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

went back inside and looked in on Benji. He was sleeping, his face
smooth and his lips pouted. He rolled over and opened his eyes,
regarding Alan without surprise.

"Told you so," he said.

#

Alan had an awkward relationship with the people in town. Unaccompanied
little boys in the grocery store, at the Gap, in the library and in toy
section of the Canadian Tire were suspect. Alan never "horsed around" --
whatever that meant -- but nevertheless, he got more than his share of
the hairy eyeball from the shopkeepers, even though he had money in his
pocket and had been known to spend it on occasion.

A lone boy of five or six or seven was suspicious, but let him show up
with the tiny hand of his dark little brother clasped in his, quietly
explaining each item on the shelf to the solemn child, and everyone got
an immediate attitude adjustment. Shopkeepers smiled and nodded,
shoppers mouthed, "So cute," to each other. Moms with babies in snuglis
bent to chuckle them under their chins. Store owners spontaneously gave
them candy, and laughed aloud at Bryan's cries of "Chocolate!"

When Brian started school, he foresaw and avoided all trouble, and
delighted his teachers with his precociousness. Alan ate lunch with him
once he reached the first grade and started eating in the cafeteria with
the rest of the non-kindergartners.

Brad loved to play with Craig after he was born, patiently mounding soil
and pebbles on his shore, watering him and patting him smooth, planting
wild grasses on his slopes as he crept toward the mouth of the
cave. Those days -- before Darcy's arrival -- were a long idyll of good
food and play in the hot sun or the white snow and brotherhood.

Danny couldn't sneak up on Brad and kick him in the back of the head. He
couldn't hide a rat in his pillow or piss on his toothbrush. Billy was
never one to stand pat and eat shit just because Davey was handing it
out. Sometimes he'd just wind up and take a swing at Davey, seemingly
out of the blue, knocking him down, then prying open his mouth to reveal
the chocolate bar he'd nicked from under Brad's pillow, or a comic book
from under his shirt. He was only two years younger than Brad, but by
the time they were both walking, Brad hulked over him and could lay him
out with one wild haymaker of a punch.

#

Billy came down from his high perch when Alan returned from burying
Marci, holding out his hands wordlessly. He hugged Alan hard, crushing
the breath out of him.

The arms felt good around his neck, so he stopped letting himself feel
them. He pulled back stiffly and looked at Brian.

"You could have told me," he said.

Bram's face went expressionless and hard and cold. Telling people wasn't
what he did, not for years. It hurt others -- and it hurt him. It was
the reason for his long, long silences. Alan knew that sometimes he
couldn't tell what it was that he knew that others didn't. But he didn't
care, then.

"You should have told me," he said.

Bob took a step back and squared up his shoulders and his feet, leaning
forward a little as into a wind.

"You *knew* and you didn't *tell me* and you didn't *do anything* and as
far as I'm concerned, you killed her and cut her up and buried her along
with Darryl, you coward." Adam knew he was crossing a line, and he
didn't care. Brian leaned forward and jutted his chin out.

Avram's hands were clawed with cold and caked with mud and still echoing
the feeling of frozen skin and frozen dirt, and balled up into fists,
they felt like stones.

He didn't hit Barry. Instead, he retreated to his niche and retrieved
the triangular piece of flint that he'd been cherting into an arrowhead
for school and a hammer stone and set to work on it in the light of a
flashlight.

#

He sharpened a knife for Davey, there in his room in the cave, as the
boys ran feral in the woods, as the mountain made its slow and ponderous
protests.

He sharpened a knife, a hunting knife with a rusty blade and a cracked
handle that he'd found on one of the woodland trails, beside a hunter's
snare, not lost but pitched away in disgust one winter and not
discovered until the following spring.

But the nicked blade took an edge as he whetted it with the round stone,
and the handle regained its grippiness as he wound a cord tight around
it, making tiny, precise knots with each turn, until the handle no
longer pinched his hand, until the blade caught the available light from
the cave mouth and glinted dully.

The boys brought him roots and fruits they'd gathered, sweets and bread
they'd stolen, small animals they'd caught. Ed-Fred-George were an
unbeatable team when it came to catching and killing an animal, though
they were only small, barely out of the second grade. They were fast,
and they could coordinate their actions without speaking, so that the
bunny or the squirrel could never duck or feint in any direction without
encountering the thick, neck-wringing outstretched hands of the pudgy
boys. Once, they brought him a cat. It went in the night's stew.

Billy sat at his side and talked. The silence he'd folded himself in
unwrapped and flapped in the wind of his beating gums. He talked about
the lessons he'd had in school and the lessons he'd had from his big
brother, when it was just the two of them on the hillside and Alan would
teach him every thing he knew, the names of and salient facts regarding
every thing in their father's domain. He talked about the truths he'd
gleaned from reading chocolate-bar wrappers. He talked about the things
that he'd see Davey doing when no one else could see it.

One day, George came to him, the lima-bean baby grown to toddling about
on two sturdy legs, fat and crispy red from his unaccustomed time
out-of-doors and in the sun. "You know, he *worships* you," Glenn said,
gesturing at the spot in his straw bedding where Brad habitually sat and
gazed at him and chattered.

Alan stared at his shoelaces. "It doesn't matter," he said. He'd dreamt
that night of Davey stealing into the cave and squatting beside him,
watching him the way that he had before, and of Alan knowing, *knowing*
that Davey was there, ready to rend and tear, knowing that his knife
with its coiled handle was just under his pillow, but not being able to
move his arms or legs. Paralyzed, he'd watched Davey grin and reach
behind him with agonizing slowness for a rock that he'd lifted high
above his head and Andrew had seen that the rock had been cherted to a
razor edge that hovered a few feet over his breastbone, Davey's arms
trembling with the effort of holding it aloft. A single drop of sweat
had fallen off of Davey's chin and landed on Alan's nose, and then
another, and finally he'd been able to open his eyes and wake himself,
angry and scared. The spring rains had begun, and the condensation was
thick on the cave walls, dripping onto his face and arms and legs as he
slept, leaving behind chalky lime residue as it evaporated.

"He didn't kill her," Greg said.

Albert hadn't told the younger brothers about the body buried in Craig,
which meant that Brad had been talking to them, had told them what he'd
seen. Alan felt an irrational streak of anger at Brad -- he'd been
blabbing Alan's secrets. He'd been exposing the young ones to things
they didn't need to know. To the nightmares.

"He didn't stop her from being killed," Alan said. He had the knife in
his hand and hunted through his pile of belongings for the whetstone to
hone its edge.

Greg looked at the knife, and Andy followed his gaze to his own white
knuckles on the hilt. Greg took a frightened step back, and Alan, who
had often worried that the smallest brother was too delicate for the
real world, felt ashamed of himself.

He set the knife down and stood, stretching his limbs and leaving the
cave for the first time in weeks.

#

Brad found him standing on the slopes of the gentle, soggy hump of
Charlie's slope, a few feet closer to the seaway than it had been that
winter when Alan had dug up and reburied Marci's body there.

"You forgot this," Brad said, handing him the knife.

Alan took it from him. It was sharp and dirty and the handle was grimed
with sweat and lime.

"Thanks, kid," he said. He reached down and took Billy's hand, the way
he'd done when it was just the two of them. The three eldest sons of the
mountain stood there touching and watched the outside world rush and
grind away in the distance, its humming engines and puffing chimneys.

Brendan tugged his hand free and kicked at the dirt with a toe,
smoothing over the divot he'd made with the sole of his shoe. Andy
noticed that the sneaker was worn out and had a hole in the toe, and
that it was only laced up halfway.

"Got to get you new shoes," he said, bending down to relace them. He had
to stick the knife in the ground to free his hands while he worked. The
handle vibrated.

"Davey's coming," Benny said. "Coming now."

Alan reached out as in his dream and felt for the knife, but it wasn't
there, as in his dream. He looked around as the skin on his face
tightened and his heart began to pound in his ears, and he saw that it
had merely fallen over in the dirt. He picked it up and saw that where
it had fallen, it had knocked away the soil that had barely covered up a
small, freckled hand, now gone black and curled into a fist like a
monkey's paw. Marci's hand.

"He's coming." Benny took a step off the hill. "You won't lose," he
said. "You've got the knife."

The hand was small and fisted, there in the dirt. It had been just below
the surface of where he'd been standing. It had been there, in
Clarence's soil, for months, decomposing, the last of Marci
going. Somewhere just below that soil was her head, her face sloughing
off and wormed. Her red hair fallen from her loosened scalp. He gagged
and a gush of bile sprayed the hillside.

Danny hit him at the knees, knocking him into the dirt. He felt the
little rotting fist digging into his ribs. His body bucked of its own
accord, and he knocked Danny loose of his legs. His arm was hot and
slippery, and when he looked at it he saw that it was coursing with
blood. The knife in his other hand was bloodied and he saw that he'd
drawn a long ragged cut along his bicep. A fountain of blood bubbled
there with every beat of his heart, blub, blub, blub, and on the third
blub, he felt the cut, like a long pin stuck in the nerve.

He climbed unsteadily to his feet and confronted Danny. Danny was naked
and the color of the red golem clay. His ribs showed and his hair was
matted and greasy.

"I'm coming home," Danny said, baring his teeth. His breath reeked of
corruption and uncooked meat, and his mouth was ringed with