breakdown.
He said, “They didn’t need bodies, Skipper. You know that. Nobody
needs bodies in heaven.”
“They are bodies,” the Toby-thing said cryptically. “Their bodies
are.”
“Not any more. They’re spirits now.”
“Don’t understand.”
“Sure you do. Souls. Their souls went to heaven.”
“Bodies are.”
“Went to heaven to be with God.”
“Bodies are.”
Toby stared through him. Deep in Toby’s eyes, however, like a coiling
thread of smoke, something moved. Jack sensed that something was
regarding him intensely.
“Bodies are. Puppets are. What else?” Jack didn’t know how to
respond.
The breeze coming across the flank of the sloped yard was as cold as if
it had skimmed over a glacier on its way to them. The Toby-thing
returned to the first question that it had asked: “What are they doing
down there?”
Jack glanced at the graves, then into the boy’s eyes, deciding to be
straightforward. He wasn’t actually talking to a little boy, so he
didn’t need to use euphemisms. He was crazy, imagining the whole
conversation as well as the inhuman presence. Either way, what he said
didn’t matter.
“They’re dead.”
“What is dead?”
“They are. These three people buried here.”
“What is dead?”
“Lifeless.”
“What is lifeless?”
“Without life.”
“What is life?”
“The opposite of death.”
“What is death?”
Desperately, Jack said, “Empty, hollow, rotting.”
“Bodies are.”
“Not forever.”
“Bodies are.”
“Nothing lasts forever.”
“Everything lasts.”
“Nothing.”
“Everything becomes.”
“Becomes what?” Jack asked.
He was now beyond giving answers himself, was full of his own
questions.
“Everything becomes,” the Toby-thing repeated.
“Becomes what?”
“Me. Everything becomes me.”
Jack wondered what in the hell he was talking to and whether he was
making more sense to it than it was making to him. He began to doubt
that he was even awake. Maybe he’d taken a nap. If he wasn’t insane,
perhaps he was asleep.
Snoring in the armchair in the study, a book in his lap.
Maybe Heather had never come to tell him Toby was in the cemetery, in
which case all he had to do was wake up.
The breeze felt real. Not like a dream wind. Cold, piercing. And it
had picked up enough speed to give it a voice. Whispering in the
grass, soughing in the trees along the edge of the higher woods,
keening softly, softly.
The Toby-thing said, “Suspended.”
“What?”
“Different sleep.”
Jack glanced at the graves. “No.”
“Waiting.”
“No.”
“Puppets waiting.”
“No. Dead.”
“Tell me their secret.”
“Dead.”
“The secret.”
“They’re just dead.”
“Tell me.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
The boy’s expression was still calm, but his face was flushed. The
arteries were throbbing visibly in his temples, as if his blood
pressure had soared off the scale.
“Tell me!”
Jack was shaking uncontrollably, increasingly frightened by the cryptic
nature of their exchanges, worried that he understood even less of the
situation than he thought he did and that his ignorance might lead him
to say the wrong thing and somehow put Toby into even greater danger
than he already was.
“Tell me!”
Overwhelmed by fear and confusion and frustration, Jack grabbed Toby by
the shoulders, stared into his strange eyes.
“Who are you?”
No answer.
“What’s happened to my Toby?”
After a long silence: “What’s the matter, Dad?”
Jack’s scalp prickled. Being called
“Dad” by this thing, this hateful
intruder, was the worst affront yet.
“Dad?”
“Stop it.”
“Daddy, what’s wrong?”
But he wasn’t Toby. No way. His voice still didn’t have its natural
inflections, his face was slack, and his eyes were wrong.
“Dad, what’re you doing?”
The thing in possession of Toby apparently hadn’t realized that its
masquerade had come undone. Until now it had thought that Jack
believed he was speaking with his son. The parasite was struggling to
improve its performance.
“Dad, what did I do? Are you mad at me? I didn’t do anything, Dad,
really I didn’t.”
“What are you?” Jack demanded.
Tears slid from the boy’s eyes. But the nebulous something was behind
the tears, an arrogant puppetmaster confident of its ability to
deceive.
“Where’s Toby? You sonofabitch, whatever the hell you are, give him
back to me.”
Jack’s hair fell across his eyes. Sweat glazed his face. To anyone
coming upon them just then, his extreme fear would appear to be