All Chapters of The Third Twin: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

ONEEGGS AND ELEPHANTS1The winter issue of Backtrails magazine appeared in my mailbox in February. Though I’d never heard of the magazine, much less subscribed to it, the following May I was on a plane for Munich answering one of its ads. It wasn’t unusual for me to respond to the call of a distant place or activity. An avid outdoorsman, I’d hiked, biked, climbed, snowboarded, skydived, even canyoned at various locations throughout the States and Eur

Call me paranoid. Call me what you will. But this place was freakish, and never more clearly than now as I pushed through a crowd gathered around a transparent tank in which an armless and horribly burn-scarred man wearing nothing but a Speedo sat among thousands of hairy spiders that crawled over his body like a shivering coat of fleece. The onlookers squealed as the object of their delight opened his mouth, inviting one of the hairy crawlers inside. When the spider accepted the invitation, their voices grew even shriller. When the man bit into it, they lost all semblance of belonging to a civilized species.A snowboarding buddy once told me that in the Red Light back alleys of Amsterdam he had been dragged into a sex show featuring a woman with one leg ‘doing it’ with a woman with no legs. I asked him why he’d let himself be dra

I had one order of business to attend to before making the journey. His name: Bobby Owens. I’d no trouble spotting the young man when he came out of school the next afternoon. Coach Wells, his basketball coach and a friend of mine, had told me to look for a tall kid with younger girls draped over him. His entourage gave me the suspicious eye when I separated him from their company, but I paid them no mind as I suggested to young Mr. Groves that we take a ride. It wasn’t clear whether or not he knew who I was at this point, but he was certainly alarmed by my interest, as evidenced by the meager ‘Why?’ he managed to get out after a difficult swallow. To bring it all together for him, I threw out Dr. Whittler’s name. To this he responded more actively, glancing around to see who was looking before ducking inside the cab of my beat-up 4Runner, squeezing his backpack to his chest like a security blanket.

To my voiced approval, my hotel had a ‘business center’, which basically consisted of a computer and a printer perched on a desk that barely fit in the small cubicle. The internet service wasn’t the best, the load times irksomely long, but when the results for my search engine entry came up, the wait proved worth it. The very first link led to an interesting article, but when taken in context, became the unearthed Dead Sea Scrolls, a mysterious supporting document to a book built on faith or delusion.The website was a news oriented publication out of the UK. The article, dated January 24, 2009, focused on the abnormal ratio of twins to single births in a small Brazilian town. That fearsome villain of the modern era, Josef Mengele, was named in the title of the article. Strange that a name which ordinarily existed in the pages of history

Having no desire to be caught exposed on the open road, I decided to find another route back. The most obvious option was the shoreline, assuming it was traversable. I suspected the street descended around the next hill to the vicinity of the shore, but even taking it in the opposite direction from town smacked of tempting fate, which I was sure had had enough of me today. If I needed proof of that, I’d only to look at the small gash in my arm. How I’d mustered the balls to even consider it, I don’t know, but when I’d wandered from the shop back to the gate in the rear wall, checking its lock, I’d spooked a rather large but mobile lizard perched on top of the wall, which had managed in its flight to relocate a piece of glass (like castle defender, like castle defender) that caught the edge of my forearm as it fell. Whether I would have followed through with the idea of entering the Cunhedo home was another question I’d no answer to, but I’d taken my