Child's Play

  Child’s Play

  Andrew Neiderman

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1985 by Andrew Neiderman

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition May 2015

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-792-0

  Also by Andrew Neiderman

  After Life

  Duplicates

  The Maddening

  Perfect Little Angels

  Deadly Verdict

  The Magic Bullet

  The Solomon Organization

  Guardian Angel

  Teacher’s Pet

  Sight Unseen

  For Grandma Gittel, who taught me never to be afraid of the darkness.

  Whoever shall receive one of such

  children in my name, receiveth me:

  and whoever shall receive me, receiveth

  not me, but him that sent me.

  Gospel according to Mark

  Preface

  The darkness tormented him. He was afraid to move, afraid to utter a sound. He had lost track of time, but he was sure his father had already left him in here longer than usual. Light no longer seeped in under and around the doorway. The sun had gone down. Something moved behind him, but he didn’t turn. Then he felt what seemed to be warm fingers sliding over the back of his neck. There was a new odor, a putrescence that made his stomach churn in revulsion. He tried to hold his breath, but his lungs hurt.

  He could hear the scratching around the old field-stone foundation wall to his left. Something was either burrowing in or burrowing out; it didn’t matter. In his mind’s eye he saw the kind of night creature his father had often described to him—their eyes were always filled with fire, their lips thin and wormy, their teeth sharp, and their appetites ravenous; only their appetites involved the consumption of the soul. They fed on what was good. Parasitical, they sucked out your moral strength and left you naked and alone to face the cold, black evil that loomed above and about, anxious to seize you and take you forever into the flames of hell.

  “Sometimes,” his father had told him, “you can hear the screams of the dead.”

  He would take him out into the night and together they would stand near the lake and listen to the wind threading its way through the surrounding forest and over the silvery water.

  “Listen,” he said, “do you hear it, Alex? Do you hear the cries?”

  It got so he swore that he did. Sometimes at night, he would awake with a start and sit up in his bed. It was as though they were pressing their lips against his bedroom window. Most of the time what he heard sounded like gibberish, but often the voices told him the same sort of things his father told him. It was impossible to go back to sleep until they were gone.

  In the morning, when his mother couldn’t hear him, he told his father what had happened during the night. It pleased his father to know—and there was nothing he wanted more than to please his father.

  “It’s good they come to you, Alex,” his father said. “It means you are important; that you will have something important to do with your life. You will be a soldier in the battle against evil. It’s a great responsibility, Alex. You must live up to it. If I seem hard to you at times, you must understand.”

  “I understand, Papa,” he said.

  He understood, but he couldn’t help being afraid—not all the time. His father told him that some fear was good, anyway. Without the fear, we would make more mistakes; we would doom ourselves. Fear was a kind of teacher; from it we could learn. But fear by itself wasn’t enough; something had to come afterward. The lesson had to be learned.

  And so he was in the room again, alone in the dark, locked behind the old wooden door. He knew it had been his fault; he knew he had been wrong. Cindy Butler, who was in his fifth grade class, had come over to do the science project with him. She was his partner. He couldn’t help being happy about it because she was the prettiest girl in his class. It was just that sometimes she frightened him because she acted so much older than everyone else in the class. She had already started developing breasts, and Clarence Smallwood had told him that he had heard she had recently gotten her period.

  Everyone in the class knew what that meant. Sex education was part of the curriculum, but no matter how factually and how dryly it was presented to the students, there was still something magical about Cindy Butler’s getting her period. Her looks, her touch, even her laugh were different from the other girls’.

  Alex and she had gotten bored with their work on the project, and she had begun to tease him and flirt with him. She’d asked him questions and then made fun of his answers. He didn’t know anything, she told him. And then she said something that got him angry—she said he was afraid of her. He had denied it, and she’d challenged him.

  He had done it for so many reasons, mostly because she was curious and mostly because it excited him; although he told his father he had done it because he wanted to show her up. His father thought that was bad enough. He called it false pride, and he said pride could be the worst of all the sins, so he mustn’t escape punishment.

  Cindy had told him she would show him “hers,” if he would show her “his.” The proposition made his heart flutter. He felt the flush come into his face. He had thought about this before, even daydreamed about it in class, but whenever he had, he’d chastised himself and tried to fight off the images, tried to drive them back into the closets of his mind. And now, here she was suggesting it. It was as though she could read his thoughts, as though there was something magical about her after all.

  “I’m not afraid,” he said.

  “Then do it,” she taunted.

  “You first,” he said. She laughed, but she lifted her skirt and lowered her panties so quickly it was as though it were something she did often. He had half-hoped she would back down. She surprised and shocked him with her lack of hesitation. He hadn’t even allowed himself a long enough look.

  “Well?”

  His fingers trembled on his belt buckle and his zipper. She watched him, her face frozen in a smile of superiority. He lowered his pants and pulled his underwear down slowly. When it was over, she acted as though nothing significant had taken place. She talked about the science project again and then decided she had to go home.

  Her nonchalance frightened him. After she left, he went out to where his father was working on an old wooden lawn chair. For a few moments he said nothing. His father looked at him and then looked in the direction of the road, the direction Cindy Butler had taken to go home.

  “There’s something you want to tell me?” he asked. Alex nodded and bit his lower lip. He couldn’t keep the tears from welling up in his eyes. His father put his tools down and stood up straight, the power in his eyes growing stronger.

  “I did a bad thing,” Alex said, and then he told him.

  Now, all he could think about was getting out of the room. He considered going to the door, but he was afraid to move in the darkness. He was afraid of what might come between him and the entrance; and if his father found him there, crying and begging to be released, he would think he hadn’t learned; he hadn’t stood up to the evil.

  He wanted to think of something nice to take himself men
tally out of the room, but what he thought of made him even more afraid. He thought about Cindy Butler, and he saw her face before him in the darkness, almost phosphorescent. She was smiling at him tauntingly. He closed his eyes, but she slipped in under his lids. He had to get rid of her before his father came; he had to.

  He put the palms of his hands against his eyes and he pressed as hard as he could, as hard as he could stand it. It seemed to be working; she was falling away, falling…

  And then the whispering began. He took his hands away from his face quickly and listened. The voices of the damned were coming in under the door and coming in through the openings in the stone wall. They were gathering all around him, coming closer and closer. He wrapped his arms around himself and lowered himself to the hard dirt floor, pulling his knees up protectively. They were at him from all directions. He felt them getting in under the cuffs of his pants, moving up under the back of his shirt. They were at his ears and his nose. They wanted to get into him. He put his hands over his ears and he pressed his face down as hard as he could against his shoulder.

  The whispering went on until he couldn’t help but cry out. He screamed for his father. His father had forgotten him; his father didn’t realize what could happen. His father had left him alone at the mercy of the voices. They wouldn’t bother him as long as he was with his father, but now, here, in the darkness…he screamed again and again and again.

  And then the door was opened.

  He saw his father standing there, holding one lit candle. The light streamed out in all directions, and the voices went into a quick retreat. They went into the shadows; they went into the rocks; they even burrowed into the ground as his father came forward. Against the darkness, with the candle in his hand and the light below him, his father looked gigantic.

  “They were here, Papa, the voices. They came from everywhere.”

  “I know,” he said. “I sent them to you.”

  “You sent them?”

  “You weren’t learning, Alex. The room and the darkness wasn’t enough, and you did a terrible thing.”

  “I’m sorry, Papa. I’m sorry.” His father took a step back and Alex began to panic. “Can’t I come out now, Papa? Please.”

  There was a moment of silence during which Alex felt his heart might beat through his chest. Then his father lifted the candle higher, sending the light toward the ceiling. He seemed to be looking for something in the darkness, something that would confirm what he thought.

  “You must understand,” he said, “that what I do, I do for you because I love you.”

  “I understand, Papa.”

  “Just as you will do for your own children someday.”

  “I will, Papa. I will.”

  His father looked down at him. He took another step back. Then he quenched the candlelight with his fingers, dropping himself and Alex back into the darkness.

  “It’s not time yet, Alex. A little longer,” he said and backed out of the door.

  Alex heard the door close. He clutched himself, trying desperately not to scream.

  1

  Alex opened the car door for her. Neither of them could contain their excitement, but Alex was particularly buoyant. The last time Sharon had seen him look nearly as happy was the time he came home to tell her their investment in the computer company had tripled in value. But then again, from the day she had married him, Sharon couldn’t think of any decision that Alex had made that had turned out wrong. Few men had his insight, his patience when it came to studying investments, and his perception when it came to people. She had full faith in everything he did, and although many women might criticize her for doting on him and treating him more like her “savior” than her husband, she couldn’t help admiring him and being proud that he was her husband. Some women actually resented her for being so dependent upon him. They thought it was unhealthy. She sometimes felt they avoided her because of it. But that didn’t matter. What mattered was that Alex did succeed; they were financially comfortable, and their lives were relatively free from conflict. Those other women were just jealous.

  And now they’d be even more jealous because Alex had made a decision that would bring them the one thing they didn’t have: children. They were going to take in a foster child.

  “I stood out there,” he had said one afternoon; “looking out over our grounds and the lake and this big old tourist house, and I said to myself, what is it we need here? What is it this place should have? There should be noise here—the good old-fashioned noise of laughter and activity.”

  At first she hadn’t understood. “You want to start the business again?” she’d asked him.

  “Oh no, not that kind of noise.” He laughed. “I’m talking about the laughter of children.”

  “But Alex, the doctor told us…”

  “I’m talking about taking in children, not having them.”

  “You mean adopting?”

  “Not necessarily adopting. What about the foster children program?”

  “Oh.” She had to smile. It always amazed her how Alex could simply come up with an important new idea, just like that. “Do you really think that we could?”

  “Of course. We’re qualified. Look at all the room we’ve got.”

  Once again, he was right. The next day when Sharon spoke to Mrs. Hoffman, the head of the Child Protection Agency, on the phone, the woman told her she only wished all the potential guardians had what Alex and she had to offer. Sharon was flattered. And she was becoming genuinely excited. The only thing that made her hesitate was the fact that the boy they wanted to place with them was already fourteen years old.

  “Fourteen’s not old, Sharon,” Alex told her. “It’s a very impressionable age.”

  “He’s a teenager, Alex. Let’s not fool ourselves about that.”

  “More of a challenge,” Alex replied. He had a way of making everything seem simple.

  “Well…if you think it’s OK…”

  “I wouldn’t get us into anything we couldn’t handle,” he said, and she believed that.

  Now, on the way to the agency to meet the boy for the first time, she couldn’t help feeling nervous. If only she could be more like Alex, she thought. He never seemed to worry. There he sat, perfectly straight, shoulders back. His face was so still it looked sculptured. All of the lines were fine, the features in perfect proportion. He was good looking, but not pretty-faced. There was nothing candylike about Alex. He could have been a model, but not a manikin. Sharon always thought he was too handsome for her. It wasn’t that she had an inferiority complex or that she was terribly ugly. Alex just looked like he belonged with movie stars or on television. He had television eyes. Whenever he had taken group photographs, people were invariably drawn to his face in the picture.

  She looked out her window and down at the highway. The macadam liquefied. It was as though they were skimming over grey water. She did feel as though she were moving in a dream, and when she looked back at Alex, he looked far-off. He had that half-smile on his face that indicated he was well submerged in his own thoughts.

  Alex could draw an invisible shell around him, she thought. He could create his own mental cocoon. It was eerie sometimes—as though he had left his body sitting there and gone off somewhere in another body. And when he came back, he would just blink and begin in the middle of some paragraph or some thought. He did it so casually it made her question her own awareness. Maybe she was the one who had drifted off and all the while he had been talking.

  She could imagine his thoughts now. His face had that look of determination. Alex has already arrived there, she thought. He moved into the future and he knew the conversations that were about to begin. How else could he anticipate what people would say and think so well? Sometimes, Sharon thought Alex had the power to read people’s minds.

  “Oh no,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I forgot to let Dinky out. He’s been in all day.”

  “We’re not going to be gone that long. Y
ou know,” he said, turning to her, “if you treat the foster child as well as you treat that dog, we’ll probably be given some kind of an award.”

  “Oh Alex. I don’t treat the dog any different than other people treat their dogs.”

  “Oh no?” He began to mimic her. “Oh Alex, isn’t it too cold out for Dinky? Alex, go see if Dinky wants to come in. Alex, why is Dinky so tired today?”

  “All right, all right.”

  “That’s another reason why we need children around, Sharon.”

  “I’ve been thinking though, Alex; I hope you’re prepared for the fact that foster children have special problems?” She hoped he was, she thought, because she certainly wasn’t.

  “All children have special problems. I had special problems,” he replied.

  “But you were so much younger when your parents adopted you.”

  “Yes, and I’ll never forget what it felt like the first time I was brought up to the Manor and I saw how big it was and what I would have as a home. Can you imagine the excitement this boy will feel? Half the time he didn’t have his own room, much less a three-story building to romp in, and a lake with eighty-seven acres.”

  “I know,” she said. How wonderful it was, she thought, that Alex could get so much pleasure from giving someone else pleasure. It warmed her heart to see it, and she was happy she hadn’t put up any resistance to the plan, even though she had some real reservations about it. Anyway, she thought, whatever problems they would have, Alex would solve them. She was confident of that.

  She sat back again. They drove on through Sandburg and down county road 42, one of the main thoroughfares in this part of the Catskills. It was late September, and the great tourist area had returned to its semiconscious state, a state that Alex preferred even though the area had such a deserted look to it. Billboards were stripped; many stores closed down; summer homes were boarded up; and traffic, not only very light, was practically nonexistent in some places. To her the community looked as though it was being quarantined.