Over the years a whole generation of lost boys show up one by one, shot in the head, drowned, left glassy-eyed and hollowed out by fever.
Looking back, he thinks they must have all been incomplete in some way. Some essential part of them was missing, some hardness, some steel that keeps children from running away and throwing themselves out of windows, believing the consequences will be anything but ugly and bloody and selfish.
He drains his glass, nods at the bartender and wanders off into the frigid London morning, a gentle buzz ringing in his head. He has built a routine out of this. No one will miss him for hours.
It is easy to pass unnoticed through the street and its traffic when you are old or homeless and seem to belong nowhere. Most days he walks everywhere he goes, always very slowly, bent over and shuffling along, and sometimes he sits in the park feeding pigeons and watching people, no one paying him any mind even when they catch him looking, as though he's as much a fixture of the place as the vacant eyed statues all around. Morbidly, it was watching children at play in the park that compelled him to start compiling Morgue. He will never complete it, but he has already said all that he has to say.
Which is that he misses everyone dearly.
and that he thinks there are two kinds of people who survive this world:
Those who can bear it as it is, and those who turn it into something bearable.
and that in the end, he doesn't blame anyone.
Late in the evening, just as the sky begins to darken and discolour, he will launch his body in a projectile that ends in the path of a coming train.
He will be dead before he hits the tracks.
And he doesn't believe he'll ever see any of them again, Michael, or George, or Jack, or Mother or Father, or their ghosts, but this is alright with him. He expects nothing of death. He's had enough stories for a lifetime.