Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [best books for 20 year olds .TXT] 📗

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