“No, Jack,” he said. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m not. I’m like you, remember?”
The boy relented and became solid again. “My daddy’s dead,” he said softly.
“I know, Jack.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“He was killed.”
“I know. I know that. I need to know how.”
“How he was killed?”
“I need to know what happened.” Hayes felt the boy’s thoughts flow before him. He seemed terribly stunted. He had the mind not of a boy of ten but perhaps one of five, maybe even younger. Hayes was not sure if he had been like this before he had been altered.
“What happened?” repeated the child.
“Yes. On the day that he left.”
“When he left to go to the boat?”
“Yes. On that day.”
“Why?”
“I just need to know. Someone needs to know what happened to people like your daddy. We can’t just forget about them.”
“No,” said the boy. “No, no.” He frowned, blinking back tears, and said, “I loved him.”
“I know, Jack.”
“He was my daddy. I loved him and I didn’t want to be bad but I had to see where he was going.”
“Yes.”
“I had to see. So I followed him.” And he began speaking while Hayes watched his memories unfold.
His daddy had said not to follow. He’d said he couldn’t follow, that the boy should stay home, and then his daddy had crept out in the night beforehand, trying to get away without him knowing. But the boy had been awake all night and had just been faking sleep, so when his daddy put on his shoes and put the letter on the chair the boy knew. He knew, and when the door shut he went and read the letter. Read it as best as he could. He knew what it was saying and he did not even cry, he was too old to cry, he just tossed the letter aside and went downstairs and saw his daddy walking away down the street. Walking down the street, north. Alone.
“I followed him,” Jack said then. “I’m good at it. I’m good at being quiet.”
It was a long walk, and they took trolleys sometimes but still the boy followed him. Away from the city, to the far northwestern waterside. Cold and wet and dark and alone. And there his father met a whole lot of other men and waited with them. Waited, staring out at the water, looking at a dark black boat that waited with them. And when the second boat came they all seemed scared at first but then they got to work because one man said they had to. Moving things from one boat to the other. Working. Working like daddy did at his job, and the boy wondered if this was part of his job but he didn’t think so, daddy never did work with boats and ships on the water, but deep down in the ground.
Then one man dropped one of the crates. The others swarmed to the dropped box, trying to scoop up what was inside, but his daddy saw it, and his eyes got big and he started shouting. So mad he was almost crying. The boy had been too far away to hear what was said, too far, but it had to be bad. No one looked that upset and said good things, and he knew what his daddy looked like mad. But still the men put the boxes on the boat and then they got in the boat and went away. And his daddy went with them, away toward the city.
“I was scared,” the boy said. “They left me there. I wanted to tell them not to leave but if I did that my daddy would know I had followed him.”
“I see,” Hayes said.
So the boy waited. Hunkered down below a tree and waited for day. It was too dark to see and there could be things in the woods. Hungry things, waiting. And soon the boy fell asleep.
He awoke when he heard something walking through the bushes, and at first he was scared but then he saw it was his daddy again. He wondered if his daddy had come looking for him, but he didn’t seem to be. He walked right past Jack and kept walking along the beach, looking up into the hills from time to time. And the boy waited, and hesitated, and followed him again.
“I didn’t want him to be alone,” he said. “But I didn’t want him to be mad, either.”
Sometimes it was hard to follow him. Hard to see him in the dark, walking into the hills. But then he hit a path and all the boy had to do was follow the path. After a while he saw his daddy stop and look at something. The boy had to creep close and he saw it was a fence, a big one. His daddy stared at what was inside of it, at the building he could see beyond, and he seemed to figure something out because he turned and ran away, back toward the city.
But the boy stayed. There was something inside the fence. Singing. Singing to him. Singing a song that only he could hear.
“It was beautiful,” the boy said dreamily.
“I’m sure it was,” Hayes said.
The boy climbed the fence and went out into the field. There was a big building there and there was a voice in it singing. Like an angel. He walked to it and listened to the song and sneaked inside. It was easy, because the voice told him who to watch out for. Where to go. What to do.
He went down in the dark. Down to where the thing waited. Where the voice was singing. And he found it burning in the darkness like a big golden coal and he reached out, reached out to touch the song and try and see if he could sing it, too…
What happened next was hard for Hayes to discern. The boy did not really know either. He just knew something had changed.
The world stopped. Froze and drained of color. And then stars lit up along everything, like everything was made of light, and between the stars was so much, so much emptiness, so much space, so much everything and so much nothing, and in between every second was another second, and inside of that second was a day, a month, a year, and suddenly Jack was lost, stretched out among the years and the stars and all the hidden nothingness that lurked below everything, between everything, around everything…
“I was everywhere,” Jack whispered. “I was everything. Forever.”
Hayes pulled away, gasping. He could not touch that memory. He knew that if he did it would destroy him. But he realized then that in that instant the boy had been alone for what must have felt like weeks. Perhaps years, perhaps centuries. Left alone to stagnate and go mad, isolated within that one unending moment.
Hayes noticed the boy was quivering and flickering again. His voice whined and rose higher and higher and Hayes’s ears began to pain him. Hayes waited it out, watching. When the child was done he gasped and shook his head, tears running down his face.
“Then what happened, Jack?” Hayes asked quietly.
The boy sobbed and shook his head.
“What happened?”
“I didn’t know what was wrong with me,” the boy cried. “I didn’t know what it was. I was sick. I was sick and I had to find my daddy. But I didn’t know where he was. So I went to the giant’s playground. It was all I could see, where I was. The only thing I knew.”
“To the big stones? Out on the water?”
“Yes,” the boy said, eyes baleful. “And there he was.”
Hayes saw the image laid out before him. A lone man, running toward a group of people carrying boxes. Lost in the shadows of the tomb-like stones lined up around them, waving his arms and saying to drop them, to let them go. Shouting that it wasn’t what they thought it was, that they had been betrayed and that this wasn’t the way. They could not do it this way. They had to stop. It was a trick, he said. It was a trick.
They told him to be quiet. Told him to shut his damn mouth. He said he couldn’t, said he wouldn’t let anyone die. They told him to be quiet. Again he said it was a trick. They said this had been set up by the boss men, by Tazz himself. And he shook his head and said that they had been tricked by Tazz, too, if that was the case. He wouldn’t let anyone die, he said again. Not like this. There’s a better way. There has to be. He’d go to the police if they didn’t listen.
Then they hit him. Struck him across the face with something hard and heavy, and he crumbled. They looked at him and then looked at each other and then they started to beat him. Kicking him. Punching him. Then somewhere in their movements there was the glint of a knife and someone stabbing down and across, quick. And then he lay there. White and shaking. Clutching his face. His neck. The ground around him. And then he lay still.