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- Author: Cory Doctorow
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“Your parents—” she said, then broke off.
“It’s complicated.”
“Are they dead?”
He reached out in the dark and took her hand.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” he said. “I can lie, and you’ll probably think I’m telling the truth. Or I can tell the truth, and you’ll think that I’m lying.”
She squeezed his hand. Despite the sweaty heat of the cave, her fingers were cold as ice. He covered her hand with his free hand and rubbed at her cold fingers.
“Tell me the truth,” she whispered. “I’ll believe you.”
So he did, in mutters and whispers. He didn’t have the words to explain it all, didn’t know exactly how to explain it, but he tried. How he knew his father’s moods. How he felt his mother’s love.
After keeping this secret all his life, it felt incredible to be letting it out. His heart thudded in his chest, and his shoulders felt progressively lighter, until he thought he might rise up off his bedding and fly around the cave.
If it hadn’t been dark, he wouldn’t have been able to tell it. It was the dark, and the faint lunar glow of Marci’s face that showed no expression that let him open up and spill out all the secrets. Her fingers squeezed tighter and tighter, and now he felt like singing and dancing, because surely between the two of them, they could find a book in the library or maybe an article in the microfilm cabinets that would really explain it to him.
He wound down. “No one else knows this,” he said. “No one except you.” He leaned in and planted a kiss on her cold lips. She sat rigid and unmoving as he kissed her.
“Marci?”
“Alan,” she breathed. Her fingers went slack. She pulled her hand free.
Suddenly Alan was cold, too. The scant inches between them felt like an unbridgeable gap.
“You think I’m lying,” he said, staring out into the cave.
“I don’t know—”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I can help you get home now, all right?”
She folded her hands on her lap and nodded miserably.
On the way out of the cave, Eddie-Freddie-Georgie tottered over, still holding his car. He held it out to her mutely. She knelt down solemnly and took it from him, then patted him on the head. “Merry Christmas, kiddo,” she said. He hugged her leg, and she laughed a little and bent to pick him up. She couldn’t. He was too heavy. She let go of him and nervously pried his arms from around her thigh.
Alan took her down the path to the side road that led into town. The moonlight shone on the white snow, making the world glow bluish. They stood by the roadside for a long and awkward moment.
“Good night, Alan,” she said, and turned and started trudging home.
There was no torture at school the next day. She ignored him through the morning, and he couldn’t find her at recess, but at lunch she came and sat next to him. They ate in silence, but he was comforted by her presence beside him, a warmth that he sensed more than felt.
She sat beside him in afternoon classes, too. Not a word passed between them. For Alan, it felt like anything they could say to one another would be less true than the silence, but that realization hurt. He’d never been able to discuss his life and nature with anyone and it seemed as though he never would.
But the next morning, in the school yard, she snagged him as he walked past the climber made from a jumble of bolted-together logs and dragged him into the middle. It smelled faintly of pee and was a rich source of mysterious roaches and empty beer bottles on Monday mornings after the teenagers had come and gone.
She was crouched down on her haunches in the snow there, her steaming breath coming in short huffs. She grabbed him by the back of his knit toque and pulled his face to hers, kissing him hard on the mouth, shocking the hell out of him by forcing her tongue past his lips.
They kissed until the bell rang, and as Alan made his way to class, he felt like his face was glowing like a lightbulb. His homeroom teacher asked him if he was feeling well, and he stammered out some kind of affirmative while Marci, sitting in the next row, stifled a giggle.
They ate their lunches together again, and she filled the silence with a running commentary of the deficiencies of the sandwich her father had packed her, the strange odors coming from the brown bag that Alan had brought, filled with winter mushrooms and some soggy bread and cheese, and the hairiness of the mole on the lunch lady’s chin.
When they reached the schoolyard, she tried to drag him back to the logs, but he resisted, taking her instead to the marsh where he’d first spied her. The ground had frozen over and the rushes and reeds were stubble, poking out of the snow. He took her mittened hands in his and waited for her to stop squirming.
Which she did, eventually. He’d rehearsed what he’d say to her all morning: Do you believe me? What am I? Am I like you? Do you still love me? Are you still my friend? I don’t understand it any better than you do, but now, now there are two of us who know about it, and maybe we can make sense of it together. God, it’s such a relief to not be the only one anymore.
But now, standing there with Marci, in the distant catcalls of the playground and the smell of the new snow and the soughing of the wind in the trees, he couldn’t bring himself to say it. She either knew these things or she didn’t, and if she didn’t, he didn’t know what he could do to help it.
“What?” she said at last.
“Do you—” he began, then fell silent. He couldn’t say the words.
She looked irritated, and the sounds and the smells swept over him as the moment stretched. But then she softened. “I don’t understand it, Alan,” she said. “Is it true? Is it really how you say it is? Did I see what I saw?”
“It’s true,” he said, and it was as though the clouds had parted, the world gone bright with the glare off the snow and the sounds from the playground now joyous instead of cruel. “It’s true, and I don’t understand it any more than you do, Marci.”
“Are you… human, Alan?”
“I think so,” he said. “I bleed. I eat. I sleep. I think and talk and dream.”
She squeezed his hands and darted a kiss at him. “You kiss,” she said.
And it was all right again.
The next day was Saturday, and Marci arranged to meet him at the cave-mouth. In the lee of the wind, the bright winter sun reflected enough heat off the snow that some of it melted away, revealing the stunted winter grass beneath. They sat on the dry snow and listened to the wind whistle through the pines and the hiss of loose snow blowing across the crust.
“Will I get to meet your Da, then?” she said, after they’d watched a jackrabbit hop up the mountainside and disappear into the woods.
He sniffed deeply, and smelled the coalface smell of his father’s cogitation.
“You want to?” he said.
“I do.”
And so he led her inside the mountain, through the winter cave, and back and back to the pool in the mountain’s heart. They crept along quietly, her fingers twined in his. “You have to put out the flashlight now,” he said. “It’ll scare the goblin.” His voice shocked him, and her, he felt her startle. It was so quiet otherwise, just the sounds of breathing and of cave winds.
So she let the whirring dynamo in the flashlight wind down, and the darkness descended on them. It was cool, but not cold, and the wind smelled more strongly of coalface than ever. “He’s in there,” Alan said. He heard the goblin scamper away. His words echoed over the pool around the corner. “Come on.” Her fingers were very cool. They walked in a slow, measured step, like a king and queen of elfland going for a walk in the woods.
He stopped them at the pool’s edge. There was almost no light here, but Alan could make out the smooth surface of his father’s pool.
“Now what?” she whispered, the hissing of her words susurrating over the pool’s surface.
“We can only talk to him from the center,” he whispered. “We have to wade in.”
“I can’t go home with wet clothes,” she whispered.
“You don’t wear clothes,” he said. He let go of her hand and began to unzip his snowsuit.
And so they stripped, there on his father’s shore. She was luminous in the dark, a pale girl-shape picked out in the ripples of the pool, skinny, with her arms crossed in front of her chest. Even though he knew she couldn’t see him, he was self-conscious in his nudity, and he stepped into the pool as soon as he was naked.
“Wait,” she said, sounding panicked. “Don’t leave me!”
So he held out his hand for her, and then, realizing that she couldn’t see it, he stepped out of the pool and took her hand, brushing her small breast as he did so. He barely registered the contact, though she startled and nearly fell over. “Sorry,” he said. “Come on.”
The water was cold, but once they were in up to their shoulders, it warmed up, or they went numb.
“Is it okay?” she whispered, and now that they were in the center of the cavern, the echoes crossed back and forth and took a long time to die out.
“Listen,” Andy said. “Just listen.”
And as the echoes of his words died down, the winds picked up, and then the words emerged from the breeze.
“Adam,” his father sighed. Marci jumped a foot out of the water, and her splashdown sent watery ripples rebounding off the cavern walls.
Alan reached out for her and draped his arm around her shoulders. She huddled against his chest, slick cold naked skin goose-pimpled against his ribs. She smelled wonderful, like a fox. It felt wonderful, and solemn, to stand there nude, in the heart of his father, and let his secrets spill away.
Her breathing stilled again.
“Alan,” his father said.
“We want to understand, Father,” Alan whispered. “What am I?” It was the question he’d never asked. Now that he’d asked it, he felt like a fool: Surely his father knew, the mountain knew everything, had stood forever. He could have found out anytime he’d thought to ask.
“I don’t have the answer,” his father said. “There may be no answer. You may never know.”
Adam let go of Marci, let his arms fall to his sides.
“No,” he said. “No!” he shouted again, and the stillness was broken. The wind blew cold and hard, and he didn’t care. “NO!” he screamed, and Marci grabbed him and put her hand over his mouth. His ears roared with echoes, and they did not die down, but rather built atop one another, to a wall of noise that scared him.
She was crying now, scared and openmouthed sobs. She splashed him and water went up his nose and stung his eyes. The wind was colder now, cold enough to hurt, and he took her hand and sloshed recklessly for the shore. He spun up the flashlight and handed it to her, then yanked his clothes over his wet skin, glaring at the pool while she did the same.
In the winter cave, they met a golem.
It stood like a statue, brick-red with glowing eyes, beside Alan’s mother, hands at its sides. Golems didn’t venture to this side of his father very often, and almost never in daylight. Marci caught him in the flashlight’s beam as they entered the warm humidity of the cave, shivering in the gusting winds. She fumbled the flashlight and Alan
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