In the Shadows of Children (5 page)

After several break-ins in his own neighborhood, he’d researched the subject of home security. Numerous articles said that in the majority of break-ins, the criminal hadn’t been required to force entry. He tried the knob.

The door opened.

He barely got the door closed before the barking started.

The little black dog sprinted into the kitchen, losing grip on the linoleum and sliding, his claws tapping out a spastic routine, short legs each struggling for purchase. He smacked into the island, regaining his balance. That moment of relative silence made the second barrage of barks seem all the louder. The dog bounced in its fury, and Aaron could see it had sizable teeth, and a much bigger mouth than he would have expected.

He sidled out of the kitchen and toward the hallway down which he knew he’d find the boy’s bedroom. The dog followed, barking as loudly as Aaron thought he’d ever heard a dog bark, the sound smashing into his skull like an unending flurry of punches.

The neighbors had to all be dialing the cops already. Aaron needed to hurry, but every time he turned his head from the dog and tried to focus on what he was doing, it closed the distance and only retreated once Aaron returned to walking backward.

After what seemed like an eternity, Aaron bumped into a door frame. Snapping a look back over his shoulder, he saw walls plastered in Spider-Man.

The dog had advanced again, but Aaron jumped back and slammed the door between them. Pausing for only a second to take a deep breath, he ran to the boy’s bed, with its red and blue and black-webbed comforter and its plush Spider-Man dolls. Lifting it with one hand, he peered beneath. The bed had a wooden frame, and the mattress sat atop a solid plywood board. Between the two were a slingshot and a steak knife.

Aaron’s eyes snapped to the closet as he let the mattress fall with a
whoomp
and a gust. Seeing the weapons knocked a brick out of the wall separating him from his childhood, and he envisioned his own BB rifle hidden beneath his bed, felt the small comfort it had brought him, and the sadness that it was the best he could do, that he was so helpless that a bb gun could be of any comfort at all.

The dog’s paws hit the thin wood, and its barking buzzed through the hollow space at the center. He needed to get out.

Aaron went to the closet. Could Bobby see him even then? He pulled aside the clothing and pressed his hands against the back wall. It was solid, of course. The entrances to the tunnels Bobby had talked about weren’t literally hidden behind closet walls, to be accessed with a concealed handle, and there were no physical tunnels running between houses all over town. Whatever came out of these closets did so as Bobby had, from the darkness, a darkness that, when night fell, might connect more places than it didn’t. A darkness that connected everything in a universe the stars illuminated only in specks, a darkness that reduced stars large enough to swallow half of the Earth’s solar system down to dimensionless points with an infinite vastness in which some insidious force thrived.

The dog hit the door again, snapping Aaron’s perspective down out of the infinite and into his own body. He turned to the window, thinking it might be better to avoid the dog altogether. He dismissed the idea, because he didn’t know if he could get the window shut again from the outside, and so far he hadn’t left any clue of his illegal entry. As he turned back the way he’d come, he unconsciously took in the cacophony of red and blue of Spider-Man’s costume until his eyes stopped on blackness. His heart thudded hard enough to knock his vision blurry around the edges, and he reached for the small desk.

He lifted a sheet of paper with a shaking hand. A crudely drawn Spider-Man stood in a child’s bedroom, blasting a web at a huge, clawed hand as it reached from the closet.

Aaron waited for his heart to slow, for his vision to clear, but it didn’t. Something in his mind was crumbling.

The dog hit the door again, more frantically, barking louder, and louder, and louder.

Aaron threw the door open and ran down the hall. He felt a tug on his pant leg, followed by a rhythmic jerking and blessed silence. He dragged the dog to the back door, opened it, pulled himself through it except for his right leg, closed it most of the way behind him, then pulled his right leg through, shutting it on the fabric of his pants. On the other side, the tugging continued for a moment before the dog gave up with the frayed scrap it had worried half to death and Aaron was able to walk away with nothing worse than ruined pants and a feeling of dread like nothing he’d experienced since Bobby’s last phone call some fifteen years ago.

As calmly as he could, Aaron walked back to his car. When a cold wind gusted into his back, he felt it crawl up his leg. Looking down, he saw that his pants had ripped up past his calf. Still, he continued walking leisurely until he made it to the safety of his car.

He accidentally sat down before removing his keys from his pockets, and the struggle to remove them nearly drove him to the brink of insanity. They were like a hook stuck all the way in the stomach of a trout, and by the time he’d extracted them his forehead was beaded with sweat. He tried to separate out the car key, but eventually had to set down the crumpled child’s drawing he hadn’t even remembered taking with him to free both hands for a task that had for some reason become as difficult and precise as cracking a safe.

Aaron was just about to attempt to put the key into the ignition when a knock on his window made him drop the ring onto the floorboard. With a curse, he turned and looked out his driver’s-side window.

His heart thudded again, but this time his vision didn’t just go blurry around the edges, it closed in until he was looking at the police officer as though down the wrong end of a telescope. The man spoke, but all Aaron could hear was a tsunami closing in, roaring as if it were rushing down the street, seconds from washing them all away.

It was only his blood.

He breathed. Breathed. Rolled down his window.

“Hello, sir. Can I see your license and registration?”

“What’s this about?” Aaron asked as he again began the delicate process of trying to extract something else from his pocket. Luckily, his wallet seemed not to have the treble-hook properties of his keys, and didn’t resist much.

“We had a call from the school. There’s a park a block over. Several children told their teacher they saw a man sitting in the lot in a blue car with a pair of binoculars.” The cop looked around the interior of Aaron’s car. He thanked God he’d been paranoid enough to hide the binoculars in the center console beneath a pile of CDs. “I see you have California plates. Can I ask what you’re doing here?”

“I’m from here, originally. I came back for my mother’s funeral.” Aaron tried not to look like a psycho as he handed the cop the requested papers.

“Oh? And what are you doing here, on this street?” He looked at the license.

“Visiting a family friend.”

“You appear agitated.”

“My mother just died.”

The cop looked at him, then looked at his license. Then an expression of surprise crossed his previously blank expression. “Was your mother Phyllis Conlin?”

“Yes. Did you know her?”

“I was first on the scene, after the neighbor called.”

Aaron sat there totally stunned until the cop reached through his window, making him flinch.

“I’m Office Cole. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Aaron shook the thick-fingered hand. “Thank you.”

“It must be especially hard when something like that happens so unexpectedly.”

Aaron nodded, still disoriented, staring straight ahead down the road but seeing the foyer of his mother’s house, the base of the stairs. “Did she look…?” He’d almost said “sad,” or “lonely,” but stopped when he heard how strange it sounded in his own head. He didn’t bother finishing the question.

Still, Officer Cole said, “Scared.”

Aaron looked up into the man’s eyes, and found them focused somewhere else, too, somewhere inside. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” Cole said, shaking his head as if coming back to himself. “You asked how she looked?”

Aaron didn’t say anything.

With a distracted air, as if the memory of that horrible morning wouldn’t let him go, Officer Cole handed him back his license and registration. “Again, I’m very sorry for your loss.” He took a few steps, then returned. “But you should go on home.”

He finally walked back to his cruiser. The man had found his mother. Even in a small town, Aaron supposed that Officer Cole had seen a lot of bad things in his time.

Did she look…?

Scared.

Aaron started his car with a shaking hand. He knew it wasn’t what Officer Cole meant, but he seriously considered going home, just putting the car in drive and heading for the highway and California.

What happened to me is going to happen to Elijah, unless you stop it.

With still shaking hands, Aaron drove to his childhood home.

* * *

It had been a long time since he’d eaten, and after staying up all night his acidic stomach churned. Sitting at the same yellow Formica kitchen table that he’d eaten breakfast at as a child, Aaron methodically shoveled globs of a rice casserole into his mouth. His mind was elsewhere, everywhere. It raced around with nowhere to go, hurling itself back and forth like a wild animal with its leg caught in a snare. And just like that snare, there was a fixed point at the center.

The closet.

When he couldn’t stomach any more casserole, he went upstairs. He peeked into his bedroom, into the closet, at clothes and board games, not into an endless darkness.

In the bathroom he raided his mother’s prescriptions. Even as exhausted as he was, he wouldn’t be able to sleep if he didn’t take something. He found a bottle of hydrocodone, only two years expired. He thought back to three years ago, when his mother had thrown out her back gardening. Sarah had suggested that he go spend a week at home, since his poor mother could barely move.

He’d offered to pay for a nurse. Meredith Jackman volunteered to help instead.

Aaron took three pills, swallowed them with a handful of water from the tap.

He started back downstairs, because no way in hell was he sleeping in his old bedroom, or any room on the second floor, or with a closet. He might never sleep in a room with a closet again.

He stopped halfway down the stairs and looked at the bottom, where he knew his mother had landed.

Aaron skirted the area. It felt disrespectful to keep striding over it, like walking over a grave.

In the living room, he pulled all the blinds. The room wasn’t dark, but he already felt the pills beginning to work, felt a warmth spreading from the base of his skull as he curled up on the flower-print couch and pulled an afghan over himself.

After hours of dreamless sleep, Aaron awoke in a stupor and dragged himself to the downstairs bathroom. He pissed, gulped down two glasses of water, then dragged himself back to the couch. His head felt like it weighed a hundred pounds, and he let it drop to the cushion, staring over the side at the floor, where, on a sheet of paper, Spider-Man shot a web at a huge, clawed hand extending from a closet. The jolt of fear couldn’t counteract the leaden weight of the pills for long, and Aaron quickly slipped beneath the surface, drowning in sleep without any struggle.

But this time it wasn’t dreamless.

* * *

Eight-year-old Aaron pushed spaghetti around on his plate. He usually loved spaghetti, but he wasn’t hungry. His stomach hurt. It had hurt ever since first recess.

“Aaron, why aren’t you eating?” his mother asked. “Spaghetti is your favorite.”

“I’m just not hungry.”

“Look at how good Bobby is eating.”

Bobby sat in his booster seat, face covered in spaghetti sauce up to just below his eyes. Aaron took a small bite and chewed slowly.

“Out with it,” his dad said. “What’s up?”

“At recess, Ryan told us about something scary that happened to him last night.”

Both his parents put down their silverware. Their focus was too intense, and Aaron wished he hadn’t said anything.

“What did he tell you?” his father asked.

Aaron didn’t want to answer. His parents looked angry already, and he didn’t know why.

“Aaron…” his father said in a warning tone.

“He said that last night a tall, weird man-monster thing came out of his closet, that he had a big bag and he wanted to put Ryan in the bag, but Ryan hid under his blankets.”

Their dad laughed. “That’s just the boogeyman.”

Aaron had been worried by Ryan’s story. Some of the kids had called him a liar, had said he was just trying to scare them, and some of them had been scared, including Aaron. But Ryan had looked the most scared of all.

“Is he real?” Aaron asked.

“Yes, but he only comes for bad children.”

“John! No, the boogeyman isn’t real.”