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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“Have you read all of these?” Alan asked as he shifted the John Mortimers down one shelf to make room for the Ed McBains.
“Naw,” she said, punching him in the shoulder. “What’s the point of a bunch of books you’ve already read?”
She caught him in the schoolyard on Monday and dragged him by one ear out to the marshy part. She pinned him down and straddled his chest and tickled him with one hand so that he cried out and used the other hand to drum a finger across his lips, so that his cries came out “bibble.”
Once he’d bucked her off, they kissed for a little while, then she grabbed hold of one of his nipples and twisted.
“All right,” she said. “Enough torture. When do I get to meet your family?”
“You can’t,” he said, writhing on the pine needles, which worked their way up the back of his shirt and pricked him across his lower back, feeling like the bristles of a hairbrush.
“Oh, I can, and I will,” she said. She twisted harder.
He slapped her hand away. “My family is really weird,” he said. “My parents don’t really ever go out. They’re not like other people. They don’t talk.” All of it true.
“They’re mute?”
“No, but they don’t talk.”
“They don’t talk much, or they don’t talk at all?” She pronounced it a-tall.
“Not at all.”
“How did you and your brothers learn to talk, then?”
“Neighbors.” Still true. The golems lived in the neighboring caves. “And my father, a little.” True.
“So you have neighbors who visit you?” she asked, a triumphant gleam in her eye.
Damn. “No, we visit them.” Lying now. Sweat on the shag of hair over his ears, which felt like they had coals pressed to them.
“When you were a baby?”
“No, my grandparents took care of me when I was a baby.” Deeper. “But they died.” Bottoming out now.
“I don’t believe you,” she said, and he saw tears glisten in her eyes. “You’re too embarrassed to introduce me to your family.”
“That’s not it.” He thought fast. “My brother. David. He’s not well. He has a brain tumor. We think he’ll probably die. That’s why he doesn’t come to school. And it makes him act funny. He hits people, says terrible things.” Mixing truth with lies was a lot easier. “He shouts and hurts people and he’s the reason I can’t ever have friends over. Not until he dies.”
Her eyes narrowed. “If that’s a lie,” she said, “it’s a terrible one. My Ma died of cancer, and it’s not something anyone should make fun of. So, it better not be a lie.”
“It’s not a lie,” he said, mustering a tear. “My brother David, we don’t know how long he’ll live, but it won’t be long. He acts like a monster, so it’s hard to love him, but we all try.”
She rocked back onto her haunches. “It’s true, then?” she asked softly.
He nodded miserably.
“Let’s say no more about it, then,” she said. She took his hand and traced hieroglyphs on his palm with the ragged edges of her chewed-up fingernails.
The recess bell rang and they headed back to school. They were about to leave the marshland when something hard hit Alan in the back of the head. He spun around and saw a small, sharp rock skitter into the grass, saw Davey’s face contorted with rage, lips pulled all the way back off his teeth, half-hidden in the boughs of a tree, winding up to throw another rock.
He flinched away and the rock hit the paving hard enough to bounce. Marci whirled around, but David was gone, high up in the leaves, invisible, malicious, biding.
“What was that?”
“I dunno,” Alan lied, and groaned.
Kurt and Alan examined every gap between every storefront on Augusta, no matter how narrow. Kurt kept silent as Alan fished his arm up to the shoulder along miniature alleys that were just wide enough to accommodate the rain gutters depending from the roof.
They found the alley that Frederick had been dragged down near the end of the block, between a mattress store and an egg wholesaler. It was narrow enough that they had to traverse it sideways, but there, at the entrance, were two smears of skin and blood, just above the ground, stretching off into the sulfurous, rotty-egg depths of the alleyway.
They slid along the alley’s length, headed for the gloom of the back. Something skittered away from Alan’s shoe and he bent down, but couldn’t see it. He ran his hands along the ground and the walls and they came back with a rime of dried blood and a single strand of long, oily hair stuck to them. He wiped his palms off on the bricks.
“I can’t see,” he said.
“Here,” Kurt said, handing him a miniature maglight whose handle was corrugated by hundreds of toothmarks. Alan saw that he was intense, watching.
Alan twisted the light on. “Thanks,” he said, and Kurt smiled at him, seemed a little taller. Alan looked again. There, on the ground, was a sharpened black tooth, pierced by a piece of pipe-cleaner wire.
He pocketed the tooth before Kurt saw it and delved farther, approaching the alley’s end, which was carpeted with a humus of moldering cardboard, leaves, and road turds blown or washed there. He kicked it aside as best he could, then crouched down to examine the sewer grating beneath. The greenish brass screws that anchored it to the ground had sharp cuts in their old grooves where they had been recently removed. He rattled the grating, which was about half a meter square, then slipped his multitool out of his belt holster. He flipped out the Phillips driver and went to work on the screws, unconsciously putting Kurt’s flashlight in his mouth, his front teeth finding purchase in the dents that Kurt’s own had left there.
He realized with a brief shudder that Kurt probably used this flashlight while nipple-deep in dumpsters, had an image of Kurt transferring it from his gloved hands to his mouth and back again as he dug through bags of kitchen and toilet waste, looking for discarded technology. But the metal was cool and clean against his teeth and so he bit down and worked the four screws loose, worked his fingers into the mossy slots in the grate, lifted it out, and set it to one side.
He shone the light down the hole and found another fingerbone, the tip of a thumb, desiccated to the size of a large raisin, and he pocketed that, too. There was a lot of blood here, a little puddle that was still wet in the crusted middle. Frederick’s blood.
He stepped over the grating and shone the light back down the hole, inviting Kurt to have a look.
“That’s where they went,” he said as Kurt bent down.
“That hole?”
“That hole,” he said.
“Is that blood?”
“That’s blood. It’s not easy to fit someone my brother’s size down a hole like that.” He set the grate back, screwed it into place, and passed the torch back to Kurt. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
On the street, Alan looked at his blood and moss-grimed palms. Kurt pushed back his floppy, frizzed-out, bleach-white mohawk and scratched vigorously at the downy brown fuzz growing in on the sides of his skull.
“You think I’m a nut,” Alan said. “It’s okay, that’s natural.”
Kurt smiled sheepishly. “If it’s any consolation, I think you’re a harmless nut, okay? I like you.”
“You don’t have to believe me, so long as you don’t get in my way,” Alan said. “But it’s easier if you believe me.”
“Easier to do what?”
“Oh, to get along,” Alan said.
Davey leapt down from a rock outcropping as Alan made his way home that night, landing on his back. Alan stumbled and dropped his school bag. He grabbed at the choking arm around his neck, then dropped to his knees as Davey bounced a fist-sized stone off his head, right over his ear.
He slammed himself back, pinning Davey between himself and the sharp stones on the walkway up to the cave entrance, then mashed backward with his elbows, his head ringing like a gong from the stone’s blow. His left elbow connected with Davey’s solar plexus and the arm around his throat went slack.
He climbed to his knees and looked Davey in the face. He was blue and gasping, but Alan couldn’t work up a lot of sympathy for him as he reached up to the side of his head and felt the goose egg welling there. His fingertips came back with a few strands of hair blood-glued to them.
He’d been in a few schoolyard scraps and this was always the moment when a teacher intervened—one combatant pinned, the other atop him. What could you do after this? Was he going to take the rock from Davey’s hand and smash him in the face with it, knocking out his teeth, breaking his nose, blacking his eyes? Could he get off of Davey without getting back into the fight?
He pinned Davey’s shoulders under his knees and took him by the chin with one hand. “You can’t do this, Danny,” he said, looking into his hazel eyes, which had gone green as they did when he was angry.
“Do what?”
“Spy on me. Try to hurt me. Try to hurt my friends. Tease me all the time. You can’t do it, okay?”
“I’ll stab you in your sleep, Andy. I’ll break your fingers with a brick. I’ll poke your eyes out with a fork.” He was fizzling like a baking-soda volcano, saliva slicking his cheeks and nostrils and chin, his eyes rolling.
Alan felt helplessness settle on him, weighing down his limbs. How could he let him go? What else could he do? Was he going to have to sit on Davey’s shoulders until they were both old men?
“Please, Davey. I’m sorry about what I said. I just can’t bring her home, you understand,” he said.
“Pervert. She’s a slut and you’re a pervert. I’ll tear her titties off.”
“Don’t, Danny, please. Stop, okay?”
Darren bared his teeth and growled, jerking his head forward and snapping at Alan’s crotch, heedless of the painful thuds his head made when it hit the ground after each lunge.
Alan waited to see if he would tire himself out, but when it was clear that he would not tire, Alan waited for his head to thud to the ground and then, abruptly, he popped him in the chin, leapt off of him turned him on his belly, and wrenched him to his knees, twisting one arm behind his back and pulling his head back by the hair. He brought Davey to his feet, under his control, before he’d recovered from the punch.
“I’m telling Dad,” he said in Davey’s ear, and began to frog-march him through to the cave mouth and down into the lake in the middle of the mountain. He didn’t even slow down when they reached the smooth shore of the lake, just pushed on, sloshing in up to his chest, Davey’s head barely above the water.
“He won’t stop,” Alan said, to the winds, to the water, to the vaulted ceiling, to the scurrying retreat of the goblin. “I think he’ll kill me if he goes on. He’s torturing me. You’ve seen it. Look at him!”
Davey was thrashing in the water, his face swollen and bloody, his eyes rattling like dried peas in a maraca. Alan’s fingers, still buried in Davey’s shiny blond hair, kept brushing up against the swollen bruises there, getting bigger by the moment. “I’ll fucking kill you!” Davey howled, screaming inchoate into the echo that came back from his call.
“Shhh,” Alan said into his ear. “Shhh. Listen, Davey, please, shhh.”
Davey’s roar did not abate. Alan thought he could hear the whispers and groans of their father in the wind, but he couldn’t make it out. “Please, shhh,” he said, gathering Davey in a hug that pinned his arms to his sides, putting his lips up against Davey’s ear, holding him still.
“Shhh,” he said, and Davey stopped twitching against
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