LEONARD

I WAS BEING FOLLOWED. OR NOT FOLLOWED SO MUCH AS WATCHED. Someone was watching me, from among the trees, or in one of the ruined kilns. Still, it didn't bother me to begin with. I was scared that Morrison, or somebody, would come for me, but I didn't think this watcher was from the Innertown. Which wasn't that logical, maybe, but I figured, if I was next— and for a couple of days, there, I really was convinced that I would be the next kid to be taken—if I was next, if the bastards wanted me, they could find me anytime at home, but I didn't think they could touch me out here on the headland. Which was stupid because I had to have known that, if they wanted me, they would just come and get me, and there wasn't anything I could do about it. The police were in on it, that was obvious now, and the town hall was probably in on it too. The Homeland bloody Peninsula Company weren't just in on it, they were probably running the whole thing from somewhere in their Outertown offices, some kind of ethnic-cleansing scheme, clearing the streets of potential troublemakers or whatever, or maybe just keeping us all scared, so that when their great Homeland plan finally kicked into motion, they'd have a docile population to man the waste-incineration units or whatever it was they were going to build to replace the plant. Or maybe it was some weird religious thing, like when God let Satan kill Job's sons, or when He sent the angel to kill all the eldest sons of the Egyptians, but spared the Israelite kids. You had to give it to those Israelites, they were hard bastards. They just painted a white mark on the lintel of the door, or whatever, brewed up a mug of Ovaltine, and went off to bed. Some fucking angel was going to be running through the town killing children, and they just lay down and had a good night's sleep, without a second thought. Me, I'd have felt a bit bad about some of those Egyptian kids. I'd have wanted to tip somebody off, maybe that nice brick merchant across the street, or the baker at the end of the road, the one with the cute wife. Or I'd be up all night, in case it rained and the white mark on my door got washed off. It's your eldest kid for God's sake. You wouldn't want any misunderstandings.

I had thought I'd be safe for a day or two, time enough to think what to do about what I knew, which was next to nothing, but I had a start and as a start it was better than torturing that guy Rivers with razor blades. Now, I was being followed. I didn't know who it was and at first they kept their distance, but midmorning the next day I was in one of the old warehouses, one of the big echoey ones with ivy and such growing through the holes everywhere in the roof and birds flying in and out all the time, and I could feel that someone was close. Very close. Only I couldn't see anybody. All I could see was sun and shadow, and bird shapes flitting here and there, and all I could hear was the singing. I stopped dead still and looked around, then I called out: “Jimmy?” That was more wishful thinking than anything else, because Jimmy I could deal with, but I pretty much knew it wasn't Jimmy out there among the shadows. This was something else altogether. This was a person, I thought, someone bigger and quieter than Jimmy or any of his crew. Someone who was used to being alone and very quiet. A watcher, like one of those characters in old mystery books. The Watcher in the Shadows. The Watcher of the Skies. Only, now, I didn't know if he was there because he was after me, or because he wanted to protect me. To watch over me. Or maybe he was just there, watching. It didn't matter that it was me, it could have been anyone. And maybe it wasn't a person at all, maybe it was just a presence. The spirit of the place. They say every place has its own spirit, but when they talk about it in books and poems and stuff, they always mean places like bosky groves, or dark reed beds where Pan sits playing his pipes to some lost nymph, or maybe some lake with a lady sleeping just beneath the surface, but why not an old warehouse, or a cooled furnace? Why not a landfill? Don't they play that game just so that these things—these spirits—get to belong to somebody else? I'd always felt something out at the chemical plant, no matter where I went. You could call it a spirit, or a genius loci—why not? It was present, and I always thought it was trying to talk to me. Not in words, though. Not like that. It was more like pointing. It was there, pointing to something I should know about, something I should have seen beyond the things I was seeing, but it wasn't concerned with what you could say in words. You get a huge moon in an indigo sky, floating over the dusty water by the docks, over the rusty cranes and the old boat eaten away by rust, you get that big moon over the harbor and you can hear owls calling from the woods above, on the West Side—what words are you going to have for that? It's not a description you want, anyway, it's something finer. It's like parsing, or chromatography Sometimes, the whole world points to something you can't see, some essence, some hidden principle. You can't see it, but you can feel it, though you have no idea how to put it into words. And sometimes, it's just that things are beautiful, only what you mean by beautiful is different from what people usually mean when they say that word. It's not sentimental, or choccy box. It's beautiful, and it's terrible too. It takes your breath away, but you don't know if that comes from awe or terror. Sometimes, I wonder why people think so little of beauty, why they think it's just calendars and pictures of little white churches or mountain streams in adverts and travel brochures. Why do they settle for that? I'm only fifteen, and even I can see there's more to it than that.

I know what ugly is, too. That day, in the broken warehouse, standing there in that dance of sunlight and shadow, nobody there but me and the birds, and this person, whoever or whatever it was, the world looked more than usually beautiful to me, but I knew that was partly because of the contrast with how ugly things were back in the town. Everybody thought the plant was a terrible thing, that they should finally demolish what was left of it and build something new on the headland, but they were getting it the wrong way round: it was the town they should demolish, the Innertown and the Outertown, the terraces and the villas, the poor and the rich, everything. They should pull everything down and start over, maybe in shacks or mud huts, so the people could learn how to live again, instead of just watching TV all the time and letting their kids run wild. They should move the people farther along the coast and teach them to fish, give them little plots of land to look after, little allotments, and some tools and a few bags of seed, and they should leave them for a generation, learning how to live, and how to teach their children. It wouldn't take any more than that. In one generation, they would have new skills, new homes, new stories. Then they could start moving out from there, a few at a time, moving out into the world to teach others, beautiful nomads, moving from place to place, making it good to be alive again.

I was standing there, thinking all this, and I wasn't sure whether it was me thinking it, or whether it was someone else. Thoughts came into my head of their own accord, from nowhere, or maybe from whoever was out there, watching me: thoughts at first, then pictures and sounds, pieces of memory, fragments, but not fragments, because I could see that somewhere, behind it all, everything was connected to everything else, only I couldn't see all the connections, because I wasn't ready. I wasn't used to connections, I was used to the bits and pieces. I was used to the fragments.

Then, after I don't know how long of just standing there, I looked round and saw a shape. It was the shape of a man, a living man who had just stepped out from somewhere. Only there was nowhere to step out from, he was in the middle of the place, right in the midst of all the song and sun and shadow, and yet, still, he looked like he had just stepped out from somewhere because he had. He had just stepped out of that—out of the light, out of the shadow, out of the birds' singing. He was a man: taller than me, but not much; he was standing very still, just gazing at me, no intentions, nothing to be afraid of.

“Who are you?” I asked him. I really wasn't afraid. I was just curious— only it wasn't the usual curiosity, where part of you wanted to know and part of you didn't really give a damn, because what difference does it make anyway, right? This was a pure, sweet, delectable curiosity that was an end in itself, and maybe it didn't have an answer anyhow. It was the wondering that mattered.

It was a long moment before he stepped forward into a pool of sunlight and I saw his face. He looked familiar, but at first I couldn't place him. I'd seen him somewhere, but I didn't get it till he spoke, though even then, I didn't quite hear what he said. It was just a sound, a voice on the air, like something you might hear if you tuned your radio to some new wavelength. For a moment I thought I had wandered into some new place, into some dream of heaven, or the afterlife at least, and I was in the presence of something unworldly, some otherworldly being that, as strange as it might seem, saw me as a friend. Because it seemed to me that this was my friend. The one I had been looking for, for as long as I could remember. Then he moved, just a little, and I saw that it was the Moth Man. I recognized him now, though he looked different; or rather, he was the same as before, only bigger—not larger, but bigger in himself, more defined and, at the same time, full of possibilities. He was the Moth Man and nobody else, yet as he stepped out of the shadows, I thought I saw someone else in him, someone I knew, and I was confused for a moment, and I almost turned away, because I thought something was wrong, but then I looked again and I saw that it really was my friend the Moth Man, and he was smiling. He took another step forward and looked into my face, as if he were checking to see if I were awake or sleepwalking. Then he laughed softly and turned away. “Come on,” he said, as he walked away. “I'll make you some tea.”

I kept going back and forward from the place where I was sitting by the fire and some other place that I must have seen sometime in a film or a dream, but neither of those places was an illusion and neither was more real than the other. And I was sure I wasn't hallucinating. One moment I was sitting on a low concrete wall, listening as the Moth Man talked about the machine his father had built deep in the inner reaches of the plant, the next, I was standing in a field of bees, up to my waist in oxeye daisies and golden-rod, the bees swaying in their hundreds back and forth around me, the sun on my face in a place that was impossibly clean, the air scented with grass and pollen. Then I was back by the fire, looking up at him, listening. I had no idea what was in the tea he'd just given me, but it had made me sleep and in that sleep a dream had come, though now, almost awake, I couldn't remember it exactly, I could only see pictures. I knew I had only slept for a short time because it was still daylight there, in the campsite at the edge of the woods, and then, a moment later, in the wide meadow where I stood in the to-and-fro of the bees. That's a surprise: I don't remember falling asleep, I don't even remember feeling strange or drowsy, but all of a sudden I'm waking up and everything is altered—though it feels, not that I'm still in a dream, but that I'm too awake, every detail of every leaf of grass and curl of flame is utterly there in my head, so it's almost unbearable, how real and close it all is.

After a while, I realized we were walking, but I didn't know where we were, or where we were going. It surprises me now, looking back, that I didn't recognize the building we were walking toward, or the room that he led me into, after producing a key and opening a real, working lock on the door, but we must have been in a place that I'd never come across before that day, an enormous, dusty room that looked like a school laboratory at one end—three rows of careworn laboratory tables with sinks and gas taps, a single, not quite dead houseplant on a blackened windowsill by the door— then stretched away into a cold, dim space beyond, a long emptiness as far as my eyes could see in the half-light, as much corridor as it was room. As soon as we were inside, the Moth Man closed the door, and everything went dark.

“Wait a moment,” he said, before he ventured into the darkness, leaving me alone in the blackness. I know, looking back, that the wait was no more than a few seconds, but at the time it felt long—so long, even, that I forgot he was there, forgot why I had come to this place, and, like a child lost at a carnival, I had begun to feel abandoned, when a faraway gold light came on and the Moth Man came back for me, his face kindly, and perhaps a little concerned, as if he had read the fear in my eyes and wanted me to know there was nothing to worry about, that everything was good. All will be well and all manner of thing shall be well, I thought, as he reached out and touched me gently on the arm: words from a book, I knew, but they had been something else once, they had been words that someone had thought, in a moment like this one. “Come on,” he said. He gazed at me for a moment, his face calm, his eyes empty of all emotion, then he turned and started walking slowly, back into the gold light. I followed. All the way, I had the sense of something watching me—not a person, not people, but something small, something concealed in the fabric of the room. Some animal in the wainscot, whatever a wainscot is, some creature hidden in the shadows.

“This is a sacred place.” He was standing in front of some kind of machine, maybe a kiln, or a gas chamber—I couldn't make it out, but then I couldn't make anything out, it was hard to see clearly and it was hard to hear what he was saying. I kept missing things, phrases melting on the air before I could pin them down, his hands moving as he spoke, the metal fascia of this machine I'd never seen before, in a room I didn't even know existed, even though I'd been wandering around this old plant all my life. I made that out, though, that phrase he liked so much. He'd said it before, said it more than once when we were outside, in the woods, or trapping moths in the waste ground between the town and the foreshore. I'd laughed the first time he said it, though even then I think I had a glimmer of what he meant. Still, sacred wasn't a common word for people to use when they talked about the plant and I'd laughed.

“Yeah,” I'd said. “Sacred. It leaps right out at you.”

He'd smiled at that, but he'd persisted with the idea. “You know what sacred means?” he'd asked.

I'd thought for a moment, then shook my head—though I knew where he was going. I always knew where he was going, even when he talked about the bizarre life cycles of the Lepidoptera, or the inner workings of fungus colonies; it was like listening to another version of myself talking about the world, filling me in on all the things I hadn't had time to notice yet. “OK,” I'd said, “enlighten me.”

He'd laughed. I didn't know how he saw me, if he thought I was another version of him, maybe a there-but-for-the-grace-of version from the Innertown, the smart-arsed kid he never got to be growing up. He'd said it often since that first time, how the headland was sacred, but this time it meant something else, something harder, something as dangerous as it was beautiful. This time he's talking about something more specific, some piece of machinery he has made, but I can't really follow because of the tea I've drunk. All I can do is stand there, trying to stay in one place, in my body and in my head, trying not to sway as I watch his lips moving, like someone who's suddenly gone deaf and is trying desperately to lip-read from scratch. Not that it would have mattered, I think. He isn't explaining anything. At one point, I think, he's telling me about how he's found some old drawings and plans on his father's computer system, how he's sat down and worked it out, how they have something to do with the plant. At first, he just thought they were plans for some kind of purification process, maybe something his father designed to help clean up the mess the plant created, but after a while he sees through to something else, some ghost of a notion to begin with, but enough to make him see that what the old man was working on—during his very last days, according to the dates, days when he knew he didn't have very long—what he came close to achieving, is a portal of some kind, a gateway that's already partly built into the plant's inner workings, and has only to be completed. I think that's what he is saying, though I might have imagined it, or maybe I put it in afterward, to make some sense of what will happen later, when I walk into that huge light without a second thought and come to where I am now. I don't know. What I do know is that he shows me a machine at the dark end of a long, cold room that looks like a cross between a warehouse and a laboratory, then he tells me about something that's going to happen. It concerns me, but it doesn't sound like anything that will matter. It sounds abstract. In another twenty-four hours or so, this machine will be ready—right now, it's going through some special process, like charging up or something—and we will walk, or maybe I will walk, I'm not sure about the details, somebody will walk through this rusty old door and enter into—something. Another world, another time. Or nowhere, never. I can't really follow him, I'm too far gone in my own mind. There are times when I want to laugh, times when I want to cry, but I don't laugh or cry, I just stand in that long room, listening to him speak and swaying in the half-light, not even sure I'm there at all. Not even sure I'm not dreaming.

Later, when the effects of the tea have almost worn off, I find myself sitting by a fire again, in the same clearing we'd camped in before, just ten or so yards from the old farm road. The Moth Man is sitting opposite me, tending a large pot of what smells like soup or stew, the gold light off the fire playing on his hands and face as he sits gazing into the flames. He appears to have forgotten I'm there—maybe I've been sleeping again—but he looks calm. Not happy, but calm. I can't say for sure, and maybe this is something else that occurs to me afterward, but he looks like a man who has made a final decision about something and is just waiting for events to unfold.

His decision has something to do with me, I know—only I don't know what it is he, or I, or both of us have decided. Something to do with the machine in the enormous room. I want to ask him about it, but the questions just don't form right in my head and I start thinking about other things, like seeing Morrison in the woods, or finding the watch, or the theory I had come up with about the lost boys. I even get myself together enough to start telling him about it all. I want to lay out my suspicions, maybe get his views on who is involved with Morrison. I want him to help me make sense of everything. He's not interested in that, though. As far as he's concerned, we've gone beyond the Innertown. He listens patiently for as long as I talk, but he doesn't say anything. At first I think it's because I'm not making any sense—I'm still pretty confused, and not saying things right—but then I see that it doesn't matter what I say, or how clearly I say it, because he has moved on to things that I haven't even begun to consider, much less understand. Which is true, of course.

“None of this is your concern,” he says, after I show him the watch.

I shake my head. I feel like I'm saying the words of a script, like one of the minor characters in some whodunit, telling the great detective about my hopelessly mistaken theory. “Somebody killed all those boys—” I say.

He waves his hand. “Don't bother yourself with that stuff,” he says.

And that's it. Case closed. I'm tired and confused, and he has other things on his mind. Yet just when I start to think it's hopeless, he stands up and starts setting out two lots of blankets on the ground by the fire. He's thinking something through, but he's not in any hurry. He lays out the blankets, puts some more wood on the fire, then stands up and looks back toward the woods, in the direction of the Innertown. “Tell you what,” he says. “We'll go and have a chat with the constable tomorrow. Maybe then you can forget all this and we can move on.”

I am surprised by that. I almost laugh, not at what he's saying, but at the way he says it. Have a chat. It sounds so ordinary; like we'll just pop by the police house and ask Morrison if he's killed five boys and, if he hasn't, does he know who did. I almost laugh.

He lies down on a groundsheet and pulls some blankets over himself. “Get some rest now,” he says. “It's going to be a long day.”

I don't expect to sleep again, but I do. It's the sleep of exhaustion this time, not some drug-induced hypnogogic reverie, though there are dreams in my head that must have come from the hours I was under the influence of the Moth Man's strange tea, dreams from the gaps in the day that I can't remember, not with my conscious mind at least—whatever that is. I am exhausted, and I sleep deep, but when I wake it's still early—and very cold, much colder than I would have expected. I lie on the ground under the Moth Man's camphor-scented blankets and I try to remember, if not everything, then the points at which one thing connects with the next, so that I can tell myself the story of what has happened. The story of what has been decided. I know that I have pledged myself to something, but I'm not sure what it is. It has to do with that machine the Moth Man showed me, it has to do with passing through to some other place. At some point during the previous twelve hours, I know I have seen something, and I know that it is sacred to the Moth Man in a different way than anything he's shown me before, and I think it has to do with some kind of deity, or spirit, but I don't know if I have actually seen it, or if he has told me about it, or even if it was something that came up out of a dream and slipped into the story he was telling me in the enormous room—out of a dream, or out of the earth, which is much the same thing by then. Lying there, in the cold dawn, I think that, for the Moth Man, it is a god, a wildness beyond his imagining that took form one bright afternoon when he was out here alone and showed him another way of being in the world. A wild god, but not savage. Not cruel. I don't know what is about to happen, or where the silent machine in the enormous room might take me, but I do know, beyond all doubt, that this is so. Whatever happens, wherever the next twenty-four hours take me, I know that the god of that place is wild but it isn't cruel. Cruelty, I know, is a human quality, and whatever I might find in the enormous room, I know it will not be human.

I sit up. The fire is still burning, though it isn't quite as bright or as warm as it had been when we were talking, before I fell asleep. I look for the Moth Man, but he isn't there. That doesn't worry me, though. I know he won't be far away. He's probably gone to fetch more wood for the fire, or maybe he is gathering leaves to make more of that tea he'd given me. I don't like the idea of that. It was amazing and beautiful in a way, but I don't like that I can't remember everything that happened. Though it might have been better if I'd forgotten everything. What really unsettles me, though, is the procession of disconnected images running through my head, and the sense I have of a story all disjointed and out of sequence.

I struggle to my feet and walk away from the fire, away from the campsite, out to the edge of the clearing, and through the trees to where the old farm road runs down to the sea. The headland is always at its best in the early morning, but that day it's more beautiful than ever. When I say beautiful, I don't mean tourist-brochure stuff, because it could never have been that. For one thing, there is nothing much to look at, just a wide field spotted here and there with cold, red poppies and a line of twisted trees turning from black to gray in the first light. Overhead, a few gulls are drifting up from the shore, and what might have been a little owl flutters out across the gray-green grass to the cover of the trees as I cross the road and stand watching, my mind empty—though in a good way, as if absence was what it has promised itself for years. Absence. Nothingness. There's a saying— nothingness haunts being, and I understand what that means, only if you say it in those words it sounds too abstract, too philosophical. Kind of drab, too—which it isn't in the least. John would have said it sounds better in French, but that's not it. It sounds better when you stand at the edge of a field of cold poppies and let the nothingness come, just like that, no huge thing, just that matter-of-fact nothingness. It sounds better when you don't say it in words, when you don't even remark on it, but watch and listen as it takes you away—not some negative thing at all, not some existential condition, but a kind of blossoming, a natural event. Something that, when it finally comes, is no big deal. The self bleeding out. The red of the poppies. The cool of the morning.

When I get back, the Moth Man is back by the fire, doing what he always does, as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened. He looks up when I cross over and stand a few feet away, staring at the fire as if it is some kind of miracle, but he doesn't say anything. He just finishes what he is doing, then he feeds me some breakfast and a cup of regular, non-hallucinogenic coffee. I know I've missed something in what he told me about the machine and his father's blueprints and I'm wondering if he knows it too. If he does, I think, he'll surely say something else, he'll surely try to explain—but he doesn't say anything. We sit around for a while, not saying much, just tending the fire and listening to the woods as they go about their business around us. It's not awkward, there's no tension, no sense of delay or expectation. If anything, it's like any other morning: just two friends out camping in the woods. It's friendly, though, with that light, unspoken sense of being comfortable together in the quiet. We sit there a long time, not saying a word; then we put all his stuff in the van and drive down to the Innertown, like a pair of God's closest angels, to pluck a man's soul out of hell.