The Three Deaths of Frank Garber

It didn’t take a medical degree to see the man was dead. He lay sprawled across the concrete floor, his head at angle that meant he’d never be a good candidate for reanimation. Herbert’s reagent re-energized the muscles, the organs, but it didn’t do a fucking thing for a broken spine, as the Rufus incident has proven. It couldn’t undo what Dan had done, even if he’d only half-meant to do it.

Dan looked down at Frank Garber’s corpse and waited for regret to leak in, pooling in the bottom of his consciousness the way blood had already begun to pool in the man’s tissues. No regret came.

“Dan?”

Herbert’s voice stirred Dan from his daze. Herbert. He had to get to Herbert.

Herbert was huddled under a faded woolen blanket, sitting on top of—a piece of cardboard? Better than sitting directly on the concrete, especially considering that as Dan got closer, he realized that Herbert was naked under the blanket. Almost before he’d arrived at Herbert’s side, Dan was kneeling, reaching for him. Herbert shrank away in an instinctive flinch. Dan jerked his hand back.

“You’re here?” Herbert said, with a question in his voice that Dan hated. He wasn’t wearing any glasses.

“Yeah,” Dan said.

“You took your time about it,” Herbert said.

“Yeah,” Dan said, laughing in near-hysterical relief. He had explanations, excuses—but he didn’t actually care about any of them. He doubted Herbert did either. Six days Herbert had been gone. “But you’re okay.” As he said it, Dan couldn’t help but take stock. Pale, unwashed, unshaven, some worrying contusions on one side of Herbert’s face—was that blood dried in his hair? But whole, it seemed. “I thought—I thought he was going to kill you.”

“Eventually. Once he got all my secrets out of me. Then I was going to be his first subject.”

“Christ, Herbert.”

“Well, you’re here now, and Garber certainly has nothing of value in this paltry excuse for a lab, so can we get out of here? You’ll have to untie me.” He shifted under the blanket until he could present his bound wrists to Dan.

“Yeah. Yeah.” Dan reached for Herbert’s wrists. The rope was synthetic, dyed blue and white. As he started trying to tug the knots loose, he noticed dried blood worked into the fibers, near the skin. Herbert’s breath hitched every time Dan applied any force to the ropes, though he didn’t flinch. Distantly Dan catalogued the things they’d need once he got Herbert home: disinfectant cream, bandages.

It took longer than he wanted to get the knots worked free. He couldn’t imagine Garber had often gone to all this trouble, so probably Herbert had been tied up like this the whole time. Finally Dan was able to unwind the rope from around the fragile skin. Herbert hissed, and then Dan could see why: painful-look red marks circled his wrists, chafed to rawness in places.

“Shit,” Dan said.

“My feet, too,” Herbert said. He kept the blanket in his lap and shoved his feet out from under it, wincing as he did: from stiffness, cold, more chafing? Dan chose not to think about it. Herbert reached down to help but gave up almost immediately. While Dan worked, Herbert slowly flexed his fingers and rotated his wrists.

Finally Dan got Herbert’s ankles free. There, too, the skin was worn raw in places. As Dan inspected the wounds, one of them started to bleed. Dan glanced around, but the lab—such as it was—was filthy. He didn’t see anything he’d want to even let near an open wound, much less try to bind one with.

“I’m fine,” Herbert said. Dan snorted in disbelief. Herbert amended, “I’ve sustained no life-threatening injuries. Please, can we go?”

The please was the most alarming thing yet.

“Yeah,” Dan said. He helped Herbert up with a hand and steadying grip on his elbow. Herbert lost his hold on the blanket, and it fell at his feet. Automatically Dan reached for it, and that’s when he saw the bruises.

Herbert had them all along his thighs and lower belly. Hand-shaped, some of them, and in colors ranging from green to purple to fresh, painful red. For a single, blissfully ignorant moment, Dan wondered what they meant. Then he saw dark ones the shape and size of fingerprints pressed into Herbert’s inner thigh, just six inches below his dick. Dan stared at them, unable to look away.

Herbert snatched up the blanket and held it in front of himself. Unwillingly, Dan looked up to Herbert’s face and met his vicious, murderous glare. “I’m leaving,” Herbert said. He pulled the blanket around himself—giving Dan another brief glimpse of those bruises—and then he stalked towards the door.

Almost immediately he stumbled, grabbing the makeshift lab bench for support. Dan hurried to his side, but once he was there he didn’t know what to do. He didn’t want to be the reason Herbert lost the blanket again, and he really didn’t want to see another one of those flinches. Herbert glared up at him some more, and Dan looked helplessly back. With a huff, Herbert gripped Dan’s arm, and they set off together.

It was slow progress. Dan felt none too steady either, which was stupid. Nothing had happened to him. Well, nothing except committing some semi-accidental manslaughter, and it wasn’t even Dan’s first time for that.

They arrived at Garber’s corpse. Herbert gazed down at it, impassive. Then, with deliberate care, he lifted his foot and brought his bare heel down directly onto Garber’s nose. Dan winced at the crunch of breaking cartilage. Breathing heavily, Herbert brought his foot down again, this time leaning his heel into Garber’s eye. There was a wet, awful squelch and the crack of a bone breaking.

Herbert straightened and headed towards the door as if nothing had happened. Dan glanced back at Garber. Immediately he wished he hadn’t. The nausea that’d been threatening for a while—since killing Garber, since seeing those bruises on Herbert—finally got the best of him. He pulled away from Herbert and retched onto the concrete floor.

There wasn’t much to throw up. Dan hadn’t really eaten a lot in the last day or so. Afterwards, Dan coughed a couple of times, spit, and returned to Herbert, who didn’t say a word. Dan offered his arm, and Herbert took it.

“Hey,” Dan said as they finally reached the door. “Where are your glasses?”

“He smashed them,” Herbert said. Without giving Dan time to respond to that—though really, what the hell was there to say?—Herbert continued, “We’ll have to close the vault door.”

“What for?”

“We don’t want someone finding the body.”

“Right,” Dan said, feeling stupid again. While Herbert leaned against the outer wall for support, Dan swung the steel door into place. From the outside the door just looked like more wall, and the seal was nearly airtight. Nobody would notice the door unless they already knew it was there, and the factory above had looked pretty thoroughly abandoned. Dan doubted anyone would ever get close enough to notice an odor.

All Dan wanted now was to get Herbert to the car and drive them both far, far away from Francis Garber’s laboratory bunker, never mind the body. Maybe it said something about Dan’s life at that point that the prospect of one more dead body on his conscience didn’t even really phase him. Or maybe it said more about Garber’s life.

Herbert seemed to be weakening. Dan couldn’t imagine Garber had been particularly free with food or water. Herbert wasn’t a big guy, and on a better day Dan probably could have carried him, but he still was feeling a little shaky on his pins. Anyway, he doubted Herbert would have allowed it.

They made it through the abandoned factory without incident. Dan left Herbert standing at the door and brought the car around and parked it beside Garber’s pickup truck. He hustled Herbert into the car and slammed the door shut behind him. Once Dan was pulling out from cracked pavement of the parking lot and onto the street with Herbert in the passenger seat, that’s when he finally began to feel like he could breathe again.

After all Dan’s frantic searching, Garber’s lab had turned out to be barely twenty minutes’ drive from the mortuary. Herbert was quiet on the ride back. He was still wrapped up in that blanket, because it hadn’t occurred to Dan to bring clothes. Worse, Dan hadn’t brought food, either. He offered to stop at a gas station and get something, but Herbert shrugged a little deeper into the blanket and said in a quiet, flat voice, “I want to go home.”

Home they came to, at last. Dan rushed around the car to open the passenger door, only to be met with Herbert’s glare. “I’m quite all right,” Herbert said.

“Really?” Dan said, feeling a stupid flicker of hope.

Herbert must have heard it. His brow furrowed. “Yes,” he said firmly, like it was a decision he was making. He got out of the car on his own, and though he winced as he stood, he ignored Dan’s offered hand. He headed across the gravel towards the front door on his own two bare feet. He seemed a little steadier than he had in Garber’s bunker, which meant a lot of his trouble had been stiffness and lack of circulation. That was a good sign. Still, once the front door was closed behind them, he leaned into the wall with visible relief.

“Do you want—”

“A shower,” Herbert said. “And a shave.”

Dan’s priorities ran more towards getting some food into Herbert and tending to those wounds, but Herbert’s expression brooked absolutely no argument. “Okay,” Dan agreed cautiously.

Herbert glared up towards the second floor, though his glare didn’t have quite the same force without his glasses. Dan hadn’t really ever seen him without them; it felt wrong to do so now. Just another wrong thing.

Herbert heaved a sigh and said, “I’ll need your help getting up the stairs.”

“Okay,” Dan said again.

This time he took Herbert’s hand, so Herbert could hold onto him if he slipped. He didn’t, though. Together they climbed the stairs, slowly and a little shakily, with a brief pause on the landing to give Herbert a breather. He was still holding onto the filthy goddamn blanket. At last they arrived at the bathroom they shared. Herbert gripped the frame and said, “I appreciate your help.” Then he closed the door in Dan’s face.

Dan looked at the grain of the wood for a while, just a few inches from his nose. Then he went downstairs and began fixing sandwiches. He ate the first one so quickly he was a little surprised to find his plate empty. He ate part of another one and listened for the shower to turn off upstairs. After it did, he waited a little longer—as long, he thought, as it ought to take Herbert to shave off six days of facial scruff. Then he plated a new sandwich, filled a glass with water, and took both upstairs.

“Herbert,” he called, tapping his knuckles against the bathroom door.

After a pause, he heard Herbert’s muffled invitation to come in. Dan swung the door open. Herbert had a clean towel around his hips. He squinted into the mirror and caught a few stray hairs with the safety razor, and then he met Dan’s gaze in the mirror. “What?”

“I, uh. I brought you a sandwich.” The plate rattled against the bathroom counter as Dan set it down.

Herbert’s gaze flicked to it and away again. “Perhaps now you’d fetch my spare glasses.”

“Uh, sure. Sure.”

It took Dan a couple of minutes to find the glasses case in Herbert’s room, tucked behind what Dan chose to believe was an implausibly realistic model of a human arm. The arm didn’t move, anyway, and that was really all Dan asked of detached body parts these days.

He returned to the bathroom and found Herbert seated on the closed toilet lid, hips wrapped in a towel. The sandwich was already half gone. Dan held out the glasses, and Herbert shoved them onto his nose. Now he looked like Herbert again, and Dan breathed a sigh of relief. Herbert was still pale and too slender, and the hot water had irritated the rope burns around his ankles and wrists, but at least with his glasses on he wasn’t naked anymore.

Acidly, Herbert said, “You can help me dress these wounds now.”

“Right. Sure.”

Dan went downstairs for the medical supplies. When he returned, he sat on the edge of the bathtub with the gauze and disinfectant. Herbert held out one arm. There was a raw, red spot on the side of his wrist that had probably been crusted over before the shower but was now oozing a little.

This, Dan could do. He couldn’t even think about the other stuff—those bruises he’d seen, the crack of Garber’s spine as he fell against the work bench—but he could swab disinfectant over abrasions. Herbert winced minutely; Dan wouldn’t have even noticed if Herbert’s hand hadn’t been resting in his. He pretended he hadn’t seen. He put antibiotic cream on the injuries and wrapped them in bandages and gauze.

There, Dan thought. He’d fixed it.

He turned his attention to Herbert’s other wrist and did it all over again. When that was done, he bent towards Herbert’s ankle.

“I’ll do that,” Herbert said.

“I can do it,” Dan said.

“So can I.” Herbert’s scowl was as fierce as Dan had ever seen it, as sharp as glass shards. Dan had stopped taking notice of that scowl pretty soon after they’d met, once he’d encountered Herbert’s really alarming moods, like glee, but now looking at it felt like bleeding.

Herbert reached for the disinfectant.

“Please,” Dan said, before he realized he was going to. He saw Herbert hesitate. Hurriedly, with a desperation that didn’t make any sense at all, Dan said, “Let me do it. You should finish your sandwich.”

Herbert looked at him a moment longer, thrust the bottle into Dan’s hand, and watched silently as Dan knelt on the floor by his feet. Dan winced at the harsh redness of the wounds against Herbert’s pale skin. They wrapped all the way around his ankles as if he were still bound. Moving slowly and deliberately, Dan picked up Herbert’s foot, set it on his thigh, and began to work.

After a while, Herbert set the empty plate aside. Dan waited for Herbert to break the silence, say something caustic, ask about the experiment he’d left behind in the basement that night he disappeared. He didn’t, and so there was nothing at all to distract Dan from the miserable thud of his pulse in his ears or from Herbert’s sharp inhales each time Dan touched a sore spot. The bathroom amplified the sound of every breath.

He finished with the first ankle and began working on the second. He could almost forget everything else, doing this: how these wounds had occurred in the first place and what other, less visible ones Herbert might have sustained.

At last all Herbert’s open sores were cleaned, salved, and bandaged. Dan set Herbert’s foot down on the bathroom tile and sat back on his heels. He looked at Herbert, and words stuck in his throat.

Herbert pushed to his feet, firmly gripping the bathroom towel he’d been sitting in all the while. “I’m going to bed.”

“Is there—” Dan began. He swallowed and tried again. “Are you hurt anywhere else?”

“Nowhere you need to worry about,” Herbert said. He stepped around Dan and headed for the door.

“I’m sorry,” Dan said.

Slowly Herbert turned and regarded Dan coolly, looking almost indifferent. Almost. “For what?” he asked.

“For not finding you sooner.”

Herbert took a deep breath, visible in the rise and fall of his bare chest. The last time before this that Dan had seen him shirtless had been in the hospital locker room a month or so back, when Herbert had come off a particularly messy shift in the ER. He’d lost weight since then.

“You shouldn’t be sorry,” Herbert said. “No one else would have looked.” He turned again, resolute and final, and walked out of sight. Dan knelt there on the tile floor listening to Herbert’s footsteps until finally they faded away down the hall.

The shape of life went back to normal, more or less. Herbert returned to the hospital the very next day. “Of course I’m sure,” he said when Dan asked. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

Dan didn’t have any answer to that.

Maybe Herbert was a little sharper with the patients and orderlies, not that he’d had much patience with them before. He kept his sleeves rolled down and snapped at anyone who asked about the bruising at his temple, and people stopped asking him questions by the middle of the first day.

Of course that meant they asked Dan instead. “He says he fell,” Dan said, shrugging. He knew he was a shitty liar, and nobody looked very convinced, but eventually they quit asking him, too.

Back at the mortuary, Herbert spent even less of his time in the common areas than he had before, which was saying something. Sometimes Dan walked into the bathroom and found the mirror foggy from the shower, but he never saw Herbert go in or out. He didn’t even eat with Dan anymore. Food disappeared from the fridge when Dan wasn’t there, and so he tried to make sure to always save some leftovers. It wasn’t like he had much to do at home but cook, anyway.

It took until day three for Dan to admit to himself that he was avoiding the lab. Herbert hadn’t bugged him about it, either, or shared any new experimental progress. That meant that Dan should probably go down and see what Herbert was up to. When Herbert stopped talking about his experiments, that’s when Dan had learned to worry.

Dan ate a spaghetti dinner all by himself, put the dishes away, and stood at the top of the basement stairs, steeling himself. Then he descended, not thinking about what he’d found the last time he’d broken into a place buried as deeply in the earth as this, smelling of solvents and chemical solutions like the ones currently stinging his nose. He almost knocked at the door and then felt ridiculous. It was his lab, too.

He pushed the heavy door open. Across the room, Herbert was squinting at a beaker, face twisted with intense concentration. It could have been any of a dozens of nights in the lab—or days, honestly, because natural light never reached this far.

“What are you working on?” Dan said.

Herbert gave Dan the briefest glance and returned to his work. “A variation.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Something Garber said. Patently ridiculous. Obviously it wouldn’t work.”

“What wouldn’t?” Dan asked. This was comfortingly familiar: trying to keep up with Herbert, always at least one step ahead and two steps sideways.

Another glance. “Never mind,” Herbert said. “It’s absurd. There’s no point in even explaining it.” And he returned to whatever impossible, absurd thing it was.

“Can I help?” Dan asked. This, on the other hand, wasn’t familiar at all. Herbert usually dragged Dan into his research of the day whether Dan wanted or not.

Herbert considered that question marginally longer than he had the others, and then he shook his head. “I think not. You’re welcome to tidy the lab if you’re bored. Now, if you’ll let me return to my work?” It wasn’t really a question, and Herbert didn’t wait for an answer.

“Sure,” Dan said, defeated.

He did tidy the lab. Keeping the cobwebs under control was a never-ending job, and Dan found broken glass scattered over one corner of the lab, like a flask had exploded, so he swept that up. Eventually he ran out of things to do. He put the broom away. Herbert was still bent over the work bench, muttering as he wrote in one of his ever-present notebooks and taking no notice of Dan whatsoever.

There wasn’t anything weird about it. If anything, Dan ought to have been relieved at how normal it was to see Herbert so intently focused, so aggressively ignoring anything outside his own head and the research directly in front of him.

Dan waited a little longer to see if Herbert would speak to him again. He never did, and eventually Dan went back upstairs. It was fine. Herbert was going through a weird spell, and it wasn’t like Dan could blame him. He just had to let him work through it.

God help him, Dan actually kind of missed Herbert’s fucked-up little animation experiments with the fingers.

Coming awake took a long time. Dan kept drifting back to sleep, and then something would irritate him enough to bring him to the surface again. A noise, like a leaky faucet or a tree branch scraping on the window or—

—or someone crying out.

Dan sat up all at once. He blinked into the darkness, and there it came again: a human voice. For one stupid moment, Dan wondered if it was a ghost. He’d always thought if any place deserved to be haunted, it was the mortuary, with the crumbling brickwork and the cemetery right next door. But the next moment the cry came again, and it didn’t sound ethereal or otherworldly. It sounded like Herbert.

Dan shoved his feet into his slippers. His door creaked loudly when he opened it, and he waited, thinking surely that’d woken Herbert. But no, there was the sound again, clearly coming from down the hall. Dan shuffled to Herbert’s door and knocked quietly. “Herbert?”

There was no answer. Then, faintly enough Dan could barely hear it, there came a whimper.

Dan opened the door and walked into Herbert’s room. It was all shadowed darkness, broken by a few unnerving, parallel glints of light. After a moment’s alarm, Dan remembered the rack of glass pipettes he’d seen Herbert with. Herbert had brought them up here a few days before the kidnapping for reasons he’d declined to explain. It felt like a lifetime ago now.

Herbert made a soft, pained sound. Dan made his way to the bed, careful not to step on any of the scientific detritus Herbert always left lying around. In the faint moonlight, Herbert was just barely visible, curled into a tight ball.

“Herbert,” Dan said. There was no response. More loudly, he repeated, “Herbert.”

His reward was a shaky, gasping exhale, so quiet Dan wouldn’t have heard it if he weren’t standing right there.

Dan didn’t seen any other alternative. Cautiously he reached forward and touched Herbert’s bare shoulder. He felt Herbert go still under his hand. With complete clarity, Herbert said, “You can do whatever you like to me. After I’m dead, you’ll still be a moron.”

“Herbert,” Dan said, shaking him.

He felt the moment Hebert startled awake. He heard Herbert’s harsh breath. “Dan?”

“Yeah,” Dan said, sharply relieved. He let go of Herbert and slumped onto the bed.

“What are you doing here? What time is it?”

“Late. I dunno. I—I heard you.”

“Heard me.”

“You were—I think you were having a bad dream.”

“Ah,” Herbert said. No more; just that single sound, more breath than word.

In the nighttime stillness, unable to see Herbert or be seen, Dan found himself asking, “Herbert, are you all right?”

After a long pause, during which Dan was sure Herbert wouldn’t answer at all, Herbert said, “I’m fine. Haven’t you noticed? The contusions and abrasions are already nearly healed.”

Dan hadn’t actually known about the abrasions. Herbert hadn’t rolled up his sleeves once since Dan had tended to them. They weren’t what he’d been asking about, anyway. Before Dan lost his nerve altogether, he blurted, “Can I help? I mean, is there—I just—shit, Herbert. Sorry.” He scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m just worried about you.”

This was met with silence. Dan started to wish he could see Herbert—but maybe if he could, Herbert would have thrown him out by now. Dan sat there in the dark listening to the quiet sounds of Herbert’s breath. Herbert was alive, he’d suffered no significant injury, and Garber was dead. Herbert was fine, even, except for the nightmares.

Dan was pretty sure he’d be hearing those stifled sounds of anguish in his nightmares.

“You needn’t be,” Herbert said at last. “I’m not one of your patients.”

“Well, I do.” Then, “Wait, a patient? You’re not—no, obviously you’re not a patient. You’re my…” Dan trailed off, stuck.

“Your what?”

Friend felt inadequate. Herbert would probably laugh at it anyway, and Dan suddenly felt he couldn’t handle that, not just then. Research partner was at least accurate, but it didn’t feel like an improvement. Dan cast about wildly. “My roommate,” he said, and winced. That was even worse than the others. “Never mind. I’ll let you go back to sleep.”

Herbert said nothing as Dan rose and went to the door. He paused there just in case Herbert had something more to say, some help he needed that Dan could give. After a moment’s silence, Dan shut the door gently behind him and went back to bed, though he doubted he’d sleep much more that night. He hoped at least Herbert would.

Dan woke again. For a long, disoriented moment, he thought it was the same night. Had Herbert cried out again? But no, that had been days ago. They’d worked several hospital shifts since then, and the evening prior, in a return to form, Herbert had surfaced from the lab just as Dan was taking dinner off the stove. Dan had been desperately relieved and just as desperate not to let Herbert see, which had made for pretty awkward dinner conversation. If Herbert had been less Herbert, he would probably have noticed.

That had been hours ago. Dan had gone to bed, had been fast asleep, and now he wasn’t.

In the corner of his room, something creaked. The hairs rose on Dan’s neck, but he’d been through this before. It was an old building; it creaked. Dan rolled over, fully expecting to see absolutely nothing, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he saw a shadowed figure standing in the open doorway.

“Holy shit,” Dan said. “Herbert? What the hell are you doing?” The figure didn’t move. Dan felt an awful new chill. “Herbert?”

The figure gave a gusty, Herbert-like sigh and walked over to the bed. He was dressed in his usual sleep clothes of undershirt and briefs, though he’d put his glasses on. He seemed to be looking out the window. Dan couldn’t see much more than that. He reached for his bedside lamp. “Don’t,” Herbert said.

Dan paused, then retreated. “What’s up? Is—is something wrong?”

Herbert laughed mirthlessly. “You asked if you could help.”

“Yeah?” Dan sat up hurriedly. “Sure, yeah. Whatever I can do.”

“I have had sexual intercourse before,” Herbert said, as if continuing some conversation Dan had definitely not been a part of. “Just not that kind. I’ve even been with a man, but the experience was underwhelming, so I never continued as far as penetration.”

“Okay,” Dan said dumbly.

“I have no experience with it, except—well.”

“Sure,” Dan said. What the hell else was there to say?

Herbert made frustrated noise. “I’d prefer not to remember the incident anymore. The problem is I can’t remember anything else, because there isn’t anything.” Herbert turned abruptly to face Dad. His hands were clenched into fists. “I want something else to remember.”

“Like what?”

“Dan,” Herbert said, in his most withering tone. When Dan didn’t respond, Herbert said, “You like sex, I believe?”

“Well, yeah,” Dan said, and then his brain finally caught up. “Are you—you can’t be serious.” Herbert said nothing, from which Dan gleaned that he was in fact serious. He couldn’t be, though. “You’re not—you don’t want to have sex with me.”

“I didn’t think it was such a ridiculous idea. You’re not unattractive, and you have sex with a variety of people, including men.” Okay, so Herbert had seen who Dan had snuck off with in that bar in Peru, after all. Dan hadn’t ever gotten up the courage to ask. “And you said—you said if you could help—but never mind.”

Dan could hardly see Herbert in the gloom, and yet Herbert seemed to become a little smaller as he watched, a little less present. “Never mind,” Herbert repeated. “I’ll just try not to wake you the next time I cry out, shall I?”

It was that little dig, that utterly Herbert bit of snideness that rattled Dan out of his shock. “Wait,” Dan said. “I’m not—it just seems like a bad idea.”

“Why?” Herbert asked. He sounded almost curious.

“Because we’re—” roommates, his mind suggested, which was not helpful. “Because we work together and live together, and I don’t want to screw that up. And I don’t want to screw you up, or—or hurt you more. You’ve—you’ve been through a lot.”

“Yes,” Herbert said drily. “Several incidents in succession in which I had no choice. And now it seems you’d rather I had no choice in this, either.”

“That’s not fair,” Dan said.

“Isn’t it?”

Dan stared at Herbert’s dark outline. “Look, can I please turn on the light?”

A pause. “Fine.”

Dan switched the light on. Now fully illuminated, Herbert scowled down at him. He looked exhausted. Dan had really thought Herbert had been doing better, but the heavy shadows deepened the furrows in his brow and made his eyes looked bruised. There was a slump to his shoulders Dan couldn’t ever remember seeing.

“You said you would help,” Herbert said quietly.

Dan couldn’t say he felt any desire to sleep with Herbert just then. Maybe in the past, one or twice, he’d—well, anyway, not then. Mostly he wanted to pull Herbert into a hug and hold him into those furrows went away, even if it took a really long time.

No way Herbert would allow that. Apparently this was the only option on the table. “And you’re sure this will? Help?”

Herbert grimaced. “No.”

Dan laughed. He couldn’t help it; there wasn’t anything else to do. “Yeah, okay. Come here.”

Herbert edged closer to the bed. He watched warily as Dan reached out and touched his arm, stroking along it and then taking Herbert’s hand in his. “Okay?”

“Fine,” Herbert said. He’d gone rigid, and he wasn’t coming any nearer.

How the hell was this going to work? “Look, what do you want, exactly? Like, what do you want me to do?”

“Turn off the light,” Herbert said promptly.

Yeah, okay. That, Dan could do. When the room was dark again, Dan tugged on Herbert’s hand. “You can sit down,” he said. He felt the bed dip as Herbert sat on the very edge of the bed, grudgingly—but that part might have been Dan’s imagination. He stroked Herbert’s arm again, thinking that might relax him. It did not.

“Just tell me what you want, okay?” Dan said.

Herbert took a shuddering breath. The sound of it made something in Dan ache. “I don’t know. You were right, this was an absurd idea.” He started to pull away.

“Hey, wait,” Dan said, feeling a little desperate. Herbert couldn’t just go back to bed like that, sounding and looking like that. “Don’t leave. Give me a chance here, huh? What if I sucked you off?”

Herbert scoffed. “I can promise you, Garber didn’t do that.”

Was that really what Herbert had in mind? To recreate what had happened with Garber? Dan wasn’t sure he had the stomach for that, even if Herbert insisted. “Well, I want to,” Dan said stubbornly, but that sounded wrong. He amended, “If it’s okay. It’ll be something different to remember, right?”

There was a pause. “Very well.”

“Cool. Okay.”

Herbert was still sitting on the edge of the bed in his undershirt and briefs. Asking him to move seemed risky, and so Dan slid from the covers and knelt in front of him, on the ancient rug that’d been in the room since long before Dan moved in. It wasn’t much cushion against the hardwood floor. Dan had only worn his pajama bottoms to bed, and the night air was starting to draw out goosebumps on his skin.

He palmed Herbert’s knees and pushed in between them. Herbert was rigid under his touch, but soon Dan was going to help him relax, hopefully. Dan cupped Herbert’s clothed cock and balls in his hand, and Herbert took a sharp breath. He didn’t move or object, though, so Dan carefully drew his limp cock out through the pocket. He’d never sucked anyone off quite like this, but again, pausing long enough to coax Herbert out of his underwear—assuming Dan even could—seemed like a bad idea.

“Uh, I should mention, I haven’t done this a whole lot.” Before Herbert could find anything to say about that, Dan added, “So if I do something wrong, or if you don’t like it, you know, just tell me. Okay?”

“Fine,” Herbert said.

Fine. Okay.

Every other time Dan had sucked a guy off—which was about half a dozen times, all told—the guy had been at least a little bit hard first. They’d been kissing and feeling each other up, and sometimes the guy had worked himself up by getting Dan off first. Usually the guy had liked watching Dan, which he’d kind of taken for granted, but now here he was in the dark with Herbert’s entirely uninterested dick in his hand while Herbert scowled down at him. Or else Herbert wasn’t scowling, which was probably worse. Dan didn’t want to think about what expression he might have instead.

This was like the bandages, Dan told himself. He knew how to clean wounds. He knew how to do this, too, more or less, and that put him several steps ahead of anywhere else he’d been with Herbert these past few weeks.

And it wasn’t like he minded touching Herbert’s dick. It was uncut, the skin silky against his fingers. It was a nice weight in his hand, like he’d occasionally imagined it would be. Dan squeezed gently. When that raised no objection, Dan massaged him, inching up to the root and down again. After a minute or so of this, he felt the first twitches of interest.

“You said you were going to suck me off,” Herbert said.

“I am,” Dan said, laughing a little. Of course Herbert was pushy in bed; Dan should have known—except this wasn’t in bed in any sense Dan would ever use.

For just a moment, Dan had forgotten what they were doing here, but he remembered now. Shit.

He couldn’t think about it. Instead he bent down until Herbert’s dick was right in front of his face. If the light were on, Dan could have seen the veins, might have traced them with his fingers. Lacking that, he took a deep whiff of Herbert. Mostly he smelled of soap; he always showered at night after coming up from the lab.

Enough stalling. Dan leaned in that last half inch and licked at Herbert. Herbert inhaled sharply.

“Okay?” Dan said.

“Yes, yes, get on with it.”

Dan put his tongue to Herbert again. He licked across the opening in the foreskin and felt a shiver from Herbert. After a moment’s consideration, Dan opened his mouth wide and carefully closed it around the tip of Herbert’s cock, foreskin and all. Again, unmistakably: a shiver.

He gave up thinking how this had gone with other guys. He just wanted to make Herbert feel something good, so who the hell cared how he did it? He kept Herbert in his mouth, licking a little, sucking a little, but mostly he focused on teasing Herbert’s shaft with his fingers, like he’d done for himself a thousand times.

It worked. Gradually Herbert firmed up, accompanied by a stifled gasp every so often. The foreskin retreated, letting Dan lick across and around the sensitive head. At one point Dan gripped Herbert’s thigh for stability, and then he kept it there so that he could feel each twitch and tense as Dan sucked him. Dimly Dan was aware of his own cock stiffening, too.

“Dan,” Herbert said sharply.

Dan jerked back. “What? Is it—are you okay?”

“I assumed you would like some warning.”

“Some—oh. Thanks. You can just—you can come in my mouth. It’s okay.” Dan found himself flushing. Doing this was one thing, but saying it aloud where someone could hear—where Herbert could hear—was something else again.

“Very well,” Herbert said. He sounded like he might have been out of breath, which gave Dan a warm sort of glow in his chest.

It was short work after that. Soon after, Herbert inhaled sharply and tensed under Dan’s hand. He came in Dan’s mouth, a hot bitter splash on Dan’s tongue. Dan kept his mouth on Herbert through the orgasm. Then he sat back on his heels and swallowed until all that was left of Herbert was the taste.

He could just make out Herbert tucking himself back into his underwear. “Did that help?” Dan asked.

Herbert paused. “I’ll find out, I suppose.”

“Okay. Let me know, I guess.”

Herbert got to his feet and stepped around Dan. Dan twisted to watch him leave. Herbert paused at the door. “Thank you,” he said, in a tone Dan didn’t recognize.

“Uh, sure. Anytime.”

Herbert might have nodded, and then he was gone.

Anytime. It had slipped out without thought. Dan didn’t know if he meant it.

He was still half-hard. He palmed himself, but it felt wrong. He didn’t want to get off after all that, not if Herbert wasn’t there with him and didn’t want to help. Instead Dan crawled back into bed. His knees were sore from the hardwood floor, and as the flush of arousal faded, he started to feel chilled. He pulled the blankets up and squeezed his eyes shut, hoping he’d fall asleep soon.

In the morning, Dan found Herbert waiting impatiently by the door, just like he did every morning. Dan didn’t understand how a guy could always look so starched and clean-cut while spending as little time working at it as Herbert apparently did. Herbert opened the door pointedly and closed it firmly shut behind them, and so Dan didn’t get a chance to really look at him until they hit the first red light going into town.

“What?” Herbert demanded.

“Nothing,” Dan said, which was the truth. He didn’t see anything in Herbert’s face that was different from any other morning. Maybe a little under slept, but that was normal, too. “Are you—did it help?” He found his grip on the wheel had tightened. He really wanted it to have helped, which was probably stupid. That was a hell of a lot to ask of one midnight orgasm.

Unexpectedly, Herbert flushed. Dan watched in fascination. Until that moment, he hadn’t even realized Herbert was capable of it, although obviously he must; he had facial capillaries like anyone else. “I don’t want to talk about it,” Herbert said. “And the light’s green.”

Herbert didn’t give Dan a chance to ask him about it again. Probably that was all right. Probably it wasn’t any of Dan’s business.

Herbert entrenched himself in the lab over the next couple of days. Dan didn’t know if that was related to the blowjob or not. Dan would come down and tidy up, although the lab didn’t really need much, especially since no more flasks had exploded. He’d ask Herbert a question or two and get one or two words in reply each time, and finally Dan would go away.

Herbert didn’t come up for dinner again, but that, too, might have been a coincidence. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d forgotten to eat. A few times in the year they’d lived in the mortuary, Dan had even caught him sleeping down there.

Dan spent a lot of his spare time cooking. Other times, when Herbert was clearly in the lab for the long haul, Dan opened the book he’d found in the hospital library. He gave it up pretty quickly, though. Herbert would mock Dan mercilessly if he ever brought up the word trauma—unless it was preceded by a nice concrete word like ‘head’ or ‘organ’—and the book’s protocols didn’t seem very relevant to the situation anyway. The scant two pages on male victims really didn’t seem relevant. Dan was on his own.

One evening, while Dan was sweeping cobwebs off the laboratory’s brick walls, Herbert said, “That cannot possibly be right.”

“What?” Dan asked.

Herbert shook his head furiously and scribbled something in his notebook. Dan wasn’t sure he’d even heard him. After a while, Dan went back to clearing out cobwebs. When he headed for the stairs a few minutes later, Herbert didn’t look up.

It probably wasn’t healthy to be that fixated on the theories of a guy who had—who had—well. On Gaber’s theories. Dan had never had even marginal success in preventing Herbert from obsessing about something, though. He’d just have to let the thing run its course.

Dan wasn’t startled when he woke this time. There was someone in the room, it was Herbert, and Dan wasn’t surprised. It took him a moment to remember how to talk, though. “Hey,” he croaked. “Are you—did you have another bad dream?”

“It didn’t work. We’ll have to try again.”

“Herbert—”

“Dan, please,” Herbert said.

“Okay.” That was all it took, just one ‘please’ in a voice that wasn’t quite steady, and Dan was toast. “What—what do you want?”

Herbert was quiet for longer than Dan expected. “I want to erase what he did to me. I want to burn it out, obliterate it. When I—when I dream of how it felt, I want to remember something I chose with someone else altogether. With you.”

With you. Dan knew Herbert didn’t mean anything by that. Dan was just the ‘someone else,’ and who the hell else would Herbert ask? Who would he even admit any of this to in the first place? No one. Dan was it.

“Come here,” he said. He sat up, and when Hebert was within reach, Dan reached out to rub up and down his arms. Dan felt him starting to goose pimple. Touching him, Dan was reminded that Herbert really wasn’t a big guy. Somehow the button-down shirts, pressed slacks, and ever-present scowl made him seem larger, but Garber must have had a good six inches on him.

Dan could see him pretty clearly even without the bedside lamp, because a few days ago Dan had found a battered night light in the back of a kitchen drawer and plugged it into his wall, just in case. “Hi,” Dan said stupidly. Herbert’s eyebrows rose. God, he was such an asshole, and Dan was so into him. If things had been different—

Well, they weren’t. Still, almost without meaning to, Dan said, “Can I kiss you?”

Herbert looked skeptical. “Is kissing important?”

“It is to me,” Dan said, which was the only answer he had to that question.

“All right,” Herbert said. He didn’t move, just sat there in his underclothes and watched warily as Dan shifted closer. The wariness wasn’t doing a lot for Dan’s confidence. He tucked one foot under himself so that he could angle in sideways and see Herbert properly. He closed his hand over Herbert’s bare shoulder. Here was Herbert in Dan’s room, on Dan’s bed, waiting to be kissed, and so Dan leaned in and kissed him.

Herbert’s mouth was warm. That was about all that could be said for it, at first. “Relax,” Dan murmured, stroking Herbert’s shoulder. “It’s more fun that way.” He closed his mouth over Herbert’s again, swallowing any protests Herbert might have made about how he wasn’t here to have fun. Dan didn’t care, he decided. If Herbert wanted to do this with him, then Dan was going to give him his very best shot, even if Herbert only wanted it the once. Maybe especially then.

And Herbert wasn’t a bad study. After a bit, he began to respond. His hand came to rest tentatively on Dan’s hip, over his pajama bottoms. For the first time, it occurred to Dan that maybe Herbert would touch him, too, at least a little.

To encourage this line of thinking—or just because he really wanted to—Dan brushed his palms down Herbert’s arms. That was pretty nice, so he kept going, skating across Herbert’s shoulder blades, along his spine, over his ribs.

Herbert shuddered, and Dan pulled back in alarm. “Was that okay?” Dan asked.

“Are you going to keep asking me that?”

Dan took a deep, unsteady breath. “Yeah. Yeah I am.”

“Very well,” Herbert said with a grimace. After a moment, he said pointedly, “Yes, it was fine, you can keep doing it.”

“You’re such a dick,” Dan said. For a moment, sheer incredulous fondness crowded out every other kind of feeling. He added, “It’s fine for me, too. I mean, you can touch me, too. If you want.”

Herbert took this in. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“Okay.” Okay. Herbert liked Dan touching him, so he might as well keep doing that. Dan leaned in to kiss him again, one hand stroking his back through his undershirt. Herbert shuddered again, which meant he liked it. He liked what they were doing, at least for the moment. Dan knew where he was, now, and where to go from here.

After a few moments, Herbert’s hand returned to Dan’s hip. He gripped him harder now, possessive, and Dan felt the first stirrings of arousal. They were both breathing pretty hard when Dan slipped his hand under the hem of Herbert’s shirt. Herbert froze, but before Dan could pause or retreat, Herbert curled his fingers inside the waistband of Dan’s pajamas.

“Holy shit,” Dan breathed. Herbert pulled away, eyebrows rising again and full of judgment, and Dan retaliated by sliding his palm all the way up Herbert’s bare ribs. Herbert tried to wriggle away, which meant he was ticklish, which was maybe the greatest scientific discovery Dan had ever made. “Oh yeah?” Dan said, brushing his fingers up Herbert’s sides.

“Stop that!” Herbert said, swatting at Dan’s hands.

Dan froze. He and Herbert stared at each other, and Dan swallowed, hard. “Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing,” Herbert said. “And stop—stop—oh, for God’s sake.” He cupped the side of Dan's jaw, near the hinge—feeling out the tendons, probably, knowing Hebert. Frowning deeply in concentration, he leaned up and kissed Dan on the mouth.

Dan shuddered—more with feeling than desire—and pulled Herbert closer. A beat later he thought better of it and tried to retreat, but Herbert held him firmly in place. When he stopped trying to get away, Herbert snaked one hand down into Dan’s lap. Dan shivered as Herbert’s fingers brushed over his dick. Herbert closed his hand loosely around it, and Dan shivered again. Against his mouth, Dan felt Herbert’s lips curve. Dan tried to pull away to get a good look at him and find out if sex brought out that particular gremlin smile Dan had gotten unaccountably fond of, but once again Herbert held him right where he was.

Dan’s dick twitched in Herbert’s hand.

Now Herbert did pull back to give Dan a good, hard look. Heat flooded Dan’s face. “I see,” Herbert said, which only made Dan flush harder. Herbert closed his hands around Dan’s wrists, his grip firm but not tight.

“You don’t have to,” Dan protested.

“But I am,” Herbert said, with such confidence that Dan felt a new wash of arousal through him. Herbert leaned in and kissed him again, insistent, not quite hard enough to bruise. Without Dan quite noticing how it happened, Herbert maneuvered him into lying back on the bed, his head propped up on a pillow. Herbert straddled Dan’s thighs and gazed coolly down at him, as if Dan were just a specimen Herbert wanted to see the inside of.

Dan, mortified, realized he liked it.

The corner of Herbert’s mouth twitched. He grazed his fingers over Dan’s dick, now standing up in his pajamas bottoms. Dan’s breath hitched. Any doubts Dan had had about whether Herbert ever beat off were banished as Herbert touched him. He knew what he was doing, all right. The angle made things a little awkward, and he didn’t know Dan’s cock like Dan did, obviously, but that didn’t matter, because Herbert was touching him. It took everything Dan had to keep still, and little gasps still escaped him now and then. Every time, a little crease formed between Herbert’s brows.

Finally Dan caught Herbert’s wrist. “I’m not going to last much longer.”

“Hmm,” Herbert said. He considered this gravely, and then he shifted his weight and settled down onto his elbows, so that he was eye-level with Dan’s dick. Without any ceremony, he leaned forward and closed his mouth around it.

“Shit,” Dan hissed, overcome. He’d already been so keyed up, and now someone’s mouth was one him, and that someone was Herbert. Dan was rigid in an effort to not just come on the spot. After a moment, he dared to take a breath, then another. Herbert waited while he pulled himself together, his gaze trained on Dan, attentive and not quite impatient.

“Okay,” Dan gasped at last. “You can—if you want, I mean—”

Herbert did something spectacular, something hot and wet and secret. Sensation burst through Dan and fizzed out his fingertips. On the other side of it, his breath was shaky, and he gave up his ambitions of lasting more than thirty seconds.

Actually he probably lasted about a minute and a half. Then Herbert licked him just the right way, and Dan just lost it.

After it was over, he realized Herbert was coughing—because Dan had thrust up into his mouth there at the end. “Shit,” Dan said, struggling to sit up. “I’m sor—”

“Do not,” Herbert said.

“Okay. Okay. Shit.” Dan scrubbed his hand over his face. After a moment’s battle with gravity, he sank back against the bed. “You’re really good at that.”

Herbert snorted. “That’s not what I’ve heard. Perhaps you’re just easily satisfied.”

Dan laughed. He was floating on a gentle endorphin sea. “You calling me easy?”

“Well,” Herbert said. He packed a lot of implication into that word.

“Dick,” Dan said. He kicked at Herbert, earning a grunt when he connected with Herbert’s ribs.

Herbert probably wasn’t wrong, though. Dan had had kind of a dry spell, these past few months; he’d been really ripe for this. Women had caught his eye here and there, but somehow he hadn’t ever gotten around to following through. Too busy getting dragged into Herbert’s experiments or trying to drag Herbert out of them, trying to keep him from murdering anyone or dying of his own hubris.

Or getting murdered himself. A chill blew through Dan’s contentment. “Hey,” he said. “Did you—is that what you wanted? What do you want me to do for you?” He could sit up and do something for Herbert. Definitely. Any moment now.

“Never mind,” Herbert said. He squeezed Dan’s knee. “Get some sleep, Dan.”

“ ‘kay,” Dan said. His eyes were already falling shut. Dimly he was aware of Herbert pulling the covers over him.

It wasn’t until the next day that Dan wondered whether Garber was one of the people who’d told Herbert he was bad at sucking dick.

It kept happening. Dan should have expected that. Give Herbert an inch and he’d take the whole damn road. Three nights later, Herbert knocked just as Dan was ready to turn out the light. He swung the door open without waiting for a response.

“Herbert, what—oh.”

Herbert’s grip tightened on the doorknob.

Dan swallowed. “Do you want to come in?”

Herbert had come up from the lab and was still fully dressed, which meant Dan got to help undress him. That was pretty great. Granted, the lab funk wasn’t exactly a turn-on, but it turned out Dan really liked getting Herbert out of his button-down dress shirt and slacks. He let Dan touch him, too, and kiss him to his heart’s content. When Dan was getting ready to ask the hand job or blowjob question, Herbert said, entirely casual, “I thought perhaps I’d finger you, if you wanted.”

Dan’s brain flatlined at that point, and it never really recovered. A blowjob was eventually also involved, because it turned out Herbert was pretty good at doing two things at once.

Another night, Herbert caught him on the stairs, scowling and furious. He pressed Dan against the wall right there on the landing, which led to dry-humping and messy hand jobs. Afterwards, Dan sagged against the wall and wondered what the hell had hit him while Herbert tucked himself back into his slacks.

“Herbert?” Dan said.

Herbert gave him a sidelong glance that in another person Dan might have read as guilt. “Thank you,” he said, and he disappeared up the stairs.

Somewhere along the line Dan would have said no, except every time he caught at least one utterly unguarded glimpse of Herbert. He looked haunted and so tired, and Dan couldn’t stand it.

That first part was a lie. Dan was never going to say no.

Dan was chopping onions for soup when Herbert appeared in the kitchen doorway. Dan hadn’t expected him to surface from the lab for hours. “Hey,” Dan said, pleased. “Do you want to—” have dinner with me?

“We have to go back to the warehouse,” Herbert said.

“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” Dan said. Then, “Wait, what?”

“The warehouse,” Herbert said, voice edged with impatience. “Where Garber held me. Where he kept his lab, if you want to call it that.”

“Why?”

“To be sure,” Herbert said.

“Uh.”

“Garber’s theory was completely off-base. I just need to be sure, and I need you to come with me.”

“I don’t think—”

“Dan,” Herbert said. Just that: no argument, no eye-rolling, not even a please. Just Herbert saying Dan’s name and looking a little frantic, now that Dan was paying attention.

“Yeah,” Dan said, setting down the vegetable knife. “Okay.”

It was a tense, silent ride over. Dan tried to ask what Garber’s theory was that had Herbert all fired up, but Herbert only shook his head and brooded. And then as they got closer, Dan found he had no interest in talking. It had been night when he’d made this drive before. He really could have done without the re-enactment.

In the light of day, the warehouse looked almost ordinary: vacant-windowed, its paint faded, its walls maybe no longer standing entirely square, but no more ominous than any other building abandoned to time and slow, rusting decay. It didn’t even seem as tall as he remembered.

Herbert was out of the door almost before Dan had rolled to a stop. “Herbert,” Dan called.

“I’d bring the baseball bat if I were you,” Herbert said, striding towards the door.

“What the hell?” But Dan went and got his bat from the trunk, as instructed. He’d started keeping it there fairly soon after meeting Herbert.

He jogged towards Herbert and caught up to him just as he arrived at the door. “Who do you expect me to swing this at?”

“No one.”

“Right,” Dan said, and clutched the bat a little tighter.

Light filtered through dirty windows and the gaps in the roof. It’d rained in Arkham the night before, and Dan had to step carefully to avoid puddles in the cracked concrete. The place smelled of piss and old, wet ashes. Dan hadn’t noticed the warehouse smelling of anything that night, but now the force of memory slammed into his lungs and made him cough.

Herbert’s shoulders were rigid with tension as he barged deeper into the warehouse.

“Wait up,” Dan said, jogging around another puddle.

“If I’m right, then there’s no point in hurrying,” Herbert called, still well ahead.

Dan picked up his pace. He caught up to Herbert at the top of the basement stairs. “What is it with crazy scientists and basements?” Dan muttered.

Herbert glanced back. “Why? Do you know of another one?”

“Never mind.”

Herbert had brought the flashlight from the glove compartment. He shone it around the room. There wasn’t much to see: the boiler Dan vaguely remembered from last time. The top of it was the highest peak in the room, surrounded by smaller foothills of junk. And there across the way was the vault door, ajar just as it had been when Dan—

“Holy shit,” Dan breathed. “Herbert.”

Herbert stood just ahead, unmoving. Dan gripped his shoulder. “Herbert, it’s open.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” Herbert said.

Dan was not really in a mood to be reassured. Herbert crept forward, his flashlight beam fixed on the vault door, and Dan followed right behind him with the bat gripped tightly in both hands. Herbert reached the vault door. He glanced back at Dan, nodded, and pulled the vault door further ajar.

The hinge squeaked, and Dan damn near swung at it.

“Steady,” Herbert said.

Dan peered past Herbert into the vault. It was pitch-black everywhere except where the flashlight beam fell, and its light seemed feeble against the weight of that darkness. All was quiet, and yet Dan could easily imagine some shambling figure lurching out of the shadows at them.

Herbert wasn’t scanning the room with the flashlight, which was sure as hell what Dan would have been doing. In fact, his gaze seemed fixed on just one stained patch of concrete floor. “Herbert, what—oh. Oh my god.”

Those stains were blood. Dan had left Garber’s body lying there. “Where is he?”

“You mean ‘it,’” Herbert said. He shone the light around the room. Nothing moved. There was no one there, alive or dead. “Not who. Garber’s just a decomposing corpse now.”

“Okay, fine, but where is it?”

“Someone took it, obviously.”

“Why would they do that? Who would—what would they want with a corpse?”

Herbert walked into the vault, systematically scanning the whole space, all the nooks and crannies. “As if you haven’t helped me steal seven of them from the hospital morgue already.”

“I mean—okay, sure, but—Herbert?”

Herbert was now staring past Dan, towards the door they’d come in. Dan turned around to see what he was looking at: gouge marks in the cinderblock wall. No, not just marks but practically an excavation, a hole chipped straight through, just to the right of the steel door.

“I don’t remember those,” Dan said.

“The door opens from the outside. If you were locked in here, you couldn’t just open it. You’d have to break through the wall to the locking mechanism.”

“Locked in—you don’t mean Garber.”

Herbert smiled grimly.

“Garber was dead,” Dan said. “I swear. I—I checked.”

“Oh, Dan,” Herbert said pityingly. “We of all people know that death isn’t necessarily permanent.”

“Did you—did you come back here? Did you give him the reagent?”

“He didn’t need me,” Herbert said. He turned to Dan with a faraway look in his eyes. “He never needed me at all. I never gave him a single thing, and his idiotic theory still worked.”

Dan gripped Herbert’s arm. “What theory, Herbert?”

Herbert finally seemed to see Dan in front of him. He squared his shoulders. “I administer the reagent as soon after the point of death as I can manage. But that does pose certain difficulties, doesn’t it? Much easier to administer a reagent before death, as he apparently had been doing to himself for some time.”

“His neck snapped,” Dan protested. “How would he even—?”

“He was quite motivated, it seems.”

“Where do you think he is now?”

“How should I know, Dan? I was his prisoner, not his—his confidante. And that was when he was still alive.” Herbert shrugged tightly.

So Garber could be anywhere, doing anything. Vandalizing their car outside—or their home. If he knew Herbert’s routines well enough to capture him on a reagent supply run, he surely knew where Herbert lived. “I think we should go home,” Dan said.

Herbert cast an eye around the abandoned vault. “Yes. There’s certainly nothing of value here.”

Only as Dan pulled out onto the road, heading back across town to the mortuary, did he realize that Garber’s pickup track was gone from the parking lot, too.

Dan had barely closed the mortuary’s front door when Herbert jumped him. One moment Dan was turning, and the next moment he found himself pressed against a wall while Herbert tore at his clothing. “Hey,” Dan said. When this availed nothing, he caught Herbert’s hands between his. “Herbert. Hey.”

Herbert’s breath was loud and harsh. After a moment he released the lapels of Dan’s jacket and shoved away from him. He was shaking. Dan wanted to touch him—wanted to pull him in and hold him—but he wasn’t sure if any of that would be welcome.

“He didn’t even need me,” Herbert said. He stared down at the battered hardwood floor, his hands in fists. “All—all that, and he already had everything he needed.”

“Maybe you were insurance,” Dan said.

“I was entertainment.”

Dan gave in to his instinct and pulled Herbert close. He stood stiff and still in Dan’s arms, and Dan could feel each shuddering breath Herbert took. He kissed Herbert’s hair and felt Herbert’s fingers curl into the fabric of his sweater.

After a bit, when Herbert’s breathing had steadied, Dan said, “Do you think we should go after him? Figure out where he is?”

“No,” Herbert said. “I think we should go to bed.”

“Oh yeah?” Dan said. He squeezed Herbert a little tighter. “I don’t know if—”

“I want him out of me, Dan.” He shuddered again.

“Okay,” Dan said.

Herbert didn’t look back on the way up the stairs. He went directly to Dan’s room, and when Dan walked in, Herbert was already stripping: tie, button-down, undershirt. It was the first time Dan had ever seen him like this in daylight, dimmed though it was by the drawn curtains. It felt forbidden somehow, a pleasure that wasn’t Dan’s to have.

Herbert glanced up, belt unbuckled and the ends dangling. “What are you waiting for?”

“Right,” Dan said.

By the time Dan got down to undershirt and socks, Herbert was naked. He stomped bare-assed over to Dan’s bedside table and took the lube out of it, because that was who they were to each other now: people who knew where the other one kept the lube.

Except Dan had no idea where Herbert kept his, or if he even had any.

Before Dan could follow that thought any further, Herbert knelt on the bed. He squirted some lube into his palm, rolled a couple of fingers in it, and without hesitation he pushed his fingers into his ass.

Dan tried to swallow down his reaction of holy shit, but a strangled grunt escaped him. Herbert looked up sharply. “What?” he demanded.

“Um,” Dan said. Herbert’s scowl deepened. He looked half-ready to flee, even though he’d been the one to insist on this. “You, uh.” Look really hot like that, but he couldn’t imagine that was what Herbert wanted to hear. “You said you hadn’t done, uh, that. Penetration.”

With this much light, Dan could see the rosy color of Herbert’s flush. “Not with another person,” Herbert said.

“Oh,” Dan said faintly. Images flashed before his eyes of Herbert alone in his bedroom next door doing exactly what he was doing now. “Do you need help?”

“I have it under control.”

Herbert went back to slicking himself up, a familiar furrow of concentration between his brows. Yeah, he seemed to have a pretty good idea what he was doing. Dan palmed himself, feeling a little guilty about it, but if he was going to fuck Herbert, he had to be able to get it up, right? He wondered idly if Herbert kept a dildo somewhere in his room along with the unconfirmed lube. Or maybe he just used whatever was handy, like—

Okay, better not to think about the kinds of shit Herbert kept in his room.

He focused on Herbert himself instead, the wings of his shoulder blades shifting under his skin, the arch of his back as he lubed himself efficiently and utterly without ceremony. Somehow that was hotter than if he’d made a show of it.

Or maybe Dan just had it really bad for him.

Really bad.

“There,” Herbert said. He plucked a tissue from a box by the bed and wiped his fingers on it. “Dan?”

“Yeah,” Dan said distantly. Unwanted self-knowledge leaked through Dan like a chill. He was an idiot. All this time he’d thought he was just into Herbert for sex. As an end to that dry spell, maybe. A chance to get off with a guy who—gremlin smile aside—was objectively pretty good looking and turned out not give a shit that Dan was into guys sometimes. Dan had thought he was just horny.

Shit.

“Dan,” Herbert said, approaching. He looked worried.

“Yeah?”

Herbert took Dan by the arms and peered into his face. He didn’t seem to like what he saw. He cupped the back of Dan’s head, tugged him down, and put their mouths together. He’d gotten pretty good at this, what with all the practice the last couple of weeks, but now he kissed more urgently than he ever had during those midnight trysts. His grip on Dan’s neck was almost painful, and that more than the kissing shook Dan out of his daze.

Herbert drew back and looked Dan in the eye. “Dan. Please.”

Dan swallowed hard. “Yeah, okay.”

Herbert looked unconvinced. His hand slipped between them and closed around Dan’s dick. With that same focused efficiency, he went to work getting Dan up. He was getting better at it, Dan noticed. He was figuring out what Dan liked. All this therapeutic sex was good for something, apparently.

And it felt good. Dan closed his eyes and let himself focus on the building sparks of pleasure. Herbert was touching him, and that was pretty great. He might as well enjoy it, right? And it worked: eventually he found himself thrusting awkwardly into Herbert’s grip. “Okay,” he gasped. “We should probably—if you still want—”

“Yes,” Herbert said.

Dan followed Herbert to the bed. “How do you want to do it?”

Herbert was already rolling over onto his back, his knee bent. He glanced up at Dan, his expression clear: Well?

Right. “You’ll want this under your hips,” Dan said, tossing Herbert a pillow. Thank God Herbert didn’t make any comments about Garber not giving him a pillow. Dan grabbed a condom out of the same drawer the lube had come from. As he rolled it on, Herbert watched with interest, which Dan ignored for his own peace of mind. He knelt between Herbert’s legs. He wanted to ask Herbert if he was really, truly sure, but he knew the answer.

Dan palmed the meat of Herbert’s thigh, just trying to get himself to focus. They were here: they were doing this. He slipped his hand between Herbert’s thighs and found his hole. Herbert tensed against him and took several careful, deliberate breaths. “You’re all right,” Dan said. “Um, just so you know, I haven’t done a lot of this, either.”

“Never mind that,” Herbert said raggedly. “Just—just—”

“Yeah,” Dan said. He slipped a finger into Herbert. Herbert took a sharp breath. He was still tense, and that was no good. “You gotta relax,” Dan said. “Otherwise—”

“I know why. I am fully aware, I promise you.”

No prize for guessing how he knew. Dan’s grip tightened on Herbert’s thigh, because that was better than smashing things against the wall and pretending they were Garber’s head. That wasn’t what Herbert needed right now—what either of them needed.

“It’s me,” Dan tried. “Not anyone else. Just me, Dan, remember? Your—your roommate.”

Slowly, warily, Herbert opened his eyes. “That’s a ridiculous word,” he grumbled. “We don’t share a room.”

Dan laughed, feeling a dizzying wave of relief. He stroked along Herbert’s thigh. “Yeah? What’s a better one?”

“House mate, I suppose.”

“Is it even really a house? There’s a crematorium in the basement.”

“Colleague,” Herbert offered. “Research partner.”

That was a sharp left turn into things Dan didn’t want to think about. “Sure,” he said. He wriggled his finger in Herbert’s ass and then pulled it out. The dumb arguing about words had helped; Herbert was more relaxed now. Dan got himself in position, steadying himself with a hand on Herbert’s hip. With the other he guided his dick to Herbert’s hole, brushing the head against it to give Herbert some warning. He saw Herbert brace himself and take a couple of measured breaths.

That’d have to be good enough. Dan pushed slowly into Herbert, breaching him. Immediately Herbert tensed again, eyes squeezed shut behind his glasses, but Dan squeezed his hip and waited for Herbert to breathe through the sensation. “Go on,” Herbert said after a few moments.

It took several agonizing minutes to bottom out. Herbert had gone red and flushed all down his chest, and at each stage Dan paused to let Herbert get used to things, but finally Dan was all the way in. “Okay?”

Herbert ducked his chin in agreement.

Okay.

Dan pulled out slowly. Even relaxed, Herbert felt incredible, an agonizing, delicious drag on Dan’s dick. When Dan pushed back, Herbert made a low, punched-out sound Dan was pretty sure he’d never forget. The next time he shoved in, Herbert pushed back to meet him, and they gasped in unison.

Dan pushed everything out of his mind and focused on this one thing: on screwing Herbert. On Herbert’s bony hips between his hands and the damp slap of skin as they both started to sweat. On each little grunt Herbert made.

Dan’s orgasm came on him almost without warning. “Herbert,” he said, and then pleasure flooded through him in a torrent. When it had slowed to a trickle, just a weak little burst now and then he pulled out, gasping and shaky. He rolled off of Herbert and collapsed next to him. After a moment, he remembered the condom. He tied it off and dropped it in the waste basket he kept near the bed for the purpose—not that he’d used it much for that since they moved to the mortuary.

He realized Herbert had his hand on his cock. He hadn’t come yet. Dan’s arm felt like it weighed about thirty pounds, but he dragged it across the bed and gripped Herbert’s hand. “Let me,” he said.

“You can help, I suppose,” Herbert said.

So they got him off together, Dan’s hand clasped over Herbert’s. It was awkward and not very efficient, but somehow Dan didn’t want to let go. He felt the moment Herbert went still, and then Herbert shot white spunk over their joined hands.

Herbert rolled over just far enough to get tissues from the bedside table. He wiped at himself and then handed the tissue to Dan, so Dan could get his fingers sort of clean.

Herbert was still breathing hard. Dan shifted onto his side and pressed his face into Herbert’s shoulder. Add ‘fuckbuddy’ to the list, he thought, but it didn’t feel right either. None of those words Dan had tried ever fit, because what he felt about Herbert was bigger than any of them, and Dan had been too dumb to notice.

“Was that—” Dan croaked. He stopped and cleared his throat. “Was that what you wanted?”

“You did very well,” Herbert said. He squeezed Dan’s hand, stretched across Herbert’s chest. “Thank you,” he added softly.

Dan swallowed around a lump. “I just—I wish I’d gotten there sooner. I saw his truck the first day, Herbert, I could have just followed him, I could have—shit.” Dan scrubbed at his face. It was all too much, the disappearance of Garber’s body and screwing Herbert and Dan’s very own, very unwelcome realization.

“Dan?”

Dan’s eyes were hot and growing damp. “I’m fine.”

“Hmm,” Herbert said. There was a profound amount of skepticism packed into that one syllable.

“I really hope it helped,” Dan said. That was it, that was all he’d meant to say, but then somehow he blurted, “And—and I don’t think I can do it anymore. This.”

“Oh?”

Dan kept his gaze fixed on the ceiling. “It’s kind of been screwing me up.”

“Oh?” Herbert repeated, sharper now.

Dan grimaced. It didn’t help. “I’m not really very good at casual sex. If it’s more than once or twice, I get, you know, attached. Invested.” He took a deep, steadying breath, except it didn’t leave him any steadier than before. “And I know that’s not what this for you, okay? I’m just—just the guy who happened to be here. I’m not trying to make it into something different than it is.”

Herbert made a noise of dissent, but Dan pushed on. “I’ve been into you for a while anyway. I just didn’t realize it before. Or I didn’t want to admit it before. I don’t know. But I’m—shit. I am, okay? I’m really into you. So I can’t be your therapy hookup anymore. Or—or whatever this is.”

Herbert sat up, too. His fingers brushed Dan’s arm. “Dan—”

Dan shifted hastily out of reach. “I’m really sorry, Herbert. For everything.” At last he dared a glance at Herbert’s face. His brow was furrowed, his gaze sharp as he looked at Dan like he was an unexpected lab result. And Dan, God help him, was still kind of into it. “Look, I’m gonna go take a shower, okay? And then we can figure out what to do about Garber.”

He fled, then, half-expecting Herbert to call him back, protest, say something, but he never did.

Dan felt better after the shower. Well, he felt pretty stupid, but probably Herbert wouldn’t differentiate it from all the other times he thought Dan was being a moron, so it was fine. They wouldn’t sleep together anymore, and Dan would get over himself, and it’d be fine. Eventually.

He felt cleaner after the shower, anyway.

He found Herbert down in the kitchen, dressed and pressed in a fresh shirt and slacks. He’d combed his hair, too. There wasn’t a single sign that he’d recently come all over Dan’s hand. “Eat that,” he said, jutting his chin towards a plate on the table with a square of lasagna left over from Dan’s efforts the night before. Vapor rose from it in curls and wisps. “Then we need to make plans.”

Dan dutifully sat. And he was hungry, he found, though he hadn’t realized it before. He was starving, even. Herbert sat down across from him with his own plate of lasagna and what turned out to be a map of Arkham, which he spread across the table.

Unfortunately for the purposes of finding Garber’s reanimated corpse, it turned out they didn’t actually know very much. When Dan pointed this out, Herbert said, “He spent a great deal more time boasting of his grandiose plans than he did explaining their logistics.”

“We could try his apartment,” Dan said, pointing on the map.

“This is why we should get a dog,” Herbert mused, a return to a very old topic. “We could put it on Garber’s trail.”

“We’re not getting a dog, Herbert,” Dan said, by rote, but with an unfamiliar ache in his throat. They’d last had this argument the morning Herbert had gone missing. “You’d just end up doing experiments on it.”

“Not immediately,” Herbert said. Dan smiled a little despite himself. Herbert was here; Herbert was—well, maybe not fine, but doing okay and back where he belonged, with Dan.

Shit. Dan really did have it bad, and he’d had it bad for a long time without ever noticing. He grimaced to himself and took another bite of lasagna.

They did end up driving over to Garber’s place. He’d lived in the top apartment of a grungy-looking duplex on the bad side of town—which was to say, on Herbert and Dan’s side of town. They parked down the street and approached the building armed a baseball bat (Dan), and the axe they used to chop firewood (Herbert).

Garber’s front door hung open, and the room inside was dark. Dan took a flashlight from his back pocket and swung it around, but nothing moved. He ventured just far enough inside to hit the light switch.

The place had been trashed: furniture tumbled over, papers strewn everywhere. Dirt, too, from a planter that had been home to a now-dead Venus flytrap. Of course. “He couldn’t just have a philodendron like everyone else?” he muttered.

After a glance in all the rooms, he and Herbert met by the front door. “Do you think he did this?” Dan asked.

“Maybe. Or maybe some neighborhood burglar saw an opportunity. This street does look rather seedy.”

They nosed around for a few minutes, looking for clues, but the mess obscured any clues they might conceivably have found. Garber didn’t keep a rolodex or, unfortunately, a map with a location circled and marked Frank Garber is here.

“I don’t know where else to look,” Dan said.

Herbert’s shoulders slumped, which made Dan want to touch him, but that wasn’t fair to either of them. Dan kept his hands to himself.

It was a somber ride back to the mortuary. “Maybe he just left,” Dan offered as he turned onto the long cemetery driveway. “Went to, I dunno, Florida. Somewhere it’s warm.”

“Then we’ll go to Florida,” Herbert said grimly.

Herbert climbed out of the car as soon as Dan parked. It took Dan a little longer, and eventually Herbert noticed. He came back around to the driver’s side. “Aren’t you coming?” he said, muffled somewhat through the door.

“Yeah, just a minute,” Dan said. “I have to get some stuff.” He thumbed over his shoulder, towards the trunk.

Herbert looked dubious, but he didn’t argue. “Meet me in the lab,” he said. He brandished his axe and headed for the house. “We have to plan our strategy.”

Dan couldn’t imagine coming up with any better a strategy in the lab than they had at the kitchen table, but that was fine. It was good, even; it’d been weeks since Herbert had seemed to want him down there, and Dan would go on and join him pretty soon.

He just needed a minute to himself, first. Some fresh air and a little time away from Herbert. He got out and leaned against the side of the car. Dusk had fallen on the way back, and a chilly damp was blowing in: not quite cold enough for snow yet, but soon. Dan sucked in lungfuls of cool air, strong with the late-fall odor of decaying leaves.

Maybe he’d go for a run before he went down to the lab. He’d gotten out of the habit the week Herbert was gone, and since then—well, he hadn’t wanted to get that far away from Herbert. That was probably unhealthy, though.

He headed for the house, already thinking of his running shoes inside the front door.

That was the point at which a foul-smelling hand clamped over Dan’s mouth. His arm was wrenched behind his back, and someone yelled in his ear, a loud yet indecipherable mumble.

Dan tried to yell through the hand, which accomplished nothing. Abruptly the person yanked him backward, right off his feet. Garber. It had to be Garber, unless it was some other unhappy acquaintance of Herbert’s, which would be just Dan’s luck.

Dan bit the hand. The next moment he really, really regretted it. Dan spit out the mouthful of rotting meat and tried desperately to keep his gorge down, and by the time he’d more or less succeeded, he was being dragged into the cemetery.

He elbowed Garber in the gut, but his elbow just sank into the flesh, which was nearly as nauseating as the bite had been. He yelled again and kicked back against Garber, aiming for a knee, but all he got was a wordless bellow in his ear and another wrench of his shoulder. By now the mortuary door was barely visible through the trees. Herbert was well out of earshot even supposing Dan could get his mouth free, and Garber didn’t seemed to have tired at all. He ignored Dan’s flailing and attempted blows and just dragged him relentlessly on.

And then, abruptly, they were inside. Garber dropped Dan all at once, and it was a cold, hard fall. Dan banged his elbow sharply against a—rock? A wall? Where were they? Garber shuffled around in the darkness, humming tunelessly to himself. Fumbling hands—decaying, bloated hands—gripped Dan’s wrists and bound them in rope. Before Dan could react, Garber did the same with his ankles.

Just like Herbert, Dan thought. He put the thought firmly away, or tried, but it kept getting up and lurching towards him again.

Meanwhile, Garber was doing something in the corner that clanked. Abruptly, light filled the space and nearly blinded Dan.

When his eyes adjusted, he found Garber had dragged him into a crypt. It was one of the big ones, probably erected by some venerable old Arkham family, built of ageless stone with a sarcophagus in the center, which Dan had hit his elbow on. A battery-powered camping lantern hung from the ceiling. The walls were lined with plaques, and behind those plaques were surely bones. The floor was littered with dry leaves, and spider webs spanned the corners of the ceiling. It was just like home.

Actually, it did have an earthy, basement kind of smell to it.

“You just really like basements,” Dan said.

Garber was too busy dragging the heavy wooden door shut to answer. Then he turned, and Dan could see him at last.

It was Garber, all right. Dan would recognize that broken neck anywhere, the head at a permanent and precarious angle, the nose caved in under the weight of Herbert’s foot. Garber’s eyes rolled sluggishly to finally look at Dan. His tongue lolled from his mouth. He made a guttural sound and advanced.

Dan did what he should have done before: took in a big deep breath, and yelled at the top of his lungs. “Herbert!”

Garber growled and batted at Dan with a huge, decaying paw. Dan’s head thumped against the side of the sarcophagus.

Some time later Dan opened his eyes. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. Thirty seconds? Two hours? Time seemed to be moving strangely around him. After a while, it occurred to him to try to untie himself. Garber had bound him pretty tightly, though; he could barely feel his fingers, much less work at any knots. Anyway, every time he shifted even a little bit, pain spiked through his skull.

For what felt like a long time, nothing happened at all. Garber shuffled around the crypt and hummed some more. Had he been this tone deaf in life? Dan would have to ask Herbert.

Dan got colder, he thought. He’d worn his light jacket to Garber’s apartment, but it was poor protection against a Massachusetts evening in late autumn.

He got colder still. He got hungry, then nauseous from hunger—or maybe that was from the smell or the concussion he’d concluded he had—but then hunger and nausea and chill all went away, and all Dan knew was that he missed Herbert. He was an asshole and shouldn’t have been a doctor, and Dan shouldn’t have liked him at all. He did, though. He wanted to see him. And sleep with him again. And sleep with him, just the two of them together in the bed. Maybe Dan could talk Herbert into cuddling.

There was a niggling voice that said Herbert wouldn’t want any of those things, that Herbert wasn’t interested in him like that, but sometimes Dan forgot to listen for a while. He rested against the sarcophagus and daydreamed. Nightdreamed? It was night, after all.

Shit, he was tired.

If he slept, then he could stop missing Herbert for a while, but sleeping seemed like a bad idea for reasons Dan could no longer put his finger on.

He really wished Herbert would come. But the wooden door was pretty thick, and Herbert only had an axe. And what if Garber heard him, and grabbed him again, and—

Dan couldn’t think about that.

Garber was moving around again. Before Dan really knew what was happening, Garber had straddled Dan’s thighs. His hands were fumbling at his belt buckle. Slowly it dawned on Dan what was going to happen next.

“No way,” he slurred. When had he forgotten how to talk? Maybe around the time his teeth stopped chattering.

Garber paid no attention to him, focused instead on getting his pants open. His fingers seemed to have retained a lot more dexterity than his mouth and tongue. That was interesting; Herbert would want to know about that. Maybe the broken neck was affecting his speech.

“Herbert,” Dan said suddenly. “Herbert will come get me. He has an axe.”

Garber’s entire face folded up, skin and muscle creasing where no creases should be. With what seemed to be a great effort, he hissed, “Wessssst.”

“That’s right,” Dan said, growing more sure of himself by the moment. “Herbert West. He’s my friend—” Let Herbert laugh at that; Dan didn’t care anymore. “—and he’s going to kill you with his axe. Any moment now,” he added in growing alarm as Garber succeeded in dragging his gray, rotting cock out of his pants.

Garber took his cock in his equally discolored hand and shuffled on his knees towards Dan. Dan tried to scramble backwards, but he had the sarcophagus at his back, and there was nowhere to go. Garber angled his cock towards Dan’s mouth. Obviously it wasn’t hard, because he didn’t have any blood flow. It was dark and discolored, like a deep-tissue bruise.

Dan could bite it. That’d be better than the alternative, right? Just bite off the tip, spit it out. Get hit in the head again. That sounded like a good plan.

Something was buzzing. At first Dan thought it was the inside of his skull—concussion, he thought clearly, and then the word was gone again—but it seemed to be getting louder. Garber twisted towards the door, his cock lax and forgotten in his hand.

“Cover your eyes,” someone yelled distantly. Dan squeezed his eyes shut just before things got really loud. Someone was murdering the door, and flying wooden splinters stung Dan’s skin. Garber was roaring. Then the roaring outside overcame the roaring inside, and wet fragments sprayed across Dan’s face.

The roar stopped. Someone was shoving at Dan, hauling him up, setting him against the sarcophagus. “Dan,” Herbert said, patting his face. “Dan.”

Carefully Dan opened his eyes. “Herbert,” he said, grinning. “I’m really happy to see you. I have a concussion.”

Herbert pursed his mouth, looking much less happy to see Dan than Dan was to see him. He had that crease between his eyebrows. Before Dan could consider what to do about it, if anything, Herbert took Dan’s face firmly in both hands. “You’re a moron,” Herbert declared, scowling. Then he put his mouth to Dan’s and gave him a harsh, bruising kiss.

After a moment he drew back, making a face. “I have a concussion,” Dan told him.

“Hmm, yes. Let’s get you back to the house, shall we? And into the bath.”

When Herbert tried to get Dan upright, he discovered the rope around his ankles and wrists. Or twine, rather—bright red. “He probably stole it off someone’s porch,” Herbert said, sounding offended by this low-effort larceny. At least it didn’t take long to untie.

Herbert tried again to haul Dan to his feet, and this time he succeeded. “Hey,” Dan said. “Where’s Garber?”

Herbert snorted softly. His eyes gleamed in the lantern-light. “All around you.” He bared his teeth in savage grin. “Dripping from your hair. Pooling on the floor—careful, don’t slip.”

“How did you do all that?” Dan asked. “And—the door?”

“With that,” Herbert said.

Dan followed his gaze to the corner of the crypt. There was a chainsaw sitting in it, its blades covered in gore. “I thought you had an axe.”

“I upgraded,” Herbert said.

At the house, Herbert put Dan in a lukewarm bath, muttering about hypothermia, and helped him scrub clean of Garber’s rotten remains. By then Dan had started to shiver, and Herbert drained the filthy water and ran him a second, warmer bath. When Dan’s teeth had stopped chattering, Herbert sat him on the toilet seat and took a quick shower himself.

Dan had a killer headache coming on by that point, but his thoughts had mostly cleared. “Well, he’s really dead now.”

“Yes,” Herbert said, with grim satisfaction. He stepped out of the shower and tucked the towel around his waist, which made Dan want to pull it off him again. “He’ll be even more dead once I set fire to what’s left of him.” He sounded like he planned to enjoy it. Dan figured that was fair.

He helped Dan to the bedroom and propped him up against the bed. “Stay here,” Herbert said firmly. “Don’t fall asleep.”

Dan had no intention of going anywhere. Staying awake was more of a challenge; his eyes were nearly shut when Herbert strode back in, dressed now and with a coffee mug in one hand. He sat on the bed by Dan and held the cup to his lips.

It was tomato soup, pleasantly warm. Herbert sat patiently and helped Dan drink all of it. Dan’s stomach was feeling a little iffy from the concussion, but he was also really hungry, he discovered. He was so focused on the soup that it took him a while to notice how deeply Herbert was scowling. That crease between his brows had never gone away.

“Hey,” Dan said. “Is everything—are you okay? With everything?”

Herbert gave him a sharp look.

“I mean, seeing Garber again, and—”

“You’re an imbecile,” Herbert said.

“Uh—”

“We knew he was out there, we already knew what he was capable of even before he died, and you just loitered out there waiting for him to take you? What were you thinking? Were you thinking?”

“Hey,” Dan protested.

“We knew he had a grudge against me, so you were already attractive because of the personal connection, and then you killed him, which could not have endeared you to him. You practically offered yourself up on a platter. He could have—he could have—”

“Hey,” Dan said again. He stroked Herbert’s arm. Herbert was shaking minutely—with fury, or maybe something else. “He didn’t, okay? He didn’t. He didn’t have time. You rescued me.” Dan snorted, the same familiar shame curling in his gut. “You found me a hell of a lot faster than I found you.”

“Yes, well, I had some help,” Herbert muttered.

“Help?” Dan echoed, baffled. “Like what?”

Some of the old life came back into Herbert’s eyes. He slid off the bed. “Wait here,” he said, as if Dan had displayed the slightest impulse to move one inch from his bed. Not sixty seconds later, Herbert returned and dropped something the comforter.

Something like a really huge spider.

“Jesus, Herbert!” Dan said, nearly jumping out of his skin.

“Calm down, it won’t hurt you.”

Heart rabbiting, Dan took a couple of deep breathes, steeled himself, and finally looked closer at the thing. It wasn’t a spider, no. It did have eight legs, but those legs were actually fingers, all attached to a single hand, palm down. A human nose sprouted out the top of the hand. As Dan watched, the nostrils flared.

“I made my own dog,” Herbert said, audibly smug. “I gave it your scent and let it loose out by the car. It led me straight to you. You’re fortunate Garber took you away on foot.”

“What the hell,” Dan said weakly. “Can you—I don’t want that in my room.” As he said it, the thing scuttled a little closer to him. It had his scent, Jesus.

“Fine,” Herbert said, smugness undimmed. He scooped up the hand and took away—just as far as his room, Dan noted, but Dan made the deliberate decision to just not care about that right now.

Herbert returned to sit on the bed, now looking more subdued. He seemed on the verge of saying something, and so Dan forced his eyes to stay open. It was getting harder and harder to stay awake. After a bit, he reached out and closed his fingers over Herbert’s.

Herbert exhaled shakily. “He wanted my mouth first.”

Dan’s whole body went cold.

“He threatened to cut my limbs off if I—if I didn’t cooperate. That was all he wanted for several days, but eventually I proved inadequate in that area—”

“Herbert,” Dan said softly. He didn’t have anything else to offer him, just his name and a squeeze of his hand.

“—and that’s when he moved on to the more intimate act. By the time you arrived he’d grown bored of that as well and had started talking about making new—new orifices to—”

“Shit,” Dan said. He took firm hold of Herbert’s hand now, though whether to steady Herbert or himself, he didn’t know. Herbert squeezed back. He had no more confessions, it seemed; he sat quietly holding Dan’s hand, saying nothing. It felt as intimate as any of the times they’d had sex: really intimate, not the fucked-up perversion Garber had forced on him.

At last Herbert turned deliberately toward Dan. After looking him squarely in the eye, he shifted towards him, and like he had in the crypt, he took Dan’s face in his hands and pressed his mouth to Dan’s. Dan was more conscious now; he could kiss back. At first he kissed him for comfort, for an apology. Then he gripped Herbert’s arm and kissed him with those feelings he’d discovered earlier in the day, the awful yearning ones and the ones mostly centered in his dick and all the other feelings in between.

He was out of breath when Herbert finally pulled away.

Another time, Dan might have let it lie, but his shoulder was sore where Garber had wrenched it, his head ached, and he’d sustained some other wound near his heart that was gaping open. “Was that necessary?” he asked softly. “The kissing?”

Herbert regarded him gravely. “Yes.”

“Really?” Dan said, his voice rising stupidly with hope.

“You have a concussion,” Herbert told him firmly. He moved to rise from the bed. “You should rest.”

Dan caught his hand. “Will you stay?” It felt like the same question as before, just in different words. “Please? Just to sleep. You can make sure I keep breathing.”

Herbert hesitated. Dan didn’t know what he saw on Herbert’s face. It wasn’t that haunted look Herbert had been hiding for weeks, but there was something fragile about it all the same. Something new. “All right,” he said at last.

Herbert slipped out of his clothes and folded them on a chair. Dan shifted over in the bed. The movement made his head hurt, even through the Tylenol Herbert had given him, but it was worth it to see Herbert sitting down at the edge of his bed in his underclothes. Then Herbert did something Dan didn’t expect, which seemed pretty silly in retrospect: he took off his glasses and set them on Dan’s bedside table.

Herbert glanced briefly at Dan and paused, his hand on the lamp switch. “What?”

“Come here,” Dan said. He reached for Herbert.

Warily, Herbert shifted closer. Firmly ignoring his headache, Dan leaned up and cupped the side of Herbert’s jaw. Herbert went still. He looked different like this. All those times they’d had sex, and Herbert had never gotten around to taking his glasses off.

Dan drew Herbert in and kissed him softly on the mouth. When he’d finished, he leaned back against the pillows. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go to sleep.”

Herbert looked at him a moment, but he didn’t ask any questions, just reached over and turned out the light at last. The room glowed dimly with the orange light of the nightlight. Dan shrugged down under the covers, and Herbert pulled the covers over them both.

Herbert spent the next couple of days watching Dan very closely. Dan didn’t move around a lot or read a lot or really do much of anything. He spent several evenings lying in the den with his eyes closed, listening to the TV. Football, mostly, which Herbert had a lot of snide things to say about, and yet whenever Dan drifted awake from a doze, Herbert was still there in the armchair across from him, frowning at his notebook.

Every night, without comment, Herbert followed Dan to his room and got into bed with him. They hadn’t progressed to cuddling yet, but Dan was hopeful. He’d gotten a goodnight kiss every night.

On the fourth day, the headache was mostly gone, and the gray, overcast day didn’t hurt Dan’s eyes when he went outside. He reported this to Herbert. “We could burn the remains, if you wanted,” Dan said. “Unless you did it already.”

Herbert had not done it already. That night, Dan bundled up in his winter coat, and with Herbert he crossed the frozen cemetery lawn to the crypt. Even as cold as it was, he could smell the stench of Garber as they approached. Dan held his breath and peeked in the door with the flashlight. As far as he could tell, none of the piles of chainsawed slop was moving or had moved at any point in the past several days. Some of them looked halfway to freezing.

Herbert spritzed the interior with gasoline. He joined Dan well back from the entrance with an old rag in one hand, weighted with a rock, and a cigarette lighter in the other.

“Would you care to do the honors?” Herbert said.

“Nah.” Dan shrugged comfortably against Herbert. “This is your thing.”

Herbert lit the rag on fire. Without ceremony he tossed it into the crypt, which caught fire instantly with a percussive sound that Dan felt in his chest. Orange flames glowed in the doorway, and waves of heat rolled out from it. The odor of rotten meat grew stronger and then turned acrid, like char. Dan swallowed hard.

Soon enough all that was left was the burning smell. Herbert slipped the cigarette lighter in the pocket of his coat.

“Does it help?” Dan asked. “Seeing him dead? Or, I dunno, more dead?” There were more degrees of death than Dan had imagined when he began medical school, but surely a man couldn’t be any more dead than Frank Garber was at that moment.

“It’ll do,” Herbert said. His quiet smugness was more comfort to Dan than any words he could have said. With barely a pause, Herbert added, “Do you think I’d live with just anyone? Let them into my lab? Ask them to share in my discoveries?”

Dan hadn’t thought of it quite like that. Or he had, but the other way around. “Well—”

“I’d rather work alone than with—well, any of those other idiots at the hospital or the university. You didn’t happen to be here, Dan.”

“No?”

“No. I thought—I thought you knew that. I thought we were partners. Aren’t we?” Herbert cast him an uncertain, sidelong glance. Herbert, who was so damn certain about so many things that no human ought to be certain about—but not this.

Dan’s pulse had picked up. “You mean partners in research?”

Herbert’s gaze shifted away, fixing firmly on the burning crypt. “Among other things.”

Dan took that in. It wasn’t a new idea, exactly; it had slowly taken shape in his mind over the past few days, mostly out of sight, buried under other, more immediate concerns like Tylenol and naps. He pressed his shoulder to Herbert’s. He felt off-balance, almost giddy, and maybe that was the concussion, but maybe not. “Like, the kind of partners that have sex sometimes? Just because we want to?”

This time Herbert’s glance had a promising glint to it. “I imagine we could work something out.”

Dan took a deep breath of the November air, its chill very slightly eased by the burning remains of Frank Garber. “Neat,” he said.