I had seen Ellen twice now and we were getting to know her pretty well. So, I felt like that part of my life was under control.
Lou and I were in the kitchen mixing up bread dough. More heavy brown bread…
Bubby was underfoot and making sotto voce remarks from under the table. We had run out of canned dog food months ago. So, he had to eat what we ate. “A guy can get tired of bread and eggs, greens and potatoes…” muttered Bubby.
“Go catch a rabbit, Bubs,” I said. “I’ll cook it for you.” He grunted.
Suddenly, there was loud knocking as if by two hands at the front door. Bubs must have been too busy pouting because he hadn’t heard the knocker before he arrived to knock.
He lit out, baying, from underneath the table, knocking over a chair in his rush to get to the door and bark at it, like a common mutt!
Our hands were covered in dough, but we wiped them off and headed out to see what the excitement was about.
Maybe I should have been more cautious, but I opened the door, even though all three of our guys were not in the house.
Two characters stood on the porch. They were remarkably alike.
They wore matching yellow Carhartt coveralls. They wore black beanies, exactly alike. They placed their palms together…………..
“Oh no, Lou, run out the back and find Doug” I yelled, but it was too late.
The thinly disguised Thumbies barged right through the doorway, shoving me aside and made a dive to grab Lou! But Bubby was right there on the job!
Bubby and Lou had a kind of symbiotic relationship, and nobody was taking Lou right in front of him!
Thumbie #1 grabbed Lou’s right arm and was just beginning to burble the word “joyous”, when Bubby grabbed him by his throat and made a bleeding carcass of him. He turned to look at #2, who was just letting go of Lou’s left arm and backing away toward the open doorway whispering “configuration….” under his breath.
Lou started screaming in her best movie star style, making a hell of a lot of noise. She was shaking her hands like something filthy had gotten on her, and the big Lou-style tears started to flow then. She wasn’t a little kid anymore and she could really raise a world class ruckus.
Bubby knocked #2 to the ground and stood over him with #1’s blood still dripping from his big black muzzle.
Just about then, hearing all the screaming, Doug and Elvin plus Roger ran in the back door and arrived in the living room.
Doug yelled “Back off, Bubs, we got him!” Bubby came around to Lou and nudged her hand, she stopped screaming then, and ran a hand over her eyes.
“Jen, why don’t you and Lou take a seat for a minute while we figure out what’s going on here.”
Doug and Elvin pulled the live one to his feet and pulled off the beanie. “Oh no, you guys again,” said Doug. “Roger, will you run outside to the shed and find some line. I need to secure this creature.” Roger took off back out the door.
The Thumbie was shaking, his big black eyes looked from face to face. Then he looked at the corpse of his copy and started whispering something below an audible level.
Finally, he said “my master is no more. The connection is broken. I am only one.”
About then Roger reappeared with a small, neat coil of line in his hand. Remember, our dad was a bit of a boatman. He liked such things hung up right.
Doug tied #1’s whole forearms together. Because of that extra elbow joint he was afraid just tying the wrists wouldn’t be enough.
“Why did you come back? Why are you here?” asked Doug.
“I don’t understand you at all! Now one of you is dead!
“What did you think you were doing?”
The Thumbie crouched down in his Carhartts, near the floor. He wept. His strange big black eyes with no white at all, not nearly human looking, ran tears. He bowed until his forehead touched the floor. He slipped his arms out of Doug’s knots and put his hands palm down on the carpet. He wept some more.
His face to the floor, he said, “we came to ask you to let us be with you and follow you. We seek strength. It pulls us.”
“That’s crazy!” Doug yelled at the crouching figure. “Why shove the girls around? Are you completely stupid? That’s how your friend ended up dead!”
Elvin said, “make him bury the other one Doug.”
Oz started rocking and keening bent down in his crouch.
Doug said, “ok, start to serve me now, by picking up your brother or whatever he is and let’s go bury him behind the garden.”
Roger recoiled the line and followed Doug and Elvin and Oz out the kitchen door. Oz carried his brother or other or whatever he was in a perfect fireman’s carry over a shoulder.
Lou and I were left with a bit of a bloody mess on the old carpet in the living room. I figured we better clean it up while it was still wet. We did. It was disgusting. Never did I ever expect to wash someone’s blood off of the floor at home.
It took an hour for a deep enough hole to be dug way down below the garden. That was another first for us. A grave on our place. A grave for someone not really human, though biological in some sense. I mean, the one bled and died, right?
Eventually they all came back. Oz was still following Doug around, with his big sad black eyes and mumbling. Elvin and Roger stayed about as far from the creature as they could get without leaving the house.
I spoke to him at last, “do you eat? What keeps you alive?”
Oz put his palms together and was about to say it…but gave up on the plan. He said, finally, “we can eat, but we don’t have to. Any matter is absorbable to us. Even air, though rather dilute, has enough substance for us.”
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