In the Shadows of Children (6 page)

“Don’t coddle them. They need to know.” Aaron’s dad turned to him. “The boogeyman looks like a man, but he’s a monster. He comes for children who disobey their parents, stuffs them in his sack and steals them away. So you’d better eat your spaghetti.” He spoke with total seriousness until their mother yelled at him again, which made him laugh again for some reason.

“That’s not true, boys,” their mother said. “Your father’s just being naughty.”

Aaron looked across the table at Bobby, who’d stopped chewing, his mouth hanging partway open to show a mouthful of spaghetti mush.

“John, look at how much you’ve scared them. Tell them the truth.”

“They’re good boys. Why should they be scared?”

Aaron looked to his mother, who put her hand on his.

“No boogeyman is coming to get you. Tell them, John. It’s not funny anymore.”

“The boogeyman isn’t coming to get you, Aaron,” his father said, rolling his eyes. As soon as Aaron’s mother turned to tend to Bobby, though, he opened his eyes wide and mimed shoveling food into his mouth.

Aaron got the message loud and clear. The boogeyman wouldn’t come and get him if he finished his spaghetti. Even though it felt like trying to swallow dry flour—which he had once attempted—Aaron began to wolf down his dinner.

It didn’t matter.

Later that night, after Aaron had been tucked in and read a bedtime story by his mother, and a second, and been denied a third, she finally shut out the light, leaving only the small night light to battle the darkness spreading from the corners of the room.

Bobby had gone to sleep hours before and breathed deeply from his bed. Aaron tried to listen to that comforting sound and not think of the story Ryan had told and that his father had confirmed. But the harder he tried not to, the more he did, and the more he did, the harder he tried not to.

He hadn’t asked his mother to close the closet door, had never felt a need to. Now he wished he had. The night light didn’t shine directly into the closet, partially illuminating one side but leaving the other in complete darkness.

Then the darkness began to spread.

Aaron pulled his blanket over his head and curled into a ball. But he had to look. He had to know.

Opening a tiny gap, Aaron peeked out, and saw that the closet was now perfectly black.

He stared without blinking, unable to understand what he was seeing. It was as if a black sheet hung over the entrance to his closet, hiding all the board games and clothes, and then a hand emerged from the center.

It was huge, bigger than his father’s, and gnarled with clawlike fingers. Aaron squeaked, but then shut his mouth tight, afraid to make another sound. The hand felt along the ground, grasping at the floor, trying to find purchase, slipping, but then shooting out farther so that Aaron could see a long, spindly arm in a filthy sleeve.

Aaron took air in tiny sips and watched as the boogeyman emerged, crawling along the floor, slowly pulling away from the darkness of the closet. It peeled off him reluctantly, clinging like tar and then snapping back into place. He was of the darkness and the darkness didn’t want to let him go.

But finally he emerged in full and rose up. Even with his stooped shoulders and rounded back he stood almost to the ceiling. His arms dangled nearly to the floor. He wore a long, filthy coat and dragged a filthier burlap sack an inch at a time into the room.

But the scariest parts of him were the ones that weren’t there. His eyes and mouth were yawning black chasms, the same stuff as the closet, and the sack opened into a dark tunnel leading to the same place.

The sack slowed the creature, but Aaron could still tell where he was going. Slowly, inch by inch, dragging the darkness with him, he progressed toward Bobby’s bed.

“Bobby! Bobby, wake up!” Aaron screamed in a whisper that whistled out of his constricted throat.

Bobby didn’t wake up at first, but Aaron kept making noises until his little brother finally groaned, rolled over and looked at him.

Barely shoving his quivering hand from beneath the blanket, Aaron pointed to the monster emerging from their closet.

Bobby turned and hesitated for only the moment necessary to draw in a huge lungful of air before letting it out as a piercing scream.

The boogeyman kept coming, kept dragging his sack, kept stretching his arm out, swiping closer and closer to Bobby’s bed.

“Come here,” Aaron said, but Bobby curled up against the wall and screamed.

Without thinking about what he was doing, Aaron jumped out of bed and ran to Bobby. The boogeyman looked at him, reached for him, so that even though his long, clawed hand futilely raked the air from several feet away, Aaron threw himself back and collided with their dresser.

Scrabbling across the floor now on all fours, Aaron reached Bobby’s bed and grabbed him by the hand. He pulled, and Bobby came with him. He didn’t seem to want to at first, but Aaron was twice his size and powered by terror, and he dragged his little brother back to his bed and wrapped them both in his blanket. There was nowhere else to go. The closet was too near the door. The creature had them trapped.

Bobby had stopped screaming. He sobbed and quaked, holding Aaron tightly.

Then the light came on and the boogeyman instantly disappeared, not leaving behind even a puff of smoke.

“What’s wrong?” their mother asked, rushing into the room.

“The boogeyman!”

She soothed them and put them back in their beds, though as soon as she left the room Bobby sprinted across the gap and jumped beneath Aaron’s blankets.

From down the hall, Aaron could hear his mother talking in her punishment voice.

* * *

Aaron tumbled off the couch, tangled in the afghan, barely managing to land on his hands and knees. He fought his way out, unsure of where he was or if he were safe. The room was dark, and darkness held danger. Now he remembered what kind.

Drenched in sweat, he finally emerged from his cocoon, stood, oriented himself. He was in his parents’ living room. He made his way to a light switch, flipped it on, felt a bit safer.

But not much.

Looking at his watch, he found that it was just after seven. Exhausted and drugged, he’d slept soundly for nearly ten hours. His tongue felt covered in glue, and as soon as some of the adrenaline receded, his thoughts began to stream by in doped slow motion. Like fish in an aquarium, he had time to watch each one pass. And then came the shark, with its dead eyes and lethal maw.

The boogeyman had taken his brother.

It had emerged from the closet many nights, and together they’d fought it off, but then Aaron had left, had forgotten, and Bobby faced it alone.

The memories didn’t flood back, but the brick wall that separated him from his childhood was crumbling, losing structural integrity.

Aaron peered out the window. Night had fallen. He looked to the stairs, walked out in the foyer.

Upstairs, his brother lurked in the darkness, waiting for him. He’d somehow escaped the boogeyman. Not fully. If he were free, he’d step out of the darkness and reclaim his life. Aaron wondered why he didn’t.

It was time to find out.

He climbed the stairs, keeping his eyes on the doorway to his old bedroom. He was afraid. Afraid of the lurking boogeyman and afraid of Bobby, or what his brother had become.

At the top of the stairs he flipped on the hall light, forced himself to breathe, stared into the shadows of his old room.

“Bobby, are you there?” Still standing on the upper landing, Aaron’s voice echoed through the house.

“You know it.”

Aaron took a deep breath, stepped forward and reached for the switch on the wall. Then he remembered, and with only a moment’s hesitation, walked into the shadows.

Bobby sat in what Aaron was beginning to think of as his normal place in the closet. Aaron walked past him and sat on the foot of his old bed.

He looked to Bobby, who seemed to be expecting something.

“I went to the park. I found the house. You were right, about Spider-Man, about the slingshot and the knife. You didn’t tell me about the dog.”

Bobby smiled. “That damn dog. Sorry, I should have told you. If only dad hadn’t been allergic to dogs, we might have had one.”

Aaron paused at the non-sequitur. “Why does that matter?”

“To keep the boogeyman away.”

Aaron’s heart sank. His dream wasn’t a construction of his mind; it was a repressed memory.

“I remember the boogeyman. I dreamed about the first time. Do you remember that?”

“I’m not sure. You always told me about it. I remember that, at least.”

“That was the start of everything, leading straight to here. Like the entire struggle was futile.”

“If you look back, it always is, isn’t it? In hindsight, everything is inevitable.”

These were not the words of a fifteen-year-old. Bobby was different. Maybe he hadn’t grown up, exactly, but he’d changed, and Aaron wondered why he wouldn’t want to show it.

“Why couldn’t I remember?” Aaron asked. “This thing seems to have unconsciously shaped my entire life, and I just forget it?”

“That’s the trick. That’s how it does what it does. The adult mind can’t hold the darkness.”

Aaron shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. We were little jackasses when we were kids. We had no idea of how the world worked, of how tough it is.” Aaron’s face flushed after he remembered that Bobby never grew up.

Bobby scoffed. “We hadn’t learned the shared reality, yet. In that way you’re right. We hadn’t learned the hard truths like you’re gonna grow up to be an accountant, not an astronaut. But none of that is real. The reason children don’t understand that stuff is because it’s a complex set of made-up rules. Like if you try to teach a kid chess, the first thing he might do is reach across the board, steal your king and run off with it. He just won. But there are truths, real truths, and just to get by, to find the motivation to keep struggling anyway, adults have to grow numb to them.”

After all he’d seen, Aaron couldn’t bring himself to dismiss what Bobby was saying. He wanted to, but he couldn’t quite do it. Still, his tone was incredulous when he said, “And what truths are those?”

“That almost every corner of the universe is dark, that hungry things live in that darkness, and that one day, they’ll take every single one of us. Body or soul, one day they’ll catch us with our guards down, stuff us in their sack and walk out of the light. All children know this. All children respect this, live their lives by this. But the knowledge is like a guitar string.”

Bobby paused. He had always been precocious, and had seemed to enjoy nothing more than saying things too profound or esoteric for Aaron to understand. Even after all the lost years, Aaron felt a bit annoyed when he had to admit, “You lost me.”

“Life is like playing the guitar, and the knowledge of how vulnerable we are is like sharp strings. Do you remember how my fingertips used to crack and blister when I first started playing?”

Aaron nodded.

“I had the fingers of a child. Sensitive, unarmored. They had to become calloused so that I could keep playing. Teen suicides are people who stop playing. Teen drug addicts are people who couldn’t develop calluses, so they have to artificially dull their senses.”

“But I was an adult when I left.”

“And your soul had been ready to forget, to finally shut itself off from the horrible universe, to stop looking up into the darkness and to look down, to plod one step forward at a time. And the thing is, to some degree, it works. It doesn’t want you after that.”

“Who is
it
?”

“I don’t know, exactly. Not exactly. But it watches as best it can, and it’s envious.”

“Why did it come after us?”

Bobby shrugged. “We’re marked somehow. Maybe it’s in our genes.”

“Elijah,” Aaron said, his eyes unfocusing, imagining his boy back in California. He looked at his watch. Elijah would go to bed soon. The lights would go out. What waited for that opportunity?

“Bobby, have you seen his room?”

Bobby nodded slowly. “He really likes
Power Rangers
.”

“So his closet is part of the—network.”

“Yes. We’re marked, brother. That’s why I came back. That’s why I had to warn you.”

“What happened to you? How are you back? Where did you go?”

“I couldn’t take it anymore, waiting for the boogeyman to catch me with my guard down. I didn’t have much hope left. It might have been false security, but before you left I thought I might have a chance. Alone, with only Mom and Dad… They thought I was crazy. I wouldn’t even talk to them about it, but just the way I avoided the bedroom, how despondent I got… They got sick of me, I think.”