Alan smelled him now, a stink like a mouse dead between the gyprock in the walls, the worst smell imaginable. He felt Mimi breathing behind him, her chest heaving against his back. He reached out and pushed aside the wings, moving them by their translucent membranes, fingers brushing the tiny fingerlets at the wingtips, recognizing in their touch some evolutionary connection with his own hands.
George toppled over as Alan stepped off the bed, moving in the twilight of the light from under the bathroom door. Mimi came off the bed on the other side and hit the overhead light switch, turning the room as bright as an icebox, making Alan squint painfully. She closed the blinds quickly, then went to the door and shot the chain and the deadbolt closed.
Mimi looked down at him. “Ugly sumbitch, whoever he was.”
“My brother,” Alan said.
“Oh,” she said. She went back around the bed and sat on the edge, facing the wall. “Sorry.” She crossed her leg and jiggled her foot, making the springs squeak.
Alan wasn’t listening. He knelt down and touched George’s cheek. The skin was soft and spongy, porous and saturated. Cold. His fingertips came away with shed white flakes of translucent skin clinging to them.
“Davey?” Alan said. “Are you in here?”
Mimi’s foot stilled. They both listened intently. There were night-time sounds in the motel, distant muffled TVs and car engines and fucking, but no sound of papery skin thudding on ground-down carpet.
“He must have come up through the drain,” Alan said. “In the bathroom.” The broad pale moon of George’s belly was abraded in long grey stripes.
He stood and, wiping his hand on his bare thigh, reached for the bathroom doorknob. The door swung open, revealing the sanitized-for-your-protection brightness of the bathroom, the water sloshed on the floor by Mimi earlier, the heaps of damp towels.