Sour Candy (6 page)

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.”