Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 50

He wouldn't let Kurt walk him up the steps and put him to bed, so instead Kurt watched from the curb until Alan went inside, then gunned the engine and pulled away. It was still morning rush hour, and the Market-dwellers were clacking toward work on hard leather shoes or piling their offspring into minivans.

Alan washed the blood off his scalp and face and took a gingerly shower. When he turned off the water, he heard m.u.f.fled sounds coming through the open windows. A wailing electric guitar. He went to the window and stuck his head out and saw Krishna sitting on an unmade bed in the unsoundproofed bedroom, in a grimy housecoat, guitar on his lap, eyes closed, concentrating on the screams he was wringing from the instrument's long neck.

Alan wanted to sleep, but the noise and the throb of his head -- going in counterpoint -- and the sight of Davey, flicking from climber to bush to hillside, scuttling so quickly Alan was scarce sure he'd seen him, it all conspired to keep him awake.

He bought coffees at the Donut Time on College -- the Greek's wouldn't be open for hours -- and brought it over to Kurt's storefront, but the lights were out, so he wandered slowly home, sucking back the coffee.

Benny had another seizure halfway up the mountain, stiffening up and falling down before they could catch him.

As Billy lay supine in the dirt, Alan heard a distant howl, not like a wolf, but like a thing that a wolf had caught and is savaging with its jaws. The sound made his neck p.r.i.c.kle and when he looked at the little ones, he saw that their eyes were rolling crazily.

"Got to get him home," Alan said, lifting Benny up with a grunt. The little ones tried to help, but they just got tangled up in Benny's long loose limbs and so Alan shooed them off, telling them to keep a lookout behind him, look for Davey lurking on an outcropping or in a branch, rock held at the ready.

When they came to the cave mouth again, he heard another one of the screams. Brendan stirred over his shoulders and Alan set him down, heart thundering, looking every way for Davey, who had come back.

"He's gone away for the night," Burt said conversationally. He sat up and then gingerly got to his feet. "He'll be back in the morning, though."

The cave was destroyed. Alan's books, Ern-Felix-Grad's toys were smashed. Their clothes were bubbling in the hot spring in rags and tatters. Brian's carvings were broken and smashed. Schoolbooks were ruined.

"You all right?" Alan said.

Brian dusted himself off and stretched his arms and legs out. "I'll be fine," he said. "It's not me he's after."

Alan stared blankly as the brothers tidied up the cave and made piles of their belongings. The little ones looked scared, without any of the hardness he remembered from that day when they'd fought it out on the hillside.

Benny retreated to his perch, but before the sun set and the cave darkened, he brought a couple blankets down and dropped them beside the nook where Alan slept. He had his baseball bat with him, and it made a good, solid aluminum sound when he leaned it against the wall.

Silently, the small ones crossed the cave with a pile of their own blankets, George bringing up the rear with a torn T-s.h.i.+rt stuffed with sharp stones.

Alan looked at them and listened to the mountain breathe around them. It had been years since his father had had anything to say to them. It had been years since their mother had done anything except wash the clothes. Was there a voice in the cave now? A wind? A smell?

He couldn't smell anything. He couldn't hear anything. Benny propped himself up against the cave wall with a blanket around his shoulders and the baseball bat held loose and ready between his knees.

A smell then, on the wind. Sewage and sulfur. A stink of fear.

Alan looked to his brothers, then he got up and left the cave without a look back. He wasn't going to wait for Davey to come to him.

The night had come up warm, and the highway sounds down at the bottom of the hill mingled with the spring breeze in the new buds on the trees and the new needles on the pines, the small sounds of birds and bugs foraging in the new year. Alan slipped out the cave mouth and looked around into the twilight, hoping for a glimpse of something out of the ordinary, but apart from an early owl and a handful of fireflies sparking off like distant stars, he saw nothing amiss.

He padded around the mountainside, stooped down low, stopping every few steps to listen for footfalls. At the high, small entrance to the golems' cave, he paused, lay on his belly, and slowly peered around the fissure.

It had been years since Alvin had come up to the golems' cave, years since one had appeared in their father's cave. They had long ago ceased bringing their kills to the threshold of the boys' cave, ceased leaving pelts in neat piles on the eve of the waning moon.

The view from the outcropping was stunning. The village had grown to a town, fast on its way to being a city. A million lights twinkled. The highway cut a glistening ribbon of streetlamps through the night, a straight line slicing the hills and curves. There were thousands of people down there, all connected by a humming net-work -- a work of nets, cunning knots tied in a cunning grid -- of wire and radio and civilization.

Slowly, he looked back into the golems' cave. He remembered it as being lined with ranks of bones, a barbarian cathedral whose arches were decorated with ranked skulls and interlocked, tiny animal tibia. Now those bones were scattered and broken, the ossified wainscoting rendered gap-toothed by missing and tumbled bones.

Alan wondered how the golems had reacted when Darl had ruined their centuries of careful work. Then, looking more closely, he realized that the bones were dusty and grimed, cobwebbed and moldering. They'd been lying around for a lot longer than a couple hours.

Alan crept into the cave now, eyes open, ears straining. Puffs of dust rose with his footfalls, illuminated in the moonlight and city light streaming in from the cave mouth. Another set of feet had crossed this floor: small, boyish feet that took slow, arthritic steps. They'd come in, circled the cave, and gone out again.

Alan listened for the golems and heard nothing. He did his own slow circle of the cave, peering into the shadows. Where had they gone?

There. A streak of red clay, leading to a mound. Alan drew up alongside of it and made out the runny outlines of the legs and arms, the torso and the head. The golem had dragged itself into this corner and had fallen to mud. The dust on the floor was red. Dried mud. Golem-dust.

How long since he'd been in this cave? How long since he'd come around this side of the mountain? Two months. Three? Four? Longer. How long had the golems lain dead and dust in this cave?

They'd carved his cradle. Fed him. Taught him to talk and to walk. In some sense, they were his fathers, as much as the mountain was.

He fished around inside himself for emotion and found none. Relief, maybe. Relief.

The golems were an embodiment of his strangeness, as weird as his smooth, navelless belly, an element of his secret waiting to surface and -- what? What had he been afraid of? Contempt? Vivisection? He didn't know anymore, but knew that he wanted to fit in and that the golems'

absence made that more possible.

There was a smell on the wind in here, the death and corruption smell he'd noticed in the sleeping cave. Father was worried.

No. Davey was inside. That was his smell, the smell of Davey long dead and back from the grave.

Alan walked deeper into the tunnels, following his nose.

Davey dropped down onto his shoulders from a ledge in an opening where the ceiling stretched far over their heads. He was so light, at first Alan thought someone had thrown a blanket over his shoulders.

Then the fingers dug into his eyes. Then the fingers fishhooked the corner of his mouth.

Then the screech, thick as a desiccated tongue, dry as the dust of a golem, like no sound and like all the sounds at once.

The smell of corruption was everywhere, filling his nostrils like his face has been ground into a pile of rotten meat. He tugged at the dry, thin hands tangled in his face, and found them strong as iron bands, and then he screamed.

Then they were both screeching and rolling on the ground, and he had Danny's thumb in his hand, bending it back painfully, until *snap*, it came off clean with a sound like dry wood cracking.

Doug was off him then, crawling off toward the shadows. Alan got to his knees, still holding the thumb, and made ready to charge him, holding his sore face with one hand, when he heard the slap of running footfalls behind him and then Bill was streaking past him, baseball bat at ready, and he swung it like a polo-mallet and connected with a hollow crunch of aluminum on chitinous leathery skin.

The sound shocked Alan to his feet, wet sick rising in his gorge. Benny was winding up for a second blow, aiming for Darren's head this time, an out-of-the park *smack* that would have knocked that shrunken head off the skinny, blackened neck, and Alan shouted, "NO!" and roared at Benny and leapt for him. As he sailed through the air, he thought he was saving *Benny* from the feeling he'd carried with him for a decade, but as he connected with Benny, he felt a biting-down feeling, clean and hard, and he knew he was defending *Drew*, saving him for once instead of hurting him.

He was still holding on to the thumb, and Davey was inches from his face, and he was atop Benny, and they breathed together, chests heaving. Alan wobbled slowly to his feet and dropped the thumb onto Drew's chest, then he helped Billy to his feet and they limped off to their beds. Behind them, they heard the dry sounds of Davey getting to his feet, coughing and hacking with a crunch of thin, cracked ribs.

He was sitting on their mother the next morning. He was naked and uns.e.xed by desiccation -- all the brothers, even little George, had ceased going about in the nude when they'd pa.s.sed through p.u.b.erty -- sullen and silent atop the white, chipped finish of her enamel top, so worn and ground down that it resembled a collection of beach-China. It had been a long time since any of them had sought solace in their mother's gentle rocking, since, indeed, they had spared her a thought beyond filling her belly with clothes and emptying her out an hour later.

The little ones woke first and saw him, taking cover behind a stalagmite, peering around, each holding a sharp, flat rock, each with his pockets full of more. Danny looked at each in turn with eyes gone yellow and congealed, and bared his mouthful of broken and blackened teeth in a rictus that was equal parts humor and threat.

Bradley was the next to wake, his bat in his hand and his eyelids fluttering open as he sprang to his feet, and then Alan was up as well, a hand on his shoulder.

He crouched down and walked slowly to Davey. He had the knife, handle wound with cord, once-keen edge gone back to rust and still reddened with ten-year-old blood, but its sharpness mattered less than its history.