by Ian Whates
“Lying bastard,” Sergei commented as they drove off. “That Feliso’s up to his neck in it. All our informers tell us the same. Not only is he involved in it, but he may well be one of the principal movers behind this whole head-hunting business.”
Janet was quite shaken by this. She’d liked the headman – he’d conformed to all her preconceptions about wise, earthy peasant folk – and it troubled her greatly to think that all his garlicky charm had been a calculated performance.
“So why can’t we just bust him then?”
“Intelligence isn’t the same thing as evidence, unfortunately. We need to catch these people red-handed, and that’s quite hard to do. This is a big forest. There are almost a million settlers, and they’re spread out over an area as big as the Eurasian landmass.”
RESPONDING TO HIS uncle’s whistle, Caledon came ambling out of the shack. He was the youngest of Anna’s brothers, in his middle twenties and, like his uncle, a big man, both in height and girth. Now he stood on the veranda, meditatively watching his uncle’s hand as it moved under his sister’s shirt.
“Girl having one of her turns again?”
“Don’t call it a turn, boy. It’s a gift our girl’s got, to sense them out there, to sense them and hear them, when we don’t feel anything at all. Go and get the others.”
“Dad’s over in the village.”
“Well go and get him! Only don’t shout off your mouth like Felipe did last time, or someone will cheat us of what we’re due.”
Caledon nodded, but didn’t move.
“So what are they telling you then, eh, Anna?” he asked his sister.
“Leave our girl alone,” said Paulo, gently stroking the soft skin of Anna’s waist. “Go and get your dad like I told you.”
Caledon scratched his groin.
“How many do you reckon there are out there, Anna?”
“I said leave her alone.”
Caledon nodded and began to roll a cigarette.
“Headman pays ten dollars a head these days,” he observed.
“Where are your brothers?” his uncle asked.
Caledon tucked his cigarette under his moustache, drew in the moist rich smoke and slowly savoured it.
“Felipe’s inside sleeping, the great slob,” he said when he finally exhaled. “The other two are with Dad.”
“Well go and get them then.”
One of his eyes looked at Caledon, the other at a floater drifting over the pond, trailing its wispy tendrils.
Caledon turned and called into the shack.
“Felipe, you tub of lard. Wake up and get the guns ready. Girl’s hearing goblins again.”
“Tub of lard yourself,” Uncle Paulo said to him, as he caressed his niece’s skin. “Get your arse over to the village and fetch your dad and your brothers.”
THAT NIGHT JANET found it hard to sleep. She kept thinking about those decapitated indigenes, and about Headman Feliso and that colourful and exotic charm of his that had turned out to be a cold and cynical ruse. She imagined some girl coming in with a sackful of goblin heads just as she and Sergei and Tom were leaving the village, and the headman shaking with laughter as she tipped them all out at his feet.
She climbed out of bed and walked to the window. There was a little yard at the back of her bungalow and beyond that, more bungalows, but she could just glimpse between two of them the shapes of mushroomy trees in the forest that lay beyond. She pulled on some clothes and slipped outside into the warm caramel air. The forest was still silent but there was a sense of energy, of presence, that hadn’t been there in the day. The ground had a faint pinkish glow and the ponds shone with phosphorescence, illuminating the tree trunks around them.
“It’s beautiful,” Janet whispered. “It’s absolutely beautiful.”
Suddenly she saw a line of pale animal shapes moving rapidly through the trees in the distance. And almost in the same moment they finally disappeared, she heard a loud splash from a nearby pond. Janet began to walk out into the forest. There was another splash as she did so, and she saw a pale and slender creature rising from the water of a pond and bounding away until it was hidden by the forest: completely alien life, sharing no common ancestor with the life of Earth other than primal matter itself, and the fertile nothingness from which it emerged. Janet was enchanted.
“Tall, and thin, with sort of... glittery wing-things,” she said to herself, trying to memorise the animal so she could ask Sergei about it in the morning.
Then she noticed how much she was looking forward to talking to Sergei, and all her elation vanished.
“You are pathetic,” said a familiar voice inside her head. “You are utterly pathetic. You work yourself up into these artificial little moments of excitement, you develop these little crushes, but you are nothing but a pathetic, desperate lump of neediness that nice people are willing to tolerate, but no one will ever really want.”
That was when she saw the indigenes, two of them, no more than twenty metres away, watching her through the trees with their black button eyes, and smiling their V-shaped smiles.
ANNA COVERED HER face with her hands again and began to rock back and forth.
“Shut up!” she whispered. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”
“Look at the state she’s in, Caledon!” her uncle said. “Why can’t you just go down and get your dad? It’s not like it’s far!”
“Okay, okay, keep your hair on! I’m going, aren’t I?”
He squeezed down the steps past the two of them, but even now he didn’t just head straight to the village, but turned again to Anna.
“About four or five, do you reckon?”
“We’ll find out soon enough, for the love of God!” Paulo exclaimed. “Just get your dad and your brothers and we’ll find out.”
“Only it’s always at least four or five of them when you get as bad as that,” he went on, as if his uncle hadn’t spoken. “That’s unless one of them has got right up close, of course, but then we’d all feel it, wouldn’t we?”
He regarded his sister with an appraising eye.
“And I don’t feel anything at all now. Nothing. So I figure it must be a whole bunch of them, but some way off. Four or five at least. Not bad. Forty or fifty dollars-worth.”
“Go!” commanded Uncle Paulo.
Anna rocked and moaned.
“YOU READY FOR a raid, Janet?” Sergei asked.
“A raid?”
“That’s right. A proper raid. Joint operation between us and the police. We’ve finally got some witnesses who are willing to testify in court. Things can get a bit ugly on a raid, and you’re still very new here, so don’t feel you have to come, but if you’re up for it you’d be most welcome.”
“Well of course I’m up for it, Sergei! This is what I’ve trained for! This is why I came to Lutania!”
“Let’s go then. We’ve a whole day’s drive ahead of us.”
They grabbed backpacks and headed to the truck. The Agency Police were waiting outside in two vehicles of their own.
“This is exciting,” said Janet as they headed off.
The night had drained her, but this felt good and strong.
“I’ll say,” Sergei agreed. “It’s great to be able to finally do something. And apparently, this woman’s one of the deadliest goblin hunters in the business, with scores of kills to her name. It seems her family have made a few enemies in the local community, though, offended a few proprieties, and that’s what’s given us this chance. Just once in a while, Luto village politics work in our favour, and this is one of those occasions.”
IT WAS GETTING towards evening when they set out, Anna, her father, her uncle and her four brothers, every one of them armed. The five big men walked behind, the tiny woman in front. She was no taller than a goblin herself.
“Come on now, girl,” her dad called out reproachfully to her. “Don’t forget to keep us in the picture. Are we getting near?”
He was a slightly shorter and balder version of h
is brother Paulo. In fact he had no hair at all, except for one single tuft that stuck out like a brush from the left hand side of his head.
“Yeah, we’re near,” muttered Anna, her hands tightening round a gun that was almost as big as she was.
The sun was setting. The pink moss under the trees was starting to glow, and so were the ponds that dotted through the forest all around them. Soon the animals would start to come up out of the water.
“Don’t listen to what they tell you, girl,” her father reminded her. “You know what...”
“Oh shit, I can hear them now,” his son Felipe interrupted him. “Time to stop, eh guys? Let’s let the girl go on ahead. It’s her job, after all.”
“So what are they telling you then, Felipe?” demanded his oldest brother George, with a sneer. “What are the goblin voices saying?”
“That he’s a tub of lard,” said the second brother, Stephan, the most ordinary-looking of the three.
“Oh crap,” muttered Caledon, “I’ve got them now too. No way am I going any further.”
Anna was muttering rapidly and constantly, like people do when they’re trying very hard to blot something out from their minds.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up...”
“You keep going, girl,” her dad instructed, sitting himself down with a sigh. “We blokes would only scare them away.”
Anna carried on into the forest, muttering all the while.
“WE’LL LET THE police deal with the actual arrest,” Sergei said as they drew nearer to their destination. “We’re not trained for shoot-outs. But since her family are all blokes and the hunter’s a woman, the police suggested you ride back with her in one of their cars, and they’ll take the men in the other. From what I’ve heard she’d been the victim of a few crimes herself. Makes sense to separate her from them.”
“Yes, of course,” said Janet enthusiastically.
Sergei had said that goblin hunters tended to be outsiders. Well, she was an outsider too. She’d been teased at school. She’d found it hard to make friends. Once she’d driven a needle right though her own hand in response to a dare. She’d hoped to earn some respect for her courage. In fact the other girls had laughed at her for rising to their bait.
She looked at the forest outside the window, the trees, the ponds, the floaters nudging along in the distance, and imagined a meeting of minds in the police car. She would reach out to the poor young goblin hunter, the girl would realise she wasn’t alone any more, and she would no longer need to kill.
“FORTY OR FIFTY dollars, eh?” chuckled Caledon. “Forty or fifty dollars! So what are we going to spend it on?”
Anna was far off in the distance now, a shadow against the softly glowing moss.
Felipe pulled a flask from his pocket.
“Drink anyone?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” said Uncle Paulo, opening his knapsack. “And here’s something to go with it.”
He took out bread and a large sausage.
“Now that’s a bit more like it,” said Dad.
The young men laughed and rubbed their bellies, and Caledon opened his tobacco pouch and began to roll a fat cigarette.
“You going to pass that round, Cal,” demanded his brother Stephan, “or are you going to keep it to yourself?”
“I’ll pass it round right enough, Steph, when you stop guzzling Felipe’s rum, and Dad stops hanging on to that sausage like it’s his precious cock.”
Stephan made a lunge for the tobacco pouch. Caledon snatched at the flask. And then all six men were pushing and shoving for the various treats, laughing and yelling at each other, so as to drown out the whispering in their heads.
“VERY NEARLY THERE,” said Sergei. “She lives just outside the village, I gather, beside a pond. Have a look at the satellite image, will you, and see if you can figure out the way.”
FAR OFF THROUGH the forest to her right, a delicate little hart emerged from a pond and looked round at the dimming forest with its shiny black eyes. Anna moved slowly through the mushroomy trees.
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” she muttered to the voices inside her head.
They were identical to her own voice, but they were speaking words she hadn’t chosen and didn’t want to hear.
“What kind of father does those things to his own little daughter? What kind of brother? Look at them now, letting you do the work. And then tonight they’ll come to you one by one, stinking of meat and booze...’
“Shut up!” she hissed.
She peered through the trees. They were rapidly losing their colour as night fell and the glowing moss and the ponds became the only source of light. A golden water-dragon, the size of a stoat, peered at her from behind a grey trunk, its scales quivering.
“Kiss my arse!” came George’s bellowing voice from the distance behind her. “Kiss my arse!
Her men were horsing around while they waited for her, making lots of noise as they always did.
“I wouldn’t kiss your hairy arse if you give me two hundred dollars,” she heard Felipe shouting back.
The voices in her head were quieter, but they were much, much nearer.
“No one likes you, do they? No one wants you for a friend even, let alone a wife.”
She tried not to react. She needed to make them feel that she was holding out against them, so as to make them come closer.
“They all know what goes on back there in the shack, don’t they? And who wants spoiled goods?”
She could see them now ahead of her. There were four of them, thin grey creatures, hand-in-hand, smiling their V-shaped smiles.
“They don’t even let you keep the money, do they? They gamble it on cards and go to whorehouses, or buy themselves new boots, while your feet stay bare.”
There were three full-sized ones, about the same height as Anna, and a single smaller one on the left-hand end of the row. Their hose-like penises dangled down. The little one was clutching a pebble of quartz that it had brought up from the water. Now it held the thing out to her, as if offering a present.
“If you had any guts you’d run away and leave them, wouldn’t you?” said the voices in her head. “But you don’t dare. It’s much easier to lie to yourself.”
“Shut up!” snarled Anna, lifting the heavy gun and blasting a hole right through the chest of the little goblin.
Grey strands of flesh splattered onto the pale tree trunk behind it as it crumpled to the ground, smiling all the while. The other goblins went on smiling too, and the voices kept speaking inside her head.
“And anyway, you know quite well that no one but them would ever want you.”
She fired at the one on the right. It fell open sideways, as if hinged, so that its grinning face ended up next to its feet, from where it carried on watching her as the whole creature toppled slowly to the ground. The other two turned and bounded away with the strange skipping motion that was the goblin equivalent of a run.
She fired twice more. One of them fell twitching to the ground. She missed the other – it was further off – but she blasted away at it until it dropped, then ran after it to finish it off.
“That’ll teach you,” she hissed, as she emptied two more rounds into its grey, fibrous flesh, taking care not to shoot the head.
“I THINK IT’S just down that track there.”
“Never mind that, Janet! Look over there through the trees!”
“WELL DONE, OUR girl!”
“Good good girlie!”
Coy as they had been about approaching the goblins when they were alive, the men came bounding eagerly through the forest with their machetes at the ready. Four times they sliced through the grey and boneless flesh, then Paulo slung the sack of grinning heads onto his back, while George picked Anna up like a little doll and hoisted her onto his shoulders.
“Good girlie!” they all told her.
She felt like the happiest person alive.
“You’re better now, aren’t you, girl?” said Uncle Paul
o. “No more rocking and trembling, eh?”
Anna giggled happily, like a little child.
“That’s more like it,” said Uncle Paulo. “No more muttering under...”
Suddenly a new, heavily accented voice called out through the trees, and powerful beams of light flared out through the trees.
“Halt right there! This is the Agency Police! Stop where you are and put down your guns!”
JANET FOLLOWED SERGEI and the four armed police officers as they surrounded the little group. They were pathetic, misshapen, malnourished-looking creatures all of them. The men made her think of lumps of clay which some sculptor had begun to mould into human form and then changed his mind. The tiny, flat-chested girl managed to look both much older and much younger than her real age: a wizened ancient child.
One of the policemen walked forward and collected the guns and machetes, while Sergei fetched the sack and emptied the four heads onto the ground. They lay there grinning, each with its long dark shadow stretching away over the pink moss.
“The girl did it, officer,” said the man called Paulo. One of his eyes looked at the agency people, the other at the young woman who her brother had lifted down from his shoulders. “She’s not right in the head, you see, sir. We all came out to try and stop her. Well, it’s not right is it? Everyone knows that shooting goblins is wrong and against the law.”
“WHY DO YOU do it, Anna?” asked Janet gently in the best Luto she could manage. “They never harm people. They never steal. They never stop people taking whatever they want from the forest. And, after all, they were here long before human beings.”