Chapter 14

First, one of the punks (who had a rusty "NO FUTURE" pin that Alan thought would probably go for real coin on the collectors' market) asked Natalie to pass her the cream. Then Link and another punk (foppy silly black hair and a cut-down private school blazer with the short sleeves pinned on with rows of safety pins) met over the baklava, and the punk offered Link a napkin. Another punk spilled her coffee on her lap, screeching horrendous Quebecois blasphemies as curses, and that cracked everyone up, and Arnold, watching from near the blanket that fenced off Kurt's monkish sleeping area, figured that they would get along.

"Kurt," he said pulling aside the blanket, handing a double-double coffee over to Kurt as he sat up and rubbed his eyes. He was wearing a white T-shirt that was the grimy grey of everything in his domain, and baggy jockeys. He gathered his blankets around him and sipped reverently.

Kurt cocked his head and listened to the soft discussions going on on the other side of the blanket. "Christ, they're at it already?"

"I think your volunteers showed up a couple hours ago -- or maybe they were up all night."

Kurt groaned theatrically. "I'm running a halfway house for geeky street kids."

"All for the cause," Alan said. "So, what's on the plate for today?"

"You know the church kittycorner from your place?"

"Yeah?" Alan said cautiously.

"Its spire is just about the highest point in the Market. An omnidirectional up there..."

"The church?"

"Yeah."

"What about the new condos at the top of Baldwin? They're tall."

"They are. But they're up on the northern edge. From the bell-tower of that church, I bet you could shoot half the houses on the west side of Oxford Street, along with the backs of all the shops on Augusta."

"How are we going to get the church to go along with it. Christ, what are they, Ukrainian Orthodox?"

"Greek Orthodox," Kurt said. "Yeah, they're pretty conservative."

"So?"

"So, I need a smooth-talking, upstanding cit to go and put the case to the pastor. Priest. Bishop. Whatever."

"Groan," Alex said.

"Oh, come on, you're good at it."

"If I get time," he said. He looked into his coffee for a moment. "I'm going to go home," he said.

"Home?"

"To the mountain," he said. "Home," he said. "To my father," he said.

"Whoa," Kurt said. "Alone?"

Alan sat on the floor and leaned back against a milk crate full of low-capacity hard drives. "I have to," he said. "I can't stop thinking of..." He was horrified to discover that he was on the verge of tears. It had been three weeks since Davey had vanished into the night, and he'd dreamt of Eugene-Fabio-Greg every night since, terrible dreams, in which he'd dug like a dog to uncover their hands, their arms, their legs, but never their heads. He swallowed hard.

He and Kurt hadn't spoken of that night since.

"I sometimes wonder if it really happened," Kurt said.

Alan nodded. "It's hard to believe. Even for me."

"I believe it," Kurt said. "I won't ever not believe it. I think that's probably important to you."

Alan felt a sob well up in his chest and swallowed it down again. "Thanks," he managed to say.

"When are you leaving?"

"Tomorrow morning. I'm going to rent a car and drive up," he said.

"How long?"

"I dunno," he said. He was feeling morose now. "A couple days. A week, maybe. No longer."

"Well, don't sweat the Bishop. He can wait. Come and get a beer with me tonight before I go out?"

"Yeah," he said. "That sounds good. On a patio on Kensington. We can people-watch."

#

How Alan and his brothers killed Davey: very deliberately.

Alan spent the rest of the winter in the cave, and Davey spent the spring in the golem's cave, and through that spring, neither of them went down to the school, so that the younger brothers had to escort themselves to class. When the thaws came and icy meltoff carved temporary streams in the mountainside, they stopped going to school, too -- instead, they played on the mountainside, making dams and canals and locks with rocks and imagination.

Their father was livid. The mountain rumbled as it warmed unevenly, as the sheets of ice slid off its slopes and skittered down toward the highway. The sons of the mountain reveled in their dark ignorance, their separation from the school and from the nonsensical and nonmagical society of the town. They snared small animals and ate them raw, and didn't wash their clothes, and grew fierce and guttural through the slow spring.

Alan kept silent through those months, becoming almost nocturnal, refusing to talk to any brother who dared to talk to him. When Ed-Fred-George brought home a note from the vice principal asking when he thought he'd be coming back to school, Alan shoved it into his mouth and chewed and chewed and chewed, until the paper was reduced to gruel, then he spat it by the matted pile of his bedding.

The mountain grumbled and he didn't care. The golems came to parley, and he turned his back to them. The stalactites crashed to the cave's floor until it was carpeted in ankle-deep chips of stone, and he waded through them.

He waited and bided. He waited for Davey to try to come home.

#

"What have we here?" Alan said, as he wandered into Kurt's shop, which had devolved into joyous bedlam. The shelves had been pushed up against the wall, clearing a large open space that was lined with long trestle tables. Crusty-punks, goth kids, hippie kids, geeks with vintage video-game shirts, and even a couple of older, hard-done-by street people crowded around the tables, performing a conglomeration of arcane tasks. The air hummed with conversation and coffee smells, the latter emanating from a catering-sized urn in the corner.

He was roundly ignored -- and before he could speak again, one of the PCs on the floor started booming out fuzzy, grungy rockabilly music that made him think of Elvis cassettes that had been submerged in salt water. Half of the assembled mass started bobbing their heads and singing along while the other half rolled their eyes and groaned.

Kurt came out of the back and hunkered down with the PC, turning down the volume a little. "Howdy!" he said, spreading his arms and taking in the whole of his dominion.

"Howdy yourself," Alan said. "What do we have here?"

"We have a glut of volunteers," Kurt said, watching as an old rummy carefully shot a picture of a flat-panel LCD that was minus its housing. "I can't figure out if those laptop screens are worth anything," he said, cocking his head. "But they've been taking up space for far too long. Time we moved them."

Alan looked around and realized that the workers he'd taken to be at work building access points were, in the main, shooting digital pictures of junk from Kurt's diving runs and researching them for eBay listings. It made him feel good -- great, even. It was like watching an Inventory being assembled from out of chaos.

"Where'd they all come from?"

Kurt shrugged. "I dunno. I guess we hit critical mass. You recruit a few people, they recruit a few people. It's a good way to make a couple bucks, you get to play with boss crap, you get paid in cash, and you have colorful co-workers." He shrugged again. "I guess they came from wherever the trash came from. The city provides."

The homeless guy they were standing near squinted up at them. "If either of you says something like, *Ah, these people were discarded by society, but just as with the junk we rescue from landfills, we have seen the worth of these poor folks and rescued them from the scrapheap of society,* I'm gonna puke."

"The thought never crossed my mind," Alan said solemnly.

"Keep it up, Wes," Kurt said, patting the man on the shoulder. "See you at the Greek's tonight?"

"Every night, so long as he keeps selling the cheapest beer in the Market," Wes said, winking at Alan.

"It's cash in the door," Kurt said. "Buying components is a lot more efficient than trying to find just the right parts." He gave Alan a mildly reproachful look. Ever since they'd gone to strictly controlled designs, Kurt had been heartbroken by the amount of really nice crap that never made its way into an access point.

"This is pretty amazing," Alan said. "You're splitting the money with them?"

"The profit -- anything leftover after buying packaging and paying postage." He walked down the line, greeting people by name, shaking hands, marveling at the gewgaws and gimcracks that he, after all, had found in some nighttime dumpster and brought back to be recycled. "God, I love this. It's like Napster for dumpsters."

"How's that?" Alan asked, pouring himself a coffee and adding some UHT cream from a giant, slightly dented box of little creamers.

"Most of the music ever recorded isn't for sale at any price. Like 80 percent of it. And the labels, they've made copyright so strong, no one can figure out who all that music belongs to -- not even them! Costs a fortune to clear a song. Pal of mine once did a CD of Christmas music remixes, and he tried to figure out who owned the rights to all the songs he wanted to use. He just gave up after a year -- and he had only cleared one song!

"So along comes Napster. It finds the only possible way of getting all that music back into our hands. It gives millions and millions of people an incentive to rip their old CDs -- hell, their old vinyl and tapes, too! -- and put them online. No label could have afforded to do that, but the people just did it for free. It was like a barn-raising: a library raising!"

Alan nodded. "So what's your point -- that companies' dumpsters are being napstered by people like you?" A napsterized Inventory. Alan felt the *rightness* of it.

Kurt picked a fragile LCD out of a box of dozens of them and smashed it on the side of the table. "Exactly!" he said. "This is garbage -- it's like the deleted music that you can't buy today, except at the bottom of bins at Goodwill or at yard sales. Tons of it has accumulated in landfills. No one could afford to pay enough people to go around and rescue it all and figure out the copyrights for it and turn it into digital files and upload it to the net -- but if you give people an incentive to tackle a little piece of the problem and a way for my work to help you..." He went to a shelf and picked up a finished AP and popped its latches and swung it open.

"Look at that -- I didn't get its guts out of a dumpster, but someone else did, like as not. I sold the parts I found in my dumpster for money that I exchanged for parts that someone else found in *her* dumpster --"

"Her?"

"Trying not to be sexist," Kurt said.

"Are there female dumpster divers?"

"Got me," Kurt said. "In ten years of this, I've only run into other divers twice or three times. Remind me to tell you about the cop later. Anyway. We spread out the effort of rescuing this stuff from the landfill, and then we put our findings online, and we move it to where it needs to be. So it's not cost effective for some big corporation to figure out how to use or sell these -- so what? It's not cost-effective for some big dumb record label to figure out how to keep music by any of my favorite bands in print, either. We'll figure it out. We're spookily good at it."

"Spookily?"

"Trying to be more poetic." He grinned and twisted the fuzzy split ends of his newly blue mohawk around his fingers. "Got a new girlfriend, she says there's not enough poetry in my views on garbage."

#

They found one of Davey's old nests in March, on a day when you could almost believe that the spring would really come and the winter would go and the days would lengthen out to more than a few hours of sour greyness huddled around noon. The reference design for the access point had gone through four more iterations, and if you knew where to look in the Market's second-story apartments, rooftops, and lampposts, you could trace the evolution of the design from the clunky PC-shaped boxen in Alan's attic on Wales Avenue to the environment-hardened milspec surplus boxes that Kurt had rigged from old circuit boxes he'd found in Bell Canada's Willowdale switching station dumpster.

Alan steadied the ladder while Kurt tightened the wing nuts on the antenna mounting atop the synagogue's roof. It had taken three meetings with the old rabbi before Alan hit on the idea of going to the temple's youth caucus and getting *them* to explain it to the old cleric. The synagogue was one of the oldest buildings in the Market, a brick-and-stone beauty from 1930.

They'd worried about the fight they'd have over drilling through the roof to punch down a wire, but they needn't have: The wood up there was soft as cottage cheese, and showed gaps wide enough to slip the power cable down. Now Kurt slathered Loctite over the nuts and washers and slipped dangerously down the ladder, toe-tips flying over the rungs.

Alan laughed as he touched down, thinking that Kurt's heart was aburst with the feeling of having finished, at last, at last. But then he caught sight of Kurt's face, ashen, wide-eyed.

"I saw something," he said, talking out of the sides of his mouth. His hands were shaking.

"What?"

"Footprints," he said. "There's a lot of leaves that have rotted down to mud up there, and there were a pair of little footprints in the mud. Like a toddler's footprints, maybe. Except there were two toes missing from one foot. They were stamped down all around this spot where I could see there had been a lot of pigeon nests, but there were no pigeons there, only a couple of beaks and legs -- so dried up that I couldn't figure out what they were at first.

"But I recognized the footprints. The missing toes, they left prints behind like unbent paperclips."

Alan moved, as in a dream, to the ladder and began to climb it.

"Be careful, it's all rotten up there," Kurt called. Alan nodded.

"Sure, thank you," he said, hearing himself say it as though from very far away.

The rooftop was littered with broken glass and scummy puddles of meltwater and little pebbles and a slurry of decomposing leaves, and there, yes, there were the footprints, just as advertised. He patted the antenna box absently, feeling its solidity, and he sat down cross-legged before the footprints and the beaks and the legs. There were no tooth marks on the birds. They hadn't been eaten, they'd been torn apart, like a label from a beer bottle absently shredded in the sunset. He pictured Davey sitting here on the synagogue's roof, listening to the evening prayers, and the calls and music that floated over the Market, watching the grey winter nights come on and slip away, a pigeon in his hand, writhing.

He wondered if he was catching Bradley's precognition, and if that meant that Bradley was dead now.

#

Bradley was born with the future in his eyes. He emerged from the belly of their mother with bright brown eyes that did not roll aimlessly in the manner of babies, but rather sought out the corners of the cave where interesting things were happening, where movement was about to occur, where life was being lived. Before he developed the muscle strength and coordination necessary to crawl, he mimed crawling, seeing how it was that he would someday move.

He was the easiest of all the babies to care for, easier even than Carlo, who had no needs other than water and soil and cooing reassurance. Toilet training: As soon as he understood what was expected of him -- they used the downstream-most bend of one of the underground rivers -- Benny could be relied upon to begin tottering toward the spot in sufficient time to drop trou and do his business in just the right spot.

(Alan learned to pay attention when Bruce was reluctant to leave home for a walk during those days -- the same premonition that made him perfectly toilet-trained at home would have him in fretting sweats at the foreknowledge that he has destined to soil himself during the recreation.)

His nightmares ran twice: once just before bed, in clairvoyant preview, and again in the depths of REM sleep. Alan learned to talk him down from these crises, to soothe the worry, and in the end it worked to everyone's advantage, defusing the nightmares themselves when they came.

He never forgot anything -- never forgot to have Alan forge a signature on a permission form, never forgot to bring in the fossil he'd found for show-and-tell, never forgot his mittens in the cloakroom and came home with red, chapped hands. Once he started school, he started seeing to it that Alan never forgot anything, either.

He did very well on quizzes and tests, and he never let the pitcher fake him out when he was at bat.

After four years alone with the golems, Alan couldn't have been more glad to have a brother to keep him company.

Billy got big enough to walk, then big enough to pick mushrooms, then big enough to chase squirrels. He was big enough to play hide-and-go-seek with, big enough to play twenty questions with, big enough to horse around in the middle of the lake at the center of the mountain with.

Alan left him alone during the days, in the company of their parents and the golems, went down the mountain to school, and when he got back, he'd take his kid brother out on the mountain face and teach him what he'd learned, even though he was only a little kid. They'd write letters together in the mud with a stick, and in the winter, they'd try to spell out their names with steaming pee in the snow, laughing.

"That's a fraction," Brad said, chalking "3/4" on a piece of slate by the side of one of the snowmelt streams that coursed down the springtime mountain.

"That's right, three-over-four," Alan said. He'd learned it that day in school, and had been about to show it to Billy, which meant that Brad had remembered him doing it and now knew it. He took the chalk and drew his own 3/4 -- you had to do that, or Billy wouldn't be able to remember it in advance.

Billy got down on his haunches. He was a dark kid, dark hair and eyes the color of chocolate, which he insatiably craved and begged for every morning when Alan left for school, "Bring me, bring me, bring me!"

He'd found something. Alan leaned in and saw that it was a milkweed pod. "It's an egg," Bobby said.

"No, it's a weed," Alan said. Bobby wasn't usually given to flights of fancy, but the shape of the pod was reminiscent of an egg.

Billy clucked his tongue. "I *know* that. It's also an egg for a bug. Living inside there. I can see it hatching. Next week." He closed his eyes. "It's orange! Pretty. We should come back and find it once it hatches."

Alan hunkered down next to him. "There's a bug in here?"

"Yeah. It's like a white worm, but in a week it will turn into an orange bug and chew its way out."

He was about three then, which made Alan seven. "What if I chopped down the plant?" he said. "Would the bug still hatch next week?"

"You won't," Billy said.

"I could, though."

"Nope," Brad said.

Alan reached for the plant. Took it in his hand. The warm skin of the plant and the woody bole of the pod would be so easy to uproot.

He didn't do it.

That night, as he lay himself down to sleep, he couldn't remember why he hadn't. He couldn't sleep. He got up and looked out the front of the cave, at the countryside unrolling in the moonlight and the far lights of the town.

He went back inside and looked in on Benji. He was sleeping, his face smooth and his lips pouted. He rolled over and opened his eyes, regarding Alan without surprise.

"Told you so," he said.

#

Alan had an awkward relationship with the people in town. Unaccompanied little boys in the grocery store, at the Gap, in the library and in toy section of the Canadian Tire were suspect. Alan never "horsed around" -- whatever that meant -- but nevertheless, he got more than his share of the hairy eyeball from the shopkeepers, even though he had money in his pocket and had been known to spend it on occasion.

A lone boy of five or six or seven was suspicious, but let him show up with the tiny hand of his dark little brother clasped in his, quietly explaining each item on the shelf to the solemn child, and everyone got an immediate attitude adjustment. Shopkeepers smiled and nodded, shoppers mouthed, "So cute," to each other. Moms with babies in snuglis bent to chuckle them under their chins. Store owners spontaneously gave them candy, and laughed aloud at Bryan's cries of "Chocolate!"

When Brian started school, he foresaw and avoided all trouble, and delighted his teachers with his precociousness. Alan ate lunch with him once he reached the first grade and started eating in the cafeteria with the rest of the non-kindergartners.

Brad loved to play with Craig after he was born, patiently mounding soil and pebbles on his shore, watering him and patting him smooth, planting wild grasses on his slopes as he crept toward the mouth of the cave. Those days -- before Darcy's arrival -- were a long idyll of good food and play in the hot sun or the white snow and brotherhood.

Danny couldn't sneak up on Brad and kick him in the back of the head. He couldn't hide a rat in his pillow or piss on his toothbrush. Billy was never one to stand pat and eat shit just because Davey was handing it out. Sometimes he'd just wind up and take a swing at Davey, seemingly out of the blue, knocking him down, then prying open his mouth to reveal the chocolate bar he'd nicked from under Brad's pillow, or a comic book from under his shirt. He was only two years younger than Brad, but by the time they were both walking, Brad hulked over him and could lay him out with one wild haymaker of a punch.

#

Billy came down from his high perch when Alan returned from burying Marci, holding out his hands wordlessly. He hugged Alan hard, crushing the breath out of him.

The arms felt good around his neck, so he stopped letting himself feel them. He pulled back stiffly and looked at Brian.

"You could have told me," he said.

Bram's face went expressionless and hard and cold. Telling people wasn't what he did, not for years. It hurt others -- and it hurt him. It was the reason for his long, long silences. Alan knew that sometimes he couldn't tell what it was that he knew that others didn't. But he didn't care, then.

"You should have told me," he said.

Bob took a step back and squared up his shoulders and his feet, leaning forward a little as into a wind.

"You *knew* and you didn't *tell me* and you didn't *do anything* and as far as I'm concerned, you killed her and cut her up and buried her along with Darryl, you coward." Adam knew he was crossing a line, and he didn't care. Brian leaned forward and jutted his chin out.

Avram's hands were clawed with cold and caked with mud and still echoing the feeling of frozen skin and frozen dirt, and balled up into fists, they felt like stones.

He didn't hit Barry. Instead, he retreated to his niche and retrieved the triangular piece of flint that he'd been cherting into an arrowhead for school and a hammer stone and set to work on it in the light of a flashlight.

#

He sharpened a knife for Davey, there in his room in the cave, as the boys ran feral in the woods, as the mountain made its slow and ponderous protests.

He sharpened a knife, a hunting knife with a rusty blade and a cracked handle that he'd found on one of the woodland trails, beside a hunter's snare, not lost but pitched away in disgust one winter and not discovered until the following spring.

But the nicked blade took an edge as he whetted it with the round stone, and the handle regained its grippiness as he wound a cord tight around it, making tiny, precise knots with each turn, until the handle no longer pinched his hand, until the blade caught the available light from the cave mouth and glinted dully.