Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

/> cave. Edward, normally a sweet-tempered baby, howled long screams that
resonated through Alan's milk teeth and made his testicles shrivel up
into hard stones. Alan knew his mother liked to be left alone when she
was in labor, but he couldn't just stand there and watch her shake and
shiver.

He went to her and pressed his palms to her top, tried to soothe and
restrain her. Bill, the second eldest and still only four years old,
followed suit. Edward's screams grew even louder, loud and hoarse and
utterly terrified, echoing off their father's walls and back to
them. Soon Alan was sobbing, too, biting his lip to keep the sounds
inside, and so were the other children. Dillon wrinkled his brow and
screamed a high-pitched wail that could have cut glass.

Alan's mother rocked harder, and her exhaust hose dislodged itself. A
high-pressure jet of cold, soapy water spurted from her back parts,
painting the cave wall with suds. Edward crawled into the puddle it
formed and scooped small handsful of the liquid into his mouth between
howls.

And then, it stopped. His mother stopped rocking, stopped shaking. The
stream trailed off into a trickle. Alan stopped crying, and soon the
smaller kids followed suit, even Edward. The echoes continued for a
moment, and then they, too, stopped. The silence was as startling -- and
nearly as unbearable -- as the cacophony had been.

With a trembling hand, Alan opened his mother's door and extracted
little Frederick. The baby was small and cyanotic blue. Alan tipped the
baby over and shook him gently, and the baby vomited up a fantastic
quantity of wash water, a prodigious stream that soaked the front of
Alan's school trousers and his worn brown loafers. Finally it ended, and
the baby let out a healthy yowl. Alan shifted the infant to one arm and
gingerly reconnected the exhaust hose and set the baby down alongside of
its end. The baby wouldn't suck, though.

Across the cave, from his soggy seat in the puddle of waste water,
Edward watched the new baby with curious eyes. He crawled across the
floor and nuzzled his brother with his high forehead. Frederick squirmed
and fussed, and Edward shoved him to one side and sucked. His little
diaper dripped as the liquid passed directly through him.

Alan patiently picked dripping Edward up and put him over one shoulder,
and gave Frederick the tube to suck. Frederick gummed at the hose's end,
then fussed some more, whimpering. Edward squirmed in his arms, nearly
plummeting to the hard stone floor.

"Billy," Alan said to the solemn little boy, who nodded. "Can you take
care of Edward for a little while? I need to clean up." Billy nodded
again and held out his pudgy arms. Alan grabbed some clean shop rags and
briskly wiped Frederick down, then laid another across Billy's shoulder
and set Edward down. The baby promptly set to snoring. Danny started
screaming again, with no provocation, and Alan took two swift steps to
bridge the distance between them and smacked the child hard enough to
stun him silent.

Alan grabbed a mop and bucket and sloshed the puddles into the drainage
groove where his mother's waste water usually ran, out the cave mouth
and into a stand of choking mountain-grass that fed greedily and thrived
riotous in the phosphates from the detergent.

Frederick did not eat for thirty days, and during that time he grew so
thin that he appeared to shrivel like a raisin, going hard and folded in
upon himself. Alan spent hours patiently spooning sudsy water into his
little pink mouth, but the baby wouldn't swallow, just spat it out and
whimpered and fussed. Edward liked to twine around Alan's feet like a
cat as he joggled and spooned and fretted over Frederick. It was all
Alan could do not to go completely mad, but he held it together, though
his grades slipped.

His mother vibrated nervously, and his father's winds grew so unruly
that two of the golems came around to the cave to make their slow,
peevish complaints. Alan shoved a baby into each of their arms and
seriously lost his shit upon them, screaming himself hoarse at them
while hanging more diapers, more rags, more clothes on the line, tossing
his unfinished homework in their faces.

But on the thirtieth day, his mother went into labor again -- a labor so
frenzied that it dislodged a stalactite and sent it crashing and
chundering to the cave floor in a fractious shivering of flinders. Alan
took a chip in the neck and it opened up a small cut that nevertheless
bled copiously and ruined, *ruined* his favorite T-shirt, with Snoopy
sitting atop his doghouse in an aviator's helmet, firing an imaginary
machine gun at the cursed Red Baron.

That was nearly the final straw for Alan, but he held fast and waited
for the labor to pass and finally unlatched the door and extracted
little George, a peanut of a child, a lima-bean infant, curled and fetal
and eerily quiet. He set the little half-baby down by the exhaust hose,
where he'd put shriveled Frederick in a hopeless hope that the baby
would suck, would ingest, finally.

And ingest Frederick did. His dry and desiccated jaw swung open like a
snake's, unhinged and spread wide, and he *swallowed* little George, ate
him up in three convulsive swallows, the new baby making Frederick's
belly swell like a balloon. Alan swallowed panic, seized Frederick by
the heels, and shook him upside down. "Spit him out," Alan cried, "Spat
him free!"

But Frederick kept his lips stubbornly together, and Alan tired of the
terrible business and set the boy with the newest brother within down on
a pile of hay he'd brought in to soak up some of Edward's continuous
excretions. Alan put his hands over his face and sobbed, because he'd
failed his responsibilities as eldest of their family and there was no
one he could tell his woes to.

The sound of baby giggles stopped his crying. Edward had belly-crawled
to Frederick's side and he was eating *him*, jaw unhinged and gorge
working. He was up to Frederick's little bottom, dehydrated to a
leathery baby-jerky, and then he was past, swallowing the arms and the
chin and the *head*, the giggling, smiling head, the laughing head that
had done nothing but whine and fuss since Alan had cleared it of its
volume of detergenty water, fresh from their mother's belly.

And then Frederick was gone. Horrified, Alan rushed over and picked up
Edward -- now as heavy as a cannonball -- and pried his mouth open,
staring down his gullet, staring down into *another mouth*, Frederick's
mouth, which gaped open, revealing a *third* mouth, George's. The
smallest mouth twisted and opened, then shut. Edward squirmed furiously
and Alan nearly fumbled him. He set the baby down in the straw and
watched him crawl across to their mother, where he sucked
hungrily. Automatically, Alan gathered up an armload of rags and made
ready to wipe up the stream that Edward would soon be ejecting.

But no stream came. The baby fed and fed, and let out a deep burp in
three-part harmony, spat up a little, and drank some more. Somehow,
Frederick and George were in there feeding, too. Alan waited patiently
for Edward to finish feeding, then put him over his shoulder and joggled
him until he burped up, then bedded him down in his little rough-hewn
crib -- the crib that the golems had carved for Alan when he was born --
cleaned the cave, and cried again, leaned up against their mother.

#

Frederick huddled in on himself, half behind Edward on the porch,
habitually phobic of open spaces. Alan took his hand and then embraced
him. He smelled of Edward's clammy guts and of sweat.

"Are you two hungry?" Alan asked.

Edward grimaced. "Of course we're hungry, but without George there's
nothing we can do about it, is there?"

Alan shook his head. "How long has he been gone?"

"Three weeks," Edward whispered. "I'm so hungry, Alan."

"How did it happen?"

Frederick wobbled on his feet, then leaned heavily on Edward. "I need to
sit down," he said.

Alan fumbled for his keys and let them into the house, where they
settled into the corners of his old overstuffed horsehide sofa. He
dialed up the wall sconces to a dim, homey lighting, solicitous of
Frederick's sensitive eyes. He took an Apollo 8 Jim Beam decanter full
of stunning Irish whiskey off the sideboard and poured himself a finger
of it, not offering any to his brothers.

"Now, how did it happen?"

"He wanted to speak to Dad," Frederick said. "He climbed out of me and
wandered down through the tunnels into the spring pool. The goblin told
us that he took off his clothes and waded in and started whispering."
Like most of the boys, George had believed that their father was most
aware in his very middle, where he could direct the echoes of the
water's rippling, shape them into words and phrases in the hollow of the
great cavern.

"So the goblin saw it happen?"

"No," Frederick said, and Edward began to cry again. "No. George asked
him for some privacy, and so he went a little way up the tunnel. He
waited and waited, but George didn't come back. He called out, but
George didn't answer. When he went to look for him, he was gone. His
clothes were gone. All that he could find was this." He scrabbled to fit
his chubby hand into his jacket's pocket, then fished out a little black
pebble. Alan took it and saw that it wasn't a pebble, it was a
rotted-out and dried-up fingertip, pierced with unbent paperclip wire.

"It's Dave's, isn't it?" Edward said.

"I think so," Alan said. Dave used to spend hours wiring his dropped-off
parts back onto his body, gluing his teeth back into his head. "Jesus."

"We're going to die, aren't we?" Frederick said. "We're going to starve
to death."

Edward held his pudgy hands one on top of the other in his lap and began
to rock back and forth. "We'll be okay," he lied.

"Did anyone see Dave?" Alan asked.

"No," Frederick said. "We asked the golems, we asked Dad, we asked the
goblin, but no one saw him. No one's seen him for years."

Alan thought for a moment about how to ask his next question. "Did you
look in the pool? On the bottom?"

"*He's not there!*" Edward said. "We looked there. We looked all around
Dad. We looked in town. Alan, they're both gone."

Alan felt a sear of acid jet up esophagus. "I don't know what to do," he
said. "I don't know where to look. Frederick, can't you, I don't know,
*stuff* yourself with something? So you can eat?"

"We tried," Edward said. "We tried rags and sawdust and clay and bread
and they didn't work. I thought that maybe we could get a *child* and
put him inside, maybe, but God, Albert, I don't want to do that, it's
the kind of thing Dan would do."

Alan stared at the softly glowing wood floors, reflecting highlights
from the soft lighting. He rubbed his stocking toes over the waxy finish
and felt its shine. "Don't do that, okay?" he said. "I'll think of
something. Let me sleep on it. Do you want to sleep here? I can make up
the sofa."

"Thanks, big brother," Edward said. "Thanks."

#

Alan walked past his study, past the tableau of laptop and desk and
chair, felt the pull of the story, and kept going, pulling his housecoat
tighter