Marshall did not like visiting Harley. It wasn't just that Simon's brother appeared to be functionally ageless, frozen in eternity as a mostly-silent, permanently grinning six year old. It wasn't the Rat King, discorporated into thousands of rodents whose black eyes all shone with a single driving intelligence. The now-sprawling brood of cockatrice kept to themselves in their stony kingdom on what used to be the Holmes' front lawn, and the goat that had once been earmarked for sacrifice at the Witch Queen's Black Mass cropped placidly at whatever greenery remained, content to graze in the moments when he wasn't trotting at his master's side.
No, it was the house. The house that had stood next to his own the day he moved to Eerie, paint peeling and rusted screens hanging at odd angles from windows whose frames warped and rotted with every winter cold snap and damp spring thaw. The house that sat unchanged, weeds springing up in the cracked driveway as the carcass of an abandoned car slowly melted back into the iron-red ground around it. The house where the air still hummed with the memory of voices raised in anger, and words and other things thrown to wound.
The house Simon had grown up in.
Chick Four lifted one of it's four heads as they approached, yellow eyes appraising them as a dozen forked tongues flickered out of a beak lined with serrated teeth, tasting the air. It climbed to some of it's clawed feet, the first third of a long and serpentine body raising out of dust that smelled like cold stone and rosemary.
Simon waved to it.
"Hey, boy," he said, shoving one hand deep into his jacket pocket and emerging with a small bag of poultry feed, which he dangled encouragingly. "I brought you a treat."
It shouldn't be possible for something with four beaks to smile fondly, but Marshall could swear the old cockatrice managed it.
With a rasp and whisper of scales against shale, Chick Four half-slithered, half-bobbed towards them. Simon scattered the grain in a thin line in front of the four heads, then set about petting each one in turn.
A few of the Rat Kings' smaller rats scuttled over, noses twitching, pink paws grabbing greedily for any overlooked fragments of the treat Simon had brought.
"You're like the princess out of a nightmare-world Walt Disney," Marshall told his friend, as the rats swarmed around their ankles and the other cockatrice shook off reptilian dreams and came to join the throng.
Simon only laughed, fishing out a seemingly endless supply of goodies as he stroked and scratched and whispered compliments to a monstrous horde.
"Nah," he said. "The real royalty is inside, and he knows we're here. Let's head in and say hi."
He stepped over a wriggling knot of grey-brown sewer rats and pushed open the faded red door of 997 Normal Avenue.
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