Web of the Weaver: Sidestory, Mysterious Death in a Gray Boy Zone! A Deserted Park Reveals a Mystery!

I hated the interview.

Not because it was unproductive, it very much was, but it reminded me of the interviews with Timmis’ victim… Or that night when Mom had died.

Ordinary people, not parahumans, not trained officers, or hardened criminals, ordinary people with a joke welcome mat and pictures on the wall… and hoping they could wake up from this nightmare.

I had nothing to comfort them with. I’d prayed, harder than ever in my life, that when I woke up after Dad told me the news, Mom would be in the living room, telling us how Alexandria had scooped her up and saved her.

I was not so lucky then; they would not be so lucky now.

I ran them through the basic Master/Stranger test. In this, I trusted the PRT’s conclusions,  but I needed to be sure.

But no. No missing moments, no strange desires, none of the warnings of a Master or Stranger. If one had been here, they were extremely careful…

But that didn’t mean they didn’t exist. And that Michael hadn’t been a victim. I didn’t think so, but…

I hadn’t thought I’d run into a Master in the Bay, and little acts of sadism were often a hallmark of a new criminal master. I would remain cautious.

My questions were quiet in the room. Once the toddler woke up and Mrs. O’Grady went to comfort him. A cat wandered into the room, hopping up onto the couch where Jenna absently petted it.

“When did Michael first start acting differently…”

“Two weeks ago, after that fight with Jackson,” his father growled. “I have a good—“

“Wait.” I held up my hand. “He was in a fight with another student? Why?”

“Supposedly a joke that went too far with Jackson’s girlfriend, Sheila,” Mrs. O’Grady said.

“What kind of joke?”

“They didn’t want to say. They patched it up and Jackson and Michael went to Saturday school as a detention.”

I raised my eyebrows. A fight at Winslow when I’d been going wouldn’t be worth a detention unless someone ended up hurt.

“Had Michael known Jackson very long?”

“For the first part of the year after he’d joined the football team.”

I nodded.

“Did his change in behavior start immediately after that?”

“No… it was… Tuesday, after he came home late,” Mr.O’Grady said. “He was upset, I figured it was something about the fight, but he…didn’t say.”

“He went out late the next couple of days, and I… threatened to ground him,” Mrs. O’Grady said. ”I should have!”

“And his behavior?”

“It was… he stopped, like he was listening to someone. And then…”

“He’d twirl,” Jenna said. “He never did that before. And he filled up the sink and watched the whirlpool. That’s when I yelled at him because I needed to go to the bathroom.” She looked away.

A focus on repetitive movements, both in action and in observation.   

A very common symptom of Gray Boy Disorder among PRT troopers assigned to the duty.

Listening was less common but still existed…

“When he yelled at me, he said…” Jenna looked down. “I was just a little kid. He never talked like that before, and he said that he knew what had to be done and “we would eat our fear.””

I leaned forward. “Jenna, that’s a very strange thing to say. So, can you remember, did he seem to be talking to you?”

“Um, he was like looking up and he had his hands out like this.” She stretched them wide.

“I see.”

Not talking to you, Jenna. So, talking to himself or talking to someone else. And why? 

But then, the Master I’d encountered had never expected to draw attention either. Maybe they didn’t expect him to commit suicide?

A dog came walking through, sniffing every part of the room, including me, before it softly howled, almost a moaning sound, as it went back into the rear of the house.

Michael’s dog, I was told, searching for a master who would never return. Had Michael had a Master? Had he answered a call only he could hear?

Or maybe there was no Master.

The rest of the conversation had little helpful information. They allowed me to look at his computer, and other than his mother’s surprised gasp at the numerous barely clad females in one folder there was nothing of note. Just ordinary emails, homework—the gap immediately before his death wasn’t long enough to be suspicious… and Michael didn’t keep a diary.

When I concluded the meeting, I explained where I would go from here—first to examine where he’d entered the containment zone, and then to interview his classmates.

“I will do my best,” I told the family. “But I cannot promise anything.”

“Th-thank you,” Mrs. O’Grady said, holding her sleeping toddler.

****

The next stop with Agent Stimmons was the overgrown yard Michael had used. I kept my bugs in. Not only was it risky, but I needed to develop my skills, not just parahuman, but ordinary.  The gate to the zone itself was unmanned, cameras on it. A shrine was set up by it, teddy bears, votive candles, and such.

“Every Sunday the local Catholic Church holds a mass here,” Stimmons said. “Don’t think it’s a good idea, but they don’t try to enter so…” he shrugged.

The wall itself was fifteen feet tall, smooth, with barbed wire on the top. Next to it was the yard, trees and bushes making it hard to see the wall at the back. Stimmons and I walked, following the path the police investigators had made. Soon the street was lost in the foliage. 

“This is part of the problem. Anywhere else and we’d have seen the gap. But it wasn’t in the view of the interior cameras, you couldn't see the wall from the street, and the guys, when they have to go in, don’t spend any more time than they have to.”

“I understand.”

And there was the crack. I bent down and looked through it. They were right. The most I could see was a tiny overgrown park, a rusted grill and swing set barely visible. Above were some marks where Michael had used his hands to climb up. The autopsy said his hands were badly skinned…

He was determined.

So was I. I looked around and—

Well.

“He was the only one to come up here, correct?”

“As far as we know, why?”

“Take a look at the ground in front of the crack,” I said. I walked to the side, about three feet and squatted and scooped up rich wet earth. Then I went to the other side and did the same.

“I don’t under…”

Then I went to the clearing in front of the crack and my hands came up with just a little bit of dirt, the rest too compressed for me to get a purchase on.

“You see? The dirt here is tamped down. People, more than one came here, came here more than once.”

He started. “There was rain the night of the suicide. They would have assumed…”

“It was just him. Footprints erased. Yes. But the dirt under it… still pressed down.” I stared at it. “More than one person was here… but were they here when Michael killed himself…”

Now I sent my senses out, feeling the bugs in the area and soon I had a result.

“This way,” I said. Stimmons followed me. The path wasn’t a direct one to the street. But the bugs had detected broken branches, people forcing their way though in a winding route, and I followed, my senses alert. Moments later, we came to another little clearing, the ground also compressed. “So they follow a winding… hello.”  I picked up a candle. “Interesting.”  Then we were off again.

Ultimately, we found four clearings, counting the one in front of the wall. Each one showed the signs of groups of people standing on them, more than once, crushing the soil down.  And several candles, of the kind you found in church ceremonies…

The police wanted to close a suicide, quickly. The PRT wanted to focus on what might have happened inside the zone, but this…

“Any cameras close to here?”

“No. The Teeth pay juvenile gangs to break ‘em, so we can’t track their moves.”

Some kind of ceremony? Did Michael have a falling out? Was the fight about something else…

People didn’t worship Gray Boy, it wasn’t like the Endbringers. But then… maybe I should amend it that most people didn’t worship Gray Boy.

But…

“There was a store at the corner; let’s stop there.”

“You think they might have seen something?”

“I think a job is harder to conceal than one person.” I glanced at Stimmons. “I just wonder if it was a mob of friends, a cult,  or a lynch mob. Or all of them at once.”