My brother went missing out by Paris, Texas some years back, and what came home in his skin was something else, though you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone that’d believe me.
I know how the story would go. Folks would say I was so mad he’d up and left me alone in that house that I’d made up some excuse so as I wouldn’t have to open the door to him, or else he’d run up so much trouble across state that I couldn’t stand the sight of him no more.
Truth is, I’d have harboured my brother even if he’d killed a man, so strong was my love for him, in those days. But as far as I know, the furthest he ever got in his career was petty crimes, maybe a couple of armed robberies, nothing more.
Harvey was a good kid, under it all, just a little boy who’d lost both parents to a joint suicide before he was sixteen years old. Maybe that’s why he ran off, the way he did, sick of the sight of the house he grew up in, and the sister that had become his mother overnight, needing badly to disappear from it all, and never come back.
Last anyone saw of Harvey, he got out of a moving car and walked out into the desert at the side of the road, though who’d been driving him and what had compelled him to stride out there that day nobody knows. Rumours trickled back to me, from time to time, most of them lies— how he’d shacked up with a waitress in Alabama, that he was in a county jail in Nebraska, stories of a hundred other skinny, sick boys with dark hair, run loose, just like him.
He’s still out there on that road, maybe, for the man that staggered up onto the stoop of my house last summer was no blood of mine, nor was he likely any sort of person at all.
I remember hearing a knocking on my front door— violent, offbeat, like an animal had stood up on two legs, and figured out how to gain entry from watching what human beings did. Scared me half out of my skin, that sound, coming at three in the afternoon, with no guests announced to call by.
I went to the window, tugging the net curtain aside to see who was on the front porch before I answered.
I wished to God I hadn’t done it.
The thing knocking on my door looked vaguely like my brother, being that it was tall, and sort of hunched at the shoulders, like he was, and the face hanging off its neck reminded me of Harvey’s, more or less. But it stood in a sort of crooked posture like a beaten-up coat rack, buckled over and twisted in directions I don’t think human joints can rightly go.
It struck the door with the back of one arm, seeming not to know how to bring its fist up straight the way it ought to be.
“Let me in, Leigh-anne,” it called out, from the porch.
It spoke in my brother’s voice, only a strained and broken sort, like he was going through puberty again, only what he was becoming through this second change wasn’t a man.
“Please, Leigh,” it moaned. “The heat’s killing me.”
I stood clutching a handful of curtain, feeling the sweat on my palm gather the scratchy fabric into a sodden ball. It didn’t occur to me to call the cops— the house was too far out for them to get there in any reasonable time, and I wasn’t sure precisely what they could do to help me in my situation. Chase the thing off my doorstep? Pick it up and haul it into the slammer?
It would have been sort of funny, if I wasn’t alone in the house, feeling black horror wash through me in heady rolls.
“Harvey,” I said, loud enough the thing on the doorstep would hear me— Lord knows how I kept the shake from my voice; I sounded more angry, then, than afraid. “Where’ve you been all this time?”
I saw the thing of bones and skin twitch at the sound of my voice, like roadkill full of flies.
“Paris,” he said, and the uneven crawl of his voice made me shove my fist to my mouth against a scream.
“You know how long you’ve been gone, Harv?” I asked, not much wanting to hear the answer.
Play along, I thought. Play along, and it might not do you harm.
“Don’t know how long,” the skeleton on the doorstep muttered. “Can’t tell.”
“Three years,” I said, choking on a tearless sob. “Three years, and not a word from you. What kept you out there for so long, huh?”
I watched the creature work its lips a while, like it was afraid of the answer.
“The road,” it said, at last. “The road…”
I couldn’t stand the way it spoke, slow and shaking, like it had coughed up the name of God.
“What do you mean, the road?” I demanded. “What the hell are you talking about?”
The thing drew itself into the shadows of the porch, out from under the white hand of the sun.
“There was something about it,” it said. “Like it was… calling out to me, and I couldn’t do a thing but go out there and walk. Then I just kept walking, and it felt like there was something waiting for me, at the end of it, but there was no end, nothing but the road.”
I pulled my jacket tighter around myself, chilled by the breeze of those words.
“The sun never went down, out there,” said the thing on my porch. “It was so bright, and it looked… hungry. Or maybe it was the road that was.”
“You’re not making sense,” I snapped, and the creature whined like a man with his guts slit, knowing there was nothing to do for him but die.
“I changed, out there, Leigh. Lost something, or else picked something up, on the road. I was walking so long I thought I might die from feeling so damn tired in every fucking way, but I couldn’t stop walking. I couldn’t stop walking.”
The thing that sounded like my brother began to cry, great heaving sobs that shook its gnarled body like an old tree in a gale.
“I started praying to God,” it said. “To the sun, to the road, begging them to let me go. I’d had enough, and if they had to kill me to end it, I’d lie down right there and die. Everything hurt so bad; the thirst and the heat made me go crazy. But my legs just kept moving themselves, and the closest I could get to stopping it was crawling like a half-dead cat in the dirt, and I still kept going. I kept going, and I wondered if I was already dead. If the road was some place after.”
The creature’s head turned, or tried to; it moved like its neck was snapped, and had been jammed back into its socket like a kid does with a doll.
“I’ve done bad things, Leigh,” it said. “Things you don’t know nothing about. I’ve come from two people that covered up for me, and killed themselves for the shame of it. I figured maybe I was paying for that, out there on the road.”
Our parents— it knew my parents were dead, and the way they went, which was kept out of the papers, somehow, written up to seem like an accident. This thing knew how they’d gone out, and the reason it gave for it rang true.
I’d loved my brother, and hoped that he was better than people told me. But listening to that creature talk, the sickness and regret in its phlegm-thickened voice, I figured I didn’t know Harvey even half as well as I thought I did.
I tasted tears in my throat like tequila salt, like blood in the dirt.
“One day, I started hearing cars again,” said the thing on my doorstep. “Birds, and people somewhere in the distance. I saw telephone wires, and gas stations, and sign posts, and that was when I knew somehow I’d come out of that empty place, and got to the end of the road. I stood up again, and kept walking along until I ended up someplace I knew.
“Then I knew I had to find you, and tell you I was still around. Please, Leigh, let me into the fucking house. I need to sit down. I need water. I need to fucking eat.”
The creature shook, and sobbed, and leaned against the porch in wincing desperation, but I couldn’t open the door to it, even then. I couldn’t stand the thought of it inside the house with me, looking at me, touching me with those broken hands.
Still, I was crying like a kid, because by then I truly believed that it was my brother, that he’d ended up some place that had chewed him up and regurgitated him so as he wasn’t human, anymore. I was sorry for him, and I loved him, even seeing what he’d become.
But I couldn’t let him into the house, because I knew with every screaming sense that if I did, he’d surely kill me, likely without even truly meaning to. It’d be an accident, but he’d still eat my body afterwards, tears running wet all down his face while he did it. He’d be so hungry he’d just have to, like a cat after its owner dies, leaving it starving and alone.
I couldn’t die for the love of my brother. There’d been death enough in our family for me to know it’d do no good.
“You’ve got to go away, Harvey,” I said, leaning my forehead against the window, the closest I could get to hugging him goodbye. “I can’t let you in. I’m sorry.”
The creature wrung the autumn branches of its ruined hands in a child’s despair.
“Why?”
“You know why,” I said, and then the thing turned and saw me at the window, its sun-bleached body going into a palsy.
It stepped towards me, its legs bowing like all the bone had gone to dust inside them, and it raised its sagging head to look at me, still begging for my pity.
Then it went quiet, and I thought maybe it was going to try and break the window, with the way it was staring at the glass. I trembled, stuck where I was without the simplest weapon to hand, thinking that this was how I’d die, cut down by this husk of a boy that ended up so ruined by the road.
But then the thing started screaming something ungodly, a sound like a man with his arm in a wood saw, and it took off running from the house, flailing its crane fly arms in all directions.
It took a minute for me to figure out it’d seen its reflection in the window, seen for the first time what it became out there on the road, under the ravenous sun.
I should have just let it run off, I guess, but I pitied it too much to let it go on living like that, the thing that was my brother. Scrubbing the tears from my face, I went to get the gun I kept in the kitchen drawer and went out into the street after in, where it was trying to get into one of the boarded-up houses on my street to hide.
If I’d let it get away, it would’ve crept in there like a half-stomped roach and lived there in the dark until it got hungry enough to forget that it was ashamed of what it had become. Insanity was in its every movement; I guess it only held itself together enough to talk to me through there being just enough of it left to remember that it loved its sister.
I loved my brother, too.
“Harvey!” I said, and it turned to gawp at me, its head hanging on its axis like boots off a telephone wire.
I shot it five times, watching blood as dry as red sand shatter against the empty house. The gangling body fell down in the yard, its face blown off, holes blasted through its thin body like tears in a moth’s dusty wing.
It didn’t look much like my brother anymore, and so I didn’t make a grave for it, or anything that might have commemorated the dirty shell he’d left behind. All I did was haul the corpse into the house with my sleeves tugged down over my fingertips so that I wouldn’t have to touch it, knocked bilious by how light it was in my arms, like some old kite without the structure to fly straight.
I left it there to moulder and rot, knowing that it wouldn’t be found for a year or so, by which time I’d have moved far away. It wasn’t my brother I laid out in that house; he died a long time ago, in Paris, Texas, that I know.
I only wish he’d stayed out there, so that I could remember him the way he was before he came back.
The Morgue 