“Can I help you?”
“Are you…Simon Church?” she asked, though even as she spoke the words he could see her appraising him and realizing her error.
“No, ma’am. I’m his associate. You can call me Joe.”
When he invited her in, she glanced over her shoulder as if fearful that she might be observed.
“What can we do for you, Miss…” Joe asked as he closed the door behind her.
“Mrs.,” she corrected. “Rachael Blum.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble, Mrs. Blum?”
“Not me,” she said quickly, pausing to weigh the words as if she herself were uncertain of their veracity. “It’s my daughter. She was ill. Badly ill. The doctors told us she had only months to live.”
Joe ran a rough hand over the bristly stubble on his chin. “But you said she was ill. She’s not sick anymore?”
For just a moment, the dark cloud over her features vanished and joy shone from her eyes. Then the grim weight of whatever haunted her returned.
“Far from it. Jillian’s better. So much better.” Mrs. Blum paused and Joe thought she looked almost sickened by her next words. “She’s almost too well. So healthy it seems, well, unnatural.”
Intrigued as he was, Joe still didn’t see where he and Church came into it.
“If you have any concerns—“
“I know I should just be happy, but—“
“—shouldn’t you talk to a doctor? It’s not the kind of thing Mr. Church and I normally handle.”
Mrs. Blum shook her head. “It’s strange and a little frightening, but that’s not what brought me here. Jillian’s been having nightmares, horrible dreams about a withered, ugly little man who visits her in the night and tries to persuade her to run away with him, promises to carry her off if she hasn’t the courage to go willingly. ‘Courage,’ that’s how he puts it.”
“Still—“ Joe began.
“It’s not a dream!” Mrs. Blum snapped, tears springing to her eyes. She waved her hands as if she had no idea what to do with them. “Last night, I heard her whimpering in her bedroom and I went in. The thing was there, this little goblin, sitting on the windowsill. I screamed and grabbed a lamp, but when I went to hurl it at the thing, it looked at me with terrible eyes…and it called me by name.
“It knew my name!” Rachael Blum repeated, the horror of this fact clearly still deeply unsettling her. “I threw the lamp but it leaped out into the dark. Jillian screamed for her father and he came running and the three of us stayed up together the rest of the night.”
Joe frowned. “Where are your husband and daughter now?”
“Home. Asleep. My husband intends to stand guard over Jillian this evening and to kill the creature if it returns, but I fear for them both. For us all. With her illness, and now this strange new vitality…I can’t help wondering if this thing is somehow responsible for all of that. Whatever the case, my husband would not approve of my seeking help, but I’ve heard stories about Simon Church and I knew if anyone could help…”
She trailed off there.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Blum,” Joe said, frowning deeply. “Mr. Church is an old man. He relies on certain medicines and…equipment, and he rarely leaves the premises.”
How could he have explained to her the strange mechanics the old detective had installed inside his own chest, the gears and metal chambers and tubes that kept him alive? Magic had kept Simon Church from aging like an ordinary man, but it couldn’t make him immortal. He often said that entropy could be deceived but never defeated, thus the combination of magic and mechanical apparatus had staved off the reaper for many, many decades, but could not do so forever.
“You could ask him,” Mrs. Blum said desperately. “Please?”
After a moment, Joe nodded. “Tell you what. Let me come out there tonight. I’ll make sure no harm comes to your family. If this thing shows up, I’ll deal with it. And if I can’t, I’ll try to talk Mr. Church into coming out himself tomorrow.”
In her relief, Rachael Blum was beautiful. Her beauty made Joe even more determined to help her, and he knew that was dangerous. He’d nearly been killed for beautiful women before, and it rarely ended well.
That night, Joe stood in the rain on the front stoop of the Blum residence, his hair wet and slick against his skull. Beneath his heavy coat he carried a pistol in a shoulder holster, the gun adding bulk beneath his left arm. Joe didn’t like guns, but Mr. Church had long ago persuaded him that a gun was sometimes a necessary tool. There were dangers in the city that even the scavengers did not understand. Bullets weren’t always effective, but even in those rare cases, they could usually be counted upon to buy a few precious seconds for him to think of some other way to avoid being killed. And since he had no idea what, if anything, had been lurking in Jillian Blum’s dreams and outside her bedroom window, he figured better safe than sorry.
He heard voices raised in argument beyond the heavy door and tensed, wondering if he ought to interfere. When his patience wore thin and the rain had nearly soaked through his jacket, he pounded on the door again. The wind whipped at him, waves crashing against the building just a few feet below the stoop.
With a loud thunk, the lock was thrown back and the door hauled open, but it wasn’t Rachael Blum standing silhouetted in the warm, golden light of their foyer. Her husband was thin and olive-complexioned with eyes so brown they were nearly black. He dressed in dark trousers and a crisp white shirt, the sort of businessman that was rare in the Drowning City and much more at home in Upper Manhattan, where the water had never filled the streets and where business and architecture and finance had raced ahead to the future, leaving the Drowning City to retreat into an earlier age and create a culture of its own. There were still some families in Lower Manhattan who had money, who owned businesses, and who cared enough to stay and try to help create that culture—or at least profit from it—but they were rare. Mr. Blum had Joe’s respect for that alone, but he didn’t seem to want it.
“My wife’s just told me about her visit to you today,” the man said angrily. “You’re not welcome here. You’re not wanted.”
Joe studied him carefully, saw the fear in his eyes, and realized the man was just as haunted as his wife. Why wouldn’t he be? A man like Blum would be hesitant to turn to thuggish policemen or an unelected mayor with his troubles; he’d want to solve them himself.
“I just want to help, Mr. Blum.” He thrust out a hand. “I’m Joe. And whatever it is that’s threatening your daughter, I promise you I’ve dealt with worse.”
Blum hesitated, leaving Joe standing in the rain, both of them buffeted by the storm. Then he seemed to deflate a little before he replied.
“Define dealt with,” he said.
Rachael Blum appeared in the foyer behind him. “Steven,” she said emphatically. “Let him in. This is what he does. If he can’t help us—“
“What I mean is that I’ve seen things most people wouldn’t even believe existed,” Joe assured him. “Unnatural things. I’ve fought them. Sometimes I’ve caught them. And sometimes I’ve killed them.”
“Whatever this thing is, I don’t want it caught,” Blum said, eyes alight with righteous fury. “It’s threatening my daughter, Joe. I want it dead.”
Joe gave a single nod. “I’ll see what I can do.”
Steven Blum took a deep breath and let it out. Then he stepped back and let Joe in.
Drowsy and stiff, Joe blinked and forced his eyes open wide. He yawned and stretched, knocking a knee against the little girl’s bed, which caused her to stir. He froze, hoping he hadn’t woken her, but just as her breathing began to deepen again she snapped awake, lifted her head and looked around fearfully.
“Sorry,” Joe said. “I’ll be more careful.”
Jillian Blum smiled sweetly, but her smile didn’t reach her eyes. He saw only sadness and worry there, and thought to himself that he had never before met an entire family who see
med so haunted. And yet he could have sworn they were haunted by different things. There seemed a different tension in each member of the Blum clan. Jillian seemed skittish, as if she were guilty of some deception. Joe hadn’t spent a lot of time around twelve-year-old children, but he knew that they were old enough to keep their own counsel and to not always trust their parents with the truth.
“It’s all right,” the girl said.
She glanced at her father, who sat slumbering in a high-backed chair in the far corner of the room. Steven Blum had made it clear he had no intention of letting Joe stay the night in his daughter’s room without him present, but he’d nodded off before midnight. Joe saw something in the girl’s glance that underlined his thoughts about Jillian keeping secrets. She seemed wary of him.
What aren’t you telling me? he thought.
As the girl settled down again, drawing her floral duvet up around her neck and nestling deeply into her pillows, Joe studied what little of her face he could see. She’d turned from him, and her wild hair obscured part of her profile, but still he found himself fascinated by her strange luminescence. Her hair had a bright sheen and her skin had a radiant glow, in a hue like burnished copper. Rachael Blum had shown Joe photographs of her daughter, and the girl had always been pretty. But in those old pictures, Jillian’s complexion had been more like her mother’s, pale with the faint blush of rose at her cheeks.
He had also seen a photo of Jillian when she had been ill, and the contrast was startling. She had been thin and drawn and gray. Only her eyes had been the same, for Jillian had striking eyes, with flecks of gold and green surrounded by a ring of purple. She must have inherited them from a grandparent or great-grandparent, Joe figured, since neither of her parents had such startling eyes.
In that old photo, there had been a small scar on the girl’s cheek, the result—according to her mother—of a mishap involving a disinterested cat, an enthusiastic but unsteady toddler, and the corner of a fireplace. The new Jillian, this copper girl, showed no evidence of that injury. The scar had healed.
Unusual as her eyes and her remarkable recovery and vibrant health were, however, her most arresting feature was the coppery cast of her skin. Her hair was lush and had the golden orange hue of copper, brushed fine, and her flesh seemed almost to have been forged by a metalsmith rather than by God. The curves of her face gleamed in the dimly lit room, the copper color warm and rich. Whatever had gifted her with this new vitality had left her more than cured.
Joe watched the sleeping girl for another moment. She snored lightly, but even from this angle he could see a slight crinkling of her brow. She did not rest easily.
Troubled, wishing he could look inside the minds of these people to learn what it was they were not telling him, he settled deeper into his chair and wished he had brought a book. If he could have read, it might have been easier for him to keep his eyes open. Instead, he tried to focus on the two tall windows, which rattled in their frames with every gust of wind. Rain pelted the glass as the storm howled outside. The whole building seemed to groan with the waxing and waning of the storm’s strength and the gossamer curtains billowed in the cool breeze that slid in through the gaps between window and sill. Blum had wanted to keep the windows closed and locked, which Joe had said would be foolish. If some night-time creature actually was tormenting his daughter, hoping to spirit the girl away, they didn’t want to keep it out. They wanted to let it in, so Joe could teach it a lesson about preying on little girls.
The clamor of the rain began to blur into white noise and he grew drowsy again. Focusing on the lamp beside Jillian’s bed—an antique brought from downstairs to replace the one her mother had broken—he tried to practice a meditation technique that Mr. Church had taught him, but to no avail. A dim light burned inside the hand-painted glass globe of the lamp, but it was more soothing than illuminating and the pink and white and crimson rose patterns painted on the glass made him feel warm and content, until his thoughts blurred like the sound of the rain.
“Daddy?”
The word floated across Joe’s sleeping thoughts without any significance. His unconscious mind did not recognize the voice, ignoring the intrusion into his slumber. Even the rattle of the window in its frame did not cause him to stir, for the windows had been rattling all night. But his body felt the new chill as a fuller gust of wind stormed into Jillian Blum’s bedroom and he heard the flap of the curtains. Droplets of moisture touched his right arm and he shivered in his sleep.
And opened his eyes.
He found himself staring at the hand-painted rose on the glass globe of Jillian’s lamp. Blinking once, he focused beyond it, and saw the girl huddled in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, copper skin almost unearthly against the linens. Her purple-limned eyes were open wide in confusion and fear. In the same instant, Joe’s mind raced backward, pulling together the strands of the waking world that had immediately preceded his own awakening.
The girl was staring at the window.
Joe turned, fully awake at last, and saw the dark figure silhouetted against the storm. Cadaverously thin, it was still not slender enough to have slithered through the few inches Blum had allowed, so it had pushed the window open, letting the wind and the rain blow in. When it had first begun to pay visits to Jillian, the girl had thought she was dreaming, and so had her mother. But the monster was neither nightmare nor imagination; it was entirely real.
Now it slid itself halfway across the windowsill, hands clutching the frame. It wheezed damply, moving slowly and with obvious effort, though its body had almost no mass at all. Pale and wizened, this creature seemed little more than the husk of a man, and Joe understood Mrs. Blum better now. Drenched with rain, struggling to move, it looked entirely inhuman. Not a demon or a ghost, but perhaps something quite like a goblin after all.
“No,” Jillian whispered.
Her voice drove him to action. Perhaps the thing had not noticed that she wasn’t alone, or perhaps it didn’t care. Either way, he had to act before it saw its own peril.
Bolting from the chair, he lunged toward the creature. In motion, he heard a shout of alarm and rage, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Blum rising as well, but his focus was the creature. Hearing the commotion, it looked up as Joe reached it. He grabbed a fistful of its wet, greasy hair, feeling some of it come out at the roots as he started to drag it further into the room.
“Kill it!” Blum roared. “Kill it, damn you!”
Jillian began to shriek, covering her ears and driving herself up against the headboard of her bed as if she could escape right through the wall.
His grip on its hair giving way, Joe yanked the goblin’s head back and clutched its throat, hauling it bodily into the room. Its mottled, pale skin left a trail of filth and slime on the sill and it almost slipped out of his grasp, so oily was its toad-like flesh. The creature squeezed its eyes shut and cringed like a frightened child, wishing its pain away.
“What the hell are you?” Joe asked. “And what’ve you done to the girl?”
Not what did it want with the girl, but what had it done to her. He hadn’t meant to phrase it that way, but one look at her bright copper skin and he’d known that was the real question.
“Don’t talk to it!” Blum snapped incredulously. “Demons are liars. Just kill it. We don’t know what it’s capable of!”
A hammering on the bedroom door was followed by cries from Mrs. Blum, out in the hall. In the back of his mind, Joe registered that Blum had locked them all in to his daughter’s bedroom, and locked his wife out.
“Kill it!” Blum shouted angrily.
But that wasn’t the way Joe worked. He and Simon Church had destroyed their share of monsters, but they had also helped restless spirits find peace. They didn’t kill without reason, no matter that he could barely think above Jillian’s shrieking and Blum’s shouting and Mrs. Blum’s hammering on the door.
“What do you want here?” Joe demanded, shaking the
goblin.
The creature opened its eyes and Joe was taken aback by the depths of its anguish…and by the startling color of its irises. Flecks of green and gold, ringed in purple.
“My baby,” the goblin croaked.
Joe stared. “What the—“
Then he saw the creature’s eyes go wide—eyes like Jillian’s—and saw its focus shift to something behind him. Alarmed, he turned, but too late. Steven Blum’s fist connected with his temple, and Joe staggered aside, catching himself on the footboard of Jillian’s bed.
Blum began to beat the goblin, pummeling its face and body with strength Joe would not have credited if he hadn’t seen it himself. With a savage snarl, Blum dragged the creature toward the open window as it scrabbled for purchase on the pine plank floor.
“Daddy!” the girl screamed.
Joe saw the goblin look up at her with those eyes that matched her own, and suddenly he remembered something Rachael Blum had said about the night she’d walked in on the thing slinking into her daughter’s room. I threw the lamp, she had said, but it leapt out into the dark. Jillian screamed for her father…
“Son of a bitch,” Joe muttered.
He crossed the room in two long strides. In addition to being smarter than he looked, Joe was also faster than he looked. Trying to manhandle the creature out the window, Blum heard him coming and twisted around, but not in time. Joe splayed a huge hand across the man’s head and shoved, bouncing his head off the window frame hard enough to crack the glass.
Lightning split the sky and as the thunder rolled across the city, Blum turned toward him, hatred and desperation burning in his eyes. Then the man hissed, revealing rows of small, jagged teeth and a raw, red gullet. The goblin was forgotten as Blum stalked toward Joe, but of course the creature sprawled on the floor, weak and in pain, was not a goblin at all…any more than the man now advancing upon Joe was Steven Blum.
“Please!” Jillian cried, now scrambling to the end of her bed and looking on in fear and hope. “Please help us!” She clung to the footboard as if her bed were a sailing ship and the wooden floor below a sea full of hungry sharks. With the wind and rain howling in and the thunder booming again, the illusion was complete.
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