grocery store. He was throwing a fit. I thought of him when I realized she was who had crashed into me. Thought the kid might have been hurt.”

“There was nobody else in the car.”

“No. I guess she must have dropped him off somewhere after the store.”

Cortez looked at his notebook. “Mrs. Bennings doesn’t have any children, Mr. Pendleton.”

“Well then it was probably a relative or a friend’s kid or something, I don’t know, but if it wasn’t her kid and he clearly wasn’t here, why are you asking me about him?”

“Because if Mrs. Bennings was acting as oddly as you claim she was, we need to be sure she didn’t hurt anyone else, the child included. Now, can you describe him for us?”

Despite the headache that made it feel as if someone was trying to drive a nail into the top of his head, the recollection came easy.

“About six or seven, I’d say. I don’t know that for sure. I’m not good with ages. Sandy blond hair, blue eyes. He looked healthy.”

Marsh scribbled; Cortez stared. “What was he wearing?”

“Black pants with suspenders. White shirt and a black jacket. I remember thinking he was dressed strangely.”

“Strange how?” asked Cortez.

“Old-fashioned. Kinda Amish, I guess.”

Marsh looked up from her notebook. “You find the Amish strange?”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant.”

“Can you clarify what you did mean?”

“Just…I mean it would have made more sense if an Amish family had been with him is all. But he was with the woman and she looked normal. Well, she was dressed normal. Ms. Bennings, I mean.”

“Mrs. Bennings,” Cortez corrected.

“Sorry, Mrs.”

“Although,” Marsh offered, “I suppose it hardly matters what you call her now that she’s dead.”

Phil didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing.

Detective Marsh finished her scribbling, closed her notebook, and sighed. “Cortez, can you give me a moment alone with Mr. Pendleton?”

“Sure,” he said, his dark eyes boring holes in Phil’s face before he blinked and walked away.

“Did I do something wrong?” Phil asked. “I mean, I’m sorry that lady is dead and all but I was the one she rammed her car into and I can’t shake the feeling that you’re blaming me for something here.”

“I’m not blaming you for anything, Mr. Pendleton. I’m just not clear on a couple of things, that’s all. I’m hoping you can help me with that.”

Marsh fished a pack of Newports from her pocket, lit one and took a draw. She exhaled smoke as if she’d never tasted anything quite so wondrous in her life. Then she offered the pack to Phil, which he declined.

The detective pocketed the cigarettes. “The paramedics gave you the all-clear, right?”

“Yeah, aside from a few cracked ribs, I should be fine.”

“No concussion, no disorientation, no memory loss or anything?”

“No, none. At least, not that I’m aware of. Why?”

“You described to Officer Burns the child you saw at the store earlier, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you sent a young man over to Mrs. Bennings’ car to make sure the kid wasn’t in there?”

“I did. I wasn’t aware concern was a crime now.”

“It isn’t.”

“Then for Christ’s sake, why are you making me feel as if it is?”

“As per your request, we sent a patrol car to your address to inform your friend...” She consulted her notebook. “…Lori Watkins, about your accident.”

“And?”

“And she wasn’t there.”

“Well, she’s probably on her way here.”

“Seems unlikely. That was an hour ago. It’s a ten minute drive with traffic. Have you tried to call her since then?”

“No. My phone died. That’s why I asked the officer to send a patrol car over there. Didn’t realize I’d be kept here this long and I figured she’d be worried.”

“And your address is 160 Grady Avenue?”

“Yes.”

“In Delaware?”

“Yes, for the umpteenth time, yes. Jesus. Why are you asking me all this?”

Marsh studied him as one might a particularly exotic species of insect. “I’m asking you all of this, Mr. Pendleton, because when the officers went to your house, the child you just described seeing with Mrs. Bennings is the one who opened the door.”

4. Possession

“There has to be some kind of mistake,” Phil told the detectives as they drove him home. “Why would she drop him at my house? I mean, how would she even know where I live?”

The daylight had faded in time with all logic and sense, so much so that the back of the detectives’ car felt like a padded room in an insane asylum. As absurd as it was, he kept expecting to find that he was merely the victim of one of the most elaborate pranks he’d ever seen. Any minute now the cops would break character and reveal that he’d been had. You’re a good sport, they’d say, right before they let him out into an audience of their coconspirators. Lori would be there, laughing and apologizing for being in on the game, for maybe being the source of it. But such reasoning faltered at the notion that anyone would think almost killing him and destroying his car would be good for a laugh.

“Assuming you’re right,” Cortez asked, with no more warmth in his tone than before. “How would the kid get in?”

“I don’t know, but I’m guessing if she went to the trouble of finding out where I live, then she wouldn’t stop at just dropping him outside. Did your men check for signs of a break-in?”

“Our men?” Marsh asked. “One of those men was Officer Patricia Velasquez.”

“Oh for fuck sake, you know I didn’t mean it like that.”

“Then you should have put it differently.”

“And watch your language,” Cortez added.

“Sorry, sorry.” One arm cradling his injured ribs, he hissed air through his teeth, afraid to take as deep a breath as the situation demanded. Clarity would come, he knew. He just needed to maintain control. No matter how bizarre the situation seemed in that moment, he knew the truth and could prove it. A chance encounter with an insane woman had knocked his world off-kilter, but if he kept his cool and didn’t antagonize the detectives any further, he could get them to see sense.

“Any word from your girlfriend?” Cortez asked.

They had allowed him to use the car charger to juice up his phone long enough to turn it on for a few minutes, but there were no missed calls and no texts from Lori, only another reminder from Verizon that his phone bill was due. His attempts to call her had gone straight to voicemail.

“No.”

“Is that unusual?”

“Very. I left her at home and she knew I’d been in an accident. She would have waited there or at least tried to call me back. Maybe she panicked when I didn’t answer and checked out the hospitals or the police station.”

They passed the gaudy neon lights of Ming’s Chinese Restaurant, a favorite haunt of Phil and Lori’s. They had eaten there the night before last.

“If she’d gone to the station,” Cortez said, “we’d know by now, so rule that out. And if you weren’t at the hospital, she’d have come back home to see if you were there, right?”

“Right.”

“You guys been having problems lately?”

“What? No.”

“No reason you can think of why she wouldn’t answer the phone?”

“None.”

Where the hell are you, Lori?

Her absence from the house bothered him a great deal, and not merely because she represented his sole anchor in an otherwise unmoored day. When he’d left, it had been with the expectation that they would lounge together in front of the TV, enveloped in a chocolate coma and each other. They’d had problems in the past, of course—what couple didn’t?—but nothing to explain her just up and vanishing from the house without a call to let him know where she was going. It just wasn’t like her.

“Well,” Cortez said, as he turned onto Grady Avenue, a street lined with elms and ordinary houses and ornate streetlights, a street unremarkable but for the insidious implication of what might be awaiting him there. “I guess we’ll see soon enough.”

They had to be wrong. He willed them to be wrong. His life thus-far remained unpunctuated by drama beyond the typical expected of a man his age. He had a decent job at a respectable bank. He had more acquaintances than friends, but that was hardly anything new. He was moderately attractive (on a good day). Unremarkable. This new element simply did not fit and thus his mind could not process it. He’d have had an easier time believing that aliens had invaded the town.

Cortez pulled the car to a halt in the driveway. Lori’s Volkswagen was gone, only the ghost of an old oil stain to suggest it had ever been there at all, and of course his Chevy was on the back of a tow truck en route to a garage somewhere. Visible through the narrow window next to the front door, Phil could see that only the light in the hall was on. The rest of the house was in darkness, and while he’d seen it this way countless times before, it unsettled him now.

The detectives exited the vehicle, Cortez coming around to open the door for Phil, who, with great difficulty, braced a hand on the doorframe and eased himself out.

It was early Fall and a chill had crept into the air, something Phil loved but found difficult to fully appreciate now that his battered chest limited his air intake.

“You all right?” Marsh asked, sounding as if she really didn’t care one way or another.

“Yeah.” He pushed away from the car door and closed it behind him.

He looked up at the house. It looked as it always had but he found himself dreading it.

“You need to mow your lawn, man,” Cortez said. Phil ignored him.

How could a day that started so sweetly, so perfectly, so quickly turn to hell?

The answer to that was a simple one: the woman. And now she was gone, out of the picture, free from accountability, which left only the boy she had somehow and for whatever reason, installed in his house.

“Lead the way,” Cortez said.

Phil did, his hands trembling as he fished for his keys. He reached the front door and stood for a moment on the welcome mat, head turned, listening for a sound from within, but all was quiet.

“You want us to go first?” Marsh asked.

“No, I got it.” He slid the key into the lock, turned the knob and the door swung soundlessly open, revealing everything right where he had left it. Dark hardwood floor; lemon-yellow walls. To the left, beneath a silver framed oval mirror stood the small mahogany table where he left his keys and the mail after work. Beyond that, the door to the living room and further along, the stairs. To the right, the door to the office he shared with Lori. At the far end of the hall next to the stairs, the entryway to the kitchen. Again he waited and again there was no sound to indicate a presence in his house. And while he would have preferred to have seen Lori rushing out to meet him, he was content with silence for now because it meant nobody else was here either.

He allowed himself a moment to relax a little, though the tension was not so easily dismissed. He started to turn to tell the detectives waiting on the threshold that they could go now, and what a pleasure it would be to finally be rid of them and their inexplicable hostility…

…And then the kitchen light came on, revealing the backlit silhouette of the child standing in the doorway.

Phil froze, the keys clattering to the floor.

“What are you doing in my house?” he blurted. And much to his surprise, one he’d forever wish he’d never experienced, the child responded.

His voice was perfectly normal, perfectly child-like, and worse, utterly convincing.

“I live here, Daddy.”

* * *

“I’ll look after the kid,” Marsh told her partner, then nodded at Phil. “You might want to take him outside for a moment.”

Cortez turned and gestured toward the open doorway. Phil gaped at him. “What in God’s name is going on here?”

“Step outside and we’ll discuss it.”

“I don’t want to discuss it. I want to know what’s going on.”

“I wasn’t asking.”

Frustrated and afraid he was losing his mind, Phil nevertheless complied, if only because he had absolutely no idea what else he was supposed to do. He stepped out into a light rain and raised his face to it, hoping it might wash away some of the panic that was fluttering like a caged bird in his chest.

Cortez followed him out, leaving the door open behind them for light. He looked up at the sky as if disappointed that it had decided to rain without telling him.

Marsh called out to them from inside. “What’s his name?” And, as if Phil had somehow missed it, Cortez repeated the question.

Phil couldn’t help it. He laughed. Not because there was anything even remotely funny about the situation but because it was so incredibly absurd no other reaction seemed appropriate. But then the mirth abated, replaced by frustration and anger. He got right up in Cortez’s face. The big man didn’t flinch.

“I don’t fucking know the kid’s name. Why can’t you people get that through your heads? How would I know it? Until today I’d never seen him before in my life. I told you both that and yet here he is and here we are with everyone treating me like I’m lying. This is absolutely insane.”

“Calm down.”

“No. You know what? I won’t calm down. Would you calm down if some batshit crazy person tried to kill you right before she killed herself but before all that…before she did that, she stashed her fucking child in your house? And then, when you tell the cops what happened, they decide not to believe you even though you’re telling them the truth. Tell me, please, I’m dying to know: just how fucking calm would you be in that situation?”

Still Cortez looked the picture of steely calm. He took a moment to wipe some of Phil’s spittle from his face and then folded his arms, his eyes like two pieces of flint.

“You need to listen very carefully to me.”

“Do I?”

“Don’t be a smartass, and don’t talk. Despite what you think, we’re trying to help you here.”

“And how’s that exactly? Because it sure doesn’t feel like it.”

“I said don’t talk.”

“Would you listen if I did?”

A curious thing happened then. Cortez took a deep breath and when he released it, some of the latent hostility in him seemed to depart with it.

“I’m a family man too, Pendleton. Been married three times and have four kids. The two kids from the first marriage hate the two from the second and vice-versa like it’s some kind of competition. The eldest just turned seventeen and thinks I’m the biggest asshole on the planet. She hangs around with this emo kid who fancies himself a poet or some shit. The alimony is sucking me dry, and my first ex-wife should be classified as a stalker.”

“Is there some reason you’re telling me this?”

“I’m telling you this because I’m on my third marriage, easily the sanest and most normal of the three and still, still there are days when I wake up and think about walking out the door and just keep walking until I run out of road. I love my wife and my kids, but sometimes I regret ever having them, which is an awful thing to admit to another person.”

“So why admit it at all?”

“So you get that what you’re going through is perfectly normal. Maybe not reasonable and definitely not healthy, but normal all the same.”

“And what is it you think I’m going through?”

“In a word: denial.”

Phil clenched his fists. “Denial of what?”

Cortez attempted to put a hand on Phil’s shoulder. He shrugged it off, the motion sending lances of fiery pain through his chest, and moved a step back.

The detective continued, unfazed. “Look, I don’t know the full extent of what you’re going through here, or what might have happened to you in the accident, but when all is said and done, it’s not about you, it’s about protecting a child.”

Phil scoffed. “You can start protecting him by getting him back where he belongs.”

“See, that’s just it. We checked and according to the records, this is where he belongs.”

“Then your records are mistaken. I don’t have any children.” A thought occurred to him through the panic. “So, wait: if you already know all there is to know about the child, why did you ask me his name?”

Cortez shrugged. “Marsh’s idea. She thought if we caught you off-guard maybe you’d answer before you caught yourself. We know the kid’s name.”

Phil swallowed. “Well I don’t want to know it.”

“His name is Adam. Adam Pendleton. His mother’s name was Hannah Ward.”

“Hannah? I don’t know any Hannah Ward either. How could I not know the mother of the child you’re insisting is mine? Are you seriously trying to make me believe I somehow just forgot all of this? That’s ridiculous.”

“No argument there. But Hannah Ward was the boy’s mother.”

“Was?”

Cortez looked closely at him, studying Phil’s eyes for some sign that he was pretending not to remember. Both men now had something in common: the sheer implausibility that Phil could have forgotten such major events. “Yes, was. She died the day Adam was born. A fire in her room, thought to have been a ruptured oxygen tank. Blew her to pieces. Luckily, Adam was in the intensive care unit at the time.”

Phil turned and began to pace despite the discomfort it caused him to do so. He put his hands in his hair and looked at the houses around him. It all seemed so very normal, and yet it wasn’t. Somewhere between encountering the woman in the store and his arrival home, he’d entered The Twilight Zone.

5. Alteration

“Do you need us to call someone to help you?” Cortez asked, not unkindly.

Phil scoffed. “Help me? You’re the ones who are supposed to be helping me.”

“At this point, if you really do believe what you’re claiming, I’d advise you to let us hook you up with a psychiatric professional. Is there someone you can call who can look after the child for a few days?”

“I already told you, I don’t know the child. Nobody else in my life does either.”

“Your mother, maybe?”

“I haven’t spoken to her in years.”

“Let me ask you something: if I called her right now, would she back up what you’re saying? Would she claim she’s never heard of her own grandson?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

“Wait…” Phil muttered, raising a hand as if the solution to all of this had somehow materialized in front of him. “Wait just a minute…” He turned back to face Cortez. “A DNA test.”

Cortez closed his eyes for a moment, clearly growing tired of Phil’s stubborn refusal to claim a child that was obviously his own. “A DNA test.”

“Yeah. That’ll prove—”

“Nothing.”

“What?”

“It’s not surprising you don’t know Hannah Ward. You never met her.”

“Okay, good, that’s a start.”

“The child was put into foster care. Which is where you and your then wife Stacey Miller found him.”

“Oh for fuck sake, look, here.” Phil dug his cell phone out of his pocket and shoved it into Cortez face. “Call her. Call my ex-wife. We divorced because I didn’t want children.”

“Yes, we already spoke to her.”

“So then…what you’re saying can’t be true. She backed it up.”

“Not quite.”

Phil stared at him. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’re correct in that she divorced you because you didn’t want children. The part you’re leaving out is what made the situation worse: you already had one. She accused you of neglecting him, of not wanting anything to do with him.”

“If that was true, then how could the kid end up here with me?”

“After your ex-wife’s accident, she agreed to let you have sole custody of the boy.”

“Accident? What accident?”

“She was struck by a car while crossing an intersection downtown. She survived but lost the use of her legs. You’re seriously telling me you don’t remember any of this?”

Phil turned away, his vision swimming. “I need to sit down.”

“Please do.”

Wincing, Phil lowered himself to the damp grass. His head hurt. Everything hurt. His mind felt like weak tin being crumpled by a merciless hand. He knew this was all wrong, that something had happened to the fabric of his reality, had been made to happen by someone or something, but how it might have been done was beyond him. Worst of all, the overwhelming evidence presented to him brought with it the first seed of doubt. He had, after all, been in an accident. Could what Cortez was saying be true, the knowledge of his real life jarred from his brain during the crash? Could the kid really be his charge? There was so much to take in, so much to process, and none of it made any sense.

“What about the store?” he mumbled.

“Say again?”

“The store. Walmart. Where I saw the boy and the woman. The manager was there. Did you call him? He can tell you I wasn’t with them, that the woman was there with the boy.”

“Yes, Marsh called him before we drove you home.”

“And?” Phil already knew what the answer was going to be and he turned his grim defeated smile to the rain.

“He says you were there alone with the boy.”

Phil took out his phone. “You know, Detective, there are a couple of holes in your story too. It still doesn’t add up, and I think you know that. I think that’s why you’re here. I think you’re incredibly good at your job and you operate on instinct. I think that same instinct is telling you that something doesn’t jibe here and it’s driving you a little crazy not being able to put your finger on it.”

Behind him, Cortez was silent.

Phil continued. “It may very well be the case that at some point today I went insane, or just had all knowledge of the boy and my life with him knocked right the fuck out of my head. I don’t believe that but then if I were truly mad I wouldn’t, would I? No, what I actually think is that there’s something wrong with that boy. I thought it the first time I saw his eyes and the way he was dressed. I thought it when I saw the condition of the woman I took to be his mother. She looked like she might have been afraid of him and had simply checked out to protect herself. For all I know maybe that’s why she killed herself. To get away from him.” He laughed, because now he really did sound insane. But the words wouldn’t stop coming. “I also think that before Mrs. Bennings crashed her car into me, that child was not a part of my life, that nobody I know had ever heard of him. I think he released Mrs. Bennings from her obligations on the condition that she find a replacement. Which she did. Maybe the candy was her way of transferring the responsibility for him, some messed up ritual that only made sense to them. And now that that’s done, my world has been altered to accommodate him.”

“Phil,” Cortez said, using his first name for the first time since they’d met. “You realize how this sounds, right?”

Phil tapped a finger on the screen of his iPhone and saw that he had one missed call and a voice mail from Lori.

“Yes, I do. I also know that you managed to do a spectacular amount of research into my life and the boy’s place in it in the short space of time since the accident. Don’t these things usually take days, weeks, and wouldn’t there have needed to be some compelling reason for you to do it in the first place? But no, here you are and you know everything. It’s like the whole police department suddenly dropped everything and threw all their resources into proving that boy was mine. And I know that nothing I say or do will change that reality.”

He thumbed the icon to listen to the voicemail and put the phone to his ear.

“Who are you calling?” Cortez asked.

Phil didn’t answer. He just listened, and once he was done, he knew the boy had won.

“You know what else, Detective Cortez? The worst thing of all?”

“What?”

“I think I know all of this because the boy is allowing me to.”

* * *

Over the next hour, and with the child still sequestered in the kitchen, they showed him framed pictures they had taken from his office desk and the walls in the upstairs landing. They covered a period of years and showed Phil grinning with his son in various locations, most of which he had never seen before. In one, he was fishing on a pontoon boat, the boy at his side, both of them smiling, their faces dappled with light from the sun on the water. Around them, other tourists grinned knowingly. In another, they were on a rollercoaster, arms raised, both of them screaming in delight. There were more, all of them showing a father and son’s most precious moments, all of them showing Phil happier than he could ever remember being. There were a dozen pictures of a perfectly ordinary young boy enjoying time with his father. Only a closer look showed the slightest hint of darkness in the boy’s eyes. It was vague, but there, easily attributable to shadow, or the quality of the picture, but Phil knew better. How could anyone look at those pictures and not notice the queerest things apparent in them? The digital dates in the bottom right hand corner showed that they had been taken over the course of three years, but not only had the child not aged in that time, he was wearing the exact same clothes in each one, the same clothes he was wearing today. And how often did one see digital timestamps on pictures these days?

Such things would only go unnoticed if you’d been instructed not to notice them, but Phil could see it clearly because the child was making no effort to blind him. The child wanted him aware of the game he was playing so that the effect would not be diluted by self-doubt or fear of madness.

There was something terribly wrong with the child, and simply by crossing paths with him, Phil had caught his attention. He felt trapped in a bizarre otherworld in which everything was crooked, but the harder he fought to extricate himself, the more tangled he became. So, in the absence of better options, he stopped struggling.

And every ounce of that theory still sounded to him like sheer lunacy. This was the real world and things like this simply didn’t happen.

And yet it was.

“Is it coming back? Any of it?”

Now that there was something of a rapport between them (in the detective’s mind, at least), Cortez stayed with Phil while Marsh kept the boy company in the kitchen. They were sitting in Phil’s home office, and though the detective had expressed concern that given his mental state, drinking might not be a good idea, they were nursing tumblers of Johnny Walker Black. Phil had insisted that after the day he’d just endured, the liquor would calm his nerves.

“I think so,” he lied. “It’s just bits and pieces. I think after that woman killed herself, the paramedic might have been a bit rattled. It’s possible he missed a concussion. Seeing those pictures…I don’t know. They’re the one thing that doesn’t seem out of place.”

“You mean what’s in the pictures or the pictures themselves?”

“The pictures themselves. They look like they belong right where they are.”

“That’s something I guess.”

“I’m sorry, by the way.”

“For what?”

“My behavior. I hope you’ll understand that I’ve never experienced anything like this before. Almost two decades of driving and I’ve never been in an accident. I’ve also never really been injured. I think it shook me up more than I realized.”

“We should probably take you back to the hospital if you think you might be concussed. Leaving that untended can be dangerous.”

Phil shook his head and looked at the liquid in his glass. “I think I just need to rest.”

“I know I asked this before, but is there anyone who could come look after Adam while you’re on the mend?”

Phil nodded. “Yes, Lori. She left a message saying she’ll be over later.”

“That’s good.”

And you’re going to accept that on faith despite my abrupt change in attitude, Phil thought, and you’re going to do something the police would never do and leave me here, drinking and alone with the boy because that’s what he wants. No child services, no child psychologist, no guardians of the state, no nothing. And I’m guessing if you conceded to that nagging whisper in the back of your mind that persists in telling you that you’re being manipulated, the boy would probably make you take out that gun of yours, stick it in your mouth and pull the trigger. Because like me, there’s a part of you that knows this is anything but normal.

Lori. It took everything in him not to stalk into the kitchen and throttle the life out of the child for what he had caused to happen between Phil and the woman he loved. His heart ached at the memory of her standing there this morning, a morning that seemed years in the past now, her eyes gleaming with mischief and love. It was going to be such a wonderful day. He tried not to replay her voice message in his head for fear it would affect his performance in front of the detective, but snippets of it kept coming back like malicious whispers:

I asked you to stop calling me. We’re done, Phil. Get that through your head. We’ve been done for a long time now.

A long time. By his count, it had been less than four hours.

I tried, I really did, but I told you I wasn’t ready to be a mother and as hard as that is, taking care of a kid that’s not your own is even harder.

I just need to live my life until I’m ready to settle down, and that day isn’t anywhere in the near future.

Words he himself had once used with his ex-wife.

I’m sorry.

Please don’t call me anymore. It’s too hard.

In the only outward concession to the anger that burned within him, Phil’s grip on the glass tightened.

Marsh appeared in the doorway and looked none too impressed to find both men drinking. “Nice,” she said, and hiked up her belt. “Thought you were off the sauce, Cortez?”

He inspected the glass. “It isn’t sauce. It’s scotch.”

“Wiseass.” To Phil, she said: “I assume you’ve been talked down, Mr. Pendleton?”

Expression forced into one of fake apology, he nodded. “Yes, I think so. As I’ve been telling your partner here, I lost my mind for a little bit, probably due to the accident. I’m sorry I made you both jump through hoops.”

“That’s the job,” Marsh told him. To Cortez she said: “You about ready to head out?”

The detective drained his glass, tipped it at Phil in thanks and set it down on the desk. He rose and followed his partner out of the room.

“Goodbye, Mr. Pendleton,” Marsh said.

In the doorway, Cortez paused and looked back over his shoulder. In his eyes, that glimmer again, the awareness that without being fully aware how, he was merely a cog in a machine too big and too strange for him to understand. “I left my card on the table,” he said. “You start to feel….whatever…call me.”

Your card won’t be there, Phil thought, the kid will make sure of that, but he forced a smile and said, “I will, thank you.”

They left, the sound of the door shutting behind them like the closing of a tomb.

6. Confrontation

It took Phil another thirty minutes and two more jolts of scotch before he could summon the courage to enter the kitchen, the short walk down the hall extending before him as if in a dream.

Inside, he found the kid sitting at the table eating candy and drawing a picture with crayons he had produced from somewhere.

Nervously, Phil took a seat at the opposite end of the table.

After almost ten minutes in which the child did not acknowledge his presence, Phil cleared his throat and broke the silence. “Who are you?”

At this, the child looked up, his eyes the crystalline blue they had been at the store and not dark like they were in the pictures. Because in the pictures, it was meant as a warning, meant to intimidate me into keeping my mouth shut if I didn’t want people getting hurt.

When the boy smiled, it was so sincere, so genuine, so child-like, that it gave Phil pause. He had come here expecting confrontation, hostility, perhaps some dramatic demonstration of the boy’s power now that they were alone. Some act of aggression befitting an unnatural monster. But not this, not the kind of smile expected of a normal, happy child. Not for the first time since this all began, he felt a peal of doubt resonate through him. What if I’m wrong? What if I have lost my mind and this is my child? Could this be what happened to ordinary parents when they snapped and murdered their children? Did they stop knowing them, convince themselves that innocents had become monsters?

“I’m Adam, Daddy,” the boy said, the normality of his voice only exacerbating the doubt. He returned to his picture, which from where Phil sat, appeared to be a drawing of a fishing boat, much the same as the picture in the upstairs hall, the only major difference being that it was a cruder version drawn in crayon.

“How old are you?”

“Don’t know.”

“And what are you?” Phil asked.

The boy did not look up from his picture. “I am a boy.”

And with that simple response, Phil’s doubt died. The answer seemed an automatic one, too rehearsed, almost played out, as if the child had had to say it so many times it had lost all inflection, all meaning. As if he’d had to say it to himself just as many times in order to believe it.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

And now the child did look up, his face impassive as he studied Phil. “I don’t understand, Daddy. What am I doing?”

“You’re changing things, changing my life so that you can be in it. Why? And stop calling me Daddy.”

The child giggled and then put a hand over his mouth to stifle it. His eyes were gleaming. A crayon the color of blood was clamped between his index and middle fingers. “You’re silly,” he said, and without taking a breath added, “And I’m hungry.”

“This is not your house,” Phil said, his exhausted voice cracking on the last word. “You don’t live here.”

The kid stared back. “Yes I do.”

“No, you don’t. Who was the woman at the store this morning?”

“Old Mommy.”

“What does that mean, ‘Old Mommy’?”

“It means she was my Mommy before and she isn’t anymore.”

“And why isn’t she?”

The kid tilted his head and regarded his drawing. “Because I let her go.”

“Why?”

A shrug. “She wasn’t able to be my mommy anymore. She was too sick to keep going until we were done. I felt bad because her mind stopped working properly, so I let her go.”

“Is that what ‘letting her go’ means? That when you’re done with someone, when they’re no longer of use to you, you kill them, cast them aside like an old toy?”

“That’s what you’re supposed to do with old toys. If they’re broken you get new ones.” He looked at Phil and pouted. It looked very real. “Daddy, I’m hungry. Can I have something to eat?”

Partly because he needed to move to release the tension that was making his back and shoulders hurt, but mostly because he was afraid of the child, Phil stood and went to the cupboard where, if memory served, he still had a bag of Lays sour cream and onion chips. Maybe the kid would have preferred a bologna sandwich or a hot dog, but that’d be tough-titty-said-the-kitty, now wouldn’t it?

Mindful that he was closer to the child than he’d gotten thus far, and after pausing to check that he was still engaged in his drawing—which this close looked eerily similar to the photograph upstairs—Phil opened the cupboard door.

His jaw dropped.

All his food was gone, replaced by hundreds of bags of sour candy. Slamming the cupboard shut, he went to the next cupboard, in which he kept dried goods, pasta, flour, unopened jars of sauces, cans of peas and beans…and found that was no longer the case. More sour candy, crammed in there so tightly there was no way to remove one without causing the veritable wall of colorful bags to vomit onto the kitchen floor. He tried the next and last cupboard, same. The cupboard beneath the sink where he kept the cleaning products now held nothing but hundreds upon hundreds of bags of sour candy. Every cupboard, candy. Even the fridge had been packed full of the damn things. There were even a few in the ice box, frozen into jaunty slabs, suggesting they’d been in there longer than was possible. Red bags, yellow bags, green bags, but none a brand he recognized. No Haribo here, instead each bag was emblazoned with the name GJØK in colorful cartoonish letters. There were no ingredients listed on the back, no snappy captions on the front designed to entice you to choose this brand over all others, just that single word.

“So…” Phil asked, feeling an uncontrollable bubble of laughter working its way up his throat. “What do you want to eat?” And then the laugh exploded from him, killing his chest, forcing him to double over in pain, but he didn’t care, couldn’t have stopped even if he’d wanted to, and before he knew it, he was on the floor behind the boy’s chair, howling and slamming his fist against the linoleum.

Only when the child mimicked his laugh with eerie synchronicity did he stop, the mad joviality evaporating as quickly as it had come. Carefully, he got to his feet, wiped his eyes, and went to the fridge. He plucked a bag of candy free and tossed it onto the table before the child and went to his office. He returned to the table armed with his glass and the bottle of scotch.

“I want to know what you want from me,” he said, pouring himself a generous measure. “If you’re going to continue this charade, I deserve at least to know the reason for it. Did someone put you up to it? Is it some kind of a game?”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Cut the bullshit.”

The child gasped, eyes wide, and he pointed a forefinger at Phil. “Awwww…you said a bad word. I’m telling.”

Phil smirked and took a deep draw from his glass. “Yeah? Who are you going to tell, you little shit? You’ve already hurt anyone who might have listened.”

“I can’t tell you their names. Not allowed to. But you can call them Eldre if you’d like, though really they’d prefer you didn’t call them anything. It upsets them.”

Phil scoffed and waved a hand at him. “Whatever. Where’s your Mom?”

Little pink tongue protruding from the side of his mouth, Adam picked up and blue crayon and began to draw squiggly lines for the waves. “Which one?”

“The first one.”

“Heaven.”

“So you believe in Heaven.”

“Sure. But it’s not the same as yours.”

“What does that mean?”

The child did not raise his head, but looked up at Phil through the sandy veil of his bangs, and there the darkness was. It told Phil that there were lines of questioning he could feel free to pursue, but this wasn’t one of them.

“You can’t be here,” Phil said, weakly, the scotch burning his throat and stirring up his stomach.

“You should have some candy,” the boy said, still watching him, still harboring blackness in those eyes. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“I doubt it.”

“Try.” He slid the unopened bag across the table to Phil and then stared until Phil realized he had no other choice but to do as he was told. Is this how it’s going to be now? Am I a prisoner in my own home, in my own life? If this turned out to be the case, and surely he would know sooner rather than later, he had no intention of being alive for very long.

Aggressively he tore the bag open. Candy skittered across the table. Grimacing, for even on a normal day he hated sour candy, he popped one in his mouth.

At first, there was nothing.

At second, there was everything.

And too late he realized that what he had put into his mouth was not candy at all, but a key.

* * *

All he will ever retain from however long he spends in that other place—and surely it’s an eternity—will be fragments of horrors, so garish and alien it is impossible for his mind to put them together into any kind of sense or order, but they will be enough to compound the seriousness of the situation in which he has found himself.

He will recall with no transition at all the kitchen table turning to a slab of ancient granite upon which a multitude of symbols have been chiseled with great care. Above it, instead of his kitchen ceiling, he sees a deep crimson sky threaded with black veins, as if this world exists within the belly of some colossal monster and what he is seeing is its flesh lit from without by some alien sun. But there are birds up there too, crooked, angular things like broken kites with bladed edges.

On the horizon, pulsing in the red light, enormous figures move, warring, tentacle limbs tangling, the blazing blue lights of their eyes like falling stars. He will hear them shriek as they die.

And he will know that this world is forever dying and being reborn again, just as he is certain that no one like him was ever supposed to see it. This is a forbidden place, and yet he is here.

And then he’ll draw his focus in closer, to the figures, what he will think of as Eldre or Elders without ever knowing how he knows that’s what they are. The word is just there, as are they, standing around the granite table watching him, their faces the elongated skulls of ancient deer, their horns impossibly long and tangled, twisting upward into apparent oblivion. These are not masks. The holes where there eyes should be will reveal nothing, but he senses the age and the eldritch threat, as all six of them open their bony mouths at once and deafen him with the same scream he heard from the child, only louder. The sound costs him part of his mind. It’s the cost of being allowed to see as the symbols catch fire and blind him.

7. Patience

Phil awoke on the floor of the kitchen with blood running from his eyes, nose, and mouth. He could taste it on his tongue, mixed with the needling sting of the sour candy. His head felt as if someone had had their hands in his brain, meddling with it, changing things. He could feel their fingerprints inside there and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so he did both, which was how he realized as the convulsions rippled their way through him, that the pain in his ribs was gone. Any relief he might have felt, however, was vanquished at the realization that he had also wet himself, and that only furthered the misery and fear into which he had awoken.

The child stood over him, his face calm, unthreatening, the façade of normalcy returned.

“I made this,” he said and held the picture up between them. It was, as Phil had already seen, a crude replica of the upstairs picture, itself a fake, of Phil and the boy on a pontoon boat. Only now that the boy had completed it, he had made some adjustments. Phil was unsmiling in this version, and the boy’s head had been replaced with the crudely drawn skull of a deer. “Do you like it?”

Phil nodded dumbly.

“Can I put it on the fridge?”

Without waiting for a response, he turned and tacked the picture to the fridge door—another reminder, another caution—with a magnetic bottle opener, and then appraised it for a second before turning back to where Phil lay. He smiled. “I’m tired. I’m going to bed, Daddy.”

Daddy. The word was like a spear through Phil’s heart. Before the vision, or revelation, or whatever it was he had been shown, he’d already railed against this kid pretending to be his son. Now that some hint of the boy’s true nature had been revealed, it sickened him, made him feel nothing less than prey being toyed with.

“You can have my bed,” he managed to tell the boy. “I’ll sleep down here.” Any distance at all from the child would be a temporary and welcome mercy.

The boy frowned. “Don’t be silly, Daddy. You told me I’m not allowed to sleep in your bed, remember, because I’m too old for that? I’ll sleep in my own room.”

“You don’t…what room?”

“The highest one,” said the boy. “Where I belong. Closer to them so they can hear my prayers better. Goodnight, Daddy.”

Phil didn’t move as the boy left the room. He just lay where he was, the urine cooling at the crotch of his jeans, the blood turning sticky on his face, until he heard the stairs to the attic squealing open, and then shut again. Until today there had been nothing but boxes of old clothes and books and Christmas decorations up there. He knew if he went up there now, it would appear a lot different, but had no intention of finding out how drastic that difference might be. Instead he waited another twenty minutes until he was sure the boy wasn’t going to come back down. Then he rose, still mindful of his ribs even though it appeared they had been miraculously cured, grabbed the bottle of scotch, and took it with him into the office.

* * *

The hope that whatever the boy was, whatever those creatures he’d seen had been, might be so old as to be oblivious to modern technology was vanquished when a Google search failed to reverse Phil’s rewritten history. His Facebook and Twitter pages now featured pictures of Phil grinning like an idiot in places he’d never been with his arm around a boy he hadn’t known before today. Worse, when he checked the comments on those pictures, hoping to find his friends and coworkers at the bank questioning the sudden presence of some strange child all over Phil’s social media pages, he instead found nothing but appreciation and familiarity.

“Kid gets bigger every day, dude!”

“Can’t believe how much he’s grown, Phil!”

Except of course, he hadn’t. Just like in the pictures on the walls upstairs, he looked the same in every one.

Draining his glass, the warmth of the scotch doing little to melt the ice on his bones, and with one ear attuned to the attic upstairs, he turned his attention instead to the sour candy, and found no trace of the brand name he’d seen on the plastic bags. All he did find was that “gjøk” was the Norwegian word for “cuckoo”. He sat back with a bitter grin and poured himself another scotch. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the candy had been named after a brood parasite known for laying its eggs in the nests of other birds. Wasn’t that what had happened to him today? Some parasite had come and laid its eggs in his nest, and after eating the candy, hadn’t he met that hatchling’s goddamn parents? And he could only assume that Hannah Ward’s womb had been the original nest. So why kill her if what the child wanted was a parent? Unless that wasn’t the point. Unless what they really wanted was to drive people insane by forcing an alternate reality upon them in which they lost everything they loved.

Why would some alien or other-dimensional parasite force its child to move from person to person, destroying their lives? What was the endgame, the ultimate goal? Was it nothing more than sport to them? He didn’t know and doubted he ever would. If the nature of those things had struck him as unequivocally unknowable, only a fool would attempt to decode their motives. Besides, that was hardly the most important thing. No, all that really mattered now was figuring out a way to play along with the game while simultaneously trying to escape it.

Still, one thing nagged at him, a single piece of knowledge he had taken from that other place, a little taste of their reality that he hoped, prayed, needed to believe he could use to his advantage. It was possibly the only thing other than his own death that could serve as a way out.

Hannah Ward had given birth to the child, and while Phil was over there in that other place, he had seen those creatures killing each other. Which meant they could die.

Birth and death. Evidence that, like ordinary beings, they were tied to a life cycle.

Thus far, Adam, the cuckoo’s child, had only experienced one of those things, but it heartened Phil to know that he could yet introduce him to the other, and that it wouldn’t be murder.

Not really.

* * *

To an outsider, blissfully unaffiliated with the opposing forces at play in their world, the life of Phil Pendleton and his son might have appeared typical of a single father and his young son, but for a few curiosities.

For one, the boy lived in the attic, which by itself might not have been all that unusual, for children often gravitate to the mysterious places in their domain with only secondary thought to comfort and practicality. But the warping of the wood on the attic door and the branding of symbols upon its buckled surface would have suggested something more unusual afoot. For another, there was no food in the house other than some foreign brand of sour candy, upon which the father was forced to feed or risk starvation. Any attempt to ingest other foods resulted in its immediate expulsion. As a result, Phil Pendleton began to lose weight at a rapid pace, his skin began to break out and develop a waxy quality, his hair started to thin, and his teeth to rot, as apparently the human body cannot sustain itself to any healthy degree on a diet of citric acid, malic acid, dextrose, corn syrup, maltodextrin, artificial flavors and coloring, sugar, beeswax, and of course, the secret ingredient in GJØK that made visitation to horrific realms possible.

Outdoors, the father and son behaved as expected, with the child propelled by youthful enthusiasm to parks and stores and fairs and rides, and if the father appeared browbeaten and defeated, well then, this made him no different than many a single parent trying to juggle a job and a home life with a hyperactive child, particularly one given to sporadic outbursts of hysterics in public places.

8. Escape

Instinct told him that given the awesome power the boy had demonstrated thus far, escape was not going to be easy, if possible at all, so he started small.

Nine days after the boy had first invaded his life, Phil rose from a turbulent sleep on the sofa downstairs. This was where he slept now, as he’d deemed his own room much too close to the child’s domain. The first and only night he’d tried to sleep in his own bed, he fancied he heard awful sounds coming through the ceiling, and quickly fled to the living room.

The morning sun muted by the shuttered blinds, he sat up and rubbed a hand over his face and felt the skin flake away and catch in his stubble. His body ached, his stomach was in knots, in large part due to his new diet of sour candy and water, but also from the dread of the task he’d set himself.

He’d spent the past few days monitoring the child’s routine, and found that the boy never emerged from the attic before eleven o’ clock and always went to bed before nine. An odd schedule for a child his age, but then everything about the boy was odd. To allay suspicion, Phil had adopted the role of dutiful, if reluctant father, admiring the boy’s handiwork when he set to arts and crafts, which he did every day at the same time. The kitchen was now a museum of weird pictures and a veritable shrine of crooked origami birds and popsicle stick creatures, all of which had been painted black, and none of which Phil could look at without it making his head hurt. At Adam’s request, he took the boy for walks. They visited museums, libraries, art galleries, parks, nature preserves, and science centers. A normal parent would have been pleased at their child’s eagerness to learn. To Phil, the boy’s hunger for knowledge was unnerving and potentially dangerous because he didn’t know what the child planned to do with all that information, or even where that information would eventually end up. And all throughout these jaunts, the boy spoke to him as any child would speak to their father, politely requesting treats (always the fucking sour candy), alerting his attention to wondrous things, and all the while the other more fortunate and blissfully ignorant parents around him would smile sweetly at the handsome, sweet little boy in his unusual clothes.

Until Adam screamed, as he did at least once every day, because this too was routine.

Only then did the parents scowl and glare and cluck their tongues, that sweet little boy not so sweet anymore, and hurry their own little innocents away from the monster at the epicenter of the crowd.

And all Phil could think as the embarrassment swept him away and home, was that if they had the slightest inkling of what else that boy was capable of, they too would have screamed.

Because that scream was a lot more than just an annoyance. No, the more Phil heard it, the more he started to think of it as something infinitely worse.

He became convinced it was a beacon.

The child was signaling the others.

* * *

The plan was to not go very far at first, just enough to convincingly claim he’d intended to return, but as he hadn’t left the house unaccompanied by the boy since the day Adam had first appeared here, he had no idea whether or not it would work.

Quietly, he shrugged on his coat, slipped on his shoes, and eased his way into the hall, convinced at any moment he would hear the attic door yawn open and the boy’s voice hailing him in that terrifyingly saccharine tone. Where are you going, Daddy? Can I come? Terrifying because the words themselves would be perfectly ordinary and yet so loaded with veiled threat, Phil would be paralyzed. Where do you think you’re going, Daddy? You’re not going without me.

He scooped his keys up from the table in the hall and closed his eyes, then took a deep breath and released it, wincing at the noxious odor as it escaped his mouth. The candy had not only permanently soured his breath, resisting all orthodontic attempts to vanquish it, it had also scraped his tongue so raw he was barely able to speak without it hurting. But sometimes that pain was good and he employed it now by rubbing his tongue against the roof of his mouth. It energized him, goaded him onward, reminding him that if he didn’t see this through, if he didn’t at least try, the end result would be worse than just a dire case of halitosis.

The few feet to the door seemed like miles away, and with every gentle step, his muscles grew tenser. Any moment now he expected to hear the boy’s voice, or worse, his scream shattering the air. Or maybe it wouldn’t be the boy at all. At the thought, he looked ahead to the smoked glass of the front door and imagined one of those horned, skull-faced things appearing on the other side. He swallowed and kept moving, and then his hand was on the door, heart in his mouth, and he was turning the handle, slowly, slowly, and the door made the slightest squeak, betraying him, and his heart stopped.

He listened, eyes shut.

Nothing.

Released another foul breath and pulled the door open. Opened his eyes and found himself blinded by the morning sunlight. Pulse hammering at his temples, he did not open the door all the way, just enough for him to sidle out through the gap. Half the battle won. The air, untainted by the company of the child, felt like a victory in itself. Easing the door shut behind him, he quickly moved away and hurried down the driveway. His car was still gone and likely would stay that way, just like the phone and Internet had died. The child had cut him off from outside communication, which was fine. Who would he contact anyway? As far as the world was concerned, he was the one who was wrong.

So he walked, and kept walking, no partic-ular-place-to-go as the song said, but it felt good to be alone, unencumbered by the presence of that thing for however long he was permitted to do so.

Around him the world carried on as normal. Leaves fell, the breeze blew. A blonde woman across the street walking a blonde dog almost as big as her started to wave at him until she saw his face and then thought better of it. A man out cutting his grass, a neighbor Phil had spoken to once or twice, but whose name he couldn’t remember, asked him if he was okay. “My kid’s trying to kill me,” Phil replied and the man went back to mowing his lawn. Of course he did.

Phil kept walking, destination unknown, just testing, testing to see how long his leash ran before it went taut and he was yanked back into hell.

* * *

He made it to a strip mall two miles east of home, his intent to take the weight off his feet for a few minutes before he went to find a bus or a train and just ride that goddamn rail until his money ran out. He considered trying to order a sandwich at the nearby Subway if only to test the theory that the further away from the boy’s influence he got, the more normal he would feel, but the mere thought of it made his stomach clench and he vetoed the idea. But it was while gazing longingly at the ad for their footlong steak and cheese in the restaurant window that a familiar face swam into view behind him, erasing all thought of food from his mind.

Licking his lips, body quaking, he turned.

“Jesus Christ,” Lori said. “Phil?”

He was as gratified as he was saddened to see the tears glimmering in the corners of her eyes, and found it difficult to keep them from his own.

“Hey b…hey,” he said, nixing the word babe before it could leave his mouth.

“My God, you look…” She put a hand to her mouth and shook her head. Everything she needed to say was there, in his own broken reflection in her tears.

“Like hell, I know.” He hadn’t had the energy to bathe in days, hadn’t changed his clothes in three, and he was damp from the sweat of fear and desperation. His teeth were starting to loosen and there was crusted blood on his lip from his perpetually bleeding mouth. “I’m sorry.”

She, on the other hand, looked incredible. Dressed in a white halter top, jeans, and a cream suede jacket, her makeup impeccable, eyes smoky, he thought he might collapse under the strain of knowing she’d never love him again. Thanks to the boy, he’d never have anything but her pity and the disgust so evident in her regard.

She composed herself and tucked a lock of her dark hair behind her ear, something he had adored doing for her, and she summoned a frail smile. “How are you, I mean…are you okay?” In a subconscious gesture, she clamped her elbow down on the purse slung over her shoulder, as if afraid he might attempt to steal it.

“Few rough days,” he admitted. Understatement of the millennium. “But I’m working on getting back on my feet.”

She nodded. “I met Gerard Willis the other day. He mentioned there’d been a shakeup at Chase. Said you were one of the ones let go. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Yeah,” he said, averting his gaze. “These things happen though, I guess.”

He tried to shake the ugly thought that Gerard, that perfectly manicured motherfucker, might have done more with her than just inform her of her ex-boyfriend’s shitty luck.

“You seemed to be doing so well there.”

And he had been. Prior to the boy’s arrival, there’d been talk of promoting Phil to assistant manager. Clearly so much time away from home would not have suited the cuckoo.

He could barely stand to look at her, could hardly stand to look away. She was so beautiful, had so unfairly been excised from his life, and with no warning at all. Everything he wanted to say to her—the explanation, the begging, the anger, the pleading, the love—came bubbling up his throat and became tears that almost choked him.

“I tried calling you again a few days after we last spoke, to apologize for how I might have come across. I mean, I meant what I said. I just didn’t mean for it to be so—”

“Lori…” He looked at her damp eyes and tried to smile. When it failed, he sought out a focal point somewhere over her shoulder.

Where he saw yet another familiar face, this one not nearly so welcome. His hair prickled to attention all over his body.

“I should go,” he said, and pushed away from the window, from her.

The image of her standing in the bedroom doorway in her underwear, the coquettish smile, her laughter on the phone, all the nights they’d lain in bed together talking about the future…all gone, all stolen from him.

Sour candy trumps chocolate.

“Well, wait…did you want to get a coffee or a sandwich or something?”

“Some other time.”

“Okay, well, please take care of yourself.”

“I will.”

He waved a hand at her without looking back and scurried away, his face turned toward the strip mall storefronts in a feeble attempt to dissuade the attention of the woman currently cruising up alongside him in her car.

As he feared, it had the opposite effect.

“Mr. Pendleton?” Detective Marsh called to him. “Might I have a word?”

9. Prison

Four months to the day he first encountered the boy at Walmart, the last of Phil Pendleton’s teeth fell out. He watched the blackened incisor rattle in the sink and tumble down the drain and felt nothing. There was no blood. His hair had thinned to the point where he could see his scabrous pate but this had also ceased to disturb him, for he had, after the latest foiled attempt to escape, decided on a course of action he was sure would work.

Today it would end, either for him or the boy or both, but either way, here the nightmare stopped. Because despite the torture he’d been put through, the pain and loss he did not believe he had done anything to deserve, he had tried to be a decent person, tried to stay within the confines of morality. And all it had gotten him was more suffering.

He raised his face to the mirror and saw a hollow shell of a man, little more than a bleached-out husk. He was almost dead, whatever cancer the boy and his guardians had given him rotting him from the inside out, which meant that soon he, like Mrs. Bennings, would be of no more use to them and they would send him off to die. And once he was gone, they’d find another host, another poor helpless soul to destroy.

Phil was fine with the first part. He longed for death now. The second part? No. With the last ounce of his energy, he was going to do everything in his power to make sure this never happened to anyone again. A feeble part of him was driven by the notion that maybe, just maybe if he succeeded in killing the child, it would end the cycle and reverse all that had been done to him. At night, in what fitful sleep his addled body and mind allowed, he fantasized about waking up to find himself lying in his own bed, Lori’s arm across his chest as she slept. He would run to the mirror and find he looked like his old self again, never dashingly handsome, but no dog either, and my God how content he’d be to be just average again. The pictures on the walls would show his family and friends and Lori and no towheaded Amish-clad spawn of Satan, and the collective memories of everyone he knew would be restored. He would return to work, get that goddamn promotion and save up just enough money to marry Lori.

Maybe they’d even have a child.

This last thought always woke him with a snort of laughter on his lips that never lasted long before it devolved into weeping. With the return of cruel reality came the hate and desperation, and the thoughts of murder.

Five times he’d tried to escape the house and the boy. Each time he’d been caught. The first three times, Marsh had brought him home after being alerted to his absence by the boy (“panicked to find his father gone”), or else some concerned neighbor or storeowner who didn’t like the look of “some vagrant guy” wandering around town. That it was hardly a detective’s job to round up vagrants didn’t matter. Phil Pendleton was a special case. Special enough for the universe to bend around him in order to stop him from getting away.

The fourth time nobody had stopped him, at least not in person. He’d managed to make it out of the house and down the driveway, this time in the dead of night, when his legs abruptly quit working and he dropped like a stone to the pavement, chipping two of his front teeth and breaking his nose. Dazed, he’d crawled back to the house, where he found the boy waiting for him on the stoop, holding out—what else?—a piece of that infernal candy. Maddened by the pain, he took it, swallowed it, and passed out. When he came to, it was morning and his nose had healed, though it was slightly crooked now. The teeth were still chipped. Not that it would matter. Three weeks later they’d fall out on their own.

The fifth and final time, earlier this evening, he had gotten drunk and forgotten his fear long enough to flee, an all-out staggering sprint down the street. He hadn’t even bothered to be quiet or to close the door behind him. He made it three quarters of a mile before he saw, or thought he saw, one of them. It was standing behind a dumpster in the alley beside Ming’s Chinese restaurant, its head tilted back as if in ecstasy, though as far as Phil could tell, it was alone. He could hear its horns scraping against the brick wall. As he drew abreast of it, that deer skeleton face turned in his direction and an involuntary scream escaped Phil’s throat. For an instant, it had felt as if those hands were inside him again, tugging hard, and his guts had seemed to shift outward in all directions. He fell to his knees in agony, hands clutched to his chest and belly, but just as he drew in the breath to power another scream at the sensation of dozens of fishhooks rending him asunder, the pain vanished. Still, he kept his head lowered as he rose on unsteady feet because even though the pain had gone, he knew the thing in the alley was still there. No, not there, closer. He fancied if he raised his head just a little more, he’d see the frayed hem of its coal-dark robe as it stood looming over him. Confirmation came via the sudden overwhelming stench of rotting fish and the soft whisper behind him as he turned and began to hobble away.

“Mora.”

He returned home to find the house almost as he’d left it. The boy was thankfully nowhere in sight, the attic door with its new symbols and scratches firmly shut, but when he went to retrieve his scotch, he found the inside of the bottle coated in greenish blue mold. What appeared to be the head of some bizarre looking eyeless fish was floating in the remaining third of scotch. Enraged at the corruption of the only solace he had left, Phil flung the bottle at the wall.

And the attic door opened.

Phil’s rage turned to ice and he slowly sat down on the couch, his whole body trembling from a mixture of adrenaline, fear, and rage.

The boy appeared at the foot of the stairs, rubbing his eyes sleepily, still dedicated to the ruse of normality.

“I heard a sound.”

“Good for you.”

“Did you go out again?”

Phil sneered. “You know I did.”

“Did you meet my friend?”

Phil lowered his face into his hands, pulled at his hair, felt strands come away. “What the fuck do you want from me?”

“You don’t have to worry,” said the boy. “You’re not doing so good, and I know that’s no fun, but it’ll all be over soon.”

“Like it was for Mrs. Bennings?”

“Oh no, not like that. You’re going to make it all the way. She was too broken for that.”

“Why do you do this…this pretending? Why not just be whatever it is that you are?”

The boy cocked his head. Another in a long line of curiously convincing gestures. “I am being what I am. I’m a child.”

“You’re a goddamn parasite.”

“What’s a parasite?”

The look of genuine curiosity on the child’s face was disarming.

“Google it.”

“What?”

“Just go back to bed.”

“Yes Daddy. You should try to sleep too.”

“Why?”

“You have a busy day tomorrow.”

Phil looked at him. “What does that mean? What’s tomorrow?”

The boy smiled. “Tomorrow’s the day you try to kill me.”

Phil was only startled for a moment. It had not come as a surprise that the boy was aware of his plans. The boy apparently knew everything. No, the shock came from having him finally drop the pretense and admit that he knew.

He smiled back at the boy as he headed back upstairs. “That’s right. Tomorrow’s the day I try to kill you.”

“Goodnight Daddy.”

“Goodnight, son.”

Except the boy wasn’t right. Not at all. For in that moment, at the look of cruel delight on the thing’s face, the look that said Phil was destined to fail, he decided he wasn’t going to wait.

No. The child was going to die tonight.

10. Sacrifice

After washing his face in the bathroom and staring down the ogre in the mirror, Phil headed back to the living room and grabbed one of the pine hard-backed chairs. With no attempt to be quiet, for such a thing would be pointless at this late stage, he raised it over his head and smashed it down on the hardwood floor. It took three tries to break one of the legs free and on the third strike, the lights went out, plunging the house into darkness. Unfazed, Phil raised his weapon and saw to his satisfaction that not only did the chair leg make a decent club, a long sharp splinter jutted from the top of it, which was even better.

As he turned to make his way up the stairs his eye caught on something out in the yard and he stopped.

Only his house was in darkness. The streetlights were still working out there and in their cool blue light he saw six of the robed, skeletal faced figures standing on his lawn, their eyes lost in inky shadow, but he knew they were looking at him. The Elders were impossibly tall and thin, and he could see now that although their faces appeared made entirely from fleshless bone, their limbs were dark tentacles that whipped and snapped at the air.

Time to give you motherfuckers something to see, Phil thought, his body thrumming with the urgency to bring this nightmare to some kind of a conclusion once and for all. His mind had become a drumbeat, a war cry, pounding at the center of his forehead as civility gave way to survival. Surely even the monsters would respect another animal’s need to defend itself. After all, they seemed well-versed in the ways of war.

After a quick stop to fetch a flashlight from the living room drawer, he mounted the steps to the upstairs two at a time until he was on the second floor landing. The stench of himself was only slightly less appalling than the sudden briny fish stink that assailed his nose from both the floor below and the attic above. Undaunted, he reached for the handle that would open the attic door and saw as he did so the symbols carved into its surface start to swim and change color, as if he was seeing them through a layer of water and oil. Teeth bared, he yanked on the handle, careful not to let those swimming symbols touch his skin, and stepped back as the stairs slid down to meet him. Hefting the chair leg like an Olympian, like a warrior, he marched up the steps.

* * *

Phil didn’t know what he expected to find in the attic—a portal to Hell perhaps, or maybe an extension of that place the boy and his elders had shown him—but there was little to see that hadn’t been there before. Boxes of forgotten junk were still piled beneath the eaves in haphazard stacks, pink tufts of insulation poking like cotton candy up from the spaces between the rafters. The noxious reek of brine was even worse up here, as if the room had been flooded at some point in the past. There was no bed, no drawings, no toys, no crayons, nothing to suggest a child lived up here. But of course, a child didn’t live up here. Something else did.

“Come out,” Phil said. “You said you wanted to learn, right? Well, Daddy’s here to teach you a lesson.”

There was nothing but silence in the attic.

“And the lesson is,” Phil continued, sweeping the beam of the flashlight around the stinking attic, “You don’t fuck with people’s lives for no reason. We’re not your playthings.”

On his second sweep of the flashlight, the boy appeared, standing at the far end of the attic as if he’d been there all along. Phil pinned him with the light and tightened his grip on both the flashlight and the chair leg.

“But there is a reason,” the boy told him.

“And what’s that?”

“Mora.”

The attic door slammed shut hard enough to startle a cry from Phil and he almost dropped the flashlight. He spun and felt a cold blow of fear in his chest at the sight of the Elders blocking his path, all of them so tall they were forced to stoop, their hollow eyes boring into him, horns tangled together like brambles.

He had expected their intervention of course. He wasn’t stupid. But he hadn’t expected they would reach him so quickly. No matter. There was still a chance. He turned back to face the boy and was mildly surprised to see him still there, right where he’d been before the Elders had come. Nor did the child look even mildly perturbed, and this was worrisome.

“You ate the candy,” the boy said. “You ate of her, and so her you will become.”

It was all more gibberish to Phil and after a single heartbeat reserved to be sure he knew what he was doing (he didn’t) and to assure himself there was no time to change his mind (there was and he knew it, but was afraid to), he rushed forward toward the boy. As he closed the distance between them, he heard a muttering sound and was alarmed to realize it was coming from his own mouth: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…”

And then the flashlight beam swelled in the boy’s face, making it a burning sun in a dying sky, made it become the only light in the world, and he plunged the splintered edge of the chair leg into the child’s throat.

He expected magic, the supernatural, some last minute sleight of hand gleaned from a thousand horror movies in which, at the last, the monster cackles and plucks free the instrument of his apparent undoing, only to rise and wreak his vengeance on the killer. He expected black blood, green blood, no blood at all, maybe smoke, fire, ethereal sparks, something indicative of the unnatural and its unwillingness to die.

Instead the child choked as dark red blood, real blood, normal blood spurted out around the ragged, gaping hole in the side of his neck, and then he slowly slid down the wall until he was sitting with his hands in his lap and his eyes on Phil, who stood over him in sudden disbelief.

Silence again now but for the child choking and the spurting of the blood and before Phil knew he was going to do it, he was on his knees beside the boy, weapon forgotten, hands clasped around the rent in the child’s neck. “No, no, no,” he moaned, the blood impossible to contain as the child’s eyelids began to droop.

“I want to wait,” the child whispered.

“Don’t talk.”

“I want to wait for Mora.”

It was illogical, impossible, but in that instant Phil came to believe he had made a terrible mistake, had lost his mind, and in the morning the world would wake up to images on their TV screens of him being led out of his house after committing filicide, looking every bit the deranged murderer.

As the warmth of the child’s life’s blood coated his fingers and he wept in anguish, his mind became one of those same TV screens showing him the child and the mother looking at him in the grocery store, a mother who the store manager would later say wasn’t there. He saw the crowd, looking not at the child but at him, the man who maybe had been the only one there who was screaming. Then the accident and the woman who’d killed herself. Why? Had he known her somehow? Had she existed at all? And the police, looking at him strangely, suspiciously. Maybe because they’d spent most of their adult lives dealing with insane people and thus had learned to identify the telltale signs.

And lastly Lori. Was it possible she had left him long ago, that his broken mind had latched onto that one final memory as the last good thing worth remembering? Because what he remembered now was her face that day outside Subway when she’d looked at him as everyone else had done since the day of the accident: as if he’d completely lost his mind.

Sobbing, he looked down at the child, still alive, but only just. And what if…dear Jesus in Heaven…what if the child was really his own, if everything the police had told him was the truth, and maybe the kid had only ever dressed so strangely at the behest of his insane father? Had he been so mad that he’d been seeing everything backwards? Had he been the monster and the poor child his victim? Had he been the one forcing his son to eat shitty candy instead of real food? In a situation in which every rational person is telling you a fact and you’re the one who denies it, doesn’t that make you the one most likely wrong?

He’d been drinking a lot lately, convinced he was a captive in a supernatural nightmare. How likely was that to be the case when all was said and done? How much more reasonable did it seem that something had snapped deep within him and he’d been living a nightmare of his own creation? But of course, to realize such a thing at any point before now would have forced him to accept his own madness, and that itself, as he knew now, was its own particular form of Hell.

“I’m sorry,” he said to the boy, to Adam, to his son.

“Mora’s coming…” the child said.

“Who is Mora?”

“You are.”

Then the child’s eyes glazed over and with a soft hiss, he breathed his last.

11. Mora

Unchallenged by the elders, who had vanished just as quickly as they had come, if indeed they’d ever existed at all, he carried the boy’s body downstairs and set it gingerly on the couch, where he sat next to it until the first rays of the morning sun began to bleed into the house. Then he went to the bathroom, careful not to look at the man patiently waiting in the mirror to look back at him, washed the blood from his hands, and made his way next door to the neighbor’s house. The man he’d seen mowing the lawn the first time he’d tried to escape his own madness opened the door and jerked back in shock at the sight of Phil standing on his stoop.

“Jesus Christ, man, what happened to you?”

He’d already heard that question a few times over the past few months. He imagined after today he’d be hearing it even more. Though maybe not. People tend to distance themselves from the insane, as if to inquire is to request an invitation to the same dance.

“I’m embarrassed to admit it,” Phil said, his voice hoarse from a night spent crying, “but I’ve forgotten your name.”

“It’s Jack.”

Phil nodded slowly. “Jack Staunton.”

“That’s right. What happened? Do you need help?” He made as if to let Phil into his house, a gesture of undeserved kindness that was almost too much for Phil to handle.

He shook his head.

“No, thank you, Jack, but I do need your help. What I need for you to do is call the police and ask for a Detective Cortez. Send him to my house.”

Jack adjusted his glasses, his eyes deep pools of concern. “Has something happened?”

“Yeah, it has,” Phil said. “I think I’ve killed my son.”

The old man stared at him for a long moment before adjusting his glasses again. He cleared his throat. “But…Phil…you don’t have a son.”

Phil looked at him.

The old man composed an uncertain smile. “I mean…we don’t know each other all that well, but you’ve never mentioned any kids. I know I’ve never seen any and you’ve lived next door to me for years. And I’m pretty sure on one of the few times we have spoken, you said you broke up with your ex-wife because she wanted kids and you didn’t.”

Phil would never know how long he stood there before he was able to find his voice. His mind had become a chaos of malformed thoughts. “Jack…I’m sorry…” He extended a trembling hand which the old man regarded as if it were a scorpion. “Do…do you have a cell phone I could borrow? I’ll pay you for the calls if you like…I just need to check something…to…I just need to make some calls.”

“Sure, sure,” the old man said and fished a hopelessly outdated Nokia from his pants pocket. He handed it over. “Say, are you sure you don’t need an ambulance or something? You look like hell.”

“No, I’m fine, thanks,” Phil said and cursed his trembling fingers as he tried to dial the number.

After a few rings, his ex-wife answered, sounding annoyed at having been woken so early.

After that, he called Detective Marsh.

And finally Lori.

None of them had ever heard of a boy named Adam Pendleton.

And Lori couldn’t wait to see him again.

* * *

At home, he found the couch bare but for a few traces of blood he was able to blame on the nasty cut on his right palm he’d probably sustained when he’d broken the chair, which still lay in pieces on the floor of the living room. He paced like a maddened animal, afraid to believe it could be true and still reeling from the hammering his mind at taken, not just overnight, but in the months preceding it.

He went to the kitchen and could not restrain the laughter upon discovering his cupboards and fridge once more stocked with food. And while all the meat had spoiled, which went some way toward explaining the smell, it was infinitely better than finding the shelves crammed with gjøk.

In the bathroom, it took him five minutes to bring his gaze up to the mirror, and when finally he met his own gaze, he burst out laughing. He looked thin, gaunt, and haunted, but his teeth were all present and accounted for, his hair thick, if more than a little filthy.

Next he hurried upstairs, Lori’s voice still ringing beautifully in his ears: You were weird as hell after that car accident, honey. You mean to tell me you don’t remember me coming to get you at the hospital? And why the hell haven’t you been answering your phone? Whose phone are you calling me from now?

All the pictures on the walls upstairs were normal. No boy to be seen anywhere, only people he knew and had always known. He took a moment to run his fingers over the black and white shot of he and Lori at the cabin in Hocking Hills, both of them near-freezing to death, but laughing like fools.

His ex-wife’s aggravated tone arose in his mind as he stood at the foot of the ladder to the attic.

Accident? You mean yours? Yeah, I heard and I’m glad you’re okay, but no, I’m fine. Crippled? Jesus, I don’t know what kind of misfortune you’ve been wishing on me in your sleep but let’s hope it stays there.

The attic was bare. No bodies, no monsters, no blood. Only junk and Christmas decorations. He sat down in the corner where he may or may not have killed a boy who was not a boy and took the old man’s cell phone from his pocket. He’d promised to return it within the hour, and he would. And no, he’d explained to the old man, there was no need to call the police. He simply wanted to call Lori again and couldn’t while his own phone was downstairs charging. Even once it was charged it wouldn’t be of any immediate use to him, considering it had only stopped getting service in the first place because he’d ignored Verizon’s demands that he pay his overdue bill.

He dialed Lori’s number, a hum of excitement in his chest, put the phone to his ear, and closed his eyes. There was so much he wanted to tell her, but didn’t even know where to start. So he started as if there was nothing to tell her at all, because that was the safest place.

“Hey you.”

“Hey sexy,” she said, and an involuntary sob escaped him, which he excused as laughter, even though she knew him better than anyone and as such was not so easy to fool.

“What’s up with you lately, honey? I’m worried. You haven’t been yourself.”

“I know I haven’t. I’ve had a lot on my mind, but all that’s about to change, I promise.”

“Damn well better. I miss that good lov—”

Click.

He frowned. “Hello? Lori?” Checked the phone and saw that it was as dead as his own had been when he’d recovered it from under the sofa. “Shit.”

The attic door slammed shut, startling him. For a moment he entertained the idea that it was his neighbor, or maybe the police after the old man decided his nutty neighbor needed checking on after all, but the recent horrors he’d endured were too fresh in his mind for him to put much stock in self-deception.

And then the Elders materialized from the gloom. Six of them, as before, their bony skulls downcast, that tangled mass of their horns pointed directly at him.

“No,” Phil moaned. “No, no, no. I fixed it. I set it right.”

“The boy is here in spirit,” one of the Elders said, his voice rain through a gutter. “He would be honored to know how well you’ve done, Mora.”

“Mora?” Despite sitting with his back to the wall, Phil turned to look over his shoulder for whomever the creatures were addressing, but when he turned back and found one of the Elders looming over him, he was suddenly, horrifically aware that they were addressing only him.

In an instant its writhing, tentacles had lashed themselves around his wrist and he was once more returned to that altar in that unholy crimson place, only this time, he saw the truth and the mistakes he had made almost from the beginning.

“Eat of her, become her,” the voices chanted, and he saw himself accepting the first piece of candy—or what he had assumed was candy back then—from the boy in the grocery store. It was not candy at all, of course, he knew that now, but a seed, a seed which had taken root inside him and would soon give birth to new life, a life that would, once old enough, find another nest, another life to poison, and the process would carry on again until the time came for the attendant child to give itself up in blood sacrifice.

And the ritual would begin again.

They make us bear their children.

Phil opened his eyes and he was on his back in the attic. The Elders still loomed over him, their tentacles writhing around them in ecstasy as they threw back their bony heads and screamed at the ceiling.

Phil rolled over on his stomach and scrabbled to reach the phone. It was tantalizingly close and from here he could see the display glowing blue as the power returned. He imagined it was Lori on the phone, calling him back, and he wanted so desperately to answer, to tell her that whatever happened he was so very sorry, to beg her to save him, although even in the throes of panic he knew it was too late for that.

Because the child he had feared, the child he had killed had not been a monster at all but a guardian, assigned to watch over Phil and the life he was carrying inside him. And in killing the boy, he had not escaped at all, but completed the last step of their ritual.

And then his insides heaved forward so violently it lifted him off the floor and flopped him over on his back. He screamed and clamped his hands down on his belly, felt the flesh beneath them begin to roil and heave and split. His ribs cracked and blood surged up his throat ahead of his organs, as, with his last breath, he felt a tiny tendril clutch his finger from within the gaping cavity where once had been his chest.

Then, there was only fire.

12. Delivery

Cortez was late getting to the scene. Later, when he and Marsh got together for their usual Friday night shot and bull session, he planned to tell her all about how he’d walked in on his eldest daughter Marissa masturbating on Skype for that fuckhead poet boyfriend of hers. He would omit the part in which he’d hit her so hard her nose bled, because certain things needed to stay his own business. But it had hardly started the day off on a positive note and he knew Marsh would somehow find a way to make him feel guilty about it no matter how he chose to portray his role in the proceedings.

And then the call from that lunatic Pendleton while he’d been spraying Bactine on his wrist, the image of the shock on his daughter’s face still lingering in his mind.

And now this bullshit.

It was shaping up to be quite a day.

The first responder on the scene, a young Turk named Danielson, fresh off a tour of Iraq, all crisp pleats and shine, came over and filled him in on what he already knew: the Pendleton guy had been cooked in his own house. By the time they cleaned the mess up, only the frame would be left standing.

“Didn’t think this would be something you’d need to be called in on, Detective,” Danielson said.

“It isn’t, but the guy who got roasted in there called me this morning to ask if I knew anything about his son.”

The police officer’s eyebrows rose in concern. “He had a kid?”

“No, he didn’t,” Cortez said, and walked toward the house, leaving the young officer behind him looking perplexed.

The fire would be deemed “just one of those things.” An iPhone charger had shorted and the sparks set fire to the living room curtains, and, with the houses in this neighborhood being so old, well, nobody would be surprised by the outcome.

But even without yet being aware of the particulars, and despite, or maybe because of, his foul mood, the whole thing bothered Cortez. In truth, it had bothered him since the first time he’d met Pendleton that day at the scene of the accident. For one thing, parts of their exchange were missing, both from his own mind and the notes he was customarily vigilant in taking in the event that the former failed him. For another, whenever his own ill-formed hunches led him to broach the subject with Marsh, she got a dazed look on her face and started grousing about migraines. This was especially unusual considering the report log showed she had been out this way more than once over the past few months. What remained undocumented—another irregularity—was why.

All of this he could have forgiven, however, if not for this morning’s phonecall. The guy calls him and less than an hour later gets burned to death in his own home? Fine, whatever, coincidences happen, but upon finding those pages missing from his notes, he’d attempted to reclaim some hint of them by shading the next blank page with a charcoal pencil, an old trick he had learned, not from the Academy, but from the movies, and what he’d found was a name: Hannah Ward. He was sure he’d never heard the name before, and his research hadn’t yielded much except for a mother who had burned to death in a maternity ward.

She burns, he burns, we all fall down.

It didn’t sit well with him at all and he knew he’d be tonguing the fucking thing like a hole in his tooth until he found some kind of closure to it.

But for today, he decided there was little he could do, so he left word with Danielson to call him if anything came up, and drove to a bar far enough from the scene not to risk being spotted. There he chatted up the flirtatious young barmaid (even though he knew she had little interest in anything but a bigger tip) and did his best to drown out the persistent, aggravating sensation that he was missing something, that someone had blinded him to truths of which he should have been aware.

For now, the only relevant truth seemed to be how quickly his home life was falling to shit, and if that didn’t warrant another few brain-deadening rounds, then nothing did.

By the time Marsh joined him six hours later, he could barely stand, and he was dismayed to find her in the throes of another sour mood. Worse, she seemed determined to use him as the piñata for it, and when he got defensive, she stormed out, leaving with a parting shot that made no sense to him at all.

“Maybe when you stop bringing your fucking infant son to bars, we can talk about my problems, but for now, you’re better off dealing with your own.”

And then she was gone, only the lingering scent of her perfume as a sign that she’d even been there.

It was only when he went to the parking lot and saw that one of the boys had left an infant child strapped into the backseat of his cruiser that he finally got the joke.

* * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Dungarvan, Ireland, Kealan Patrick Burke is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of five novels, over a hundred short stories, six collections, and editor of four acclaimed anthologies.

Kealan has worked as a waiter, a drama teacher, a mapmaker, a security guard, an assembly-line worker at Apple Computers, a salesman (for a day), a bartender, landscape gardener, vocalist in a grunge band, and, most recently, a fraud investigator. He also played the male lead in Slime City Massacre, director Gregory Lamberson’s sequel to his cult B-movie classic Slime City, alongside scream queens Debbie Rochon and Brooke Lewis.

When not writing, Kealan designs covers for print and digital books through his company Elderlemon Design. To date he has designed covers for books by Richard Laymon, Brian Keene, Scott Nicholson, Bentley Little, William Schoell, and Hugh Howey, to name a few.

In what little free time remains, Kealan is a voracious reader, movie buff, videogamer (Xbox & PS4, and PC), and road-trip enthusiast.

A movie based on his short story “Peekers” is currently in development through Lionsgate Entertainment.

www.kealanpatrickburke.com

Table of Contents

- Sour Candy

- Midpoint