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.
“My daddy,” whispered Jack quietly.
“I know,” Hayes said. “I know.”
“They couldn’t do that to him. They couldn’t. They can’t,” spat the boy. “I went and hid. But then I found them. I found them later. All of them.” He flared up again, his face growing indistinct, his words a stuttered buzz. “My daddy,” he cried out. “They killed my daddy! They killed him! I’ll kill all of you! All of you! For what you did to my daddy, for what you did!”
“I know.”
“I found them. Most of them.”
“Yes.”
“And I got so mad that… that things stopped. And I could hear the blood inside them and all the angry things inside of them and I thought of my daddy and… and…”
Hayes saw the door of the Third Ring. He watched as the men filed out, Naylor, Evie, Eppleton, all of them laughing, and they descended into the trolley station. The boy watched from across the street and then picked up a waste bin from in front of a diner. He waited, steeling himself, and then bolted after them through the darkness to where the trolley was now standing frozen in the tunnels, curiously still like all time was stopped around it since the boy was moving at unimaginable speeds, and then the boy threw the trash can at the door and screamed at the top of his lungs and charged in. Windows cracked and lights erupted in dazzling fireworks as the boy descended on the trolley like a lightning bolt. And inside the people were like statues, eyes wide, waiting to die. Waiting to die, as they should have. All of them.
There was a glitter from something in a woman’s hands. A pair of scissors, clipping yarn. Hayes saw the boy’s gray-white hand reach forward and pick them up and turn to the nearest person and raise the blades up…
Their flesh tore like paper, and gore tumbled from their wounds at slow, syrupy speeds. The tunnel outside floated by, piping and tubing drifting along like logs in a stream. The boy wept as he lashed out at them, tearing at the still figures that slowly fell to the ground once he stabbed them, wafting down like thistle seeds in a summer breeze. It was like a dreamy dance, sinking to the trolley floor with red streams twirling up and away from their necks and backs and chests. Their faces quiet and thoughtful as though they did not yet know they were dead. And then when the scissors broke he stopped and moved to the man at the front, the pilot-man in the uniform with the shiny brass buttons, but he knew not to hurt him because once his daddy had said those men were very good men and would get him home if he was lost, and to just ask them for help.
Which is what the boy did then. Asked him how to get home, and for help. But the man sat still as stone like the other frozen people, and said nothing. And so the boy turned to look at the little trolley behind him and all the colorless people still falling to the ground or slumping over like marionettes with their strings cut, and he dropped the scissor handles and walked out to the dark tunnel and the distant lights beyond.
