Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (best pdf ebook reader txt) đź“•
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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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Alan hurried past him, his shoulders and fists clenched. Krishna chuckled nastily and Alan thought he knew who got the job of sawing off Mimi’s wings when they grew too long, and thought, too, that Krishna must relish the task.
“Where you going?” Krishna called.
Alan fumbled with his keyring, desperate to get in and get the keys to the coach house and to fetch the shovel before the new tunnels under the park collapsed.
“You’re too late, you know,” Krishna continued. “You might as well give up. Too late, too late!”
Alan whirled and shrieked, a wordless, contorted war cry, a sound from his bestial guts. As his eyes swam back into focus, he saw Mimi standing beside Krishna, barefoot in a faded housecoat. Her eyes were very wide, and as she turned away from him, he saw that her stubby wings were splayed as wide as they’d go, forming a tent in her robe that pulled it up above her knees. Alan bit down and clamped his lips together and found his keys. He tracked mud over the polished floors and the ancient, threadbare Persian rugs as he ran to the kitchen, snatching the coach-house keys from their hook over the sink.
He ran back across the street to the little park, clutching his shovel. He jammed his head into the centerpiece and tried to see which way the tunnel had curved off when it turned, but it was too dark, the dirt too loose. He pulled himself out and took the shovel in his hands like a spear and stabbed it into the concrete bed of the wading pool, listening for a hollowness in the returning sound like a man thudding for a stud under drywall.
The white noise of the rain was too high, the rolling thunder too steady. His chest heaved and his tears mingled with the rain streaking down his face as he stabbed, again and again, at the pool’s bottom. His mind was scrambled and saturated, his vision clouded with the humid mist rising off his exertion-heated chest and the raindrops caught in his eyelashes.
He splashed out of the wading pool and took the shovel to the sod of the park’s lawn, picking an arbitrary spot and digging inefficiently and hysterically, the bent shovel tip twisting with each stroke.
Suddenly strong hands were on his shoulders, another set prizing the shovel from his hands. He looked up and blinked his eyes clear, looking into the face of two young Asian police officers. They were bulky from the Kevlar vests they wore under their rain slickers, with kind and exasperated expressions on their faces.
“Sir,” the one holding the shovel said, “what are you doing?”
Alan breathed himself into a semblance of composure. “I… ” he started, then trailed off. Krishna was watching from his porch, grinning ferociously, holding a cordless phone.
The creature that had howled at Krishna before scrambled for purchase in Alan’s chest. Alan averted his eyes from Krishna’s shit-eating, 911-calling grin. He focused on the cap of the officer in front of him, shrouded in a clear plastic shower cap to keep its crown dry. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It was a—a dog. A stray, or maybe a runaway. A little Scottie dog, it jumped down the center of the fountain there and disappeared. I looked down and thought it had found a tunnel that caved in on it.”
The officer peered at him from under the brim of his hat, dubiousness writ plain on his young, good-looking face. “A tunnel?”
Alan wiped the rain from his eyes, tried to regain his composure, tried to find his charm. It wasn’t to be found. Instead, every time he reached for something witty and calming, he saw the streaks of blood and torn clothing, dark on the loose soil of the fountain’s center, and no sooner had he dispelled those images than they were replaced with Krishna, sneering, saying, “Lost another one, huh?” He trembled and swallowed a sob.
“I think I need to sit down,” he said, as calmly as he could, and he sank slowly to his knees. The hands on his biceps let him descend.
“Sir, do you live nearby?” one of the cops asked, close in to his ear. He nodded into his hands, which he’d brought up to cover his face.
“Across the street,” he said. They helped him to his feet and supported him as he tottered, weak and heaving, to his porch. Krishna was gone once they got there.
The cops helped him shuck his drenched shoes and socks and put him down on the overstuffed horsehide sofa. Alan recovered himself with an effort of will and gave them his ID.
“I’m sorry, you must think I’m an absolute lunatic,” he said, shivering in his wet clothes.
“Sir,” the cop who’d taken the shovel from him said, “we see absolute lunatics every day. I think you’re just a little upset. We all go a little nuts from time to time.”
“Yeah,” Alan said. “Yeah. A little nuts. I had a long night last night. Family problems.”
The cops shifted their weight, showering the floor with raindrops that beaded on the finish.
“Are you going to be all right on your own? We can call someone if you’d like.”
“No,” Alan said, pasting on a weak smile. “No, that’s all right. I’ll be fine. I’m going to change into some dry clothes and clean up and, oh, I don’t know, get some sleep. I think I could use some sleep.”
“That sounds like an excellent idea,” the cop who’d taken the shovel said. He looked around at the bookcases. “You’ve read all of these?” he asked.
“Naw,” Alan said, falling into the rote response from his proprietorship of the bookstore. “What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?” The joke reminded him of better times and he smiled a genuine smile.
Though the stinging hot shower revived him somewhat, he kept quickening into panic at the thought of David creeping into his house in the night, stumping in on desiccated black child-legs, snaggled rictus under mummified lips.
He spooked at imagined noises and thudding rain and the dry creaking of the old house as he toweled off and dressed.
There was no phone in the mountain, no way to speak to his remaining brothers, the golems, his parents. He balled his fists and stood in the center of his bedroom, shaking with impotent worry.
David. None of them had liked David very much. Billy, the fortune-teller, had been born with a quiet wisdom, an eerie solemnity that had made him easy for the young Alan to care for. Carlos, the island, had crawled out of their mother’s womb and pulled himself to the cave mouth and up the face of their father, lying there for ten years, accreting until he was ready to push off on his own.
But Daniel, Daniel had been a hateful child from the day he was born. He was colicky, and his screams echoed through their father’s caverns. He screamed from the moment he emerged and Alan tipped him over and toweled him gently dry and he didn’t stop for an entire year. Alan stopped being able to tell day from night, lost track of the weeks and months. He’d developed a taste for food, real people food, that he’d buy in town at the Loblaws Superstore, but he couldn’t leave Davey alone in the cave, and he certainly couldn’t carry the howling, shitting, puking, pissing, filthy baby into town with him.
So they ate what the golems brought them: sweet grasses, soft berries, frozen winter fruit dug from the base of the orchards in town, blind winter fish from the streams. They drank snowmelt and ate pine cones and the baby Davey cried and cried until Alan couldn’t remember what it was to live in a world of words and conversations and thought and reflection.
No one knew what to do about Davey. Their father blew warm winds scented with coal dust and loam to calm him, but still Davey cried. Their mother rocked him on her gentlest spin cycle, but still Davey cried. Alan walked down the slope to Carl’s landmass, growing with the dust and rains and snow, and set him down on the soft grass and earth there, but still Davey cried, and Carlos inched farther and farther toward the St. Lawrence seaway, sluggishly making his way out to the ocean and as far away from the baby as possible.
After his first birthday, David started taking breaks from his screaming, learning to crawl and then totter, becoming a holy terror. If Alan left his schoolbooks within reach of the boy, they’d be reduced to shreds of damp mulch in minutes. By the time he was two, his head was exactly at Alan’s crotch height and he’d greet his brother on his return from school by charging at full speed into Alan’s nuts, propelled at unlikely speed on his thin legs.
At three, he took to butchering animals—the rabbits that little Bill kept in stacked hutches outside of the cave mouth went first. Billy rushed home from his grade-two class, eyes crazed with precognition, and found David methodically wringing the animals’ necks and then slicing them open with a bit of sharpened chert. Billy had showed David how to knap flint and chert the week before, after seeing a filmstrip about it in class. He kicked the makeshift knife out of Davey’s hand, breaking his thumb with the toe of the hard leather shoes the golems had made for him, and left Davey to bawl in the cave while Billy dignified his pets’ corpses, putting their entrails back inside their bodies and wrapping them in shrouds made from old diapers. Alan helped him bury them, and then found Davey and taped his thumb to his hand and spanked him until his arm was too tired to deal out one more wallop.
Alan made his way down to the living room, the floor streaked with mud and water. He went into the kitchen and filled a bucket with soapy water and gathered up an armload of rags from the rag bag. Methodically, he cleaned away the mud. He turned his sopping shoes on end over the grate and dialed the thermostat higher. He made himself a bowl of granola and a cup of coffee and sat down at his old wooden kitchen table and ate mindlessly, then washed the dishes and put them in the drying rack.
He’d have to go speak to Krishna.
Natalie answered the door in a pretty sun dress, combat boots, and a baseball hat. She eyed him warily.
“I’d like to speak to Krishna,” Alan said from under the hood of his poncho.
There was an awkward silence. Finally, Natalie said, “He’s not home.”
“I don’t believe you,” Alan said. “And it’s urgent, and I’m not in the mood to play around. Can you get Krishna for me, Natalie?”
“I told you,” she said, not meeting his eyes, “he’s not here.”
“That’s enough,” Alan said in his boss voice, his more-in-anger-than-in-sorrow voice. “Get him, Natalie. You don’t need to be in the middle of this—it’s not right for him to ask you to. Get him.”
Natalie closed the door and he heard the deadbolt turn. Is she going to fetch him, or is she locking me out?
He was on the verge of hammering the buzzer again, but he got his answer. Krishna opened the door and stepped onto the dripping porch, bulling Alan out with his chest.
He smiled grimly at Alan and made a well-go-on gesture.
“What did you see?” Alan said, his voice tight but under control.
“Saw you and that fat guy,” Krishna said. “Saw you rooting around in the park. Saw him disappear down the fountain.”
“He’s my brother,” Alan said.
“So what, he ain’t heavy? He’s fat, but I expect there’s a reason for that. I’ve seen your kind before, Adam. I don’t like you, and I don’t owe you any favors.” He turned and reached for the screen door.
“No,” Alan said, taking him
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