To whom it may concern

Simon smelled them before he saw them, the heavy, cloying scents of cotton candy and fried onion that couldn't quite mask the underlying must and mildew that came from soft things stored too long in damp places.

"Dang it, Harley," he said, pushing back the heap of mismatched coverlets that couldn't quite keep out the chill of the unheated house. "I said no."

"You said no guns," said Harley, not turning from his place at the window. Firelight danced in his eyes as, miles away, the carnival burned. On the lawn below them, stuffed animals looked up, hopeful and smiling.

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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"Oh, I know all about the Holmes boy," the Mayor said airly. "He's loyal as a dog." He grinned, his teeth white and even and blinding. "And when he realises I've taken his little friends, he'll come running like a dog. And then, as usually happens to boys who are loyal and good and true, he'll die like a dog."

Behind a tumble-down veil of hair that she'd thought she was long past wearing, Sara Sue glared hatred. At her side, Dash laughed.

"You're thinking of the wrong brother," he said. "Simon was loyal. Harley? He's just very, very angry."

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Simon was pretty certain that Chick Four now counted as a dragon.

Certainly, the false wall at the back of Mister Teller's garden shed could no longer shelter the scaled and towering thing the way it had when he'd been newly-hatched, part of a small clutch of hen's eggs nursed by a toad who had the misfortune to encounter Harley, and the foresight to run and hide when that happened.

Simon kept his eyes closed as he reached into his bag, produced wet and copper-smelling things that were still warm to the touch as he tossed them to the cockatrice.

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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What had once been the front of his parent's house was torn away, and the space behind it was a howling void where the wind shrieked like the souls of dead men and your breath froze to icy crystals that clung to a person's mouth and nose.

Simon nodded approvingly.

"It looks good," he said, smiling down at his little brother. Harley, round-cheeked and cherubic and apparently not keen to age beyond six any time soon, smiled back.

Tiny fingers, hot and dry, wrapped themselves around Simon's thumb and tugged him towards the towering basalt gates.

"Welcome home," Harley whispered.

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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"That guy?" said Marshall, with mounting disbelief. "The idiot who couldn't go out a window when you held it for him? That guy's a Prince of Hell?"

"Apparently," said Simon. "Harley said... well, he didn't say much, he just bowed and left the room."

Marshall gaped.

"That stupid fly-swarm outranks your brother?" he asked "Are you serious?"

"Makes sense to me," said Dash, shrugging. "It's Hell. What's more hellish than taking orders from someone dumber and less competent than you?"

"I don't want you to think that I didn't get that reference," said Marshall. "I'm just choosing to ignore it."

Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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The power came on and deep beneath a cracked and dented plastic shell, internal fans began to move.

Marshall could hear the click and whir of demonic wings struggling to take flight. The air grew hot and the smell of sulphur filled the room, the rank odour choking him and making his eyes burn. On the laptop in front of him was a login screen, red text on a black background.

Harley and Simon's usernames showed who had used it most recently, and both "6" keys were worn smooth and blank from constant use.

"Maybe I should get my own..."

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Marshall had to admit that the Tod and Donna Halloween Spooktacular Special was better than he'd expected.

Shot entirely in black and white, with unsettlingly skewed camera angles and a score comprised mostly of ominous organ riffs and scare chords, and containing at least three visual homages to Boris Von Orloff's "The Bloody Revenge of the Mummy's Curse" within the first twenty minutes alone, he'd actually been enjoying himself until the second act.

"Is that Harley?" he whispered, to Simon, who was dozing beside a bowl of popcorn bigger than his own torso.

Simon blinked, focused, and groaned.

"Not again!"

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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"That," said Dash X, his eyes wide and his voice tinged with genuine emotion. "Was beautiful."

Simon scowled at him, then at his baby brother.

"Don't talk to him," he said. "He's in trouble. You're in trouble! You're both in trouble!"

Dash spread his hands wide.

"I swear, Shrimpenstein, I had nothing to do with this. I was just innocently minding my own business in a security camera blind spot and saw the whole thing play out."

"I got pancakes," Harley informed him solemnly.

Dash smirked. "You sure did."

Simon closed his eyes tight. Was nine too young to go bald from stress? He thought he might be on his way to finding out...

"Dash," he said. "Thank you very much for bringing him home, but please don't encourage this."

Dash shook his head.

"You realise that's like asking fans of cheesy musicals not to encourage Andrew Lloyd Webber, right?" he said. "I've never seen anything like that before. I've gotta know how he did it."

"He's not showing you anything," Simon said. "You don't need my little brother to teach you better ways to crime, okay?"

He paused.

"Anyway, it wouldn't work. Harley's much, much cuter than you are."

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Simon leaned back in the rickety and wobbling kitchen chair, rubbing his eyes. A stray wisp of sticky tape caught on the fraying collar of his t-shirt, and he let it hang there.

"Well," he said, gesturing at the array of tiny, glittering cardboard cones before him. "What do you think?"

Harley tilted his head, a tiny index finger pressed against his smooth, round chin in a childish imitation of deep thought that was an unsettling as it was adorable. He thought for a long moment, then nodded.

At last, they had enough party hats for the Rat King's birthday.

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Hi! please find the unroll here: @wiz52: "If you're reading this, I'm either dead or have disappeared under mysterious circumstances..." Anyone else… https://t.co/5c5qggkCfM Enjoy :) 🤖

— Thread Reader App (@threadreaderapp) October 24, 2020

It's not Halloween, but lets get our George Bush masks on, make some popcorn and enjoy such classics as the Bloody Revenge of the Mummies Curse. If you're going to bite the remote control, make sure you're dressed warmly and have comfortable shoes on, because otherwise you may find yourself starring in... Scariest Home Videos.

"I'm not sure if that's a good sign or a bad one," Marshall muttered, carefully lifting one leg as a panicked Candy Drops scuttled behind him, threatening to snare him in the tangle of her own enchanted leash.

"Why does it have to be either?" asked Simon, stepping out of the writing coil of Snooter's lead and kneeling to comfort the little beast. "Just because they're supernatural and potentially dangerous doesn't mean they can't recognise something big enough to be a threat to them."

Marshall eyed Simon's little brother cautiously.

"Sort of what I meant," he said, as Harley waved.

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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"How many?" Marshall asked, and braced himself.

"Two," said Simon, and it wasn't great, but it was better than Mars had expected. He allowed himself a short sigh of relief, and felt his shoulders, hunched with tension, relax marginally.

"Okay," he said, already uncoiling a length of iron chain and laying it across the fairy ring like a makeshift bridge. "We can work with that. Put the rest back and come out of the circle."

Simon made a face. It was the sort of face Harley made a lot, Marshall himself only marginally less so, and Syndi occasionally, but memorably.

Ongoing Verse: Trusted Associates Inc

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Ongoing Verse: Teller Family History

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Simon looked at the glowing portal that hung in mid-air between Aisle 6.66 and Aisle 6.67. It was glowing a kind of sullen orange-red, and the faint sound of screams drifted on the sulphur-scented air that wafted from it's sixth-dimensional entrance.

"I am so sorry," he said again.

Mister Radford waved the apology away.

"Don't worry about it," he said. "These things happen."

"There's a gateway to hell in your store," said Simon.

"Well," said Radford. "I didn't say they happened often."

Simon turned to glare at his brother.

"Say you're sorry for eating the fabric of reality!" he scolded.

Ongoing Verse: The Powers That Be

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Lightning flashed overhead, and for a moment the sky was all aflame, the land beneath it lit bright as day though midnight had come and gone long since.

Thunder rumbled, shaking the single-pane glass in the soft and rotting wood of window frames up and down that long-abandoned street.

Dash X stood in the middle of the weed-cracked road, borrowed clothes plastered to him by the driving rain. This was his least-favourite outfit, the colours too bright and the whole thing several sizes too big, but it was still clothing he could ill-afford to lose.

His feet were bare, and in the light of the storm the scars on them were red, livid and shining. Beneath him, a thick rubber mat of the kind used in offices to lessen the chance of static discharge glistened like living oil.

Lightning cracked again, closer now. At the edge of town, something was burning. The new Weatherman didn't yet have Wally's level of control, and property damage happened more often these days.

The door to one of the houses banged open, caught by the rushing wind. In hand-me-down oil-slickers and heavy-soled rubber boots, Sara Sue and Harley said nothing as they joined him.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Weather

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It's not quite a Viking funeral - for all his muscle and mass, he's still a triple-folded sheet of A4 in the end and that means his body would burn up too quickly to suit the solemnity of the occasion - but it's not a bad approximation, either.

Sara Sue sketches a shallow-bottomed row boat, the benches missing, and after she's signed it into reality the three of them line it with moss gathered from the scrubland that surrounds the lake. She unfolds the rumpled sketch of the Nanny and smoothes the brittle paper over the soft, damp green.

Dash hadn't known Harley before the disappearances at the lake and his own long, dark years trapped in the cell beneath City Hall, and the quiet, slightly lost shadow left behind in Simon's absence doesn't bear much resemblance to the stories he'd heard back then. Still, he thinks he sees a glimmer of it when Harley shows up twenty minutes before Arnold's send-off with a crate of illegal fireworks and an honour guard courtesy of the Unkind Ones.

They slide the paper-light boat out onto the dark blue water, and when the gentle swell has carried it a little distance from the shore, the three of them shoot rockets at it until it catches fire, orange-white flames curling up to mingle with multi-coloured explosions that light up the night sky and reflect in the waves below.

The Unkind Ones stand with heads bowed and hands clasped, and Billy Millions doesn't answer when Dash presses him on exactly how Eerie's most notorious biker gang came to know the Haversock's mail-order nanny. Harley shrieks with laughter at some of the bigger explosions, and again Dash wonders about that six year old who could bite through reality, and how hard reality must have bitten back once Simon was gone.

Sara Sue selects a roman candle that's thicker around than she is, lining it up with the drifting, half-melted boat with the same carefully calculated precision that he's seen her apply to everything, from drawings designed to leave municipal buildings in screaming heaps of meat and rubble to the exact amount of whipped cream required to make a perfect sundae.

It bursts with a thousand cascading explosions of green and pink and blue, and the shrill whistle as it goes off is magnified tenfold by the empty space around them. As the last traces of Nanny Arnold are obliterated in alternating flashes of light and dark, Sara Sue's eyes are wide and wet, and she drinks in the final death of her oldest creation.

Ongoing Verse: Pay Attention

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Simon took a deep breath, willing his heart to slow down and the panicked rush of blood in his ears to quiet.

"Okay," he said, faking a calm he was in no way feeling. "Can you get the gist, at least?"

Harley tilted his face up, his spine cracking as his body twisted a slow and unnatural ninety degrees until he faced his brother straight-on. He smiled, and the perfect crescent curve of his small, white milk teeth was so like the grin of the monstrous squirrel that it made Simon shudder in the August heat.

"Oh yes," he said.

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: CAT

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Simon laid the well-worn sweater carefully at the bottom of the cardboard box, the arms coiled around the edges, the centre soft and flattened within the woolly ramparts. From their place side by side on his too-small bed, Harley and Tweedle-Tweep watched with interest.

"Okay," Simon said, when everything was eventually arranged to his satisfaction. "I think that'll do."

He turned to his audience, motioned for the little black cockatrice to join him on the dingy carpeting.

"What do you think?" he asked, tilting the makeshift nest so Tweedle-Tweep could get a better look.

Tweedle-Tweep trilled happily, and hopped inside.


Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Tweedle-Tweep was waiting for them when they emerged. For once, his song held a note of uncertainty, a tremor that ran through all seven bars.

Simon knelt on the rotting concrete step, hand open, palm up, and the little cockatrice climbed into it. He fluffed his void-black feathers, spiny tail thrashing as he peeped an interrogatory towards the now-closed front door.

"It's okay," Simon assured him, gently transferring him to his left hand as his right slung the too-small bookbag over his shoulder. He glanced back at the house and repeated, softer, "It'll be okay."

"I'll see if Dash can get that magical fox to cover the rest of his shift at the Order," said Marshall. "We can pick him up, swing by Eerie Video, rent whichever movie the Wilson Twins gave the most fingers to this week."

Simon gave his best friend a smile. At twenty-two, he no longer had to look up to do it, but the gesture still held some of that element.

"Thanks," he said. "I do still need to drop that feed 'round for Baba Yaga before the chupacabras go stir-crazy though."

"It can wait 'til tomorrow," said Marshall. "It can all wait for tomorrow."

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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"See?" said Simon. "I told you. You can't live off candyfloss and caramel apples and sugared popcorn alone."

Harley made a dismissive noise, far too old for the childlike face he currently wore. Simon sighed.

"Fine," he said. "Eat at Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show every night until you get cavities, but remember you've got thirteen supernumerary teeth already, and more coming in all the time."

Harley scowled.

"I brush," he said, and around him the Rat King susurrated with embarrassment, either at the lie itself or at how poorly it was delivered.

"Mm-hmm," said Simon, his tone sceptical.

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Simon stood, lifting Eerie's leading Anti-Christ in his arms and spinning him around the gutted room as Harley shrieked with glee.

"Again!" he demanded, when Simon eventually set him down upon a stone floor that glowed red beneath his tiny feet.

"No way," said Simon, reaching out with one adult-sized hand and ruffling his brother's hair. "I'm too old and you're almost too big!"

Harley frowned.

"I'll be smaller next time," he said. "I'll teach you how to be younger, too."

Simon shook his head.

"Maybe later," he said. "Right now, there's things I need to be a grown-up for."


Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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"Harley," Simon called, stepping over the jagged edge of a torn-out skirting board and ducking under a wooden strut in order to pass from the corridor to the lounge. "You around?"

The inside of the pillow fort was dark, darker than it should have been with the midday sun streaming through the unshaded windows. Nothing stirred within.

Marshall's skin prickled. The Rat King was everywhere, watching from every shadowed spot in the hollowed-out shell of the house. Wherever he looked, dozens of black eyes glittered back at him.

Simon sighed.

"Harley Schwarzenegger Holmes," he said. "Get your butt out here."

Ongoing Verse: Holmes Brothers

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Ongoing Verse: Microwave

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