Free In the Shadows of Children by Alan Ryker

question is: What did we do to deserve this? Did we really bring this on ourselves?”
    Bobby looked at him blankly. “You think I deserved this?”
    “I didn’t mean… God, I mean…”
    “You’re on the right track, but you’re drawing the wrong conclusions.”
    “What happened to you in there? You come back after all this time, say you’ve waited so long, but you won’t tell me a damn thing straight!”
    Aaron shouted the last few words, and though Bobby didn’t visibly react, the darkness around him began to writhe like a pit full of jet-black serpents.
    “Maybe I’m trying to spare you, brother.”
    “Don’t. If you’d really wanted to spare me you would have never come back in the first place. Since you did, tell me something. Stop being so fucking mysterious.” The words spilled from Aaron. He’d been so confused the past few days, his head such a maelstrom of lost memories, worries, and doubts, that he didn’t know how he felt until he said it.
    Aaron wished Bobby had never come back. Aaron would have preferred never to know what happened to his brother rather than to know this, whatever this was. God, that was so horrible. That was not how an older brother should feel.
    “They take children because their minds are still vulnerable.” Bobby’s eyes unfocused as he went back into whatever hell he’d emerged from. “The bag isn’t a bag. It’s an extension of the darkness made manifest to create a tunnel into the void. I keep saying ‘they,’ but just like the sacks, the sack men are just appendages of the void. Once it has us, it drains us. For as many years as we had, it drains us, drinking down our lives, leaving us husks, then dropping us.” Bobby eyes refocused. “It’s eaten me. It’s spit out the gristle and bone, and that’s what sits before you.”
    Fifteen years. It used them for as many years as they’d had. Bobby had been fifteen, and it had chewed on him for that many years.
    “Why? Why the hell does it do this?”
    “Because it doesn’t exist, and things that don’t exist are envious of the things that do.”
    Aaron realized then that he was talking to a ghost. A faint hope that he hadn’t even known he’d held collapsed, and he felt the hollow it left in his chest.
    Bobby wouldn’t step out of that closet and back into his old life.
    “I’m so sorry.”
    Bobby nodded, held his gaze. “You should be.”
    “What?”
    “You started all this. You brought its attention on us.”
    “How? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “You almost had it right, the one thing in all the tales. You said they always go after the naughty ones, the ones who’ve done something wrong.”
    “So what did I do? What could I have possibly done? I was just a kid.”
    Bobby looked up through his shaggy bangs in exasperation. “I told you, that’s not it!”
    That roar again, smashing into Aaron physically like PA system turned up far too loud.
    “Then what?” Aaron asked quietly.
    “The thread isn’t that the children are bad. It’s that their parents tell them. They already fear the darkness. They already sense the void. But hearing it from their parents… So when Dad told us the boogeyman was real, you knew deep down it was true, and while I slept, you stared into the darkness. When you did that, you reached out to it. It reached back.”
    Aaron sat, stunned. “They couldn’t have known.”
    Bobby snorted. “That makes it even worse. They take advantage of a fear the intensity of which they can’t remember because their minds no longer have the capacity to contain it. For what, to make sure their spawn eat all their spinach?”
    A thought slammed into Aaron so hard his heart skipped a beat. His eyes widened. His mouth fell open. Unsteadily, he rose to his feet. “What happened to Mom?”
    “She never believed us.”
    “Dad said it. Dad said it! Mom made him stop.”
    “It drained my fifteen years, then dropped me like a flattened juice box. I find Dad is