Life Was Known - 3. Chapter Three: Shoes

Chapter Three: Shoes

The child ate his cheeseburger quickly, scarfing it down like there was no tomorrow. Liam couldn't even eat, his burger still wrapped and sitting in his lap while he processed everything.

This child, who was Noah's perfect mirror image, had dug himself out of said child's grave. Noah, who'd died fourteen years ago. Who'd been murdered fourteen years ago.

Liam put his burger back in the McDonald's bag. The boy sat on his knees in the truck, leaning his shoulder against the seat so that he could face Liam while he ate. He looked at the man.

"Am I getting shoes?" he asked. Liam looked at him like he were a ghost. Was he? Liam looked out the windshield, eyes wide. Could anyone else see him? "Liam?"

"Shh!" Liam held up a hand to the boy, silencing him. "I'm thinking!" Something about that must have been funny, because the boy giggled while he took another bite.

Who could Liam talk to about this? Carlos? Ashe? Definitely not Sam. Carlos was a well off real estate agent, would he want to believe Liam? He was also mexican, and had a heavy belief in the paranormal- so would he believe him? Ashe was an idiot who believed anything, but what if he told someone?

"That's it," Liam said, making the boy look at him passed his hand. He started up the truck and started driving.

"Where are we going?" the boy asked.

"Back to the house."

"Why?"

"Because I don't want people to think I'm crazy."

"You aren't."

Liam looked at the kid, who had just finished his burger. He shook his head and looked back to the road. He couldn't believe it, and he didn't know what to do. He couldn't tell his friends. He couldn't tell himself that all of this was fake. He shook his head again in disbelief. "How did you walk all that way?"

"I just did."

Was he wrong to not take the kid to the police? Was he wrong to sort of start believing him?

The kid was real. Liam had felt him, and he felt like real live flesh. The boy had bled, and he was hungry. ...He wasn't a zombie, that was for sure. But what if he was a different kid, who just... thought he was... Noah? That one- that one sounded plausible.

At the house, Liam helped the boy out of the truck and took his dirty socks to wash, which made him actually wash a load of his own laundry, too. The boy sat in the living room eating Liam's burger and watching TV, which was playing Spongebob. Liam came into the room and shut the TV off, making the boy look at him.

"You have to tell me about that guy," the man said. The child swallowed a bite of his burger. He looked down at the food.

"...He's g-"

"I know that part, but how do you know? Why don't you tell the police? Who's the guy? Did he bury you as some joke?"

The boy stared at Liam, his nose scrunching. "He didn't bury me."

"Then who did? That's one sick fucking joke. Do you know who-"

"You buried me." The boy put his sandwich in his lap. "You did."

Liam glared at the kid. "None of this is funny."

"I know!" the boy yelled at him.

"Then stop lying to me!"

"I'm not lying to you! Stop calling me a liar!"

"Then who's going to hurt someone?"

"I don't remember!"

Liam ran a hand through his hair. He sighed. Turning, he turned the TV back on and left to his computer. Going online, he looked up... he hesitated before looking up: Noah Taylor murder case.

There weren't as many hits as there would be if he looked up Marsha Dewsome, because she came from a well known family and nice neighborhood. Noah was from a struggling family that lived in a trailer outside of town.

"Noah Taylor, abducted on his way home from school in 1992, was discovered two weeks after his disappearance drowned in a lake near the outskirts of town. He is believed to have been kept alive for the duration of his disappearance, until his drowning. His body was discovered three days after he was killed.

Autopsy and forensics showed that Taylor had been kept in a confined space during his captivity and suffered multiple abuse, such as sodomy, torture, and starvation."

"No! Noah! Noah!" Miranda screamed, trying to wretch herself from two police officers that held her at bay of her son's nude corpse being zipped into a body bag. Liam couldn't breathe. His father kept him behind him, but hearing his mom's screaming and all of the wailing sirens told him that his twin brother had been found. Dead.

David had grabbed the chief investigator by the collar of his shirt and was screaming in his face, making more officers run over to try and detain him.

"How dare you bring us here! How dare you show us the body of our son! I'll kill you! I'll kill you!" he spat in the investigator's face, towering over him from his bigger build. Officers started pulling them apart.

Family is always the first suspect. The closer you are, the guiltier. The detective thought that showing them the body would bring out a confession. He was wrong. Because they hadn't done it. All he'd done was traumatize a reeling family.

"My baby!" Miranda screamed.

A crime that heinous could never just be one. No, the killer would grow a taste for it. Worse yet, there were no mistakes at the crime scene, or with Noah's body. This killer had done this before. And he would again.

The boy was right. The man was going to hurt someone else.

Liam left back into the living room, where the boy had finished his second burger and changed the channel to another cartoon. "Kiddo," he said, getting the boy's attention. "If you're telling the truth, which is bat-shit crazy, then we only have two weeks to find that kid."

The boy watched Liam for a moment before smiling. "See, you're not that dumb, Liam."

Liam waved a finger at the boy and shook his head, like it was so stupid he hadn't thought of it before. He ran back to his office and got back on his computer.

If the cops found any cases similar to Noah's, they would figure out and announce that there was a serial killer on the loose. But, no one ever looks at the poor children. If the killer had killed anyone else, before or after Noah, it would be a low profile case that everyone dismissed, because no one cared for those beneath them.

Being a true crime writer was beginning to pay off.

Liam paused, closing his eyes. ...If it was all true. If there really was a serial killer on the loose and this child knew, then... how did he know? That was the one question Liam hadn't answered yet. Who was that boy watching television?

Something told him he already knew. He didn't want to know. Something kept him from calling the police, and something made him let the kid stay here despite his great similarity to Noah. Dead Noah.

But, there's no plausible explanation! How did a kid dig himself out of a grave? How did he know Liam's name? His parents' old phone number? Look like Noah? Have his eyes? Have his birth mark?

...The only plausible explanation is that... it is Noah.

Liam opened his eyes and looked at his computer screen, where the article of Noah's death was still plastered.

Confined space; sodomy, torture, starvation; two weeks.

How could someone do that to a child?

Liam put in a new search: Boy missing two weeks, drowned.

Three boys. Three boys apart from Noah came up in the search. Brent Hal, aged 10, 1978; Ashton Grayson, aged 9, 1985; Allen Green, aged 9, 1999. All from small beat families, but not the same town. All faces that no one would miss. All... Liam grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down the years of their deaths.

1978, 1985, 1999... Noah was 1992; Liam rewrote the years. 1978, 1985, 1992, 1999... He let out a slow breath and shook his head.

All of the murders were seven years apart. This crazy, sick fuck waited seven years to snuff the life of a child. Like it was some sweet ritual- he woke up once every seven years with the intent to take a child from their family and torture and murder them.

And this was seven years after Allen Green's death in 1999, the child killed after Noah. ...If the killer still hadn't been caught, then... he would kill another boy.

Liam pulled out his phone. He had to call the police this time. This wasn't a matter of: Don't call the police because they'll call me crazy, no- now it was a matter of: there's a serial killer on the loose ready to take a new victim.

He called them.

l.l

"Even if what you're saying is true, there's no missing children here," the Lieutenant said, standing in the front yard of the house with Liam and an officer. The child had gone and hidden in Liam's bedroom when he heard the knocking on the front door, and he wasn't happy with Liam calling them.

Liam shook his head. "He's going to take a kid, alright? You have to put out a warning, or at least state that there's an actual, real life serial killer on the loose!"

The officer looked at the Lieutenant. "...He doesn't look like he's lying."

The lieutenant waved him off. "Anyone who lies thinks their telling the truth."

Liam glared. "So you think I'm lying?"

"Aren't you that true crime writer? I don't think you're lying, I just think you may have gotten some fiction mixed up with reality," the Lieutenant said. Liam scoffed.

"I don't write fiction, and I know what I'm saying, okay? If you guys weren't so high and mighty and up in your asses, you may have realized it earlier and stopped the last kid from being killed!"

"Alright," the Lieutenant gave Liam a rude smile, "We'll be taking out leave. Looks like you think you're the detective now, huh?"

"If I am, I'm a better fucking one than you," Liam spat and the Lieutenant went for him, but the officer held him back. The officer cleared his throat.

"Let's all get back to what we were doing. Lieutenant, I think there's something you were needing to do at the office," he said. The lieutenant straightened up and fixed himself. He looked Liam up and down before nodding and going to his car. The officer went to his own. Liam growled.

"Yeah, piss off and let another kid get taken, huh?" he yelled at them, watching their cars pull out. He spat at the ground and shook his head before going back into the house.

"Okay, kid, they're fucking gone," he called, giving the door a good kick that he wished the Lieutenant could feel. The kid came out of the bedroom. He, for the first time, had an emotion opposite of just giggling or smiling a little. He was mad.

"You weren't supposed to call them," he said. Liam shrugged his shoulders.

"They didn't believe me anyway."

"I know they didn't believe you! I knew they wouldn't!"

"Then how about you try and come up with some answers, huh? Every time I ask you something, you say you don't fucking remember!"

"Because I don't!"

"Whoopdie fucking doo!"

The boy stepped back into the bedroom and slammed the door shut.

Noah slammed the bedroom door shut, locking Liam out. Liam looked at David, who watched with an eyebrow raised from his recliner.

"What'd you do?" he asked the black haired boy. Liam rolled his eyes and crossed his arms.

"Nothing," he said. Then he huffed and gave the real answer. "We were gonna go to the game store together, but he was being too slow so I went without him."

"Well. That's rude."

"He was being too slow!"

"Bud, you still gotta apologize." David looked down at whatever he was messing with in his lap.

Liam knocked on the bedroom door, which used to be his parents'. "Sorry, okay? Come out and... we'll get you some shoes."

"I'm not lying," the boy called from the other side of the door. Liam twisted his lips.

"...I know. We just have to find out if or when he's going to take the kid." If he didn't have him already. If he already had the kid, then their two weeks has already started.

The door opened and the kid looked out at Liam. Liam sucked his teeth.

"The bank's actually closed, so uh... I can't get any money out."

"You suck."

"...Yeah. Come on, let's get you to bed. It's late."

"We're going in the morning," the boy said. Liam rose an eyebrow before nodding.

"Okay. Come on." Liam stepped into the bedroom and made up the bed for the kid before going to the couch to get his own rest.

l.l

In the morning, the kid was still in bed, not a figment of Liam's imagination. That meant that everything else was real, too.

Liam drove the kid to the bank and got some money out of his account to buy breakfast and clothes. They got some cheap breakfast from McDonald's and Liam took the kid to a second hand store, where it was proven that the child was real.

"Aw, you're getting tired of hand-me-downs, huh?" a woman asked the child with a smile. Liam swallowed.

He was real. The woman had her hand on the boy's head and could actually see and feel him. Liam wasn't crazy. But the idea of a ghost coming to life was crazy enough to make him crazy.

The woman gave the boy a smile before slipping passed and leaving the shop. Liam cleared his throat and pointed off. "Go on and pick some clothes," he said. The boy watched him for a long moment before stepping away and going to look at the racks of clothing. Liam walked off to look at the shoes.

"I said you can have mine," Liam said to Noah as the two looked at shoes to buy. Noah had dragged him there with ten dollars from their dad before he'd gone to work. Miranda would let them walk to town while she stayed home doing her own things. It let them burn off the excessive energy.

"I don't want yours- Adam said that they have this cool new pair here."

"Noah, I don't think this is the place."

"Shh!"

Liam grabbed a pair of tennis shoes and went to look for the boy. He couldn't find him. He sifted through the clothing racks and peeked around the other customers there, but he couldn't find the kid.

"Hey!" he called out, which garnered some unwanted attention. He pressed his lips together and glanced around. He left to another part of the shop and called out again, but the boy didn't come out. Now Liam was getting a little scared. "Noah!" he called.

"I'm here," the boy said, suddenly standing beside Liam. There was no way this disappearing act was sane. Liam pointed at the boy.

"Stop doing that."

The boy smiled, like it was funny. For him, it was. He then held up some clothes. "I got some."

Liam took the clothes and motioned for the boy to follow him before going to the counter, where a very old lady was working. He put the clothes down and she started going through them.

"Everything's fifty cents," she said absently while counting how many things were placed down. Liam also counted, looking at the boy when he counted to seven.

"I didn't say get a lot of clothes," he said. The child gave a single shrug.

"You didn't tell me how much."

Now Liam felt bad for only getting one pair of shoes. When the woman stated the cheap price, Liam paid and took the child to the bathroom so that they could dress. While he waited on the kid, he decided to check his phone. There were a few texts from Sam, but Liam ignored them and saw a text from Carlos, asking if he wanted to meet up later. Liam had to decline, because he had a kid to watch.

He decided to get online and look up any new missing children.

None matched the killer's MO. ...Were they too late?

The boy stepped out of the bathroom dressed in clothes that actually fit. He still wore the jacket, because it was big and warm. He looked up at Liam, holding his old clothes in his arms.

"…I think I remembered something," he said.

l.l

Liam held the door open for the kid, letting him inside the pretty empty bar before stepping in after him. Ashe looked over from where he stood at the bar and smiled and waved.

"Hey," he greeted. Then he looked at the kid. He furrowed his eyebrows and looked back at Liam. "...What's going on?" he asked. Liam grabbed the kid and brought him over. He cleared his throat.

"I gotta talk to you in private."

Ashe looked at Lizzy, a bigger girl with too much metal in her face, and pointed at the bar. She rolled her eyes and nodded, and Ashe motioned for Liam to follow him to the back room, where they kept props for Halloween. Liam brought the boy in with him and Ashe crossed his arms, watching the child before looking at Liam.

"...What's up?" he asked.

Liam looked at the boy. "...This kid says that there's a kid in trouble."

"Okay, well, tell the cops."

"Believe me, I've tried. And… it's more than that."

Ashe gave his friend a look. "Like, how much more?" he asked slowly. The door to the room suddenly opened and James stepped inside.

"Bro, Lizzy says you're hiding out," he said before noticing Liam. When he saw him, he rose an eyebrow in question, and then he noticed the kid. "...What- wow, that resemblance is… uncanny," he said. Liam closed his eyes and shook his head.

"...It's not just a resemblance. It's… Noah."