Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke Read Free Book Online

had been packed full of the damn things.
There were even a few in the ice box, frozen into jaunty slabs,
suggesting they’d been in there longer than was possible. Red bags,
yellow bags, green bags, but none a brand he recognized. No Haribo
here, instead each bag was emblazoned with the name GJØK in colorful cartoonish letters. There were no
ingredients listed on the back, no snappy captions on the front
designed to entice you to choose this brand over all others, just
that single word.
    “ So…” Phil asked, feeling an
uncontrollable bubble of laughter working its way up his throat.
“What do you want to eat?” And then the laugh exploded from him,
killing his chest, forcing him to double over in pain, but he
didn’t care, couldn’t have stopped even if he’d wanted to, and
before he knew it, he was on the floor behind the boy’s chair,
howling and slamming his fist against the linoleum.
    Only when the child mimicked his laugh
with eerie synchronicity did he stop, the mad joviality evaporating
as quickly as it had come. Carefully, he got to his feet, wiped his
eyes, and went to the fridge. He plucked a bag of candy free and
tossed it onto the table before the child and went to his office.
He returned to the table armed with his glass and the bottle of
scotch.
    “ I want to know what you
want from me,” he said, pouring himself a generous measure. “If
you’re going to continue this charade, I deserve at least to know
the reason for it. Did someone put you up to it? Is it some kind of
a game?”
    “ What do you
mean?”
    “ You know what I mean. Cut
the bullshit.”
    The child gasped, eyes wide, and he
pointed a forefinger at Phil. “Awwww…you said a bad word. I’m
telling.”
    Phil smirked and took a deep draw from
his glass. “Yeah? Who are you going to tell, you little shit?
You’ve already hurt anyone who might have listened.”
    “ I can’t tell you their
names. Not allowed to. But you can call them Eldre if you’d like, though really
they’d prefer you didn’t call them anything. It upsets
them.”
    Phil scoffed and waved a hand at him.
“Whatever. Where’s your Mom?”
    Little pink tongue protruding from the
side of his mouth, Adam picked up and blue crayon and began to draw
squiggly lines for the waves. “Which one?”
    “ The first one.”
    “ Heaven.”
    “ So you believe in
Heaven.”
    “ Sure. But it’s not the same
as yours.”
    “ What does that
mean?”
    The child did not raise his head, but
looked up at Phil through the sandy veil of his bangs, and there
the darkness was. It told Phil that there were lines of questioning
he could feel free to pursue, but this wasn’t one of
them.
    “ You can’t be here,” Phil
said, weakly, the scotch burning his throat and stirring up his
stomach.
    “ You should have some
candy,” the boy said, still watching him, still harboring blackness
in those eyes. “It’ll make you feel better.”
    “ I doubt it.”
    “ Try.” He slid the unopened
bag across the table to Phil and then stared until Phil realized he
had no other choice but to do as he was told. Is this how it’s going to be now? Am I a prisoner in my own
home, in my own life? If this turned out to
be the case, and surely he would know sooner rather than later, he
had no intention of being alive for very long.
    Aggressively he tore the bag open.
Candy skittered across the table. Grimacing, for even on a normal
day he hated sour candy, he popped one in his mouth.
    At first, there was
nothing.
    At second, there was
everything.
    And too late he realized that what he
had put into his mouth was not candy at all, but a key.
     
    * * *
     
    All he will ever retain
from however long he spends in that other place—and surely it’s an
eternity—will be fragments of horrors, so garish and alien it is
impossible for his mind to put them together into any kind of sense
or order, but they will be enough to compound the seriousness of
the situation in which he has found himself.
    He