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

see the pines dance in the wind and the
ant-sized cars zooming along the highways, Doug was far behind, likely
sat atop their mother, sucking his thumb and sulking and thinking up new
perversions to accuse Alan of.

#

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 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 and 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.