Where Evil Resides

Keep your children close - the forest calls...

The wheel of the red tricycle still spins sometimes, as though it is remembering the days when it was ridden with vigor through the streets. It is no longer ridden with vigor; in fact, it is not ridden at all. The little boy that used to ride it does not live in that house anymore. Some might say the white house with the red door on Cherry Lane is the loneliest on the street, even though people still occupy it. The little boy’s mother and father still live there, though perhaps live is a loose term. They exist there, shells of themselves, hearts empty now that their child is no longer there to fill them and bind them together. People used to wonder where the child went. There one day, gone the next. Not spoken about, but whispered about if you listened to the wind rustling the leaves just right. People will tell you the boy ran off, lost and confused at his young age. The forest will tell you the boy was taken.

Something came out of the forest on the eve of some dark, terrible night. It crept and crawled; it slithered and tiptoed. It went right up to the edge of the forest, for it was forbidden to leave. And it called out, in whatever devilish language it could, beckoning the lost, the lonely and the afraid. The little boy fit none of these categories. He was loved by family, adored by friends. He was smart, capable, funny, creative and strong-willed. He was fearless and his smile was so bright and full of innocent joy that it could drive Satan himself to his knees.

The boy answered the call nonetheless. He skipped and ran and toddled towards the edge of the forest, something in his chest tugging him towards the whispering voice of the thing in the woods. The breath of the thing tousled his hair, blond strands falling into blue eyes. The little boy looked up at the thing, and a laugh rose in his throat, bursting out in giggles that seemed too big for a mouth so small. The thing watched as the boy laughed; it was not accustomed to being laughed at. The thing touched a claw to the boy’s chest, the sharpened tip that had brought death and suffering to many now brought a lopsided smile to a boy who could barely speak in articulated sentences. When the thing touched the boy, he felt it - the same ice that filled the thing filled the boy as well. The thing leaned closer to the boy, looking into his eyes, registering the emptiness within them. The blue, glittering orbs flashed as the boy laughed, but not with mirth. They flashed with violence. They flashed with images of death, destruction and rampage. They flashed with the things that lived in the boy’s soul. As the thing looked into the boy’s eyes, it discovered that the things in the boy’s soul were it - the boy was him and he was the boy and they were the purest forms of evil to walk the Earth alongside each other.

The thing marveled at the boy. In all its ugliness and slime, in all its creeping and crawling and pain and torture, the thing had never seen a soul such as this. One so black, one so evil that it rivaled the thing’s own. And perhaps, the thing thought, that is where true evil lives. In the biggest of smiles, in the loudest of laughs, in the brightest of eyes - that is where evil resides.

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