City of the Absent by Robert W. Walker Read Free Book Online Page B

Vander’s hunched back either, as he’d been the lucky one at birth and looked normal by everyday standards.
    Philander now gesticulated like a wild baboon at his brother to Shut up and back up into the shadows!
    Domestic sounds from the windows of houses warmed by a hearth on either side floated on the air. And the hint of anyone who rode past in a cab came to the ear immediately and with such force as to spin Philander Rolsky, a man of instinct, to the next sound and the next opportunity.
    The report of approaching footfalls again seemed shockingly vivid to Philander’s ear. The sound of even the slightest, thinnest vermin could be heard as a result of so crisp a night.
    Philander settled in for a long watch below the shadows of McCumbler and Hurley’s law offices, old-world Polish or Austrian castlelike turrets forming overhanging window facings. Chicago’s architecture proved as varied and multifaceted as its population.
    Philander looked at the list again, his eyes and mind ticking off the anonymous names—people the good doctor had targeted for harvesting, people the good doctor felt contributed nothing to their families, their neighborhoods, their city, their world. Disposable people. People that Philander and his brother could watch and in a vulnerable moment snatch.
    From his vantage point, Philander—the smart twin—watched for a victim from the list, a Mr. Burbach, who frequented this street each night about this time to go through the garbage set out by the grocery and the restaurant beside the attorney’s office. Philander grimaced now, disapproving of Vander’s pacing, singing of all things, drawing attention to himself, while the men who’d dropped Vander coin had not even known that a second man was here. They’d gone right past him and never knew.
    His teeth began to hurt from the grinding caused by worries brought on by Vander. “My counterpart,” he muttered, “the one of us without patience or cunning or boldness. My broken, timid other self.” He flailed with both hands again to signal his disgust at his brother for being under a light and easily seen and recognized.
    â€œLet the fool be arrested and tossed into the Cook County loony bin,” he muttered to himself. “Deserves nothing better. Fool will get me caught as well.”
    The dead , Alexander , could’ve been me , he thought, else the thought was forced on me from my second and dead brother. Just as I could’ve been born Vander , and Vander could’ve been me. Just barely escaped being stillborn , then being Vander , and in a sense , I’ve not escaped either. Not at all.
    â€œVander, oh…Vander,” he muttered. “He’ll never fly.”
    His dead brother’s creaky voice sounded a reply. “Yes, b-but he makes a g-good diversion t-to the real show.” Philander had become so accustomed to his third self, speaking from inside his head, that it never shocked or surprised him.
    They were born triplets, a rarity if only the third born had not died and the second hadn’t come out a brain-dented fool. So their mother had lamented all their lives. Who knows? Perhaps the trio might’ve been celebrated as a rarity. Perhaps mama wasn’t exaggerating, but what kind of a freak did that make him? Philander wondered.
    The dead one was Alexander, but even dead, Alex still had a voice—a sepulchral voice to be sure, but clear as a bell inside Philander’s head. The other one, across the street, surveying another direction for prey, Vander, couldn’t hear Alex’s voice. He hadn’t the imagination or element of empathy, Philander had decided years before. Mama had called the dead one simply It or Number Three , adding, Though it’d come out after Philander and before Vander.
    The stillborn one was never christened, except by his first-born brother years later when it made itself known inside him like a phantom limb or