Sour Candy (7 page)

“
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.