Sour Candy (8 page)

Licking his lips, body quaking, he
turned.

“
Jesus Christ,” Lori said.
“Phil?”

He was as gratified as he was saddened
to see the tears glimmering in the corners of her eyes, and found
it difficult to keep them from his own.

“
Hey b…hey,” he said, nixing
the word
babe
before it could leave his mouth.

“
My God, you look…” She put
a hand to her mouth and shook her head. Everything she needed to
say was there, in his own broken reflection in her
tears.

“
Like hell, I know.” He
hadn’t had the energy to bathe in days, hadn’t changed his clothes
in three, and he was damp from the sweat of fear and desperation.
His teeth were starting to loosen and there was crusted blood on
his lip from his perpetually bleeding mouth. “I’m
sorry.”

She, on the other hand, looked
incredible. Dressed in a white halter top, jeans, and a cream suede
jacket, her makeup impeccable, eyes smoky, he thought he might
collapse under the strain of knowing she’d never love him again.
Thanks to the boy, he’d never have anything but her pity and the
disgust so evident in her regard.

She composed herself and tucked a lock
of her dark hair behind her ear, something he had adored doing for
her, and she summoned a frail smile. “How are you, I mean…are you
okay?” In a subconscious gesture, she clamped her elbow down on the
purse slung over her shoulder, as if afraid he might attempt to
steal it.

“
Few rough days,” he
admitted.
Understatement of the
millennium.
“But I’m working on getting
back on my feet.”

She nodded. “I met Gerard Willis the
other day. He mentioned there’d been a shakeup at Chase. Said you
were one of the ones let go. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“
Yeah,” he said, averting
his gaze. “These things happen though, I guess.”

He tried to shake the ugly thought
that Gerard, that perfectly manicured motherfucker, might have done
more with her than just inform her of her ex-boyfriend’s shitty
luck.

“
You seemed to be doing so
well there.”

And he had been. Prior to the boy’s
arrival, there’d been talk of promoting Phil to assistant manager.
Clearly so much time away from home would not have suited the
cuckoo.

He could barely stand to look at her,
could hardly stand to look away. She was so beautiful, had so
unfairly been excised from his life, and with no warning at all.
Everything he wanted to say to her—the explanation, the begging,
the anger, the pleading, the love—came bubbling up his throat and
became tears that almost choked him.

“
I tried calling you again a
few days after we last spoke, to apologize for how I might have
come across. I mean, I meant what I said. I just didn’t mean for it
to be so—”

“
Lori…” He looked at her
damp eyes and tried to smile. When it failed, he sought out a focal
point somewhere over her shoulder.

Where he saw yet another familiar
face, this one not nearly so welcome. His hair prickled to
attention all over his body.

“
I should go,” he said, and
pushed away from the window, from her.

The image of her standing in the
bedroom doorway in her underwear, the coquettish smile, her
laughter on the phone, all the nights they’d lain in bed together
talking about the future…all gone, all stolen from him.

Sour candy trumps
chocolate.

“
Well, wait…did you want to
get a coffee or a sandwich or something?”

“
Some other
time.”

“
Okay, well, please take
care of yourself.”

“
I will.”

He waved a hand at her without looking
back and scurried away, his face turned toward the strip mall
storefronts in a feeble attempt to dissuade the attention of the
woman currently cruising up alongside him in her car.

As he feared, it had the opposite
effect.

“
Mr. Pendleton?” Detective
Marsh called to him. “Might I have a word?”

9. Prison

Four months to the day he first
encountered the boy at Walmart, the last of Phil Pendleton’s teeth
fell out. He watched the blackened incisor rattle in the sink and
tumble down the drain and felt nothing. There was no blood. His
hair had thinned to the point where he could see his scabrous pate
but this had also ceased to disturb him, for he had, after the
latest foiled attempt to escape, decided on a course of action he
was sure would work.

Today it would end, either for him or
the boy or both, but either way, here the nightmare stopped.
Because despite the torture he’d been put through, the pain and
loss he did not believe he had done anything to deserve, he had
tried to be a decent person, tried to stay within the confines of
morality. And all it had gotten him was more suffering.

He raised his face to the mirror and
saw a hollow shell of a man, little more than a bleached-out husk.
He was almost dead, whatever cancer the boy and his guardians had
given him rotting him from the inside out, which meant that soon
he, like Mrs. Bennings, would be of no more use to them and they
would send him off to die. And once he was gone, they’d find
another host, another poor helpless soul to destroy.

Phil was fine with the first part. He
longed for death now. The second part? No. With the last ounce of
his energy, he was going to do everything in his power to make sure
this never happened to anyone again. A feeble part of him was
driven by the notion that maybe, just maybe if he succeeded in
killing the child, it would end the cycle and reverse all that had
been done to him. At night, in what fitful sleep his addled body
and mind allowed, he fantasized about waking up to find himself
lying in his own bed, Lori’s arm across his chest as she slept. He
would run to the mirror and find he looked like his old self again,
never dashingly handsome, but no dog either, and my God how content
he’d be to be just average again. The pictures on the walls would
show his family and friends and Lori and no towheaded Amish-clad
spawn of Satan, and the collective memories of everyone he knew
would be restored. He would return to work, get that goddamn
promotion and save up just enough money to marry Lori.

Maybe they’d even have a
child.

This last thought always woke him with
a snort of laughter on his lips that never lasted long before it
devolved into weeping. With the return of cruel reality came the
hate and desperation, and the thoughts of murder.

Five times he’d tried to escape the
house and the boy. Each time he’d been caught. The first three
times, Marsh had brought him home after being alerted to his
absence by the boy (“panicked to find his father gone”), or else
some concerned neighbor or storeowner who didn’t like the look of
“some vagrant guy” wandering around town. That it was hardly a
detective’s job to round up vagrants didn’t matter. Phil Pendleton
was a special case. Special enough for the universe to bend around
him in order to stop him from getting away.

The fourth time nobody had stopped
him, at least not in person. He’d managed to make it out of the
house and down the driveway, this time in the dead of night, when
his legs abruptly quit working and he dropped like a stone to the
pavement, chipping two of his front teeth and breaking his nose.
Dazed, he’d crawled back to the house, where he found the boy
waiting for him on the stoop, holding out—what else?—a piece of
that infernal candy. Maddened by the pain, he took it, swallowed
it, and passed out. When he came to, it was morning and his nose
had healed, though it was slightly crooked now. The teeth were
still chipped. Not that it would matter. Three weeks later they’d
fall out on their own.

The fifth and final time,
earlier this evening, he had gotten drunk and forgotten his fear
long enough to flee, an all-out staggering sprint down the street.
He hadn’t even bothered to be quiet or to close the door behind
him. He made it three quarters of a mile before he saw, or thought
he saw, one of
them
. It was standing behind a dumpster in the alley beside Ming’s
Chinese restaurant, its head tilted back as if in ecstasy, though
as far as Phil could tell, it was alone. He could hear its horns
scraping against the brick wall. As he drew abreast of it, that
deer skeleton face turned in his direction and an involuntary
scream escaped Phil’s throat. For an instant, it had felt as if
those hands were inside him again, tugging hard, and his guts had
seemed to shift outward in all directions. He fell to his knees in
agony, hands clutched to his chest and belly, but just as he drew
in the breath to power another scream at the sensation of dozens of
fishhooks rending him asunder, the pain vanished. Still, he kept
his head lowered as he rose on unsteady feet because even though
the pain had gone, he knew the thing in the alley was still there.
No, not there, closer. He fancied if he raised his head just a
little more, he’d see the frayed hem of its coal-dark robe as it
stood looming over him. Confirmation came via the sudden
overwhelming stench of rotting fish and the soft whisper behind him
as he turned and began to hobble away.

“
Mora
.”

He returned home to find the house
almost as he’d left it. The boy was thankfully nowhere in sight,
the attic door with its new symbols and scratches firmly shut, but
when he went to retrieve his scotch, he found the inside of the
bottle coated in greenish blue mold. What appeared to be the head
of some bizarre looking eyeless fish was floating in the remaining
third of scotch. Enraged at the corruption of the only solace he
had left, Phil flung the bottle at the wall.

And the attic door opened.

Phil’s rage turned to ice and he
slowly sat down on the couch, his whole body trembling from a
mixture of adrenaline, fear, and rage.

The boy appeared at the foot of the
stairs, rubbing his eyes sleepily, still dedicated to the ruse of
normality.

“
I heard a
sound.”

“
Good for you.”

“
Did you go out
again?”

Phil sneered. “You know I
did.”

“
Did you meet my
friend?”

Phil lowered his face into his hands,
pulled at his hair, felt strands come away. “What the fuck do you
want from me?”

“
You don’t have to worry,”
said the boy. “You’re not doing so good, and I know that’s no fun,
but it’ll all be over soon.”

“
Like it was for Mrs.
Bennings?”

“
Oh no, not like that.
You’re going to make it all the way. She was too broken for
that.”

“
Why do you do this…this
pretending? Why not just be whatever it is that you
are?”

The boy cocked his head.
Another in a long line of curiously convincing gestures. “I
am
being what I am. I’m a
child.”

“
You’re a goddamn
parasite.”

“
What’s a
parasite?”

The look of genuine curiosity on the
child’s face was disarming.

“
Google it.”

“
What?”

“
Just go back to
bed.”

“
Yes Daddy. You should try
to sleep too.”

“
Why?”

“
You have a busy day
tomorrow.”

Phil looked at him. “What does that
mean? What’s tomorrow?”

The boy smiled. “Tomorrow’s the day
you try to kill me.”

Phil was only startled for a
moment. It had not come as a surprise that the boy was aware of his
plans. The boy apparently knew everything. No, the shock came from
having him finally drop the pretense and
admit
that he knew.

He smiled back at the boy as he headed
back upstairs. “That’s right. Tomorrow’s the day I try to kill
you.”

“
Goodnight
Daddy.”

“
Goodnight, son.”

Except the boy wasn’t right. Not at
all. For in that moment, at the look of cruel delight on the
thing’s face, the look that said Phil was destined to fail, he
decided he wasn’t going to wait.

No. The child was going to die
tonight.

10. Sacrifice

After washing his face in the bathroom
and staring down the ogre in the mirror, Phil headed back to the
living room and grabbed one of the pine hard-backed chairs. With no
attempt to be quiet, for such a thing would be pointless at this
late stage, he raised it over his head and smashed it down on the
hardwood floor. It took three tries to break one of the legs free
and on the third strike, the lights went out, plunging the house
into darkness. Unfazed, Phil raised his weapon and saw to his
satisfaction that not only did the chair leg make a decent club, a
long sharp splinter jutted from the top of it, which was even
better.

As he turned to make his way up the
stairs his eye caught on something out in the yard and he
stopped.

Only his house was in darkness. The
streetlights were still working out there and in their cool blue
light he saw six of the robed, skeletal faced figures standing on
his lawn, their eyes lost in inky shadow, but he knew they were
looking at him. The Elders were impossibly tall and thin, and he
could see now that although their faces appeared made entirely from
fleshless bone, their limbs were dark tentacles that whipped and
snapped at the air.