In the Shadows of Children (8 page)

Aaron nodded, unable to speak through a second mouthful of pancakes, this one syrup-laden. She sat a mug before him, and he sloshed some steaming coffee into his mouth, the food there buffering his tongue from the heat.

He finally managed to swallow. “This is delicious. Thank you so much.”

“It’s nice to watch a young man enjoy my cooking. No matter what my figure says, we old people don’t like eating much, but we can enjoy it vicariously.”

The Jackmans’ had their son and their grandkids. His mother had died alone.

“I guess the lesson is, don’t get old,” Mrs. Jackman said with a laugh.

“I guess so,” he said, taking a more reasonably sized bite of scrambled eggs. He knew only one person who’d followed Mrs. Jackman’s advice, and it didn’t seem to have worked out so well for him.

“Have you made much progress?” she asked, looking around as if the evidence of his past few days’ work would be there in the kitchen.

“Not really. It’s gone very slowly.”

“It does. I remember going through my parents’ things. It took weeks.” She glanced around the kitchen again, and Aaron realized that she wasn’t looking for signs of his progress. She’d been looking around ever since she stepped through the door, and he’d misinterpreted, expecting to be judged for running away. What he saw in her face when she didn’t know he was watching wasn’t judgment. It was fear.

“Is something wrong?”

“What? No.” But she was flustered.

Over the past few days, everything had meant something. “You can tell me. You look nervous.”

Meredith Jackman sighed deeply, took a sip of her coffee, and carefully sat it back on the table. She pressed her lips together, bringing out deep lines around her mouth. “It’s silly.”

Aaron gave her an encouraging look.

“Ever since it happened, I’ve had a bad feeling about this house.”

“That’s understandable.”

Mrs. Jackman shook her head. “Something wasn’t right. Your mother wasn’t clumsy, and she didn’t look like she’d just stumbled. I’m older than she was. I have friends who’ve fallen down the stairs, broken a hip. I’d seen them shuffling about before their accidents. They looked like it was bound to happen at some point. But they didn’t die.” Her lips clamped shut as she fought tears.

“It’s not fair,” Aaron said.

Mrs. Jackman shook her head. No, it wasn’t fair. There was more too it, though. Aaron didn’t want to push, but it seemed like she knew something. Had she seen something of the strangeness he’d been living with?

“There’s something more to it, isn’t there? What is it? You can tell me. I can take it.”

“I just feel so stupid. And so selfish for putting this on you. There’s nothing to it.”

“Please. I want to know.”

Mrs. Jackman sighed, closed her eyes, composed herself. “You can’t imagine walking in on a scene like that. I’m old enough to have lost friends, but nothing like this. I’m not going to go into details. This was your mother. But it wasn’t just the injuries. It was her expression.”

The image of the police officer’s face as he realized who Aaron was struck him, and he felt sick. The pancakes stretched the thin sack of his stomach like a pile of double-ought buckshot.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I should have kept my darn mouth shut.” Mrs. Jackman’s face began to crumple. She looked sad, scared and furious at herself all at the same time.

“No, it’s not you,” Aaron said, reaching across the table and putting a hand on hers, trying to stop their worrying of a stack of napkins. “I talked to a police officer today, the one who responded to your call.”

“Teddy Cole.”

“Yeah. Cole. He said something similar to what you’re saying. He said she looked scared.”

Mrs. Jackman had been shaking her head in the negative since Aaron had forced the terrible conversation, but she shook it more vigorously. “Your mother was too young for this. She was too healthy. Of course she looked scared. Of course. She…”

Aaron knew how that sentence ended. Of course you die looking scared when you fall down a tall flight of stairs, breaking half the large bones in your body before landing in a crumpled heap on the floor, unable to move and with no one to help you. Alone. Abandoned.

“I’m going to tell you something, though, and you can’t tell my husband. He’ll think I’m losing it.”

“Of course.”

Mrs. Jackman looked Aaron in the face. “I’m old. I’ve gotten scared of the world. Hank is probably right and a couple of screws have probably come loose. But I brought it up, so I’m going to tell you. Maybe it’ll ease your mind.” After taking a deep breath, she said, “Late that night, I was out in the backyard looking up at your house, just thinking about your mom, just remembering, and I saw something.”

Chills ripped up Aaron’s spine. Mrs. Jackman had almost convinced him that whatever she was about to say was going to be the delusions of a mind in decline and strained by grief. But he knew now what she’d seen.

Still, he couldn’t just say it. He had to
ask
, had to let her put it in terms that made sense to her.

“What did you see?” he finally asked when it seemed she wouldn’t go on.

“It was a shape. Just a vague shape, dark and huge. Somebody had left the light on in the second-floor landing, and I saw it silhouetted in your bedroom doorway. My mind keeps telling me that I didn’t see it, that I was just upset, that it was a shadow, that it was something that makes sense.”

“What was it, though, really?”

Her eyes went unfocused as she peered back into that memory, as if through the same heavy fog that settled over Aaron’s memories of the last few nights whenever the sun rose. “I think it was Death, looking down the stairs, gloating over his work.”

* * *

Aaron sat in the living room and watched the world grow dark. He considered going upstairs—actually stood, walked to the staircase and put his foot on the first step several times—but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. The closet in his old bedroom had two modes that he’d seen. The first was as a normal closet, containing the sort of things you’d expect to find. The second was as a sort of gateway into another universe, a junction where Bobby could make contact with him. Aaron was curious about what happened in the liminal zone between those two modes when Bobby appeared, but couldn’t quite bring himself to go watch. From childhood, he vaguely remembered the swirling darkness, the way the room felt contained and safe one moment, and the next on the brink of a void so huge that it could destroy him not by consumption but by perspective, as if the camera would pull out and out and out until he became so small he disappeared entirely.

That was where Bobby lived, and that night, Aaron intended to find out what had happened to his brother.

The shadows deepened and spread, sliding from their corners like oil. The foyer disappeared. Still Aaron sat, paralyzed by dread. He did not want to go upstairs. He wanted to go home.

He knew that by this point his brother sat waiting for him. Bobby, about whom Aaron had said for years that he’d give anything to talk to one last time.

Aaron stood, made his way to the base of the dark stairs. He should have turned the upstairs landing light on before the sun fell. Taking a deep breath and gripping the banister tightly, Aaron ascended.

He watched the doorway to his bedroom. He realized he was staring into the darkness, waiting for something, and step by step the anticipation increased until the slightest sound or movement would have probably sent him sprinting for the door.

But by the time he’d reaching the landing, nothing had happened, and as Aaron reached for the landing light switch he almost wished that something had, giving him an excuse to escape.

It was just his brother. He loved his brother. They’d been best friends.

He turned on the landing light and stepped into the bedroom. There Bobby sat, cross-legged on the pure black “floor” of whatever had replaced their closet. He’d been fiddling with the frayed hem of his jeans where he’d walked on them, which had driven their seamstress of a mother crazy. She always asked why he didn’t just let her fix them so that they fit correctly. He always said that if he wanted them to fit right, he would have bought them that way.

Bobby looked up from the tattered denim cuff and smiled. “What’s up, bro?”

Aaron’s heart swelled up into his throat with love even as it beat a frantic message of fear. Neither emotion made him want to smile, but he forced one and said, “Not much. It’s good to see you again.”

“It is good. It is.”

Aaron tried to think of something to say, some sort of small talk to ease their way into discussing the elephants crashing around the room. But there were no small subjects.

What have you been up to?

How are you doing?

How’s the weather in there?

Every question led to the same rough territory, like unfinished nature trails stopping dead against dense, dark wilderness.

Aaron was still thinking of something to say when Bobby asked, “So what did you do today?”

“A few things.”

“Oooh, productive day.”

“I went to the library. I researched the boogeyman.”

Bobby smirked. “And what did you learn about the boogeyman in the library?”

“That almost every culture has a story about him, and that for all the small variations, they’re remarkably similar.”

“It’s only remarkable if you don’t believe in him. Once you’ve stepped through, it all makes perfect sense. I think you’re still trying to convince yourself that he’s not real.”

“Or that he is. I don’t know which is worse.”

“I do. But what are some of these remarkable similarities?”

“He almost always has a sack. In fact, he’s often literally called the ‘Sack Man’ or ‘
el Hombre del Saco
.’ He usually comes from the closet, but sometimes from beneath the bed. He wants only children. He wants only
bad
children. That got me thinking. I’m still having such a hard time remembering what happened to us.”

“Armor. Your brain is still hoping you’ll decide to forget.”

“It struck me, how the boogeyman always punishes bad children. If you stay out too late, if you don’t eat your dinner, if you don’t go to bed on time, if you argue with your parents, the boogeyman will get you. It seems like the one constant. So my question is: What did we do to deserve this? Did we really bring this on ourselves?”

Bobby looked at him blankly. “You think I deserved this?”

“I didn’t mean… God, I mean…”

“You’re on the right track, but you’re drawing the wrong conclusions.”

“What happened to you in there? You come back after all this time, say you’ve waited so long, but you won’t tell me a damn thing straight!”

Aaron shouted the last few words, and though Bobby didn’t visibly react, the darkness around him began to writhe like a pit full of jet-black serpents.

“Maybe I’m trying to spare you, brother.”

“Don’t. If you’d really wanted to spare me you would have never come back in the first place. Since you did, tell me something. Stop being so fucking mysterious.” The words spilled from Aaron. He’d been so confused the past few days, his head such a maelstrom of lost memories, worries, and doubts, that he didn’t know how he felt until he said it.

Aaron wished Bobby had never come back. Aaron would have preferred never to know what happened to his brother rather than to know this, whatever
this
was. God, that was so horrible. That was not how an older brother should feel.

“They take children because their minds are still vulnerable.” Bobby’s eyes unfocused as he went back into whatever hell he’d emerged from. “The bag isn’t a bag. It’s an extension of the darkness made manifest to create a tunnel into the void. I keep saying ‘they,’ but just like the sacks, the sack men are just appendages of the void. Once it has us, it drains us. For as many years as we had, it drains us, drinking down our lives, leaving us husks, then dropping us.” Bobby eyes refocused. “It’s eaten me. It’s spit out the gristle and bone, and that’s what sits before you.”

Fifteen years. It used them for as many years as they’d had. Bobby had been fifteen, and it had chewed on him for that many years.

“Why? Why the hell does it do this?”

“Because it doesn’t exist, and things that don’t exist are envious of the things that do.”

Aaron realized then that he was talking to a ghost. A faint hope that he hadn’t even known he’d held collapsed, and he felt the hollow it left in his chest.

Bobby wouldn’t step out of that closet and back into his old life.

“I’m so sorry.”

Bobby nodded, held his gaze. “You should be.”

“What?”

“You started all this. You brought its attention on us.”

“How? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You almost had it right, the one thing in all the tales. You said they always go after the naughty ones, the ones who’ve done something wrong.”