obeyed the order he had been given, closed the distance between them,
and surprised his brother by taking his hand. Then, as Bobby had hoped,
Frank traveled and Candy went with him, not under his own power but as a
sidecar rider, the way Bobby had gone.
After the tumult, the silence was shocking.
Sweating, clearly ill from what she had witnessed, Julie pushed back her
chair. The wooden legs stuttered on the linoleum.
“No,” Bobby said, and quickly came to her, stooped beside her,
encouraging her to sit down. He took her uninjured hand.
“Wait, not yet, stay out of the way.
The hollow piping.
A blustery whirl of wind.
“Bobby,” she said, panicking,
“they’re coming back, let’s go, i I let’s get out of here while we have
the chance.” He held her in the chair.
“Don’t look. I have to look, be sure, make certain Frank understood,
but you don’t need to see.” The atonal music trilled again, and the
wind stirred up the scent of the dead women’s blood.
“What are you talking about?” she demanded.
“Close your eyes.” She did not close her eyes, of course, because she
had never been one to look away or run away from anything.
The Pollards reappeared, back from the brief visit they had made in
tandem to someplace as far away as Mount Fuji or as close as Doc
Fogarty’s house, more likely to several places.
Recklessly rapid and repeated travel was key to the success of the
trick, just as Bobby had outlined it to Frank in the car.
The brothers were no longer two distinct human beings, for Frank’s had
been the guiding consciousness on their Journeys, and his ability to
shepherd them through error-free reconstitution was declining rapidly,
worse with each jaunt. They were re biologically tangled than any
Siamese twin fused, most of Frank’s left arm disappeared into Candy’s
right side, as if had reached in there to fish among his brother’s
internal o gans- Candy’s right leg melted into Frank’s left, giving the
only three to stand on.
There were more strangenesses, but that was all Bobby could comprehend
before they vanished again. Frank needed to keep moving, stay in
control, give Candy no chance to exert hispower, until the scramble was
so complete that proper reco stitution of either of them would be
impossible.
Realizing what was happening, Julie sat perfectly still, her broken hand
curled in her lap, holding fast to Bobby with her good hand. He knew
she understood, without being told, that Frank was sacrificing himself
for them, and that the least they could do for him was bear witness to
his courage, just as they would keep Thomas and Hal and Clint and Felina
alive memory.
That was one of the most fundamental and sacred duti good friends and
family performed for one another: they tended the flame of memory, so no
one’s death meant an imm diate vanishment from the world; in some sense
the deceas would live on after their passing, at least as long as those
w loved them lived. Such memories were an essential weap against the
chaos of life and death, a way to ensure some con nuity from generation
to generation, an endorsement of ord and of meaning.
Piping, wind: the brothers returned from another series rapid
deconstructions and reconstitutions, and now they were essentially one
creature of cataclysmic biology. The body large, well over seven feet
tall, broad and hulking, for it inco porated the mass of both of them.
The single head had a nigh mare face: Frank’s brown eyes were badly
misaligned; slanted mouth gaped between them where a nose should had
been; and a second mouth pocked the left cheek. Two torture screaming
voices filled the kitchen. Another face was set inchest, mouthiess but
with two eye sockets, in one of which I an unblinking eye as blue as
Candy’s; the other socketfilled with bristling teeth.
The slouching beast vanished, then returned once moor after less than a
minute. This time it was an undifferentiated mass of tissue, dark in
some places and hideously pink in others, prickled with bone fragments,
tufted with sparse clumps of hair, marbled with veins that pulsed to