Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best thriller novels of all time .txt) 📗
- Author: Cory Doctorow
Book online «Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best thriller novels of all time .txt) 📗». Author Cory Doctorow
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. He grunted a little ouch. Kurt narrowed his eyes and shook his head at him.
“This is pretty fucked up right here,” Kurt said, looking down into his coffee.
“It’s only a little less weird for me, if that’s any comfort.”
“It’s not,” Kurt said.
“Well, that’s why I don’t usually tell others. You’re only the second person to believe it.”
“Maybe I could meet up with the first and form a support group?”
Alan pushed his omelet away. “You can’t. She’s dead.”
Davey haunted the schoolyard. Alan had always treated the school and its grounds as a safe haven, a place where he could get away from the inexplicable, a place where he could play at being normal.
But now Davey was everywhere, lurking in the climber, hiding in the trees, peering through the tinsel-hung windows during class. Alan only caught the quickest glimpses of him, but he had the sense that if he turned his head around quickly enough, he’d see him. Davey made himself scarce in the mountain, hiding in the golems’ cave or one of the deep tunnels.
Marci didn’t come to class after Monday. Alan fretted every morning, waiting for her to turn up. He worried that she’d told her father, or that she was at home sulking, too angry to come to school, glaring at her Christmas tree.
Davey’s grin was everywhere.
On Wednesday, he got called into the vice principal’s office. As he neared it, he heard the rumble of Marci’s father’s thick voice and his heart began to pound in his chest.
He cracked the door and put his face in the gap, looking at the two men there: Mr. Davenport, the vice principal, with his gray hair growing out his large ears and cavernous nostrils, sitting behind his desk, looking awkwardly at Marci’s father, eyes bugged and bagged and bloodshot, face turned to the ground, looking like a different man, the picture of worry and loss.
Mr. Davenport saw him and crooked a finger at him, looking stern and stony. Alan was sure, then, that Marci’d told it all to her father, who’d told it all to Mr. Davenport, who would tell the world, and suddenly he was jealous of his secret, couldn’t bear to have it revealed, couldn’t bear the thought of men coming to the mountain to catalogue it for the subject index at the library, to study him and take him apart.
And he was… afraid. Not of what they’d all do to him. What Davey would do to them. He knew, suddenly, that Davey would not abide their secrets being disclosed.
He forced himself forward, his feet dragging like millstones, and stood between the two men, hands in his pockets, nervously twining at his underwear.
“Alan,” Marci’s father croaked. Mr. Davenport held up a hand to silence him.
“Alan,” Mr. Davenport said. “Have you seen Marci?”
Alan had been prepared to deny everything, call Marci a liar,
Comments (0)