'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
