Like Father

by Nick Gifford

  “So?” he said. “What am I looking for? What does it mean, a ‘self-bored stone’?”

  Cassie had a hand in the water, rummaging through the pebbles, stirring up a swirling cloud of mud in the otherwise clear water.

  “It’s a stone that’s been knocked about in a stream. All stones get smoothed off and worn away in the water, but a self-bored stone has a weak point somewhere in the centre and after thousands and thousands of years it ends up hollowing itself out, so you get a round stone with a hole in the middle.”

  She stirred up the stones and mud again, frustrated.

  Danny leaned over the water, and plucked a stone out. “Like this?” he said, holding it out to Cassie. On his palm, glistening wet, was a round pebble with a hole going right through it, just off-centre.

  It was a curious object, but it hardly seemed like much protection from what he had been experiencing.

  “How’d you do that?” demanded Cassie. She looked at the stone, and then at Danny. “Right,” she went on. “Now look through it.”

  He held it to his right eye.

  “What do you see?”

  “The trees.” He turned. “Grass. Mud. An old fence post.”

  “It’s supposed to be a window,” she told him. “Into the Other World. You should see fairies dancing in the grass, that kind of thing. Maybe they’re on their lunch break.”

  He turned it on Cassie.

  She looked scared.

  Pale face, wide open eyes ... There was panic in those eyes, terror.

  He took the stone away from his eye and she was normal, no sign of panic. She looked at him curiously. “What?” she said. “What is it?”

  He looked at her through the self-bored stone again, and she was just Cassie, watching him and waiting. “I ... I don’t know,” he said. “Nothing. It’s just hard to see through that small hole.”

  She took it from him and looked around before eventually handing it back.

  “So,” she said, “what is it that Hodeken is after? You said he’s nagging you. What about?”

  He couldn’t tell her. Not that much.

  He blinked and saw the kitchen knife flying through the air and then plunging, right up to its handle, in the turf.

  “The family,” he said. He could tell her part of it. “He thinks he can bring the family together and we’ll all live happily ever after.”

  “Do you think he can?”

  Danny shook his head. “Freakish as all this stuff is,” he said, “this isn’t a fairy-tale. You can’t just change what’s gone before. My father – he did what he did, and now he’s locked away. Which is right. It’s how it should be. He’s a dangerous man. It terrifies me to think just how dangerous he is. You can’t undo all that.

  “Did I tell you he was appealing? I think that was Hodeken’s doing, but it didn’t work. They’re not going to let him out. Hodeken’s not going to get his way, but ... but I’m scared of what he might do before he realises that. I’m scared of what he might do to all of us.”

  “I’ve got to go,” Cassie told him now. She had been looking at her watch as he spoke. “I’m sorry. I told Mum I’d be back by six and it’s half-six already. Walk with me?”

  They crossed the stream and cut along a low wall to join the lane between Moreton Farm and the village. From there they could look down the hill to where Danny had helped with the car parking that morning. Most of the vehicles had gone now. The Open Day must be over.

  At the top of Swiss Lane, Cassie took Danny’s hand and squeezed it. “Want to come round tomorrow morning, around ten? We can ask some questions. You said I’m good at that.”

  She smiled nervously, and waited for him to answer.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’d like to do that.”

  She nodded. “Got to go.”

  When he was a few paces down the road, she called after him, “Danny? One more thing. Danny: be careful. I mean that, Danny Schmidt. Be very careful.”

  He carried on walking. He knew how to do that. Be careful. He spent all his life being careful.

  ~

  It was a quiet evening, and he was thankful for that. Val and Josh stayed down at the marquee, helping clear up. Danny should have been there, too, but he couldn’t face it. Not so soon. Oma was in her room, suffering from one of her bad heads, so until Val and Josh returned Danny had the place to himself.

  All the time, his head was quiet and he wondered if it really could be that straightforward, if he really had driven the kobold from his head.

  He poured himself a bowl of cereal and thought about doing some of his homework, then turned the TV on for the Bond film instead.

  He couldn’t think straight. He couldn’t follow what was happening in the film, but that didn’t matter. It distracted him.

  His phone vibrated against his leg. He took it out and checked the little screen: Cassie.

  “So what is it, then?” she demanded, before he had a chance to say anything.. “Why now? Why can’t it wait until tomorrow?”

  “I... “ He stopped, started again. “What do you mean? Why can’t what wait? I don’t understand.”

  “Your message. You texted me.”

  Danny shook his head, still struggling to catch up. “No, he said. “I didn’t text you. I didn’t do anything.” He thought for a few seconds, then added, “This message: what number did it come from?”

  “Yours, stupid. Why do you think I’m calling you?”

  “Are you sure?” Then: “What did it say?”

  “It said, ‘spirit-talking - now’.”

  “And have you been there?”

  “Think I’m stupid? Whenever I get strange requests from male admirers I always check them out first. It’s a matter of principle.”

  “Don’t go there,” said Danny urgently. “Do you hear? They’re trying to get to you. They’re trying to get at me through you. He is ... Hodeken.”

  “You’re telling me that message wasn’t from you? You’re winding me up, aren’t you? You have one twisted sense of humour, Danny Schmidt.”

  “Just don’t go there, do you hear? Don’t do anything until I come in the morning, okay?” But he was talking to the connection tone. Cassie had rung off.

  He took the phone away from his ear. The small screen told him he had a message from Cassie. How could she have texted him while she was on the phone to him?

  He opened it.

  spirit-talking - now

  He called her back. “Cassie? Trust me on this? ’Til the morning?”

  “It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “It wasn’t me. ’Til the morning?”

  “‘Til the morning.”

  ~

  It was going to be another hot day. As early as he reasonably could, Danny set off down the long drive from the Hall to the main road through the village. Over on the lawn a group of people were dismantling the marquee and loading it up into an open-backed truck.

  He had to get to Cassie, just to be sure she was okay. But by going to her today was he just drawing her in deeper...?

  He paused on the bridge over the brook and looked down at the rushing water. He needed to stop. Think. He mustn’t rush into anything. He let the sound of the water soothe him, then a car swung round the bend in the road, breaking the moment. He walked on.

  At the top of Swiss Lane, he hesitated again. There was the house, its bright yellow paintwork ablaze in the harsh sunlight.

  He saw a face at the front window. There and then gone. She had seen him.

  He went down the road and Cassie swung the door open. “I thought you’d forgotten which house,” she said. “Stood there so long. I say hello, the yellow one – remember? Hi, Dad. You remember Danny, don’t you? The German kid. He was here before. I told you all about him. Hardly speaks a word of English.”

  Cassie’s father stood in the kitchen doorway in a dressing gown, with part of a newspaper held in one hand. “Morning, Danny,” he said, grinning. “Guten morgen.”

  “Hi,” said Dann
y, looking from Cassie to her father and back again.

  “We’re going up to look on the web, okay?” said Cassie. She stepped up onto the stairs and waved for Danny to follow.

  As they went up to the landing, her father started counting off on his fingers, “Ein. Zwei. Drei. Viere. Fünf. Sechs. Sieben...”

  There were three doors off the landing. One was half-open into the bathroom. The one towards the front of the house was closed, and now Cassie pushed through the other into her room.

  “Don’t go getting any ideas,” she said to him over her shoulder. “You can leave the door open. I know what men are like. I’ve read all about it.”

  He followed her in, leaving the door open.

  “You know what they say,” she said, turning, and spreading her hands to indicate the room’s contents. “Tidy room, tidy mind. So what did you expect?”

  The room was complete chaos. Every surface was loaded with books, notepads, CD cases, clothes, plastic models of aeroplanes and monsters, magazines, pens, hair brushes, boxes...

  “Like I say: don’t go getting any ideas about tidying up or anything. Have a seat. There’s one ... over there somewhere. Pepsi?”

  There was a leather cube that must be some kind of seat. He cleared the stack of magazines off it – a random mixture of New Scientist, Sugar, the Observer Magazine and some yellow-spined National Geographics – and sat, waiting.

  The windows looked out over the back garden to the fields. Cassie had stuck cardboard cut-outs into the corners of the windows so that they looked like gothic arches.

  “So: you going to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Did you get any more messages?”

  She shook her head.

  “It’s him, Hodeken. He took over the chatroom. Now he’s getting to us through our phones. He can’t control me, so he’s trying to get to me through you, now. There’s one thing, I suppose: this proves it’s not just in my head.”

  “What? Just because I got a text message from your number? You’re winding me up.”

  Danny took his own phone out, thumbed the controls and handed it to Cassie. “Did you send this message last night? It’s from your number.”

  She stared at it. “God, Danny. What do we do?”

  “You tell me to get out of here,” said Danny. “And we hope he leaves you alone.”

  “Or we stick to Plan A,” said Cassie, shaking her head. “You came here to ask questions, so let’s ask questions.”

  She handed him his phone, then swept some clothes off a chair so she could sit.

  She twisted in her chair so she could open up a laptop Danny hadn’t noticed among all the debris on her desk. “So what do we want to ask?”

  Danny listened to the computer’s mechanical chirruping as it dialled up an internet connection.

  “Okay,” said Cassie into the silence. “You’re not a morning person, are you, Danny? Hello? Time to wake up. Okay. Here. It’s remembered the search I did last time. Let’s go.”

  She clicked as she talked, working through a series of web pages. Danny recognised one or two of them as sites he’d found the other day.

  “So, Danny.” She turned to him, and leaned forward. “What is it that you want?”

  “You’re going to grant me a wish, are you?”

  She snorted. “In your dreams, matey. As if.”

  “What I want? I want things to settle down again. I want to get Hodeken – whatever he or it is – out of our lives. I want it to stop interfering.”

  Cassie was nodding as he spoke. “Danny, have you asked him? Have you told Hodeken this? He’s your family’s guardian spirit, after all. Maybe he’d listen to you if you find the right way to ask.”

  Danny started to protest, but stopped himself. Hodeken always knew better, there was no point reasoning with the thing. But then, “Maybe,” he told her. “I’ve argued with him, over and over in my head. But I can’t remember if I’ve actually asked him to leave us alone, just like that. I’ve told him that what he wants to do will never work, that it’s impossible – but that’s different. Maybe we just need to find the right way to persuade him to go.”

  “So we need to find out how to do that. What’s he like, this kobold? How would you describe him?”

  Danny thought. “Grotesque,” he said. “Ancient. His skin’s shrivelled and wrinkled and covered with lumps and little hairy warts. His teeth are yellow and they look like they’ve been worn down – they’re too small for the spaces in his mouth. Pale eyes, with a tiny black centre and riddled with blood vessels. He wears a lumpy felt hat, pulled down hard onto his head. He hides things, and he hums tunes – he did that in a dream I had. They’re the ones Oma sings. Old German tunes. I think he taught them to her.”

  Cassie was clicking. “Here’s some stuff I found before. The hiding and the tunes you mentioned.”

  Danny looked at the page. This was just a plain text file, no formatting. It looked like some kind of archive or transcript.

  The Hinzelmannchen or Kobold is a small goblin-like being, who can be both a great asset to his hosts and a mischievous nuisance. Give a kobold a home in your coal-cellar and he will repay you by working late into the night, finishing off chores and keeping a household in order. He is drawn to children, and will entertain them with his songs and physical humour. His favourite prank is to kick over stooping people, and

  “Hang on – I’m reading.”

  Cassie had been about to click the Back button.

  “I dreamed this,” he told her, pointing at the screen. “He pointed at something on the ground and I bent to pick it up and he pushed me over. When I got up he’d gone.”

  he can get very angry if he is not fed properly or if he is crossed. In the 17th century, kobolds were usually depicted in paintings as little daemons with a conical hat and pointed shoes. In the class of beings from folklore, they are considered to be the most dangerous and most ugly. The Hinzelmannchen is drawn to extremes of emotion and takes his duties particularly seriously (even to extremes, it must be said, in some legends).

  Danny stared at the words, and Cassie waited patiently.

  Finally, she said, “It doesn’t tell us how to get rid of him, does it? If anything, it makes it worse. It’s like, don’t cross them, or else!”

  She set the page to print, and somewhere in the room a printer started to whine.

  “Right,” said Cassie, decisively. “He wanted us to go to Spirit Talking. Are you up for that? This might be the best way to ask him to leave you in peace.”

  “I don’t know.” Before, he’d been on his own in the HoST office. Now, with Cassie, it didn’t seem quite so daunting. But what would Hodeken have in store for them there? “Okay.”

  The banner ad flashed up first of all, offering them genuine psychic readings at knockdown prices. Then the stone-effect frame and the photograph of the smiling Dr Bob welcoming them to the site.

  “Do you think they’ll be there now?” Danny asked. “Headkin or FirstLady, or whatever they call themselves this time?”

  “Who knows?” said Cassie. “You seemed to draw them in last time. Maybe they’ll show up again and you can ask them to go, if you dare.”

  The link on the home page was there, as before, asking them to pick today’s card. Danny nodded at it. “What’s all that about?”

  Absently, Cassie clicked on the link. A playing card appeared on the screen, revealing itself from the top down. The picture was upside down. It showed a jester. The caption underneath said, “0. Fool. (INVERTED)”

  “What does that mean?”

  “The unknown, I think. A wild card, like a modern joker.”

  “And what does it mean by ‘inverted’?”

  “The card’s been dealt upside down,” said Cassie. “It means ... I don’t know. Deception, hidden meanings, problems. I don’t like this. I’ve got a bad feeling about this. Let’s go back and find the chatroom.”

  She slid the pointer across to the toolbar at the top and clicked on the Back b
utton.

  Nothing happened, then the screen flickered and the same page started to load again.

  “You hit Refresh,” said Danny.

  “I didn’t. You saw me. I hit Back. Why’s it reloading? Oh my god...”

  A new card was revealing itself. The picture showed a stooped man in a dark cloak, carrying a long-bladed scythe. Underneath the image, the caption read, “XIII. Death.”

  Cassie clicked the “X” in the top right corner of the window and the web browser vanished.

  She turned.

  “Oh, Danny,” she said. “Oh ... Danny.”

  21 A telephone call and a visit

  “Call me,” Cassie urged him, as she stood at the end of her drive and watched Danny leave. “Let me know you’re okay.”

  “Sure,” he said, backing away, unsettled by her panicked reaction to the tarot cards. “I’ll be fine.”

  Heading back to the flat, Danny realised that he was feeling frustrated. He hadn’t wanted to go anywhere near that Spirit Talking website again. Not after last time and those phone messages. But today, with Cassie, it had seemed worth trying. He had psyched himself up for it, and he had been ready to go into that chatroom again and confront “Headkin”.

  Maybe he would try it on his own, later.

  As he walked, his thoughts kept returning to his grandmother. She knew more than she had told him. When he had asked her about Hodeken before she had played innocent, accused him of asking odd questions.

  But maybe if he tried again, if he told her that he knew that she and Eva and their brothers had called on Hodeken in the war, and later in East Berlin – maybe she would tell him more then.

  Maybe she would tell him what her relationship with the kobold really was. She had lived with him as a presence in her life, in some form or another, for several decades, and she had not cracked like his father had. She must have worked out how to cope. She even seemed to have adapted well to his presence.

  She hummed Hodeken’s tunes.

  And when she worked late into the night – on her own, they had always thought – just how much help did she have?