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

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 sheet 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 known 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 --
some*thing* -- 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.

#

"It's disgusting, keep it away," Marci said, shrinking away from his
hand in mock horror. He held his proto-thumb under her nose and waggled
it.

"No joking, okay? I just want to know what it *means*. I'm *growing a
new thumb*."

"Maybe you're part salamander. They regrow their legs and tails. Or a
worm -- cut a worm in half and you get two worms. It's in one of my Da's
books."

He stared at his thumb. It had grown perceptibly, just on the journey
into town to Marci's place. They were holed up in her room, surrounded
by watercolors of horses in motion that her mother had painted. She'd
raided the fridge for cold pork pies and cheese and fizzy lemonade that
her father had shipped from the Marks & Spencer in Toronto. It was