Free In the Shadows of Children by Alan Ryker Page A

already dead. Mom never believed us. She made us sleep in here. She thought I was just a bad kid. Grounded me to my room. Forced me to fend for myself.” Bobby spoke faster, grew more animated. “But you know what, Aaron? Her death is your fault, too. Maybe I could have forgiven her, but I knew of only one thing that would bring you back here, and I needed you back here, at the one place I can appear like this. We can only take our old forms in the place where we disappeared.” He shook his head in mock solemnity. “So many people have suffered in your place.”
    “What the hell did you do?”
    “I showed her,” Bobby whispered. Then he rose and stepped toward Aaron, dragging his backpack behind him.
    Aaron had settled on the rules. Bobby was a ghost, something to be wary of, but he was trapped within the closet. As Bobby broke that boundary, Aaron stepped back, tripped over the end of the bed and fell to the floor.
    The hand Bobby pressed against the film separating him from the real world was small and soft, but when it broke through, it was enormous, gnarled, clawed. He continued to press forward, dragging himself through, unsticking from the darkness, pulling his sack behind him until he had passed the low doorway and unfurled himself almost to the ceiling.
    Black pits yawned in the center of his face, trying to draw Aaron in and consume him, trying to fill the emptiness Bobby had become.
    He reached forward. Aaron scrabbled back, staring into the black-pitted face. He screamed. He’d been screaming. Finally, he hit the back wall, just beneath the window.
    Bobby the sack man stepped forward, then dragged his bag another foot. Step. Drag. Step. Drag.
    Aaron stood and fumbled at the window latch, and the boogeyman stopped. They stared at each other for a long moment before the creature slowly backed into the closet, pressing into that tangible shadow, letting it envelop him and transform him into a teenage boy once again in the process.
    “I can’t hurt you, bro,” he said, then sneered. “You’re all grown up.”
    “But Mom…”
    “I never touched her. She fell on her own.”
    “After you scared her.”
    Bobby nodded. “After I showed her what your children can become when you don’t believe them.”
    Aaron stared at the boy, at his fresh face, but he saw now what he’d sensed for days: that it lay over nothing, that it disguised a void. The other face was his true self, the abyss, devoid of rage or sorrow. This thing didn’t want, and it wasn’t hungry except in the same sense that a vacuum is hungry. It consumed because it was a thing made to consume, it was an imbalance, a chasm over the sides of which things tumbled, an unthinking black hole.
    “You’re not my brother,” Aaron said.
    For the first time since he’d appeared, the look of certainty left Bobby’s face. “Yes, I am. Are you still thinking that you’ve lost it?”
    “No, but you aren’t my brother. You’re wearing him.”
    “Fuck you. I’m the dear little brother you loved so much that you left him to die. Don’t try to weasel out of this. This is your fault.”
    “Bobby was a great kid. He was my best friend. He loved his family, and he would never, ever hurt us, no matter what happened to him.” For all his fear, Aaron scoffed as he watched the effect his words had on Bobby, the baby face growing petulant and confused. “Shit, I thought you knew, that you were trying to trick me. You didn’t know. You actually think you’re Bobby.”
    “I am!” The roar pressed Aaron back against the wall, but the voice that followed was quiet, less sure. “You twisted your ankle so bad playing baseball when you were twelve that you had to spend weeks of summer vacation on the couch. I fetched things for you the whole time. Comics, snacks, whatever you asked for. That one winter I walked out onto the ice over the river. You yelled at me, but I didn’t listen and I fell through. You used a stick to drag me to the shore. You told