Sour Candy (9 page)

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.