Sky Song

One: Midnight is when everything changes

Jacob couldn’t have known that the man standing before him would kill him. Not at this meeting, not at the next, but soon. And if he had known about the other things this man would do, Jacob would probably have tried to kill him, there and then. Because he didn’t know these things, Jacob wasn’t afraid now, only bewildered. The intruder repeated the question.

‘Do you understand what you need to do?’

Jacob stared for what seemed like a long time, unable to think of a response. When he finally answered his voice was surprisingly calm. ‘I’m not going.’

It was almost midnight when Jacob had been woken by a man’s voice. Bolting upright, he found himself staring stupidly at the stranger who seemed to have literally materialised in his room. Jacob, in spite of the madness of it, listened in mute astonishment. What the man told him was too incredible to believe, yet Jacob did believe it. On some deep unconscious level he had always known it to be true. He was an invention, a fictional character. Jacob Lightfoot didn’t exist.

A fleeting shadow of anger crossed the man’s moonlit features, but dispersed just as quickly.

‘You have no choice, Ioh. You must come.’

‘Stop calling me that!’ Jacob hissed. ‘My name is Jacob!’

‘Very well… Jacob,’ the man replied, speaking the name like it had a bad taste.

‘If you don’t go I’ll call my parents.’ Jacob pinched his own arm hard as he said this, hoping fervently that he was dreaming. He screwed his eyes up tight and opened them again but the man was still there. Illuminated by the pearly moon streaming in through the open curtains of his bedroom window, Jacob could see that the man was tall and willowy, his head seemed imperceptibly too large for his frame with a smooth bald pate. Large, calculating eyes appraised Jacob from a finely featured face with the smoothest skin he had ever seen on a full grown man. He looked human enough…

Jacob found himself drawn in; something in the man’s dark eyes gave him the same compelling, uneasy feeling he got from gazing into his own in the mirror.

‘You could have called them at any time but you have not, despite my presence and what I have told you.’ The man gave a small patronising smile. ‘That is because you know the truth and are afraid of it.’

‘I’m not afraid… I couldn’t…’ Jacob hesitated.

‘They are not your parents.’ The voice was beguiling, hypnotic; Jacob felt the seduction.

For fifteen years Maggie and Phil Lightfoot had brought him up as their son, had loved him, clothed him and fed him, had filled him full of their beliefs and morality so that he thought as their son and felt like their son. He wanted to be happy with that; he wanted that to be the truth. He forced himself to remember.

‘I’m going to turn over and go to sleep now. If you’re a dream, you’ll be gone by morning. If you are real, then there’s no point in hanging around because my mind is made up.’ Jacob lay down, pulled the bedcovers up over his shoulder and turned to face the wall. It felt like a weird thing to do, after all, there was a stranger in his bedroom, but it didn’t occur to him to do anything else.

Another brief flicker of menace crossed the man’s features, but he controlled his anger. ‘You will not leave these people?’

Jacob didn’t reply.

‘Then you give me no choice.’

Jacob flipped himself back over, but the slender figure of the man was already fading into disparate atoms, leaving nothing but the empty silence of the night.