by Dean Koontz
She paused to pull up the hood on Toby’s jacket and tie it under his chin. “Well, all right, but don’t stay out there too long at a stretch. When you get cold, come in and warm up a little, then go back out. We don’t want your nose freezing and falling off.” She gave his nose a gentle tweak. He looked so cute. Like a gnome.
“Don’t throw the Frisbee toward the house,” Jack warned him. “Break a window, and we’ll show no mercy. We’ll call the police, have you committed to the Montana Prison for the Criminally Insane.”
As she gave Toby two raisin cookies, Heather said, “And don’t go into the woods.”
“All right.”
“Stay in the yard.”
“I will.”
“I mean it.” The woods worried her. This was different from her recent irrational spells of paranoia. There were good reasons to be cautious of the forest. Wild animals, for one thing. And city people, like them, could get disoriented and lost only a few hundred feet into the trees. “The Montana Prison for the Criminally Insane has no TV, chocolate milk, or cookies.”
“Okay, okay. Sheeeesh, I’m not a baby.”
“No,” Jack said, as he fished cans out of a shopping bag. “But to a bear, you are a tasty-looking lunch.”
“There’s bears in the woods?” Toby asked.
“Are there birds in the sky?” Jack asked. “Fish in the sea?”
“So stay in the yard,” Heather reminded him. “Where I can find you easy, where I can see you.”
As he opened the back door, Toby turned to his father and said, “You better be careful too.”
“Me?”
“That bird might come back and knock you on your ass again.”
Jack pretended he was going to throw the can of beans that he was holding, and Toby ran from the house, giggling. The door banged shut behind him.
Later, after their purchases had been put away, Jack went into the study to examine Eduardo’s book collection and select a novel to read, while Heather went upstairs to the guest bedroom where she was setting up her array of computers. They had taken the spare bed apart and moved it to the cellar. The two six-foot folding tables, which had been among the goods delivered by the movers, now stood in place of the bed and formed an L-shaped work area. She’d unpacked her three computers, two printers, laser scanner, and associated equipment, but until now she’d had no chance to make connections and plug them in.
As of that moment, she really had no use for such a high-tech array of computing power. She had worked on software and program design virtually all of her adult life, however, and she didn’t feel complete with her machines disconnected and boxed up, regardless of whether or not she had an immediate project that required them. She set to work, positioning the equipment, linking monitors to logic units, logic units to printers, one of the printers and logic units to the scanner, all the while happily humming old Elton John songs.
Eventually she and Jack would investigate business opportunities and decide what to do with the rest of their lives. By then the phone company would have installed another line, and the modem would be in operation. She could use data networks to research what population base and capitalization any given business required for success, as well as find answers to hundreds if not thousands of other questions that would influence their decisions and improve their chances for success in whatever enterprise they chose.
Rural Montana enjoyed as much access to knowledge as Los Angeles or Manhattan or Oxford University. The only things needed were a telephone line, a modem, and a couple of good database subscriptions.
At three o’clock, after she’d been working about an hour—the equipment connected, everything working—Heather got up from her chair and stretched. Flexing the muscles in her back, she went to the window to see if flurries had begun to fall ahead of schedule.
The November sky was low, a uniform shade of lead gray, like an immense plastic panel behind which glowed arrays of dull fluorescent tubes. She fancied that she would have recognized it as a snow sky even if she hadn’t heard the forecast. It looked as cold as ice.
In that bleak light, the higher woods appeared to be more gray than green. The backyard and, to the south, the brown fields seemed barren rather than merely dormant in anticipation of the spring. Although the landscape was nearly as monochromatic as a charcoal drawing, it was beautiful. A different beauty from that which it offered under the warm caress of the sun. Stark, somber, broodingly majestic.
She saw a small spot of color to the south, on the cemetery knoll not far from the perimeter of the western forest. Bright red. It was Toby in his new ski suit. He was standing inside the foot-high fieldstone wall.
I should have told him to stay away from there, Heather thought with a twinge of apprehension.
Then she wondered at her uneasiness. Why should the cemetery seem any more dangerous to her than the yard immediately outside its boundaries? She didn’t believe in ghosts or haunted places.
The boy stood at the grave markers, utterly still. She watched him for a minute, a minute and a half, but he didn’t move. For an eight-year-old, who usually had more energy than a nuclear plant, that was an extraordinary period of inactivity.
The gray sky settled lower while she watched.
The land darkened subtly.
Toby stood unmoving.
The arctic air didn’t bother Jack—invigorated him, in fact—except that it penetrated especially deeply into the thighbones and scar tissue of his left leg. He did not have to limp, however, as he ascended the hill to the private graveyard.
He passed between the four-foot-high stone posts that, gateless, marked the entrance to the burial ground. His breath puffed from his mouth in frosty plumes.
Toby was standing at the foot of the fourth grave in the line of four. His arms hung straight at his sides, his head was bent, and his eyes were fixed on the headstone. The Frisbee was on the ground beside him. He breathed so shallowly that he produced only a faint mustache of steam that repeatedly evaporated as each brief exhalation became a soft inhalation.
“What’s up?” Jack asked.
The boy did not respond.
The nearest headstone, at which Toby stared, was engraved with the name THOMAS FERNANDEZ and the dates of birth and death. Jack didn’t need the marker to remind him of the date of death; it was carved on his own memory far deeper than the numbers were cut into the granite before him.
Since they’d arrived Tuesday morning, after staying the night with Paul and Carolyn Youngblood, Jack had been too busy to inspect the private cemetery. Furthermore, he’d not been eager to stand in front of Tommy’s grave, where memories of blood and loss and despair were certain to assail him.
To the left of Tommy’s marker was a double stone. It bore the names of his parents—EDUARDO and MARGARITE.
Though Eduardo had been in the ground only a few months, Tommy for a year, and Margarite for three years, all of their graves looked freshly dug. The dirt was mounded unevenly, and no grass grew on it, which seemed odd, because the fourth grave was flat and covered with silky brown grass. He could understand that gravediggers might have disturbed the surface of Margarite’s plot in order to bury Eduardo’s coffin beside hers, but that didn’t explain the condition of Tommy’s site. Jack made a mental note to ask Paul Youngblood about it.
The last monument, at the head of the only grassy plot, belonged to Stanley Quartermass, patron of them all. An inscription in the weathered black stone surprised a chuckle out of Jack when he least expected one: Here lies Stanley Quartermass / dead before his time / because he had to work / with so damned many / actors and writers.
Toby had not moved.
“What’re you up to?” Jack asked.
No answer.
He put one hand on Toby’s shoulder. “Son?”
Without shifting his gaze from the tombstone, the boy said, “What’re they doing down there?”
“Who? Where?”
“In the ground.”
“You mean Tommy and his folks
, Mr. Quartermass?”
“What’re they doing down there?”
There was nothing odd about a child wanting to fully understand death. It was no less a mystery to the young than to the old. What seemed strange to Jack was the way the question had been phrased.
“Well,” he said, “Tommy, his folks, Stanley Quartermass…they aren’t really here.”
“Yes, they are.”
“No, only their bodies are here,” Jack said, gently massaging the boy’s shoulder.
“Why?”
“Because they were finished with them.”
The boy was silent, brooding. Was he thinking about how close his own father had come to being planted under a similar stone? Maybe enough time had passed since the shooting for Toby to be able to confront feelings that he’d been repressing.
The mild breeze from out of the northwest stiffened slightly.
Jack’s hands were cold. He put them in his jacket pockets and said, “Their bodies weren’t them, anyway, not the real them.”
The conversation took an even stranger turn: “You mean, these weren’t their original bodies? These were puppets?”
Frowning, Jack dropped to his knees beside the boy. “Puppets? That’s a peculiar thing to say.”
As if in a trance, the boy focused on Tommy’s headstone. His gray-blue eyes stared unblinking.
“Toby, are you okay?”
Toby still didn’t look at him but said, “Surrogates?”
Jack blinked in surprise. “Surrogates?”
“Were they?”
“That’s a pretty big word. Where’d you hear that?”
Instead of answering him, Toby said, “Why don’t they need these bodies any more?”
Jack hesitated, then shrugged. “Well, son, you know why—they were finished with their work in this world.”
“This world?”
“They’ve gone on.”
“Where?”
“You’ve been to Sunday school. You know where.”
“No.”
“Sure you do.”
“No.”
“They’ve gone on to heaven.”
“They went on?”
“Yes.”
“In what bodies?”
Jack removed his right hand from his jacket pocket and cupped his son’s chin. He turned the boy’s head away from the gravestone, so they were eye-to-eye. “What’s wrong, Toby?”
They were face-to-face, inches apart, yet Toby seemed to be looking into the distance, through Jack and at some far horizon.
“Toby?”
“In what bodies?”
Jack released the boy’s chin, moved one hand back and forth in front of his face. Not a blink. His eyes didn’t follow the movement of the hand.
“In what bodies?” Toby repeated impatiently.
Something was wrong with the boy. Sudden psychological ailment. With a catatonic aspect.
Toby said, “In what bodies?”
Jack’s heart began to pump hard and fast as he stared into his son’s flat, unresponsive eyes, which were no longer windows on a soul but mirrors to keep out the world. If it was a psychological problem, there was no doubt about the cause. They’d been through a traumatic year, enough to drive a grown man—let alone a child—to a breakdown. But what was the trigger, why now, why here, why after all these many months, during which the poor kid had seemed to cope so well?
“In what bodies?” Toby demanded sharply.
“Come on,” Jack said, taking the boy’s gloved hand. “Let’s go back to the house.”
“In what bodies did they go on?”
“Toby, stop this.”
“Need to know. Tell me now. Tell me.”
Oh, dear God, don’t let this happen.
Still on his knees, Jack said, “Listen, come back to the house with me so we can—”
Toby wrenched his hand out of his father’s grasp, leaving Jack with the empty glove. “In what bodies?”
The small face was without expression, as placid as still water, yet the words burst from the boy in a tone of ice-cold rage. Jack had the eerie feeling that he was conversing with a ventriloquist’s dummy that could not match its wooden features to the tenor of its words.
“In what bodies?”
This wasn’t a breakdown. A mental collapse didn’t happen this suddenly, completely, without warning signs.
“In what bodies?”
This wasn’t Toby. Not Toby at all.
Ridiculous. Of course it was Toby. Who else?
Someone talking through Toby.
Crazy thought, weird. Through Toby?
Nevertheless, kneeling there in the graveyard, gazing into his son’s eyes, Jack no longer saw the blankness of a mirror, although he was aware of his own frightened face in twin reflections. He didn’t see the innocence of a child, either, or any familiar quality. He perceived—or was imagining—another presence, something both less and more than human, a strangeness beyond comprehension, peering out at him from within Toby.
“In what bodies?”
Jack couldn’t work up any saliva. Tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. Couldn’t swallow, either. He was colder than the wintry day could explain. Suddenly much colder. Beyond freezing.
He’d never felt anything like it before. A cynical part of him thought he was being ridiculous, hysterical, letting himself be swept away by primitive superstition—all because he could not face the thought of Toby having a psychotic episode and slipping into mental chaos. On the other hand, it was precisely the primitive nature of the perception that convinced him another presence shared the body of his son: he felt it on a primal level, deeper than he had ever felt anything before; it was a knowledge more certain than any that could be arrived at by intellect, a profound and irrefutable animal instinct, as if he’d captured the scent of an enemy’s pheromones; his skin was tingling with the vibrations of an inhuman aura.
His gut clenched with fear. Sweat broke out on his forehead, and the flesh crimped along the nape of his neck.
He wanted to spring to his feet, scoop Toby into his arms, run down the hill to the house, and remove him from the influence of the entity that held him in its thrall. Ghost, demon, ancient Indian spirit? No, ridiculous. But something, damn it. Something. He hesitated, partly because he was transfixed by what he thought he saw in the boy’s eyes, partly because he feared that forcing a break of the connection between Toby and whatever was linked with him would somenow harm the boy, perhaps damage him mentally.
Which didn’t make any sense, no sense at all. But then none of it made sense. A dreamlike quality characterized the moment and the place.
It was Toby’s voice, yes, but not his usual speech patterns or inflections: “In what bodies did they go on from here?”
Jack decided to answer. Holding Toby’s empty glove in his hand, he had the terrible feeling that he must play along or be left with a son as limp and hollow as the glove, a drained shell of a boy, form without content, those beloved eyes vacant forever.
And how insane was that? His mind spun. He seemed poised on the brink of an abyss, teetering out of balance. Maybe he was the one having the breakdown.
He said, “Th-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 the
m.
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. Or 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.”