THE BOY IN THE RUSTED MERCEDES nosleep

I’m unsure if this post is against the rules because unlike most of the stuff that gets posted here, my story has a happy ending and is only scary for the first half, but I felt like if I didn’t write it down, I’d go crazy. It’s about a crime I witnessed, which I believe is creepy enough to warrant being shared in /r/nosleep, especially if you imagine (like I do) all the ways this particular story could have gotten worse.

 

I’ll start with quote that I’ve always loved (and have, until recently, always mistakenly attributed do Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.)

 

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. – Edmund Burke

 

THE BOY IN THE RUSTED MERCEDES

 

I almost didn’t see the boy run into the middle of the road.

 

I had a cold and I was reaching for a Kleenex. When I noticed him, right there in my peripheral because I’d turned my head away from the windshield like an idiot, I got flabbergasted. My foot jolted onto the gas instead of the brake. In that moment, the boy and I stared at one another, terrified, each of us sure our life, in its own way, was about to end. But I braked in time. And despite the rain and the wet road and the awful screeching, I skidded to a stop with a few feet to spare

 

I should have been upset.

 

The boy had run into street without warning. But it’s hard to be angry at little kids. He had an overgrown bowl haircut. I remembered them fondly from when I was his age. He also had a sort of miniature California surfer look. Tan skin and golden hair. This was the type of boy I could just intuit would be a future ladykiller.

 

There in the road and the rain, he cried and he shook, and at first I thought this was from the fear of our near-death encounter, but his red, puffy eyes suggested he’d been crying for some time.

 

He raised his hand and waved in the most timid way, just a twitch of the arm and fingers. He was saying something too, but between my closed windows and the music blasting from my speakers, I couldn’t hear. I waved back. But now the boy wasn’t looking at me. His father had charged into the street and taken him by the wrist.

 

The man gave me an embarrassed smile. He waved in a much more confident manner than his son. Thank you, the wave said. Thank for stopping.

 

I nodded and returned the smile. Polite obligation. I didn’t want to. There was something about the man’s smile I disliked. It had nothing to do with the stained teeth. The smile was forced. I could tell by the guy’s eyes. In genuine smiles, your eyes usually squint. But here was this guy, eyes as wide as his mouth.

 

I strummed my fingers against the wheel, waiting for the pair to cross the street.

 

They didn’t.

 

The man, still smiling, still waving, pulled his sobbing son back to the sidewalk from which they’d come, to a gray, rusted Mercedes parked along the curb.

 

Since they were no longer in the road, I accelerated forward. I was purposely slow about it. Something felt off. The man opened the driver side door and shepherded his boy in, and all the while, the boy struggled against his grip.

 

Kid’s just throwing a temper tantrum, I told myself. Dad’s trying to take him home and he doesn’t want to go.

 

The man kept waving to me with his free arm, a gesture that had become as artificial as his smile, and I drove onward.

 

But I only made it two blocks before I stopped.

 

Questions. Questions, questions, questions.

 

If his dad’s car was right there, why had the boy tried to cross the street? Had he been running from his dad? Was that why his father needed to force him into the car via driver-side door: any other way would have meant temporarily losing ahold of the child?

 

And the worst question of all: what if that hadn’t been the boy’s father?

 

It couldn’t have been a child-abduction, I thought. Not in broad daylight. But then I recalled that story where a woman was raped while 30+ people listened, none of the bystanders doing anything because they were convinced it couldn’t be what it sounded like.

 

I turned into a residential side street and pulled a U-y . At the stop sign, I idled and waited for the Mercedes to pass. Maybe I was being silly. Reading too much into this and wasting time. Plus, there was no guarantee the man wouldn’t drive in the opposite direction he had been parked. In which case I’d call the police, report my suspicion, and curse myself for not getting a license plate number. But that’d mean going back to my apartment since I never brought my phone to the gym. Luckily my apartment wasn’t far. I’d have jogged the mile to the fitness center if it hadn’t been raining.

 

Two cars passed. Neither of them the Mercedes.

 

Was I being ridiculous? Never mind my apartment. I could continue on to the gym and use their phone, tell the police, you know, it’s probably nothing, but over there by Sycamore Drive and James Road I saw what could—

 

And then there it was: the gray monstrosity.

 

A huge dent ran along the passenger side. I saw the boy through the window, pounding his little fists on the glass, trapped in the mechanical beast that had swallowed him whole, and I knew then I wasn’t being silly.

 

I’d made the right choice.

 

Something was definitely wrong.

 

Hang on, buddy, I thought, pulling out behind them. I reached for that tissue I’d never been able to grab. The excitement had reopened the floodgates. I’d never done this before. Pursued a car. This wasn’t me. What exactly did I plan to do when this man got to his house? And what if the man lived an hour outside the city? Or even further? What would happen if he noticed I was tailing him?

 

I resolved this last issue by letting an SUV slip between the Mercedes and me. The rust discoloration made the vehicle easy to spot. We approached a highway on-ramp and I tensed up. This would be the moment of truth; there was no telling where we were headed if the greasy-haired man got on the highway. But the Mercedes traveled past.

 

Although I was uncomfortable in this position I’d been thrown—vigilante; hero; whatever you wanted to call it—at least fate sided with me. The man didn’t live far. When the Mercedes pulled into the driveway, we were three/ three-and-a-half miles from where I had witnessed the abduction.

 

The man’s home was a bland square in need of a new paint job, and the weedy yard was in as much disrepair as his car. I parked a couple houses away, hoping the man wouldn’t recognize how the red van from earlier was now in his neighborhood.

 

I could tell something must have happened during their drive. Some kind of threat had been made, because although the man still had to practically drag the boy to the door, the boy no longer screamed. No longer did anything that might attract the attention of a neighbor. Assuming any neighbors were present to hear, seeing as it was 2:30 on a Tuesday.

 

I felt sick. Beyond the cold. I sniffled and reached for a new tissue. If I didn’t do something, I was going to puke out my anxiety. The coward in me was thinking, You know where he lives. Go into one of these other houses, find someone who’s home or just break in and call the police. But that would be a delay. I imagined the boy’s bronze skin fully exposed. I saw the man smiling his rotten smile, turning golden skin bruised and red, and I knew I couldn’t wait.

 

Outside the smell of dog shit pierced my congested nose. Two mutts barked at me, jumping and rattling against their chain-link fence. I hurried past. Soon I was slinking beside the rusted car and around the kidnapper’s house. I figured I best go through a window, but then I doubled back. Why waste time? Hoping it wasn’t locked—and it wasn’t—I entered through the front door.

 

The door’s ragged weatherseal scraped the floor. Loud. It would have given me away if not for the running blender.

 

Hearing the machinery terrified me. Mangled fingers. Bone fragments. These were the images in my head as I sprinted toward the sound. I found the kitchen. There was no boy-slushy. There was just the man, alone. His back to me. A jug of milk and pint of chocolate-chip ice cream and a bottle of pills. Blending something to put the boy to sleep. I took an unwashed skillet from the stovetop. Filmy remnants of food stuff clung to it. This was a funny thing for me to notice. Maybe it had been eggs? The aftermath of an omelet or a scramble? I didn’t know. I didn’t know why I cared about what had been cooked in the pan when I struck the back of the man’s head.

 

The abductor hunched over and screamed. I struck again, this time slapping the base of the skillet against his face. The result was ugly. I won’t describe it. In hindsight I think that’s why I obsessed over the pan and what had last been cooked in it. I needed something to distract me from this nightmare in which I’d been forced to partake.

 

The man moaned through his bloody lips and started to speak and I raised the pan over my head the same way I did when I wielded the hammer at the fair’s Strong Man game, shouting over him.

 

“YOU DON’T HURT KIDS!”

 

Down the pan went and down the man went.

 

The blender was still running.

 

I shut it off.

 

Now I heard gasping and panting.

 

I whipped around and there was the boy. He didn’t have his shirt on, so I could tell from the rapid contractions of his chest that he was hyperventilating.

 

“Did you see that?” I asked, simultaneously dreading and knowing the answer.

 

His face broke into a giant sob and I ran to him and hugged him. He pushed at me, but I held him tighter and soon he wrapped his arms around me and cried into my left pectoral.

 

“I had to,” I said. “To save you. I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t’ve seen that. I’m sorry. It’s going to be okay. I promise. It’s okay now.” I pressed his quivering body harder against mine, whispering it’s okay while running my fingers through his hair.

 

Beside us was the refrigerator. I spotted the boy in multiple magneted photos, and a chill crept through my spine. The man hadn’t targeted the boy at random. He’d been stalking the child, photographing the boy from afar. Had perhaps even been someone close to him.

 

“This man,” I asked, “was he someone you knew?”

 

The answer came in bits and pieces due to the boy’s wailing. His mom’s ex-boyfriend.

 

“Let’s get you out of here.” I lifted the boy and he instinctively straddled me. I took an odd pleasure in the way his shivering form felt. I wished I were a father so I could always have a child to comfort. I thought about the universe, about how I almost hadn’t stopped after seeing the abduction. About how in some awful parallel world this kid was being force-fed the contents of the blender because I’d rather turn a blind eye to evil than inconvenience myself by standing up to it.

 

In the drizzle outside, it was hard to determine what was the rain and what were the tears as the boy cried into my chest.

 

I buckled him in my passenger seat, setting my box of tissues in his lap. You’d have thought he was suffering from a cold too. Crying does that. He didn’t touch the Kleenex. He was so passive, I became nervous the violence in the kitchen had left him traumatized.

 

“Do you want a stuffed animal?” I asked.

 

“What?”

 

I reached behind my seat, to where I kept my tiger, and placed it in his lap. “This is Rajah. He’ll protect you.”

 

“This is a toy.”

 

I laughed. It was such an adorable thing to say in spite of the whole awful situation.

 

“Haven’t you seen Toy Story?” I asked. “Don’t you know that toys come alive?”

 

“That’s a movie.”

 

“You’re a movie.”

 

He started to cry anew and I apologized. I shouldn’t have been joking, but I was desperate to lighten the mood. To change the subject I asked, “What’s your name?”

 

He didn’t answer. Not at first. And I didn’t push him to. We were back on the main road when he finally said, “Spencer.” Then, in a whisper: “Or Spence.”

 

“Well, Spencer or Spence, it’s a pleasure to meet you. I wish it could be under different circumstances, but it’s going to be okay.”

 

I had to say this for my benefit as much as his. I’d possibly killed a man. I told myself it shouldn’t bother me. Most likely the man wasn’t dead. I’d only struck him a total of three times. Most likely he’d wind up in jail and wish I’d killed him.

 

After I got Spence to say his address, I tried to put him at ease. “You didn’t deserve this. Children deserve to have fun. They shouldn’t have to deal with, you know…ugliness. It’s not fair. You don’t get to be a kid for long, so it’s supposed to be a good time. It’s the best time. When you’re grownup, you’re supposed to be able to look back to when you were… how old are you?”

 

“Six.”

 

“To when you were six, and you’re supposed to find, do you know the word solace?”

 

“What?”

 

“It means comfort. These are supposed to be comfortable years, because once you grow up, that’s when it gets ugly. But. It’s—” I realized I was in danger of losing myself, of going down a deep, dark rant, of making this about me when I needed to focus on Spence. “You know what? Enough. I’m not even making sense. Let’s be happy.”

 

I turned the volume of my CD player up.

 

“You listen to Kidz Bop?”

 

“Do you like them?”

 

He shook his head no.

 

“Aw!” I made an exaggerated pouty face and pretended to get angry. “YOU DON’T MEAN THAT!”

 

The speed at which he apologized made me worry he didn’t understand I was joking, so I laughed it off and playfully punched him on the shoulder.

 

“Come on! They’re fun!”

 

I teased him by increasing the volume. I bobbed my head to the beat, trying to get Spence to partake. I hoped he had a singing voice. He’d be perfect for this type of band. But he kept sniffling, and I felt so bad. He’d been through so much. I wanted him to be happy. I reached over and squeezed just above his knee. It may have seemed weird, but I knew what I was doing. My stepbrother used to do the same thing when I was in a sour mood, and as I hoped, Spence laughed in spite of himself.

 

“OooooOOOOooh,” I said, raising my voice to that over-enthusiastic tone to which children respond so well. “Is someone ticklish?”

 

Between his sobs and giggles, Spence begged me to stop, but I’d only just begun. The trick here was to maintain skin contact. Spence’s shorts were loose, much like my own gym shorts, so it was no trouble working the tickle-monster beneath the fabric of the pants and up his thigh, squeezing here, squeezing there. Before I knew it, I was at his groin. I had to be careful, because the last thing I wanted to do was squeeze his most sensitive area.

 

Due to an accidental slip of my finger, he gasped, and I felt embarrassed. “Whoopsy daisy,” I said. So we didn’t get caught up in the awkwardness, I tickled his armpits next. This was fun, because if he was still crying, it was only because he was laughing too hard.

 

I must have gotten carried away. A truck’s horn informed me I had swerved into the wrong lane.

 

I corrected the van’s steering, shouting, “Close one!”, and although I was still grinning, the charm of the earlier moment had diminished. We drove without talking and I caught myself feeling a pang of hurt. It was probably unjustified. I shouldn’t have blamed Spence, but he was so beautiful, and I’d gone so far out of my way to help him, and he hadn’t even bothered to thank me or ask my name.

 

Which was nothing new. I had a bad habit of fully giving myself to people. It was what pleased me the most, making other people happy. Unfortunately this usually meant I wound up being taken advantage of by the people I loved most.

 

I waited a little longer to see if Spence might take initiative, and then I finally asked, “Don’t you want to know who I am?”

 

“You mean your name?”

 

“Bingo!”

 

“Okay.”

 

“I’m—And…” I waved my finger at his face. “…you’re not allowed to make fun. I’m Mr. Aladdin.”

 

“Mr. Aladdin?”

 

“I told you you’re not allowed to make fun!”

 

“Is that really your name?”

 

“Do you wish I was Mr. Genie instead?”

 

A bad joke.

 

And it wasn’t really my name.

 

I only got to be Mr. Aladdin when I felt young.

 

Spence was helping me achieve that feeling. I imagined the two of us chasing after one another in blankets forts or spinning each other on swings, and I knew I’d found another reason to be a father. If I had a kid of my own, I could be Mr. Aladdin anytime I wanted. Assuming the child was as special as Spence. Because there was no denying there was something magical about him. It was like he and I were two parts of a broken key needed to unlock a dimension where time didn’t exist. Just as I felt younger, Spence had a maturity about him. In this other dimension we were perfectly balanced. It was scary, but if someone had presented me the papers and said, Sign here, and Spence is yours, I’d have adopted him in a heartbeat.

 

“Has anyone ever told you you’re beautiful?”

 

My question comes out a little stuttered. I always get tongue-tied around attractive people.

 

“My mom calls me handsome,” Spence said quietly. “Sometimes.”

 

“You’re way more than handsome. You’re beautiful.”

 

“This isn’t my house.”

 

I didn’t realize it. I was so lost in playing with Spence that I drove us straight to my apartment. “I’m such a sillypants,” I said. “This is my place. Do you want to check it out?”

 

“I wanna go home.”

 

“You will.” He was acting like he thought this was our last stop. “And just so you know, even though you’re pouting—,” I emphasized the word pouting in the hopes he’d shift his demeanor into something positive, “—you’re still beautiful.”

 

I waited for a response and got nothing. I shouldn’t have been angry. Spence had been through Hell, and what he needed now was love, not lessons, but I was compelled to explain common courtesy. “You know, Spence, when someone gives you a compliment, it’s customary to give one back.”

 

“What?”

 

“I said you were beautiful. That was a nice thing for me to say. I didn’t have to say it, but I said it. So now it’s your turn to say something nice.”

 

He looked at me, and I hoped he’d say it. I thought the words must be on the tip of his tongue: I think you’re beautiful too, but his lip trembled and he started to sniffle and do that frantic breathing of his, and he cried and screamed, “I don’t know what you want me to say! I’m sorry. I don’t know. If you tell me, I can say it. I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” He repeated the word sorry in his sobs and I felt like the world’s biggest jerk.

 

“Hey, hey, hey,” I said, unbuckling his seatbelt and pulling him onto my lap. “Shhhh. It’s okay. It’s okay. You don’t have to cry. You don’t have to say anything. That was just Mr. Aladdin being a dumb idiot.”

 

How could I dare to lecture Spence on manners after everything he’d been through?

 

“I don’t want to be here. I want to go home.”

 

He was trembling on my legs and I knew that more than anything, he needed affection. I embraced him like how I sometimes embraced the larger Rajah in my apartment. But this needed to stop quickly. He was so warm, and I hadn’t been this close to another human being for a while, and my gym shorts weren’t that thick. I couldn’t have him stay cushioned on my lap. That was a bad idea. “Alright,” I said, feeling a bit winded. “I’m icky. I need a shower and you need a shirt.”

 

I carried him to my unit, doing my best to wave to one of my neighbors I passed, who joked, “Stole another one, did you?”

 

“Oh, you know,” I replied with a purposely creepy smile.

 

This was a little gag we had. I supposed it was a tad morbid, not the thing you should joke about, but since I frequently tutored elementary and middle schoolers, it always appeared I’d acquired a new child when she saw me.

 

I was glad she was in a rush and didn’t ponder Spence’s lack of a shirt. I didn’t want Spence to have to relive his ordeal. He’d have to do that enough with his mom and the police. He was crying into my chest again, and as I finagled with my keys, I decided that for as beautiful as Spence was, he was sweaty and puffy and should probably have a bath before I returned him home. And I needed one too. Not a shower, but a nice bath with bubbles and salts and candles to wash away the ugliness sticking to me. Here I was, trying to get Spence to offer me a compliment, and I was wet and gross! No wonder why he had such trouble. I just wished I’d witnessed the child abduction on my way home from the gym. If I was going to be shirtless like Spence, I wished he was seeing me after a workout, when my muscles were engorged with blood, because then, with my pumped abdominals and biceps, he might appreciate me more.

 

But that was a petty thing to wish for. Something Mr. Genie would make fun of me for wanting. I needed to stop fretting. I was able to save Spence when I did, and that was all that mattered. As we entered the apartment, I put on the voice of a game show host. “Mr. Aladdin and Spence,” I said, like I was announcing our arrival for my apartment’s invisible audience. “Let the adventure begin.”

Submitted January 21, 2016 at 12:45PM by MrAladdin http://ift.tt/1OylRY9 nosleep