They took to the tunnels. Even with the flashlight, Marci couldn't match him for speed. He could feel the tunnels through the soles of his boots, he could smell them, he could pick them apart by the quality of their echoes. He moved fast, dragging Marci along with his good hand while she cranked the flashlight as hard as she could. He heard her panting, triangulated their location from the way that the shallow noises reflected off the walls. When they found Davey at last, it was in the golem's cave, on the other side of the mountain. He was hunkered down in a corner, while the golems moved around him slowly, avoiding him like he was a boulder or a stalagmite that had sprung up in the night. Their stony heads turned to regard Marci and Adam as they came upon them, their luminous eyes lighting on them for a moment and then moving on. It was an eloquent statement for them: *This is the business of the mountain and his sons. We will not intervene.* There were more golems than Alan could remember seeing at once, six, maybe seven. The golems made more of their kind from the clay they found at the riverbank whenever they cared to or needed to, and allowed their number to dwindle when the need or want had passed by the simple expedient of deconstructing one of their own back to the clay it had come from. The golems' cave was lined with small bones and skulls, rank and row climbing the walls, twined with dried grasses in ascending geometries. These were the furry animals that the golems patiently trapped and killed, skinned, dressed, and smoked, laying them in small, fur-wrapped bundles in the family's cave when they were done. It was part of their unspoken bargain with the mountain, and the tiny bones had once borne the flesh of nearly every significant meal Alan had ever eaten. Davey crouched among the bones at the very back of the cave, his back to them, shoulders hunched. The golems stood stock still as Marci and he crept up on Davey. So intent was he on his work that he didn't notice them, even as they loomed over his shoulder, staring down on the thing he held in his hands. It was Alan's thumb, and growing out of it -- Allen. Tiny, the size of a pipe-cleaner man, and just as skinny, but perfectly formed, squirming and insensate, face contorted in a tiny expression of horror. Not so perfectly formed, Alan saw, once he was over the initial shock. One of the pipe-cleaner-Allen's arms was missing, protruding there from Davey's mouth, and he crunched it with lip-smacking relish. Alan gawped at it, taking it in, watching his miniature doppelganger, hardly bigger than the thumb it sprouted from, thrash like a worm on a hook.