Sour Candy

by Kealan Patrick Burke

There was something terribly wrong with the child, and simply by crossing paths with him, Phil had caught his attention. He felt trapped in a bizarre otherworld in which everything was crooked, but the harder he fought to extricate himself, the more tangled he became. So, in the absence of better options, he stopped struggling.

The sound costs him part of his mind. It’s the cost of being allowed to see as the symbols catch fire and blind him.

“You ate the candy,” the boy said. “You ate of her, and so her you will become.”

It was not candy at all, of course, he knew that now, but a seed, a seed which had taken root inside him and would soon give birth to new life, a life that would, once old enough, find another nest, another life to poison, and the process would carry on again until the time came for the attendant child to give itself up in blood sacrifice. And the ritual would begin again.