He didn’t respond to my question. His eyes just slipped back down to the radio. And he continued to wait.
I tried to wait him out. I tried to wait for the shock to subside, for the answers to start coming, but Charlie remained mute. He just sat there in the middle of the room, fixated on that matte-black radio.
After a couple of minutes, a sound erupted in the quiet house, and it made me jump. It was a loud, prolonged creak, like a tight hinge slowly swinging open, and it came from downstairs.
I jumped to my feet and started toward the door. Charlie remained seated. He didn’t even raise his eyes. I didn’t even think he’d heard the sound. I left him sitting in front of the radio and quietly moved out into the hallway.
My nerves were frayed by the time I reached the top of the stairs, and my heart was beating hard. I had no idea what I might find downstairs.
“Hi, Dean.” The voice was quiet and subdued, drained of all energy. It was the type of voice a sponge would have, if the sponge had been taking sedatives for a month straight. “I didn’t know you were here.”
It was Floyd. He was in the downstairs hallway, sitting with his back against the front door, the exact same spot I’d found him in the last time we were here, after he’d fled the tunnels in absolute horror. The cellar door stood open across from him, and a fresh trail of mud stretched from the gaping dark maw to his muddy boots.
I made my way down the rest of the stairs and stood over him for a moment. When he didn’t look up, I sat down at his side.
“I found a flashlight,” he said, lifting a large metal Maglite from his lap. After a moment, it dropped back down to his thighs, his arm collapsing under its weight. “Much better than your camera screen.”
“I thought it scared you,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and soothing. “I thought we couldn’t drag you back underground.”
He shrugged. “I had to. It was … calling to me.” He laughed, a cold and lifeless chuckle. “Isn’t that stupid? It called, and I came, again and again. And here I am, the king of running away. But I just had to see. I had to see him.”
“Who?”
He looked up from the flashlight in his lap. His eyes were out of focus.
“They aren’t working anymore,” he said, ignoring my question. He dug into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pill bottle, shaking it upside down to show me it was empty. “I’ve taken, like, six now, and I’m perfectly sober.”
I nodded, humoring him.
His shoulders slumped even lower. “It was my brother,” he said. “When we were underground before, I swear I saw my younger brother down there, in those tunnels. He was sitting there, cross-legged in the middle of one of those offshoots—you know, the one I was looking down when you were taking your pictures? When you hit your flash, I saw him sitting there, in the dirt. And then the next flash, he was starting to stand up, heading toward me.” Floyd tilted his head back against the wall and sighed. I could hear energy seeping out in that exhausted breath. Pretty soon he’d be an empty husk, puddled on the floor like a deflated balloon. “So I ran. That’s me. I always run. But now … now I can’t stop thinking about it, about him. No matter what I fucking do, what I fucking take.”
“What happened to your brother?” I asked. “Why was he down there?”
Floyd tilted his head toward me and smiled. “I killed him, Dean—that’s what happened. I fucking killed him.”
There was a surprising warmth in his voice and a tiny little smile on his lips as he talked, as he tried to explain. And those two things remained even as his words turned to horrible things. Warm voice and tiny smile. They were a jarring contrast to the tears clinging to his cheeks and the pain and helplessness in his roving eyes.
“Byron. His name was Byron. And he idolized me. He wanted to hang out with me and talk like me and skate like me. And I tried to make time for him, really I did. I tried to look out for him. My father left when we were both pretty young, and my mom, she had her own problems—trying to support us and raise us right—and I wanted to take some of the weight off her shoulders. You know how it is, right?” He looked up at me, pleading, and I nodded. I could understand, even if I’d never had a brother, or a sister, or a parent who’d had to scrape and sacrifice just to make my life a little better. “I let him tag along when I went skating. Me and my friends … he was like a fucking mascot or something, and it kept us both out of my mom’s hair, so she didn’t complain. He was a pretty good skater. Not great, but good. I don’t know if he could have really gone pro, but being my brother and all, that certainly helped. The company reps took him seriously, and when we hung out, they always wanted to give him free stuff. I worked some consulting shit for a company called F*ckstick—kind of a poseur company, with a little fucking star instead of the ‘u’ in their name—but they had me testing boards, giving input on design and image and stuff. Hell, they were even going to release a signature deck under my name, put my face in the ads and the whole celebrity endorsement shtick. Bullshit like ‘Ride Pretty Boy Floyd’s pretty-boy stick.’ And God, man, isn’t that just about the most awful thing you’ve ever heard?” Floyd let out a little laugh. It ended in an abrupt, wheezing gasp, as if he’d just been punched in the stomach. “Byron would tag along whenever I went to their offices in San Diego. This was right after I dropped out of high school, so he couldn’t have been more than thirteen. He was there so much, they ended up making him his own board. Probably just trying to kiss up to me, really—buttering up my brother and all that—but he was so fucking proud of that board. Their graphic designer even did a caricature of him, in midflight, with wings sprouting out of his back, like a motherfucking angel—it was right there, blazed across the hardwood. It’s corny, I know, but really, I’ve seen worse. They probably could have sold it in stores. Anyway, they never did release my deck—I think they were just stringing me along, really, trying to get my expertise on the cheap—but Byron still loved that board. He kept it pristine, never wanting to ride it. He just kept it propped up on top of his dresser, standing there like an icon, like some type of religious shrine.” Floyd shook his head. “I don’t know, maybe it was his future he saw up there: flying through the air on a skateboard, fucking angel wings on his back. Just like his motherfucking brother.”
He paused and reached up to touch the side of his face, brushing his fingers against his cheek. His grin remained, but it had turned hard, an expression of perplexed bittersweet nostalgia. He ran his fingers from his temple down to the curve of his lips. His touch was light, as if he were exploring a brittle ceramic mask, something ready to crack and crumble and fall away.
After a moment, his eyes looked up and found me, locking on my face for a second before swiveling back to the cellar door.
“We lived in Santa Cruz at the time, and my friends and I had this little place in the woods, just off 17, near the base of the foothills. It was just a little clearing where we hung out, drank and smoked. Where we talked about boarding and tried to hook up with the skater chicks that were always hanging around. There was a fire pit out there, and most nights we had it burning. It wasn’t far off the road; it was just a little country lane type of thing, branching off of the highway. And the clearing was so close, if you stood on the shoulder, you could see the fire sparking down in the mess of trees and brush, just down an incline and a hundred yards away. Fuck, I’m surprised we didn’t burn down all of California with those fires.” He paused and was lost in thought for a moment. “But anyway, I took him there a couple times. Not a lot. Not often. And I didn’t let him drink or anything. Just … we’d just be hanging out there with all of my friends, and that was something he really loved.
“He was just trying to be close to me. I know that. The kid fucking idolized me. And I humored him. I looked out for him. I tried to include him. That was my job. I figured it was my duty. But it was more than that, I guess. I guess it was something I loved. I was his big brother, man, and I loved being his big brother. I loved that look in his eyes, that simple adoration.” Floyd’s smile widened, and for a brief moment it didn’t seem quite so creepy.
“And then … one night—this was in late September—he got in a fight with my mom. It was all your typical teenage bullshit. He was concentrating too much on skating, and his grades were starting to slip, yadda yadda yadda—spending too much time out on his board or daydreaming about his board and not enough time studying. My
