Something smashed into Alan's head and bounced to the dirt below the
climber. A small, sharp rock. Alan reeled and tumbled from the climber,
stunned, barely managing to twist to his side before landing. The air
whooshed out of his lungs and tears sprang into his eyes.
Gingerly, he touched his head. His fingers came away wet. Kurt was
shouting something, but he couldn't hear it. Something moved in the
bushes, moved into his line of sight. Moved deliberately into his line
of sight.
Danny. He had another rock in his hand and he wound up and pitched
it. It hit Alan in the forehead and his head snapped back and he
grunted.
Kurt's feet landed in the dirt a few inches from his eyes, big boots
a-jangle with chains. Davey flitted out of the bushes and onto the
plastic rocking-horses, jumping from the horse to the duck to the
chicken, leaving the big springs beneath them to rock and creak. Kurt
took two steps toward him, but Davey was away, under the chain link
fence and over the edge of the hill leading down to Dupont Street.
"You okay?" Kurt said, crouching down beside him, putting a hand on his
shoulder. "Need a doctor?"
"No doctors," Alan said. "No doctors. I'll be okay."
They inched their way back to the car, the world spinning around
them. The hard-hats met them on the way out of the Vesta Lunch and their
eyes went to Alan's bloodied face. They looked away. Alan felt his
kinship with the woken world around him slip away and knew he'd never be
truly a part of it.
#
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 muffled 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 prickle 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-shirt 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
unsexed by desiccation -- all the brothers, even little George, had
ceased going about in the nude when they'd passed through puberty --
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.
"Welcome me home," Davey rasped as Alan drew closer. "Welcome me home,
mother*fucker*. Welcome me home, *brother*."
"You're welcome in this home," Alan said, but Davey wasn't welcome. Just
last week, Alan had seen a nice-looking bedroom set that he suspected he
could afford -- the golems had left him a goodly supply of gold flake,
though with the golems gone he supposed that the sacks were the end of
the family's no-longer-bottomless fortune. But with the bedroom set
would come a kitchen table, and then a bookcase, and a cooker and a
fridge, and when they were ready, he could send each brother on his way
with the skills and socialization necessary to survive in the wide
world, to find women and love and raise families of their own. Then he
could go and find himself a skinny redheaded girl with a Scots accent,
and in due time her belly would swell up and there would be a child.
It was all planned out, practically preordained, but now here they were,
with the embodied shame sitting on their mother, his torn thumb gleaming
with the wire he'd used to attach it back to his hand.
"That's very generous, *brother*," Danny said. "You're a prince among
*men*."
"Let's go," Alan said. "Breakfast in town. I'm buying."
They filed out and Alan spared Davey a look over his shoulder as they
slipped away, head down on his knees, rocking in time with their mother.
#
Krishna grinned at him from the front porch as he staggered home from
Kurt's storefront. He was dressed in a hoodie and huge, outsized raver
pants that dangled with straps and reflectors meant to add kinetic
reflections on the dance floor.
"Hello, neighbor," he said as Alan came up the walkway. "Good evening?"
Alan stopped and put his hands on his hips, straightened his head out on
his neck so that he was standing tall. "I understand what he gets out of
*you*," Alan said. "I understand that perfectly well. Who couldn't use a
little servant and errand boy?
"But what I don't understand, what I can't understand, what I'd like to
understand is: What can you get out of the arrangement?"
Krishna shrugged elaborately. "I have no idea what you're talking
about."
"We had gold, in the old days. Is that what's bought you? Maybe you
should ask me for a counteroffer. I'm not poor."
"I'd never take a penny that *you* offered -- voluntarily." Krishna lit
a nonchalant cig and flicked the match toward his dry, xeroscaped
lawn. There were little burnt patches among the wild grasses there, from
other thrown matches, and that was one mystery-let solved, then, wasn't
it?
"You think I'm a monster," Alan said.