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Despite the agreement that they remain childless and therefore free to live their lives untethered by such suffocating obligations, over time his ex-wife’s position morphed into mourning that she would never be a mother.
His hope had been that, given time, Stacey would realize the limitations a child would impose upon their lives and bury her maternal need. She hadn’t. Instead, her impulses bred anger and resentment toward him,
the child with the runny nose and puffy eyes, his clothes remarkably pristine and oddly old-fashioned,
Phil thought he detected a glimmer of glee, as if nothing gave the kid greater pleasure than the reaction his histrionics wrought from his suffering mother.
Again, the kid looked in Phil’s direction, and the feeling that somehow he was hearing Lori’s side of the phone conversation intensified.
The manager reached the woman and her son and joined his hands together before him as if his intent was not to chastise them but to lead them in prayer.
He’d been following a PT Cruiser into the intersection when another vehicle had slammed into him from behind, in turn forcing his car into the Cruiser.
There was a madness in her eyes of a kind Phil had never seen before. It chilled him to the core and he knew he would be seeing it again, all of this, for many sleepless nights to come.
“Yours now,” the woman said,
Phil learned that the woman from the store, the woman who had rammed her car into his at high speed, had walked out into traffic where a taxi had ended her suffering.
he turned the thing over in his fingers and found to his considerable relief that it was not at all a tooth. No, it was much too soft, much too rough for that. It was a piece of sour candy.
A line from a book he’d read in high school popped into his mind: The nameless are easier to bury.
“There was nobody else in the car.” “No. I guess she must have dropped him off somewhere after the store.” Cortez looked at his notebook. “Mrs. Bennings doesn’t have any children, Mr. Pendleton.”
“I’m asking you all of this, Mr. Pendleton, because when the officers went to your house, the child you just described seeing with Mrs. Bennings is the one who opened the door.”
His voice was perfectly normal, perfectly child-like, and worse, utterly convincing. “I live here, Daddy.”
“See, that’s just it. We checked and according to the records, this is where he belongs.”
“His name is Adam. Adam Pendleton. His mother’s name was Hannah Ward.”
Somewhere between encountering the woman in the store and his arrival home, he’d entered The Twilight Zone.
“The child was put into foster care. Which is where you and your then wife Stacey Miller found him.”
“It means you’re correct in that she divorced you because you didn’t want children. The part you’re leaving out is what made the situation worse: you already had one. She accused you of neglecting him, of not wanting anything to do with him.”
I think that’s why you’re here. I think you’re incredibly good at your job and you operate on instinct. I think that same instinct is telling you that something doesn’t jibe here and it’s driving you a little crazy not being able to put your finger on it.”
I think he released Mrs. Bennings from her obligations on the condition that she find a replacement. Which she did. Maybe the candy was her way of transferring the responsibility for him, some messed up ritual that only made sense to them. And now that that’s done, my world has been altered to accommodate him.”
It’s like the whole police department suddenly dropped everything and threw all their resources into proving that boy was mine.
“I think I know all of this because the boy is allowing me to.”
they showed him framed pictures they had taken from his office desk and the walls in the upstairs landing. They covered a period of years and showed Phil grinning with his son in various locations, most of which he had never seen before.
The digital dates in the bottom right hand corner showed that they had been taken over the course of three years, but not only had the child not aged in that time, he was wearing the exact same clothes in each one, the same clothes he was wearing today.
The child wanted him aware of the game he was playing so that the effect would not be diluted by self-doubt or fear of madness.
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.
I asked you to stop calling me. We’re done, Phil. Get that through your head. We’ve been done for a long time now.
In the doorway, Cortez paused and looked back over his shoulder. In his eyes, that glimmer again, the awareness that without being fully aware how, he was merely a cog in a machine too big and too strange for him to understand.
Because in the pictures, it was meant as a warning, meant to intimidate me into keeping my mouth shut if I didn’t want people getting hurt.
“And what are you?” Phil asked. The boy did not look up from his picture. “I am a boy.” And with that simple response, Phil’s doubt died. The answer seemed an automatic one, too rehearsed, almost played out, as if the child had had to say it so many times it had lost all inflection, all meaning.
Who was the woman at the store this morning?” “Old Mommy.” “What does that mean, ‘Old Mommy’?” “It means she was my Mommy before and she isn’t anymore.” “And why isn’t she?” The kid tilted his head and regarded his drawing. “Because I let her go.”
Maybe the kid would have preferred a bologna sandwich or a hot dog, but that’d be tough-titty-said-the-kitty, now wouldn’t it?
Red bags, yellow bags, green bags, but none a brand he recognized. No Haribo here, instead each bag was emblazoned with the name GJØK in colorful cartoonish letters.
“So…” Phil asked, feeling an uncontrollable bubble of laughter working its way up his throat. “What do you want to eat?” And then the laugh exploded from him, killing his chest, forcing him to double over in pain, but he didn’t care, couldn’t have stopped even if he’d wanted to, and
The child did not raise his head, but looked up at Phil through the sandy veil of his bangs, and there the darkness was. It told Phil that there were lines of questioning he could feel free to pursue, but this wasn’t one of them.
And too late he realized that what he had put into his mouth was not candy at all, but a key.
The holes where their eyes should be will reveal nothing, but he senses the age and the eldritch threat, as all six of them open their bony mouths at once and deafen him with the same scream he heard from the child, only louder. 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.
what room?” “The highest one,” said the boy. “Where I belong. Closer to them so they can hear my prayers better.
All he did find was that “gjøk” was the Norwegian word for “cuckoo”. He sat back with a bitter grin and poured himself another scotch. It couldn’t be a coincidence that the candy had been named after a brood parasite known for laying its eggs in the nests of other birds.
Hannah Ward had given birth to the child, and while Phil was over there in that other place, he had seen those creatures killing each other. Which meant they could die. Birth and death. Evidence that, like ordinary beings, they were tied to a life cycle.
But the warping of the wood on the attic door and the branding of symbols upon its buckled surface would have suggested something more unusual afoot.
the father was forced to feed or risk starvation. Any attempt to ingest other foods resulted in its immediate expulsion.
To Phil, the boy’s hunger for knowledge was unnerving and potentially dangerous because he didn’t know what the child planned to do with all that information,
Until Adam screamed, as he did at least once every day, because this too was routine.
Because that scream was a lot more than just an annoyance. No, the more Phil heard it, the more he started to think of it as something infinitely worse. He became convinced it was a beacon. The child was signaling the others.
