Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
By Cory Doctorow
3
Saturday night arrived faster than Alan could have imagined. He spent Saturday morning in the woods, picking mushrooms and checking his snares, then headed down to town on Saturday afternoon to get a haircut and to haunt the library.
Converting his father’s gold to cash was easier than getting a library card without an address. There was an old assayer whom the golems had described to him before his first trip to town. The man was cheap but he knew enough about the strangeness on the mountain not to cheat him too badly. The stern librarian who glared at him while he walked the shelves, sometimes looking at the titles, sometimes the authors, and sometimes the Dewey Decimal numbers had no such fear.
The Deweys were fascinating. They traced the fashions in human knowledge and wisdom. It was easy enough to understand why the arbiters of the system placed subdivided Motorized Land Vehicles (629.2) into several categories, but here in the 629.22s, where the books on automobiles were, you could see the planners’ deficiencies. Automobiles divided into dozens of major subcategories (taxis and limousines, buses, light trucks, cans, lorries, tractor trailers, campers, motorcycles, racing cars, and so on), then ramified into a combinatorial explosion of sub-sub-sub categories. There were Dewey numbers on some of the automotive book spines that had twenty digits or more after the decimal, an entire Dewey Decimal system hidden between 629.2 and 629.3.
To the librarian, this shelf-reading looked like your garden-variety screwing around, but what really made her nervous were Alan’s excursions through the card catalogue, which required constant tending to replace the cards that errant patrons made unauthorized reorderings of.
The subject headings in the third bank of card drawers were the most interesting of all. They, too, branched and forked and rejoined themselves like the meanderings of an ant colony on the march. He’d go in sequence for a while, then start following cross-references when he found an interesting branch, keeping notes on scraps of paper on top of the file drawer. He had spent quite some time in the mythology categories, looking up golems and goblins, looking up changelings and monsters, looking up seers and demigods, but none of the books that he’d taken down off the shelves had contained anything that helped him understand his family better.
His family was uncatalogued and unclassified in human knowledge.
He rang the bell on Marci’s smart little brick house at bang-on six, carrying some daisies he’d bought from the grocery store, following the etiquette laid down in several rather yucky romance novels he’d perused that afternoon.
She answered in jeans and a T-shirt, and punched him in the arm before he could give her the flowers. “Don’t you look smart?” she said. “Well, you’re not fooling anyone, you know.” She gave him a peck on the cheek and snatched away the daisies. “Come along, then, we’re eating soon.”
Marci sat him down in the living room, which was furnished with neutral sofas and a neutral carpet and a neutral coffee table. The bookcases were bare. “It’s horrible,” she said, making a face. She was twittering a little, dancing from foot to foot. Alan was glad to know he wasn’t the only one who was uncomfortable. “Isn’t it? The company put us up here. We had a grand flat in Scotland.”
“It’s nice,” Alan said, “but you look like you could use some books.”
She crossed her eyes. “Books? Sure – I’ve got ten boxes of them in the basement. You can come by and help me unpack them.”
“Ten boxes?” Alan said. “You’re making that up.” Ten boxes of books! Things like books didn’t last long under the mountain, in the damp and with the ever-inquisitive, ever-destructive Davey exploring every inch of floor and cave and corridor in search of opportunities for pillage.
“I ain’t neither,” she said. “At least ten. It was a grand flat and they were all in alphabetical order, too.”
“Can we go see?” Alan asked, getting up from the sofa.
“See boxes?”
“Yes,” Alan said. “And look inside. We could unbox them after dinner, okay?”
“That’s more of an afternoon project,” said a voice from the top of the stairs.
“That’s my Da,” she said. “Come down and introduce yourself to Alan, Da,” she said. “You’re not the voice of God, so you can bloody well turn up and show your face.”
“No more sass, gel, or it will go very hard for you,” said the voice. The accent was like Marci’s squared, thick as oatmeal, liqueur-thick. Nearly incomprehensible, but the voice was kind and smart and patient, too.
“You’ll have a hard time giving me any licks from the top of the stairs, Da, and Alan looks like he’s going to die if you don’t at least come down and say hello.”
Alan blushed furiously. “You can come down whenever you like, sir,” he said. “That’s all right.”
“That’s mighty generous of you, young sir,” said the voice. “Aye. But before I come down, tell me, are your intentions toward my daughter honorable?”
His cheeks grew even hotter, and his ears felt like they were melting with embarrassment. “Yes, sir,” he said in a small voice.
“He’s a dreadful pervert, Da,” Marci said. “You should see the things he tries, you’d kill him, you would.” She grinned foxish and punched him in the shoulder. He sank into the cushions, face suddenly drained of blood.
“What?” roared the voice, and there was a clatter of slippers on the neutral carpet of the stairs. Alan didn’t want to look but found that he couldn’t help himself, his head inexorably turned toward the sound, until a pair of thick legs hove into sight, whereupon Marci leapt into his lap an threw her arms around his neck.
“Ge’orff me, pervert!” she said, as she began to cover his face in darting, pecking kisses.
He went rigid and tried to sink all the way into the sofa.
“All right, all right, that’s enough of that,” her father said. Marci stood and dusted herself off. Alan stared at his knees.
“She’s horrible, isn’t she?” said the voice, and a great, thick hand appeared in his field of vision. He shook it tentatively, noting the heavy class ring and the thin, plain wedding band. He looked up slowly.
Marci’s father was short but powerfully built, like the wrestlers on the other kids’ lunchboxes at school. He had a shock of curly black hair that was flecked with dandruff, and a thick bristling mustache that made him look very fierce, though his eyes were gentle and bookish behind thick glasses. He was wearing wool trousers and a cable-knit sweater that was unraveling at the elbows.
“Pleased to meet you, Albert,” he said. They shook hands gravely. “I’ve been after her to unpack those books since we moved here. You could come by tomorrow afternoon and help, if you’d like – I think it’s the only way I’ll get herself to stir her lazy bottom to do some chores around here.”
“Oh, Da!” Marci said. “Who cooks around here? Who does the laundry?”
“The take-away pizza man does the majority of the cooking, daughter. And as for laundry, the last time I checked, there were two weeks’ worth of laundry to do.”
“Da,” she said in a sweet voice, “I love you Da,” she said, wrapping her arms around his trim waist.
“You see what I have to put up with?” her father said, snatching her up and dangling her by her ankles.
She flailed her arms about and made outraged choking noises while he swung her back and forth like a pendulum, releasing her at the top of one arc so that she flopped onto the sofa in a tangle of thin limbs.
“It’s a madhouse around here,” her father continued as Marci righted herself, knocking Alan in the temple with a tennis shoe, “but what can you do? Once she’s a little bigger, I can put her to work in the mines, and then I’ll have a little peace around here.” He sat down on an overstuffed armchair with a fussy antimacassar.
“He’s got a huge life-insurance policy,” Marci said conspiratorially. “I’m just waiting for him to kick the bucket and then I’m going to retire.”
“Oh, aye,” her father said. “Retire. Your life is an awful one, it is. Junior high is a terrible hardship, I know.”
Alan found himself grinning.
“What’s so funny?” Marci said, punching him in the shoulder.
“You two are,” he said, grabbing her arm and then digging his fingers into her tummy, doubling her over with tickles.
There were twelve boxes of books. The damp in the basement had softened the cartons to cottage-cheese mush, and the back covers of the bottom layer of paperbacks were soft as felt. To Alan, these seemed unremarkable – all paper under the mountain looked like this after a week or two, even if Doug didn’t get to it – but Marci was heartbroken.
“My books, my lovely books, they’re roont!” she said, as they piled them on the living room carpet.
“They’re fine,” Alan said. “They’ll dry out a little wobbly, but they’ll be fine. We’ll just spread the damp ones out on the rug and shelve the rest.”
And that’s what they did, book after book – old books, hardcover books, board-back kids’ books, new paperbacks, dozens of green- and orange-spined Penguin paperbacks. He fondled them, smelled them. Some smelled of fish and chips, and some smelled of road dust, and some smelled of Marci, and they had dog ears where she’d stopped and cracks in their spines where she’d bent them around. They fell open to pages that had her favorite passages. He felt wobbly and drunk as he touched each one in turn.
“Have you read all of these?” Alan asked as he shifted the John Mortimers down one shelf to make room for the Ed McBains.
“Naw,” she said, punching him in the shoulder. “What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?”
She caught him in the schoolyard on Monday and dragged him by one ear out to the marshy part. She pinned him down and straddled his chest and tickled him with one hand so that he cried out and used the other hand to drum a finger across his lips, so that his cries came out “bibble.”
Once he’d bucked her off, they kissed for a little while, then she grabbed hold of one of his nipples and twisted.
“All right,” she said. “Enough torture. When do I get to meet your family?”
“You can’t,” he said, writhing on the pine needles, which worked their way up the back of his shirt and pricked him across his lower back, feeling like the bristles of a hairbrush.
“Oh, I can, and I will,” she said. She twisted harder.
He slapped her hand away. “My family is really weird,” he said. “My parents don’t really ever go out. They’re not like other people. They don’t talk.” All of it true.
“They’re mute?”
“No, but they don’t talk.”
“They don’t talk much, or they don’t talk at all?” She pronounced it a-tall.
“Not at all.”
“How did you and your brothers learn to talk, then?”
“Neighbors.” Still true. The golems lived in the neighboring caves. “And my father, a little.” True.
“So you have neighbors who visit you?” she asked, a triumphant gleam in her eye.
Damn. “No, we visit them.” Lying now. Sweat on the shag of hair over his ears, which felt like they had coals pressed to them.
“When you were a baby?”
“No, my grandparents took care of me when I was a baby.” Deeper. “But they died.” Bottoming out now.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, and he saw tears glisten in her eyes. “You’re too embarrassed to introduce me to your family.”
“That’s not it.” He thought fast. “My brother. David. He’s not well. He has a brain tumor. We think he’ll probably die. That’s why he doesn’t come to school. And it makes him act funny. He hits people, says terrible things.” Mixing truth with lies was a lot easier. “He shouts and hurts people and he’s the reason I can’t ever have friends over. Not until he dies.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If that’s a lie,” she said, “it’s a terrible one. My Ma died of cancer, and it’s not something anyone should make fun of. So, it better not be a lie.”
“It’s not a lie,” he said, mustering a tear. “My brother David, we don’t know how long he’ll live, but it won’t be long. He acts like a monster, so it’s hard to love him, but we all try.”
She rocked back onto her haunches. “It’s true, then?” she asked softly.
He nodded miserably.
“Let’s say no more about it, then,” she said. She took his hand and traced hieroglyphs on his palm with the ragged edges of her chewed-up fingernails.
The recess bell rang and they headed back to school. They were about to leave the marshland when something hard hit Alan in the back of the head. He spun around and saw a small, sharp rock skitter into the grass, saw Davey’s face contorted with rage, lips pulled all the way back off his teeth, half-hidden in the boughs of a tree, winding up to throw another rock.
He flinched away and the rock hit the paving hard enough to bounce. Marci whirled around, but David was gone, high up in the leaves, invisible, malicious, biding.
“What was that?”
“I dunno,” Alan lied, and groaned.
Kurt and Alan examined every gap between every storefront on Augusta, no matter how narrow. Kurt kept silent as Alan fished his arm up to the shoulder along miniature alleys that were just wide enough to accommodate the rain gutters depending from the roof.
They found the alley that Frederick had been dragged down near the end of the block, between a mattress store and an egg wholesaler. It was narrow enough that they had to traverse it sideways, but there, at the entrance, were two smears of skin and blood, just above the ground, stretching off into the sulfurous, rotty-egg depths of the alleyway.
They slid along the alley’s length, headed for the gloom of the back. Something skittered away from Alan’s shoe and he bent down, but couldn’t see it. He ran his hands along the ground and the walls and they came back with a rime of dried blood and a single strand of long, oily hair stuck to them. He wiped his palms off on the bricks.
“I can’t see,” he said.
“Here,” Kurt said, handing him a miniature maglight whose handle was corrugated by hundreds of toothmarks. Alan saw that he was intense, watching.
Alan twisted the light on. “Thanks,” he said, and Kurt smiled at him, seemed a little taller. Alan looked again. There, on the ground, was a sharpened black tooth, pierced by a piece of pipe-cleaner wire.
He pocketed the tooth before Kurt saw it and delved farther, approaching the alley’s end, which was carpeted with a humus of moldering cardboard, leaves, and road turds blown or washed there. He kicked it aside as best he could, then crouched down to examine the sewer grating beneath. The greenish brass screws that anchored it to the ground had sharp cuts in their old grooves where they had been recently removed. He rattled the grating, which was about half a meter square, then slipped his multitool out of his belt holster. He flipped out the Phillips driver and went to work on the screws, unconsciously putting Kurt’s flashlight in his mouth, his front teeth finding purchase in the dents that Kurt’s own had left there.
He realized with a brief shudder that Kurt probably used this flashlight while nipple-deep in dumpsters, had an image of Kurt transferring it from his gloved hands to his mouth and back again as he dug through bags of kitchen and toilet waste, looking for discarded technology. But the metal was cool and clean against his teeth and so he bit down and worked the four screws loose, worked his fingers into the mossy slots in the grate, lifted it out, and set it to one side.
He shone the light down the hole and found another fingerbone, the tip of a thumb, desiccated to the size of a large raisin, and he pocketed that, too. There was a lot of blood here, a little puddle that was still wet in the crusted middle. Frederick’s blood.
He stepped over the grating and shone the light back down the hole, inviting Kurt to have a look.
“That’s where they went,” he said as Kurt bent down.
“That hole?”
“That hole,” he said.
“Is that blood?”
“That’s blood. It’s not easy to fit someone my brother’s size down a hole like that.” He set the grate back, screwed it into place, and passed the torch back to Kurt. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
On the street, Alan looked at his blood and moss-grimed palms. Kurt pushed back his floppy, frizzed-out, bleach-white mohawk and scratched vigorously at the downy brown fuzz growing in on the sides of his skull.
“You think I’m a nut,” Alan said. “It’s okay, that’s natural.”
Kurt smiled sheepishly. “If it’s any consolation, I think you’re a harmless nut, okay? I like you.”
“You don’t have to believe me, so long as you don’t get in my way,” Alan said. “But it’s easier if you believe me.”
“Easier to do what?”
“Oh, to get along,” Alan said.
Davey leapt down from a rock outcropping as Alan made his way home that night, landing on his back. Alan stumbled and dropped his school bag. He grabbed at the choking arm around his neck, then dropped to his knees as Davey bounced a fist-sized stone off his head, right over his ear.
He slammed himself back, pinning Davey between himself and the sharp stones on the walkway up to the cave entrance, then mashed backward with his elbows, his head ringing like a gong from the stone’s blow. His left elbow connected with Davey’s solar plexus and the arm around his throat went slack.
He climbed to his knees and looked Davey in the face. He was blue and gasping, but Alan couldn’t work up a lot of sympathy for him as he reached up to the side of his head and felt the goose egg welling there. His fingertips came back with a few strands of hair blood-glued to them.
He’d been in a few schoolyard scraps and this was always the moment when a teacher intervened – one combatant pinned, the other atop him. What could you do after this? Was he going to take the rock from Davey’s hand and smash him in the face with it, knocking out his teeth, breaking his nose, blacking his eyes? Could he get off of Davey without getting back into the fight?
He pinned Davey’s shoulders under his knees and took him by the chin with one hand. “You can’t do this, Danny,” he said, looking into his hazel eyes, which had gone green as they did when he was angry.
“Do what?”
“Spy on me. Try to hurt me. Try to hurt my friends. Tease me all the time. You can’t do it, okay?”
“I’ll stab you in your sleep, Andy. I’ll break your fingers with a brick. I’ll poke your eyes out with a fork.” He was fizzling like a baking-soda volcano, saliva slicking his cheeks and nostrils and chin, his eyes rolling.
Alan felt helplessness settle on him, weighing down his limbs. How could he let him go? What else could he do? Was he going to have to sit on Davey’s shoulders until they were both old men?
“Please, Davey. I’m sorry about what I said. I just can’t bring her home, you understand,” he said.
“Pervert. She’s a slut and you’re a pervert. I’ll tear her titties off.”
“Don’t, Danny, please. Stop, okay?”
Darren bared his teeth and growled, jerking his head forward and snapping at Alan’s crotch, heedless of the painful thuds his head made when it hit the ground after each lunge.
Alan waited to see if he would tire himself out, but when it was clear that he would not tire, Alan waited for his head to thud to the ground and then, abruptly, he popped him in the chin, leapt off of him turned him on his belly, and wrenched him to his knees, twisting one arm behind his back and pulling his head back by the hair. He brought Davey to his feet, under his control, before he he’d recovered from the punch.
“I’m telling Dad,” he said in Davey’s ear, and began to frog-march him through to the cave mouth and down into the lake in the middle of the mountain. He didn’t even slow down when they reached the smooth shore of the lake, just pushed on, sloshing in up to his chest, Davey’s head barely above the water.
“He won’t stop,” Alan said, to the winds, to the water, to the vaulted ceiling, to the scurrying retreat of the goblin. “I think he’ll kill me if he goes on. He’s torturing me. You’ve seen it. Look at him!”
Davey was thrashing in the water, his face swollen and bloody, his eyes rattling like dried peas in a maraca. Alan’s fingers, still buried in Davey’s shiny blond hair, kept brushing up against the swollen bruises there, getting bigger by the moment. “I’ll fucking kill you!” Davey howled, screaming inchoate into the echo that came back from his call.
“Shhh,” Alan said into his ear. “Shhh. Listen, Davey, please, shhh.”
Davey’s roar did not abate. Alan thought he could hear the whispers and groans of their father in the wind, but he couldn’t make it out. “Please, shhh,” he said, gathering Davey in a hug that pinned his arms to his sides, putting his lips up against Davey’s ear, holding him still.
“Shhh,” he said, and Davey stopped twitching against him, stopped his terrible roar, and they listened.
At first the sound was barely audible, a soughing through the tunnels, but gradually the echoes chased each other round the great cavern and across the still, dark surface of the lake, and then a voice, illusive as a face in the clouds.
“My boys,” the voice said, their father said. “My sons. David, Alan. You must not fight like this.”
“He –!” Davey began, the echoes of his outburst scattering their father’s voice.
“Shhh,” Alan said again.
“Daniel, you must love your brother. He loves you. I love you. Trust him. He won’t hurt you. I won’t let you come to any harm. I love you, son.”
Alan felt Danny tremble in his arms, and he was trembling, too, from the icy cold of the lake and from the voice and the words and the love that echoed from every surface.
“Adam, my son. Keep your brother safe. You need each other. Don’t be impatient or angry with him. Give him love.”
“I will,” Alan said, and he relaxed his arms so that he was holding Danny in a hug and not a pinion. Danny relaxed back into him. “I love you, Dad,” he said, and they trudged out of the water, out into the last warmth of the day’s sun, to dry out on the slope of the mountainside, green grass under their bodies and wispy clouds in the sky that they watched until the sun went out.
Marci followed him home a week before Christmas break. He didn’t notice her at first. She was cunning, and followed his boot prints in the snow. A blizzard had blown up halfway through the school day, and by the time class let out, there was fresh knee-deep powder and he had to lift each foot high to hike through it, the shush of his snow pants and the huff of his breath the only sounds in the icy winter evening.
She followed the deep prints of his boots on the fresh snow, stalking him like he stalked rabbits in the woods. When he happened to turn around at the cave mouth, he spotted her in her yellow snow-suit, struggling up the mountainside, barely visible in the twilight.
He’d never seen an intruder on the mountain. The dirt trail that led up to the cave branched off a side road on the edge of town, and it was too rocky even for the dirt-bike kids. He stood at the cave-mouth, torn by indecision. He wanted to keep walking, head away farther uphill, away from the family’s den, but now she’d seen him, had waved to him. His cold-numb face drained of blood and his bladder hammered insistently at him. He hiked down the mountain and met her.
“Why are you here?” he said, once he was close enough to see her pale, freckled face.
“Why do you think?” she said. “I followed you home. Where do you live, Alan? Why can’t I even see where you live?”
He felt tears prick at his eyes. “You just can’t! I can’t bring you home!”
“You hate me, don’t you?” she said, hands balling up into mittened fists. “That’s it.”
“I don’t hate you, Marci. I – I love you,” he said, surprising himself.
She punched him hard in the arm. “Shut up.” She kissed his cheek with her cold, dry lips and the huff of her breath thawed his skin, making it tingle.
“Where do you live, Alan?”
He sucked air so cold it burned his lungs. “Come with me.” He took her mittened hand in his and trudged up to the cave mouth.
They entered the summer cave, where the family spent its time in the warm months, now mostly empty, save for some straw and a few scattered bits of clothing and toys. He led her through the cave, his eyes adjusting to the gloom, back to the right-angle bend behind a stalactite baffle, toward the sulfur reek of the hot spring on whose shores the family spent its winters.
“It gets dark,” he said. “I’ll get you a light once we’re inside.”
Her hand squeezed his tighter and she said nothing.
It grew darker and darker as he pushed into the cave, helping her up the gentle incline of the cave floor. He saw well in the dark – the whole family did – but he understood that for her this was a blind voyage.
They stepped out into the sulfur-spring cavern, the acoustics of their breathing changed by the long, flat hollow. In the dark, he saw Edward-Frederick-George playing with his matchbox cars in one corner; Davey leaned up against their mother, sucking his thumb. Billy was nowhere in sight, probably hiding out in his room – he would, of course, have foreseen this visit.
He put her hand against the cave wall, then said, “Wait here.” He let go of her and walked quickly to the heap of winter coats and boots in the corner and dug through them for the flashlight he used to do his homework by. It was a hand-crank number, and as he squeezed it to life, he pointed it at Marci, her face wan and scared in its light. He gave the flashlight a few more pumps to get its flywheel spinning, then passed it to her.
“Just keep squeezing it,” he said. “It doesn’t need batteries.” He took her hand again. It was limp.
“You can put your things on the pile,” he said, pointing to the coats and boots. He was already shucking his hat and mittens and boots and snow pants and coat. His skin flushed with the warm vapors coming off of the sulfur spring.
“You live here?” she said. The light from the flashlight was dimming and he reached over and gave it a couple of squeezes, then handed it back to her.
“I live here. It’s complicated.”
Davey’s eyes were open and he was staring at them with squinted eyes and a frown.
“Where are your parents?” she said.
“It’s complicated,” he said again, as though that explained everything. “This is my secret. No one else knows it.”
Edward-Frederick-George tottered over to them with an armload of toy cars, which he mutely offered to Marci, smiling a drooly smile. Alan patted him on the head and knelt down. “I don’t think Marci wants to play cars, okay?” Ed nodded solemnly and went back to the edge of the pool and began running his cars through the nearly scalding water.
Marci reached out a hand ahead of her into the weak light, looked at the crazy shadows it cast on the distant walls. “How can you live here? It’s a cave, Alan. How can you live in a cave?”
“You get used to it,” Alan said. “I can’t explain it all, and the parts that I can explain, you wouldn’t believe. But you’ve been to my home now, Marci. I’ve shown you where I live.”
Davey approached them, a beatific smile on his angelic face.
“This is my brother, Daniel,” Alan said. “The one I told you about.”
“You’re his slut,” Davey said. He was still smiling. “Do you touch his peter?”
Alan flinched, suppressing a desire to smack Davey, but Marci just knelt down and looked him in the eye. “Nope,” she said. “Are you always this horrible to strangers?”
“Yes!” Davey said, cheerfully. “I hate you, and I hate him,” he cocked his head Alanward. “And you’re all motherfuckers.“
“But we’re not wee horrible shits, Danny,” she said. “We’re not filthy-mouthed brats who can’t keep a civil tongue.”
Davey snapped his head back and then forward, trying to get her in the bridge of the nose, a favorite tactic of his, but she was too fast for him and ducked it, so that he stumbled and fell to his knees.
“Your mother’s going to be very cross when she finds out how you’ve been acting. You’ll be lucky if you get any Christmas pressies,” she said as he struggled to his feet.
He swung a punch at her groin, and she caught his wrist and then hoisted him to his tiptoes by his arm, then lifted him off the floor, bringing his face up level with hers. “Stop it,” she said. “Now.”
He fell silent and narrowed his eyes as he dangled there, thinking about this. Then he spat in her face. Marci shook her head slowly as the gob of spit slid down her eyebrow and over her cheek, then she spat back, nailing him square on the tip of his nose. She set him down and wiped her face with a glove.
Davey started toward her, and she lifted a hand and he flinched back and then ran behind their mother, hiding in her tangle of wires and hoses. Marci gave the flashlight a series of hard cranks that splashed light across the washing machine and then turned to Alan.
“That’s your brother?”
Alan nodded.
“Well, I see why you didn’t want me to come home with you, then.”
Kurt was properly appreciative of Alan’s bookcases and trophies, ran his fingertips over the wood, willingly accepted some iced mint tea sweetened with honey, and used a coaster without having to be asked.
“A washing machine and a mountain,” he said.
“Yes,” Alan said. “He kept a roof over our heads and she kept our clothes clean.”
“You’ve told that joke before, right?” Kurt’s foot was bouncing, which made the chains on his pants and jacket jangle.
“And now Davey’s after us,” Alan said. “I don’t know why it’s now. I don’t know why Davey does anything. But he always hated me most of all.”
“So why did he snatch your brothers first?”
“I think he wants me to sweat. He wants me scared, all the time. I’m the eldest. I’m the one who left the mountain. I’m the one who came first, and made all the connections with the outside world. They all looked to me to explain the world, but I never had any explanations that would suit Davey.”
“This is pretty weird,” he said.
Alan cocked his head at Kurt. He was about thirty, old for a punk, and had a kind of greasy sheen about him, like he didn’t remember to wash often enough, despite his protestations about his cleanliness. But at thirty, he should have seen enough to let him know that the world was both weirder than he suspected and not so weird as certain mystically inclined people would like to believe.
Arnold didn’t like this moment of disclosure, didn’t like dropping his carefully cultivated habit of hiding this, but he also couldn’t help but feel relieved. A part of his mind nagged him, though, and told him that too much of this would waken the worry for his brothers from its narcotized slumber.
“I’ve told other people, just a few. They didn’t believe me. You don’t have to. Why don’t you think about it for a while?”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to try to figure out how to find my brothers. I can’t go underground like Davey can. I don’t think I can, anyway. I never have. But Davey’s so... broken... so small and twisted. He’s not smart, but he’s cunning and he’s determined. I’m smarter than he is. So I’ll try to find the smart way. I’ll think about it, too.”
“Well, I’ve got to get ready to go diving,” Kurt said. He stood up with a jangle. “Thanks for the iced tea, Adam.”
“It was nice to meet you, Kurt,” Alan said, and shook his hand.
Alan woke with something soft over his face. It was pitch dark, and he couldn’t breathe. He tried to reach up, but his arms wouldn’t move. He couldn’t sit up. Something heavy was sitting on his chest. The soft thing – a pillow? – ground against his face, cruelly pressing down on the cartilage in his nose, filling his mouth as he gasped for air.
He shuddered hard, and felt something give near his right wrist and then his arm was loose from the elbow down. He kept working the arm, his chest afire, and then he’d freed it to the shoulder, and something bit him, hard little teeth like knives, in the fleshy underside of his bicep. Flailing dug the teeth in harder, and he knew he was bleeding, could feel it seeping down his arm. Finally, he got his hand onto something, a desiccated, mummified piece of flesh. Davey. Davey’s ribs, like dry stones, cold and thin. He felt up higher, felt for the place where Davey’s arm met his shoulder, and then twisted as hard as he could, until the arm popped free in its socket. He shook his head violently and the pillow slid away.
The room was still dark, and the hot, moist air rushed into his nostrils and mouth as he gasped it in. He heard Davey moving in the dark, and as his eyes adjusted, he saw him unfolding a knife. It was a clasp knife with a broken hasp and it swung open with the sound of a cockroach’s shell crunching underfoot. The blade was rusty.
Alan flung his freed arm across his body and tried to tug himself loose. He was being held down by his own sheets, which had been tacked or stapled to the bed frame. Using all his strength, he rolled over, heaving and bucking, and felt/heard the staples popping free down one side of the bed, just as Davey slashed at where his face had been a moment before. The knife whistled past his ear, then scored deeply along his shoulder. His arm flopped uselessly at his side and now they were both fighting one-armed, though Davey had a knife and Adam was wrapped in a sheet.
His bedroom was singularly lacking in anything that could be improvised into a weapon – he considered trying getting a heavy encyclopedia out to use as a shield, but it was too far a distance and too long a shot.
He scooted back on the bed, trying to untangle the sheet, which was still secured at the foot of the bed and all along one side. He freed his good arm just as Davey slashed at him again, aiming for the meat of his thigh, the big arteries there that could bleed you out in a minute or two. He grabbed for Davey’s shoulder and caught it for an instant, squeezed and twisted, but then the skin he had hold of sloughed away and Davey was free, dancing back.
Then he heard, from downstairs, the sound of rhythmic pounding at the door. He’d been hearing it for some time, but hadn’t registered it until now. A muffled yell from below. Police? Mimi? He screamed out, “Help!” hoping his voice would carry through the door.
Apparently, it did. He heard the sound of the small glass pane over the doorknob shatter, and Davey turned his head to look in the direction of the sound. Alan snatched up the pillow that he’d been smothering under and swung it as hard as he could at Davey’s head, knocking him around, and the door was open now, the summer night air sweeping up the stairs to the second-floor bedroom.
“Alan?” It was Kurt.
“Kurt, up here, he’s got a knife!”
Boots on the stairs, and Davey standing again, cornered, with the knife, slashing at the air toward him and toward the bedroom door, toward the light coming up the stairs, bobbing, Kurt’s maglight, clenched in his teeth, and Davey bolted for the door with the knife held high. The light stopped moving and there was an instant’s tableau, Davey caught in the light, cracked black lips peeled back from sharp teeth, chest heaving, knife bobbing, and then Alan was free, diving for his knees, bringing him down.
Kurt was on them before Davey could struggle up to his good elbow, kicking the knife away, scattering fingerbones like dice.
Davey screeched like a rusty hinge as Kurt twisted his arms up behind his back and Alan took hold of his ankles. He thrashed like a raccoon in a trap, and Alan forced the back of his head down so that his face was mashed against the cool floor, muffling his cries.
Kurt shifted so that his knee and one hand were pinning Davey’s wrists, fished in his pockets, and came out with a bundle of hairy twine. He set it on the floor next to Alan and then shifted his grip back to Davey’s arms.
As soon as Alan released the back of Davey’s head, he jerked it up and snapped his teeth into the top of Kurt’s calf, just above the top of his high, chain-draped boot. Kurt hollered and Adam reached out and took the knife, moving quickly before he could think, and smashed the butt into Davey’s jaw, which cracked audibly. Davey let go of Kurt’s calf and Alan worked quickly to lash his feet together, using half the bundle of twine, heedless of how he cut into the thin, cracking skin. He used the knife to snip the string and then handed the roll to Kurt, who went to work on Danny’s wrists.
Alan got the lights and rolled his brother over, looked into his mad eyes. Dale was trying to scream, but with his jaw hanging limp and his teeth scattered, it came out in a rasp. Alan stood and found that he was naked, his shoulder and bicep dripping blood down his side into a pool on the polished floor.
“We’ll take him to the basement,” he told Kurt, and dug through the laundry hamper at the foot of the bed for jeans. He found a couple of pairs of boxer shorts and tied one around his bicep and the other around his shoulder, using his teeth and chin as a second hand. It took two tries before he had them bound tight enough to still the throb.
The bedroom looked like someone had butchered an animal in it, and the floor was gritty with Darrel’s leavings, teeth and nails and fingerbones. Picking his way carefully through the mess, he hauled the sheet off the bed, popping out the remaining staples, which pinged off the bookcases and danced on the polished wood of the floor. He folded it double and laid it on the floor next to Davey.
“Help me roll him onto it,” he said, and then saw that Kurt was staring down at his shriveled, squirming, hateful brother in horror, wiping his hands over and over again on the thighs of his jeans.
He looked up and his eyes were glazed and wide. “I was passing by and I saw the shadows in the window. I thought you were being attacked –” He hugged himself.
“I was,” Alan said. He dug another T-shirt out of his hamper. “Here, wrap this around your hands.”
They rolled Davey into the sheet and then wrapped him in it. He was surprisingly heavy, dense. Hefting his end of the sheet one-handed, hefting that mysterious weight, he remembered picking up Ed-Fred-Geoff in the cave that first day, remembered the weight of the brother-in-the-brother-in-the-brother, and he had a sudden sickening sense that perhaps Davey was so heavy because he’d eaten them.
Once they had him bound snugly in the sheet, Danny stopped thrashing and became very still. They carried him carefully down the dark stairs, the walnut-shell grit echoing the feel of teeth and flakes of skin on the bare soles of Alan’s feet.
They dumped him unceremoniously on the cool mosaic of tile on the floor. They stared at the unmoving bundle for a moment. “Wait here, I’m going to get a chair,” Alan said.
“Jesus, don’t leave me alone here,” Kurt said. “That kid, the one who saw him – take – your brother? No one’s seen him since.” He looked down at Davey with wide, crazed eyes.
Alan’s shoulder throbbed. “All right,” he said. “You get a chair from the kitchen, the captain’s chair in the corner with the newspaper recycling stacked on it.”
While Kurt was upstairs, Alan unwrapped his brother. Danny’s eyes were closed, his jaw hanging askew, his wrists bound behind him. Alan leaned carefully over him and took his jaw and rotated it gently until it popped back into place.
“Davey?” he said. The eyes were closed, but now there was an attentiveness, an alertness to him. Alan stepped back quickly, feeling foolish at his fear of this pathetic, disjointed bound thing on his floor. No two ways about it, though: Davey gave him the absolutely willies, making his testicles draw up and the hair on the back of his arms prickle.
“Set the chair down there,” Alan said, pointing. He hoisted Davey up by his dry, papery armpits and sat him in the seat. He took some duct tape out of a utility drawer under the basement staircase and used it to gum Danny down in the chair.
“Davey,” he said again. “I know you can hear me. Stop pretending.”
“That’s your brother?” Kurt said. “The one who –”
“That’s him,” Alan said. “I guess you believe me now, huh?”
Davey grinned suddenly, mirthless. “Still making friends and influencing people, brother?” he said. His voice was wet and hiccuping, like he was drowning in snot.
“We’re not going to play any games here, Davey. You’re going to tell me where Edward, Felix, and Griffin are, or I’m going to tear your fingers off and smash them into powder. When I run out of fingers, I’ll switch to teeth.”
Kurt looked at him in alarm. He moaned. “Jesus, Adam –”
Adam whirled on him, something snapping inside. “Don’t, Kurt, just don’t, okay? He tried to kill me tonight. He may already have killed my brothers. This is life or death, and there’s no room for sentiment or humanity. Get a hammer out of the toolbox, on that shelf.” Kurt hesitated. “Do it!” Alan said, pointing at the toolbox.
Kurt shrank back, looking as though he’d been slapped. He moved as if in a dream, opening the toolbox and pawing through it until he came up with a scarred hammer, one claw snapped off.
Davey shook his head. “You don’t scare me, Albert. Not for an instant. I have a large supply of fingers and teeth – all I need. And you – you’re like him. You’re a sentimentalist. Scared of yourself. Scared of me. Scared of everything. That’s why you ran away. That’s why you got rid of me. Scared.”
Alan dug in his pocket for the fingerbones and teeth he’d collected. He found the tip of a pinky with a curled-over nail as thick as an oyster’s shell, crusted with dirt and blood. “Give me the hammer, Kurt,” he said.
Davey’s eyes followed him as he set the fingertip down on the tiles and raised the hammer. He brought it down just to one side of the finger, hard enough to break the tile. Kurt jumped a little, and Alan held the hammer up again.
“Tell me or this time I won’t miss,” he said, looking Davey in the eye.
Davey shrugged in his bonds.
Alan swung the hammer again. It hit the fingertip with a jarring impact that vibrated up his arm and resonated through his hurt shoulder. He raised the hammer again. He’d expected the finger to crush into powder, but instead it fissured into three jagged pieces, like a piece of chert fracturing under a hammer-stone.
Davey’s eyes were squeezed down to slits now. “You’re the scared one. You can’t scare me,” he said, his voice choked with phlegm.
Alan sat on the irregular tile and propped his chin in his palm. “Okay, Davey, you’re right. I’m scared. You’ve kidnapped our brothers, maybe even killed them. You’re terrorizing me. I can’t think, I can’t sleep. So tell me, Danny, why shouldn’t I just kill you again, and get rid of all that fear?”
“I know where the brothers are,” he said instantly. “I know where there are more people like us. All the answers, Albert, every answer you’ve ever looked for. I’ve got them. And I won’t tell you any of them. But so long as I’m walking around and talking, you think that I might.”
Alan took Marci back to his bedroom, the winter bedroom that was no more than a niche in the hot-spring cavern, a pile of rags and a sleeping bag for a bed. It had always been enough for him, but now he was ashamed of it. He took the flashlight from Marci and let it wind down, so that they were sitting in darkness.
“Your parents –” she said, then broke off.
“It’s complicated.”
“Are they dead?”
He reached out in the dark and took her hand.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I can lie, and you’ll probably think I’m telling the truth. Or I can tell the truth, and you’ll think that I’m lying.”
She squeezed his hand. Despite the sweaty heat of the cave, her fingers were cold as ice. He covered her hand with his free hand and rubbed at her cold fingers.
“Tell me the truth,” she whispered. “I’ll believe you.”
So he did, in mutters and whispers. He didn’t have the words to explain it all, didn’t know exactly how to explain it, but he tried. How he knew his father’s moods. How he felt his mother’s love.
After keeping this secret all his life, it felt incredible to be letting it out. His heart thudded in his chest, and his shoulders felt progressively lighter, until he thought he might rise up off his bedding and fly around the cave.
If it hadn’t been dark, he wouldn’t have been able to tell it. It was the dark, and the faint lunar glow of Marci’s face that showed no expression that let him open up and spill out all the secrets. Her fingers squeezed tighter and tighter, and now he felt like singing and dancing, because surely between the two of them, they could find a book in the library or maybe an article in the microfilm cabinets that would really explain it to him.
He wound down. “No one else knows this,” he said. “No one except you.” He leaned in and planted a kiss on her cold lips. She sat rigid and unmoving as he kissed her.
“Marci?”
“Alan,” she breathed. Her fingers went slack. She pulled her hand free.
Suddenly Alan was cold, too. The scant inches between them felt like an unbridgeable gap.
“You think I’m lying,” he said, staring out into the cave.
“I don’t know –”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I can help you get home now, all right?”
She folded her hands on her lap and nodded miserably.
On the way out of the cave, Eddie-Freddie-Georgie tottered over, still holding his car. He held it out to her mutely. She knelt down solemnly and took it from him, then patted him on the head. “Merry Christmas, kiddo,” she said. He hugged her leg, and she laughed a little and bent to pick him up. She couldn’t. He was too heavy. She let go of him and nervously pried his arms from around her thigh.
Alan took her down the path to the side road that led into town. The moonlight shone on the white snow, making the world glow bluish. They stood by the roadside for a long and awkward moment.
“Good night, Alan,” she said, and turned and started trudging home.
There was no torture at school the next day. She ignored him through the morning, and he couldn’t find her at recess, but at lunch she came and sat next to him. They ate in silence, but he was comforted by her presence beside him, a warmth that he sensed more than felt.
She sat beside him in afternoon classes, too. Not a word passed between them. For Alan, it felt like anything they could say to one another would be less true than the silence, but that realization hurt. He’d never been able to discuss his life and nature with anyone and it seemed as though he never would.
But the next morning, in the school yard, she snagged him as he walked past the climber made from a jumble of bolted-together logs and dragged him into the middle. It smelled faintly of pee and was a rich source of mysterious roaches and empty beer bottles on Monday mornings after the teenagers had come and gone.
She was crouched down on her haunches in the snow there, her steaming breath coming in short huffs. She grabbed him by the back of his knit toque and pulled his face to hers, kissing him hard on the mouth, shocking the hell out of him by forcing her tongue past his lips.
They kissed until the bell rang, and as Alan made his way to class, he felt like his face was glowing like a lightbulb. His homeroom teacher asked him if he was feeling well, and he stammered out some kind of affirmative while Marci, sitting in the next row, stifled a giggle.
They ate their lunches together again, and she filled the silence with a running commentary of the deficiencies of the sandwich her father had packed her, the strange odors coming from the brown bag that Alan had brought, filled with winter mushrooms and some soggy bread and cheese, and the hairiness of the mole on the lunch lady’s chin.
When they reached the schoolyard, she tried to drag him back to the logs, but he resisted, taking her instead to the marsh where he’d first spied her. The ground had frozen over and the rushes and reeds were stubble, poking out of the snow. He took her mittened hands in his and waited for her to stop squirming.
Which she did, eventually. He’d rehearsed what he’d say to her all morning: Do you believe me? What am I? Am I like you? Do you still love me? Are you still my friend? I don’t understand it any better than you do, but now, now there are two of us who know about it, and maybe we can make sense of it together. God, it’s such a relief to not be the only one anymore.
But now, standing there with Marci, in the distant catcalls of the playground and the smell of the new snow and the soughing of the wind in the trees, he couldn’t bring himself to say it. She either knew these things or she didn’t, and if she didn’t, he didn’t know what he could do to help it.
“What?” she said at last.
“Do you –” he began, then fell silent. He couldn’t say the words.
She looked irritated, and the sounds and the smells swept over him as the moment stretched. But then she softened. “I don’t understand it, Alan,” she said. “Is it true? Is it really how you say it is? Did I see what I saw?”
“It’s true,” he said, and it was as though the clouds had parted, the world gone bright with the glare off the snow and the sounds from the playground now joyous instead of cruel. “It’s true, and I don’t understand it any more than you do, Marci.”
“Are you...human, Alan?”
“I think so,” he said. “I bleed. I eat. I sleep. I think and talk and dream.”
She squeezed his hands and darted a kiss at him. “You kiss,” she said.
And it was all right again.
The next day was Saturday, and Marci arranged to meet him at the cave-mouth. In the lee of the wind, the bright winter sun reflected enough heat off the snow that some of it melted away, revealing the stunted winter grass beneath. They sat on the dry snow and listened to the wind whistle through the pines and the hiss of loose snow blowing across the crust.
“Will I get to meet your Da, then?” she said, after they’d watched a jackrabbit hop up the mountainside and disappear into the woods.
He sniffed deeply, and smelled the coalface smell of his father’s cogitation.
“You want to?” he said.
“I do.”
And so he led her inside the mountain, through the winter cave, and back and back to the pool in the mountain’s heart. They crept along quietly, her fingers twined in his. “You have to put out the flashlight now,” he said. “It’ll scare the goblin.” His voice shocked him, and her, he felt her startle. It was so quiet otherwise, just the sounds of breathing and of cave winds.
So she let the whirring dynamo in the flashlight wind down, and the darkness descended on them. It was cool, but not cold, and the wind smelled more strongly of coalface than ever. “He’s in there,” Alan said. He heard the goblin scamper away. His words echoed over the pool around the corner. “Come on.” Her fingers were very cool. They walked in a slow, measured step, like a king and queen of elfland going for a walk in the woods.
He stopped them at the pool’s edge. There was almost no light here, but Alan could make out the smooth surface of his father’s pool.
“Now what?” she whispered, the hissing of her words susurrating over the pool’s surface.
“We can only talk to him from the center,” he whispered. “We have to wade in.”
“I can’t go home with wet clothes,” she whispered.
“You don’t wear clothes,” he said. He let go of her hand and began to unzip his snowsuit.
And so they stripped, there on his father’s shore. She was luminous in the dark, a pale girl-shape picked out in the ripples of the pool, skinny, with her arms crossed in front of her chest. Even though he knew she couldn’t see him, he was self-conscious in his nudity, and he stepped into the pool as soon as he was naked.
“Wait,” she said, sounding panicked. “Don’t leave me!”
So he held out his hand for her, and then, realizing that she couldn’t see it, he stepped out of the pool and took her hand, brushing her small breast as he did so. He barely registered the contact, though she startled and nearly fell over. “Sorry,” he said. “Come on.”
The water was cold, but once they were in up to their shoulders, it warmed up, or they went numb.
“Is it okay?” she whispered, and now that they were in the center of the cavern, the echoes crossed back and forth and took a long time to die out.
“Listen,” Andy said. “Just listen.”
And as the echoes of his words died down, the winds picked up, and then the words emerged from the breeze.
“Adam,” his father sighed. Marci jumped a foot out of the water, and her splashdown sent watery ripples rebounding off the cavern walls.
Alan reached out for her and draped his arm around her shoulders. She huddled against his chest, slick cold naked skin goose-pimpled against his ribs. She smelled wonderful, like a fox. It felt wonderful, and solemn, to stand there nude, in the heart of his father, and let his secrets spill away.
Her breathing stilled again.
“Alan,” his father said.
“We want to understand, Father,” Alan whispered. “What am I?” It was the question he’d never asked. Now that he’d asked it, he felt like a fool: Surely his father knew, the mountain knew everything, had stood forever. He could have found out anytime he’d thought to ask.
“I don’t have the answer,” his father said. “There may be no answer. You may never know.”
Adam let go of Marci, let his arms fall to his sides.
“No,” he said. “No!” he shouted again, and the stillness was broken. The wind blew cold and hard, and he didn’t care. “NO!” he screamed, and Marci grabbed him and put her hand over his mouth. His ears roared with echoes, and they did not die down, but rather built atop one another, to a wall of noise that scared him.
She was crying now, scared and openmouthed sobs. She splashed him and water went up his nose and stung his eyes. The wind was colder now, cold enough to hurt, and he took her hand and sloshed recklessly for the shore. He spun up the flashlight and handed it to her, then yanked his clothes over his wet skin, glaring at the pool while she did the same.
In the winter cave, they met a golem.
It stood like a statue, brick-red with glowing eyes, beside Alan’s mother, hands at its sides. Golems didn’t venture to this side of his father very often, and almost never in daylight. Marci caught him in the flashlight’s beam as they entered the warm humidity of the cave, shivering in the gusting winds. She fumbled the flashlight and Alan caught it before it hit the ground.
“It’s okay,” he said. His chest was heaving from his tantrum, but the presence of the golem calmed him. You could say or do anything to a golem, and it couldn’t strike back, couldn’t answer back. The sons of the mountain that sheltered – and birthed? – the golems owed nothing to them.
He walked over to it and folded his arms.
“What is it?” he said.
The golem bent its head slightly and looked him in the eye. It was man-shaped, but baggier, muscles like frozen mud. An overhang of belly covered its smooth crotch like a kilt. Its chisel-shaped teeth clacked together as it limbered up its jaw.
“Your father is sad,” it said. Its voice was slow and grinding, like an avalanche. “Our side grows cold.”
“I don’t care,” Alan said. “Fuck my father,” he said. Behind him, perched atop their mother, Davey whittered a mean little laugh.
“You shouldn’t –”
Alan shoved the golem. It was like shoving a boulder. It didn’t give at all.
“You don’t tell me what to do,” he said. “You can’t tell me what to do. I want to know what I am, how we’re possible, and if you can’t help, then you can leave now.”
The winds blew colder, smelling now of the golem’s side of the mountain, of clay and the dry bones of their kills, which they arrayed on the walls of their cavern.
The golem stood stock still.
“Does it...understand?” Marci asked. Davey snickered again.
“It’s not stupid,” Alan said, calming a little. “It’s...slow. It thinks slowly and acts slowly. But it’s not stupid.” He paused for a moment. “It taught me to speak,” he said.
That did it. He began to cry, biting his lip to keep from making a sound, but the tears rolled down his cheeks and his shoulders shook. The flashlight’s beam pinned him, and he wanted to run to his mother and hide behind her, wanted to escape the light.
“Go,” he said softly to the golem, touching its elbow. “It’ll be all right.”
Slowly, gratingly, the golem turned and lumbered out of the cave, clumsy and ponderous.
Marci put her arm around him and he buried his face in her skinny neck, the hot tears coursing down her collarbones.
Davey came to him that night and pinned him in the light of the flashlight. He woke staring up into the bright bulb, shielding his eyes. He groped out for the light, but Darryl danced back out of reach, keeping the beam in his eyes. The air crackled with the angry grinding of its hand-dynamo.
He climbed out of bed naked and felt around on the floor. He had a geode there, he’d broken it and polished it by hand, and it was the size of a softball, the top smooth as glass, the underside rough as a coconut’s hide.
Wordless and swift, he wound up and threw the geode as hard as he could at where he judged Davey’s head to be.
There was a thud and a cry, and the light clattered to the ground, growing more dim as its dynamo whirred to a stop. Green blobs chased themselves across his vision, and he could only see Darren rolling on the ground by turning his head to one side and looking out of the corner of his eye.
He groped toward Davey and smelled the blood. Kneeling down, he found Davey’s hand and followed it up to his shoulder, his neck. Slick with blood. Higher, to Davey’s face, his forehead, the dent there sanded ragged by the rough side of the geode. The blood flowed freely and beneath his other hand Danny’s chest heaved as he breathed, shallowly, rapidly, almost panting.
His vision was coming back now. He took off his T-shirt and wadded it up, pressed it to Davey’s forehead. They’d done first aid in class. You weren’t supposed to move someone with a head injury. He pressed down with the T-shirt, trying to stanch the blood.
Then, quick as a whip, Davey’s head twisted around and he bit down, hard, on Alan’s thumbtip. Albert reeled back, but it was too late: Davey had bitten off the tip of his right thumb. Alan howled, waking up Ed-Fred-Geoff, who began to cry. Davey rolled away, scampering back into the cave’s depths.
Alan danced around the cave, hand clamped between his thighs, mewling. He fell to the floor and squeezed his legs together, then slowly brought his hand up before his face. The ragged stump of his thumb was softly spurting blood in time with his heartbeat. He struggled to remember his first aid. He wrapped his T-shirt around the wound and then pulled his parka on over his bare chest and jammed his bare feet into his boots, then made his way to the cave mouth and scooped up snow under the moon’s glow, awkwardly packing a snowball around his hand. He shivered as he made his way back into the winter cave and propped himself up against his mother, holding his hurt hand over his head.
The winter cave grew cold as the ice packed around his hand. Bobby, woken by his clairvoyant instincts, crept forward with a blanket and draped it over Alan. He’d foreseen this, of course – had foreseen all of it. But Bobby followed his own code, and he kept his own counsel, cleaning up after the disasters he was powerless to prevent.
Deep in the mountains, they heard the echoes of Davey’s tittering laughter.
“It was wrong to bring her here, Adam,” Billy said to him in the morning, as he fed Alan the crusts of bread and dried apples he’d brought him, packing his hand with fresh snow.
“I didn’t bring her here, she followed me,” Adam said. His arm ached from holding it aloft, and his back and tailbone were numb with the ache of a night spent sitting up against their mother’s side. “And besides, why should it be wrong? Whose rules? What rules? What are the fucking rules?”
“You can feel the rules, brother,” he said. He couldn’t look Alan in the eye, he never did. This was a major speech, coming from Bobby.
“I can’t feel any rules,” Alan said. He wondered if it was true. He’d never told anyone about the family before. Had he know all along that he shouldn’t do this?
“I can. She can’t know. No one can know. Even we can’t know. We’ll never understand it.”
“Where is Davey?”
“He’s doing a...ritual. With your thumb.”
They sat silent and strained their ears to hear the winds and the distant shuffle of the denizens of the mountain.
Alan shifted, using his good hand to prop himself up, looking for a comfortable position. He brought his injured hand down to his lap and unwrapped his blood-soaked T-shirt from his fist, gently peeling it away from the glue of dried blood that held it there.
His hand had shriveled in the night, from ice and from restricted circulation, and maybe from Davey’s ritual. Alan pondered its crusty, clawed form, thinking that it looked like it belonged to someone – something – else.
Buddy scaled the stalactite that served as the ladder up to the lofty nook where he slept and came back down holding his water bottle. “It’s clean, it’s from the pool,” he said, another major speech for him. He also had an armload of scavenged diapers, much-washed and worn soft as flannel. He wet one and began to wipe away the crust of blood on Alan’s arm and hand, working his way up from the elbow, then tackling the uninjured fingers, then, very gently, gently as a feather-touch, slow as a glacier, he worked on Alan’s thumb.
When he was done, Alan’s hand was clean and dry and cold, and the wound of his thumb was exposed and naked, a thin crust of blood weeping liquid slowly. It seemed to Alan that he could see the stump of bone protruding from the wound. He was amazed to see his bones, to get a look at a cross-section of himself. He wondered if he could count the rings and find out how old he was, as he had never been really certain on that score. He giggled ghoulishly.
He held out his good hand. “Get me up, okay?” Bobby hauled him to his feet. “Get me some warm clothes, too?”
And he did, because he was Bobby, and he was always only too glad to help, only too glad to do what service he could for you, even if he would never do you the one service that would benefit you the most: telling you of his visions, helping you avoid the disasters that loomed on your horizon.
Standing up, walking around, being clean – he began to feel like himself again. He even managed to get into his snow pants and parka and struggle out to the hillside and the bright sunshine, where he could get a good look at his hand.
What he had taken for a bone wasn’t. It was a skinny little thumbtip, growing out of the raggedy, crusty stump. He could see the whorl of a fingerprint there, and narrow, nearly invisible cuticles. He touched the tip of his tongue to it and it seemed to him that he could feel a tongue rasping over the top of his missing thumbtip.
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