Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  * * *

  They transferred everything she thought might be useful from PB&G’s production truck to the CBM truck. It would be a week until Hal’s face healed enough that they could film, so they could focus first on the network show. They hadn’t resolved the housing issue except to verify that no one in the offices was actually handling those duties. She really didn’t have any choice but to take the men home again.

  It was ten o’clock when they left the offices, a full fifteen hours since they left her house, but it still felt like she was slacking. Part of her soul wanted to be out looking for lost little girls. Even if Tinker were found, though, her soul wouldn’t be satisfied. She would need her Boo back for her to be at peace and the nightmares to end.

  As she pulled out of the parking lot, she turned on the radio and tuned to KDKA. Her cousin Sean was doing the news before leading into his show on local fusion music. Their video clip of the tengu was still the headline story. Pittsburgh Police had set up a tip line for anyone who might have spotted a black winged man flying over the city. Director Maynard of the EIA reported that he had requested additional troops during Shutdown. As Dmitri pointed out, the United Nations would have to approve the request, influenced most strongly by the United States. Sean repeated the news that Windwolf sent for royal troops. Once again, everyone in Pittsburgh was reporting in except the oni.

  Sean transitioned to commercial with “You’re listening to Sean Roach on KDKA.”

  Taggart chuckled quietly. “He’s using the name Roach? Seriously?”

  “There’s nothing wrong with Roach,” Jane growled.

  “They’re cousins,” Hal sang from the backseat.

  “Your cousin’s name is Roach?” Taggart said.

  “Yes, my Uncle Bill Roach is a very successful businessman. All his kids are business savvy.”

  “And they stayed here in Pittsburgh?” Taggart asked.

  “New York is not the center of the universe,” Jane said.

  “I didn’t say it was. In fact I don’t really like New York.” He stared out the window at the forest to the north of the city as they drove down Bigelow Boulevard. The streetlights went up to the Rim and stopped abruptly. Beyond it elf shines drifted over the dark canopy, a million earthbound stars. “I like quiet and solitude.”

  “Mine,” Hal grumbled quietly in the backseat.

  “What is that?” Nigel leaned forward to point through the windshield.

  She glanced to see where he was pointing. They were crossing the Fort Pitt Bridge. Downriver was a glimmer of lights moving in the dark water below.

  “Water fairies,” Hal said. “Lots of them. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  It was probably the most dangerous section of road in Pittsburgh. Five lanes of traffic fed onto the bridge from three directions and had approximately five hundred feet of road-planning insanity to merge to two lanes into the tunnel or take the off-ramp to the river-hugging Route 51.

  During the day, Jane wouldn’t have thought about stopping, but traffic trickled to a halt at night. She checked her rearview mirror. There wasn’t any other traffic following them. She put on her flashers and stopped at the center of the bridge.

  “Stay off the road,” she warned.

  A large truck rumbled across the inbound deck overhead.

  They scrambled over the jersey wall to the sidewalk and set up tripods for the night shooting. The mass of water fairies flowed inexplicably closer, coming upriver.

  “We could go to the Point,” Hal murmured in the darkness beside her. He pointed across the water at the fountain set in the wedge of concrete that marked where the Mon and Allegheny River flowed together to create the Ohio River.

  Jane shook her head. “It would take us fifteen minutes to drop down to 51, swing across the West End Bridge, come back across the Fort Duquesne and get into Point Park. Another three or four minutes to walk through the park and set up.”

  “We could U-turn—there’s room enough and—” Hal started.

  “Hal, last time I listened to you, I nearly lost my license. No!”

  “If they go up the Allegheny, we’ll miss them,” Hal said.

  Nigel suddenly blew a loud piercing tri-toned whistle.

  It made Jane jump and swear. “What the hell?”

  “Am I supposed to hear it?” Hal asked. “I thought it was ultrasonic.”

  “It has four tones. Only one is…” Nigel started to explain.

  The last of his explanation was lost under a deafening roar, seemingly in answer to his whistle. It was stunningly loud. The deep rumbling noise echoed off Mount Washington, making it impossible to pinpoint the exact origin.

  Chesty leaned out the window of the truck and growled.

  “What the hell is that?” Taggart asked.

  “I don’t know.” Jane peered into the dark. The glittering school of water fairies darted suddenly to the left and flowed up the Allegheny River. There was another roar and it seemed closer. Louder.

  “You think it might be the Nessie?” Nigel asked.

  “What the hell is the Loch Ness?” Jane said.

  “The most popular theory is that it’s a plesiosauria, about the size of a sperm whale.”

  “Shit!” Jane cried. The last thing Pittsburgh needed was a huge river monster.

  Nigel blew his whistle again. The answering roar from the dark waters sent shivers down Jane’s back.

  “Nigel!” She snatched the whistle from Nigel’s hand. “What the hell are you thinking?”

  “That we get a picture of whatever it is.” Nigel’s tone indicated that he had no clue why she was angry.

  “Is that it?” Hal was leaning far out over the railing to point at something arrowing through the river, coming at them at alarming rate. It seemed comfortingly small—barely a dozen feet in length—until Jane realized that she was just seeing the creature’s head. There was another wedge behind it, easily adding thirty feet to the creature. Suddenly the forty-some feet that the bridge deck was from the river’s surface didn’t seem far enough.

  Chesty had gone full-throttle warning snarl.

  “In the truck.” Jane reached out and jerked Hal back. A second later, electricity flared in the water like a Tesla coil discharging, outlining a massive crocodilelike body. The monster was nearly fifty feet long from nose to tip of tail. “Truck! Truck!”

  “How wonderful!” Nigel cried. “Shouldn’t we be filming this?”

  “Too dark.” Taggart shoved him into the backseat, earning Jane’s love. “We’ll film it tomorrow!”

  * * *

  They cautiously looked for the river monster the entire next day, careful not to stray too close to the water’s edge, with Chesty on watch. Jane kept hold of the whistle and refused to let them use it.

  “We could call Nessie to us,” Nigel pointed out many times.

  “No!” Jane kept shouting back.

  Taggart finally broke the pattern. “Can you at least explain why?”

  Jane growled. God, she hated being outnumbered. This was like riding herd on her little brothers, only worse because “I’ll beat you if you do” wasn’t an acceptable answer. “First rule of shooting a show on Elfhome.” She grabbed Hal and made him face each of the two newbies so there was no way they could miss the mask of dark purple bruises across Hal’s face. “Avoid getting ‘The Face’ damaged. Viewers don’t like raccoon boys. Hal is out of production until the bruising can be covered with makeup. We’ve got fifty days and a grocery list of face-chewing monsters to film. We have to think about damage control.

  “Second rule!” She let Hal go and held up two fingers. “Get as much footage as possible of the monster before you kill it. People don’t like looking at dead monsters if you don’t give them lots of time seeing it alive. Right now we have got something dark moving at night in water. No one has ever seen this before, so we can’t use stock footage to pad. We blow the whistle and it will come out of the water and try to rip your face off—violating rule one—and then
we’ll have to kill it and thus break rule two.”

  “Sounds reasonable,” Taggart said.

  “Would we really have to kill it?” Nigel’s tone suggested he equated it to torturing kittens.

  “If it’s trying its damnedest to eat you? Yes!” Jane cried. “And if we just lure it out of the river right now, without some way to keep that from happening, we will have no other option. Until we know which of the three rivers this thing is in now, even setting up a safe perch to film from is going to be a waste of time. We don’t have time for this. I can get people to keep an eye out for it and call us if it shows up.”

  She had Hal too well trained to argue with her. Nigel looked to Taggart instead of her.

  “I think Jane’s right,” Taggart said. “Our end goal is to get enough great footage that we can get an open pass to Elfhome. We haven’t shot anything but water today.”

  Nigel nodded reluctantly. “Okay, let’s do the saurus tomorrow.”

  * * *

  It came as no surprise that her nightmares had gotten worse. Between Tinker’s kidnapping, the lack of any progress at finding her, and quiet sounds of someone else in her house, she had no hope. At three a.m., she slipped out of her room and padded down to the kitchen to find something to drown them out.

  There was light on in the kitchen. It was in an odd place. She paused to feel Chesty standing beside her, not growling, before swinging the door the rest of the way open.

  Taggart was holding her refrigerator’s door open, studying its contents, wearing only his low pajama pants.

  “Do you not have shirts to sleep in?”

  “Actually, no.” He eyed her milk as if there was something strange about it.

  “It’s fresh.”

  “I’ve never seen milk in a glass bottle before.”

  “I get it from a dairy down the road. It’s easier for them to recycle glass bottles than plastic.”

  “It’s like I’ve gone back in time.” He poured the milk into her smallest saucepot. “Do you have any sugar and cocoa I can put into this?” As she handed him her sugar bowl, he explained his lack of shirts. “Network wanted us in L.A. first before coming to Pittsburgh to do pre-production work. Design the logo, hire on the people that will be doing the graphics for titles and end credits. Mostly what we spent the month on, though, was having it drummed into us that we were going to film monsters. The bigger and more fantastic, the better. Then we flew to New York to drive to Pittsburgh—and half my luggage didn’t make it.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Luckily it was just my backup boots, some extra pairs of jeans, and,” he motioned to his bare chest, “the shirt I sleep in.”

  “We do have clothing stores.” Jane put the cocoa on the counter beside the saucepot. “We can get you something tomorrow evening after filming.”

  “Thanks. Sorry about waking you up.” Then reluctantly he added, “I have bad dreams. If I go back to sleep, it’s like I just hit pause when I woke up.”

  “Been there, doing that. You didn’t wake me. I’ve got my own little demons.”

  He did his eyebrow quirk, which was stunningly sexy since he had the most striking eyes she’d ever seen.

  She found him a teaspoon to keep from blushing. She grew up with a small testosterone-driven army, but never had to deal with man alone in her kitchen, half-naked, in the middle of the night. At least, not one that wasn’t related to her.

  “I have five younger brothers.” She stumbled for an explanation.

  “Hal said something like that.”

  “Yes, well, what Hal hasn’t mentioned is that I had a baby sister too. When I was eighteen, she was six.”

  He realized the implication and his face filled with sorrow for her. With the look, all the raw grief that been building up the last few days seemed to expand to fill her. Feeling like her heart was about to explode with the anguish, she found herself talking.

  “My dad died when I was twelve. My brothers were ten, eight, six, four and two.” Not that she had their ages memorized for that year alone; it had always been simple to figure out. “I’m not sure what the hell happened in June, but every other March, regular as clockwork, my parents had a baby.”

  Taggart nodded while mixing sugar, cocoa and a splash of milk into a dark paste. The fact that he continued to make hot cocoa, albeit in a very odd manner, made it easier to spill out her grief.

  “I’d always spent a lot of time watching my brothers, but after my father died, it was like I became the dad. Mom had just had Boo and needed to be the mommy, so I took care of everything Dad used to do. Cut the grass. Fix things that got broke. Teach my brothers how to run and climb and shoot and fight. I didn’t really mind it. It was just how things were. I didn’t know anything else.”

  He stirred the paste in the hot milk. She realized that he’d made enough for two people. She got out two coffee mugs and set them down on the counter. As if she’d opened up floodgates, the words kept spilling out. There was something comforting about the dim kitchen, the quiet of the night. For once, not being alone was a blessing.

  “My brothers. It was like they had a death wish, and every time I turned around, I had to fish them out of the river or cut them down from a strangle vine. Boo was smart. She was curious as a cat but she’d always get someone else to do stuff for her. She’d be there in the thick of things but she was never the one stuck and screaming.”

  He poured out the steaming cocoa, dividing it neatly, and then turned to wash out the saucepot.

  “The summer that I was eighteen, our freezer quit working. Here in Pittsburgh, you have to have a freezer, especially with eight people in the family. You shoot a deer. You catch a shark. You butcher a cow. You can smoke some of the meat, but the rest, you have to freeze it or it will go bad. The thing is, they’re harder than hell to get. There’s one little appliance store down in the Strip District, just a hole in the wall. Every Shutdown they get one truck full of things—washers, dryers, refrigerators, hot water heaters—and there are only one or two freezers per month. You can put money down and order one in advance and wait two months. Or you can be the first person in the store as they unload the truck. Mom didn’t want to be out the money and have to wait, so she decided that we’d go into the Strip District the night before Shutdown and just camp there until a truck came in and we’d get one. You know all the ‘could have’ and ‘should have.’ She still tears herself apart blaming herself. She could have ordered the freezer. She could have left us all at home. She should have left Boo with my aunt. It just eats at her. It eats at all of us.”

  “What happened?”

  Jane lifted her shoulders. “We don’t know. One minute Boo was there, with us, and then the next, she was gone. All the delivery trucks trying to get into the Strip District, unload and get out of the city before they get stranded on Elfhome. It’s a crazy time.”

  “Been there. Done that.”

  “The police thought at first that maybe she went to the river’s edge. We told them that she wouldn’t do that. She was too smart. Then they thought maybe she tried to get home. We’d come all piled in my mom’s pickup but there were other times we’d come in on the light-rail. We were all sick of being stuck in the Strip District, waiting for the big trailer to be unloaded down to the freezers. But she was about the only one of us kids that wasn’t whining about going home. It was the first time she’d been in town for Shutdown. All those different trucks all being unloaded, some of them right there in the street. Whole families carrying everything into their stores fast they could. She was fascinated.

  “And then, the police suggested that maybe she’d gotten into one of the empty trucks. At least, that’s what they said in front of me and my brothers. And then they took my mom quietly aside and said what they really meant. That one of the truckers took her.

  “That got the EIA involved and they stopped all the trucks that had deliveries in the Strip District that hadn’t crossed the border already and searched them.

  “You
know when they first disappear, you’re angry. You told them just to be good, stay close, and not get into trouble and now they’re nowhere in sight. You look and you look and you look—just so angry you could hurt someone—and you’re rehearsing what you’re going to say when you finally figure out where the hell they are. Then slowly this fear takes root, and starts to grow, and you try so hard to hold on to that anger, because it’s so much safer than the fear.

  “But it leaks away and all there is left is fear. And then that goes away too, because you know, whatever horrible thing that was going to happen has happened. It’s over. It’s done. It can’t be undone. And you walk around feeling like a big hollow drum with no idea how you’re supposed to feel.”

  * * *

  The hot cocoa was the best she’d ever tasted, hinting that Taggart had spent many sleepless nights perfecting it. Her dreams for the rest of the night were unsettling in a totally different way and featured a wild man with chocolate-colored eyes.

  * * *

  The tip from Beef4U had specified the old Mount Lebanon golf course. Jane hadn’t been back into the area for years, so she had expected to find it overrun with possibly dangerous brush. She was surprised when they arrived in the early gray of dawn, to find the grass looking regulation height.

  “What the hell?” She pulled to a stop to peer out over the lush rolling green. She was driving her SUV with Nigel following in the CBM production truck. “Don’t tell me someone actually still plays golf.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me.” Hal surprised her by volunteering to ride with Nigel, but based on the chatter over the voice-activated headsets, they were bonding over a mutual love of flora and fauna.

  Taggart was in her passenger seat, smelling good enough to eat. She never met anyone that could be so distracting without saying anything. He was wholly focused on filming.