Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town Part 13

Converting his father's gold to cash was easier than getting a library card without an address. There was an old a.s.sayer whom the golems had described to him before his first trip to town. The man was cheap but he knew enough about the strangeness on the mountain not to cheat him too badly. The stern librarian who glared at him while he walked the shelves, sometimes looking at the t.i.tles, sometimes the authors, and sometimes the Dewey Decimal numbers had no such fear.

The Deweys were fascinating. They traced the fas.h.i.+ons in human knowledge and wisdom. It was easy enough to understand why the arbiters of the system subdivided Motorized Land Vehicles (629.2) into several categories, but here in the 629.22s, where the books on automobiles were, you could see the planners' deficiencies. Automobiles divided into dozens of major subcategories (taxis and limousines, buses, light trucks, cans, lorries, tractor trailers, campers, motorcycles, racing cars, and so on), then ramified into a combinatorial explosion of sub-sub-sub categories. There were Dewey numbers on some of the automotive book spines that had twenty digits or more after the decimal, an entire Dewey Decimal system hidden between 629.2 and 629.3.

To the librarian, this shelf-reading looked like your garden-variety s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around, but what really made her nervous were Alan's excursions through the card catalogue, which required constant tending to replace the cards that errant patrons made unauthorized reorderings of.

The subject headings in the third bank of card drawers were the most interesting of all. They, too, branched and forked and rejoined themselves like the meanderings of an ant colony on the march. He'd go in sequence for a while, then start following cross-references when he found an interesting branch, keeping notes on sc.r.a.ps of paper on top of the file drawer. He had spent quite some time in the mythology categories, looking up golems and goblins, looking up changelings and monsters, looking up seers and demiG.o.ds, but none of the books that he'd taken down off the shelves had contained anything that helped him understand his family better.

His family was uncatalogued and uncla.s.sified in human knowledge.

He rang the bell on Marci's smart little brick house at bang-on six, carrying some daisies he'd bought from the grocery store, following the etiquette laid down in several rather yucky romance novels he'd perused that afternoon.

She answered in jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt, and punched him in the arm before he could give her the flowers. "Don't you look smart?" she said. "Well, you're not fooling anyone, you know." She gave him a peck on the cheek and s.n.a.t.c.hed away the daisies. "Come along, then, we're eating soon."

Marci sat him down in the living room, which was furnished with neutral sofas and a neutral carpet and a neutral coffee table. The bookcases were bare. "It's horrible," she said, making a face. She was twittering a little, dancing from foot to foot. Alan was glad to know he wasn't the only one who was uncomfortable. "Isn't it? The company put us up here. We had a grand flat in Scotland."

"It's nice," Alan said, "but you look like you could use some books."

She crossed her eyes. "Books? Sure -- I've got *ten boxes* of them in the bas.e.m.e.nt. You can come by and help me unpack them."

"Ten *boxes?*" Alan said. "You're making that up." *Ten boxes of books!*

Things like books didn't last long under the mountain, in the damp and with the ever-inquisitive, ever-destructive Davey exploring every inch of floor and cave and corridor in search of opportunities for pillage.

"I ain't neither," she said. "At least ten. It was a grand flat and they were all in alphabetical order, too."

"Can we go see?" Alan asked, getting up from the sofa.

"See boxes?"

"Yes," Alan said. "And look inside. We could unbox them after dinner, okay?"

"That's more of an afternoon project," said a voice from the top of the stairs.

"That's my Da," she said. "Come down and introduce yourself to Alan, Da," she said. "You're not the voice of G.o.d, so you can b.l.o.o.d.y well turn up and show your face."

"No more sa.s.s, gel, or it will go very hard for you," said the voice. The accent was like Marci's squared, thick as oatmeal, liqueur-thick. Nearly incomprehensible, but the voice was kind and smart and patient, too.

"You'll have a hard time giving me any licks from the top of the stairs, Da, and Alan looks like he's going to die if you don't at least come down and say h.e.l.lo."

Alan blushed furiously. "You can come down whenever you like, sir," he said. "That's all right."

"That's mighty generous of you, young sir," said the voice. "Aye. But before I come down, tell me, are your intentions toward my daughter honorable?"

His cheeks grew even hotter, and his ears felt like they were melting with embarra.s.sment. "Yes, sir," he said in a small voice.

"He's a dreadful pervert, Da," Marci said. "You should see the things he tries, you'd kill him, you would." She grinned foxish and punched him in the shoulder. He sank into the cus.h.i.+ons, face suddenly drained of blood.

"*What*?" roared the voice, and there was a clatter of slippers on the neutral carpet of the stairs. Alan didn't want to look but found that he couldn't help himself, his head inexorably turned toward the sound, until a pair of thick legs hove into sight, whereupon Marci leapt into his lap and threw her arms around his neck.

"Ge'orff me, pervert!" she said, as she began to cover his face in darting, pecking kisses.

He went rigid and tried to sink all the way into the sofa.

"All right, all right, that's enough of that," her father said. Marci stood and dusted herself off. Alan stared at his knees.

"She's horrible, isn't she?" said the voice, and a great, thick hand appeared in his field of vision. He shook it tentatively, noting the heavy cla.s.s ring and the thin, plain wedding band. He looked up slowly.

Marci's father was short but powerfully built, like the wrestlers on the other kids' lunchboxes at school. He had a shock of curly black hair that was flecked with dandruff, and a thick bristling mustache that made him look very fierce, though his eyes were gentle and bookish behind thick gla.s.ses. He was wearing wool trousers and a cable-knit sweater that was unraveling at the elbows.

"Pleased to meet you, Albert," he said. They shook hands gravely. "I've been after her to unpack those books since we moved here. You could come by tomorrow afternoon and help, if you'd like -- I think it's the only way I'll get herself to stir her lazy bottom to do some ch.o.r.es around here."

"Oh, *Da*!" Marci said. "Who cooks around here? Who does the laundry?"

"The take-away pizza man does the majority of the cooking, daughter. And as for laundry, the last time I checked, there were two weeks' worth of laundry to do."

"Da," she said in a sweet voice, "I love you Da," she said, wrapping her arms around his trim waist.

"You see what I have to put up with?" her father said, s.n.a.t.c.hing her up and dangling her by her ankles.

She flailed her arms about and made outraged choking noises while he swung her back and forth like a pendulum, releasing her at the top of one arc so that she flopped onto the sofa in a tangle of thin limbs.

"It's a madhouse around here," her father continued as Marci righted herself, knocking Alan in the temple with a tennis shoe, "but what can you do? Once she's a little bigger, I can put her to work in the mines, and then I'll have a little peace around here." He sat down on an overstuffed armchair with a fussy antimaca.s.sar.

"He's got a huge life-insurance policy," Marci said conspiratorially. "I'm just waiting for him to kick the bucket and then I'm going to retire."

"Oh, aye," her father said. "Retire. Your life is an awful one, it is. Junior high is a terrible hards.h.i.+p, I know."

Alan found himself grinning.

"What's so funny?" Marci said, punching him in the shoulder.

"You two are," he said, grabbing her arm and then digging his fingers into her tummy, doubling her over with tickles.

There were *twelve* boxes of books. The damp in the bas.e.m.e.nt had softened the cartons to cottage-cheese mush, and the back covers of the bottom layer of paperbacks were soft as felt. To Alan, these seemed unremarkable -- all paper under the mountain looked like this after a week or two, even if Doug didn't get to it -- but Marci was heartbroken.

"My books, my lovely books, they're roont!" she said, as they piled them on the living room carpet.

"They're fine," Alan said. "They'll dry out a little wobbly, but they'll be fine. We'll just spread the damp ones out on the rug and shelve the rest."

And that's what they did, book after book -- old books, hardcover books, board-back kids' books, new paperbacks, dozens of green- and orange-spined Penguin paperbacks. He fondled them, smelled them. Some smelled of fish and chips, and some smelled of road dust, and some smelled of Marci, and they had dog ears where she'd stopped and cracks in their spines where she'd bent them around. They fell open to pages that had her favorite pa.s.sages. He felt wobbly and drunk as he touched each one in turn.

"Have you read all of these?" Alan asked as he s.h.i.+fted the John Mortimers down one shelf to make room for the Ed McBains.

"Naw," she said, punching him in the shoulder. "What's the point of a bunch of books you've already read?"