In the Shadows of Children

  IN THE SHADOWS OF CHILDREN

  Alan Ryker

  First Edition

  In the Shadows of Children

  © 2014 by Alan Ryker

  All Rights Reserved.

  A DarkFuse Release

  www.darkfuse.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Other Books by Author

  Among Prey

  Dream of the Serpent

  Nightmare Man

  The Hoard

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  Always to Christina

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks to everyone at DarkFuse who helped in the creation of this book, especially Dave Thomas, Shane Staley, and Zach McCain.

  Aaron stood paralyzed in the second-floor hallway, the landing dimming as evening deepened. Two doors opened to his left, two to his right, and behind him, the stairs. The doors to his left led to the bathroom and his parents’ bedroom, his mother’s room for the seven years since his father’s passing. He should go in there, look through the boxes of old photos and mementos, the crayon drawings and report cards. He couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  The first door on his right was his childhood bedroom, the one he’d shared with his little brother, Bobby. He took a step toward the open door.

  The room didn’t look the way he’d left it, exactly, but it was close. At least Bobby’s half. Death metal posters hung on the walls, bands in corpse paint glaring out at him, and Aaron’s old things no longer occupied a full half of the room, but were shoved into a corner.

  Still, it was amazing they were there at all after fifteen years. His mother didn’t seem to have touched the space. That wasn’t true. Even from the hallway, Aaron could see the room had been tended to. She’d dusted. She’d vacuumed. But she’d left everything else the same.

  Aaron’s eyes danced around the room, settling briefly on trophies and other childhood memorabilia that should have evoked fond memories, but every time his eyes drifted over the closet’s closed door, a huge hand clamped down on his rib cage, wringing adrenaline out of his heart like it were a wet sponge.

  He couldn’t go in there. Not yet.

  That left one room, his mother’s sewing room, where she’d made their family’s supplementary income doing alterations. The room that made it necessary for him and his brother to share a bedroom even after Aaron had turned eighteen.

  He supposed if his mother hadn’t done the work she had, he and his brother wouldn’t have been so close. For all the good it did Bobby.

  But despite the sewing room’s pivotal role in his development, nothing within mattered much to him. He’d have taken the sewing machine if it were the same one she’d used when he was a child, when he’d lain on the floor and read, listening to the soft percussion and whir of her work. But she’d replaced it years ago with a machine that was half-computer, complete with an LCD screen, a cold appliance he couldn’t imagine any child forming nostalgic memories about.

  He looked back to his mother’s bedroom. Not that night.

  He looked back to his and Bobby’s bedroom (something wasn’t right). Again, not that night (something wasn’t right). Maybe not at all (something wasn’t right).

  His head hurt. Aaron had wanted to get this over with quickly, which wouldn’t happen if he never got started. He sighed and began to turn to the stairs.

  Then his heart pounded so hard that he gasped and his vision blackened before fading in again. His head whipped back to his old bedroom and saw the change, the one that had caused a tickle in the back of his brain, the one his subconscious mind had worked to figure out.

  A black square split the left wall.

  The closet door stood open.

  Aaron didn’t pause to consider if his previous impression of it being shut might have been mistaken. He didn’t think about how it might have slipped open on its own. He turned and ran.

  His feet tangled and he nearly fell. Both hands slapped the banister and halted his forward movement long enough for him to get his feet beneath himself again so he could continue his dash. He didn’t slow down until he’d burst out the front door, and didn’t stop entirely until he’d descended the porch and made it almost to the sidewalk.

  He looked over his shoulder to make sure nothing had followed him out.

  Why was he so scared? He was a grown man. It was an empty house, a place he knew well, where he’d grown up in perfect safety.

  Some part of him wasn’t convinced, a part that didn’t put instinct into words because that took too long, because in that time you could be killed by things that didn’t pause to remember, weigh, and judge before eviscerating you and dragging you to their lair to consume you at their leisure. That part of his mind told him to run, to keep running until he hit the West Coast, just like last time, just like fifteen years ago.

  Which was ridiculous. Fifteen years ago he hadn’t run. He’d left for California to go to college, and stayed because of the opportunities it presented a young computer programmer.

  As Aaron stared into the open doorway, his breath came out in shudders. He thought he might be trying to laugh until he understood where his eyes had settled: at the foot of the stairs, where they’d found his mother’s crumpled body.

  He turned away and fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket as he walked around the side of the house.

  * * *

  Aaron took a drag off his cigarette and released the smoke into the cold, late-winter evening air as he tried not to think about anything, despite the forces conspiring to make him do so. His head hurt with the effort, and swam with the nicotine. He’d quit smoking more than ten years back, had started in high school and quit after college. These were his mother’s.

  Had been his mother’s.

  The sun hadn’t set, but he couldn’t see it any longer behind the forest that backed his childhood home. Well, they’d called it a forest, but it was really a river with maybe a half a block of dense foliage on each side.

  Skeletal limbs framed patches of red sky like stained glass, and above it the world turned from iron gray to black. It was beautiful, and yet every sight made him anxious. No—fearful. He needed to admit to himself that it was fear. Fear he had forgotten.

  The scariest part was that he couldn’t remember why he’d ever been afraid. He couldn’t figure out why the open closet door had sent him into instinctive, panicked flight. His fragmentary childhood memories were happy. But confronted with the physical space in which those memories took place... He wanted to run all the way back to California, to a sky that never looked like this. Was it guilt?

  He stood with his back to the house. He needed a few minutes away from it. A few minutes away from the assault of hazy memories that struck like creatures in the night, unseen but not unfelt. Inscrutable phantom memories that rattled him to the core.

  And yet even as part of his mind asked what he had to be so afraid of, another kept his back turned
to the house, kept him staring into the dying light.

  Glancing at his watch, he saw that he’d been standing outside, staring and smoking these horrible, wonderful cigarettes for almost half an hour.

  “How are you doing?” asked a deep voice to Aaron’s right. Mr. Jackman.

  Usually, people asked how “things” or “it” was going. After a funeral, it was always “you.”

  “I’m managing. It’s overwhelming, being here.”

  “I imagine,” Mr. Jackman said. “How long has it been?”

  Aaron searched the man’s deeply lined face for accusation but couldn’t find any. He looked over at him, seeing in the dim light that he’d changed out of his suit into his usual jeans and flannel coat.

  “Seven years.”

  Mr. Jackman nodded, then squinted straight up, staring into the same memories Aaron was trying to avoid. Aaron supposed that’s why he’d been staring straight ahead since he’d gotten there. “Since your father passed. And seven before that, your brother. Supposed to be a lucky number.”

  “Nobody knows what happened to my brother,” Aaron said, turning his focus from the last red hints of a setting sun. His old neighbor withered a little more beneath his gaze. He’d seemed so tall once.

  “ I didn’t mean anything by it. Just thinking out loud. It is an interesting coincidence.”

  “Interesting.” Aaron nodded.

  “Well, I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Meredith sent me out here, wanted to see if you needed anything. You eaten?”

  Aaron thought back to the refrigerator stuffed with food that people from the neighborhood had brought by. Food he hadn’t touched. “Yeah, I’ve eaten. I’m going to be taking off for the day soon, anyway.”

  “You’re not staying in the house?”

  Aaron shook his head, sucked the cigarette down to the filter. A few minutes ago he’d never wanted to step foot in his childhood home again. Now, he couldn’t wait.

  “I suppose I might not want to, either,” Mr. Jackman said. “How’s your family? We were hoping to get a chance to meet little Elijah. Though I suppose he’s not so little anymore. We’ve seen so many pictures of him, we feel like we know him.”

  Aaron flicked his filter to the ground and quickly said, “He and Sarah are good. Well, I’ve only got a few days, so I better get back to work.” He didn’t feel like making excuses. He felt like removing himself from the conversation.

  Mr. Jackman looked at him. “Are you sure you’re up to this right now? You could let things settle in and come back another time.”

  “There isn’t going to be another time. I’m sorting out the few things I want, taking care of some details, and then I’m gone for good.”

  Mr. Jackman nodded slowly. He didn’t seem to know how to respond. Aaron realized how he’d sounded and supposed the old guy couldn’t figure out where that hostility came from. His dead parents? The town? Mr. Jackman? Aaron supposed he wouldn’t have been able to answer that question if Mr. Jackman had been able to ask it.

  From the look on his neighbor’s face, he was blaming himself. Aaron felt guilty, and then felt slightly angry as the guilt crowded in with every other emotion. He didn’t have the energy reserve to be gentle with people right then.

  “Thank you for the offer. And please thank your wife. I know how hard this has been on her, too. I’m just very tired.”

  Mr. Jackman nodded. “I know how hard it is. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to knock on our door.” He turned to go, and Aaron saw a back that was much more stooped than the last time he’d seen his old neighbor, and shoulders that were much narrower. Mr. Jackman turned back. “You know, we’ve missed you, Aaron. We always asked your mother about what you were up to, and she was always so proud.”

  Aaron set his jaw against tears as he watched Mr. Jackman head back inside.

  * * *

  Aaron understood why his behavior was a mystery to the people in the town who still remembered him. He was a popular kid with a lot of friends. His family life had been as good as a kid could hope for. His father had been old, mellow and funny. His mother properly mothering. Despite him being five years older than his younger brother, they’d been great friends, had barely ever fought.

  So it was a surprise to everyone when Aaron left and never came back.

  He chose a school in California, as far away as it was possible to get and stay within the United States. And then he never visited. He always had an excuse—summer internships, summer classes, travel expenses—but it was fear.

  His brother Bobby had been terrified at Aaron’s desertion, then hurt, and finally furious. Whatever it was that had scared Aaron so badly that he’d returned home only three times in fifteen years, he and Bobby had once faced it together.

  Whatever he’d escaped, as dim as the details were, the raw emotions still burned in him. He could still feel every bit of it in his memories of leaving for college: the terror that he’d be allowed right to the front door, suitcase in hand, and then be jerked back; the feeling of elation as the house diminished behind him, even after it was out of sight, feeling it shrink as the miles between them grew in the back of his family’s SUV, Bobby staring glumly at him, his breath hitching as he barely controlled himself; the guilt when Bobby called, ranting about things Aaron couldn’t remember, couldn’t understand even then, though he knew he should have been able to; that guilt turning to anger; those two emotions mixing up in his gut and rising bitter in his throat as he told his brother not to call him anymore; the cold feeling of utter loneliness in his chest, of total abandonment, a hollowness that made him scared to breathe too deeply for fear of popping, and knowing it wasn’t his despair he was feeling there surrounded by friends, but his brother’s, which he could feel across the thousand miles between them.

  He didn’t want to feel it, so he told Bobby to stop calling him if he insisted on talking such nonsense.

  He remembered the way his younger brother restrained himself after that, the tenuous control he showed right up until Aaron wanted to get off the phone and Bobby refused, demanded, cajoled. And if the meltdowns at the end of phone conversations were bad, the response to Aaron’s confession that he wouldn’t be returning home for the summer was like a flash bang going off, a blast of light and sound so intense it was physical, followed by silence, ringing silence, until…

  “I’m all alone,” Bobby said before breaking off the call.

  Aaron began to dial him back, but stopped halfway and, after putting the phone back in its cradle, understood that Bobby was right.

  He didn’t hear from his brother that summer or for most of the fall semester. When his phone rang late one night at the beginning of winter break his sophomore year, which he was also planning on spending in California, he did not expect to hear Bobby’s voice.

  “I thought you’d want to know that I’m going to end this. I’m facing it down.”

  “Hold up, Bobby. What are you talking about?”

  “You never had to go through this alone. You don’t know what it’s like. It has to end.”

  But for some strange reason, the rest of the conversation had been lost in his mind, the thread of it cut, the end frayed and so abrupt that it didn’t feel natural. Aaron couldn’t remember what had to end, and he couldn’t remember what he’d said in reply, but he remembered that Bobby didn’t listen to much of it before hanging up on him.

  Aaron hesitated, thumb over the numbers.

  Over the years since, he’d played out the scenario thousands of times in his head, sometimes coming back to himself after having spent hours down a different timeline, one where he’d called his parents immediately after Bobby hung up, where he hadn’t stood frozen for ten minutes, thumb hovering over the keys. He played out other lives he could almost swear were real, where his parents ran up and found Bobby in his room, got him the help he needed to make it through the next few years until he could escape, too. He moved out to California, studied computer programming, and he and Aaron became rich
entrepreneurs. Or he studied something completely different. It didn’t matter. What mattered is that in all these scenarios, Bobby eventually got away, just as Aaron had, and when he did, he forgave Aaron. He told Aaron that he would have done the same thing if he’d been the older brother.

  Aaron did hesitate, though, just those few minutes, to call his parents in the middle of the night about something he no longer understood, some vague threat that had blacked out most of his childhood.

  And when they went to check on Bobby, he was gone.

  * * *

  After taking his phone from his pocket, Aaron sat on the porch steps and dialed Sarah, his wife. He’d lost time in his staring, and Elijah would soon be in bed. Aaron had promised his son he’d call him every evening to say good night. Elijah was a sweet boy, and Aaron wanted to soak up as much of that as possible. He’d known another sweet little boy who’d become angry and sullen and then had disappeared.

  Aaron shoved the thought aside as Sarah said, “Hey, I was just wondering about you.”

  “What were you wondering?”

  “How are you doing?”

  There was that “you” again, though it felt much more sincere coming from the woman who’d stuck by him for the past decade than from all the townsfolk who hadn’t seen him in almost as long.

  “I’m okay.”

  “How was the funeral?”

  “It was a funeral.”

  “Come on.”

  “It was nice. People had lots of nice things to say. I felt weird being there, though, like everyone was watching me.”