In the Shadows of Children by Alan Ryker Read Free Book Online Page B

everything, leading straight to here. Like the entire struggle was futile.”
    “If you look back, it always is, isn’t it? In hindsight, everything is inevitable.”
    These were not the words of a fifteen-year-old. Bobby was different. Maybe he hadn’t grown up, exactly, but he’d changed, and Aaron wondered why he wouldn’t want to show it.
    “Why couldn’t I remember?” Aaron asked. “This thing seems to have unconsciously shaped my entire life, and I just forget it?”
    “That’s the trick. That’s how it does what it does. The adult mind can’t hold the darkness.”
    Aaron shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. We were little jackasses when we were kids. We had no idea of how the world worked, of how tough it is.” Aaron’s face flushed after he remembered that Bobby never grew up.
    Bobby scoffed. “We hadn’t learned the shared reality, yet. In that way you’re right. We hadn’t learned the hard truths like you’re gonna grow up to be an accountant, not an astronaut. But none of that is real. The reason children don’t understand that stuff is because it’s a complex set of made-up rules. Like if you try to teach a kid chess, the first thing he might do is reach across the board, steal your king and run off with it. He just won. But there are truths, real truths, and just to get by, to find the motivation to keep struggling anyway, adults have to grow numb to them.”
    After all he’d seen, Aaron couldn’t bring himself to dismiss what Bobby was saying. He wanted to, but he couldn’t quite do it. Still, his tone was incredulous when he said, “And what truths are those?”
    “That almost every corner of the universe is dark, that hungry things live in that darkness, and that one day, they’ll take every single one of us. Body or soul, one day they’ll catch us with our guards down, stuff us in their sack and walk out of the light. All children know this. All children respect this, live their lives by this. But the knowledge is like a guitar string.”
    Bobby paused. He had always been precocious, and had seemed to enjoy nothing more than saying things too profound or esoteric for Aaron to understand. Even after all the lost years, Aaron felt a bit annoyed when he had to admit, “You lost me.”
    “Life is like playing the guitar, and the knowledge of how vulnerable we are is like sharp strings. Do you remember how my fingertips used to crack and blister when I first started playing?”
    Aaron nodded.
    “I had the fingers of a child. Sensitive, unarmored. They had to become calloused so that I could keep playing. Teen suicides are people who stop playing. Teen drug addicts are people who couldn’t develop calluses, so they have to artificially dull their senses.”
    “But I was an adult when I left.”
    “And your soul had been ready to forget, to finally shut itself off from the horrible universe, to stop looking up into the darkness and to look down, to plod one step forward at a time. And the thing is, to some degree, it works. It doesn’t want you after that.”
    “Who is it ?”
    “I don’t know, exactly. Not exactly. But it watches as best it can, and it’s envious.”
    “Why did it come after us?”
    Bobby shrugged. “We’re marked somehow. Maybe it’s in our genes.”
    “Elijah,” Aaron said, his eyes unfocusing, imagining his boy back in California. He looked at his watch. Elijah would go to bed soon. The lights would go out. What waited for that opportunity?
    “Bobby, have you seen his room?”
    Bobby nodded slowly. “He really likes Power Rangers .”
    “So his closet is part of the—network.”
    “Yes. We’re marked, brother. That’s why I came back. That’s why I had to warn you.”
    “What happened to you? How are you back? Where did you go?”
    “I couldn’t take it anymore, waiting for the boogeyman to catch me with my guard down. I didn’t have much hope left. It might have been false security, but before you left I thought I might have a