The Conspiracy Against Adults
By
Whitney R. Holp
Quidve mali fuerat nobis non esse creatis?
―Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Maya was worried about her children. The other day, when she was cleaning her son’s room, she found a knife under his mattress. That evening, when she confronted him about this, asking why he had a knife in his room, he was nonchalant, saying, “Just in case I have to kill myself.”
Such a response was as perplexing as it was unnerving; she didn’t understand this kind of thing. She remembered when they watched scary movies together, little Johnny always covered his face during the gory scenes (but he always peeked between his fingers). They used to do lots of things like that: watching movies, playing games. She even read bedtime stories to him. Now that he was older, they both felt little Johnny could be left on his own more often.
However, left to his own devices, little Johnny seemed to have no interest in going outside, making friends, or doing anything at all. He spent a lot of time alone in his room and she had no idea what he did in there. Sometimes she barged in without knocking, hoping to catch him in the act – of what? Something, anything, but no, she never did. He would always be sitting there with his toys and comic books spread out on the floor around him, and while it looked normal, something about it was not.
It seemed to her that these things were laid out as props and that he had been doing something vastly different just before she entered, something that was equally beyond her ability to imagine. And there was something sinister in this ambiguity; the very fact she didn’t know was perhaps what upset her the most.
Sometimes she thought she could smell sulfur in his room, as though he were lighting matches in there. After the incident with the knife, she discovered hidden cassettes of rock&roll devil-music, then taped videos from South America. Her husband found pornography and violent video-games on the computer. There were cum-stains in his underwear and black magic textbooks behind his bedside table. She had sickening visions of finding needles next.
In the bushes across the alley behind their house there was an old shed he went into sometimes, and Maya often wondered what he did in there, but for some reason she never dared stroll across to find out. Sometimes he’d leave the house without stating where he was going or why, just off on one of his solitary excursions.
They got him a dog, hoping it would bring him from his stupor, and the animal did help, he always took it with him wherever he went, a black spaniel named Edicius. At least they knew when the boy was gone, the dog was with him. Sometimes, he would be gone until long after dark, and she worried. But she took solace that at least the dog could look out for their boy, even if they could not.
For she and her husband were both very busy working at their jobs and they were lucky enough to provide what they could. She knew it might be better for them to simply spend more time together, but there was nothing they could do about it now: they were locked into the 9-5 workaday grind. And it was there, sitting at her desk crunching numbers, where she would often think about them, her two beloved offspring, and wonder where they were or what they were doing, who they were with, what was happening to them.
With her daughter, Alice, she had the opposite problem, and it was a constant worry what sort of people she was getting involved with. Just lately, she’d been overhearing rather snide remarks being made by the other mothers of girls her daughter’s age when she was in or near their company, at the grocery store, bake sale, hockey game. She quickly realized her daughter was doing things their daughters knew about and had told their mothers, but they never told her; they judged and laughed and gossiped in secret.
Though she couldn’t be certain, she was sure her poor beautiful daughter was being coerced into sex and drug activities. She was getting taken advantage of, and there was nothing she could do to stop it; those people are too clever and conniving, and the girl was too stupid, stubborn and willful like her father.
She’d been reading about this sort of thing lately; they were symptoms of a broader phenomenon. Several news articles had appeared in recent months on the subject of dissonant youth, and their growing numbers. Both her children were exhibiting the very traits described in these reports. It stated there was increasingly widespread sense of anomie developing among the young, this somehow occurring as a result of whatever evil influence was able to corrupt them in such fashion.
On the radio one night, they were talking about cults and recruitment techniques used by terrorist groups, how they identified and lured susceptible minds and brainwashed them to cause misery in the world: an angry teen brings a gun to school and shoots everyone, a disgruntled toddler kills its family in their sleep.
She had already shared these concerns with her husband when he told her that their daughter Alice had confronted him in his office the other day. She had said to him, “Why, Father? Why?”
He looked up from his desk and saw her standing there in the doorway, his little girl, her hands clasped behind her back. In her eyes there was a certain wild look that frightened him, blazing in her face as she entered the room.
“Answer me―why did you do this to me? Why did you make me exist?”
A few nights ago, she had gone out with some boys, and hadn’t spoken to him since. Alice started walking toward him then, and that is when he saw what she held behind her back: a hatchet, taken from his workshop. It had gone missing a few nights ago and he hadn’t given much thought to its disappearance.
Then she started running toward him, raising the hatchet over her head, lips peeling back to open upon a banshee scream and she swung down onto the spot that had created her, the organ that fulfilled her mother’s monthly prophesy all those years ago. He jumped out of the way at the last moment, so stunned by what he was seeing that it delayed his reaction.
But not quite quick enough: the razor sharp crescent nicked his leg as it slammed down on the seat of the chair. He twisted around and screamed, then he grabbed hold of her hands and took the weapon from her, whereupon she fell to the ground and burst into tears.
Social Services was overwhelmed by the influx of cases like this. It seemed as though a rabid lemming brainwave was passing over the country: most were simply killing themselves, but the odd one deigned to take others with them. Many of these children were from good homes; nonetheless, it was indiscriminate: the self-extermination epidemic manifested equally among the lowest classes as it did in the upper.
Nobody’s kids were safe from the dis-ease they had with existence. They turned whether they were abused or not, whether they were sick or healthy, etc. Nobody could understand why this was happening. Why would an innocent child reach up and kill his mom and dad? Never in her life did Maya ever think seriously of either murder or suicide.
She started seeing more and more of this sort of thing around town even. When she was out doing her weekly shopping, she saw kids at a store laughing at everyone. Was this because they were exchange money or plastic numbers for actual material goods? Maya felt like somehow she and everyone else was wearing the emperor’s new clothes. And then she noticed the bandages on their wrists.
Looking at her own children, she was disturbed by these miniature humans and how they regarded everything they saw with blank, glassy eyes. When they spoke it was with affectless, drone-like voices. They did not volunteer information, but answered every question with mockerous precision. And when they fixed that dreadful, weary gaze upon her, they did not look away, not even blink, as if they could see right through her, all that she was and all she would never be. But even worse than that, however, were the rare occasions when the children either laughed or smiled – because this only happened when calamity occurred.
Sometimes, she recalled her days as a schoolteacher, before becoming a bank-teller, and seeing the kids on her recess patrol. She remembered how it made her heart glow to see all the little scampers running around, playing games, their eyes still full of wonder, wild and carefree, just having a good time. Of course, she knew that soon enough they would enter high-school and know the meaning of angst in varying shades according to their disposition, and that look would slowly fade from their eyes, to be fully extinguished by their mid- to late-twenties.
She started having nightmares about being on playground supervision again. In these dreams, there was always the moment, just before she forced herself awake, when she suddenly realized that all the children had surrounded her, and were staring up at her vacuously. They never said anything or did anything, but the very proximity of these beings filled her with unease.
One day, little Stevie from down the street came over after school. There was him and a couple other kids from around the neighborhood she recognized but didn’t know who they were. They were all in the play-room upstairs having a pretend tea-party. Maya was downstairs folding laundry; she could hear them up there, laughing and romping around; it sounded like they were having a grand old time. She went upstairs to get the hamper from the bath-room and as she was walking down the hall she overheard the following dialogue:
“I’m glad I’m not going to grow old.”
“Me too.”
“Nobody asked to be born.”
“What a curse to make us exist.”
“And expect us to be glad for it.”
“Try to make us be like them.”
“Have to live the whole life through, and for what?”
“Nothing means anything except what meaning you can attribute to it.”
“Why should we fear death? We did not exist before they made us. There was nothing before this; and there is nothing after. Pull us out of the void? We’re going back in.”
She quickly carried on before they noticed her. The whole thing unnerved her unspeakably; she felt cold all the way through her being. She could see herself in their eyes: this lumbering enormity come to impose its will, order and neatness, logic and reason. They were made in her image, and thus should behave accordingly. Through a crack in the door, she glimpsed them seated around the table with dolls and stuffed animals. At supper that evening, she could barely look at them.
A few nights later, their house caught on fire. In her sleep, she could smell the smoke, and oddly thought of cooking, of something burning. Then she sensed the heat, and alarm bells went off. She woke and was surrounded by flames. She and her husband rushed out of bed to the kids rooms – they were both gone. They rushed through the house, checking every room, ducking through flames and falling timbers. She called out for them, “Alice! Johnny! Where are you? We have to get out of here!”
Then she noticed through a window they were both standing together on the front lawn already. She grabbed her husband and they fled their burning home. Lucky thing they did: the house was engulfed in flames. Neighbors called the fire department, who arrived shortly thereafter, and did what they could to put out the blaze. The last thing Maya remembered is seeing her children watch the inferno with smiles upon their faces, veritably aglow in the pyromanic light-show. Then she lost consciousness.
She and her husband were taken to hospital for treatment; the kids were taken to an emergency shelter for the night. Maya suffered third degree burns over half her body. Her husband died of complications from smoke inhalation. It was later determined the fire originated from a towel that was left placed on a stove burner in the kitchen that had been turned on to maximum. By the end of the year, both her children had successfully committed suicide.
That same night, two other homes in their neighborhood burned to the ground as well.
Whitney R. Holp is a writer from Saskatchewan. He studied Journalism at the University of Regina and worked at various odd jobs while writing his first book. A surrealist, he seeks gnosis through dreams, intoxication, and objective chance. This tale is from his forthcoming collection The Old Carter Place & Other Stories.
By
Whitney R. Holp
Quidve mali fuerat nobis non esse creatis?
―Lucretius, De Rerum Natura
Maya was worried about her children. The other day, when she was cleaning her son’s room, she found a knife under his mattress. That evening, when she confronted him about this, asking why he had a knife in his room, he was nonchalant, saying, “Just in case I have to kill myself.”
Such a response was as perplexing as it was unnerving; she didn’t understand this kind of thing. She remembered when they watched scary movies together, little Johnny always covered his face during the gory scenes (but he always peeked between his fingers). They used to do lots of things like that: watching movies, playing games. She even read bedtime stories to him. Now that he was older, they both felt little Johnny could be left on his own more often.
However, left to his own devices, little Johnny seemed to have no interest in going outside, making friends, or doing anything at all. He spent a lot of time alone in his room and she had no idea what he did in there. Sometimes she barged in without knocking, hoping to catch him in the act – of what? Something, anything, but no, she never did. He would always be sitting there with his toys and comic books spread out on the floor around him, and while it looked normal, something about it was not.
It seemed to her that these things were laid out as props and that he had been doing something vastly different just before she entered, something that was equally beyond her ability to imagine. And there was something sinister in this ambiguity; the very fact she didn’t know was perhaps what upset her the most.
Sometimes she thought she could smell sulfur in his room, as though he were lighting matches in there. After the incident with the knife, she discovered hidden cassettes of rock&roll devil-music, then taped videos from South America. Her husband found pornography and violent video-games on the computer. There were cum-stains in his underwear and black magic textbooks behind his bedside table. She had sickening visions of finding needles next.
In the bushes across the alley behind their house there was an old shed he went into sometimes, and Maya often wondered what he did in there, but for some reason she never dared stroll across to find out. Sometimes he’d leave the house without stating where he was going or why, just off on one of his solitary excursions.
They got him a dog, hoping it would bring him from his stupor, and the animal did help, he always took it with him wherever he went, a black spaniel named Edicius. At least they knew when the boy was gone, the dog was with him. Sometimes, he would be gone until long after dark, and she worried. But she took solace that at least the dog could look out for their boy, even if they could not.
For she and her husband were both very busy working at their jobs and they were lucky enough to provide what they could. She knew it might be better for them to simply spend more time together, but there was nothing they could do about it now: they were locked into the 9-5 workaday grind. And it was there, sitting at her desk crunching numbers, where she would often think about them, her two beloved offspring, and wonder where they were or what they were doing, who they were with, what was happening to them.
With her daughter, Alice, she had the opposite problem, and it was a constant worry what sort of people she was getting involved with. Just lately, she’d been overhearing rather snide remarks being made by the other mothers of girls her daughter’s age when she was in or near their company, at the grocery store, bake sale, hockey game. She quickly realized her daughter was doing things their daughters knew about and had told their mothers, but they never told her; they judged and laughed and gossiped in secret.
Though she couldn’t be certain, she was sure her poor beautiful daughter was being coerced into sex and drug activities. She was getting taken advantage of, and there was nothing she could do to stop it; those people are too clever and conniving, and the girl was too stupid, stubborn and willful like her father.
She’d been reading about this sort of thing lately; they were symptoms of a broader phenomenon. Several news articles had appeared in recent months on the subject of dissonant youth, and their growing numbers. Both her children were exhibiting the very traits described in these reports. It stated there was increasingly widespread sense of anomie developing among the young, this somehow occurring as a result of whatever evil influence was able to corrupt them in such fashion.
On the radio one night, they were talking about cults and recruitment techniques used by terrorist groups, how they identified and lured susceptible minds and brainwashed them to cause misery in the world: an angry teen brings a gun to school and shoots everyone, a disgruntled toddler kills its family in their sleep.
She had already shared these concerns with her husband when he told her that their daughter Alice had confronted him in his office the other day. She had said to him, “Why, Father? Why?”
He looked up from his desk and saw her standing there in the doorway, his little girl, her hands clasped behind her back. In her eyes there was a certain wild look that frightened him, blazing in her face as she entered the room.
“Answer me―why did you do this to me? Why did you make me exist?”
A few nights ago, she had gone out with some boys, and hadn’t spoken to him since. Alice started walking toward him then, and that is when he saw what she held behind her back: a hatchet, taken from his workshop. It had gone missing a few nights ago and he hadn’t given much thought to its disappearance.
Then she started running toward him, raising the hatchet over her head, lips peeling back to open upon a banshee scream and she swung down onto the spot that had created her, the organ that fulfilled her mother’s monthly prophesy all those years ago. He jumped out of the way at the last moment, so stunned by what he was seeing that it delayed his reaction.
But not quite quick enough: the razor sharp crescent nicked his leg as it slammed down on the seat of the chair. He twisted around and screamed, then he grabbed hold of her hands and took the weapon from her, whereupon she fell to the ground and burst into tears.
Social Services was overwhelmed by the influx of cases like this. It seemed as though a rabid lemming brainwave was passing over the country: most were simply killing themselves, but the odd one deigned to take others with them. Many of these children were from good homes; nonetheless, it was indiscriminate: the self-extermination epidemic manifested equally among the lowest classes as it did in the upper.
Nobody’s kids were safe from the dis-ease they had with existence. They turned whether they were abused or not, whether they were sick or healthy, etc. Nobody could understand why this was happening. Why would an innocent child reach up and kill his mom and dad? Never in her life did Maya ever think seriously of either murder or suicide.
She started seeing more and more of this sort of thing around town even. When she was out doing her weekly shopping, she saw kids at a store laughing at everyone. Was this because they were exchange money or plastic numbers for actual material goods? Maya felt like somehow she and everyone else was wearing the emperor’s new clothes. And then she noticed the bandages on their wrists.
Looking at her own children, she was disturbed by these miniature humans and how they regarded everything they saw with blank, glassy eyes. When they spoke it was with affectless, drone-like voices. They did not volunteer information, but answered every question with mockerous precision. And when they fixed that dreadful, weary gaze upon her, they did not look away, not even blink, as if they could see right through her, all that she was and all she would never be. But even worse than that, however, were the rare occasions when the children either laughed or smiled – because this only happened when calamity occurred.
Sometimes, she recalled her days as a schoolteacher, before becoming a bank-teller, and seeing the kids on her recess patrol. She remembered how it made her heart glow to see all the little scampers running around, playing games, their eyes still full of wonder, wild and carefree, just having a good time. Of course, she knew that soon enough they would enter high-school and know the meaning of angst in varying shades according to their disposition, and that look would slowly fade from their eyes, to be fully extinguished by their mid- to late-twenties.
She started having nightmares about being on playground supervision again. In these dreams, there was always the moment, just before she forced herself awake, when she suddenly realized that all the children had surrounded her, and were staring up at her vacuously. They never said anything or did anything, but the very proximity of these beings filled her with unease.
One day, little Stevie from down the street came over after school. There was him and a couple other kids from around the neighborhood she recognized but didn’t know who they were. They were all in the play-room upstairs having a pretend tea-party. Maya was downstairs folding laundry; she could hear them up there, laughing and romping around; it sounded like they were having a grand old time. She went upstairs to get the hamper from the bath-room and as she was walking down the hall she overheard the following dialogue:
“I’m glad I’m not going to grow old.”
“Me too.”
“Nobody asked to be born.”
“What a curse to make us exist.”
“And expect us to be glad for it.”
“Try to make us be like them.”
“Have to live the whole life through, and for what?”
“Nothing means anything except what meaning you can attribute to it.”
“Why should we fear death? We did not exist before they made us. There was nothing before this; and there is nothing after. Pull us out of the void? We’re going back in.”
She quickly carried on before they noticed her. The whole thing unnerved her unspeakably; she felt cold all the way through her being. She could see herself in their eyes: this lumbering enormity come to impose its will, order and neatness, logic and reason. They were made in her image, and thus should behave accordingly. Through a crack in the door, she glimpsed them seated around the table with dolls and stuffed animals. At supper that evening, she could barely look at them.
A few nights later, their house caught on fire. In her sleep, she could smell the smoke, and oddly thought of cooking, of something burning. Then she sensed the heat, and alarm bells went off. She woke and was surrounded by flames. She and her husband rushed out of bed to the kids rooms – they were both gone. They rushed through the house, checking every room, ducking through flames and falling timbers. She called out for them, “Alice! Johnny! Where are you? We have to get out of here!”
Then she noticed through a window they were both standing together on the front lawn already. She grabbed her husband and they fled their burning home. Lucky thing they did: the house was engulfed in flames. Neighbors called the fire department, who arrived shortly thereafter, and did what they could to put out the blaze. The last thing Maya remembered is seeing her children watch the inferno with smiles upon their faces, veritably aglow in the pyromanic light-show. Then she lost consciousness.
She and her husband were taken to hospital for treatment; the kids were taken to an emergency shelter for the night. Maya suffered third degree burns over half her body. Her husband died of complications from smoke inhalation. It was later determined the fire originated from a towel that was left placed on a stove burner in the kitchen that had been turned on to maximum. By the end of the year, both her children had successfully committed suicide.
That same night, two other homes in their neighborhood burned to the ground as well.
Whitney R. Holp is a writer from Saskatchewan. He studied Journalism at the University of Regina and worked at various odd jobs while writing his first book. A surrealist, he seeks gnosis through dreams, intoxication, and objective chance. This tale is from his forthcoming collection The Old Carter Place & Other Stories.
