The Child Eater Read Online Free Page A

silently. His mom looked about to cry and he didn’t want to upset her.
    That night Jack had one of his scariest dreams. It started out all right. He was walking in the woods, watching some birds fly in and out of the branches. Something large flew overhead, big enough to move a chill shadow across the path. Jack looked up to see if it was an eagle (he would have heard it if it was a plane) and for a moment he thought it was a man. Not hang-gliding or parachuting, but actually flying. But the sun made it hard to see, and then it was gone.
    When he looked down again he was standing in front of a clump of gnarled, lifeless trees, their branches so entwined, like thick cables, it was impossible to see between them. When he looked at them a sick fear flooded his body, but he didn’t know why. He wanted to run away, to wake up, but instead he kept looking. He could see something, a flash of light.
    And then he saw a face, just that, skin all golden, surrounded by tight black curls, the eyes closed, the lashes so long they almost reached down to the tops of the cheekbones. Jack couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman and didn’t care, he had never seen anything so perfect.
    At first he thought a black tree trunk obscured the body, but then he realized it was a pole, polished ebony. The body wasn’t hidden—it didn’t exist. That wondrous head slept atop a black column hidden in the trees, had slept so long that dust, like flecks of gold, had gathered on the eyelids.
    In his dream, Jack turned his head away for just a moment, but when he looked again the trees and the head had gone and he was standing in a high-ceilinged room, very cold, with a black and white marble floor and some kind of mural on the ceiling. Angels or something, like on the History Channel. He ignored them to look around for the perfect head on its ebony perch.
    Now there was not one head but many, all on poles, all in shadows along the walls. Only, they were not beautiful. Their faces were twisted in pain. They were all children, Jack saw, the severed heads of boys and girls the same age as himself. Some were old and dried out—not justbloodless, but the skin shriveled and cracked. Others still had blood dripping from their necks, like fresh meat behind the butcher counter at the supermarket.
    And now they all turned, and Jack realized they could see him. Get out of here , he told himself, but he couldn’t move. “Jack, Jack,” they chanted, “don’t go back. Stay and heal the broken crack.”
    “I can’t,” he said. “I’m not the one.”
    “Jack!” they all shouted together. “Help us!”
    “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, “ I don’t know how .”
    He woke up screaming, unable to move his body. He strained to free himself before he realized it was just his father’s arms around him.
    “It’s all right,” his dad said. “It’s okay.”
    “No,” Jack said. “I’ve got to go back.”
    “It was just a dream.”
    “But those kids. I’ve got to—”
    “Shh,” his father said, and held Jack so tightly the boy could hardly breathe. “It’s just a dream, it doesn’t mean anything.”
    “But I have to—”
    “No. You don’t have to do anything but forget it. Just leave it and it’ll go away. I had scary dreams too when I was a boy. Everyone in this family has them. They don’t mean anything.”
    It was Jack’s father who first thought it might be the woods. He didn’t know about the animals so he just wondered if maybe it was not good for a “normal boy like Jack” to spend so much time alone, in what Dad called “kind of a primitive state.”
    Jack didn’t want to dream anymore, and he wanted to listen to his father, so he stopped going to the woods, stopped going out much at all after school, only watched TV or played on his hand-held Nintendo. Sometimes his mother would look at him with a pinched face and suggest he go outside, or call up a friend for a play date. Jack just shrugged and said, “I’m