Horrorscopes: Twelve Tales of the Macabre

Kids These Days

The world looks so small through a mail slot. So limited through the blinds of a dirty window. The world looks distorted through the fogged glass of a mahogany front door, but sometimes through these things a man can see clearer. And Dale had never seen the world with more clarity. Cruel, damning clarity.

He'd watched the world through that mail slot for the last five years of his life. They were supposed to be his golden years, his much needed respite from the decades he had put in, bowing to the time clock. But they hadn't been restful, no. They had been the most stressful years of his life.

His back ached where he knelt; his knees groaned like an old tree in its final storm upright. But these were familiar to him, these were kindred and known and not the least bit deceptive. And he couldn't say the same for the kids outside the mail slot.

It was the kids he watched, always the kids. The changing face of the monster, Youth. They puffed and postured as they always had, and yet not the same at all. It was the kids these days.

He'd had suspicions for much of the last twenty years that the kids were demons, but it was in the five years since his retirement that he became certain. The kids, they just weren't right. It had started at middle age, while he was still the neighborhood heating and air repairman. He'd spent half his waking hours in the homes of strangers and neighbors, and he'd spent that time not only repairing central air units and radiators, but watching the kids, the kids these days.

The kids weren't the same as they once were. All one has to do to make that readily apparent is step into their homes and see them in their comfortable habitat. The kids disrespect their parents. They obsess over images in the television screen. They dick around with Pac-Man video games instead of playing with one another. They have no interest in toys like natural children; they feel each other up in public, they spit on the ground, they smoke and they drink and they experiment with drugs. And it wasn't the teenagers Dale was concerned with; all teenagers do these things. It was the kids, the children, the wee babes only a few years out of short pants and stinking of placenta behind their ears.

The kids were not the same.

He saw these things when he was still a working man and he considered them deeply. He recognized the dichotomy between natural children and these monsters and he sought conclusions with the verve of a biologist on the brink of some world-changing breakthrough. And when the revelation hit him, it hit him hard.

The children were demons.

They weren't demons in the sense that some brats can be likened to demons. They weren't demons in the sense that they possessed demonic characteristics. They were literal demons, changelings from Hell in disguise as the neighborhood kids. They were the Devil's scouts, laying the groundwork for the inexorable merger between his world and Satan's.

And they were everywhere.

He realized this during the first months of his retirement. In the early days, he would sit on his stoop to pass the time with passersby and he would watch the kids. The kids in their seemingly natural environment. But the kids didn't behave like human children, no. Not anymore. Games like hopscotch and jump rope, which had survived the ages, were antiquated. The kids didn't play games. They sat on stoops, stood on sidewalks, and watched. They fussed with digital devices and they watched. They didn't make merry, they didn't joke around. They watched the world as he watched the kids and they spoke excitedly among one another in whatever demon tongues they spoke. When adults drew near, the demons would fall silent until they were left alone.

Natural childhood pastimes like artwork in sidewalk chalk were a thing for the history books. Now, the kids painted illegally on the walls of neighborhood businesses and homes with aerosol cans; bizarre demonic messages encrypted to the mortal eye, unnatural hell-borne reconnaissance reports that no human could read.