The Barbed Wire Boy
There is a child in the graveyard. It’s been there for a long time and it never stops crying.
It lives at the perimeter of the woodland cemetery, in that area perpetually darkened by the canopy of trees, the area that always seems to be shrouded in fog, no matter the weather and no matter the season. That fog at the edge of the graveyard is there to keep the child cold.
Sometimes, visitors to the graveyard will see it. Whether they are the stragglers milling around after the funeral, or kids there to desecrate the graves for a drunken laugh, or just the lonely bereaved visiting their family’s graves, sometimes they will pause in what they’re doing long enough to notice the huddled silhouette in the fog. And they will approach it and see what appears to be a bloody, sexless child, naked except for a grimy shroud, curled in a fetal position and quietly sobbing into the ground. Here, the visitor’s tentative footsteps speed up. They do not know what is happening, only that there is a little boy or a little girl, lost and alone and seemingly in pain, covered with glistening gore. Instinctively, they will feel a need to help this child. They will approach and place a comforting hand on the child’s shoulder.
They do not see the child’s foot. They do not see the black crow watching from the tree branch above. They do not know why the child is here.
The child’s dead body first entered the graveyard before 1940. The message on the grave, now illegible with decay, was probably the engraved remnants of a mother’s wishes, something about the angels weeping for a child taken too soon, a platitude about innocence preserved, going back into the gentle arms of the Heavenly Father. But as we know, the child has not gone to Heaven. Since its death, the child has never left the graveyard, and its punishment continues night after night.
If the graveyard visitor had looked down at the grave under the child’s body, they might have seen the curled and mangled horror that was once its foot. From the ankle down, the flesh is misshapen and twisted by the angry noose of roots wound around it, shackling the child to the ground. Hiding below in the bowels of the grave is something alive, something older than the graveyard itself, and its grip never weakens. The child has spent years trying to free itself, but with every tug, the knots tighten and dig in further until they reach the bone, causing the child constant pain. So the child sits there like the deformed afterbirth of the graveyard, an embryonic bloody shape bound to the earth by an umbilical cord of roots.
All the while, the crow watches from the tree branches above. Unlike the child, whose sex has been rendered unidentifiable from putrefaction, the crow is unambiguously female. And every morning she flies down and perches on top of the child’s hairless skull and pecks out both of its eyes. She flies back up and feeds the eyeballs to her own children in her nest, and over the course of the night, the child’s eyes slowly-slowly grow back, so that its torment may continue forever.
You probably want to help the child. You might be wondering what a child could do in its short life to deserve such a fate, or who it was that decided the judgment. Unfortunately, there are some things that history has erased, and probably for our benefit.
But whatever sin the child committed, it stays in the fog, quietly enduring its punishment. And with each passing day, the hate in the child’s heart grows more intense. Whatever innocence it ever had has now been polluted by pure, black hate. It feels nothing else anymore. It looks at the world around it, the faint outlines of the trees through the fog, and it makes its plans for the day when it will finally break free of its chain and destroy everything it sees.
And if it is you in the graveyard that day, if you are that unlucky visitor who sees a crying child and approaches it and tries to help, and you put your hand on its shoulder, the child will look up at you and smile.
You will have one moment to register the deep, hollow pits where its eyes should be.
And when that one moment is over, you try to back up, but you find yourself unable to tear your gaze away. You can feel yourself falling down and down into the darkness of those cavernous eyes, and the dark rises around you and fills up the sky, and the fall never ends, and you begin what will become a long, long scream.
The child is alone in the fog again. You are no longer there. You’re trapped in a dimension of darkness, and the child will make you share all of its pain. Forever.
The first time Winifred saw the boy, she knew she was destined to be his mother.
His picture stood on the desk immediately adjacent to Winifred’s, the only other desk in the office that she had gotten used to sharing for the past three years, tilted away in mirror image to Winifred’s own so that the two desks formed a sharp acute angle comporting with that of the floor-to-ceiling window they both peered out of. Like Winifred’s, the desk was gray and mostly sparse, except for the single framed photograph. From early arrival to departure, Winifred would steal glances at the photograph, and on the rare occasions when the other desk’s occupant was out of the room, she would leave her desk to peer at it up close.
The boy in the picture at the time of its taking was about five years old, though Winifred knew from conversation that he was now fourteen. The scene depicted a sunny autumn day, and the boy in corduroys and an anorak was being swept off his feet, clad in red sneakers that dangled in the air above the grass. It seemed to Winifred that all the light in the photograph was drawn toward him, highlighting his face, as if it were the center of the universe. That face was blond-haired and black-eyed and plastered with a grin so purely joyful that it infected Winifred’s own face every time she saw it.
Before she had started work at the facility, Winifred had seen many a little boy’s face when she walked in the city streets or parks that made her want to clutch them in her hands, grip their cheeks, and study the delicate contours of their features for hours on end. But those faces were all just specimens, holding scientific fascination. Seeing this face was like seeing a sunset that made you forget every other sunset you had ever seen, like it was the first thing you saw after coming out of a dark cave.
She tried to ignore the person holding the boy mid-embrace, but it was impossible for her eyes not to flicker intermittently in that direction. That face, though it was no less beautiful, was not so pleasurable for Winifred to look at, and the smile on that face was a direct antidote to the infectious effects of the other. This was usually the case with her fellow adults, who did not hold her interest or impress her nearly as much as their children did, but particularly so with this one. Not wanting to touch the photo for fear of knocking it over, she would hold her hand over that part of her vision and squint, trying to limit her view to just the five-year-old face that she loved so much. This forced her body into an awkward S-shape as she would totter slightly on her high heels, bending her knees to keep her face eye level with the picture. That the simple act of looking at a photograph was so complicated made it slightly more difficult to get her fix, and Winifred would still be unsatisfied when moments later, she had to return to her seat, and the other person in the picture would walk through the door, take her own seat, and ask Winifred if she had observed anything unusual while she’d been gone.
Sometimes, while they were working, Winifred would try to pry information from her coworker about the boy. This was made difficult by her perpetual uncertainty over how any question would sound outside her mind. All the stuff of unthinking, innocuous small talk — “How is Kevin doing? Is he still in eighth grade? What are his interests?” — seemed to radiate suspicion when one was asking with an ulterior motive. Winifred struggled with social interaction at the best of times, mainly because she actively avoided it, and so she had to carefully analyze each question in her mind, scanning for any hint of excessive eagerness or curiosity, before asking. She would ration herself, limiting her questions about Kevin to about three times a week to throw off the scent of being fixated on the subject, deliberately throwing in questions about things she had no interest in, like where her coworker had gone to college, what she had studied, whether she was still married.
Unfortunately for Winifred, Clementine was not the most loquacious coworker in the world. 'He’s doing fine,' would be the typical answer, the finality in the last syllable making it clear that no other information was forthcoming. Other answers would be similarly vague or monosyllabic: “No, just started ninth. Painting, mostly. Miskatonic, Class of ‘99. Biophysics. No.”
In the beginning, Winifred’s paranoia was such that she thought the bluntness was the result of suspicion, that despite her best efforts, Winifred had been asking too many questions and that the parental alarm bells were going off. But after the first few times she saw Clementine respond to a male coworker’s drinking invitation with a grunt, or give the junior scientists short and curt instructions without looking at them, or pick her teeth when the director was addressing the group, Winifred realized this was Clementine’s natural state. She seemed even more intensely allergic to other people than Winifred was, and outside of the photograph, Winifred never saw her smile. Together, she thought, they made an oddball pair: one unused to asking questions but determined for information, and the other putting up a giant wall of ice between her and anyone else.
Over the years, through a slow and torturous process much like gradually squeezing water from a gravestone, Winifred managed to extract a great deal of information about Kevin. And over the years, her loathing for Clementine grew.
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