Read Online Sour Candy by Kealan Patrick Burke - Free Book Online Page B

apparently knew everything. No, the shock came from
having him finally drop the pretense and admit that he knew.
    He smiled back at the boy as he headed
back upstairs. “That’s right. Tomorrow’s the day I try to kill
you.”
    “ Goodnight
Daddy.”
    “ Goodnight, son.”
    Except the boy wasn’t right. Not at
all. For in that moment, at the look of cruel delight on the
thing’s face, the look that said Phil was destined to fail, he
decided he wasn’t going to wait.
    No. The child was going to die
tonight.
     
     
    10. Sacrifice
     
     
    After washing his face in the bathroom
and staring down the ogre in the mirror, Phil headed back to the
living room and grabbed one of the pine hard-backed chairs. With no
attempt to be quiet, for such a thing would be pointless at this
late stage, he raised it over his head and smashed it down on the
hardwood floor. It took three tries to break one of the legs free
and on the third strike, the lights went out, plunging the house
into darkness. Unfazed, Phil raised his weapon and saw to his
satisfaction that not only did the chair leg make a decent club, a
long sharp splinter jutted from the top of it, which was even
better.
    As he turned to make his way up the
stairs his eye caught on something out in the yard and he
stopped.
    Only his house was in darkness. The
streetlights were still working out there and in their cool blue
light he saw six of the robed, skeletal faced figures standing on
his lawn, their eyes lost in inky shadow, but he knew they were
looking at him. The Elders were impossibly tall and thin, and he
could see now that although their faces appeared made entirely from
fleshless bone, their limbs were dark tentacles that whipped and
snapped at the air.
    Time to give you
motherfuckers something to see , Phil
thought, his body thrumming with the urgency to bring this
nightmare to some kind of a conclusion once and for all. His mind
had become a drumbeat, a war cry, pounding at the center of his
forehead as civility gave way to survival. Surely even the monsters
would respect another animal’s need to defend itself. After all,
they seemed well-versed in the ways of war.
    After a quick stop to fetch
a flashlight from the living room drawer, he mounted the steps to
the upstairs two at a time until he was on the second floor
landing. The stench of himself was only slightly less appalling
than the sudden briny fish stink that assailed his nose from both
the floor below and the attic above. Undaunted, he reached for the
handle that would open the attic door and saw as he did so the
symbols carved into its surface start to swim and change color, as
if he was seeing them through a layer of water and oil. Teeth
bared, he yanked on the handle, careful not to let those swimming
symbols touch his skin, and stepped back as the stairs slid down to
meet him. Hefting the chair leg like an Olympian, like a warrior , he marched up
the steps.
     
    * * *
     
    Phil didn’t know what he
expected to find in the attic—a portal to Hell perhaps, or maybe an
extension of that place the boy and his elders had shown him—but
there was little to see that hadn’t been there before. Boxes of
forgotten junk were still piled beneath the eaves in haphazard
stacks, pink tufts of insulation poking like cotton candy up from
the spaces between the rafters. The noxious reek of brine was even
worse up here, as if the room had been flooded at some point in the
past. There was no bed, no drawings, no toys, no crayons, nothing
to suggest a child lived up here. But of course, a child didn’t live up here.
Something else did.
    “ Come out,” Phil said. “You
said you wanted to learn, right? Well, Daddy’s here to teach you a
lesson.”
    There was nothing but silence in the
attic.
    “ And the lesson is,” Phil
continued, sweeping the beam of the flashlight around the stinking
attic, “You don’t fuck with people’s lives for no reason. We’re not
your playthings.”
    On his second sweep of the