"What do you mean, 'carried off'?" Natalie said. She folded her slice in
half to keep the toppings from spilling.
"Someone is stalking my brothers," Alan said. "Someone very strong and
very cunning. Three are gone that I know about. There are others, but I
could be next."
"Stalking?" Natalie said.
"My family is a little strange," Alan said. "I grew up in the north
country, and things are different there. You've heard of blood feuds?"
Natalie and Link exchanged a significant look.
"I know it sounds ridiculous. You don't need to be involved. I just
wanted to let you know why I acted so strangely last night."
"We have to get back," Natalie said. "Nice to meet you, Kurt. I hope you
find your brother, Andy."
"Brothers," Alan said.
"Brothers," Natalie said, and walked away briskly.
#
Alan was the oldest of the brothers, and that meant that he was the one
who blazed all the new trails in the family.
He met a girl in the seventh grade. Her name was Marci, and she had just
transferred in from Scotland. Her father was a mining engineer, and
she'd led a gypsy life that put her in stark contrast to the
third-generation homebodies that made up most of the rest of their
class.
She had red hair and blue eyes and a way of holding her face in repose
that made her look cunning at all times. No one understood her accent,
but there was a wiry ferocity in her movement that warned off any kid
who thought about teasing her about it.
Alan liked to play in a marshy corner of the woods that bordered the
playground after school, crawling around in the weeds, catching toads
and letting them go again, spying on the crickets and the secret lives
of the larvae that grubbed in the milkweed. He was hunkered down on his
haunches one afternoon when Marci came crunching through the tall
grass. He ducked down lower, then peered out from his hiding spot as she
crouched down and he heard the unmistakable patter of urine as she peed
in the rushes.
His jaw dropped. He'd never seen a girl pee before, had no idea what the
squatting business was all about. The wet ground sucked at his sneaker
and he tipped back on his ass with a yelp. Marci straightened abruptly
and crashed over to him, kicking him hard in the ribs when she reached
him, leaving a muddy toeprint on his fall windbreaker.
She wound up for another kick and he hollered something wordless and
scurried back, smearing marsh mud across his jeans and jacket.
"You pervert!" she said, pronouncing it Yuh peervurrt!
"I am not!" he said, still scooting back.
"Watching from the bushes!" she said.
"I wasn't -- I was already here, and you -- I mean, what were *you*
doing? I was just minding my own business and you came by, I just didn't
want to be bothered, this is *my* place!"
"You don't own it," she said, but she sounded slightly chastened. "Don't
tell anyone I had a piss here, all right?"
"I won't," he said.
She sat down beside him, unmindful of the mud on her denim
skirt. "Promise," she said. "It's so embarrassing."
"I promise," he said.
"Swear," she said, and poked him in the ribs with a bony finger.
He clutched his hands to his ribs. "Look," he said, "I swear. I'm good
at secrets."
Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Oh, aye? And I suppose you've lots of
secrets, then?"
He said nothing, and worked at keeping the smile off the corners of his
mouth.
She poked him in the ribs, then got him in the stomach as he moved to
protect his chest. "Secrets, huh?"
He shook his head and clamped his lips shut. She jabbed a flurry of
pokes and prods at him while he scooted back on his butt, then dug her
clawed hands into his tummy and tickled him viciously. He giggled, then
laughed, then started to hiccup uncontrollably. He shoved her away
roughly and got up on his knees, gagging.
"Oh, I like you," she said, "just look at that. A wee tickle and you're
ready to toss your lunch." She tenderly stroked his hair until the
hiccups subsided, then clawed at his belly again, sending him rolling
through the mud.
Once he'd struggled to his feet, he looked at her, panting. "Why are you
doing this?"
"You're not serious! It's the most fun I've had since we moved to this
terrible place."
"You're a sadist!" He'd learned the word from a book he'd bought from
the ten-cent pile out front of the used bookstore. It had a clipped-out
recipe for liver cutlets between the pages and lots of squishy grown-up
sex things that seemed improbable if not laughable. He'd looked "sadist"
up in the class dictionary.
"Aye," she said. "I'm that." She made claws of her hands and advanced on
him slowly. He giggled uncontrollably as he backed away from
her. "C'mere, you, you've more torture comin' to ye before I'm satisfied
that you can keep a secret."
He held his arms before him like a movie zombie and walked toward
her. "Yes, mathter," he said in a monotone. Just as he was about to
reach her, he dodged to one side, then took off.
She chased him, laughing, halfway back to the mountain, then cried
off. He stopped a hundred yards up the road from her, she doubled over
with her hands planted on her thighs, face red, chest heaving. "You go
on, then," she called. "But it's more torture for you at school
tomorrow, and don't you forget it!"
"Only if you catch me!" he called back.
"Oh, I'll catch you, have no fear."
#
She caught him at lunch. He was sitting in a corner of the schoolyard,
eating from a paper sack of mushrooms and dried rabbit and keeping an
eye on Edward-Frederick-George as he played tag with the other
kindergartners. She snuck up behind him and dropped a handful of gravel
down the gap of his pants and into his underpants. He sprang to his
feet, sending gravel rattling out the cuffs of his jeans.
"Hey!" he said, and she popped something into his mouth. It was wet and
warm from her hand and it squirmed. He spat it out and it landed on the
schoolyard with a soft splat.
It was an earthworm, thick with loamy soil.
"You!" he said, casting about for a curse of sufficient
vehemence. "You!"
She hopped from foot to foot in front of him, clearly delighted with
this reaction. He reached out for her and she danced back. He took off
after her and they were chasing around the yard, around hopscotches and
tag games and sand castles and out to the marshy woods. She skidded
through the puddles and he leapt over them. She ducked under a branch
and he caught her by the hood of her windbreaker.
Without hesitating, she flung her arms in the air and slithered out of
the windbreaker, down to a yellow T-shirt that rode up her back,
exposing her pale freckles and the knobs of her spine, the fingers of
her ribs. She took off again and he balled the windbreaker up in his
fist and took off after her.
She stepped behind a bushy pine, and when he rounded the corner she was
waiting for him, her hands clawed, digging at his tummy, leaving him
giggling. He pitched back into the pine needles and she followed,
straddling his waist and tickling him until he coughed and choked and
gasped for air.
"Tell me!" she said. "Tell me your secrets!"
"Stop!" Alan said. "Please! I'm going to piss myself!"
"What's that to me?" she said, tickling more vigorously.
He tried to buck her off, but she was too fast. He caught one wrist, but
she pinned his other arm with her knee. He heaved and she collapsed on
top of him.
Her face was inches from his, her breath moist on his face. They both
panted, and he smelled her hair, which was over his face and neck. She
leaned forward and closed her eyes expectantly.
He tentatively brushed his lips across hers, and she moved closer, and
they kissed. It was wet and a little gross, but not altogether
unpleasant.
She leaned back and opened her eyes, then grinned at him. "That's enough
torture for one day," she said. "You're free to go."
#
She "tortured" him at morning and afternoon recess for the next two
weeks, and when he left school on Friday afternoon after the last bell,
she was waiting for him in the schoolyard.
"Hello," she said, socking him in the arm.
"Hi," he said.
"Why don't you invite me over for supper this weekend?" she said.
"Supper?"
"Yes. I'm your girlfriend, yeah? So you should have me around to your
place to meet your parents. Next weekend you can come around my place
and meet my dad."
"I can't," he said.
"You can't."
"No."
"Why not?"
"It's a secret," he said.
"Oooh, a secret," she said. "What kind of secret?"
"A family secret. We don't have people over for dinner. That's the way
it is."
"A secret! They're all child molesters?"
He shook his head.
"Horribly deformed?"
He shook his head.
"What, then? Give us a hint?"
"It's a secret."
She grabbed his ear and twisted it. Gently at first, then harder. "A
secret?" she said.
"Yes," he gasped. "It's a secret, and I can't tell you. You're hurting
me."
"I should hope so," she said. "And it will go very hard for you indeed
if you don't tell me what I want to know."
He grabbed her wrist and dug his strong fingers into the thin tendons on
their insides, twisting his fingertips for maximal effect. Abruptly, she
released his ear and clenched her wrist hard, sticking it between her
thighs.
"Owwww! That bloody hurt, you bastard. What did you do that for?"
"My secrets," Alan said, "are secret."
She held her wrist up and examined it. "Heaven help you if you've left a
bruise, Alvin," she said. "I'll kill you." She turned her wrist from
side to side. "All right," she said. "All right. Kiss it better, and you
can come to my place for supper on Saturday at six p.m.." She shoved her
arm into his face and he kissed the soft skin on the inside of her
wrist, putting a little tongue in it.
She giggled and punched him in the arm. "Saturday, then!" she called as
she ran off.
#
Edward-Felix-Gerald were too young to give him shit about his schoolyard
romance, and Brian was too sensitive, but Dave had taken to lurking
about the schoolyard, spying on the children, and he'd seen Marci break
off from a clench with Alan, take his hand, and plant it firmly on her
tiny breast, an act that had shocked Danny to the core.
"Hi, pervert," David said, as he stepped into the cool of the
cave. "Pervert" was Davey's new nickname for him, and he had a finely
honed way of delivering it so that it dripped with contempt. "Did you
have sex with your *girlfriend* today, *pervert*?"
Allan turned away from him and helped E-F-G take off his shoes and roll
up the cuffs of his pants so that he could go down to the lake in the
middle of their father and wade in the shallows, listening to Father's
winds soughing through the great cavern.
"Did you touch her boobies? Did she suck your pee-pee? Did you put your
finger in her?" The litany would continue until Davey went to bed, and
even then he wasn't safe. One night, Allen had woken up to see Darren
standing over him, hands planted on his hips, face twisted into an
elaborate sneer. "Did you put your penis inside of her?" he'd hissed,
then gone back to bed.
Alby went out again, climbing the rockface faster than Doug could keep
up with him, so that by the time he'd found his perch high over the
woodlands, where he could see the pines dance in the wind and the
ant-sized cars zooming along the highways, Doug was far behind, likely
sat atop their mother, sucking his thumb and sulking and thinking up new
perversions to accuse Alan of.
#
Saturday night arrived faster than Alan could have imagined. He spent
Saturday morning in the woods, picking mushrooms and checking his
snares, then headed down to town on Saturday afternoon to get a haircut
and to haunt the library.
Converting his father's gold to cash was easier than getting a library
card without an address. There was an old assayer whom the golems had
described to him before his first trip to town. The man was cheap but he
knew enough about the strangeness on the mountain not to cheat him too
badly. The stern librarian who glared at him while he walked the
shelves, sometimes looking at the titles, sometimes the authors, and
sometimes the Dewey Decimal numbers had no such fear.
The Deweys were fascinating. They traced the fashions in human knowledge
and wisdom. It was easy enough to understand why the arbiters of the
system subdivided Motorized Land Vehicles (629.2) into several
categories, but here in the 629.22s, where the books on automobiles
were, you could see the planners' deficiencies. Automobiles divided into
dozens of major subcategories (taxis and limousines, buses, light
trucks, cans, lorries, tractor trailers, campers, motorcycles, racing
cars, and so on), then ramified into a combinatorial explosion of
sub-sub-sub categories. There were Dewey numbers on some of the
automotive book spines that had twenty digits or more after the decimal,
an entire Dewey Decimal system hidden between 629.2 and 629.3.
To the librarian, this shelf-reading looked like your garden-variety
screwing around, but what really made her nervous were Alan's excursions
through the card catalogue, which required constant tending to replace
the cards that errant patrons made unauthorized reorderings of.
The subject headings in the third bank of card drawers were the most
interesting of all. They, too, branched and forked and rejoined
themselves like the meanderings of an ant colony on the march. He'd go
in sequence for a while, then start following cross-references when he
found an interesting branch, keeping notes on scraps of paper on top of
the file drawer. He had spent quite some time in the mythology
categories, looking up golems and goblins, looking up changelings and
monsters, looking up seers and demigods, but none of the books that he'd
taken down off the shelves had contained anything that helped him
understand his family better.
His family was uncatalogued and unclassified in human knowledge.
#
He rang the bell on Marci's smart little brick house at bang-on six,
carrying some daisies he'd bought from the grocery store, following the
etiquette laid down in several rather yucky romance novels he'd perused
that afternoon.
She answered in jeans and a T-shirt, and punched him in the arm before
he could give her the flowers. "Don't you look smart?" she said. "Well,
you're not fooling anyone, you know." She gave him a peck on the cheek
and snatched away the daisies. "Come along, then, we're eating soon."
Marci sat him down in the living room, which was furnished with neutral
sofas and a neutral carpet and a neutral coffee table. The bookcases
were bare. "It's horrible," she said, making a face. She was twittering
a little, dancing from foot to foot. Alan was glad to know he wasn't the
only one who was uncomfortable. "Isn't it? The company put us up
here. We had a grand flat in Scotland."
"It's nice," Alan said, "but you look like you could use some books."
She crossed her eyes. "Books? Sure -- I've got *ten boxes* of them in
the basement. You can come by and help me unpack them."
"Ten *boxes?*" Alan said. "You're making that up." *Ten boxes of books!*
Things like books didn't last long under the mountain, in the damp and
with the ever-inquisitive, ever-destructive Davey exploring every inch
of floor and cave and corridor in search of opportunities for pillage.
"I ain't neither," she said. "At least ten. It was a grand flat and they
were all in alphabetical order, too."
"Can we go see?" Alan asked, getting up from the sofa.
"See boxes?"
"Yes," Alan said. "And look inside. We could unbox them after dinner,
okay?"
"That's more of an afternoon project," said a voice from the top of the
stairs.
"That's my Da," she said. "Come down and introduce yourself to Alan,
Da," she said. "You're not the voice of God, so you can bloody well turn
up and show your face."
"No more sass, gel, or it will go very hard for you," said the
voice. The accent was like Marci's squared, thick as oatmeal,
liqueur-thick. Nearly incomprehensible, but the voice was kind and smart
and patient, too.
"You'll have a hard time giving me any licks from the top of the stairs,
Da, and Alan looks like he's going to die if you don't at least come
down and say hello."
Alan blushed furiously. "You can come down whenever you like, sir," he
said. "That's all right."
"That's mighty generous of you, young sir," said the voice. "Aye. But
before I come down, tell me, are your intentions toward my daughter
honorable?"
His cheeks grew even hotter, and his ears felt like they were melting
with embarrassment. "Yes, sir," he said in a small voice.
"He's a dreadful pervert, Da," Marci said. "You should see the things he
tries, you'd kill him, you would." She grinned foxish and punched him in
the shoulder. He sank into the cushions, face suddenly drained of blood.
"*What*?" roared the voice, and there was a clatter of slippers on the
neutral carpet of the stairs. Alan didn't want to look but found that he
couldn't help himself, his head inexorably turned toward the sound,
until a pair of thick legs hove into sight, whereupon Marci leapt into
his lap and threw her arms around his neck.
"Ge'orff me, pervert!" she said, as she began to cover his face in
darting, pecking kisses.
He went rigid and tried to sink all the way into the sofa.
"All right, all right, that's enough of that," her father said. Marci
stood and dusted herself off. Alan stared at his knees.
"She's horrible, isn't she?" said the voice, and a great, thick hand
appeared in his field of vision. He shook it tentatively, noting the
heavy class ring and the thin, plain wedding band. He looked up slowly.
Marci's father was short but powerfully built, like the wrestlers on the
other kids' lunchboxes at school. He had a shock of curly black hair
that was flecked with dandruff, and a thick bristling mustache that made
him look very fierce, though his eyes were gentle and bookish behind
thick glasses. He was wearing wool trousers and a cable-knit sweater
that was unraveling at the elbows.
"Pleased to meet you, Albert," he said. They shook hands gravely. "I've
been after her to unpack those books since we moved here. You could come
by tomorrow afternoon and help, if you'd like -- I think it's the only
way I'll get herself to stir her lazy bottom to do some chores around
here."
"Oh, *Da*!" Marci said. "Who cooks around here? Who does the laundry?"
"The take-away pizza man does the majority of the cooking, daughter. And
as for laundry, the last time I checked, there were two weeks' worth of
laundry to do."
"Da," she said in a sweet voice, "I love you Da," she said, wrapping her
arms around his trim waist.
"You see what I have to put up with?" her father said, snatching her up
and dangling her by her ankles.
She flailed her arms about and made outraged choking noises while he
swung her back and forth like a pendulum, releasing her at the top of
one arc so that she flopped onto the sofa in a tangle of thin limbs.
"It's a madhouse around here," her father continued as Marci righted
herself, knocking Alan in the temple with a tennis shoe, "but what can
you do? Once she's a little bigger, I can put her to work in the mines,
and then I'll have a little peace around here." He sat down on an
overstuffed armchair with a fussy antimacassar.
"He's got a huge life-insurance policy," Marci said
conspiratorially. "I'm just waiting for him to kick the bucket and then
I'm going to retire."
"Oh, aye," her father said. "Retire. Your life is an awful one, it
is. Junior high is a terrible hardship, I know."
Alan found himself grinning.
"What's so funny?" Marci said, punching him in the shoulder.
"You two are," he said, grabbing her arm and then digging his fingers
into her tummy, doubling her over with tickles.
#
There were *twelve* boxes of books. The damp in the basement had
softened the cartons to cottage-cheese mush, and the back covers of the
bottom layer of paperbacks were soft as felt. To Alan, these seemed
unremarkable -- all paper under the mountain looked like this after a
week or two, even if Doug didn't get to it -- but Marci was heartbroken.
"My books, my lovely books, they're roont!" she said, as they piled them
on the living room carpet.
"They're fine," Alan said. "They'll dry out a little wobbly, but they'll
be fine. We'll just spread the damp ones out on the rug and shelve the
rest."
And that's what they did, book after book -- old books, hardcover books,
board-back kids' books, new paperbacks, dozens of green- and
orange-spined Penguin paperbacks. He fondled them, smelled them. Some
smelled of fish and chips, and some smelled of road dust, and some
smelled of Marci, and they had dog ears where she'd stopped and cracks
in their spines where she'd bent them around. They fell open to pages
that had her favorite passages. He felt wobbly and drunk as he touched
each one in turn.
"Have you read all of these?" Alan asked as he shifted the John
Mortimers down one shelf to make room for the Ed McBains.
"Naw," she said, punching him in the shoulder. "What's the point of a
bunch of books you've already read?"
#
She caught him in the schoolyard on Monday and dragged him by one ear
out to the marshy part. She pinned him down and straddled his chest and
tickled him with one hand so that he cried out and used the other hand
to drum a finger across his lips, so that his cries came out "bibble."
Once he'd bucked her off, they kissed for a little while, then she
grabbed hold of one of his nipples and twisted.
"All right," she said. "Enough torture. When do I get to meet your
family?"
"You can't," he said, writhing on the pine needles, which worked their
way up the back of his shirt and pricked him across his lower back,
feeling like the bristles of a hairbrush.
"Oh, I can, and I will," she said. She twisted harder.
He slapped her hand away. "My family is really weird," he said. "My
parents don't really ever go out. They're not like other people. They
don't talk." All of it true.
"They're mute?"
"No, but they don't talk."
"They don't talk much, or they don't talk at all?" She pronounced it
a-tall.
"Not at all."
"How did you and your brothers learn to talk, then?"
"Neighbors." Still true. The golems lived in the neighboring caves. "And
my father, a little." True.
"So you have neighbors who visit you?" she asked, a triumphant gleam in
her eye.
*Damn*. "No, we visit them." Lying now. Sweat on the shag of hair over
his ears, which felt like they had coals pressed to them.
"When you were a baby?"
"No, my grandparents took care of me when I was a baby." Deeper. "But
they died." Bottoming out now.
"I don't believe you," she said, and he saw tears glisten in her
eyes. "You're too embarrassed to introduce me to your family."
"That's not it." He thought fast. "My brother. David. He's not well. He
has a brain tumor. We think he'll probably die. That's why he doesn't
come to school. And it makes him act funny. He hits people, says
terrible things." Mixing truth with lies was a *lot* easier. "He shouts
and hurts people and he's the reason I can't ever have friends over. Not
until he dies."
Her eyes narrowed. "If that's a lie," she said, "it's a terrible one. My
Ma died of cancer, and it's not something anyone should make fun of. So,
it better not be a lie."
"It's not a lie," he said, mustering a tear. "My brother David, we don't
know how long he'll live, but it won't be long. He acts like a monster,
so it's hard to love him, but we all try."
She rocked back onto her haunches. "It's true, then?" she asked softly.
He nodded miserably.
"Let's say no more about it, then," she said. She took his hand and
traced hieroglyphs on his palm with the ragged edges of her chewed-up
fingernails.
The recess bell rang and they headed back to school. They were about to
leave the marshland when something hard hit Alan in the back of the
head. He spun around and saw a small, sharp rock skitter into the grass,
saw Davey's face contorted with rage, lips pulled all the way back off
his teeth, half-hidden in the boughs of a tree, winding up to throw
another rock.
He flinched away and the rock hit the paving hard enough to
bounce. Marci whirled around, but David was gone, high up in the leaves,
invisible, malicious, biding.
"What was that?"
"I dunno," Alan lied, and groaned.
#
Kurt and Alan examined every gap between every storefront on Augusta, no
matter how narrow. Kurt kept silent as Alan fished his arm up to the
shoulder along miniature alleys that were just wide enough to
accommodate the rain gutters depending from the roof.
They found the alley that Frederick had been dragged down near the end
of the block, between a mattress store and an egg wholesaler. It was
narrow enough that they had to traverse it sideways, but there, at the
entrance, were two smears of skin and blood, just above the ground,
stretching off into the sulfurous, rotty-egg depths of the alleyway.
They slid along the alley's length, headed for the gloom of the
back. Something skittered away from Alan's shoe and he bent down, but
couldn't see it. He ran his hands along the ground and the walls and
they came back with a rime of dried blood and a single strand of long,
oily hair stuck to them. He wiped his palms off on the bricks.
"I can't see," he said.
"Here," Kurt said, handing him a miniature maglight whose handle was
corrugated by hundreds of toothmarks. Alan saw that he was intense,
watching.
Alan twisted the light on. "Thanks," he said, and Kurt smiled at him,
seemed a little taller. Alan looked again. There, on the ground, was a
sharpened black tooth, pierced by a piece of pipe-cleaner wire.
He pocketed the tooth before Kurt saw it and delved farther, approaching
the alley's end, which was carpeted with a humus of moldering cardboard,
leaves, and road turds blown or washed there. He kicked it aside as best
he could, then crouched down to examine the sewer grating beneath. The
greenish brass screws that anchored it to the ground had sharp cuts in
their old grooves where they had been recently removed. He rattled the
grating, which was about half a meter square, then slipped his multitool
out of his belt holster. He flipped out the Phillips driver and went to
work on the screws, unconsciously putting Kurt's flashlight in his
mouth, his front teeth finding purchase in the dents that Kurt's own had
left there.
He realized with a brief shudder that Kurt probably used this flashlight
while nipple-deep in dumpsters, had an image of Kurt transferring it
from his gloved hands to his mouth and back again as he dug through bags
of kitchen and toilet waste, looking for discarded technology. But the
metal was cool and clean against his teeth and so he bit down and worked
the four screws loose, worked his fingers into the mossy slots in the
grate, lifted it out, and set it to one side.
He shone the light down the hole and found another fingerbone, the tip
of a thumb, desiccated to the size of a large raisin, and he pocketed
that, too. There was a lot of blood here, a little puddle that was still
wet in the crusted middle. Frederick's blood.
He stepped over the grating and shone the light back down the hole,
inviting Kurt to have a look.
"That's where they went," he said as Kurt bent down.
"That hole?"
"That hole," he said.
"Is that blood?"
"That's blood. It's not easy to fit someone my brother's size down a
hole like that." He set the grate back, screwed it into place, and
passed the torch back to Kurt. "Let's get out of here," he said.
On the street, Alan looked at his blood and moss-grimed palms. Kurt
pushed back his floppy, frizzed-out, bleach-white mohawk and scratched
vigorously at the downy brown fuzz growing in on the sides of his skull.
"You think I'm a nut," Alan said. "It's okay, that's natural."
Kurt smiled sheepishly. "If it's any consolation, I think you're a
*harmless* nut, okay? I like you."
"You don't have to believe me, so long as you don't get in my way," Alan
said. "But it's easier if you believe me."
"Easier to do what?"
"Oh, to get along," Alan said.
#
Davey leapt down from a rock outcropping as Alan made his way home that
night, landing on his back. Alan stumbled and dropped his school bag. He
grabbed at the choking arm around his neck, then dropped to his knees as
Davey bounced a fist-sized stone off his head, right over his ear.
He slammed himself back, pinning Davey between himself and the sharp
stones on the walkway up to the cave entrance, then mashed backward with
his elbows, his head ringing like a gong from the stone's blow. His left
elbow connected with Davey's solar plexus and the arm around his throat
went slack.
He climbed to his knees and looked Davey in the face. He was blue and
gasping, but Alan couldn't work up a lot of sympathy for him as he
reached up to the side of his head and felt the goose egg welling
there. His fingertips came back with a few strands of hair blood-glued
to them.
He'd been in a few schoolyard scraps and this was always the moment when
a teacher intervened -- one combatant pinned, the other atop him. What
could you do after this? Was he going to take the rock from Davey's hand
and smash him in the face with it, knocking out his teeth, breaking his
nose, blacking his eyes? Could he get off of Davey without getting back
into the fight?
He pinned Davey's shoulders under his knees and took him by the chin
with one hand. "You can't do this, Danny," he said, looking into his
hazel eyes, which had gone green as they did when he was angry.
"Do *what*?"
"Spy on me. Try to hurt me. Try to hurt my friends. Tease me all the
time. You can't do it, okay?"
"I'll stab you in your sleep, Andy. I'll break your fingers with a
brick. I'll poke your eyes out with a fork." He was fizzling like a
baking-soda volcano, saliva slicking his cheeks and nostrils and chin,
his eyes rolling.
Alan felt helplessness settle on him, weighing down his limbs. How could
he let him go? What else could he do? Was he going to have to sit on
Davey's shoulders until they were both old men?
"Please, Davey. I'm sorry about what I said. I just can't bring her
home, you understand," he said.
"Pervert. She's a slut and you're a pervert. I'll tear her titties off."
"Don't, Danny, please. Stop, okay?"
Darren bared his teeth and growled, jerking his head forward and
snapping at Alan's crotch, heedless of the painful thuds his head made
when it hit the ground after each lunge.
Alan waited to see if he would tire himself out, but when it was clear
that he would not tire, Alan waited for his head to thud to the ground
and then, abruptly, he popped him in the chin, leapt off of him turned
him on his belly, and wrenched him to his knees, twisting one arm behind
his back and pulling his head back by the hair. He brought Davey to his
feet, under his control, before he'd recovered from the punch.
"I'm telling Dad," he said in Davey's ear, and began to frog-march him
through to the cave mouth and down into the lake in the middle of the
mountain. He didn't even slow down when they reached the smooth shore of
the lake, just pushed on, sloshing in up to his chest, Davey's head
barely above the water.
"He won't stop," Alan said, to the winds, to the water, to the vaulted
ceiling, to the scurrying retreat of the goblin. "I think he'll kill me
if he goes on. He's torturing me. You've seen it. Look at him!"
Davey was thrashing in the water, his face swollen and bloody, his eyes
rattling like dried peas in a maraca. Alan's fingers, still buried in
Davey's shiny blond hair, kept brushing up against the swollen bruises
there, getting bigger by the moment. "I'll *fucking* kill you!" Davey
howled, screaming inchoate into the echo that came back from his call.
"Shhh," Alan said into his ear. "Shhh. Listen, Davey, please, shhh."
Davey's roar did not abate. Alan thought he could hear the whispers and
groans of their father in the wind, but he couldn't make it
out. "Please, shhh," he said, gathering Davey in a hug that pinned his
arms to his sides, putting his lips up against Davey's ear, holding him
still.
"Shhh," he said, and Davey stopped twitching against him, stopped his
terrible roar, and they listened.
At first the sound was barely audible, a soughing through the tunnels,
but gradually the echoes chased each other round the great cavern and
across the still, dark surface of the lake, and then a voice, illusive
as a face in the clouds.
"My boys," the voice said, their father said. "My sons. David, Alan. You
must not fight like this."
"He --!" Davey began, the echoes of his outburst scattering their
father's voice.
"Shhh," Alan said again.
"Daniel, you must love your brother. He loves you. I love you. Trust
him. He won't hurt you. I won't let you come to any harm. I love you,
son."
Alan felt Danny tremble in his arms, and he was trembling, too, from the
icy cold of the lake and from the voice and the words and the love that
echoed from every surface.
"Adam, my son. Keep your brother safe. You need each other. Don't be
impatient or angry with him. Give him love."
"I will," Alan said, and he relaxed his arms so that he was holding
Danny in a hug and not a pinion. Danny relaxed back into him. "I love
you, Dad," he said, and they trudged out of the water, out into the last
warmth of the day's sun, to dry out on the slope of the mountainside,
green grass under their bodies and wispy clouds in the sky that they
watched until the sun went out.
#
Marci followed him home a week before Christmas break. He didn't notice
her at first. She was cunning, and followed his boot prints in the
snow. A blizzard had blown up halfway through the school day, and by the
time class let out, there was fresh knee-deep powder and he had to lift
each foot high to hike through it, the shush of his snow pants and the
huff of his breath the only sounds in the icy winter evening.
She followed the deep prints of his boots on the fresh snow, stalking
him like he stalked rabbits in the woods. When he happened to turn
around at the cave mouth, he spotted her in her yellow snow-suit,
struggling up the mountainside, barely visible in the twilight.
He'd never seen an intruder on the mountain. The dirt trail that led up
to the cave branched off a side road on the edge of town, and it was too
rocky even for the dirt-bike kids. He stood at the cave-mouth, torn by
indecision. He wanted to keep walking, head away farther uphill, away
from the family's den, but now she'd seen him, had waved to him. His
cold-numb face drained of blood and his bladder hammered insistently at
him. He hiked down the mountain and met her.
"Why are you here?" he said, once he was close enough to see her pale,
freckled face.
"Why do you think?" she said. "I followed you home. Where do you live,
Alan? Why can't I even see where you live?"
He felt tears prick at his eyes. "You just *can't*! I can't bring you
home!"
"You hate me, don't you?" she said, hands balling up into mittened
fists. "That's it."
"I don't hate you, Marci. I -- I love you," he said, surprising himself.
She punched him hard in the arm. "Shut up." She kissed his cheek with
her cold, dry lips and the huff of her breath thawed his skin, making it
tingle.
"Where do you live, Alan?"
He sucked air so cold it burned his lungs. "Come with me." He took her
mittened hand in his and trudged up to the cave mouth.
They entered the summer cave, where the family spent its time in the
warm months, now mostly empty, save for some straw and a few scattered
bits of clothing and toys. He led her through the cave, his eyes
adjusting to the gloom, back to the right-angle bend behind a stalactite
baffle, toward the sulfur reek of the hot spring on whose shores the
family spent its winters.
"It gets dark," he said. "I'll get you a light once we're inside."
Her hand squeezed his tighter and she said nothing.
It grew darker and darker as he pushed into the cave, helping her up the
gentle incline of the cave floor. He saw well in the dark -- the whole
family did -- but he understood that for her this was a blind voyage.
They stepped out into the sulfur-spring cavern, the acoustics of their
breathing changed by the long, flat hollow. In the dark, he saw
Edward-Frederick-George playing with his matchbox cars in one corner;
Davey leaned up against their mother, sucking his thumb. Billy was
nowhere in sight, probably hiding out in his room -- he would, of
course, have foreseen this visit.
He put her hand against the cave wall, then said, "Wait here." He let go
of her and walked quickly to the heap of winter coats and boots in the
corner and dug through them for the flashlight he used to do his
homework by. It was a hand-crank number, and as he squeezed it to life,
he pointed it at Marci, her face wan and scared in its light. He gave
the flashlight a few more pumps to get its flywheel spinning, then
passed it to her.
"Just keep squeezing it," he said. "It doesn't need batteries." He took
her hand again. It was limp.
"You can put your things on the pile," he said, pointing to the coats
and boots. He was already shucking his hat and mittens and boots and
snow pants and coat. His skin flushed with the warm vapors coming off of
the sulfur spring.
"You *live* here?" she said. The light from the flashlight was dimming
and he reached over and gave it a couple of squeezes, then handed it
back to her.
"I live here. It's complicated."
Davey's eyes were open and he was staring at them with squinted eyes and
a frown.
"Where are your parents?" she said.
"It's complicated," he said again, as though that explained
everything. "This is my secret. No one else knows it."
Edward-Frederick-George tottered over to them with an armload of toy
cars, which he mutely offered to Marci, smiling a drooly smile. Alan
patted him on the head and knelt down. "I don't think Marci wants to
play cars, okay?" Ed nodded solemnly and went back to the edge of the
pool and began running his cars through the nearly scalding water.
Marci reached out a hand ahead of her into the weak light, looked at the
crazy shadows it cast on the distant walls. "How can you live here? It's
a cave, Alan. How can you live in a cave?"
"You get used to it," Alan said. "I can't explain it all, and the parts
that I can explain, you wouldn't believe. But you've been to my home
now, Marci. I've shown you where I live."
Davey approached them, a beatific smile on his angelic face.
"This is my brother, Daniel," Alan said. "The one I told you about."
"You're his slut," Davey said. He was still smiling. "Do you touch his
peter?"
Alan flinched, suppressing a desire to smack Davey, but Marci just knelt
down and looked him in the eye. "Nope," she said. "Are you always this
horrible to strangers?"
"Yes!" Davey said, cheerfully. "I hate you, and I hate *him*," he cocked
his head Alanward. "And you're all *motherfuckers.*"
"But we're not wee horrible shits, Danny," she said. "We're not
filthy-mouthed brats who can't keep a civil tongue."
Davey snapped his head back and then forward, trying to get her in the
bridge of the nose, a favorite tactic of his, but she was too fast for
him and ducked it, so that he stumbled and fell to his knees.
"Your mother's going to be very cross when she finds out how you've been
acting. You'll be lucky if you get any Christmas pressies," she said as
he struggled to his feet.
He swung a punch at her groin, and she caught his wrist and then hoisted
him to his tiptoes by his arm, then lifted him off the floor, bringing
his face up level with hers. "Stop it," she said. "*Now*."
He fell silent and narrowed his eyes as he dangled there, thinking about
this. Then he spat in her face. Marci shook her head slowly as the gob
of spit slid down her eyebrow and over her cheek, then she spat back,
nailing him square on the tip of his nose. She set him down and wiped
her face with a glove.
Davey started toward her, and she lifted a hand and he flinched back and
then ran behind their mother, hiding in her tangle of wires and
hoses. Marci gave the flashlight a series of hard cranks that splashed
light across the washing machine and then turned to Alan.
"That's your brother?"
Alan nodded.
"Well, I see why you didn't want me to come home with you, then."
#
Kurt was properly appreciative of Alan's bookcases and trophies, ran his
fingertips over the wood, willingly accepted some iced mint tea
sweetened with honey, and used a coaster without having to be asked.
"A washing machine and a mountain," he said.
"Yes," Alan said. "He kept a roof over our heads and she kept our
clothes clean."
"You've told that joke before, right?" Kurt's foot was bouncing, which
made the chains on his pants and jacket jangle.
"And now Davey's after us," Alan said. "I don't know why it's now. I
don't know why Davey does *anything*. But he always hated me most of
all."
"So why did he snatch your brothers first?"
"I think he wants me to sweat. He wants me scared, all the time. I'm the
eldest. I'm the one who left the mountain. I'm the one who came first,
and made all the connections with the outside world. They all looked to
me to explain the world, but I never had any explanations that would
suit Davey."
"This is pretty weird," he said.
Alan cocked his head at Kurt. He was about thirty, old for a punk, and
had a kind of greasy sheen about him, like he didn't remember to wash
often enough, despite his protestations about his cleanliness. But at
thirty, he should have seen enough to let him know that the world was
both weirder than he suspected and not so weird as certain mystically
inclined people would like to believe.
Arnold didn't like this moment of disclosure, didn't like dropping his
carefully cultivated habit of hiding this, but he also couldn't help but
feel relieved. A part of his mind nagged him, though, and told him that
too much of this would waken the worry for his brothers from its
narcotized slumber.
"I've told other people, just a few. They didn't believe me. You don't
have to. Why don't you think about it for a while?"
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to try to figure out how to find my brothers. I can't go
underground like Davey can. I don't think I can, anyway. I never
have. But Davey's so... *broken*... so small and twisted. He's not
smart, but he's cunning and he's determined. I'm smarter than he is. So
I'll try to find the smart way. I'll think about it, too."
"Well, I've got to get ready to go diving," Kurt said. He stood up with
a jangle. "Thanks for the iced tea, Adam."
"It was nice to meet you, Kurt," Alan said, and shook his hand.
#
Alan woke with something soft over his face. It was pitch dark, and he
couldn't breathe. He tried to reach up, but his arms wouldn't move. He
couldn't sit up. Something heavy was sitting on his chest. The soft
thing -- a pillow? -- ground against his face, cruelly pressing down on
the cartilage in his nose, filling his mouth as he gasped for air.
He shuddered hard, and felt something give near his right wrist and then
his arm was loose from the elbow down. He kept working the arm, his
chest afire, and then he'd freed it to the shoulder, and something bit
him, hard little teeth like knives, in the fleshy underside of his
bicep. Flailing dug the teeth in harder, and he knew he was bleeding,
could feel it seeping down his arm. Finally, he got his hand onto
something, a desiccated, mummified piece of flesh. Davey. Davey's ribs,
like dry stones, cold and thin. He felt up higher, felt for the place
where Davey's arm met his shoulder, and then twisted as hard as he
could, until the arm popped free in its socket. He shook his head
violently and the pillow slid away.
The room was still dark, and the hot, moist air rushed into his nostrils
and mouth as he gasped it in. He heard Davey moving in the dark, and as
his eyes adjusted, he saw him unfolding a knife. It was a clasp knife
with a broken hasp and it swung open with the sound of a cockroach's
shell crunching underfoot. The blade was rusty.
Alan flung his freed arm across his body and tried to tug himself
loose. He was being held down by his own sheets, which had been tacked
or stapled to the bed frame. Using all his strength, he rolled over,
heaving and bucking, and felt/heard the staples popping free down one
side of the bed, just as Davey slashed at where his face had been a
moment before. The knife whistled past his ear, then scored deeply along
his shoulder. His arm flopped uselessly at his side and now they were
both fighting one-armed, though Davey had a knife and Adam was wrapped
in a sheet.
His bedroom was singularly lacking in anything that could be improvised
into a weapon -- he considered trying getting a heavy encyclopedia out
to use as a shield, but it was too far a distance and too long a shot.
He scooted back on the bed, trying to untangle the sheet, which was
still secured at the foot of the bed and all along one side. He freed
his good arm just as Davey slashed at him again, aiming for the meat of
his thigh, the big arteries there that could bleed you out in a minute
or two. He grabbed for Davey's shoulder and caught it for an instant,
squeezed and twisted, but then the skin he had hold of sloughed away and
Davey was free, dancing back.
Then he heard, from downstairs, the sound of rhythmic pounding at the
door. He'd been hearing it for some time, but hadn't registered it until
now. A muffled yell from below. Police? Mimi? He screamed out, "Help!"
hoping his voice would carry through the door.
Apparently, it did. He heard the sound of the small glass pane over the
doorknob shatter, and Davey turned his head to look in the direction of
the sound. Alan snatched up the pillow that he'd been smothering under
and swung it as hard as he could at Davey's head, knocking him around,
and the door was open now, the summer night air sweeping up the stairs
to the second-floor bedroom.
"Alan?" It was Kurt.
"Kurt, up here, he's got a knife!"
Boots on the stairs, and Davey standing again, cornered, with the knife,
slashing at the air toward him and toward the bedroom door, toward the
light coming up the stairs, bobbing, Kurt's maglight, clenched in his
teeth, and Davey bolted for the door with the knife held high. The light
stopped moving and there was an instant's tableau, Davey caught in the
light, cracked black lips peeled back from sharp teeth, chest heaving,
knife bobbing, and then Alan was free, diving for his knees, bringing
him down.
Kurt was on them before Davey could struggle up to his good elbow,
kicking the knife away, scattering fingerbones like dice.
Davey screeched like a rusty hinge as Kurt twisted his arms up behind
his back and Alan took hold of his ankles. He thrashed like a raccoon in
a trap, and Alan forced the back of his head down so that his face was
mashed against the cool floor, muffling his cries.
Kurt shifted so that his knee and one hand were pinning Davey's wrists,
fished in his pockets, and came out with a bundle of hairy twine. He set
it on the floor next to Alan and then shifted his grip back to Davey's
arms.
As soon as Alan released the back of Davey's head, he jerked it up and
snapped his teeth into the top of Kurt's calf, just above the top of his
high, chain-draped boot. Kurt hollered and Adam reached out and took the
knife, moving quickly before he could think, and smashed the butt into
Davey's jaw, which cracked audibly. Davey let go of Kurt's calf and Alan
worked quickly to lash his feet together, using half the bundle of
twine, heedless of how he cut into the thin, cracking skin. He used the
knife to snip the string and then handed the roll to Kurt, who went to
work on Danny's wrists.
Alan got the lights and rolled his brother over, looked into his mad
eyes. Dale was trying to scream, but with his jaw hanging limp and his
teeth scattered, it came out in a rasp. Alan stood and found that he was
naked, his shoulder and bicep dripping blood down his side into a pool
on the polished floor.
"We'll take him to the basement," he told Kurt, and dug through the
laundry hamper at the foot of the bed for jeans. He found a couple of
pairs of boxer shorts and tied one around his bicep and the other around
his shoulder, using his teeth and chin as a second hand. It took two
tries before he had them bound tight enough to still the throb.
The bedroom looked like someone had butchered an animal in it, and the
floor was gritty with Darrel's leavings, teeth and nails and
fingerbones. Picking his way carefully through the mess, he hauled the
sheet off the bed, popping out the remaining staples, which pinged off
the bookcases and danced on the polished wood of the floor. He folded it
double and laid it on the floor next to Davey.
"Help me roll him onto it," he said, and then saw that Kurt was staring
down at his shriveled, squirming, hateful brother in horror, wiping his
hands over and over again on the thighs of his jeans.
He looked up and his eyes were glazed and wide. "I was passing by and I
saw the shadows in the window. I thought you were being attacked --" He
hugged himself.
"I was," Alan said. He dug another T-shirt out of his hamper. "Here,
wrap this around your hands."
They rolled Davey into the sheet and then wrapped him in it. He was
surprisingly heavy, dense. Hefting his end of the sheet one-handed,
hefting that mysterious weight, he remembered picking up Ed-Fred-Geoff
in the cave that first day, remembered the weight of the
brother-in-the-brother-in-the-brother, and he had a sudden sickening
sense that perhaps Davey was so heavy because he'd eaten them.
Once they had him bound snugly in the sheet, Danny stopped thrashing and
became very still. They carried him carefully down the dark stairs, the
walnut-shell grit echoing the feel of teeth and flakes of skin on the
bare soles of Alan's feet.
They dumped him unceremoniously on the cool mosaic of tile on the
floor. They stared at the unmoving bundle for a moment. "Wait here, I'm
going to get a chair," Alan said.
"Jesus, don't leave me alone here," Kurt said. "That kid, the one who
saw him -- take -- your brother? No one's seen him since." He looked
down at Davey with wide, crazed eyes.
Alan's shoulder throbbed. "All right," he said. "You get a chair from
the kitchen, the captain's chair in the corner with the newspaper
recycling stacked on it."
While Kurt was upstairs, Alan unwrapped his brother. Danny's eyes were
closed, his jaw hanging askew, his wrists bound behind him. Alan leaned
carefully over him and took his jaw and rotated it gently until it
popped back into place.
"Davey?" he said. The eyes were closed, but now there was an
attentiveness, an alertness to him. Alan stepped back quickly, feeling
foolish at his fear of this pathetic, disjointed bound thing on his
floor. No two ways about it, though: Davey gave him the absolutely
willies, making his testicles draw up and the hair on the back of his
arms prickle.
"Set the chair down there," Alan said, pointing. He hoisted Davey up by
his dry, papery armpits and sat him in the seat. He took some duct tape
out of a utility drawer under the basement staircase and used it to gum
Danny down in the chair.
"Davey," he said again. "I know you can hear me. Stop pretending."
"That's your brother?" Kurt said. "The one who --"
"That's him," Alan said. "I guess you believe me now, huh?"
Davey grinned suddenly, mirthless. "Still making friends and influencing
people, brother?" he said. His voice was wet and hiccuping, like he was
drowning in snot.
"We're not going to play any games here, Davey. You're going to tell me
where Edward, Felix, and Griffin are, or I'm going to tear your fingers
off and smash them into powder. When I run out of fingers, I'll switch
to teeth."