by Neil Gaiman
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m planning to go back to work. But it wouldn’t make sense, at the moment. Wouldn’t have made sense. When Eric isn’t working at home, he has to travel. He’s away often. I would have gone back to work, when Fery was old enough to be home alone.’
What the superior officer is really asking about is our sex life. No children? Why? Don’t you sleep together? So, what does your husband do instead? I won’t tell her anything.
When Fery was two, he buried a wooden train in the sandpit at Delauney’s park. It was red and blue, it had yellow wheels, it was called Thomas. He didn’t tell me that Thomas was missing until we were about to go home; and it was winter and getting dark. I searched, as well as I could. I couldn’t find that little train at all. I didn’t have a chance, the sandpit was too big and Fery could not tell me where I should dig. We went back the next day, and we still couldn’t find Thomas. We never found him. But all that year, and longer, Fery went on looking. Stranger than that: wherever we were, including when we were on holiday in Italy, if we passed a playground he must go in. If there was a sandpit, he must dig. He was looking for Thomas. Long afterwards, he still remembered. I’d be in Delauney’s park, the mothers sitting together the way we do, on the edge of the sandpit: I’d see my four year old casually get hold of a shovel and start turning over the cool, dirty, lollipop-stick infested sand. I’d know he was looking for Thomas, but he didn’t want anyone to know because he knew it was silly. And I’d want to help him. As if any day could be that winter’s day, and we could tear the tissue paper and step back, undo the wrong we did, catch up the dropped stitch, make the little red and blue train appear.
I walk down to the row of shops. The pharmacist, the bakery, the bank on the corner. The greengrocers. They will vanish soon. The only shops in the world will be inside shopping malls, nothing but TO LET signs blossoming on the High Street. The mothers-with-children, and the occasional fathers-with-children, queue up in the Post Office with the foreign students and the pensioners. I look inside. I am trying to make him appear, there by the carousel of cheap greeting cards. He’s looking at the cards, investigating the dirty jokes, lingering with tender emotion over sugary cartoon animals. He’s at an age where the attraction is equal, either way. This is the way I’ll find him. Not by running and sobbing, not by marching in a line across waste ground, searching the back alleys, pulling up floorboards. Not by looking up the paedophile register. I will walk along this row of shops, pushing the doors and glancing in. This is where he was lost, this is where he will be found. Where else could he be? Lost Thomas logic. I’ll take his hand, I’ll say there you are, exasperated: and we’ll go home together. Years from now, as long as the same shops are still here, as long as I can find anywhere little shops that remind me of these, it could happen.
What was he wearing? A boy, his body no longer blurred by the chubby disproportion of babyhood, not even a small child any more. A boy nothing like the sweet baby with the red mittens, in Delauney’s park. I need a different ghost. (I need all the ghosts.) He was wearing trainers and tracksuit trousers, black with white stripes. He was wearing red boxer shorts and a green T-shirt, and grey socks. He was wearing a grey hooded sweater with some sporting logo on the front, and a black quilted jacket. He was carrying nothing. He was too old to be visible in mothers-with-children world. He was not holding my hand. We’ve asked and asked, the police have asked and asked. No one saw him that morning. No one remembers me except as the mad woman, running up and down, distraught, flying up to the counter at the bank, demanding wildly have you seen a little boy? I don’t remember him myself.
That day was scheduled to be like a thousand other lost days, all its millions of precious images discarded, mislaid, never filed. Even now, I have forgotten most of it.
I’m trying desperately hard, and then suddenly I let go. I can’t help myself, it’s like a muscle failure. I turn away, defeated; and there he is. Glimpsed, corner of my eye. I turn my head slowly, slowly, inching it round … He’s there, crystal clear, no effort. He is standing by the greeting cards, sideways to me, the soft curve of his cheek, his eyes intent and a little furtive.
and then what happened, I beg of him.
Fery looks around. He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking at something that isn’t in my memory, no matter how I struggle to recover it. I want to look where he’s looking, towards the opening door of the Post Office, but wanting will do me no good, because surely I did not look that way. I never saw whoever it was, whatever, the monster, the horror that took my child. I try to turn my head anyway, but there’s an awful barrier, and suddenly I’m on the floor, thank god I’m wearing trousers, retain some dignity sprawled there, sobbing, fighting off hands that try to raise me up. The shock was physical, the shock of knowing I saw him. I really saw him. I have forced myself to see a ghost.
When I found he wasn’t with me, and he wasn’t in the street, I hurried home. He wasn’t there. Eric wasn’t in, either. I called Fery’s best friend’s mother: no reply. Another friend’s mother, no reply. I went to Delauney’s park, no sign. That part lasted about an hour. The running up and down and sobbing – that lasted I don’t know how long. I called my husband on his mobile, I left a message. I called the police. I ran up and down again, by this time meeting everywhere the concern of the street, it was an incident room already. The man in the Post Office, the young girl with the stringy hair in the bakery, the cashier at the bank. If this was a soap opera I would have known their names but I didn’t. We knew each other viscerally, like animals using the same pathways in some natural environment, we didn’t need names to get along. That’s all changed. I’m a celebrity now.
The man behind the Post Office counter called Eric. He came and took me home.
I told him that I’d seen a ghost again. He said. ‘Would you like to go away? Far away? If the police will let us? I think that might be the best thing.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand. I forced myself to see a ghost, but the ghost is real.’
The husband gets interviewed at the police station. He hasn’t been arrested, he’s nowhere near being arrested, but he’s in an interview room. The interviewing officer has a chaperone on hand, like a male doctor about to examine a woman patient’s intimate parts; everything is being recorded on video. I know about this interview because Eric told me.
They asked him about our sex life.
‘Would you say you and your wife had a good physical relationship?’ asked the policeman.
Let it be recorded. ‘Off and on, satisfactory. I mean, fine.’ said Mr Connors. ‘Sometimes good, sometimes not so good. Like most people. We’ve been married ten years you know.’
Was she ever maybe a bit too much for you? Too demanding?’
‘I wouldn’t have said that was a problem.’
He was trying to guess what I might have answered, and hoping our two stories would agree. That’s the charade the police force on you, with their insistence that it’s up to you whether you answer or not. With their tissue-paper sympathy and their watchful eyes.
‘D’you ever stray, I mean, have you ever had an affair?’
‘No.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘Not that I know of.’
‘She was your first girlfriend, wasn’t she. You’ve never looked at another woman?’
‘Looked? I don’t know about looked. I’m happy with the relationship we have—’
They have investigated our lives. They have found among our books and videos adult movies, arthouse movies that they construe as pornographic. They have invented a sour, twilight existence for the woman who stays at home although her son is seven years old, and the man who works at home except when he goes on mysterious trips away. The man who finds the adult workplace and his adult wife too demanding. Everything looks bad in their light.
‘Don’t you see what they’re doing,’ I yelled at him. ‘They’re setting you up as some kind of pervert, and you can’t stop them. Damn
ed if you answer, damned if you don’t.’
‘They won’t find any evidence,’ said my husband, shrugging, ‘will they?’
We looked at each other for a long, long moment, until I could see nothing but the mushroom cloud, boiling and silently thundering up into the sky. What can happen? What does it matter? It doesn’t matter if they call Eric a pervert, it doesn’t matter if I scream in the Post Office. Nothing can be worse than this.
Destroyer of Worlds.
‘I’m going to follow him,’ I said, ‘I want to know everything. I don’t care how bad it is.’
Nothing hurts. You could saw my leg off, I’d feel nothing. Being ‘hounded by journalists’ is not a torture, being interviewed by the police is not a torture, making appeals on the TV is not a torture. Don’t pity the families in these cases, pursued by the greedy, prurient media. We feel nothing. I’ve felt more outrage over an unwanted piece of junk mail, long ago, than over a tabloid reporter on the doorstep, or the sting of a camera flash in my eyes. I couldn’t care less. I walk out. I go and stand in the street. I lean against the wall of the bus shelter, waiting.
I see a boy in a black quilted jacket and black trousers coming out of the Post Office. I know why nobody saw him, he is totally anonymous. There is no sign of the baby’s body I loved, no sign of the sweetness of his smile. When he was five he once confided in me I keep getting stiffies … Where on earth had he picked up that expression? In the classroom, obviously, other children have older brothers. Had he any idea what he was saying? I don’t think so. Once, I lost him for ten minutes in our public library. When I found him he said he’d gone to the toilet for a wee. He’d gone into the Gents alone because he thought he couldn’t go in the Ladies without me. Very proud, very independent. There was a man in there, he said. Who looked at me, and I was scared. The Gents at the Public Library is unsafe for little boys. Thinking like this is a disgrace, but what is to be done? My blood ran cold. I said, don’t go there again.
But I can’t keep on going in the Ladies, he said. Not all my life. So what will I do?
I’m following my ghost down the street. There must be someone with him, taking him away, but I only see my child. He’s walking aimlessly, oh how I love to see him when he doesn’t know I’m watching. To see him look into a shop window, to see him bend down over a piece of litter, studying it, hope springing eternal, has he won a million pounds? He walks on, carrying this old crisp packet, his companion: little boys need to have something to hold. A stone, a ball, a pencil, an elastic band; a boiled sweet furred in pocket-grime. Of course I won’t tell him but of course I know … this affection is easy to read. I am not repelled. When he gets older I will remember these days and I will understand a young man’s obsession with his favourite toy, his faithful companion, his treasure. Having a son will explain the whole sex to me, at long last. The boy on the street stops and half turns: a stilled frame, quivering. He’s looking back, seems to look at me with an expression of intense malignity, eyes narrowed, inhuman rage—
He has read my thoughts.
He will never be a young man. He is dead.
I saw him again at the railway bridge. He was up there, crossing the line. I still could not see who was with him. I was in the car park, all the suburban commuters’ cars in rows. Everyone has their place, I imagine. Eric doesn’t like to drive, he walks when he comes to take the train. The boy on the bridge looked back at me, with incredible hatred.
I followed him, we climbed over the fence and into the waste-ground beside the line. Brambles, unkempt winter grass, weedy sycamores, naked straggling buddleia thickets with dead flower spikes. Rusting cans, rotted litter, slugs and snails, blackened ballast, the view from a train window. A path like a grey snail’s trail, a little boys’ path. Is it true that he came this way, or is the ghost lying to me?
Who brought him here? What happened?
There’s a hut by the track, the roof of tar paper, the slatted walls obliterated by crusted grime. It’s a den, a hideout, it’s somewhere things can happen out of sight. My path is heading towards it. No ghost now … but then suddenly there he is. I don’t understand what I see, then I realise he’s naked. A flash of pitiful white arms and legs, a face blank oval, and in the quivering frozen frame he’s running, brambles whipping his little ribs, rusty cans bruising his bare feet, I can’t hear him but I know he’s crying, terrified and shamed. He’s running and running, crying for help, but there’s someone catching him—
How do you kill a little boy? By accident, is my best hope. You want him to stop screaming, you’re afraid someone will come. You took him to a lonely place but it had to be somewhere nearby and now it isn’t lonely enough. Big adult hands, squeezing the child’s throat, or throwing him down, and his fragile temple crashing against stone. Something like that, in a moment. He was fighting for his life and he didn’t know he was going to lose until he’d lost. He didn’t die helpless, he didn’t die smothered, pinned, held down, knowing the whole world had betrayed him—
I found myself crouched by the snail path, fists in my pockets, head bent, dizzy and nauseous. The vision had gone, but I was seeing in my mind’s eye my baby’s skin darkly marked, printed with the pattern of that black jacket, clear as frost flowers. I’ll tell the police, I thought. They won’t believe me, but they’ll come here and search. They’ll leave no stone unturned. I listened to the distant hum of traffic, and looked at my watch. The ghost had lead me where I wanted to be led. I knew that, really. I stood up and went on down to the track.
I was beside the railway line, walking up and down, looking at my watch, shivering, oh god, how long between these suburban trains, when Eric arrived. I saw him coming, I didn’t try to get away. ‘Come home,’ he said. ‘Hazel, come on home.’
‘How do people kill themselves? I don’t know how to do it. But I’ll find a way.’
He nodded, and took my arm. I didn’t resist. He ought to say please don’t leave me or all we’ve got left is each other, or someday we’ll make a new life. But ideas like those don’t come. There is nothing left, no human need, regret, affection nor pity. Destroyer of Worlds.
‘You know how I felt about Fery,’ I said.
‘I know,’ said my husband, leading me away. He has never reproached me, he has never said it was your fault, you lost him. How could you. Ideas like that don’t come either. Not yet.
‘I loved him too much.’
‘Yes. You loved him too much.’
What a cruel thing to say.
I have committed a grave crime. I have given birth to a child, and made him my whole world, in a society where children are not safe, where little boys can be taken from the street and never seen again. Now there’s another turn of the screw, they are taking away from me my last memories. They are saying he was already lost, before I ever went out to the shops that morning. They are saying he never walked beside me, he never peeped at the greetings cards in the Post Office with that furtive, tender attention which I remember so clearly. No, they destroy that world. He was lost already, he was long gone. Where did I lose him, and when?
In Delauney’s park the mothers-with-children, and occasional fathers-with-children, are in possession until school is over. They talk to each other, they play with their toddlers, they nurse their babies. They sit like cows in the grass, silently ruminating over the weariness of broken nights. Then the schoolchildren appear, first from the nursery then from the primary school classrooms. They yell, they run around, they play with dolls or footballs, they pose and swagger and compare the prices of their trainers; they are cruel to each other. But the light changes and the shadows grow. The mothers-with-buggies all go home, except maybe for one lost soul, smoking a cigarette, naked ankles, skirt too short, her baby grizzling vaguely.
When the light has changed the park has a different clientele. Bloodstained needles, used condoms, teenagers and derelicts: all of them no more than decayed and broken-down kids themselves, that’s why the after-dusk playground is their home. They se
ll illegal drugs, and they bandy words with the schoolchildren, the bold, inquisitive ones who have lingered. Fery was one of those. Always ready to run, he promised me, at the first sign of trouble. Did he stay out too late one evening and I didn’t notice? Did he fail to come home, and my husband was so wrapped up in his work he didn’t know? Eric tells me they are going to search the park again, because of something I said or something someone remembered. The police will walk through the shrubberies in a line, working like a single machine, picking up every scrap of detritus. They will reach into the dark by that bend in the path, where the laurel bushes make their permanent shade, and they’ll find … I don’t know what. Maybe they’ll find out why it has always felt bad. If a ghost can exist after death then why not before? My son and I used to be sure that spot was haunted.
I won’t watch the search. I think I’ll stay here, in his bedroom, with the soft toys that he’ll never consign to oblivion, the pictures of cartoon animals, the battered childish things that he would have abandoned. I’m lying on his bed, where we used to cuddle together, bedtime, story-time, I’m saying now I have to go and he’s saying, no, stay, stay with me not with daddy; just for once. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, soft arms holding onto me. He’s only a baby. I don’t have to be in the park, this is the foul place, the place that dogs wouldn’t pass. This is where I lost him. This is where he destroyed all the worlds.
Gwyneth Jones is the author of many fantasy, horror novels and thrillers for teenagers under the name ‘Ann Halam’, and several highly regarded science fiction and fantasy novels for adults. She’s won the James Tiptree Award, two World Fantasy Awards, the Arthur C. Clarke Award (for Bold as Love), the Children of the Night Award, the Pilgrim Award for SF criticism, and the Philip K. Dick Award, among other honours. Of ‘Destroyer of Worlds’, the author reveals: ‘This was inspired by a newspaper report I read, about a little boy killed in the same way as suggested in the story. The details stuck in my mind as a parent’s worst nightmare, and showed me that none of the horrors of being haunted by a ghost need necessarily be supernatural.’
