Adam whirled on him, something snapping inside. "Don't, Kurt, just
don't, okay? He tried to kill me tonight. He may already have killed my
brothers. This is life or death, and there's no room for sentiment or
humanity. Get a hammer out of the toolbox, on that shelf." Kurt
hesitated. "Do it!" Alan said, pointing at the toolbox.
Kurt shrank back, looking as though he'd been slapped. He moved as if in
a dream, opening the toolbox and pawing through it until he came up with
a scarred hammer, one claw snapped off.
Davey shook his head. "You don't scare me, Albert. Not for an instant. I
have a large supply of fingers and teeth -- all I need. And you --
you're like him. You're a sentimentalist. Scared of yourself. Scared of
me. Scared of everything. That's why you ran away. That's why you got
rid of me. Scared."
Alan dug in his pocket for the fingerbones and teeth he'd collected. He
found the tip of a pinky with a curled-over nail as thick as an oyster's
shell, crusted with dirt and blood. "Give me the hammer, Kurt," he said.
Davey's eyes followed him as he set the fingertip down on the tiles and
raised the hammer. He brought it down just to one side of the finger,
hard enough to break the tile. Kurt jumped a little, and Alan held the
hammer up again.
"Tell me or this time I won't miss," he said, looking Davey in the eye.
Davey shrugged in his bonds.
Alan swung the hammer again. It hit the fingertip with a jarring impact
that vibrated up his arm and resonated through his hurt shoulder. He
raised the hammer again. He'd expected the finger to crush into powder,
but instead it fissured into three jagged pieces, like a piece of chert
fracturing under a hammer-stone.
Davey's eyes were squeezed down to slits now. "You're the scared
one. You can't scare me," he said, his voice choked with phlegm.
Alan sat on the irregular tile and propped his chin in his palm. "Okay,
Davey, you're right. I'm scared. You've kidnapped our brothers, maybe
even killed them. You're terrorizing me. I can't think, I can't
sleep. So tell me, Danny, why shouldn't I just kill you again, and get
rid of all that fear?"
"I know where the brothers are," he said instantly. "I know where there
are more people like us. All the answers, Albert, every answer you've
ever looked for. I've got them. And I won't tell you any of them. But so
long as I'm walking around and talking, you think that I might."
#
Alan took Marci back to his bedroom, the winter bedroom that was no more
than a niche in the hot-spring cavern, a pile of rags and a sleeping bag
for a bed. It had always been enough for him, but now he was ashamed of
it. He took the flashlight from Marci and let it wind down, so that they
were sitting in darkness.
"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
caught it before it hit the ground.
"It's okay," he said. His chest was heaving from his tantrum, but the
presence of the golem calmed him. You could say or do anything to a
golem, and it couldn't strike back, couldn't answer back. The sons of
the mountain that sheltered -- and birthed? -- the golems owed nothing
to them.
He walked over to it and folded his arms.
"What is it?" he said.
The golem bent its head slightly and looked him in the eye. It was
man-shaped, but baggier, muscles like frozen mud. An overhang of belly
covered its smooth crotch like a kilt. Its chisel-shaped teeth clacked
together as it limbered up its jaw.
"Your father is sad," it said. Its voice was slow and grinding, like an
avalanche. "Our side grows cold."
"I don't care," Alan said. "*Fuck* my father," he said. Behind him,
perched atop their mother, Davey whittered a mean little laugh.
"You shouldn't --"
Alan shoved the golem. It was like shoving a boulder. It didn't give at
all.
"You don't tell me what to do," he said. "You can't tell me what to
do. I want to know what I am, how we're possible, and if you can't help,
then you can leave now."
The winds blew colder, smelling now of the golem's side of the mountain,
of clay and the dry bones of their kills, which they arrayed on the
walls of their cavern.
The golem stood stock still.
"Does it...*understand*?" Marci asked. Davey snickered again.
"It's not stupid," Alan said, calming a little. "It's...*slow*. It
thinks slowly and acts slowly. But it's not stupid." He paused for a
moment. "It taught me to speak," he said.
That did it. He began to cry, biting his lip to keep from making a
sound, but the tears rolled down his cheeks and his shoulders shook. The
flashlight's beam pinned him, and he wanted to run to his mother and
hide behind her, wanted to escape the light.
"Go," he said softly to the golem, touching its elbow. "It'll be all
right."
Slowly, gratingly, the golem turned and lumbered out of the cave, clumsy
and ponderous.
Marci put her arm around him and he buried his face in her skinny neck,
the hot tears coursing down her collarbones.
#
Davey came to him that night and pinned him in the light of the
flashlight. He woke staring up into the bright bulb, shielding his
eyes. He groped out for the light, but Darryl danced back out of reach,
keeping the beam in his eyes. The air crackled with the angry grinding
of its hand-dynamo.
He climbed out of bed naked and felt around on the floor. He had a geode
there, he'd broken it and polished it by hand, and it was the size of a
softball, the top smooth as glass, the underside rough as a coconut's
hide.
Wordless and swift, he wound up and threw the geode as hard as he could
at where he judged Davey's head to be.
There was a thud and a cry, and the light clattered to the ground,
growing more dim as its dynamo whirred to a stop. Green blobs chased
themselves across his vision, and he could only see Darren rolling on
the ground by turning his head to one side and looking out of the corner
of his eye.
He groped toward Davey and smelled the blood. Kneeling down, he found
Davey's hand and followed it up to his shoulder, his neck. Slick with
blood. Higher, to Davey's face, his forehead, the dent there sanded
ragged by the rough side of the geode. The blood flowed freely and
beneath his other hand Danny's chest heaved as he breathed, shallowly,
rapidly, almost panting.
His vision was coming back now. He took off his T-shirt and wadded it
up, pressed it to Davey's forehead. They'd done first aid in class. You
weren't supposed to move someone with a head injury. He pressed down
with the T-shirt, trying to stanch the blood.
Then, quick as a whip, Davey's head twisted around and he bit down,
hard, on Alan's thumbtip. Albert reeled back, but it was too late: Davey
had bitten off the tip of his right thumb. Alan howled, waking up
Ed-Fred-Geoff, who began to cry. Davey rolled away, scampering back into
the cave's depths.
Alan danced around the cave, hand clamped between his thighs,
mewling. He fell to the floor and squeezed his legs together, then
slowly brought his hand up before his face. The ragged stump of his
thumb was softly spurting blood in time with his heartbeat. He struggled
to remember his first aid. He wrapped his T-shirt around the wound and
then pulled his parka on over his bare chest and jammed his bare feet
into his boots, then made his way to the cave mouth and scooped up snow
under the moon's glow, awkwardly packing a snowball around his hand. He
shivered as he made his way back into the winter cave and propped
himself up against his mother, holding his hurt hand over his head.
The winter cave grew cold as the ice packed around his hand. Bobby,
woken by his clairvoyant instincts, crept forward with a sheet and
draped it over Alan. He'd foreseen this, of course -- had foreseen all
of it. But Bobby followed his own code, and he kept his own counsel,
cleaning up after the disasters he was powerless to prevent.
Deep in the mountains, they heard the echoes of Davey's tittering
laughter.
#
"It was wrong to bring her here, Adam," Billy said to him in the
morning, as he fed Alan the crusts of bread and dried apples he'd
brought him, packing his hand with fresh snow.
"I didn't bring her here, she followed me," Adam said. His arm ached
from holding it aloft, and his back and tailbone were numb with the ache
of a night spent sitting up against their mother's side. "And besides,
why should it be wrong? Whose rules? What rules? What are the *fucking*
rules?"
"You can feel the rules, brother," he said. He couldn't look Alan in the
eye, he never did. This was a major speech, coming from Bobby.
"I can't feel any rules," Alan said. He wondered if it was true. He'd
never told anyone about the family before. Had he known all along that
he shouldn't do this?
"I can. She can't know. No one can know. Even we can't know. We'll never
understand it."
"Where is Davey?"
"He's doing a...ritual. With your thumb."
They sat silent and strained their ears to hear the winds and the
distant shuffle of the denizens of the mountain.
Alan shifted, using his good hand to prop himself up, looking for a
comfortable position. He brought his injured hand down to his lap and
unwrapped his blood-soaked T-shirt from his fist, gently peeling it away
from the glue of dried blood that held it there.
His hand had shriveled in the night, from ice and from restricted
circulation, and maybe from Davey's ritual. Alan pondered its crusty,
clawed form, thinking that it looked like it belonged to someone --
some*thing* -- else.
Buddy scaled the stalactite that served as the ladder up to the lofty
nook where he slept and came back down holding his water bottle. "It's
clean, it's from the pool," he said, another major speech for him. He
also had an armload of scavenged diapers, much-washed and worn soft as
flannel. He wet one and began to wipe away the crust of blood on Alan's
arm and hand, working his way up from the elbow, then tackling the
uninjured fingers, then, very gently, gently as a feather-touch, slow as
a glacier, he worked on Alan's thumb.
When he was done, Alan's hand was clean and dry and cold, and the wound
of his thumb was exposed and naked, a thin crust of blood weeping liquid
slowly. It seemed to Alan that he could see the stump of bone protruding
from the wound. He was amazed to see his bones, to get a look at a
cross-section of himself. He wondered if he could count the rings and
find out how old he was, as he had never been really certain on that
score. He giggled ghoulishly.
He held out his good hand. "Get me up, okay?" Bobby hauled him to his
feet. "Get me some warm clothes, too?"
And he did, because he was Bobby, and he was always only too glad to
help, only too glad to do what service he could for you, even if he
would never do you the one service that would benefit you the most:
telling you of his visions, helping you avoid the disasters that loomed
on your horizon.
Standing up, walking around, being clean -- he began to feel like
himself again. He even managed to get into his snow pants and parka and
struggle out to the hillside and the bright sunshine, where he could get
a good look at his hand.
What he had taken for a bone wasn't. It was a skinny little thumbtip,
growing out of the raggedy, crusty stump. He could see the whorl of a
fingerprint there, and narrow, nearly invisible cuticles. He touched the
tip of his tongue to it and it seemed to him that he could feel a tongue
rasping over the top of his missing thumbtip.
#
"It's disgusting, keep it away," Marci said, shrinking away from his
hand in mock horror. He held his proto-thumb under her nose and waggled
it.
"No joking, okay? I just want to know what it *means*. I'm *growing a
new thumb*."
"Maybe you're part salamander. They regrow their legs and tails. Or a
worm -- cut a worm in half and you get two worms. It's in one of my Da's
books."
He stared at his thumb. It had grown perceptibly, just on the journey
into town to Marci's place. They were holed up in her room, surrounded
by watercolors of horses in motion that her mother had painted. She'd
raided the fridge for cold pork pies and cheese and fizzy lemonade that
her father had shipped from the Marks & Spencer in Toronto. It was the
strangest food he'd ever eaten but he'd developed a taste for it.
"Wiggle it again," she said.
He did, and the thumbtip bent down like a scale model of a thumbtip,
cracking the scab around it.
"We should go to a doctor," she said.
"I don't go to doctors," he said flatly.
"You *haven't* gone to a doctor -- doesn't mean you can't."
"I don't go to doctors." X-ray machines and stethoscopes, blood tests
and clever little flashlights in your ears -- who knew what they'd
reveal? He wanted to be the first to discover it, he didn't want to have
to try to explain it to a doctor before he understood it himself.
"Not even when you're sick?"
"The golems take care of it," he said.