The man’s face was half in shadow from the sun, and Seth had a moment to think how short he must be, if all they could see was his shoulders and head. When their father looked in, he nearly had to lean down.
“I don’t want to have to ask again,” the man said, his voice a little stronger.
“You have to wait until our mother comes back,” Seth said.
“Let me put it this way,” the man said calmly, “so that you understand me, okay? If you let me in, all right? If you let me in, then I won’t kill you.”
And at that, the man smiled.
Owen’s little hands squeezed Seth’s hard.
The man cocked his head. “What’s your name, boy?”
Seth answered, “Seth,” before he was even aware he could have refused.
“Well, Seth, I could break that door down. I’ve done worse in my time, believe me. I could break it down and I could come in and I could kill you, but instead, I am asking you to let me in. If I really meant you harm, would I do that? Would I ask your permission?”
Seth said nothing, just swallowed nervously.
“And so I’m asking you again, Seth,” the man said. “Please let me in. If you do that, I promise not to kill you. You have my word.” The man put his hands up to the glass. “But if I have to ask one more time, I will come in there and I will kill you both. I’d prefer not to, but if that’s the decision you make –”
“Seth,” Owen whispered, his face pulled tight with terror.
“Don’t worry,” Seth whispered back, not because he knew what to do but because that’s what his mother always said. “Don’t worry.”
“I’ll count to three,” the man said. “One.”
“No, Seth,” Owen whispered.
“You promise not to kill us?” Seth asked the man.
“Cross my heart,” the man said, making the motion across his chest. “Two.”
“Seth, Mummy said no –”
“He says he won’t kill us,” Seth said, standing.
“No –”
“I’m about to say three, Seth,” the man said.
Seth didn’t know what to do. There was threat everywhere, crackling through the dead, stale air of their house, a place where harm and danger seemed impossible. He could feel it shining from the man like a fire.
But he didn’t understand the threat, not fully. Was it a threat if he didn’t do what the man said or if he did? He didn’t doubt that the man could break down the door – adults could do that sort of thing – so maybe if he just did what the man said, maybe he would –
“Three,” said the man.
Seth leapt into the kitchen, suddenly urgent, fiddling with the lock, shifting its weight so it would open.
He stepped back. The man moved from the window and around to the door. Seth saw that the funny-collared shirt was actually a dark blue jumpsuit. The man was stroking his chin, and Seth saw scarring on the man’s knuckles, a strange white puckering like he’d been burnt there.
“Why, thank you, Seth,” the man said. “Thank you very much indeed.”
“Seth?” Owen said, edging around the doorway from the main room.
“You said you wouldn’t kill us if I let you in,” Seth said to the man.
“That I did,” said the man.
“We’ve got bandages if you’re hurt.”
“Oh, it’s not that kind of hurt,” the man said. “It’s more a dilemma than an injury, I’d say.”
The man smiled. It wasn’t friendly. At all.
“I need one of you lads to come with me on a trip.” He leaned forward, hands on his knees, so that he was down on Seth’s level. “I don’t care which one of you. I really don’t. But it has to be one. Not both, not neither.” He held up a single finger. “One.”
“We can’t go anywhere,” Seth said. “Our mum is coming back for –”
“One of you is going to leave this house with me,” the man interrupted. “And that’s the end of the story.”
He stepped fully into the kitchen now. Seth backed into the oven, never taking his eyes off the man. Owen still held on to the door frame, his face bunched up, his skin white with fear and amazement at the stranger in their kitchen.
“Here’s what I’m going to do, Seth,” the man said, as if he’d just had the best idea in years. “I’m going to let you choose. I’m going to let you choose which of you two comes with me.”
“Oh, Mr. Seth,” Tomasz says. “That is too, too terrible.”
“I thought,” Seth says, not able to meet their eyes. “I thought if I said he should take Owen, I’d be able to raise the alarm better. I’d be able to explain what happened faster and they could go after the guy and catch him. Owen was only four. He barely had any language at all, and I thought . . .” He turns back to the tombstone. “Actually, I don’t know what I thought. I don’t even know if that’s true or if it’s a story I told myself.”
“But it was impossible,” Tomasz says. “You were a boy. You were little boy. How can you choose this?”
“I was old enough to know what I was doing,” Seth says. “And the truth is” – he stops, having to swallow it away –“the truth is, I was afraid. Afraid of what would happen to me if I went, and I said . . .”
He stops.
Tomasz steps forward. “If he asks you now, this man.”
“What?” Seth says.
“If this man, he comes into your kitchen now, and he asks you this question again. He says to you, I will take you or your brother and you will choose. What do you say?”
Seth shakes his head, confused. “What are you –?”
“You are asked now,” Tomasz insists. “You are asked right now who to take, you or your brother. What do you say?
Seth frowns. “That’s not the same –”
“What do you say?”
“I say take me, of course!”
Tomasz leans back, satisfied. “Of course you do. Because you are man now. This is what a grown-up person does. You were not man then. You were boy.”
“You were only a boy in that room with your mother. You were going to try to protect her. I could feel it.”
“I was older. I was not eight. I was not boy.”
“You weren’t a man. You’re not one now.”
Tomasz shrugs. “There is space in between, no?”
“You don’t seem to get it,” Seth says, his voice rising. “I killed him. And I’m only just finding this out, don’t you see? I always thought they found him alive. Damaged and in need of rehabilitation, which was bad enough. But now. Now.”
He turns back to the grave. His chest begins to draw tight, his throat closes shut, and he feels as if he’s choking, as if his body has been clamped in a vise.
“Stop this,” Regine says, quietly at first, but then louder: “Stop this, Seth.”
He shakes his head, barely hearing her.
“You’re just feeling sorry for yourself,” she says, enough anger in her voice to get through to him.
He turns to her. “What?”
“You can’t possibly believe it’s your fault.’
Seth looks at her, his eyes red. “Whose fault is it then?”
Regine’s own eyes widen, as if stunned. “How about the murderer, you dolt? How about your mother for leaving you alone in a house when you were way too young to be faced with something like that?”
“She didn’t know –”
“It doesn’t matter what she knew or didn’t know. Her job was to protect you. Her job was to make sure you never had to face any kind of shit like that. That was her job!”
“Regine?” Tomasz asks, startled at her volume.
“Look,” Regine says, “I can see why you’d think this is your fault, and I can see how your parents might have made you keep on thinking that, but did you ever consider maybe it wasn’t about you at all? Maybe your mum just screwed up, okay? And sometimes that even happens to good people. So maybe the way they treated you wasn’t about you. Maybe it was about them. Maybe all th
at happened is that they forgot you were there because they were too busy with their own crap.”
“And you don’t think that’s bad?”
“Of course it’s bad! Don’t worry, I’m not trying to take away everything that makes you feel sorry for yourself, since you seem pretty damn good at that!”
“Regine,” Tomasz warns, “he has just found out his brother is –”
“But maybe,” she keeps shouting, “maybe their world didn’t revolve around you, Seth. Maybe they thought about themselves as much as you thought about yourself.”
“Hey –” Seth says.
“WE ALL DO IT! Everyone! That’s what we do. We think of ourselves.”
“Not always,” Tomasz says quietly.
“Often enough!” Regine says. “So maybe all this tragedy of how you made the wrong decision and your parents punished you for the rest of your life, maybe that’s a story you just want to be true, because it’s easier.”
“Easier? How the hell is it easier?”
“Because then you wouldn’t have to do anything yourself! If it’s your fault, that clears everything up. You’ve done this horrible thing and that’s easy. You don’t ever have to risk being happy.”
Seth stops as if she’s slapped him. “I risked being happy. I did risk it.”
“Not enough to stop you from killing yourself,” Regine says. “Oh, poor little Seth, with his poor little parents who didn’t love him. You said we all want there to be more than this! Well, there’s always more than this. There’s always something you don’t know. Maybe your parents didn’t love you enough, and that sucks, yes, it does, but maybe it wasn’t because you were bad. Maybe it was just because the worst thing in the world had happened to them and they weren’t able to deal with it.”
Seth shakes his head. “Why are you doing this?”
Regine makes an angry, frustrated sound. “Because if it isn’t your fault, Seth, if it’s just a shitty thing that happened to you, well, shitty things happen all the time. Tommy got shot in the head! I –”
She bites her tongue.
“What?” Seth asks challengingly. “What happened to you?”
She looks into his eyes, her own blazing.
He doesn’t look away.
“I was thrown down the stairs by my stepfather,” she says.
Tomasz takes in a surprised breath.
“He started drinking more,” she says, her eyes not moving from Seth’s, “and decided that a slap now and then was okay. Then a punch. My mother tried to explain it all away, tried to make it seem normal and bearable, but I fought that bastard. I fought him every stupid time he tried to lay his hands on me. But one day, for whatever reason, he went that extra step. Probably didn’t even mean to, the piece of shit, but he did. He wanted to beat me and I was saying no and he knocked me down the stairs and I hit my head and I died.” She furiously wipes away the tears that have appeared on her cheeks. “And my mother, who I loved more than anything, she didn’t stop it either. That was her job, and she never stopped him.”
She looks around them, into the sun, at the comically tall grass they’re all standing in. “And this world? This stupid, empty world? I don’t care if it’s hell. I don’t even care. If it’s real or not real, if we’ve all woken up from some online thing or if this is all your stupid imagination, Seth, I don’t care. All I know is that I’m real enough. And Tommy’s real enough. And however much of a hell this is . . .” She suddenly quiets, as if the energy’s been leached from her. “However awful it is, it’s better than there.”
“I did not know,” Tomasz says, taking her hand in his still-wrapped own.
“How could you?” Regine says, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “I never said.”
The sun beats down on them, hot again, and Seth notices once more the lack of insect noise. There isn’t even any wind. There’s just the three of them, in the stillness of an overgrown cemetery.
“Are we not some funny kind of group?” Tomasz says. “Child abuse, murder, and suicide.”
“None of which happened for any good reason at all,” Regine says.
“Is that why you’re so mad at me all the time?” Seth asks. “You think I did it because I felt sorry for myself? While you two had really rough times?”
Regine gives him a look that doesn’t need words attached to it.
“I didn’t kill myself because of what happened to my brother,” Seth says. “It was shit and it just got shittier, but it wasn’t the reason.”
“So why, then?” Tomasz asks.
“Is this from when you said you risked happiness?” Regine asks. “With the guy with the funny name?”
Seth doesn’t answer for a moment, but then nods.
“Well,” Tomasz says, looking at the tombstone, “if there is more to this story than you thought, maybe there is more to that one, too. Maybe there is always more.”
The sun rises higher in the sky. Seth’s still reeling from all the things this morning has brought, all the new but strangely familiar hurt waiting to be felt. He’s exhausted again, despite the night’s sleep. His feelings are knotted together, so tight he can’t unwind them. Pain and anger and humiliation and loss and longing.
But maybe more, too.
He looks back at Owen’s name and wonders if Tomasz is right. There was more to this story.
Was there more to Gudmund?
“I’m not trying to be funny,” Regine says after a moment, “but are we going to stand here all day? Some of us were interrupted before we’d eaten breakfast, and some of us would like to get back to that, if that’s okay with some others of us.”
“Yeah,” Seth says. “Yeah, all right.”
No one says anything as they make their way back through the grass, occasionally bumping into hidden tombstones. They reach the low wall, and Tomasz clambers over.
“Have you ever thought of trying to go back?” Seth asks as Regine moves to step over, too.
She stops. “Go back?”
“Not to your old life, maybe,” Seth says. “But if it’s all just programming and memory manipulation . . .” He shrugs. “Maybe you could go back and it’d be better.”
Her face is still hard, but sad, too. “Knowing what you know, how would you be able to look your parents in the eye? Or your brother?”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“What is taking such a time?” Tomasz calls from over by the bike, unable to pick it up because of his hands.
“Nothing,” Regine says. “Just another unhelpful idea from Seth –”
But Seth doesn’t let her finish.
“TOMASZ!” he shouts –
Because he sees the Driver –
Running fast around the corner from the nearby church, its crackling baton already up –
Heading straight for Tomasz.
Tomasz turns and screams, tripping over the bike in his rush to get away. Regine is already sailing over the low wall, pounding into the street, straight for Tomasz.
Seth is right behind her, but they’re not going to make it –
Because here the Driver comes, its baton sending flashes and sparks from its tip.
It was waiting for us, Seth thinks. They hadn’t heard the engine. It had to have been there all along. But how could it possibly have known –?
Tomasz is yelling in Polish, trying to scramble away crabwise from where he’s fallen –
“NO!” Regine is screaming. “TOMMY!”
And Seth hears the anger in her voice, which makes so much more sense now that he’s heard her story –
She’s protecting Tommy –
Like she wasn’t protected –
The Driver makes a terrifyingly smooth leap over the bicycle, not slowing its stride as it closes in on Tomasz –
Regine is moving faster than Seth has ever seen her, so fast she’s pulling away from him –
But it’s too late –
It’s too late –
The Driver has reached Tomasz –
Tomasz is raising his bandaged hands to protect his head –
Light streams from the tip of the baton as the Driver swings it down –
And strikes the arm of Regine, who has thrown herself between Tomasz and the Driver.
The end of the baton fires into her skin. She screams inhumanly at the pain of it, her body twisting in agony. Her arm and chest and head are enveloped in a shower of sparks and flashes.
Her scream cuts off halfway through, in a sudden stop that is the scariest sound of all. She falls to the ground, making no effort to protect herself from hitting the concrete.
And lies there.
Lifeless.
Seth doesn’t think. He doesn’t call out or scream her name or make any sound.
He just moves.
The Driver is standing over Regine, and Seth doesn’t even consider that the baton is still crackling and flashing in its hand. He races past Tomasz, who’s crying out Regine’s name, and he leaps at the Driver, throwing his full weight against the faceless black shape of it.
It sees him at the last moment and tries to bring the baton up, but Seth hits it hard, and as they both fall to the ground, the baton is knocked from the Driver’s grasp and goes skittering across the road.
They hit the pavement with a hard whumpf. Seth lands on top of the Driver and has the air knocked out of him. It feels as if he’s thrown himself down onto a pillar of steel. Pain shoots through his ribs, but he ignores it and tries to use his weight to keep the Driver on the ground.
He doesn’t know what he’s going to do next –
Only that a rage unlike anything he’s ever experienced is surging through him like a forest fire.
He throws his fist down, hitting the Driver’s throat on the exposed area beneath its visor. It’s like punching the concrete of the sidewalk. He calls out, and the Driver bucks underneath him, throwing him off easily and regaining its feet.
Looking up, Seth has a clear view of its chest, where Tomasz sent the shotgun blast. Some kind of repair seems to have been made, but there’s still a cavity that’s deeper than it should be.
Deeper than should be survivable, Seth’s mind registers.
Tomasz is now curled over Regine a few feet away, wailing into her ear to wake up, wake up, wake up, his face so twisted with disbelief and shock, Seth can barely look at it.