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

the
strangest food he'd ever eaten but he'd developed a taste for it.

"Wiggle it again," she said.

He did, and the thumbtip bent down like a scale model of a thumbtip,
cracking the scab around it.

"We should go to a doctor," she said.

"I don't go to doctors," he said flatly.

"You *haven't* gone to a doctor -- doesn't mean you can't."

"I don't go to doctors." X-ray machines and stethoscopes, blood tests
and clever little flashlights in your ears -- who knew what they'd
reveal? He wanted to be the first to discover it, he didn't want to have
to try to explain it to a doctor before he understood it himself.

"Not even when you're sick?"

"The golems take care of it," he said.

She shook her head. "You're a weirdo, you know that?"

"I know it," he said.

"I thought my family was strange," she said, stretching out on her tummy
on the bed. "But they're not a patch on you."

"I know it."

He finished his fizzy lemonade and lay down beside her, belching.

"We could ask my Da. He knows a lot of strange things."

He put his face down in her duvet and smelled the cotton covers and her
nighttime sweat, like a spice, like cinnamon. "I don't want to do
that. Please don't tell anyone, all right?"

She took hold of his wrist and looked again at the teensy thumb. "Wiggle
it again," she said. He did. She giggled. "Imagine if you were like a
worm. Imagine if your thumbtip was out there growing another *you*."

He sat bolt upright. "Do you think that's possible?" he said. His heart
was thudding. "Do you think so?"

She rolled on her side and stared at him. "No, don't be daft. How could
your thumb grow another *you?*"

"Why wouldn't it?"

She had no answer for him.

"I need to go home," he said. "I need to know."

"I'm coming with," she said. He opened his mouth to tell her no, but she
made a fierce face at him, her foxy features wrinkled into a mock snarl.

"Come along then," he said. "You can help me do up my coat."

#

The winter cave was deserted. He listened at the mouths of all the
tunnels, straining to hear Davey. From his high nook, Brian watched
them.

"Where is he, Billy?" Alan called. "Tell me, godfuckit!"

Billy looked down from him perch with his sad, hollow eyes -- had he
been forgetting to eat again? -- and shook his head.

They took to the tunnels. Even with the flashlight, Marci couldn't match
him for speed. He could feel the tunnels through the soles of his boots,
he could smell them, he could pick them apart by the quality of their
echoes. He moved fast, dragging Marci along with his good hand while she
cranked the flashlight as hard as she could. He heard her panting,
triangulated their location from the way that the shallow noises
reflected off the walls.

When they found Davey at last, it was in the golem's cave, on the other
side of the mountain. He was hunkered down in a corner, while the golems
moved around him slowly, avoiding him like he was a boulder or a
stalagmite that had sprung up in the night. Their stony heads turned to
regard Marci and Adam as they came upon them, their luminous eyes
lighting on them for a moment and then moving on. It was an eloquent
statement for them: *This is the business of the mountain and his
sons. We will not intervene.*

There were more golems than Alan could remember seeing at once, six,
maybe seven. The golems made more of their kind from the clay they found
at the riverbank whenever they cared to or needed to, and allowed their
number to dwindle when the need or want had passed by the simple
expedient of deconstructing one of their own back to the clay it had
come from.

The golems' cave was lined with small bones and skulls, rank and row
climbing the walls, twined with dried grasses in ascending
geometries. These were the furry animals that the golems patiently
trapped and killed, skinned, dressed, and smoked, laying them in small,
fur-wrapped bundles in the family's cave when they were done. It was
part of their unspoken bargain with the mountain, and the tiny bones had
once borne the flesh of nearly every significant meal Alan had ever
eaten.

Davey crouched among the bones at the very back of the cave, his back to
them, shoulders hunched.

The golems stood stock still as Marci and he crept up on Davey. So
intent was he on his work that he didn't notice them, even as they
loomed over his shoulder, staring down on the thing he held in his
hands.

It was Alan's thumb, and growing out of it -- Allen. Tiny, the size of a
pipe-cleaner man, and just as skinny, but perfectly formed, squirming
and insensate, face contorted in a tiny expression of horror.

Not so perfectly formed, Alan saw, once he was over the initial
shock. One of the pipe-cleaner-Allen's arms was missing, protruding
there from Davey's mouth, and he crunched it with lip-smacking
relish. Alan gawped at it, taking it in, watching his miniature
doppelganger, hardly bigger than the thumb it sprouted from, thrash like
a worm on a hook.

Davey finished the arm, slurping it back like a noodle. Then he dangled
the tiny Allen from the thumb, shaking it, before taking hold of the
legs, one between the thumb and forefinger of each hand, and he gently,
almost lovingly pulled them apart. The Allen screamed, a sound as tiny
and tortured as a cricket song, and then the left leg wrenched free of
its socket. Alan felt his own leg twist in sympathy, and then there was
a killing rage in him. He looked around the cave for the thing that
would let him murder his brother for once and for all, but it wasn't to
be found.

Davey's murder was still to come.

Instead, he leapt on Davey's back, arm around his neck, hand gripping
his choking fist, pulling the headlock tighter and tighter. Marci was
screaming something, but she was lost in the crash of the blood-surf
that roared in his ears. Davey pitched over backward, trying to buck him
off, but he wouldn't be thrown, and he flipped Davey over by the neck,
so that he landed it a thrash of skinny arms and legs. The Allen fell to
the floor, weeping and dragging itself one-armed and one-legged away
from the melee.

Then Davey was on him, squeezing his injured hand, other thumb in his
eye, screeching like a rusted hinge. Alan tried to see through the tears
that sprang up, tried to reach Davey with his good hand, but the rage
was leaking out of him now. He rolled desperately, but Davey's weight on
his chest was like a cannonball, impossibly heavy.

Suddenly Davey was lifted off of him. Alan struggled up into a sitting
position, clutching his injured hand. Davey dangled by his armpits in
the implacable hands of one of the golems, face contorted into
unrecognizability. Alan stood and confronted him, just out of range of
his kicking feet and his gnashing teeth, and Darrel spat in his face, a
searing gob that landed in his eye.

Marci took his arm and dragged him back toward the cave mouth. He fought
her, looking for the little Allen, not seeing him. Was that him, there,
in the shadows? No, that was one of the little bone tableaux, a field
mouse's dried bones splayed in an anatomically correct mystic
hieroglyph.

Marci hauled him away, out into the bright snow and the bright sun. His
thumb was bleeding anew, dripping fat drops the color of a red crayon
into the sun, blood so hot it seemed to sizzle and sink into the snow.

#

"You need to tell an adult, Alan," she said, wrapping his new little
thumb in gauze she'd taken from her pocket.

"My father knows. My mother knows." He sat with his head between his
knees, not daring to look at her, in his nook in the winter cave.

She just looked at him, squinting.

"They count," he said. "They understand it."

She shook her head.

"They understand it better than any adult you know would. This will get
better on its own, Marci. Look." He wiggled his thumb at her. It was now
the size of the tip of his pinky, and had a well-formed nail and
cuticle.

"That's not all that has to get better," she said. "You can't just let
this fester. Your brother. That *thing* in the cave..." She shook her
head. "Someone needs to know about this. You're not safe."

"Promise me you won't tell anyone, Marci. This is important. No one
except you knows, and that's how it has to be. If you tell --"

"What?" She got up and pulled her coat on. "What, Alan? If I tell and
try to help you, what will you do to me?"

"I don't know," he mumbled into his chest.

"Well, you do whatever you have to do," she said, and stomped out of the
cave.

#

Davey escaped at dawn. Kurt had gone outside to repark his old Buick,
the trunk bungeed shut over his haul of LCD flat panels, empty
laser-toner cartridges, and open gift baskets of pricey Japanese
cosmetics. Alan and Davey just glared at each other, but then Davey
closed his eyes and began to snore softly, and even though Alan paced
and pinched the bridge of his nose and stretched out his injured arm, he
couldn't help it when he sat down and closed his eyes and nodded off.

Alan woke with a start, staring at the empty loops of duct tape and
twine hanging from his captain's chair, dried strings of skin like
desiccated banana peel fibers hanging from them. He swore to himself
quietly, and shouted Shit! at the low basement ceiling. He couldn't have
been asleep for more than a few seconds, and the half-window that Davey
had escaped through gaped open at him like a sneer.

He tottered to his feet and went out to find Kurt, bare feet jammed into
sneakers, bare chest and bandages covered up with a jacket. He found
Kurt cutting through the park, dragging his heels in the bloody dawn
light.

Kurt looked at his expression, then said, "What happened?" He had his
fists at his sides, he looked tensed to run. Alan felt that he was
waiting for an order.

"He got away."

"How?"

Alan shook his head. "Can you help me get dressed? I don't think I can
get a shirt on by myself."

They went to the Greek's, waiting out front on the curb for the old man
to show up and unchain the chairs and drag them out around the table. He
served them tall coffees and omelets sleepily, and they ate in silence,
too tired to talk.

"Let me take you to the doctor?" Kurt asked, nodding at the bandage that
bulged under his shirt.

"No," Alan said. "I'm a fast healer."

Kurt rubbed at his calf and winced. "He broke the skin," he said.

"You got all your shots?"

"Hell yeah. Too much crap in the dumpsters. I once found a styro cooler
of smashed blood vials in a Red Cross trash."

"You'll be okay, then," Alan said. He shifted in his seat and winced.