Fantastic Metropolis

“Help me roll him onto it,” he said, and then saw that Curt was staring down at his shrivelled, 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—”

“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, listening to the hum of the servers in their racks nearby. “Wait here, I’m going to get a chair,” Alan said.

“Jesus, don’t leave me alone here,” Curt said.

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 Alan 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?” Curt 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 hiccoughing, like he was drowning in snot.