The Child Eater Read Online Free

fourteenth on a list of the “Fifteen Most Livable Cities,” there lived a man named Jack Wisdom. The name was unfortunate, because neither he nor his family were especially wise. Some unknown ancestor, they joked, must have done something smart, and now all they could do was try to survive having such a difficult name. “We have to be more normal than normal,” his father used to say, almost like a family slogan. Jack would roll his eyes when his father said that, annoyed for no reason he could understand.
    Once, when he was a boy in English class, Jack doodled a family coat of arms, with lots of crossed swords and elegant swirls, and a flowering tree. He’d seen this sort of thing in a book once, and now as he looked at it he thought it was pretty good. But then, as if he couldn’t help himself, he wrote across the top of the tree “More Normal Than Normal.” Jack stared at it, then crumpled the paper and stuck it in his backpack.
    Jack had not always lived in the fourteenth most livable city. He’d only moved there as a grown-up. Jack the boy lived in a housing development outside a town known only for a cough-drop factory and a halfway decent high school basketball team. Jack didn’t play basketball. He didn’t play any sport, really, though he liked to run and thought of trying out for track. But it was the running itself he liked, not having to makea competition out of it. Jack was never competitive, maybe because he had no brothers or sisters.
    Young Jack was thin and tall, with dark brown hair that would have been curly if he let it grow. He had bony shoulders and long skinny arms and large hands and feet. It was hard to buy clothes for him, his mother complained: either they were too big or the sleeves were too short. Jack hoped he didn’t look weird.
    Young Jack liked to play in the woods at the edge of the development. He would wander around between the trees, pretending a broken-off branch was a sword, or a fallen tree a fort. Sometimes he would sit very still, pretend he was a small tree or a stone. If he did it right, the animals got over their fear and came out in the open. Woodchucks and raccoons would wobble past him, deer would crash through the branches (it amazed him how noisy deer were), and now and then he’d see a fox or a coyote. People thought coyotes only lived in the desert, but Jack knew this wasn’t true.
    The only problem was, when he spent time in the woods with the animals he sometimes had bad dreams. They started when he was around eight, right around the time when he began to go into the woods. At first they were just glimpses—a sudden burst of fire, distant screaming, a stone room with rough walls and floors and no door to escape. Over time they became longer, and more detailed. In one dream, wild animals, coyotes and wolves and foxes, hunted down all the humans and locked them in cages underneath the streets. In another, dead people were coming back. Not ghosts or zombies, just themselves, except they didn’t know they were dead and wouldn’t believe it when anyone told them.
    Jack’s mother tried all sorts of things—no television after eight o’clock, no comics at all, no scary books. She removed such things as pepper, oregano and bay leaves from all her dishes and made sure Jack drank a full glass of warm milk before he went to bed. The dreams just continued.
    Jack’s mom suggested that maybe they should see a doctor, but Jack’s dad wouldn’t hear of it. “We’re Wisdoms, remember? Just imagine the jokes Jack would have to hear if people found out a Wisdom was getting his head shrunk.”
    “Maybe he just needs a pill or something,” Mom said.
    “No. No pills.”
    Jack’s parents didn’t think he could hear them but he could, even though they were in their bedroom with the door closed and he was downstairs with his homework. That night, when his mother brought him his milk he almost said, “Mommy, I don’t want any pills,” but instead he just drank