Toy Soldiers

It had been a long trek, but they were finally approaching the DMZ. Blue took another round of photos, the relief and the pain etched in the grunts' faces as they drew closer to the edge of the jungle. Another five kays and they'd be home clear, but not all of them wanted to be there. There were too many ghosts in the bush, friends left behind, calling for them to stay. Saigon was less than a day away, but not all of them would make it. Looking back at the vacant eyes as they attempted to name him, to distinguish him from the trees, the enemy, themselves, he wondered which ones would make it back to the world. In his mind's eye he saw a splash of bright crimson on the lush green jungle and knew that this was one of the bad ones. Too late even to learn their names.
It was Blue's third tour. In eighteen months as a snapper for the Melbourne Daily News, he'd probably amassed more time in the bush than the whole platoon he was shadowing combined, and at seventeen, he was probably older than most of them too. It was eleven years since the US had finally declared war on the North, and all that had really changed since the Tet offensive was the death tolls and the steadily shrinking South. The Cong were dug in as deeply as ever, the Brits were still refusing to get involved and the latest rumours had Nixon kissing up to the Cambodians in the hope that they would finally let him send troops in to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail before the whole NLF rolled straight through Saigon. In the meantime, they were packing off younger and younger kids to war, in the hope that the sheer weight of numbers might finally begin to win through. It hadn't worked so far, but at least they were wise to the fact that it was a waste of time and money training and equipping the cannon fodder. The US now saved millions of bomb dollars every year by sending them out into the bush with little more than an ROTC lecture and a hand-me-down rifle.
Hitting a small clearing, the L.T. called a smoke break and the weary boys dropped their packs and settled against the trees to rest. After a moment, when it became apparent that no-one else was volunteering to take a watch and the fresh-faced lieutenant had no intention of ordering it, Blue took himself into the trees, found a decent vantage point and set himself up to wait for the perfect shots to appear. He didn't know quite what was going to happen, just that something was coming, soon, and afterwards the world would be nine souls lighter.
Down in the clearing, one of the grunts took out a pocket radio and tuned it through the dial until he found one of the punk rock stations coming out of London and the sound of the suburbs ripped through the jungle. No-one objected or even suggested that broadcasting their location was a bad idea, and a couple even sang along in their best nasal whine. To Blue, the question wasn't how did he know they were about to die, just how had they lasted this long? Before he could even begin to think about an answer, he felt the familiar tension across his chest as the lattice of thin welts tightened. There was an itch behind his eyes, the sensation of his third eye opening to take in the spectacle, then a sudden heat in the pit of his stomach as the morning's overpriced PX hamburger began the climb back up to the sunlight. He gulped back acid and raised one of the cameras which hung around his neck.
The telephoto lens brought him almost unbearably close to the unsuspecting soldiers, revealing every tick and twitch, every tremble of fear and exhaustion. The boy with the radio wailing along with the Talking Heads had a shaving cut on his chin but had somehow managed to miss three thick black hairs which sprouted around it. The L.T. had a stringy shred of tobacco stuck to his lower lip from a poorly roached joint. The joint maker himself was stretched out with his head on his pack, mumbling quietly to himself, either singing a different song from everyone else or perhaps just saying his prayers. The zoom placed him right in the centre of the clearing with them, made them look more than ever like children playing dressing up games, but the layers of ground glass held him separate from them, a distant, dispassionate observer. Whenever he looked through the viewfinder time slowed to a barely visible progression of still frames and he used the power now to give the boys what little extra time he could. Feeling like God's own missile guidance system, he focussed on a bead of sweat trickling down one grunt's sunburned neck and sighed. If they didn't even have the sense to wrap a towel round their necks, what chance would they ever have stood?
He pressed down hard on the button and the shutter flickered and clicked as rapidly as the AK-47 rounds which suddenly strafed the clearing. The first bullet to claim a human target sizzled as the hot metal passed through that same bead of sweat and tore into the preponderously vulnerable spine behind it. The soldier with the sunburned neck dropped like a stone, mercifully spared any further pain as the slug disconnected his nervous system and left him lying in the undergrowth, waiting for his heart to finish its heavy labours.
The L.T. died screaming. The first of three bullets to hit him went through his left cheek, ricocheting off his lower jaw and filling his mouth with hot fragments of tooth and bone. The next found his raised hand and tore off three fingers and a thumb, turning the sensitive, dextrous digits into a fine red mist and so many lumps of gristle. The kill shot came almost immediately after, but in the young lieutenant's mind, it might have been an eternity. He had time to look at the ruins of his hand and to set off a high, keening scream, the most expressive sound his shattered face could produce. Then the round with his name on it hit his chest with jackhammer force, twisting him around where he sat, forcing the final breath from his lungs in a reedy whistle.
From his secluded vantage point, Blue took shot after shot, matching the Cong beat for beat, one round, one photo. He saw the young men die, cut down where they lay drowsing in the oppressive afternoon heat, blown onto their backs as they scrambled to their feet, riddled with bullets which made a terrifyingly banal thud as they found their mark. Untouched, unmoved, Blue used up all the film in his four everyday cameras, then pulled his high speed Nikon from his pack and held it to his eye, waiting for the last breath. For a moment or two, the only sounds in the clearing were the soft drip of warm blood and the muffled radio, trapped beneath one of the corpses. Then the trees were hacked aside and three NLF soldiers in regulation black stepped into the clearing. While his comrades swept the perimeter with their Kalashnikovs at the ready, the third made a beeline for the source of the music. Tipping over the dead soldier with his boot, he retrieved the radio and held it close to his ear, shaking his head wildly and grinning witlessly, aping the last actions of the child at his feet. His comrades laughed at the impersonation, then set about stripping the other corpses. Between them, the three VC made short work of it, pocketing rations, smokes, small electricals and arms. They were quick, disciplined and methodical, working clockwise around the clearing with a set structure to their looting, taking turns at standing guard while the other two harvested the booty. It seemed that the communist ideal of equally redistributed wealth held true even when the wealth in question was prised from the still warm fingers of a murdered sixteen year old.
The eight privates had been robbed of all their valuables, leaving only the lieutenant unsullied. As they advanced on his still form, Blue felt his scarred chest twitch anew; this was it. He checked his focus and prepared to shoot as the lead man bent to roll the L.T. onto his back.
The blast was beautiful to behold. As the dead weight was released from the M61, the pin sprang into the air like an advance scout for the coming wave of white hot shrapnel. Glinting in the sunlight, the sliver of metal released in the young man's final moments seemed to hover like a silver dragonfly, floating at eye level before the startled Cong. Before they had time to react, in the instant when they understood what was happening, the grenade detonated, sending out a wide arc of shredded steel fragments which sliced through black cotton and soft flesh with ease. The razor sharp fragments tore through the men, spraying the jungle around them with gobbets of charred, torn meat. One man lost the arm which held his rifle, his death grip firing off a hail of rounds which shattered his own shins and struck one of his comrades in the eye, but both men were dead before the shooting even began. Only the third man lived beyond the initial blast, shielded as he was by the others. A single inch long shard of steel had pierced his left temple, leaving him sprawled across one of his victims, staring up at the deep blue sky, expressing his surprise in a stream of random syllables which he slurred and babbled uncontrollably until his final moment came and silenced his tongue forever.
Blue's finger squeezed the trigger and the shutter whirred, capturing the disintegration of the three men frame by frame as the deadly nova spread out across the clearing. The images were etched with perfect precision on the film's surface, preserving the instant when each man died, freezing their final breaths and trapping them like flies in amber. In the sharp staccato movement of the shutter he thought he caught a glimpse of the one he sought, the man who had brought him all the way to Asia, the being who had awoken the power within him all those years before, but in the next stuttering moment he was gone.
It had been less than a second since the grenade exploded and the corona of blazing shrapnel still expanded like the birth of a miniature universe. Up in his aerie, Blue was safe from any impact, but the tree itself was not so secure. As the shockwave hit, it bent and shook, tossing Blue back and forth. His added weight caused the tree to dip further and further, placing more and more tension on the narrow bole. Finally, with the trunk gouged by dozens of wire flechettes, the tree could support him no longer, and with a loud crack, it gave way and pitched him into the undergrowth.
Landing heavily on his back, Blue felt a wave of pain which spread from his skull and all the way down his legs. His head connected with a thick root and he was never sure afterwards whether he had blacked out. When he opened his eyes again, the sky above him swarmed with squadrons of mosquitos, attacking him like fighter planes. Every inch of him seemed to ache, a thousand cuts and bruises all screaming for relief at once, but when he tried to sit up it quickly became apparent where the worst injury was; for a moment, finding that he couldn't get up, he thought that he was paralysed. Then a pulse of pain spread from his right shoulder, radiating out like an internal frag grenade detonating at a point just below the shoulder blade. He raised his head to see what the problem was and found that he had managed to land on a two inch thick shaft of bamboo which had burst straight though his shoulder, extending a foot or more from the exit wound and pinning him to the ground like a butterfly in a collectors case.
Experimenting, he found that small, slow movements caused the shattered bones to grind together and sent rolling waves of pain down his arm and across his chest. Sudden, jerking motions simply brought a flash of white pain behind his eyes which left him breathless and biting deeply into his own tongue to hold back the mother of all screams. Either way, there was no chance of lifting himself off the post. His right hand was useless, and with his left he could neither pull the bamboo free from the earth nor reach his pack which lay just out of reach, taunting him with its cargo of painkillers, flares and smokes. Whichever way he looked at it, he was stuck until someone came along and found him and considering that he was 10 klicks across the Northern border, it was unlikely to be a friendly patrol that came to his aid.
Lying there on the jungle floor, he drifted in and out of consciousness until long after night fall, watching ragged, untidy clouds carrying the moon across his field of vision. At some point he realised that he had been speaking aloud, holding a conversation with someone nearby who had replied to all of his questions but refused to help him. At another, more lucid moment, he understood that the radio was still switched on somewhere in the clearing, and the only person speaking to him was a DJ in a glass booth somewhere on the far side of the Earth. Sometime after that he found that he was still continuing the conversation anyway.
Sliding along the edge of the blade between this world and the rest, Blue felt a sense of peace and contentment envelop him. It didn't matter which side he landed on come morning, he decided; it was enough that he had been here at all. All the men in all the photographs he had taken were witness to that. In gathering up their likenesses perhaps he had caught something of their souls as well, a fragment of the inner being which illuminated and motivated them. His photos were proof that they existed, that they were living, breathing creatures who loved and hated and won and lost. Now they would be proof that he too had once walked this Earth. Fumbling with the straps which looped and twisted around his neck, he found his Nikon and held it up to inspect it. The lens was still intact, the film safe in its housing, and while he couldn't check the internal mechanisms for impact damage, he somehow knew that there was one decent shot left in it. For several minutes he chewed on the strap until it broke and he was able to hold the camera at full arm's length, aiming back down at him. Waiting for as long as he could, holding the camera in a rock steady grip until his arm throbbed with the exertion, he tried to hold out for the final moment, but it was not to be. He could feel his consciousness ebbing away once more and the tendons in his arm trembled, shaking the camera. He could drop it at any moment, but the skein of jellyfish stings was silent. He had never been able to predict the moment of his own death, and even now, when it seemed so close, it remained tantalisingly out of reach. Instead, he did what all the best photojournalists did; he faked it. Fixing his stare on a distant star, he composed a deep, thoughtful expression, as if he was already gone and gazing into the worlds beyond. Thinking of all the dead men he had seen in the last three years he tried to fill his eyes with all the unanswered questions he had seen in theirs, along with the serenity and acceptance he had seen in far too few. He made a good corpse, he decided, then pressed the button one final time. The shutter clicked and whirred, then came to a dead stop as the camera fell from his hand, the portrait of the dead boy slowly bleaching out as light crept into the aperture for unknown hours.
When he came too this time it was daylight once again and the photograph was nothing more than a milky white frame of overexposed film. The sky was blue and clear, the radio was close by and playing some real music for a change, the plaintive wailing of Janis instead of the screaming anger of Rotten and his mates. The pain in his shoulder had been replaced by a warm, floating sensation which seemed to shimmer through his fingers and toes. Every leaf in the canopy above him seemed to sparkle and glisten with early morning dew, and the whole morning was heavy with the promise of goodness. It felt like Heaven, but for the bamboo stake which still grew from his shoulder.
Withdrawing the needle from his arm and pressing down on the tiny bubble of blood with an icy cold thumb, the man in black leant over Blue, peering into his eyes, looking for signs of awareness. He smiled a gap toothed grin, his ancient, wrinkled face splitting like an over-ripe peach, then held up the morphine ampoules he had retrieved from Blue's pack. Blue saw the sunlight sparkling off the glass, refracted through the clear, sweet liquid like a prism, splitting a single shaft of light into a rain of rainbows which fell across his face. He raised his left hand to grab at the colours but they were too fast for him, too nimble for his graceless, clumsy fingers. Instead, the old Vietnamese placed the ampoules and syringe in his hand, carefully folding his fingers around them to ensure he kept them close. Then he rocked back on his heels and took up a wide, scarred machete which looked like it had been hacking through the jungle since it had first sprouted from the Earth. Holding the top of the bamboo with his left hand, the man swung the machete with his right, slicing it clean through with a single stroke, so close to Blue's chest that it took two buttons from his shirt front at the same time.
The sky was suddenly split by the roar of B-52Ds heading for their daily bombing run above Xuan Loc. Carrying their payload of napalm and Agent Orange, the shiny tins of flying death were the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, great flying fish swimming in the deep blue sky. He watched as the hazy vapour trails mingled and crossed, forming the sigil for inner peace in the ether, and he gurgled happily to himself.
Still grinning, the old man stood and moved away towards the thicker trees, his machete raised to clear the way. Before he left, he turned back and looked down at the happy boy, drifting in his morphine stupour, too stoned to realise that he was in the presence of the man responsible for his very existence.
"That's two, little monk. The next time we meet will be the last, so if I was you, I wouldn't chase it."
He raised the machete in a salute, then turned and disappeared into the jungle.

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