The Boy Who Couldn't Fly Straight (The Broom Closet Stories)

by Jeff Jacobson

  A moan slipped from his lips, and a small puff of white vapor floated from his mouth and hung in the air in front of his face. Charlie watched it for a moment, fascinated, while a part of him mourned the loss of the rich, all-encompassing power.

  The vapor slid into his nostrils, causing him to sneeze. His head jerked to the side, and he saw Malcolm, standing still, not watching anything, just staring at the far wall. He forgot who Malcolm was for a moment. But as the surge a of power continued to wash away from him, and his mind sharpened in focus, he began to remember. He remembered that Grace was using Malcolm somehow to find more children, find them and turn them over to her so that she could drain them dry, leaving them sitting on chairs like corpses.

  The way the three of them had just drained a large quantity of energy from Todd Laramie, the basketball player.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Charlie thought in a panic. ‘I didn’t mean to. Did I just…?’

  Yes. Yes, he had. The life force that they had just drunk was now gone from Todd, as if they’d eaten months off of his life span, or maybe even years. Charlie knew in his gut that the boy could never get that vitality back.

  He looked over at the line of children against the wall, sitting zombie-like and captive, waiting to be used by Grace as nothing more than power boosters.

  Charlie felt his skin crawl. He had just been forced to drink a portion of Todd Laramie’s actual life. What’s worse, a part of him had liked the power, had wanted more, hadn’t wanted it to stop. But now that it had stopped, Charlie knew it for what it was: stealing, siphoning away someone’s life, the worst kind of violation.

  Even though he still didn’t understand how he fit into their plans, he knew that Grace and Thomas wanted to make Charlie help them, to maybe drain all of the children, and mostly likely many more.

  He felt his head shake from side to side.

  “No,” his mouth formed the silent word. He wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t steal like that again, and he wouldn’t be a part of any plan that would let the witches steal from children.

  ‘It’s time then, isn’t it?’ he said inside his mind. ‘It’s time to fight.’

  As if from far away, he heard Grace’s voice, pleasant and matter-of-fact.

  “Let’s continue, then. Let’s see if Thomas’s theory about you being a strong conduit is right.”

  Before Charlie could stop them, hands were one again placed on his head.

  “No!” he tried to scream. “I won’t let you. I can’t…”

  A violent lurch. He was no longer in the basement.

  He gasped as the dropping sensation came on again, only this time much stronger. This time it felt like he’d been tossed from a cliff.

  Something shadowy encircled his face as he fell, hissing in his ears. A cold wind stippled his skin in gooseflesh, and dark shapes darted beyond his line of vision.

  Pleasure flooded his senses, filling him with a longing so sharp that it almost hurt. He reached out to grab at something, anything, for balance, and then his feet landed on what seemed like solid ground. The euphoria increased, but this time a pall of anguish, like dark ink, sullied its surface. At first he couldn’t figure out why it was there.

  And then, as clearly as if someone had flipped on a light switch, Todd Laramie now stood less than two feet from him on a vast expanse of arid land. The sky overhead glowed silver, and the air threatened to suffocate him with its heat. Todd’s eyes, alert, were staring at Charlie. He didn’t look like a wasted zombie anymore. He stood tall and hale. But something was wrong. Tears began to run down the boy’s face. His mouth moved, as if trying to speak, but Charlie couldn’t make out what he was saying. He looked so incredibly sad right then, so grief-stricken, that Charlie felt his own heart lurch in torment without knowing why. Drops of brown-red blood began to seep from Todd’s neck, and he shook his head slowly, as if surrendering something. As if giving up.

  Charlie reached out and touched the boy’s neck, diverting one streamlet of blood onto his index finger. He heard his own sharp intake of breath. It was as if he had been parched with thirst for days at a time, only to finally drink from a cool glass of water. He could feel his skin cells, his organs, his nerve endings, being slaked.

  Having drunk his fill, he pulled his hand away from Todd’s neck. The look of grief dissipated from the boy’s face, replaced by a blank stare. Then he shuddered once, closed his eyes, and collapsed in a heap to the dry ground.

  Charlie stared at the boy’s crumpled form at his feet. What? What happened? Why was he…?

  Charlie squatted down on the ground and gave Todd’s shoulder a slight shake, already knowing the boy wouldn’t, couldn’t respond.

  “Todd, wake up! Todd, it’s okay! Come on, wake up. Wake up!” he managed to squeak out before his throat squeezed closed. Tears stung his eyes as he shook the boy harder.

  Charlie groaned, patting at the boy’s shoulder, his arm. He looked around for help, but only saw sand, stretching for miles beneath the silvery sky. He tried to grab for Words, Words which could enter his mouth and reverse what he feared had just happened. But none came. Only the sounds of his own whimpering, his cowardly denial, falling from his lips like an August rain too late to save the failed crops.

  Todd Laramie was dead. Charlie had sucked at his life force just as it was leaving the boy’s body. He had stolen from this young man again, had taken his very essence from him, and the proof of it lay in the lifeless body at Charlie’s feet. It didn’t matter that the witches forced him into it. The boy was dead and Charlie had participated in his death.

  His hands flew to his mouth in horror, as a wail began to build in his throat. But before he could make a sound, his eyes snapped open. He found himself once again on the chair in the basement. He couldn’t make sense of what he saw in front of him. Todd still sat on the chair opposite him, Grace and Thomas still on either side, eyes closed as they rode their waves of pleasure. At first he thought that the boy was smiling. But his smile was wrong. It was too wet, too red, and the angle was strange.

  The boy wasn’t smiling. His head rested back against the chair. His throat had been cut wide open. It wasn’t a mouth that Charlie saw, but a fatal gash administered by the knife Claudia held in her hand where she now stood behind the boy, morbid glee dancing in her eyes.

  Blood had gushed down Todd’s front, along Claudia’s arm. There were patches of it on Grace’s face, more smeared over the front of Thomas’s white shirt.

  “No! No no no no no!” Charlie began yelling. He tried to stand up, for he wanted to run away, to be free of these power-hungry murderers, and even more strongly, to acquit himself of any role he’d played in Todd’s death. But Tony held Charlie to his chair, and Grace and Thomas kept their hands, the ones not grasping onto Todd’s body, pressing down on Charlie’s head, maintaining a buzzing circuitry and forcing Charlie to stay locked within it.

  There was no escaping, no fleeing from the horror of Grace’s world. He couldn’t run away. The witches had forced Charlie into a nightmare of violence and death. He couldn’t free himself from it. Nor could he ever again pretend that it didn’t exist.

  But he had to do something. Hadn’t he decided that he was going to fight?

  If he couldn’t get away from these people, then what could he do?

  In that moment, deep inside himself, below the horror of Todd’s murder and his own part in it, underneath his own hopelessness at ever escaping from Grace and this hellish basement, even beneath the deep, troubling satisfaction of being filled with the dead boy’s life force, Charlie glimpsed a small window of opportunity. It seemed too easy, too implausible, but just maybe, if he acted quickly, he could slip through that window while it was still open.

  Chapter 80

  Before he could talk himself out of it, Charlie gave a sharp shout and lurched forward in his chair, slamming his right hand on the top of Thomas’s head, his left hand on Grace’s. Their eyes flew open, and he heard Claudia shout, “No!”

  But it was to
o late.

  Charlie’s hands interrupted the flow of power. With Todd’s life force completely gone, the circuitry sputtered and popped, then reversed direction, searching for and finding the only other sources of vitality left in the closed loop: Grace and Thomas. Twin screams erupted as the loop began to suck power from the witches and dump its entirety into Charlie.

  The sheer vastness of the power shooting into his body threatened to overwhelm him, to tear him from limb to limb, but he bore down on the rush, sure that he had to take this risk if he wanted to put a stop to things. By keeping his hands on the witches and draining them, they were as helpless to escape as he had been only moments prior.

  In the split second before Tony could pull Charlie back and break the circuit he’d just created, everything else seemed to come to a standstill, as all the knowledge available to him sped into his veins like an injection from a hypodermic needle.

  And just like he knew everything about Todd Laramie, he now knew everything about Thomas and Grace.

  Or very nearly everything.

  Images, emotions, colors and sensations, plots rife with murder and darkness, flooded through him.

  He couldn’t comprehend everything at once, for too many things were flashing too quickly through his mind. But with the onslaught of information came an ability to navigate it, so he narrowed his focus, as if he were taking quick gulps from a torrent of fetid water.

  Grace. He had known she was formidable, had known that she was power-hungry and untrustworthy, but now he saw more clearly into the vast network of her machinations, saw into her heart, empty of even an ounce of benevolence, and knew her wrathful and cunning ways, surpassed by nothing other than an endless ache of single-minded greed.

  Charlie felt himself yanked along the twisted trails of her thoughts, grasping more of her motivations and schemes.

  He plunged into a pocket of her memory, where she was having a conversation with Thomas about whether or not Charlie would be as useful to her plot as Thomas thought he could be. She had her doubts, but was willing to try, if the boy could somehow give her the boost of power she so craved.

  Another pocket pulled Charlie in. This time he saw Malcolm through Grace’s eyes, standing outside the gate to his property on Snoqualmie Pass, bending over his rickety old mailbox and looking for mail. Four shadows emerged from the forest and crept toward Malcolm from four different sides. The crunch of gravel alerted Malcolm, who spun around, just as Claudia threw what looked like a cloud of yellow dust at his head. Grace and the others ran out of the way as Malcolm raised his hands above his head, but he crumpled to the ground before he could protect himself. Charlie watched as Grace ordered Thomas and Tony to pick up Malcolm’s unconscious form and carry him into a shiny black car parked nearby.

  Charlie dove deeper into Grace’s psyche, looking for more of her secrets. This time there were no words, no scenes, just a realization: Grace planned to kill off Thomas, as well as Claudia, and Tony, once her system of semi-popped teenagers was complete. They knew too much, and were more of a hassle than useful, but until things were set, she needed them.

  Charlie bumped up against a small cluster of Grace’s thoughts and motivations that would not open to him, as if they were behind a locked door. He tried to break the cluster open, but it wouldn’t budge. A voice in his head pressed him to try harder, to gain access to Grace’s innermost thoughts. But the dark pocket she had hidden away remained inaccessible. He was mostly relieved, because he sensed that if he did manage to get inside the cluster, it would be like falling into a radioactive cesspool of toxicity and madness.

  Charlie released himself from Grace’s thoughts, and felt himself thrown forward, lost, scrambling for a foothold somewhere, until…

  Thomas. Snapshots and thoughts flooded into Charlie’s mind, less cogent and more fragmented than Grace’s had been.

  Thomas believed in Charlie. Or at least, he believed in his own sense of superiority, which clouded his judgment. He held tightly to the notion that because Charlie was of his own blood, that he was the powerful conduit they needed for their plans.

  Charlie waded through the detritus of pride and arrogance until he found what he was looking for: the truth of Thomas’s claims of paternity, coming at him in flashes and blurry memories.

  A much younger Thomas, discovering Charlie’s mother as a teenager, hiding in a different basement from the one in which Charlie was being held captive.

  “What, how…how could you do that?” his mother stuttering, a look of pleading and abject horror on her young face.

  “Get her out of here!” Grace whispering. “Her father’s upstairs! We can’t let him find her down here!”

  Thomas dragging his mother into a side room, her shouts of, “Dad! Dad!” muffled by his hand over her mouth.

  “You thought you could sneak in here and spy on us?” Thomas sneering at Elizabeth, then striking her upside the head, with Grace’s voice carrying down the staircase from the living room above: “Demetrius, how nice to see you again.”

  The sound of clothes tearing, a bare shoulder, Thomas pressing down on top of the wide-eyed, teenaged Elizabeth, her cries further stifled by her own sweater pressed over her lips, her hands slapping at his face.

  Muted screams, grunting, more exposed skin, the flashing of teeth.

  Thomas, red-cheeked and gloating, resting against the side of a sofa to catch his breath.

  Elizabeth’s foot connecting with Thomas’s groin, icepicks of pain stabbing in his gut.

  “Bitch!” Thomas screaming, squeezing his eyes shut and falling to his right side.

  Elizabeth’s form flickering, fading to a shadow.

  A door to the backyard opening, a gray shape slipping outside.

  “Let her go!” A man’s voice hissing at Thomas from outside the room. “Bigger fish to fry.”

  “Run!” Someone shouting from far away, throat squeezing with the threat of tears, Charlie recognizing it as his own voice after a short while.

  Charlie shook his head, releasing Thomas’s thoughts.

  For a quick moment, he only felt relief, the relief of being free from the witches’ sullied minds and memories.

  Then the realization hit him in a flash, as the blanks in his mother’s story filled in.

  She had stumbled upon the witches using deathcraft, and learned of their plot to sell it to her own father, Demetrius, in exchange for his access to the Seattle coven.

  She had fled, but not before being overpowered by Thomas.

  This was why she had left Seattle, why she never wanted to come back, why she never told Charlie about his father.

  All of this information, all of Grace’s scheming, Thomas’ violent act, Charlie’s origins, all of it organized itself in Charlie’s head in less time than it took to blink his eyes. It surged through Charlie’s cells, his mind, as he sucked away at the power and knowledge inside the witches’ heads.

  In the next second there were three more things that Charlie learned.

  One of them was that he wasn’t special. Thomas had been wrong. There was nothing unique about him, no talent imbedded in him to be the conduit that Thomas had hoped he would be. Charlie wasn’t sure how he knew this, for the truth of it wasn’t rooted in his father’s heart or Grace’s mind, but he knew it to be true just the same.

  The second thing was that even though he was not a conduit, Charlie had inadvertently gained vast knowledge and power just now from the witches. Not because he was special, but because he had turned the tables on them and stolen from them the way they had been stealing from their captives. He had taken advantage of the situation and now knew nearly everything that they did.

  And the third thing was this: he could use the knowledge that he had just stolen from the witches to defeat them. He didn’t know how yet, didn’t know if he was capable of doing it, but knew that he had what he needed to try.

  Ignoring the agonized grunts of the witches subdued beneath his hands, he saw doorways inside of him opening,
watched as new kinds of Words rushed down hallways toward him, finding his lips, his mouth, coalescing inside of him into such a savage build-up of potency that he feared his head would explode.

  In the split second it took for him to gain all of this vast knowledge, just before Claudia and Tony could get their hands on Charlie and break the circuit, he opened his mouth and unleashed the Words.

  Claudia, hand flashing toward Charlie as she prepared to bury her knife into his heart, flew backwards through the air and crashed into the far corner, her weapon clattering to the floor. Strips of material tore loose from an old couch nearby and sailed toward her, binding her mouth, her arms, her legs.

  Tony’s hands barely touched the back of Charlie’s neck before a funnel of water erupted from the floorboards and engulfed the man, lifting him several feet off the ground and spinning him in a sickening blur. As the funnel began to slow down, several pieces of heavy furniture from different parts of the room arced through the air and descended on Tony, flattening him to the ground as he screamed in gargled agony. Charlie could hear bones breaking.

  Without pausing to consider his actions, Charlie turned his head and looked at the back two walls, focusing on the kids sitting in their chairs. He felt parts of him extending, like long tongues, licking at the teens the way a mother cat licks her kittens. Soon their eyes lost their dull stares as they jerked awake. Some of them fell forward, too weak to remain sitting. Some of them shook their heads and rubbed their faces with their hands, trying to understand where they were.

  Charlie swept his gaze along the walls, waking them all, freeing them, one at a time. He passed over Todd’s body slumped in the chair opposite him, knowing it was too late for the boy. His gaze reached Malcolm, and he watched as the man’s body shuddered, watched as his face came alive with awareness.