Earl leaned forward. “Show me.”
“No.”
There was a pause, and then Earl laughed. It was a wheezy, ruined sound that made the body it inhabited flop around in the chair. After a moment, Earl ran out of humor. It leaned forward, elbows braced on the arms of the chair, and nodded at Ledger.
“I like… you,” it said.
“Would not have guessed that.”
It pushed itself upright. The body it was in had gone for a pedicure before it ran into Earl. The toenails were painted baby pink. Earl knuckled them under its feet as it clumsily walked over to the window and pushed the curtains back. It beckoned for Ledger to come closer.
When he didn’t, it twisted pretty-girl lips into a snarl. The teeth didn’t match the face. They were stained with mildew and rot.
“I can… make you,” it slurred. “You won’t like that.”
Ledger breathed shallowly—even though it didn’t help—as he walked gingerly over to the window. He gave Earl as much space as he could while still getting a look at whatever it was Earl wanted him to see.
Down below, Wren was stretched out on the truck's hood, arms folded behind his head and his T-shirt rucked up to expose a slice of tanned, tattooed stomach.
“Fail me… and after I take your bones,” it said in Ledger’s ear, breath hot and vaguely fungal, “I’ll crawl inside you and… break my bird. With your hands.”
Ledger swallowed the lump in his throat. It was sharp and reluctant to go down. He shouldn’t care. It wasn’tsmartto care in this situation. It wasn’t safe. Wren might be beautiful and oddly off-center sweet—but at the end of the day, he was Earl’s thing.
He wasn’t an ally. It wouldn’t be safe for him to be.
But Ledger made bad decisions, and he cared.
“That’s the stick,” he said. “Is there a carrot?”
Earl raised the hand with the dog’s lead still tethered to it. The rip in freckled skin bulged wider as Earl made the fingers point. Ledger half expected to see something inside—knots of Earl’s loose skin, fungal threads and growths, something. There was nothing. Just frayed meat and a dangled string that he thought was probably a nerve.
Somehow that was worse.
He tried to ignore the brackish sting of sour water in the back of his sinuses as he turned to see what else Earl had in store. It was a tattered blue folder, bound together with a cheap bit of elastic, that lay on one of the tables.
“That’s everything I have kept… of my search. The correspondence with… your father,” Earl said. “Old letters… Dead ends. I don’t know what good… it will do. Perhaps none. But that’s your problem.”
Ledger was glad of the excuse to step away from Earl. He almost broke into a trot as he walked briskly over the naked, dirty floorboards to grab the file.
“It would be easier if you just told me what you remembered,” he said.
Earl lifted its hand to its face to bite idly at a thumbnail. It hadn’t gotten the knack of how to do it, shaving chunks from the sides of its finger as it chewed.
“You don’t understand,” it said.
“OK.” He wasn’t about to ask the thing anything, even if it could be argued he invited the question. He already owed it for Bell’s brief revival; he didn’t want to double down on the tab. That was a fool's game. The house always won, and there was nowhere to run. He held up both hands in surrender and edged toward the door. “If that’s all, I’ll—“
“Wait.”
It wasn’t a request. He couldn’t move. His legs were stiff, and his feet were stuck to the floor.
This time, when Earl absently bit at its thumb, it took the creased skin off its knuckle, leaving the joint wet, pink, and exposed. Ledger had thought the awful reek of salt and rot had left him as revolted as it was humanly possible to be. He was wrong. Again. The exposed workings of the knuckle made him retch.
It was too visceral.
His bones being flayed out of his living body? It sounded awful, but it wasn’t something he could really imagine. It was too extreme to even extrapolate from something he’d experienced—a broken bone, a deeply lodged splinter.
It was easier to think about how much that raw, slick knob of exposed bone would hurt.
