In the Shadows of Children (7 page)

“Mom would never—”

“Mom thought I was on drugs. She thought I was crazy. She thought I was some resentful, pissed-off teen and she figured they’d been kind and patient and raised me right and I had no reason to act that way, so I was just being spiteful. I didn’t know then that you had really forgotten. I thought you were being selfish. It was too much. I couldn’t stand the thought of waiting. So I filled my backpack with provisions and headed into the darkness.”

“What? Why would you do that?”

“I was going to kill the boogeyman.”

“Did you?”

“Kill the boogeyman?” Bobby laughed bitterly. “No. You can’t, any more than you can kill the night. All they’d ever wanted was to pull me into the darkness. I did it for them. I hopped right into the boogeyman’s sack.”

Aaron swallowed thickly. He had to know, but he didn’t want to know. Bobby was right. He couldn’t handle this. This didn’t fit into his world. He wanted to run. If it weren’t for Elijah, he might have. He’d turned his back on his brother once, and he thought it was probably within him to do it again.

But he had to know.

“What happened to you in there, Bobby?”

“It’s hard to describe.”

Aaron was about to prod him along when his phone rang. He looked at Bobby, then pulled the phone from his pocket.

“Is it Elijah?” Bobby asked.

Aaron nodded.

“Answer it. You have to tell him. I’ve traveled through hell to try to save him from what happened to me. Tell him to stay away from his closet. They’re done with me. They want him now.”

Aaron froze. “I can’t tell my son about the boogeyman. That’s insane.”

“Unless you want him to end up like me, you fucking tell him.” Bobby stood. “I have to go. I’m working on a solution. Come back tomorrow night, and I might have good news.”

Aaron stood, too, his heart swelling up into his throat as he looked down at his little brother, eternally 5’6”, forever clad in baggy jeans and hoisting a JanSport backpack.

Aaron stepped forward, and Bobby stepped back, shaking his head, but saying with a smile, “See you tomorrow, bro.”

Aaron nodded and answered the phone. “Hey, Sarah.”

“Hey. You sound weird.”

“I fell asleep on the couch. Just woke up.”

“You’re probably worn out.”

“Yeah, I am. Is Elijah still up?”

“Of course. He’s not going to bed before he can tell you what happened on
Power Rangers
today. Here, he’s yanking on my shirt, so I’m going to give him the phone.”

“Hi, Dad!” came a voice that weakened Aaron’s knees and dropped him back onto the bed.

“Hey, buddy. Listen, I have something really important to tell you. A big secret. You can’t tell your mom.”

* * *

Lying on the couch, Aaron couldn’t feel sleep anywhere near him. He’d spent the entire day in a deep, opiate induced slumber. So when his phone rang, it didn’t wake him.

He looked quickly to the window, which was still dark. His heart thumping in his chest, he pawed around on the end table for his phone.

Sarah.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“You told your son that the boogeyman would get him?”

Aaron spun into a seated position. “Is Elijah okay?”

“What? Yes, of course, except that you scared him out of his mind,” she hissed. “He won’t go back to his bed. In fact, he won’t let me out of his sight, so we’re going to have to have our conversation about this later. But I have to ask what you were thinking. Did you really tell him to stay away from his closet, to watch out for the boogeyman?”

He’d asked Elijah not to tell his mother. They had a close bond. He wouldn’t have told her without good reason. Sitting there in the darkness, searching the murky corners for movement, Aaron could only think of one good reason. But Sarah wouldn’t understand.

“Of course not. We did talk about an episode of
Power Rangers
with a boogeyman monster, but I can’t tell you what I said that made him think it was true. I’ll talk to him tomorrow and get it sorted out. Just let him sleep with you for tonight.”

“You owe me,” Sarah said, but the anger had left her voice.

“I do. Big-time. I love you.”

“Love you, too. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Aaron sat the phone back on the table, then rested on the couch, though he still warily watched the corners of the living room and the even darker rooms beyond. That was instinct, though. He wasn’t worried about himself.

The boogeyman was after his son.

* * *

Aaron yawned as he flipped through the pages of a book. The strength of the yawn surprised him, and he covered his mouth and glanced around. The only other people in the library were an old couple reading papers splayed out on long sticks, and they didn’t seem to have been bothered by him. He rubbed his eyes and looked back down at the book in front of him,
The Life and Times of the Sack Men
. He’d found it in the folklore section when he did a search for “boogeyman.” He’d always thought of bag men as being guys who worked for the mafia, though he didn’t know exactly what they did, what sort of bag they were associated with.

But it turned out that there was another sort of bag man, or sack man, a nearly universal creature in folklore, a man or monster who stepped out of darkness to grab children, stuff them into a sack and steal them away.

As the sun had risen earlier that morning and burned away the mist from the river that ran behind his childhood home, Aaron wondered again if he were simply crazy. Yeah, he broke into a house and found things as described by his younger brother. But he hadn’t written down what those things were beforehand. Couldn’t he have created that part of the delusion after the fact? Could he have acted on this impulse, found what was to be found within the house, then invented a memory of a scene in which he was told what he would find? Wasn’t that exactly how paranoid-schizophrenia worked? It seemed strange to believe that his mind would do that to him, but he knew it happened. On the other hand, he’d never heard of a recorded case of the closet-bound ghost of a long-disappeared relative telling someone what they would find beneath a mattress in a house on the other side of town. So which was more believable?

But as he flipped through the pages of
The Life and Times of the Sack Men
, the hair rose on the back of his neck. The illustrations were terrifying and he felt movement in the place in his brain where deep memories swam slowly but ceaselessly.

He found that the myths of many Latin countries contained an
hombre del saco
, a man carrying a sack over one shoulder into which he stuffed naughty children. In some places he was magical. In several South American countries, he was a psychotic who parents had allowed to roam the streets at suppertime to snatch up children who hadn’t yet returned home.

The bag man haunted the nights of Armenian, Georgian and Bulgarian children, who were told they’d be carried off if they misbehaved. In Russia, Ukraine and Belarus they had an old man, a
babay
, who hid under the bed, waiting for naughty children who disobeyed their bedtimes to set their toes on the ground so that they could be crammed into his bag and stolen away, never to be heard from again.

Aaron found many variations. Some were the dark brother of Santa Claus, the sack of children being the antithesis of the sack of gifts. Some hid in closets, others beneath beds, and others wandered the streets. One of the most terrifying was the Egyptian
Abu Rigl Maslukha
, “the man with burnt legs.” He was badly burned when he didn’t listen to his parents, and now he grabbed naughty children to cook and eat. But for all the variation, at the center was the same kernel: from Germany to Guyana, from Iran to Quebec, in seemingly every single culture in the world, a creature waited in darkness for children to make one mistake, the excuse they needed to stuff them in a sack and steal them away.

And that is when Aaron paused. He’d forgotten so much of his childhood. From the way Bobby had described it, it was a sort of repression. Aaron had hardened his mind to the realities that gave those memories meaning, and so, without context, the memories had faded away, or perhaps sat in his brain as an island unconnected by neural bridges. Isolated. Dark.

As he flipped through the pages, noting the similarities, skimming the scholarly essays from PhDs who, unlike him, had no skin in the game and so wrote with academic aloofness or even ironic amusement, part of the repeating pattern rose up, becoming first a tickle in his mind, then a vague feeling, and finally, a question. Looking back into those hazy memories, Aaron asked himself what he and Bobby had done wrong. What sin had they committed? Could this really have happened because they’d played soccer at the park with their friends too late, or not eaten their dinners, or sneaked a flashlight under the covers to read comic books instead of going to sleep at bedtime?

The question was ridiculous, because the punishment was so disproportionate to the crimes. But Aaron was flipping through a book of tales from some fifty countries located in every habitable corner of the globe, and for all the nuances, the boogeymen had a single common thread: they wanted
naughty
children.

As he peered through the gaps in the brick wall that separated him from his childhood, Aaron felt such dread that he had to wonder if it were so crazy to think that beyond lay a sin so bad it warranted this punishment. He wondered if there weren’t some blemish on his soul so black that the night itself had reached out to him as kin.

His head began to hurt. His hands began to shake. He couldn’t see it.

But he knew that Bobby could. No more vague answers. That night, Bobby would tell Aaron what he knew.

* * *

Back at his mother’s house, Aaron tried to sleep on the couch. He was exhausted, but it was the middle of the day, and he’d never been one for naps, even when he didn’t have myths, memories and questions spinning in his confused and frightened mind. So he wasn’t really sleeping when a knock at the door yanked him up out of the whirlpool of his own thoughts.

From the living room, he peeked through the foyer to see Mrs. Jackman, the next-door neighbor, standing on his porch with a foil-covered platter in her hands.

“Hello, Mrs. Jackman. How are you?” he said, holding the door open and standing aside. He didn’t want company, but you couldn’t talk through the door at someone when they held a plate of food intended for you.

Mrs. Jackman was a short, plump woman who walked easily beneath his arm but had to squeeze past his body. “I’m doing okay, Aaron. But how are you doing? You don’t look so good.”

Aaron blinked, feeling the way his eyelids stuck to his tacky, itchy eyeballs. He was sure he looked worse than “not so good.”

“I’m all right.”

“Have you been eating?”

Aaron thought back over the last few days, but they were obscured by a fog. Especially standing in the sunny foyer, the darkness he’d been living in became more impenetrable. His stomach cramped at the smell of Mrs. Jackman’s cooking, sending acid up his throat.

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“I figured not. I made breakfast late today and cooked up so much that I thought you might like some.”

Aaron took the heavily laden plate. However bad the anxiety suppressing his appetite had been, it was surpassed at that moment by a hunger so intense his hands began to shake.

Without her load to occupy her, Mrs. Jackman’s eyes wandered over her best friend’s house, finally stopping at the bottom of the stairs and sticking.

This was the poor woman who’d found his mother. Aaron had considered himself to be the most impacted by her death—she was his mother, after all—but this was her best friend, the woman who’d nursed her in sickness, who’d visited with her most every day. She’d come over that Sunday morning because Phyllis Conlin hadn’t liked driving and so always rode with the Jackmans to church.

“This smells fantastic,” Aaron said. “Would you mind keeping me company while I eat?”

Mrs. Jackman pulled her moist eyes away from the spot where his mother had died, put on a weak smile and said, “Of course. That way I’ll know you’ve actually eaten some of it.”

Aaron led the way to the kitchen, and after putting on a pot of coffee to brew, sat down and peeled the foil off the platter. The aroma of pancakes, turkey bacon and scrambled eggs made his stomach audibly gurgle in anticipation.

Cutting a wedge out of the fluffy stack of pancakes, he crammed his mouth full. It was so good, so buttery. But dry.

“I didn’t want them to get soggy. Would you like some syrup?” Mrs. Jackman asked.

Aaron looked up at the cabinets. He didn’t have any idea where his mother kept the syrup.

Mrs. Jackman stood and circled the table, stretching to reach into a cabinet next to the refrigerator and grab a bottle of Karo. She sat it down on the table beside Aaron, then got two mugs and began preparing their coffee.

“Cream and sugar?” she asked.