S15E14 - "Child's Play" - Horror Hill

**Erik Peabody** (0:02)
Chilling Tales for Dark Nights.
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Good evening, listeners, and welcome back to Horror Hill. I'm Erik Peabody. Tonight, I've got a great little story for you from William Dauphin titled, Aaron's Magic Box. And since you can't see the text in front of you like I can, the box has two Xs. Bill is our narrator, who tells us about how his younger brother Aaron ran away when they were both younger. Except today, we're going to get the real story behind Aaron's disappearance, how it didn't have anything to do with leaving home, but rather with a strange book of arcane runes that Aaron discovered one day, about how he became obsessed with the book, and about the ultimate horror that resulted from it.
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And now, from author William Delfin, I give you Aaron's Magic Box.
Some nights are worse than others. Some nights I wake up alone in the dark with a cold chill settling upon me, seeping into my flesh. Other nights, I toss and turn until I wake with a half-remembered image of my brother Aaron's face. In my dream, it's always the same one. He's lying, prone on the floor, his head tilted back, mouth hanging open. He reaches for me, and as he does, his fingers stretch, new joints appearing, allowing them to bend and twist until they manage to grasp me.
On good nights, I don't dream at all.
Nobody but I knows what happened to Aaron, because I never told them. The events behind his disappearance are a secret I've kept for over twenty years. Our parents died believing that he had run away from home, that he was out there somewhere, alive. I thought it better to let them think that. They might have been half right. It's all my fault, you see. I could have done something. I should have done something.
I saw what was happening to Aaron and sat back and quietly hoped that things would turn out okay.
They didn't.
It was a book. Just an ordinary looking hardback that Aaron found at the town library. It seemed innocuous enough. No dust jacket, no numerical library classification and no sign out card. You'd almost think that the book didn't belong to the library at all. Its cover was dusty brown, plain, with no title or author.
Someone had tucked it away on a bottom shelf in the section reserved for works about medieval Western philosophy. That's where Aaron found it, gathering dust, waiting for him to take it.
Inside, there was no copyright or publication information, and all the text appeared to be gibberish, written in some other language we couldn't identify. I immediately brushed the book off as a mild curiosity. But something about it interested Aaron, and he tucked it into his book bag, making sure no one saw. We were both silent the whole walk home, but as soon as we got inside the house, Aaron sprinted up to his room. When I wandered up later, his do not disturb sign was up, so I knocked before letting myself in.
Aaron had cleared everything off his desk, save the book, a pad of paper, and his reading lamp. The tome was turned open to a page filled with diagrams and strange symbols scrawled by hand in a faded ink on yellowing paper. The top sheet of Aaron's notepad was half filled with his usual chicken scratch handwriting. How are you getting anything out of this? I asked, thumbing back a couple of pages in the strange work. Aaron gazed at the open book with eyes that seemed to be looking past the pages at something beyond. I don't know, but the more I read it, it's like the symbols turn into words in my head.