Bobby hadn’t the slightest idea what Ted was talking about and didn’t care. All he knew was that the course of his life was being decided on the sidewalk outside a Bridgeport billiard parlor. He could hear the rustle of the low men’s coats; he could smell them; now that Ted had touched him again he could feel them even more clearly. That horrible itching behind his eyes had begun again, too. In a weird way it harmonized with the buzzing in his head. The black specks drifted across his vision and he was suddenly sure what they meant, what they were for. In Clifford Simak’s book Ring Around the Sun, it was a top that took you off into other worlds; you followed the rising spirals. In truth, Bobby suspected, it was the specks that did it. The black specks. They were alive . . .
And they were hungry.
‘Let the boy decide,’ the leader of the low men said at last. His living branch of a finger caressed the back of Bobby’s neck again. ‘He loves you so much, Teddy. You’re his te-k a.
Aren’t you? That means destiny’s friend, Bobby-O. Isn’t that what this old smoky-smelling Teddy-bear is to you? Your destiny’s friend?’
Bobby said nothing, only pressed his cold throbbing face against Ted’s shirt. He now repented coming here with all his heart — would have stayed home hiding under his bed if he had known the truth of the low men — but yes, he supposed Ted was his te-k a. He didn’t know about stuff like destiny, he was only a kid, but Ted was his friend. Guys like us, Bobby thought miserably. Guys like us.
‘So how do you feel now that you see us?’ the low man asked. ‘Would you like to come with us so you can be close to good old Ted? Perhaps see him on the odd weekend? Discuss literature with your dear old te-k a? Learn to eat what we eat and drink what we drink?’ The awful fingers again, caressing. The buzzing in Bobby’s head increased. The black specks fattened and now they looked like fingers — beckoning fingers. ‘We eat it hot, Bobby,’ the low man whispered. ‘And drink it hot as well. Hot . . . and sweet. Hot . . . and sweet.’
‘Stop it,’ Ted snapped.
‘Or would you rather stay with your mother?’ the crooning voice went on, ignoring Ted.
‘Surely not. Not a boy of your principles. Not a boy who has discovered the joys of friendship and literature. Surely you’ll come with this wheezy old k a-mai, won’t you? Or will you?
Decide, Bobby. Do it now, and knowing that what you decide is what will bide. Now and forever.’
Bobby had a delirious memory of the lobsterback cards blurring beneath McQuown’s long white fingers: Now they go, now they slow, now they rest, here’s the test.
I fail, Bobby thought. I fail the test.
‘Let me go, mister,’ he said miserably. ‘Please don’t take me with you.’
‘Even if it means your te-k a has to go on without your wonderful and revivifying company?’ The voice was smiling, but Bobby could almost taste the knowing contempt under its cheery surface, and he shivered. With relief, because he understood he was probably going to be let free after all, with shame because he knew what he was doing — crawling, chintzing, chickening out. All the things the good guys in the movies and books he loved never did. But the good guys in the movies and books never had to face anything like the low men in the yellow coats or the horror of the black specks. And what Bobby saw of those things here, outside The Corner Pocket, was not the worst of it either. What if he saw the rest? What if the black specks drew him into a world where he saw the men in the yellow coats as they really were? What if he saw the shapes inside the ones they wore in this world?
‘Yes,’ he said, and began to cry.
‘Yes what?’
‘Even if he has to go without me.’
‘Ah. And even if it means going back to your mother?’