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

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