Sour Candy (10 page)

His ex-wife’s aggravated tone arose in
his mind as he stood at the foot of the ladder to the
attic.

Accident? You mean yours?
Yeah, I heard and I’m glad you’re okay, but no, I’m fine. Crippled?
Jesus, I don’t know what kind of misfortune you’ve been wishing on
me in your sleep but let’s hope it stays there.

The attic was bare. No bodies, no
monsters, no blood. Only junk and Christmas decorations. He sat
down in the corner where he may or may not have killed a boy who
was not a boy and took the old man’s cell phone from his pocket.
He’d promised to return it within the hour, and he would. And no,
he’d explained to the old man, there was no need to call the
police. He simply wanted to call Lori again and couldn’t while his
own phone was downstairs charging. Even once it was charged it
wouldn’t be of any immediate use to him, considering it had only
stopped getting service in the first place because he’d ignored
Verizon’s demands that he pay his overdue bill.

He dialed Lori’s number, a hum of
excitement in his chest, put the phone to his ear, and closed his
eyes. There was so much he wanted to tell her, but didn’t even know
where to start. So he started as if there was nothing to tell her
at all, because that was the safest place.

“
Hey you.”

“
Hey sexy,” she said, and an
involuntary sob escaped him, which he excused as laughter, even
though she knew him better than anyone and as such was not so easy
to fool.

“
What’s up with you lately,
honey? I’m worried. You haven’t been yourself.”

“
I know I haven’t. I’ve had
a lot on my mind, but all that’s about to change, I
promise.”

“
Damn well better. I miss
that good lov—”

Click.

He frowned. “Hello? Lori?” Checked the
phone and saw that it was as dead as his own had been when he’d
recovered it from under the sofa. “Shit.”

The attic door slammed shut, startling
him. For a moment he entertained the idea that it was his neighbor,
or maybe the police after the old man decided his nutty neighbor
needed checking on after all, but the recent horrors he’d endured
were too fresh in his mind for him to put much stock in
self-deception.

And then the Elders materialized from
the gloom. Six of them, as before, their bony skulls downcast, that
tangled mass of their horns pointed directly at him.

“
No,” Phil moaned. “No, no,
no. I fixed it. I set it right.”

“
The boy is here in spirit,”
one of the Elders said, his voice rain through a gutter. “He would
be honored to know how well you’ve done, Mora.”

“
Mora?” Despite sitting with
his back to the wall, Phil turned to look over his shoulder for
whomever the creatures were addressing, but when he turned back and
found one of the Elders looming over him, he was suddenly,
horrifically aware that they were addressing only him.

In an instant its writhing, tentacles
had lashed themselves around his wrist and he was once more
returned to that altar in that unholy crimson place, only this
time, he saw the truth and the mistakes he had made almost from the
beginning.

“
Eat of her, become her,”
the voices chanted, and he saw himself accepting the first piece of
candy—or what he had assumed was candy back then—from the boy in
the grocery store. 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.

They make us bear their
children
.

Phil opened his eyes and he was on his
back in the attic. The Elders still loomed over him, their
tentacles writhing around them in ecstasy as they threw back their
bony heads and screamed at the ceiling.

Phil rolled over on his stomach and
scrabbled to reach the phone. It was tantalizingly close and from
here he could see the display glowing blue as the power returned.
He imagined it was Lori on the phone, calling him back, and he
wanted so desperately to answer, to tell her that whatever happened
he was so very sorry, to beg her to save him, although even in the
throes of panic he knew it was too late for that.

Because the child he had feared, the
child he had killed had not been a monster at all but a guardian,
assigned to watch over Phil and the life he was carrying inside
him. And in killing the boy, he had not escaped at all, but
completed the last step of their ritual.

And then his insides heaved forward so
violently it lifted him off the floor and flopped him over on his
back. He screamed and clamped his hands down on his belly, felt the
flesh beneath them begin to roil and heave and split. His ribs
cracked and blood surged up his throat ahead of his organs, as,
with his last breath, he felt a tiny tendril clutch his finger from
within the gaping cavity where once had been his chest.

Then, there was only fire.

12. Delivery

Cortez was late getting to the scene.
Later, when he and Marsh got together for their usual Friday night
shot and bull session, he planned to tell her all about how he’d
walked in on his eldest daughter Marissa masturbating on Skype for
that fuckhead poet boyfriend of hers. He would omit the part in
which he’d hit her so hard her nose bled, because certain things
needed to stay his own business. But it had hardly started the day
off on a positive note and he knew Marsh would somehow find a way
to make him feel guilty about it no matter how he chose to portray
his role in the proceedings.

And then the call from that lunatic
Pendleton while he’d been spraying Bactine on his wrist, the image
of the shock on his daughter’s face still lingering in his
mind.

And now
this
bullshit.

It was shaping up to be quite a
day.

The first responder on the scene, a
young Turk named Danielson, fresh off a tour of Iraq, all crisp
pleats and shine, came over and filled him in on what he already
knew: the Pendleton guy had been cooked in his own house. By the
time they cleaned the mess up, only the frame would be left
standing.

“
Didn’t think this would be
something you’d need to be called in on, Detective,” Danielson
said.

“
It isn’t, but the guy who
got roasted in there called me this morning to ask if I knew
anything about his son.”

The police officer’s eyebrows rose in
concern. “He had a kid?”

“
No, he didn’t,” Cortez
said, and walked toward the house, leaving the young officer behind
him looking perplexed.

The fire would be deemed “just one of
those things.” An iPhone charger had shorted and the sparks set
fire to the living room curtains, and, with the houses in this
neighborhood being so old, well, nobody would be surprised by the
outcome.

But even without yet being aware of
the particulars, and despite, or maybe because of, his foul mood,
the whole thing bothered Cortez. In truth, it had bothered him
since the first time he’d met Pendleton that day at the scene of
the accident. For one thing, parts of their exchange were missing,
both from his own mind and the notes he was customarily vigilant in
taking in the event that the former failed him. For another,
whenever his own ill-formed hunches led him to broach the subject
with Marsh, she got a dazed look on her face and started grousing
about migraines. This was especially unusual considering the report
log showed she had been out this way more than once over the past
few months. What remained undocumented—another irregularity—was
why.

All of this he could have forgiven,
however, if not for this morning’s phonecall. The guy calls him and
less than an hour later gets burned to death in his own home? Fine,
whatever, coincidences happen, but upon finding those pages missing
from his notes, he’d attempted to reclaim some hint of them by
shading the next blank page with a charcoal pencil, an old trick he
had learned, not from the Academy, but from the movies, and what
he’d found was a name: Hannah Ward. He was sure he’d never heard
the name before, and his research hadn’t yielded much except for a
mother who had burned to death in a maternity ward.

She burns, he burns, we
all fall down.

It didn’t sit well with him at all and
he knew he’d be tonguing the fucking thing like a hole in his tooth
until he found some kind of closure to it.

But for today, he decided there was
little he could do, so he left word with Danielson to call him if
anything came up, and drove to a bar far enough from the scene not
to risk being spotted. There he chatted up the flirtatious young
barmaid (even though he knew she had little interest in anything
but a bigger tip) and did his best to drown out the persistent,
aggravating sensation that he was missing something, that someone
had blinded him to truths of which he should have been
aware.

For now, the only relevant truth
seemed to be how quickly his home life was falling to shit, and if
that didn’t warrant another few brain-deadening rounds, then
nothing did.

By the time Marsh joined him six hours
later, he could barely stand, and he was dismayed to find her in
the throes of another sour mood. Worse, she seemed determined to
use him as the piñata for it, and when he got defensive, she
stormed out, leaving with a parting shot that made no sense to him
at all.

“
Maybe when you stop
bringing your fucking infant son to bars, we can talk about
my
problems, but for now,
you’re better off dealing with your own.”

And then she was gone, only the
lingering scent of her perfume as a sign that she’d even been
there.

It was only when he went to the
parking lot and saw that one of the boys had left an infant child
strapped into the backseat of his cruiser that he finally got the
joke.

* * *

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born and raised in Dungarvan, Ireland,
Kealan Patrick Burke is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of
five novels, over a hundred short stories, six collections, and
editor of four acclaimed anthologies.

Kealan has worked as a
waiter, a drama teacher, a mapmaker, a security guard, an
assembly-line worker at Apple Computers, a salesman (for a day), a
bartender, landscape gardener, vocalist in a grunge band, and, most
recently, a fraud investigator. He also played the male lead
in
Slime City Massacre
, director Gregory Lamberson’s sequel to his cult B-movie
classic
Slime City
, alongside scream queens Debbie Rochon and Brooke
Lewis.

When not writing, Kealan
designs covers for print and digital books through his
company
Elderlemon
Design
. To date he has designed covers
for books by Richard Laymon, Brian Keene, Scott Nicholson, Bentley
Little, William Schoell, and Hugh Howey, to name a few.

In what little free time remains,
Kealan is a voracious reader, movie buff, videogamer (Xbox &
PS4, and PC), and road-trip enthusiast.

A movie based on his short story
“Peekers” is currently in development through Lionsgate
Entertainment.

www.kealanpatrickburke.com