Nodding along at Rich's tale and patting his back is the best he can do. He doesn't grasp the full significance of a Strontian, but he understands that Robby was - is - powerful. That he wouldn't be dead, and that Rich is back with Robbie, a little less seduced by the scene that will haunt them.
"They're trying harder this time," he guessed with a shrug. "To get us into our parts. We aren't kids, so it... maybe has to hit us harder so we stop thinking and just act. Like kids do. Remember how we used to just know and do? No hesitation, just swing the swing as high as you can and jump."
Like the yellow slicker and red blood and Robbie's own blue eyes, the balloon is one of the only thing that the color seems true. It makes everything else flat and dull, sliding just a bit into gray scale against the colors that an author would note.
He knows that it's wrong. The balloon does not belong here, in the pouring rain, and it certainly shouldn't move like that. Robbie's good at How Things Move, even if he doesn't always know the why.
A red balloon, so perfect and cliche that it beckons to him.
The urgency is gone, and Robbie reaches towards the string of the bright balloon. He doesn't grab it - he'd have to take his hand off Rich's back, where it's been firmly planted since he started shepherding Rich along, and step into the street.
His words come back to him. Robbie swung the swing, but he doesn't jump. He consciously refuses to go get the balloon. There's something not right about it. Don't take anything from a stranger, especially one you can't see.
"Isn't it obvious? The adults are blind dopes because we're in a kids' story." When the main characters were kids, the adults had to be idiots, evil, or both. There was no running home to Mom and Dad in a kid story, or there'd be no story.
Across the street, a flash of red appears in the dark void of the storm drain. A second balloon slips out of it, rising up from the street as it drifts towards them. The fear burbles up in his stomach with it. The churning sick fear of childhood, when fight or flight is fight, flight or freeze, and Robbie is frozen. His adult/child brain is certain: helium balloons belong in sewers even less than little boys. One is ugly but possible; the other is a violation of fact. Balloons float up.
So how did it get in the sewer? And how did it get out? It's too fat and round to have fit through the gap between metal and concrete.
Robbie remembers how he used to be afraid of sewer tops and manholes when he was a little kid, younger than he is now. He thought the kids would come loose beneath him, and he'd fall forever until he died. It was a silly fear, he told himself. They're bolted in place, set in cement, and there's nothing to be scared of. When he was a boy, there was always a friend of a friend of a friend that it had happened to. Swear to God.
Don't be a baby because some magic made you shrink.
But staring into that black, gaping maw of the drain with the dead, glassy gaze of Rich's brother gnawing at the back of his head... it's hard to listen to his better judgment. More rules of childhood are running through his head. Don't walk on the manholes. Don't step on the crack. Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.
Pools of water in his eyes.
"Rich..." Robbie's hand moves from Rich's back to grab Rich's and tug, but Robbie's rooted. The balloons have halted their march, still just out of reach, waiting for two small boys to take them.
Red balloons. It's the color that bothers him, he realizes, more than the demented physics. The balloon is part of a story dancing on the tip of his tongue. The exact red balloon of idyllic childhoods of yesterday juxtaposed against... against what?
Against dead kids in the street.
And then he remembers. Oh, not the story that he's in, but a popular concept of fiction. A trope so hardcore that it's a truth.
Kid stories are where the real monsters are.
The witch in Hanzel and Gretel. The Big, Bad Wolf. Voldemort. All the things that didn't hesitate to hurt innocents, to turn little boys by the score into donkeys, to leave them cold on the street. All the kids books.
His hand tugged again, sharply. Something pulled that kid's arm off like a chicken wing, and it can't have gone far. "We should go figure this out and come back."
What he means is, it's working. Robbie's head is usually a dark place loaded with bloody memories - it doesn't take much to inwardly unnerve him. The balloons, plural, are freaking him out, and he doesn't want to stay here with them until he can rationalize the story they're trapped in. He's had nightmares about this; he knows he has.
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"They're trying harder this time," he guessed with a shrug. "To get us into our parts. We aren't kids, so it... maybe has to hit us harder so we stop thinking and just act. Like kids do. Remember how we used to just know and do? No hesitation, just swing the swing as high as you can and jump."
Like the yellow slicker and red blood and Robbie's own blue eyes, the balloon is one of the only thing that the color seems true. It makes everything else flat and dull, sliding just a bit into gray scale against the colors that an author would note.
He knows that it's wrong. The balloon does not belong here, in the pouring rain, and it certainly shouldn't move like that. Robbie's good at How Things Move, even if he doesn't always know the why.
A red balloon, so perfect and cliche that it beckons to him.
The urgency is gone, and Robbie reaches towards the string of the bright balloon. He doesn't grab it - he'd have to take his hand off Rich's back, where it's been firmly planted since he started shepherding Rich along, and step into the street.
His words come back to him. Robbie swung the swing, but he doesn't jump. He consciously refuses to go get the balloon. There's something not right about it. Don't take anything from a stranger, especially one you can't see.
"Isn't it obvious? The adults are blind dopes because we're in a kids' story." When the main characters were kids, the adults had to be idiots, evil, or both. There was no running home to Mom and Dad in a kid story, or there'd be no story.
Across the street, a flash of red appears in the dark void of the storm drain. A second balloon slips out of it, rising up from the street as it drifts towards them. The fear burbles up in his stomach with it. The churning sick fear of childhood, when fight or flight is fight, flight or freeze, and Robbie is frozen. His adult/child brain is certain: helium balloons belong in sewers even less than little boys. One is ugly but possible; the other is a violation of fact. Balloons float up.
So how did it get in the sewer? And how did it get out? It's too fat and round to have fit through the gap between metal and concrete.
Robbie remembers how he used to be afraid of sewer tops and manholes when he was a little kid, younger than he is now. He thought the kids would come loose beneath him, and he'd fall forever until he died. It was a silly fear, he told himself. They're bolted in place, set in cement, and there's nothing to be scared of. When he was a boy, there was always a friend of a friend of a friend that it had happened to. Swear to God.
Don't be a baby because some magic made you shrink.
But staring into that black, gaping maw of the drain with the dead, glassy gaze of Rich's brother gnawing at the back of his head... it's hard to listen to his better judgment. More rules of childhood are running through his head. Don't walk on the manholes. Don't step on the crack. Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.
Pools of water in his eyes.
"Rich..." Robbie's hand moves from Rich's back to grab Rich's and tug, but Robbie's rooted. The balloons have halted their march, still just out of reach, waiting for two small boys to take them.
Red balloons. It's the color that bothers him, he realizes, more than the demented physics. The balloon is part of a story dancing on the tip of his tongue. The exact red balloon of idyllic childhoods of yesterday juxtaposed against... against what?
Against dead kids in the street.
And then he remembers. Oh, not the story that he's in, but a popular concept of fiction. A trope so hardcore that it's a truth.
Kid stories are where the real monsters are.
The witch in Hanzel and Gretel. The Big, Bad Wolf. Voldemort. All the things that didn't hesitate to hurt innocents, to turn little boys by the score into donkeys, to leave them cold on the street. All the kids books.
His hand tugged again, sharply. Something pulled that kid's arm off like a chicken wing, and it can't have gone far. "We should go figure this out and come back."
What he means is, it's working. Robbie's head is usually a dark place loaded with bloody memories - it doesn't take much to inwardly unnerve him. The balloons, plural, are freaking him out, and he doesn't want to stay here with them until he can rationalize the story they're trapped in. He's had nightmares about this; he knows he has.