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We salt our lives with other people’s sins. Our flesh to us tastes sweet. —Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)
Man’s life is a line that Nature commands him to describe upon the surface of the earth, without his ever being able to swerve from it, even for an instant. He is born without his own consent… —Baron d’Holbach, The System of Nature
The boy never really understood their reactions. He was fine. Nothing had happened. But he was just a boy. He couldn’t know how scary having a child could be, knowing there’s a piece of yourself out in the world that you can protect only with warnings and rules that could be ignored and broken; knowing that the connecting nerves are so long, any message of distress would take an eternity to reach its way back to you; feeling pain at the expectation of agony.
The parents of the young boy said much to keep that summer in his mind, as if he would somehow forget or even want to. He had to be more careful with himself, they’d say. Next time, something might find you. Their town, small as it was, was no different from any other—the well of ghost stories no less deep, and so they drew from it and served him stories about other children who had also been fine right up until the moment they weren’t.
He didn’t ssstart out all the way buh-bad. It stuh-started in his head. He thought bad things.
“Can I come home?” Startled, Ben’s eyes darted to the voice. Eric was so small, smaller than Ben expected. He was older, but he didn’t look it. There was something wrong with his face, like someone had made a skin mask from an old memory. Then it moved. I know what happens.
“Do you see me?” the boy whined, his face a puzzle of bad bones and sagging skin. “Are you lookin?” The thing limped faster now, its eyes angry, every movement a struggle. Like an insect, it shuddered toward him, chattering, losing its balance, falling, shambling. “I’m here, brother. Don’t go. It’s me. It’s me. Itsmeitsmeitsmeitsme.” Ben tried to step backward, but he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t work.
“You can’t make like a demon and think the devil won’t notice, boy.”
“How did he look?” Ben interjected. “Did he look alright?” “Yeah, man. I guess. Yeah, he looked alright.” “Tell me what he looked like. Was he scared?” “No. No, it didn’t seem like he was scared. That was the weird thing,” Marty said nervously. “His face was…was like a painting or something. It was just all froze up.” “What do you mean?” Marty cleared his throat, trying to pick his words discriminately. “I don’t know how to put it exactly. His face was just blank—like he was wearing a mask or something, but it wasn’t no mask. It was like he was staring at something really far away, like he
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Because that’s the thing about hope—when it seems that there’s no point in moving, it pushes us so forcefully that we come to feel like we need it to keep going.
And that’s what hope really is, after all. An anesthetic. Something that takes the sharp edges of reality out of focus just enough that we can keep looking at it, keep moving forward with steps that are guided by the assurance that every inch of ground can’t possibly be covered in broken glass. And then when it is—when your feet are left as coiled ribbons of wet skin—you forget what guided you there in the first place.
It’s a kind of sneaky narcotic, one produced by thoughts and words and refined by time. It doesn’t fix anything. It just numbs and reassures, until it can consume the desperate for the sake of its own brilliant incandescence. And as hope comforts us, it becomes easier and easier to forget that it too was in the jar that Pandora carried. It’s the one horror of the world that wasn’t loosed when she opened the lid. It’s the one horror that lives in us.
Ben climbed the iron steps. For a few months, the store had been transformed in Ben’s mind from a permanent reminder of the pain he had caused to a place where he might find…what? Peace? Redemption? Had that been what he was looking for? How stupid.
More than any part of the store, Ben hated the upstairs. More than the freezer or the air conditioner. More even than the baler. It might have just been the narrow, dark hall lined with all those locked doors, but it didn’t feel like that’s all it was. The whole area reeked of Palmer, reeked of the man who never fixed his cameras, who fired Ben for being the brother of a stolen boy. Who lied about tapes.
“Listen to me. I’m not putting any of this into any kind of report. I don’t work for that store, and I don’t particularly like Bill. You can buy as many Christmas toys for poor kids as you please, but that don’t mean you ain’t a sumbitch for the rest of the year.
“Ya know,” he said, “the first time I met you, my daddy asked you about cases like Eric’s, about if you always found the kid, and you said yes. Then you said, ‘Nearly every time.’ ” Ben dug some cash out of his pocket and tossed it on the table. “I remember that because you slipped that word in there like it didn’t make much difference. But there’s fifteen kids up on that board. Fifteen of ’em. How’s that for ‘nearly’?
“I went out every day”—Ben’s voice fluttered—“to look for him. I’m still looking for him, and I’m gonna find him. You didn’t look for him once. Not one time. You leaving presents in his room? Rushin out for that one last gift you made sure to forget? Throwing cakes away every year? Like he’s going to just show up one day? Now we’re fighting because I blew out some candles. You think he’s going to want this if he comes back?” Ben grabbed at the present that sat next to the cake.
“What I mean is…” Ben knew what he wanted to ask but wished there was a different way to ask it. “Do you think that a place can be bad?” The last few words tumbled weakly from Ben’s lips as his voice shriveled against its own foolish sounds. “What? You mean like haunted? Like ghosts and shit?” “No. Bad like a person. Mean.”
“Aaron asked me once—this was a long time ago, I guess—if God gets bored just watchin everything. Ya know, just sittin up there forever. So I say that I ain’t got no fuckin clue, because what kind of question is that? But then later, after thinkin for a bit, I say that however old the Earth is, God’s older, right? Older than the galaxy, the whole goddamn universe. Older than everything. The big swingin dick of all that is, sittin around for kajillions of years. Time’s gotta move fast for someone like that, right? Like if you take a dayfly and a person, ya know? So He watches everything all the
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He shook a stained and unattractive cloth doll in Ben’s direction. “Give me the power, I beg of you!” Ben looked at him blankly. “Chucky?” Marty said. “Killer doll and all that?”
