Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best thriller novels of all time .txt) 📗
- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“Owwww! That bloody hurt, you bastard. What did you do that for?”
“My secrets,” Alan said, “are secret.”
She held her wrist up and examined it. “Heaven help you if you’ve left a bruise, Alvin,” she said. “I’ll kill you.” She turned her wrist from side to side. “All right,” she said. “All right. Kiss it better, and you can come to my place for supper on Saturday at six p.m..” She shoved her arm into his face and he kissed the soft skin on the inside of her wrist, putting a little tongue in it.
She giggled and punched him in the arm. “Saturday, then!” she called as she ran off.
Edward-Felix-Gerald were too young to give him shit about his schoolyard romance, and Brian was too sensitive, but Dave had taken to lurking about the schoolyard, spying on the children, and he’d seen Marci break off from a clench with Alan, take his hand, and plant it firmly on her tiny breast, an act that had shocked Danny to the core.
“Hi, pervert,” David said, as he stepped into the cool of the cave. “Pervert” was Davey’s new nickname for him, and he had a finely honed way of delivering it so that it dripped with contempt. “Did you have sex with your girlfriend today, pervert?”
Allan turned away from him and helped E-F-G take off his shoes and roll up the cuffs of his pants so that he could go down to the lake in the middle of their father and wade in the shallows, listening to Father’s winds soughing through the great cavern.
“Did you touch her boobies? Did she suck your pee-pee? Did you put your finger in her?” The litany would continue until Davey went to bed, and even then he wasn’t safe. One night, Allen had woken up to see Darren standing over him, hands planted on his hips, face twisted into an elaborate sneer. “Did you put your penis inside of her?” he’d hissed, then gone back to bed.
Alby went out again, climbing the rockface faster than Doug could keep up with him, so that by the time he’d found his perch high over the woodlands, where he could 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
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