"Three weeks," Edward whispered. "I'm so hungry, Alan."
"How did it happen?"
Frederick wobbled on his feet, then leaned heavily on Edward. "I need to
sit down," he said.
Alan fumbled for his keys and let them into the house, where they
settled into the corners of his old overstuffed horsehide sofa. He
dialed up the wall sconces to a dim, homey lighting, solicitous of
Frederick's sensitive eyes. He took an Apollo 8 Jim Beam decanter full
of stunning Irish whiskey off the sideboard and poured himself a finger
of it, not offering any to his brothers.
"Now, how did it happen?"
"He wanted to speak to Dad," Frederick said. "He climbed out of me and
wandered down through the tunnels into the spring pool. The goblin told
us that he took off his clothes and waded in and started whispering."
Like most of the boys, George had believed that their father was most
aware in his very middle, where he could direct the echoes of the
water's rippling, shape them into words and phrases in the hollow of the
great cavern.
"So the goblin saw it happen?"
"No," Frederick said, and Edward began to cry again. "No. George asked
him for some privacy, and so he went a little way up the tunnel. He
waited and waited, but George didn't come back. He called out, but
George didn't answer. When he went to look for him, he was gone. His
clothes were gone. All that he could find was this." He scrabbled to fit
his chubby hand into his jacket's pocket, then fished out a little black
pebble. Alan took it and saw that it wasn't a pebble, it was a
rotted-out and dried-up fingertip, pierced with unbent paperclip wire.
"It's Dave's, isn't it?" Edward said.
"I think so," Alan said. Dave used to spend hours wiring his dropped-off
parts back onto his body, gluing his teeth back into his head. "Jesus."
"We're going to die, aren't we?" Frederick said. "We're going to starve
to death."
Edward held his pudgy hands one on top of the other in his lap and began
to rock back and forth. "We'll be okay," he lied.
"Did anyone see Dave?" Alan asked.
"No," Frederick said. "We asked the golems, we asked Dad, we asked the
goblin, but no one saw him. No one's seen him for years."
Alan thought for a moment about how to ask his next question. "Did you
look in the pool? On the bottom?"
"*He's not there!*" Edward said. "We looked there. We looked all around
Dad. We looked in town. Alan, they're both gone."
Alan felt a sear of acid jet up esophagus. "I don't know what to do," he
said. "I don't know where to look. Frederick, can't you, I don't know,
*stuff* yourself with something? So you can eat?"
"We tried," Edward said. "We tried rags and sawdust and clay and bread
and they didn't work. I thought that maybe we could get a *child* and
put him inside, maybe, but God, Albert, I don't want to do that, it's
the kind of thing Dan would do."
Alan stared at the softly glowing wood floors, reflecting highlights
from the soft lighting. He rubbed his stocking toes over the waxy finish
and felt its shine. "Don't do that, okay?" he said. "I'll think of
something. Let me sleep on it. Do you want to sleep here? I can make up
the sofa."
"Thanks, big brother," Edward said. "Thanks."
#
Alan walked past his study, past the tableau of laptop and desk and
chair, felt the pull of the story, and kept going, pulling his housecoat
tighter around himself. The summer morning was already hotting up, and
the air in the house had a sticky, dewy feel.
He found Edward sitting on the sofa, with the sheets and pillowcases
folded neatly next to him.
"I set out a couple of towels for you in the second-floor bathroom and
found an extra toothbrush," Alan said. "If you want them."
"Thanks," Edward said, echoing in his empty chest. The thick rolls of
his face were contorted into a caricature of sorrow.
"Where's Frederick?" Alan asked.
"Gone!" Edward said, and broke into spasms of sobbing. "He's gone he's
gone he's gone, I woke up and he was gone."
Alan shifted the folded linens to the floor and sat next to
Edward. "What happened?"
"You *know* what happened, Alan," Edward said. "You know as well as I
do! Dave took him in the night. He followed us here and he came in the
night and stole him away."
"You don't know that," Alan said, softly stroking Edward's greasy fringe
of hair. "He could have wandered out for a walk or something."
"Of course I know it!" Edward yelled, his voice booming in the hollow of
his great chest. "Look!" He handed Alan a small, desiccated lump, like a
black bean pierced with a paperclip wire.
"You showed me this yesterday --" Alan said.
"It's from a *different finger*!" Edward said, and he buried his face in
Alan's shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably.
"Have you looked for him?" Alan asked.
"I've been waiting for you to get up. I don't want to go out alone."
"We'll look together," Alan said. He got a pair of shorts and a T-shirt,
shoved his feet into Birkenstocks, and led Edward out the door.
The previous night's humidity had thickened to a gray cloudy soup, swift
thunderheads coming in from all sides. The foot traffic was reduced to
sparse, fast-moving umbrellas, people rushing for shelter before the
deluge. Ozone crackled in the air and thunder roiled seemingly up from
the ground, deep and sickening.
They started with a circuit of the house, looking for footprints, body
parts. He found a shred of torn gray thrift-store shirt, caught on a
rose bramble near the front of his walk. It smelled of the homey warmth
of Edward's innards, and had a few of Frederick's short, curly hairs
stuck to it. Alan showed it to Edward, then folded it into the change
pocket of his wallet.
They walked the length of the sidewalk, crossed Wales, and began to
slowly cross the little park. Edward circumnavigated the little cement
wading pool, tracing the political runes left behind by the Market's
cheerful anarchist taggers, painfully bent almost double at his enormous
waist.
"What are we looking for, Alan?"
"Footprints. Finger bones. Clues."
Edward puffed back to the bench and sat down, tears streaming down his
face. "I'm so *hungry*," he said.
Alan, crawling around the torn sod left when someone had dragged one of
the picnic tables, contained his frustration. "If we can find Daniel, we
can get Frederick and George back, okay?"
"All right," Edward snuffled.
The next time Alan looked up, Edward had taken off his scuffed shoes and
grimy-gray socks, rolled up the cuffs of his tent-sized pants, and was
wading through the little pool, piggy eyes cast downward.
"Good idea," Alan called, and turned to the sandbox.
A moment later, there was a booming yelp, almost lost in the roll of
thunder, and when Alan turned about, Edward was gone.
Alan kicked off his Birks and splashed up to the hems of his shorts in
the wading pool. In the pool's center, the round fountainhead was a
twisted wreck, the concrete crumbled and the dry steel and brass
fixtures contorted and ruptured. They had long streaks of abraded skin,
torn shirt, and blood on them, leading down into the guts of the
fountain.
Cautiously, Alan leaned over, looking well down the dark tunnel that had
been scraped out of the concrete centerpiece. The thin gray light showed
him the rough walls, chipped out with some kind of sharp tool. "Edward?"
he called. His voice did not echo or bounce back to him.
Tentatively, he reached down the tunnel, bending at the waist over the
rough lip of the former fountain. Deep he reached and reached and
reached, and as his fingertips hit loose dirt, he leaned farther in and
groped blindly, digging his hands into the plug of soil that had been
shoveled into the tunnel's bend a few feet below the surface. He
straightened up and climbed in, sinking to the waist, and tried to kick
the dirt out of the way, but it wouldn't give -- the tunnel had caved in
behind the plug of earth.
He clambered out, feeling the first fat drops of rain on his bare
forearms and the crown of his head. *A shovel*. There was one in the
little coach house in the back of his place, behind the collapsed boxes
and the bicycle pump. As he ran across the street, he saw Krishna,
sitting on his porch, watching him with a hint of a smile.
"Lost another one, huh?" he said. He looked as if he'd been awake all
night, now hovering on the brink of sleepiness and wiredness. A roll of
thunder crashed and a sheet of rain hurtled out of the sky.
Alan never thought of himself as a violent person. Even when he'd had to
throw the occasional troublemaker out of his shops, he'd done so with an
almost cordial force. Now, though, he trembled and yearned to take
Krishna by the throat and ram his head, face first, into the column that
held up his front porch, again and again, until his fingers were slick
with the blood from Krishna's shattered nose.
Alan hurried past him, his shoulders and fists clenched. Krishna
chuckled nastily and Alan thought he knew who got the job of sawing off
Mimi's wings when they grew too long, and thought, too, that Krishna
must relish the task.
"Where you going?" Krishna called.
Alan fumbled with his keyring, desperate to get in and get the keys to
the coach house and to fetch the shovel before the new tunnels under the
park collapsed.
"You're too late, you know," Krishna continued. "You might as well give
up. Too late, too late!"
Alan whirled and shrieked, a wordless, contorted war cry, a sound from
his bestial guts. As his eyes swam back into focus, he saw Mimi standing
beside Krishna, barefoot in a faded housecoat. Her eyes were very wide,
and as she turned away from him, he saw that her stubby wings were
splayed as wide as they'd go, forming a tent in her robe that pulled it
up above her knees. Alan bit down and clamped his lips together and
found his keys. He tracked mud over the polished floors and the ancient,
threadbare Persian rugs as he ran to the kitchen, snatching the
coach-house keys from their hook over the sink.
He ran back across the street to the little park, clutching his
shovel. He jammed his head into the centerpiece and tried to see which
way the tunnel had curved off when it turned, but it was too dark, the
dirt too loose. He pulled himself out and took the shovel in his hands
like a spear and stabbed it into the concrete bed of the wading pool,
listening for a hollowness in the returning sound like a man thudding
for a stud under drywall.
The white noise of the rain was too high, the rolling thunder too
steady. His chest heaved and his tears mingled with the rain streaking
down his face as he stabbed, again and again, at the pool's bottom. His
mind was scrambled and saturated, his vision clouded with the humid mist
rising off his exertion-heated chest and the raindrops caught in his
eyelashes.
He splashed out of the wading pool and took the shovel to the sod of the
park's lawn, picking an arbitrary spot and digging inefficiently and
hysterically, the bent shovel tip twisting with each stroke.
Suddenly strong hands were on his shoulders, another set prizing the
shovel from his hands. He looked up and blinked his eyes clear, looking
into the face of two young Asian police officers. They were bulky from
the Kevlar vests they wore under their rain slickers, with kind and
exasperated expressions on their faces.
"Sir," the one holding the shovel said, "what are you doing?"
Alan breathed himself into a semblance of composure. "I..." he started,
then trailed off. Krishna was watching from his porch, grinning
ferociously, holding a cordless phone.
The creature that had howled at Krishna before scrambled for purchase in
Alan's chest. Alan averted his eyes from Krishna's shit-eating,
911-calling grin. He focused on the cap of the officer in front of him,
shrouded in a clear plastic shower cap to keep its crown dry. "I'm
sorry," he said. "It was a -- a dog. A stray, or maybe a runaway. A
little Scottie dog, it jumped down the center of the fountain there and
disappeared. I looked down and thought it had found a tunnel that caved
in on it."
The officer peered at him from under the brim of his hat, dubiousness
writ plain on his young, good-looking face. "A tunnel?"
Alan wiped the rain from his eyes, tried to regain his composure, tried
to find his charm. It wasn't to be found. Instead, every time he reached
for something witty and calming, he saw the streaks of blood and torn
clothing, dark on the loose soil of the fountain's center, and no sooner
had he dispelled those images than they were replaced with Krishna,
sneering, saying, "Lost another one, huh?" He trembled and swallowed a
sob.
"I think I need to sit down," he said, as calmly as he could, and he
sank slowly to his knees. The hands on his biceps let him descend.
"Sir, do you live nearby?" one of the cops asked, close in to his
ear. He nodded into his hands, which he'd brought up to cover his face.
"Across the street," he said. They helped him to his feet and supported
him as he tottered, weak and heaving, to his porch. Krishna was gone
once they got there.
The cops helped him shuck his drenched shoes and socks and put him down
on the overstuffed horsehide sofa. Alan recovered himself with an effort
of will and gave them his ID.
"I'm sorry, you must think I'm an absolute lunatic," he said, shivering
in his wet clothes.
"Sir," the cop who'd taken the shovel from him said, "we see absolute
lunatics every day. I think you're just a little upset. We all go a
little nuts from time to time."
"Yeah," Alan said. "Yeah. A little nuts. I had a long night last
night. Family problems."
The cops shifted their weight, showering the floor with raindrops that
beaded on the finish.
"Are you going to be all right on your own? We can call someone if you'd
like."
"No," Alan said, pasting on a weak smile. "No, that's all right. I'll be
fine. I'm going to change into some dry clothes and clean up and, oh, I
don't know, get some sleep. I think I could use some sleep."
"That sounds like an excellent idea," the cop who'd taken the shovel
said. He looked around at the bookcases. "You've read all of these?" he
asked.
"Naw," Alan said, falling into the rote response from his proprietorship
of the bookstore. "What's the point of a bunch of books you've already
read?" The joke reminded him of better times and he smiled a genuine
smile.
#
Though the stinging hot shower revived him somewhat, he kept quickening
into panic at the thought of David creeping into his house in the night,
stumping in on desiccated black child-legs, snaggled rictus under
mummified lips.
He spooked at imagined noises and thudding rain and the dry creaking of
the old house as he toweled off and dressed.
There was no phone in the mountain, no way to speak to his remaining
brothers, the golems, his parents. He balled his fists and stood in the
center of his bedroom, shaking with impotent worry.
David. None of them had liked David very much. Billy, the
fortune-teller, had been born with a quiet wisdom, an eerie solemnity
that had made him easy for the young Alan to care for. Carlos, the
island, had crawled out of their mother's womb and pulled himself to the
cave mouth and up the face of their father, lying there for ten years,
accreting until he was ready to push off on his own.
But Daniel, Daniel had been a hateful child from the day he was born. He
was colicky, and his screams echoed through their father's caverns. He
screamed from the moment he emerged and Alan tipped him over and toweled
him gently dry and he didn't stop for an entire year. Alan stopped being
able to tell day from night, lost track of the weeks and months. He'd
developed a taste for food, real people food, that he'd buy in town at
the Loblaws Superstore, but he couldn't leave Davey alone in the cave,
and he certainly couldn't carry the howling, shitting, puking, pissing,
filthy baby into town with him.
So they ate what the golems brought them: sweet grasses, soft berries,
frozen winter fruit dug from the base of the orchards in town, blind
winter fish from the streams. They drank snowmelt and ate pine cones and
the baby Davey cried and cried until Alan couldn't remember what it was
to live in a world of words and conversations and thought and
reflection.
No one knew what to do about Davey. Their father blew warm winds scented
with coal dust and loam to calm him, but still Davey cried. Their mother
rocked him on her gentlest spin cycle, but still Davey cried. Alan
walked down the slope to Carl's landmass, growing with the dust and
rains and snow, and set him down on the soft grass and earth there, but
still Davey cried, and Carlos inched farther and farther toward the
St. Lawrence seaway, sluggishly making his way out to the ocean and as
far away from the baby as possible.
After his first birthday, David started taking breaks from his
screaming, learning to crawl and then totter, becoming a holy terror. If
Alan left his schoolbooks within reach of the boy, they'd be reduced to
shreds of damp mulch in minutes. By the time he was two, his head was
exactly at Alan's crotch height and he'd greet his brother on his return
from school by charging at full speed into Alan's nuts, propelled at
unlikely speed on his thin legs.
At three, he took to butchering animals -- the rabbits that little Bill
kept in stacked hutches outside of the cave mouth went first. Billy
rushed home from his grade-two class, eyes crazed with precognition, and
found David methodically wringing the animals' necks and then slicing
them open with a bit of sharpened chert. Billy had showed David how to
knap flint and chert the week before, after seeing a filmstrip about it
in class. He kicked the makeshift knife out of Davey's hand, breaking
his thumb with the toe of the hard leather shoes the golems had made for
him, and left Davey to bawl in the cave while Billy dignified his pets'
corpses, putting their entrails back inside their bodies and wrapping
them in shrouds made from old diapers. Alan helped him bury them, and
then found Davey and taped his thumb to his hand and spanked him until
his arm was too tired to deal out one more wallop.
Alan made his way down to the living room, the floor streaked with mud
and water. He went into the kitchen and filled a bucket with soapy water
and gathered up an armload of rags from the rag bag. Methodically, he
cleaned away the mud. He turned his sopping shoes on end over the grate
and dialed the thermostat higher. He made himself a bowl of granola and
a cup of coffee and sat down at his old wooden kitchen table and ate
mindlessly, then washed the dishes and put them in the drying rack.
He'd have to go speak to Krishna.
#
Natalie answered the door in a pretty sun dress, combat boots, and a
baseball hat. She eyed him warily.
"I'd like to speak to Krishna," Alan said from under the hood of his
poncho.