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By Root 3126 0

she should have to live with them, but at the same time wanting so badly to understand why. How could her brain operate, when it was given two sets of orders that were so opposite and so urgent? How could she ever get a moment’s sleep, or even peace, with all those voices screaming inside her skull, telling her to do different things? It was a miserable thought; and I began to be grateful, standing there on that street corner, that when I’d been a young boy in New York I’d at least been clear about who my enemies were, and what it would take for me to survive. Badly as she’d behaved, I didn’t think my mother’d ever wanted me actually, literally dead; and for the first time I saw that as, if not a blessing, at least one of the better on a long list of bad choices.

Suddenly there came the sound of approaching footsteps. The Doctor and I withdrew into the shadow of an elm tree and waited: but it was only Miss Howard, come to tell us that Mr. Moore was ready for the Doctor.

“Things are pretty quiet up there,” she said, indicating the cemetery. “So he had Cyrus give him a hand lifting the coffin out of the ground. Not that it’s all that heavy …”

The Doctor gave her a grim nod, then turned to me. “All right, Stevie,” he said. “You’ll be on your own for a few minutes. Stay alert.”

The two of them moved back down Ballston Avenue, and I stayed under the elm tree, staring at the shadows that were being thrown by the moon. A warm wind soon began to kick up, and that played hell with my vision—and my imagination. All those shadows what surrounded me were turned into ghostly, man-shaped silhouettes, the whole collection of which was moving and dancing and, I became more and more convinced, gettingready to pounce on me. Oh, sure, I told myself it was the wind, and that I didn’t have anything to worry about; they were all tricks of the light and my eyes, just alot of—

Then I noticed something: one of those manlike silhouettes—a small one underneath a tree across the street—wasn’t moving. Not only wasn’t it moving, but it wasn’t where it should’ve been, given the position of the moon. There were a couple of twinkling spots, too, right at about eye level—

And for a shadow, it was doing something that was awfully close to smiling at me.

I froze up tight, scared and bewildered. The more I stared at the thing, the more I grew convinced that “it” was an actual person; but at the same time, all that staring had started to make my vision go slightly crazy. I knew that I wasn’t going to be able to figure anything out unless I could find a way to make the thing come out from under its tree and into the moonlight; but that might wind up being a very dangerous proposition. Whoever or whatever it was that I was watching, though, didn’t seem to be sending up any alarm or making any hostile move; so I figured I’d be okay if I just took a few steps out from under my own tree and tried to get a better look.

I started to walk. Then I shivered once, mightily, when the shadowy thing across the street mirrored the move. As soon as we were clear of all the shadows, I could see plainly who it was:

El Niño, Señor Linares’s little Filipino aborigine. He was dressed in those same clothes what were four sizes too big for him—and for whatever reason, he was, in fact, smiling at me. Slowly lifting an arm, he seemed to try to signal to me in some way, and for a minute I grew less fearful. The attempt at communication and the smile combined with his appealing round features to make him look something other than threatening. But then he made a different sort of move: lifting his head, he reached up with one hand and ran a finger around his neck. Now, in most parts of the world what I know of, that only means one thing; but he was still smiling, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt for another few seconds, on the off-chance that I was reading him wrong. But what came next was in no way reassuring: still grinning, he put his hand around his throat in a kind of choke hold, as if he meant to strangle someone—in this case, pretty apparently, yours truly.

Shivering