Now he wasn't much up to pounding or bellowing for anything, I knew, even before I pulled into the familiar side-street and inched my way behind the brick rowhouses, weaving among trashcans and the occasional tricycle until I came to our own, familiar, unpainted garage door.

He met me at the back door, after ten years no more than a wizened caricature of his younger self.

"h.e.l.lo, Dad."

"h.e.l.lo, Son."

I'm sure what he meant to say was more on the order of: Why the h.e.l.l did you come back after all this time? I'd hoped you wouldn't have to.

And I wanted to reply: You know perfectly well. It isn't my fault, Dad. Or even yours.

But so many of the important things never manage to get said. Jeffrey is my brother. I can't help that, but he is.

So, overnight bag in hand, I followed him slowly through the tangle of our bas.e.m.e.nt, then upstairs, through the kitchen-it was a disaster area, far, far messier than I had ever seen it in my life-and into the still immaculate, plastic-covered living room.

He sat on the plastic-covered sofa, too weary to continue, his very presence a stain on this inviolate shrine of a room.

I remained standing. I tried not to touch anything. An awkward silence followed.

Finally, Father ran a liver-spotted hand over his almost bald head. He sighed.

"You look different, Jerry."

Unthinkingly, I ran my free hand through my own thinning hair.

"Yeah. I guess so."

"Your Mama's dead, Jerry." He hadn't called her Mama since I was very small. I think he was retreating into memories just then. I couldn't blame him. I didn't want to be the one to yank him into the uncomfortable present.

The silence resumed.

Then he said, "It was just a stroke that killed her. Just a simple stroke. Like that." He snapped his fingers. This display was meant to comfort me. No, she didn't suffer from some hideous malformity unknown to science and melt away into putrescent slime. Very neat and tidy. Just a stroke.

I swallowed hard, and was about to say something.

"I'm sorry you missed the funeral," he said.

"I'm sorry too. There was a strike in Buenos Aires. I couldn't get a plane until yesterday afternoon."

And now, an absurdity so agonizing it was a torturer's stroke of genius. The old Mister Ed theme went rattling through my brain. It was all I could do not to sing aloud something about people yackettey-yacking and wasting the time of day. But I didn't. Be thankful for small mercies. I wept, just a little. Father doubtless thought the tears were for Mama, and seemed moved.

We can't say the important things. Words fail us.

I sat on one of the plastic-protected chairs. In silence. For a long time. Outside, the sky darkened.

Gradually, very subtly, for all I knew he was still locked in his room in the attic, my brother was there, with us, impatient as always.

I had to say it at last. "How's Jeffrey, Dad?" There, I thought. Did it.

"He's still changing. Like the book said he would. I'm afraid of him, Jerry. I don't think he knows me anymore. I don't think he'll recognize you either."

But I'll have to try, remained unsaid. You know that, Pappa.

I remembered that it had been on a winter evening much like this one, the year I was thirteen and Jeffrey was seventeen, that the two of us went outside together for what should have been the last time.

He'd shambled into my room, knocking over books, sending my portable record-player to the floor with a screech that guaranteed that my copy of St. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was going to have to be replaced.

"Let's go out. And play. Please." He smelled particularly bad just then. His tusks gleamed and dripped with drool. He had to squeeze himself sideways to fit through the doorway. Something, probably a new, vestigial limb stirred underneath the extra-extra-large Philadelphia Eagles sweatshirt he always wore.

I picked up, then unplugged the record player and set it on my desk. The record itself was so obviously ruined I could only drop it into the wastebasket.

For just a second, I was angry enough to hit him.

"Want to p-p-play." His eyes, sunken in his mottled face, were still my brother's eyes. I still knew him. Some of him, a little bit, was still that Jeffrey who had walked to school with me as recently as five years earlier, before he was taken out of school and all the kids started beating me up and teasing me, shouting, "You're brother's a r.e.t.a.r.d and you are too!"

No, it wasn't that, of course. For a time, doctors came and said it was some rare and spectacular disease. There was even an English doctor from Merck. I didn't know what that meant. For the longest time I thought Merck was a place in England.

Then Mother wouldn't let them come anymore and wouldn't let Jeffrey go out of the house.

But tonight, she and Daddy were off somewhere. It might have been one of their periodic frenzies of church-going. They might have been off asking G.o.d to make Jeffrey normal again. Take this cup away from me, as the phrase went.

Even I knew it wasn't a matter of cups, or G.o.d's business. Jeffrey knew it too. I think that my parents were just as certain, but they still prayed, so they wouldn't give in to despair.

My brother shook his head violently from side to side, banging against the doorframe with his teeth like an angry bull with its horns, gouging chunks out of the wood.

"Okay! Okay! I'm coming." I hurried to put on my hat, coat, and gloves, while he stirred and stamped. A stain spread down the front of his jogging pants and started to pour onto the floor. I'd clean that up later. I reached up and put my arm around his neck, to calm him. One of the huge tusks slid wetly against my cheek, but bristling with sharp edges and points from the endlessly intricate carvings he spent most of his time executing.

("Scrimshaw." He'd read that word in a book. "Scrim! Shaw!" like a football cheer, but sputtered, grunted. "Yes, carvings on the teeth of a whale," Mama said, then added, in one of her frenzied periods, "for you are Leviathan, the Great Beast.") So we waded out into the still-falling snow, in the evening twilight, me all bundled up with long scarf trailing, a regular boy, and Jeffrey, still in his Eagles sweatshirt and jogging pants, barefoot...I would never have taken him out in broad daylight, no matter how much he wanted to play. No, I couldn't. But now, there was a certain thrill to it. He was my secret, the vast and potent magic I alone commanded...or so the game went.

We scrambled quickly across the narrow concrete strip that served as a common driveway for all the houses in our row, then I easily mounted the fence-but I had to find an opening for Jeffrey, who was too heavy-and slid, slightly out of control, down the embankment into the comforting security of Haverbrook Park itself, that not-very-large, hilly woodland which seemed endless as the night came on.

He was clumsier than ever before, crashing through the trees and briers, moving on all fours much of the time, but not on his knuckles like an ape, instead with his hands flat on the ground, leaving, huge, perfect handprints in the snow.

He grunted and laughed and even clapped his enormous hands when he came to the stream, and wallowed right in, sitting in the frigid water, splashing. The cold didn't seem to bother him.

Carefully, I tried to cross on a log, but slipped, and found myself standing in water to my knees, my boots filled, the water so cold it burned before my legs went numb.

"Play!" Jeffrey sputtered, like a very small child, happy as he could be, like the mental r.e.t.a.r.d the neighborhood kids always claimed he was.

But I knew better. I had always known better. Jeffrey merely enjoyed his frivolous moments, when he momentarily escaped those cares and fears he could not express by any means other than carving strange figures and letters on his nearly foot-long teeth.

I was glad for him, just then. I waded to the further bank. "Come on, Jeff," I said. "Let's play."

So we ran and climbed among the rocks and trees, wandering deeper and deeper into the park, as the land rose and the woods shut out the lights and noise of the city that surrounded us. We came, at last, to a series of stone terraces, high above the stream. Some people said they were man-made, that there had once been a forge there, back in the time of the Revolution. Certainly there were a lot of stories about that place.

On this particular night, as it had been some times before, it was our place alone, a secret we two brothers shared. We sat on the highest stones, in the darkness, hidden from the world. I was shivering all over then, clinging to Jeffrey for warmth; but in vain, because he wasn't warm, and felt cold and hard, like living metal beneath his soggy, half-frozen clothes.

"Fairy tale," he sputtered. That was his other truly childlike characteristic. He liked fairy tales, always had, since he was small, and the way to tell him one was to make him part of it, one of the characters.

"Once, long ago, in an old-time kingdom, there was a Beast that lived in the woods. That's you, Jeff. You're the Beast. That's not a bad thing to be, because the Beast is really a prince and he can do magic."

"And...what are you?"

I shrugged. "I guess I'm the King's huntsman." I tried to laugh. "You don't want me to be Beauty, do you? I mean, that would be queer, like a girl, you know-"

"Does the huntsman kill the Beast?" For once he didn't sputter. The question was startling. He'd seen right through the tale.

I didn't know what to say. "Um, no. Of course not."

"What's the rest of the story then?"

"I think it's that the King got so angry with his oldest son-the Royal Wrath was something everyone was afraid of-and when the King was in his rage the ground shook, and there was lightning in the sky-and the King was so angry with his son that he put a curse on him, and the kingdom was cursed too, and the trees died, and the rivers dried up, and there was only silence afterward. Everyone went away, and they left the Beast alone, everyone except his brother, the younger prince who was not afraid of him. And-"

I started to cry then, because I was lying, because the story didn't go that way. It wasn't as simple as that. It was so unfair that we couldn't just be brothers and grow up together, like other kids did. I didn't know how the story would end and was afraid that it never would; not because of anything we'd done, or even because of anything Father had done in his Royal Wrath or Mother had in her prayerful frenzies. No, it was n.o.body's fault that our grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents had come from someplace up north called Dunwich and had been named Whateley; and that someone had pa.s.sed on from generation to generation an old book called the Necronomicon, and that some of the words Jeffrey carved on his teeth were in that book and Daddy could read them, but would never tell me what they said.

It wasn't fair that sometime back in the 1920s the Whateleys had tried a great Experiment and failed, but, somehow, that Experiment had worked its way down the years and through the bloodlines until it came out again in Jeffrey.

I cried because of all that, because it wasn't fair.

And my brother did the most extraordinary thing. He touched me gently on the back of the neck, almost as if he were stroking me-if anybody else had done it, it would have been queer-and he told me a story, struggling for the words around the impediment of his ungainly tusks. I didn't understand very much of it, but it was about how the Beast was not really a monster after all, but part of a different family, and how "Those of the Air," as Jeffrey put it, would come someday and take him to a better place, maybe another planet. I couldn't make that out. There were a lot of words in the story that were just buzzing and spitting and barking sounds.

"Does the younger prince get to come too?"

"No. Blood of Them in him, but not enough. He can just barely see them."

And we sat for a long time in the darkness after that, and it seemed indeed-I was certain I imagined what I saw, that it was a kind of dream-that the wind circled around us again and again, with a whispered whoosh like a fleet of huge trucks pa.s.sing, and sometimes I could see shapes among the trees, distorted bodies, and luminous faces floating among the branches. They called out to Jeffrey, and he answered back, in a language I didn't know.

I nearly froze to death. Jeffrey had to carry me back to the house. He smashed in the back door because he couldn't open it. Father was waiting for him, and in his Royal Wrath beat Jeffrey with a shovel, and locked him in the attic room, and never let him out again. I went to the hospital for frostbite and missed some school, and later, I could only talk to my brother through the locked door when I slid his meals in through the slot Father had installed. Jeffrey didn't answer back much, and I never got to tell him any more of the story of the two princes.

"You go upstairs and rest for a while, Son," my father said. "You've had a long trip up from South America. I'll fix us a little something in the kitchen. Then you come down again."

I don't know how he thought I'd want to rest, or linger here at all, considering what the inevitable outcome must be, but he, I think, wanted to delay it just a bit longer, and I granted him the courtesy of this reprieve. Maybe he just wanted to be a father again, one last time.

So, silently, I went upstairs, into my old bedroom. I flicked on the light and saw that absolutely nothing had changed since the day, when I was twenty-three, I had stormed out of the house. There was still a 1982 newspaper on the floor, under the dust. And a pair of dirty socks.

I sat down on the bed and just stared into the indeterminate distance of the room, which was not a matter of physical s.p.a.ce at all: at the bookshelves, even the model airplanes which had dangled from the ceiling since my childhood.

And, irony of ironies: the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was still on the shelf in front of me. I had never gotten around to replacing the record.

My hand found something on the bed, under the covers, something which had not been there before: a leather-bound photo alb.u.m. I recognized some of the pictures, from family outings, graduations, and the like. I paged through it with a mixture of dull curiosity, then something almost like anger, then just exhausted sadness. The pictures had been altered, mutilated with a ballpoint pen. My own image had sometimes been made into that of a prince, with crown and flowing robes and a sword, sometimes the huntsman, with a gun or bow-and-arrows and a Robin Hood cap. Once, my eyebrows had been raised and I'd acquired long fingernails and a pigtail-a comic Chinaman. I had no idea why.

Mother's image had been the object of anger, the eyes and sometimes the whole face gouged out. She'd been given a.s.s's ears more than once, and there was even an enormous posterior drawn in the sky over her wedding picture. There she was, a bride, on the church steps, her face sc.r.a.ped away, and it was raining s.h.i.t.

The final picture in the book was one of father, exhausted, reclining on a plastic-covered sofa. I think it had actually been taken one Christmas, as he snoozed after all the preparations were done. But now there were wires going into his arms and sides, and a carefully-rendered monitor on the wall above him, the line on the screen a zig-zag, flattening out. Father in Intensive Care, dying.

The one truly frightening thing was that I didn't know if this was Jeffrey's work, which it should have been-but how had he known I was coming and how had he gotten out to place the book here for me to find?-or Papa's own.

Above me, something stirred, then hit the upstairs floor hard, again and again, as if stamping its hooves.

G.o.d help me, I thought of that stupid TV sitcom theme: A horse is a horse- And fully, and deeply, I wept, lying there on the bed, amid the dust and papers and old laundry.

Father and I ate in silence, badly cooked eggs and bacon. He couldn't look me in the eye. He stared at his plate, swirling his fork around in the grease.

I was thinking in cliches. I should have felt that there was so much I had to say to him: that I, his estranged son, truly loved him after all, that I wished our family could be together again, like old times, the whole routine. But there, sitting with him, I couldn't think of anything to say at all. I was empty. I'd cried my last tears on the bedspread upstairs, and that was the end of that.

Two floors above us, the pounding was louder, insistent.

"Come on, Son," he said at last. "We've got to finish this."

So I followed him upstairs that last time. He paused at the first landing, staring into my bedroom, where I'd left the light on and the photo alb.u.m out on the bed. Then he turned into his own room. I went to follow him. He held me back.

"Wait."

He still had to have his little secret, his final one. All right. He could have it. I waited patiently while he rustled around in the dark. I could only imagine that the bedroom, too, hadn't been touched, that my mother's things were exactly as she'd left them. It sounded like her closet Father was rummaging in.

He came out with something wrapped in a garbage bag. Even before I felt the heavy, iron-bound covers through the plastic, I knew what it was: the ancient Necronomicon.

"You'll have to study," was all he said.

That was almost the very last thing he said to me, ever. He flicked on a light. We went up the attic steps in silence. He indicated that I should be the one to remove the heavy, five-pointed stone sigil that leaned against the door of the attic room. By now the smell was almost overpowering, the stench of garbage and excrement and something that almost might have been burning, sulfurous, vile, but ultimately unidentifiable. Why the neighbors didn't have the Board of Health or the police in long ago was beyond me.

There was no sound at all from behind that door, as I dragged the heavy stone away, as Father undid the padlocks and slid the bolts back.

He opened the door, and I took the first step inside, my feet stirring what must have been old steak and pork bones.

"Jeff? You there?"

Father grabbed me from behind with surprising strength, his arm in a chokehold around my neck. He hurled me back, across the tiny landing, against the opposite wall. He held me there with both hands, and for once his eyes met mine and his face was utterly, utterly inscrutable. I could make out the King with his Royal Wrath, and Papa, exhausted beyond words, despairing, wanting only for it all to end, and more. Possibly he wanted to explain it all to me, or ask my forgiveness, or merely wish that things had turned out differently. I don't know. He was angry, sad, firm, and stoically uncaring all at once.

All he said to me was, "No. Wait here. It was supposed to be your mother. Now it has to be me."

"Father, I-?"

He squeezed my hands tight over the Necronomicon, then turned from me and went, meekly but unhesitantly, into the dark room.

As a final offering. Because Jeffrey was grown up now, and it was time.

In the instant of silence that followed, I found myself plagued with another comic, irrelevant thought, a memory of a Gahan Wilson cartoon showing a puffy-faced young man confronting his seated, frog-faced father in what must have been the great hall of an old English manor. Portraits of frog-faced ancestors lined the walls, and the caption read, "Son, now that you're of age, it's about time I told you about the old family curse."

About time.

In the room, my father was screaming. But I knew he wouldn't want me to come in.