The Hollow-Boned Child Whispered in My Ear

 

“Pick my reward.”

---

Five years ago on Halloween, me and my best friend Jake went out to kill a man.

We were dressed up like trick-or-treaters, and though both sixteen, we were small enough to pass for thirteen under masks. No one had seen our costumes ahead of time, and we’d already made excuses for where we would be for the next three hours to the few people that would care or notice. I didn’t know the world “alibi” at the time, but in our own clumsy way, that’s what we were establishing at the time.

It probably sounds to you like we were cold-blooded killers—desensitized sociopathic teens just looking for a thrill kill like in a horror movie we should be home watching instead. That’s my fault, of course. I didn’t give you the context.

We weren’t going out to kill just any man we happened across. We were going to kill Peter Sinclair, who lived alone at 429 Morrow Street. And the reason wasn’t that we were crazy or wanting to hurt anybody that didn’t deserve it.

It was the fact that Peter had murdered my little brother.

---

The year before, six years ago now, me and Jake had taken his brother Grayson and my brother Andy out trick-or-treating. Andy was only eight, but Grayson was twelve, and if they’d stuck to our neighborhood they’d have probably been safe going by themselves. But they wanted the big candy haul their friends had told them about across town where the big houses lined the hills and the new fancy subdivision was packed with well-to-do couples with money to burn and candy to unload by the pumpkinful. Me and Jake agreed to take them over there, but only if we got half of their haul at the end of the night. After some grumbling, they agreed that half of a lot was better than all of the dozen houses around our own.

I still remember that Halloween so clearly. It was a really fun night—Grayson was toeing the edge of becoming an asshole teenager, but he was a good kid overall, and Andy was always awesome. Jake would even him Awesome Andy sometimes and say he’d give me fifty bucks if I’d just swap brothers with him. It was a joke, but there was truth underneath—Andy was always good-natured and polite and funny. Just…just a really good kid, and everybody loved him.

We were on the cross-town bus by about nine o’clock. Jake wanted to go ahead and start dividing up the candy, but I convinced him to wait until we were home and could spread it all out. Better that than on a dirty bus that was…well, was fairly packed. Some kind of nearby Halloween party had just wound down, and most of the seats were full by the time we got on. A couple of minutes later, the driver was about to close the door when one last passenger climbed aboard.

He was a tall, gaunt-looking man with a shuffling gait that was painful to watch. I wondered if he’d been in an accident or had some condition, but I made a point of looking out the window as he drew near. I didn’t want him to catch me staring, and…

“Mister, do you want my seat?”

I recognized Andy’s voice and turned around to see him looking up at the figure above us. My first reaction was to tell Andy no, that the man could find his own seat. Then I remembered how full the bus was and felt a swell of pride at how kind my little brother was. The man was smiling, glancing between him and me as he cocked his head as though listening for some distant sound. When he spoke, it was with a deep, rumbling voice softened by an accent I couldn’t place.

“Yes, I’d appreciate that very much, little sir.”

Glancing around us, I didn’t see another spare seat for Andy to move to, so I wound up pulling him into my lap with a grunt. “Damn, man. You’re like a sack of rocks. Maybe I should take all your candy.” I nodded to the man. “There you go.”

The stranger returned the nod and folded himself down into the seat, his spindly legs butting up against the molded plastic of the seats in front of us as he positioned himself for the ride. He looked back over at Andy. “Did you have a good Halloween, little sir?”

Andy’s head bobbed enthusiastically under my chin. “Yep. Went to the rich folks and got the good stuff.”

The man chuckled. “Ah yes. A shrewd businessman always knows where to go.” He raised a thick black eyebrow streaked with grey. “Did you trick, or merely treat?”

I spoke up. “Just candy for us.”

He glanced at me and then back down to Andy. “Good. That’s good.” He reached into his pocket. “And since you are such a good little boy, I have a final piece to add to your collection.” Lifting his hand with a flourish, he produced a small egg wrapped in orange foil. “This egg is a rare and delicious treat. I used to get one for my boy every Halloween, and without fail it would always be his favorite.” The man’s face had brightened for a moment in the soft glow of a memory, but as he stared off, the smile faded from his lips. “But he doesn’t like such things anymore. I still get them, though I don’t know why.” He looked at Andy and gave a slight nod. “Perhaps so I can give recompense when I meet a polite gentleman such as yourself.”

He offered the egg palm up, and Andy turned to look back at me. “Is it okay, Richie?” I grinned at him. He was the only one that called me that, and I could see the nervous excitement in his face as he stared up at me.

Still, I debated my answer for a moment. On the one hand, this guy was kind of weird and a total stranger. On the other, did we really know any more about the people we’d just spent two hours getting candy from? Only that they had money, which seemed like a shitty way of deciding who you could trust or was a good person. Plus, we still had to divide up all the candy, and if we checked the egg out and it looked tampered with or something, we could always toss it later before anyone ate it.

And all of that was true, of course, but it didn’t change the real reasons I said yes: I could tell Andy wanted to take it and I didn’t want to be rude to a stranger. I nodded, and Andy immediately turned and took the egg gently from the man’s hand, putting it carefully into his bag.

“Thank you, Mister.”

The man smiled slightly. “No, thank you, little sir.”

An hour later, Andy was dead.

---

They said he was poisoned with something that was similar to strychnine but of a chemical composition they didn’t recognize. The details of what it was, of course, didn’t matter so much as what it did.

We started dividing up the candy as soon as we got home. Jake and Grayson were staying over until midnight, when all of our parents were supposed to be home from some party they went to. Plenty of time to watch scary movies, eat too much candy, and…

“Andy, where’s the egg?” I looked around, and as soon as I saw his face, I knew. “Did you take it? Did you eat it already?”

His eyes, already wide, began to shimmer with tears. “I’m sorry. I just…he said it was special and I didn’t want to lose it. So I went ahead and ate it.” He wrinkled his nose. “It wasn’t even very good.”

I frowned at him. “You idiot. He could be some nut. What if it had a razor blade in it? Or what if he…Andy, are you okay?”

It was just a small thing at first. Just a little hitch in his chest, maybe like he had a hiccup. Then I noticed that his arm was twitching, just a little at first, but then more, the tremors spreading through his body as he began to reach for me. His face was scared now, and he tried to say something, but his words came out as faint, unintelligible puffs of thin air.

I caught him as he fell, rolling him over and checking his mouth, seeing if he was choking or what else could be wrong, screaming for Jake to call 911 as I racked my brain for what else I could try and do to help. Meanwhile, Andy’s body began to curl in on itself like a burning leaf, hard shudders replaced by smaller, stiffer jerks as his lips began to turn blue and his eyes rolled with fear. He was dying, and there was nothing I could do to stop it, and by the time the paramedics got there, he was gone.

The police tracked down the man through the camera footage on the bus and the city pass he’d swiped when he got on. Peter Sinclair. He worked as a mechanic for the city, had no record, and acted surprised when people started asking him about a dead little boy he’d met on the bus that Halloween.

The thing is, they didn’t have much to go on. The autopsy didn’t show traces of the egg, digested or otherwise, in Andy’s system, though they didn’t really know what it was made of or what to look for, and I was no help as I’d never seen the candy itself. According to the lead detective, depending on the ingredients, it could be metabolized very fast or hard to test for. They looked for the foil wrapping, but it was never found either, and there was nothing else to tie the strange man we’d met on the bus to my dead brother.

Except for me. Because I knew what candy we’d gotten that night, and nothing else was missing. And I knew that Andy had eaten it, even if Jake and Grayson had been in the other room fighting over what movie to watch.

Most importantly, I knew it was my fault. That if I hadn’t been so worried about being rude or disappointing Andy, if I’d been more concerned with keeping him safe, he’d still be alive. So when they started telling us they’d run out of leads and they couldn’t just rely on my opinion or gut feelings that the man had poisoned Andy, I quickly stopped listening. I retreated inside myself and began to plan how to make Peter Sinclair pay.

I told Jake my idea to get revenge on Sinclair in August, and to my surprise, he was immediately on board. His only reservations were practical—ways to make sure we didn’t get hurt or caught. The key to that, he suggested, was taking our time and watching him when we could. Observing his routines and looking out for any weaknesses or dangers, that kind of thing. For the most part Sinclair seemed to have a fairly boring life—he rarely left his apartment building and when he did, it was usually just to go to the store or the local library. By early October we’d learned very little, and we were also frustrated by the limited windows of time we had available to keep an eye on him without raising suspicion. That’s when we decided to find a way to watch him all night.

The theory was that maybe he was going out later in the evening, and if he did it with regularity, maybe that was the thing we were missing—the puzzle piece that would give us a way of getting him alone outside the safety of his home. So we coordinated an excuse to cover each other until midnight and staked out Peter Sinclair’s street.

It was half past ten when he went out again. We thought about following, but the streets were mostly empty, and we didn’t know a good way to tail him without being seen. So instead, we waited until he came back at quarter to midnight.

Over the next week we took turns sneaking out to watch his place again at night. Every time, at some point between ten and eleven, he would leave his place on foot and come back about an hour later. We never knew where he went, but it seemed like enough of a pattern that we had the beginnings of our plan for that Halloween.

---

I think that planning to kill someone is divided into two stages. The first is the fantasy of it. Imagining how it’ll happen, what you’ll say and do, how it will feel. It was important to me, for instance, to make sure that Sinclair knew he was dying because of what he did to Andy, and to stop him from doing it to anyone else. I would run through different versions of what I’d say and how everything would go, wanting it all to be perfect. And if I felt any rush of excitement at these daydreams, I attributed it to how desperate I was to hurt less, to feel less guilt, to do anything to make everything a little better.

The second stage isn’t a daydream. It’s the hard practicalities of real planning and preparations for a situation that could very easily spiral out-of-control into something far different and worse than could be easily imagined. Me and Jake weren’t stupid. We knew that if we were ever caught, the fact that we were avenging Andy wouldn’t count for much in some people’s eyes. Maybe most people, even. That’s why we agreed the morning of Halloween that if things started to go badly or either of us wanted to pull the plug, we would. That failsafe helped us, I think. Allowed us to push through the fear and disgust of what we were about to do, because we always had the ability to call it off if it got to be too much.

But the day went by fast, and by nine that night, we were waiting in the dark for Peter Sinclair to take his last walk.

---

We both had serrated hunting knives sandwiched between two layers of black trashbag. The theory was that the inner layer would keep our fingerprints off the knives and most of the blood off our clothes, as that bag was bigger and could be pulled up past our elbow. The smaller outer bag was mainly to hide the knives from view—we were both dressed in what was likely supposed to be monks’ robes, though brown or not, I couldn’t help but picture them as vestments of the grim reaper. Two reapers, in fact. The dull black lumps that hid the knives were barely visible from within the long sleeves of the robes, and the robes themselves could be easily destroyed or hidden once we were done. All that was left was to wait for him to come out, follow him until we found a secluded spot, and then…and then do it.

My breath was thin as we watched his apartment from the alley across the street. This was all insane, right? And we’d carried the fantasy about as far as we could go without going too far. Even now, if we were found with hidden knives lurking in an alley, what were the odds we didn’t go to jail for something?

Jake’s whisper broke the silence. “Fuck, are we really doing this? I think I might puke.”

I was about to tell him no, we couldn’t really do it. Of course we couldn’t. We needed to get out of there before we got into something worse, and I didn’t blame him for wanting to yak, I could barely…

The image of Andy flashed before me. Suffocating as his muscles seized and his lungs betrayed him, reaching toward me, not understanding but afraid, expecting me to save him because that was my job, after all. I was his big brother, and I had to keep him safe. And I hadn’t.

Movement across the street caught my attention. It was Sinclair, out on the sidewalk and moving away fast. I turned to Jake and met his eyes.

“Fuck yes we’re doing it.”

---

We followed him for three blocks, staying back but picking up the pace a bit whenever he turned. There were still a few people out here and there, but the direction he was heading was quieter and more rundown. As we rounded the next corner, I was about to whisper to Jake that we needed to start looking for a good spot to grab him when I realized that Sinclair had disappeared.

Jake let out a soft curse beside me, his voice high and shaky. “Where did he go?”

I shook my head as we sped up. “I don’t know. Maybe he ducked into an alley, or he’s in one of these buildings?” We looked into the shadows of every side path as we passed, but I didn’t see any sign of the man or him going that way. And most of these buildings looked closed or abandoned, though that didn’t mean he didn’t have a…

“Hello, young sirs.”

The voice boomed from just above and behind us, and before we could react, he had grabbed us and slung us hard into the alley we were moving past. I felt my ribs crack as I hit the corner of a metal dumpster and bounced off onto the wet muck and broken asphalt of the alley itself. I heard Jake just behind me, screaming. When I looked back, I could see enough to see the right side of his face was torn and bloody—apparently he had hit a corner of brick and skidded along the rough wall on his way to the ground. Turning back, I saw the large silhouette of Peter Sinclair filling the only path to escape. Half accusation, half plea for mercy, I called out to him in a voice that sounded raw and shrill, the growing dull fire of my ribs barely registering as I stared up at him.

“You! You killed Andy!”

The man cocked his head slightly, pausing for several seconds before he replied.

“Yes, I did.” His voice carried that same soft strangeness it its tones, like the sharp, sweet tang of decaying meat. “It was necessary.”

With a grunt I pushed myself up to a seated position. “Bullshit! He was just a kid…just…he…he gave you his seat!” A dim part of me knew what I was saying was stupid, but I didn’t care. I was crying so hard I could barely talk, let alone think straight, and the growing certainty that we were about to die in that alleyway made the desperate rush of words just come faster. “You enjoyed it! You fucking talked to him! Saw how good he was and…you still fucking killed him!”

The man paused again for several seconds and then nodded. “I did. I don’t enjoy much, but I’ve come to accept that I enjoy that. She’s made me…quite strange over time, I think.”

I heard my jaw squeak as I clenched my teeth. “You’re fucking crazy!” Jake had stopped screaming behind me, and let out a soft plea in the wake of my words. “Please…let us go…”

A deep chuckle from the man standing over us. “Oh yes, I’m sure I am. And no, you cannot just go. She must be satisfied first.” My eyes were adjusting to the murk of the alley, and I could see him looking at Jake and then at me. His eyes lifted up for a moment and then he nodded, his gaze drifting back to my own.

“You are the one to decide. She likes you and would like to give you a special gift. It is only available for a moment, so think very carefully before you answer.”

I sniffled, shame and fear spreading through my belly. I wanted to fight, to get up and stab him, to get revenge but…no, that’s a lie. I wanted to want those things maybe, in some abstract, detached part of my brain that still cared about pride and courage and making things right or getting revenge. But as I sat in that cold, wet pit of dark with him smiling down at me, I just wanted to escape. To run and hide and be safe, and to never, ever see him again.

“Oh God…my leg…”

I looked back again and saw that Jake had forgotten his face for the moment, having rolled over on his side to examine where his knife had gone into his upper thigh. The bottom of the robe and what I could see of the jeans underneath already looked dark and wet with blood. He looked at me. “I…I’m going to die.”

“And that’s the point, young sirs.” I looked up at Sinclair as he went on, his eyes boring into mine. “Your friend will not leave this alley alive. Not because of that minor wound, of course. That is a trifle. But he will not leave alive, rest assured.” He raised a long, crooked finger and pointed it at me. “You, on the other hand, might. If you do two things. First, ask us to take him, not you and…

“Fuck you, I’m not…” I fell silent as he glared at me.

“I warned you not to answer too quickly. The next words you give I’ll take as your final say, so I’d hold onto them for now.” When I only nodded, he went on. “Second, you must accept what you are given.”

Behind me, I heard Jake trying to slide toward me. “Don’t…we can yell for help or…don’t do it, please…” I jerked as I felt the light pressure of his hand on my back. I couldn’t listen to him anymore. Couldn’t be this afraid anymore. And if he reached me and started trying to hold onto me like a drowning man pulling down his friend, I might start screaming and never stop until…

“Yes. Yes. Take him, not me. P-please.”

Sinclair nodded, his eyes shifting from me to just behind as he stepped forward. Jake was gripping my shirt tightly now, trying to pull himself forward and hold on, but it was no use. When Sinclair moved past me and grabbed him, he was yanked away like a field mouse being carried by a hawk. He had time to let out a squeal and then an agonized whoosh of air as the breath was knocked from him a few feet behind. I closed my eyes tightly, but it didn’t stop me from hearing as Sinclair stomped him to death a few feet away.

I did want to die then, or at least fall into a deep black that would take all of it away. Let me pass out and wake up in a hospital or…I sensed something in front of my face and opened my eyes. It was a candy egg, wrapped in a black piece of foil. The man’s rough palm was speckled with my best friend’s blood, but the egg was pristine. It almost seemed to glow or shimmer in the dim light, but none of that made me want to take it.

“It’s poison. You said you would let me go.”

The man was hunkered down behind me and as he leaned forward, I could feel his bony knees digging into my back. “It’s not poison. And I will. But you must take this and eat it, here and now, or I’m afraid I’ll leave this hole with you on my shoes as well.”

I looked back and in the dark, I saw two thin rings of yellow light. His eyes were actually glowing, and…he cocked his head further to my right. Oh God. It wasn’t his eyes I was looking at. There was something on his back, on his back and staring at me as it whispered something low and unintelligible in his ear.

“Eat up, young sir. She says…you must eat up now.”

Shuddering, I looked back to the egg and took it. He was lying about it not being poison, and no doubt it would kill me, but at least it would be over. And after what I’d done to Andy, and now to Jake, did I deserve any less?

Peeling back the foil, I saw a rich brown the color of fine milk chocolate. I had the errant thought that this would be better for Easter than Halloween, and then I popped it in my mouth before any other thoughts could take hold.

Biting down on it burst it, sending a foul, bitter ooze across my tongue and down my throat. I began to gasp and choke immediately—not just from the sensations or the taste and smell filling my head, but because there had been something small and hard in the center of that egg, and it had been carried on that foul mess I had swallowed down my throat and into my belly. I gagged, but nothing came up, and after a few moments of trying to catch my breath, I looked around to realize I was alone.

---

I wanted to call my parents, go home or to the hospital, but something in me held me back. First, I needed to get rid of the trash bags and the knives. It wasn’t hard. Jake’s had fallen out as Sinclair pulled him back to kill him, and the bags let me gather up his and mine without actually touching them. I hid them in the bags inside my robe until I got closer to the bus stop and then I carefully dumped them into another dumpster before throwing the bags away in the trash can next to the stop itself.

There were only a few people on the bus that night, but it was getting late. If anyone noticed how I looked, I guess they just thought it was part of my costume. My parents noticed, of course. They were panicked and rushing me to the hospital while on the phone with 911. I had already decided what I would tell all of them. We had decided to go out trick-or-treating after all. Some guys wearing masks mugged us, and when Jake stood up to them, one of them killed him.

By the time I was in a hospital room, they’d found Jake’s body. They talked to me several more times over the next few days, but it never amounted to anything. I was the only person that would tell them anything, and I would never tell them the truth. Never risk another visit from that man and the thing that rode him.

Once I was home, I still stayed in bed mostly. There was little to do for my broken ribs except rest and time, and I didn’t want to go anywhere or see anyone. My parents offered to carry me to Jake’s funeral the next week, but I told them I still hurt too much. And in some ways, that was the truth. So instead, I stared out the rain splattering against the window until I drifted back off to sleep.

---

I could barely feel through the blanket as it began crawling up my body. It was so very light, you see. By the time I was awake enough to realize something was on me, small hands had already settled onto my shoulders as thin legs wrapped around my waist and pressed against my back. Screaming, I stumbled out of bed, slamming my back against the floor and the bed and the wall as I tried to dislodge whatever was back there.

Nothing changed. The sensation never left or was interrupted by whatever I did, and after the first half hour, I lay exhausted and weeping in the middle of the floor. I couldn’t touch anything back there, but I could feel it, feel the touch and feather weight of it, and I felt on the verge of going crazy from it. Just then, it shifted slightly, and I felt a soft whisper puff against my ear.

“It’s okay, Richie. I’ll never leave you.”

Eyes wide, I looked over my shoulder at the swarm of shadows nesting there, slowly swirling around twin, thin rings of glowing green. As I watched, the dark solidified, and the shape of a face began to take hold. It began to look like Andy as it watched me and tried to smile.

---

It wasn’t until weeks later that my parents told me that Andy’s grave had been defiled and his body had been taken. It had happened two days before Halloween, but the cops hadn’t called them until the morning of, around the time me and Jake were trying on our costumes and making nervous jokes about being ready for that night. Maybe if we’d stayed home, if we’d found out what had happened, it would have distracted us from our plot and Jake at least would still be alive.

But none of that matters now, of course. In the last five years I’ve come to understand the worthlessness of regret. How so much of what we do and say is just…it’s just shit. And I could blame the hollow-boned child that rides on my back, aping Andy and whispering in my ear. I could say my growing numbness to the pain of others, my growing appetite for inflicting the same, is just due to him worming his way into my ear, my mind, my heart, my soul.

But cruelty is best when its honest, and I can’t honestly say where it ends and I begin. All I know for sure is that it doesn’t matter anymore.

We have an agreement, he and I. Between a thing sometimes looking like a child with bird bones and hard, cold fingers that never relent and a young sir that doesn’t feel or look that young these days. A gentlemen’s agreement if you will.

Most of the time, he leaves me alone. Silently watches as I carry him from place to place, unseen and unfelt by anyone or anything other than me. Occasionally he’ll whisper and comment, sure, but it’s rare, and as with so many things, I’ve grown very good at ignoring it most of the time.

But once a year he gets a prize. It’s always on Halloween, though I don’t know if it’s because of the holiday itself or just because it was Halloween when I ate the egg and swallowed the rotting tooth that had been pulled from my real little brother’s skull. Because that, according to my constant companion, is exactly what I did. Either way, I have commitments that must be met each year, so each year I go out and find a suitable offering to give me another year of relative peace.

Tonight I’m sitting at the edge of a school gymnasium. I don’t have a child going to school there, of course. But it’s Halloween night and the school’s Fall Festival, and the place is so packed with people that no one notices a stranger that’s become good at not being noticed. I don’t mind what’s coming next, but I am stalling, and when I feel the impatient shift of weight on my back, I know what’s coming next. Andy’s voice, whispering in my ear.

“Pick my reward.”

Swallowing, I nod. There’s a little girl, probably about ten, sitting over on a bench by herself. She has the sad, lonely look of a child without many friends, and in my growing experience, those are often the easiest to trick.

So I go over and ask her if she’s in Mrs. Darcy’s class. I know that Mrs. Darcy teaches fifth grade from looking at the school website, so the odds that she knows her is pretty good. I can tell immediately that I’m right, the initial wariness at my approach already being eroded by the addition of something familiar.

“No, I’m in Mrs. Singer’s class. I wish I’d gotten Mrs. Darcy though.”

I nod. “She’s a really good teacher. I just met her last week—me and my little girl just moved here last week, and she’s going to be starting class on Monday…” I try to look slightly concerned. “Assuming she’s well-enough, that is.” I let it hang for a second, ready to pick back up the patter if I need to, but the girl takes the bait.

“What’s wrong with your daughter?”

I let out a sigh. “Just a bad flu. Started a couple of days ago. And I hate it, because she was really looking forward to coming tonight and starting to make friends. She doesn’t know anybody yet.” Giving a small laugh, I shake my head. “She even had me order these special candy eggs. They really are special, all the way from Europe. I brought them tonight and gave them to Mrs. Darcy to give out to her class, but of course I have an extra one too. It was going to be Monica’s…my daughter’s…but she’s home sick and can’t taste a thing. So I thought maybe I’d give it to someone else here. A gift from my daughter.” I smiled at the girl. “A future friend, maybe.”

The girl beamed, her eyes wide. “You said it’s from Europe?”

I nodded, pulling the orange foil-wrapped egg from my pocket. “Yep. Very expensive and rare. If I give it to you, you have to promise to not tell anyone else tonight. I don’t want them being jealous and being mad at Monica that she didn’t give everyone not in her class one. Okay?”

She grabbed the egg quickly, looking it over with an eager eye before looking up at me with embarrassment. “Oh, I’m sorry. Thank you, mister.”

I cocked my head a moment, listening to the damned thing on my bag chuckle and holding in my own laughter as I gave her a courtly nod.

“No, thank you, little miss.”

 

---

Credits