Have you ever thought about what fiction is? Probably, such a question may seem surprising: and so everything is clear. Every person throughout his life has to repeatedly create the works he needs for specific purposes - statements, autobiographies, dictations - using not gypsum or clay, not musical notes, not paints, but just a word. At the same time, almost every person will be very surprised if he is told that he thereby created a work of fiction, which is very different from visual art, music and sculpture making. However, everyone understands that a student's essay or dictation is fundamentally different from novels, short stories, news that are created by professional writers. In the works of professionals there is the most important difference - excogitation. But, oddly enough, in a school literature course, you don’t realize the full power of fiction. So using our website in your free time discover fiction for yourself. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (e reader manga .TXT) 📖
- Author: Cory Doctorow
Book online «Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow (e reader manga .TXT) 📖». Author Cory Doctorow
And ingest Frederick did. His dry and desiccated jaw swung open like a snake’s, unhinged and spread wide, and he swallowed little George, ate him up in three convulsive swallows, the new baby making Frederick’s belly swell like a balloon. Alan swallowed panic, seized Frederick by the heels, and shook him upside down. “Spit him out,” Alan cried, “Spat him free!”
But Frederick kept his lips stubbornly together, and Alan tired of the terrible business and set the boy with the newest brother within down on a pile of hay he’d brought in to soak up some of Edward’s continuous excretions. Alan put his hands over his face and sobbed, because he’d failed his responsibilities as eldest of their family and there was no one he could tell his woes to.
The sound of baby giggles stopped his crying. Edward had belly-crawled to Frederick’s side and he was eating him, jaw unhinged and gorge working. He was up to Frederick’s little bottom, dehydrated to a leathery baby-jerky, and then he was past, swallowing the arms and the chin and the head, the giggling, smiling head, the laughing head that had done nothing but whine and fuss since Alan had cleared it of its volume of detergenty water, fresh from their mother’s belly.
And then Frederick was gone. Horrified, Alan rushed over and picked up Edward—now as heavy as a cannonball—and pried his mouth open, staring down his gullet, staring down into another mouth, Frederick’s mouth, which gaped open, revealing a third mouth, George’s. The smallest mouth twisted and opened, then shut. Edward squirmed furiously and Alan nearly fumbled him. He set the baby down in the straw and watched him crawl across to their mother, where he sucked hungrily. Automatically, Alan gathered up an armload of rags and made ready to wipe up the stream that Edward would soon be ejecting.
But no stream came. The baby fed and fed, and let out a deep burp in three-part harmony, spat up a little, and drank some more. Somehow, Frederick and George were in there feeding, too. Alan waited patiently for Edward to finish feeding, then put him over his shoulder and joggled him until he burped up, then bedded him down in his little rough-hewn crib—the crib that the golems had carved for Alan when he was born—cleaned the cave, and cried again, leaned up against their mother.
Frederick huddled in on himself, half behind Edward on the porch, habitually phobic of open spaces. Alan took his hand and then embraced him. He smelled of Edward’s clammy guts and of sweat.
“Are you two hungry?” Alan asked.
Edward grimaced. “Of course we’re hungry, but without George there’s nothing we can do about it, is there?”
Alan shook his head. “How long has he been gone?”
“Three weeks,” Edward whispered. “I’m so hungry, Alan.”
“How did it happen?”
Frederick wobbled on his feet, then leaned heavily on Edward. “I need to sit down,” he said.
Alan fumbled for his keys and let them into the house, where they settled into the corners of his old overstuffed horsehide sofa. He dialed up the wall sconces to a dim, homey lighting, solicitous of Frederick’s sensitive eyes. He took an Apollo 8 Jim Beam decanter full of stunning Irish whiskey off the sideboard and poured himself a finger of it, not offering any to his brothers.
“Now, how did it happen?”
“He wanted to speak to Dad,” Frederick said. “He climbed out of me and wandered down through the tunnels into the spring pool. The goblin told us that he took off his clothes and waded in and started whispering.” Like most of the boys, George had believed that their father was most aware in his very middle, where he could direct the echoes of the water’s rippling, shape them into words and phrases in the hollow of the great cavern.
“So the goblin saw it happen?”
“No,” Frederick said, and Edward began to cry again. “No. George asked him for some privacy, and so he went a little way up the tunnel. He waited and waited, but George didn’t come back. He called out, but George didn’t answer. When he went to look for him, he was gone. His clothes were gone. All that he could find was this.” He scrabbled to fit his chubby hand into his jacket’s pocket, then fished out a little black pebble. Alan took it and saw that it wasn’t a pebble, it was a rotted-out and dried-up fingertip, pierced with unbent paperclip wire.
“It’s Dave’s, isn’t it?” Edward said.
“I think so,” Alan said. Dave used to spend hours wiring his dropped-off parts back onto his body, gluing his teeth back into his head. “Jesus.”
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?” Frederick said. “We’re going to starve to death.”
Edward held his pudgy hands one on top of the other in his lap and began to rock back and forth. “We’ll be okay,” he lied.
“Did anyone see Dave?” Alan asked.
“No,” Frederick said. “We asked the golems, we asked Dad, we asked the goblin, but no one saw him. No one’s seen him for years.”
Alan thought for a moment about how to ask his next question. “Did you look in the pool? On the bottom?”
“He’s not there!” Edward said. “We looked there. We looked all around Dad. We looked in town. Alan, they’re both gone.”
Alan felt a sear of acid jet up esophagus. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t know where to look. Frederick, can’t you, I don’t know, stuff yourself with something? So you can eat?”
“We tried,” Edward said. “We tried rags and sawdust and clay and bread and they didn’t work. I thought that maybe we could get a child and put him inside, maybe, but God, Albert, I don’t want to do that, it’s the kind of thing Dan would do.”
Alan stared at the softly glowing wood floors, reflecting highlights from the soft lighting. He rubbed his stocking toes over the waxy finish and felt its shine. “Don’t do that, okay?” he said. “I’ll think of something. Let me sleep on it. Do you want to sleep here? I can make up the sofa.”
“Thanks, big brother,” Edward said. “Thanks.”
Alan walked past his study, past the tableau of laptop and desk and chair, felt the pull of the story, and kept going, pulling his housecoat tighter around himself. The summer morning was already hotting up, and the air in the house had a sticky, dewy feel.
He found Edward sitting on the sofa, with the sheets and pillowcases folded neatly next to him.
“I set out a couple of towels for you in the second-floor bathroom and found an extra toothbrush,” Alan said. “If you want them.”
“Thanks,” Edward said, echoing in his empty chest. The thick rolls of his face were contorted into a caricature of sorrow.
“Where’s Frederick?” Alan asked.
“Gone!” Edward said, and broke into spasms of sobbing. “He’s gone he’s gone he’s gone, I woke up and he was gone.”
Alan shifted the folded linens to the floor and sat next to Edward. “What happened?”
“You know what happened, Alan,” Edward said. “You know as well as I do! Dave took him in the night. He followed us here and he came in the night and stole him away.”
“You don’t know that,” Alan said, softly stroking Edward’s greasy fringe of hair. “He could have wandered out for a walk or something.”
“Of course I know it!” Edward yelled, his voice booming in the hollow of his great chest. “Look!” He handed Alan a small, desiccated lump, like a black bean pierced with a paperclip wire.
“You showed me this yesterday—” Alan said.
“It’s from a different finger!” Edward said, and he buried his face in Alan’s shoulder, sobbing uncontrollably.
“Have you looked for him?” Alan asked.
“I’ve been waiting for you to get up. I don’t want to go out alone.”
“We’ll look together,” Alan said. He got a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, shoved his feet into Birkenstocks, and led Edward out the door.
The previous night’s humidity had thickened to a gray cloudy soup, swift thunderheads coming in from all sides. The foot traffic was reduced to sparse, fast-moving umbrellas, people rushing for shelter before the deluge. Ozone crackled in the air and thunder roiled seemingly up from the ground, deep and sickening.
They started with a circuit of the house, looking for footprints, body parts. He found a shred of torn gray thrift-store shirt, caught on a rose bramble near the front of his walk. It smelled of the homey warmth of Edward’s innards, and had a few of Frederick’s short, curly hairs stuck to it. Alan showed it to Edward, then folded it into the change pocket of his wallet.
They walked the length of the sidewalk, crossed Wales, and began to slowly cross the little park. Edward circumnavigated the little cement wading pool, tracing the political runes left behind by the Market’s cheerful anarchist taggers, painfully bent almost double at his enormous waist.
“What are we looking for, Alan?”
“Footprints. Finger bones. Clues.”
Edward puffed back to the bench and sat down, tears streaming down his face. “I’m so hungry,” he said.
Alan, crawling around the torn sod left when someone had dragged one of the picnic tables, contained his frustration. “If we can find Daniel, we can get Frederick and George back, okay?”
“All right,” Edward snuffled.
The next time Alan looked up, Edward had taken off his scuffed shoes and grimy-gray socks, rolled up the cuffs of his tent-sized pants, and was wading through the little pool, piggy eyes cast downward.
“Good idea,” Alan called, and turned to the sandbox.
A moment later, there was a booming yelp, almost lost in the roll of thunder, and when Alan turned about, Edward was gone.
Alan kicked off his Birks and splashed up to the hems of his shorts in the wading pool. In the pool’s center, the round fountainhead was a twisted wreck, the concrete crumbled and the dry steel and brass fixtures contorted and ruptured. They had long streaks of abraded skin, torn shirt, and blood on them, leading down into the guts of the fountain.
Cautiously, Alan leaned over, looking well down the dark tunnel that had been scraped out of the concrete centerpiece. The thin gray light showed him the rough walls, chipped out with some kind of sharp tool. “Edward?” he called. His voice did not echo or bounce back to him.
Tentatively, he reached down the tunnel, bending at the waist over the rough lip of the former fountain. Deep he reached and reached and reached, and as his fingertips hit loose dirt, he leaned farther in and groped blindly, digging his hands into the plug of soil that had been shoveled into the tunnel’s bend a few feet below the surface. He straightened up and climbed in, sinking to the waist, and tried to kick the dirt out of the way, but it wouldn’t give—the tunnel had caved in behind the plug of earth.
He clambered out, feeling the first fat drops of rain on his bare forearms and the crown of his head. A shovel. There was one in the little coach house in the back of his place, behind the collapsed boxes and the bicycle pump. As he ran across the street, he saw Krishna, sitting on his porch, watching him with a hint of a smile.
“Lost another one, huh?” he said. He looked as if he’d been awake all night, now hovering on the brink of sleepiness and wiredness. A roll of thunder crashed and a sheet of rain hurtled out of the sky.
Alan never thought of himself as a violent person. Even when he’d had to throw the occasional troublemaker out of his shops, he’d done so with an almost cordial force. Now, though, he trembled and yearned to take Krishna by the throat and ram his head, face first, into the column that held up his front porch, again and
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