Davey shook his head. “You don’t scare me, Albert. Not for an instant. I have a large supply of fingers and teeth—all I need. And you—you’re like him. You’re a sentimentalist. Scared of yourself. Scared of me. Scared of everything. That’s why you ran away. That’s why you got rid of me. Scared.”
Alan dug in his pocket for the fingerbones and teeth he’d collected. He found the tip of a pinky with a curled-over nail as thick as an oyster’s shell, crusted with dirt and blood. “Give me the hammer, Kurt,” he said.
Davey’s eyes followed him as he set the fingertip down on the tiles and raised the hammer. He brought it down just to one side of the finger, hard enough to break the tile. Kurt jumped a little, and Alan held the hammer up again.
“Tell me or this time I won’t miss,” he said, looking Davey in the eye.
Davey shrugged in his bonds.
Alan swung the hammer again. It hit the fingertip with a jarring impact that vibrated up his arm and resonated through his hurt shoulder. He raised the hammer again. He’d expected the finger to crush into powder, but instead it fissured into three jagged pieces, like a piece of chert fracturing under a hammer-stone.
Davey’s eyes were squeezed down to slits now. “You’re the scared one. You can’t scare me,” he said, his voice choked with phlegm.
Alan sat on the irregular tile and propped his chin in his palm. “Okay, Davey, you’re right. I’m scared. You’ve kidnapped our brothers, maybe even killed them. You’re terrorizing me. I can’t think, I can’t sleep. So tell me, Danny, why shouldn’t I just kill you again, and get rid of all that fear?”
“I know where the brothers are,” he said instantly. “I know where there are more people like us. All the answers, Albert, every answer you’ve ever looked for. I’ve got them. And I won’t tell you any of them. But so long as I’m walking around and talking, you think that I might.”