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.