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?