Little Boy Blue

The small boy stood at the water's edge, wrinkling his bare toes, making soft impressions in the warm sand, waiting. His hair a halo of golden curls, his face free from guile or care, he was an innocent at play for the last time. As the tide rolled in to meet him, he dared himself to stand there until the very last instant, then turned, shrieking and laughing, running ahead of the wave. Later, further up the beach, his thoughts turned to construction. Podgy fingers scraping a moat around the central hub of his sandcastle, pouring a half-bucket of seawater into the shallow dip, watching it soak into the sand and dry away to nothing. Somewhere high overhead, gulls wheeled and cried. Mum lay on a towel nearby, reading her book of Ern Malley, looking over occasionally to check that he was still there, but really not all that often; There had been stories on the news, children buried on the moors of England, but they were half a world away, at the least. So she read her poems until the afternoon sun began to sing soft lullabies and the book lay forgotten in her hand, the words unread, sleeping beside her.
Beyond concern, safe in the knowledge that she was always there, Blue played on, barely looking up from his endeavours as the afternoon wore on. He built a fort, a castle, a palace. He crafted spires and arches, roads and bridges, a city of sand and seashells, a temporary testament to the potential that existed within him. Freed from the tethering gaze of the real world, from the restrictive observation of his mother, he built into four dimensions, into time, creating an edifice which would always stand, had always stood, yet somehow never will. As he mapped out the swirling maze of backstreets and studded the tenement walls with shiny sea-smoothed pebbles, he populated the secret world with tiny people, each with a name and a thought and a dream to cling to. Releasing them from his control, he laughed excitedly as they set off upon their miniature lives.
"That's a fine thing you've built there Blue."
The boy looked up, startled. Above him stood a tall, thin man with a bald head that steamed slightly in the heat. He wore black jeans, a thin black tee-shirt and, despite the sun, a black leather jacket. The man had come from nowhere, without warning; How much had he seen? Smiling, he hunkered down beside the suspicious child and held out a friendly hand.
"Morgan T. Norris, Psycho Killer, at your service."
Blue shuffled away from this strange intruder, placing the teeming sand metropolis between them. The man made a sad face, an exaggerated cartoon of rejection and pain, then shrugged and sat down, cross-legged, the way Blue and the other children did at story time.
"Don't be frightened Blue, I'm not here to hurt you; I'm here to tell you about the world."
Blue remained wary, glancing over to check that his mother was still within earshot. There was something wrong about the man, but at the same time, he felt an overwhelming need to hear what he had to say. Still frowning slightly, he maneuvered himself into the same position on the other side of the city, looking up at the man all the while.
Norris grinned and clapped his hands.
"Well done! So you're a brave boy as well as clever. What else can you do Blue?"
Blue shrugged, secretly pleased at the compliments but still not willing to give too much away.
"Nothing? Not a single solitary sausage? Hmm..."
The man cocked his head to one side, dissecting the child with his strange gaze. Looking back at him, Blue noticed that the man's eyes were flecked with darkness, black dots in the off-white orbs, like crows against the winter skies. He shivered, feeling himself drawn ever closer as Norris smiled, his irises rotating slowly, pupils turning to horizontal slits.
"Aha, I see what the trouble is."
Blue felt a wave of nausea suddenly rise in his stomach as the world seemed to lurch onto its side. Leaning forwards, he vomited into the outer suburbs of his silicate citadel, but all he produced was a thick mass of clear jelly. Sitting up, groaning, Blue found that the man had moved around to sit beside him, a hand resting on his shoulder. The man's touch was cold and smooth, with a slight static tingle.
"Not feeling so good there are you? Let's see what we can do about that then."
Still smiling, he gripped Blue's shoulder tighter and tighter, grinding the young bones together, shivering slightly as he pushed the boy onto his back on the sand. Blue tried to open his mouth, to scream, but something had come unstuck between his mind and his mouth; He managed a pathetic mewling, then vomited another thin trickle of the strange gel. It rolled back across his face, filling his nostrils, suffocating him. Still pushing him to the ground, Norris used his free hand to wipe the muck away.
"That's a good boy. Get it all out. That's it. That's it."
Another spasm in his guts, another geyser of clear emesis, the strongest yet. His stomach was cramping, tightening like a rubber band, but as he reflexively brought his knees up, Norris grabbed his ankles and pulled his legs straight out again, holding him flat on his back.
"Don't fight it. Relax. Let it go."
Looking up at him through a haze of tears, Blue saw the man as the sun, a radiant shape in a clear blue sky, beaming down upon him. He wanted to know why this was happening, why the man had chosen him, what he was going to do to him next, but all he could do was lie there, shaking and puking and whimpering , until the retching and heaving finally subsided.
"All done now?"
With a start, Blue realised that he was free to sit up, had been for some time, but he somehow hadn't registered it. His attacker was a few feet away, waiting patiently for an answer, and the inexplicable vomit had long dried into the sand. All that remained to prove that it had happened was an ache in his stomach and a flaking crust which had dried on his face and chest. He sat up and looked around uncertainly, wondering exactly how much time had passed. His mum still lay on her towel, asleep in the sun, and the same familiar figures could be seen playing in the surf further down the beach. Seeing them, Blue's heart leapt, and he felt the urge to run to them, to wake his mum and hold her tightly.
"You don't want to do that though Blue. Not really. Because I would have to come over and introduce myself to her as well, wouldn't I?"
Norris grinned at him, pulling aside his jacket to reveal a long bladed knife which hung upside down in a webbing holster beneath his left arm. Blue slowly shook his head. For all the man's strangeness, for all the vomiting and heaving, he was no longer scared.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Well now, that's the question isn't it? Who do you think I am?"
Blue concentrated hard on the question, frowning. Various thoughts flashed through his mind - God, the Devil and James Bond amongst them - but in the end, he went for a much more down to Earth option.
"Are you my dad?"
Norris threw back his head and laughed.
"That bastard? Gods no! Heh."
He scrambled to his feet, brushed sand from his jeans and held a hand out to the small boy.
"Fancy a paddle?"
Blue looked up at him, then shrugged and took his hand.
"Will you tell me who you are?"
Norris grinned down at him.
"No."
At the water's edge, the man stood waiting, rocking lightly on his heels, making soft impressions in the warm sand. The small boy stood beside him, waiting expectantly.
"Do you ever feel like you've done everything there is to do at least twice?" Norris asked.
Blue shook his head and the man shrugged.
"No, course not. What are you, five? You haven't even done most things once yet."
He looked out to the horizon, where the darker blue of the Southern Ocean met the paler blue of the sky. Two vast expanses of seeming emptiness, without which the whole world would keel over and quit. The line separating them seemed so arbitrary, unreal. The sea could flow on into the heavens, and the sky could roll on down to cover them all like a blanket. One day...
"One day," he announced, "you'll know what all this was really about."
Blue said nothing, merely watching as the man withdrew his long knife, the blade shimmering in the sun. Leaning forward, he used the tip to trace a line in the sand at his feet, drawing a circle just below the high water mark.
"In the next couple of months, people will begin to disappear. Old men wandering home, children playing out in the sun - Three of them will go from this very beach. And no-one will notice, really. No-one's looking at the big picture. They'll make a lot of noise about each individual case, but no-one will dare put them all together. That number of disappearances couldn't be put down to one or two crazies. There would have to be an organisation, a global network of kidnappers, to vanish that many people."
He paused to light a cigarette, warming to his topic, becoming more animated as he spoke.
"Of course, you don't half make it easy for them. There are so many places where abduction and torture are part of the culture that you could take half a city before anyone questioned it. A couple more years, you'll get a man on the moon and every stoner in the free world will be looking to the skies and singing Good Morning Starshine, actually inviting them to come and make contact with you! You're all looking in the wrong places anyway, but still, what a way to bring on the end of the world..."
He grinned down at Blue, drawing back the veil of normality for an instant, allowing a fraction of his true face to peak through once more. But Blue's nausea had long passed and he simply looked back at him, until the man who called himself Norris felt compelled to look away.
"You can feel it." he said. "You know why I'm here. Places have power. The spot on the beach where the missing children were last seen playing; The point where the tyre tracks mount the pavement; The flower bed outside the convent, where the secret plantings will never blossom."
He looked down at the line in the sand, then stepped across it, into the circle. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse and distant, a whisper across the void.
"These are places of darkness and strength, full of violence and shame, anger and lust, pain and terror. These are the scars torn into the Earth by the ragged blade of humanity, where the surface is peeled away to expose the chaos at the heart of it all."
Out in the bay, a dark shape moved beneath the waters, something vast and ancient turning in its slumbers, tossing up larger waves and disturbing the other denizens of the deep, sending them racing for the beach in the rising swell. Norris raised his hands to welcome them to the land.
"These are the places where your world rubs against theirs, where space gets thin and worn away. This is where you fall through."
The wave washed past them, thick with writhing, splashing life, struggling to escape from the thing in the bay. Blue felt their fear, their drive towards life, transmitted through contact with his skin. Plunging his hands into the water, fingers outstretched, he stroked and touched all the darting fish and sightless worms he could, communing with the turtles and shellfish. He could feel them in his mind, and he knew then that they felt him too, reaching out to meet his thoughts with their own, straining for this most basic of contact.
The water was barely up to his knees, but the roiling mass of life piled against his legs, building up to his waist, his chest, threatening to topple him. So many lives. So many creatures. All the small things of the Earth, swarming around him, eager for his touch and the safety it seemed to provide. Blue struggled to remain upright, leaning into the wave of shell and flesh as it battered against him, but he could feel his legs weakening. Then he felt Norris' strong, cool grip on his shoulder once more, and the solid, steady touch calmed him for a moment. Here was a contact which didn't threaten to overwhelm him, a life form with no claim upon him; A creature with no urge to exist. Realising this, Blue looked up at the man, only to find him looking back down at him, face frozen in a rictus grin like a freshly bleached skull.
"That's right little monk. I bring you greetings from the tomb world. See?"
The wave was receding, taking the swarming mass of life with it, returning the swimming, crawling, drifting beings to the depths. Looking down, Blue noticed a great red welt across his stomach, the mark of a jellyfish which had clung to him for comfort and burnt his skin with its desperately grasping tentacles. It was the worst pain he had ever experienced, and the mark would remain until beyond his dying day, but for the time being, there were more important things to attend to.
The circle Norris had drawn in the sand was no longer visible, but its shape was clearly marked in the ring of dead fish which surrounded his feet. Piled up to his shins were crabs and turtles, jellyfish and a baby shark, strangely coloured squid and shapeless lumps of muscle and bone. Peering closer, Blue saw that their flesh was already rotting, revealing needle thin bones and rusted clockwork gears within. The brittle carapace of a lobster cracked under its own weight to disgorge a matt of twisted ribbon wiring. The baby shark flicked its tail listlessly and vomited up a clotted lump of broken radio tubes and motor oil.
Falling to his knees, plunging his hands into the animatronic charnel pit, Blue struggled to find a single biological impulse, but the ersatz beasts were dead. Worse, they had never been alive, and it had taken the true presence of death on their beach to reveal them to him.
"What are they?" he demanded.
Norris shrugged.
"Who knows? You go to their worlds, maybe something comes back here. Maybe they're the outriders for an army, scouting for prime landing sites. I honestly don't know."
"Then why are you here? What was the point?"
Norris lit another cigarette, watching the horizon, smiling sadly.
"It's not always easy," he sighed. "It should be, if you've done it as many times as I have, but there are times when it just doesn't seem right. So maybe I try to give something back for a change. Maybe I don't just take, take, take."
He crouched down in the circle of decay, his cold, lifeless hands on Blue's shoulders.
"When you were sick, that was them. You were full of their filth, and I got it out of you. I woke you up, for the first time in your life. You won't remember it, once I go, but things will be different for you now. My gift to you. My apology."
He straightened up, stepped out of the circle and shook flakes of rust and fish scales from his jeans.
"Right, time for me to go."
With that he turned and walked away, up the beach, towards the ruined jetty. After a moment, he could no longer be distinguished from the jutting support struts and charred crossbars. A moment after that and Blue didn't even remember the man had ever been there. He was just a small boy, on his knees on the beach in the late afternoon. There was a black slimy circle in the sand, a sticky, putrid mess which caked his forearms, and his chest was enveloped in a dull, throbbing pain. He stood up uncertainly, tears forming in his eyes as the raw, coruscating pain began to block out all other sensations.
Sobbing, he ran wildly back down the beach, towards the spot where his mum had settled down for the afternoon. As he drew near, some silent, deeper part of his brain registered the fact that mothers don't just lie there when their children are in pain. Mothers don't sleep through screams of agony. Mothers leap up from their shallow slumbers, to sweep their child up in their arms, to kiss the pain away and soothe the fever dreams. Mothers are always there.
Faltering, understanding, the pain in his chest forgotten, subsumed by the greater agony of loss, Blue came to a stop at the edge of the towel. Looking down at the still, sad form of his mum, his halo of curls casting a dark shadow across her face, he knew why Norris had been on the beach that day, why he had felt the need to apologise.
Kneeling silently, one small hand resting on her shoulder, little boy Blue lowered his head and gently kissed his mum's brow, then slipped the book from her hand and closed it, the words unread, the poems unfinished.

Notes