“I suppose,” I said. I was trying to visualize it.
“Did you talk to her?” Rose asked.
“Once or twice. She was kind of freaked out,” Maggie said.
“You didn’t try to help?” Rose asked.
“That’s… I dunno. I’m not sure how I would’ve or could’ve,” Maggie said.
“I’ve been trying to put myself in the heads of the other locals,” Rose said. “Yourself included. I understand that they are scared. I understand that our family has a history of meddling in pretty dangerous things. But then I look at the difference between the Duchamp kids and the Duchamp parents, like we saw earlier…”
“Maybe better to not say anything there,” I commented.
“What do you mean?” Rose asked.
I rubbed at my eyes. “Might be they don’t want their actions broadcasted or gossiped about.”
“I’m sworn to secrecy about anything I discover inside this house, aren’t I?” Maggie asked.
“You are,” I said. “But betraying confidence, implicitly or otherwise, it seems messy. Bad karma, maybe.”
“Point,” Maggie said. “Change of topic then. I don’t get a lot of what’s going on, politically. I have to trade for every tidbit of information I get. Even about the obvious stuff you read about in those books. I’m kind of new here, though. New to this, to everything. I’ve only been at this for half a year.”
I nodded. My stomach was burbling just a bit. Maybe a factor in why I felt so drained. I’d given up blood, skipped meals, missed sleep. Those things had to be fundamental to personal power.
I stood up.
“I’m going to get something. You want anything?” I asked.
“Beer?”
“Something I can legally give you.”
“Nah. I’m alright.”
I made my way to the kitchen. “Can I ask, Maggie? What’s your story?”
“My story?” she asked, calling out from the living room. I glanced, and saw she had picked up Famulus again.
“You got started somewhere.”
“Didn’t we all?”
“No games, please,” Rose’s voice came from the living room. “If you don’t want to say, you don’t have to say, but I’m on the same page with Blake about being horribly fed up with this doubletalk.”
Maggie didn’t respond to that.
Searching the kitchen for foodstuffs, I found some bread in the freezer. A little freezer burned, and showing signs of what might be mold.
Well, no use wasting it.
I cut the mold off, buttered it, cut up the remaining chunk of cheddar and layered it between the two slices before throwing it in a frying pan.
Maggie appeared in the doorway, leaning against it with her arms folded, so she had both me and Rose in her line of sight. “What do you know about goblins?”
“Ugly,” I said. “Brutish, warlike, twisted, brimming with all sorts of emotional negativity.”
“That’s essentially it. You know their weak point?”
“Iron,” I said. “They’re creatures of nature?”
“Iron. But they’re warriors, understand? They use iron. They make weapons. They’re of nature, but so is snake venom, so is cancer, understand? They’re the ugly bits. The savage, primitive, visceral, neanderthal bits. Once upon a time, it was pretty standard for goblins to give humans a hard time. Steal unattended objects, suck a cow’s udders dry before the farmer could milk them, spread plague, tangle hair, gobble up anyone who got turned around in the woods and passed by the same place three times…”
I nodded. I used a fork to lift the corner of the bread and see how it was browning.
“A few reasons they stopped. The first is that practitioners started going after their leaders. The dumbest, meanest, most savage of them got snapped up and jammed into objects or they got sealed, stuck in holes and covered up with rocks, yadda yadda. And there aren’t many powerful goblins who aren’t kind of stupid and savage.”
Rose asked something I couldn’t make out.
Maggie nodded. “Yeah. There are some scary ones out there. Even now. Real monsters. But I’m getting off topic. The second big reason that the goblins stopped picking on humanity was that we went and got ourselves modern plumbing. You know that bit, about how vampires can’t cross running water? Water is life, it’s natural, and it naturally draws out the deathly energies. Well, for goblins, metal does the same thing, and it takes a bit out of them when they pass over a place where metals are buried. More so if that metal is charged with any power.”
“Pipes under the streets?” I asked.
“The flowing water gives it some basic elemental power. They don’t like it, saps their energy when they do a little hop, skip or jump over the barrier. So they lurk around the city instead of inside it. In rural areas, other places where water service is more inconsistent. Or smaller towns, where the local infrastructure taxes them a little less for getting from A to B.”
“Like Jacob’s Bell,” I could hear Rose.
“Yep. Among other places. Redneck scumholes are sort of scumholes because goblins hang around there, you know? The little twits have their fun making paint peel prematurely, stealing a little money here or there, pulling stuff apart, making it so cars break down, and so on and so on. People who wind up in slums and scumholes find it just a little bit harder to get out, when things refuse to pick up and run smoothly.”
Rose said something. I only caught the tail end, “…fair game.”
“Open season,” Maggie agreed. “Once you fall far enough through the cracks, you start losing the protections most of humanity enjoys. The kid that locks himself in his room and never comes out, the antisocial couple, the poor schmo who loses his house and business. If the goblins manage to help someone down that path, drag them down a little further, and some other Other doesn’t go after the unfortunate soul, they get to enjoy the reward. Goblin SOP. Standard operating protocol. Making everyone’s bad days a little worse”
A memory crossed my mind. Being woken from my sleep by a beating. The mocking laughter. Never seeing their faces, because I had to cover my head, because I had blood in my eyes.
One of them had called it off. Let me limp away, crawl away when the limping proved too difficult.
They let me think I could maybe get to a busier street where I could beg for help, then kicked me one last time, hard enough to prove me wrong.
And another memory, one I had told Rose about, not long ago. Being shot with BB guns. The bruises, the way my arm had changed colors, and the fear I’d felt, wondering if I needed to go to the hospital.
There had been no laughter that time. They had lurked in the shadows, firing until they had no more ammunition, watched me struggle, then feigned like they’d reloaded and were going to shoot me again, just to see me flinch. I’d gone still for a time, and they had moved on when I looked up again.
Both memories had distorted. Spend too long without revisiting memories, and they had a way of twisting. When I remembered the laughter being a little too much, a little too high pitched from some, too deep from others, I’d told myself it was just my memory playing tricks on me.