The Goblins of Bellwater

by Molly Ringle

  “How’s she coming along?” Livy asked, running her hand along the rust-speckled green hood of the 1967 Barracuda he was restoring.

  “Slow, but I’m loving every minute. I finally found the tires I wanted, and ordered them. I’ll show you the picture over dinner.”

  “Sweet. I’ve got travel ideas to show you.”

  After he had anonymously returned as many of the gold pieces to their proper owners as possible, the value of the remaining gold, cashed in, had still come to almost half a million dollars. Livy had insisted he set aside enough to fund his house, shop, and vacation dreams, then helped him choose environmental charities for the rest. One of his dreams had been to buy this battered muscle car and restore it to prime condition. A car of that vintage, she noted dubiously, did not possess an environmentally friendly engine, but he promised with a grin that it wasn’t really for driving around much anyway. It was all about the joy of making it look pretty and run smooth.

  As for vacation dreams, they were planning to go to Hawaii together in the fall. And from there, on to Japan perhaps, or New Zealand, or elsewhere in the South Pacific—Livy had bookmarked several options to discuss with him tonight.

  “Oh, and check this out,” he said as he locked the garage office. He fished out his phone and swiped to his texts, and handed it to her. “Grady’s latest creations.”

  Livy stepped into the shade of Carol’s Diner to view the screen, and examined the three photos Grady had sent: clams arranged on greens with some sort of lovely red garnish, a delicate dish of ravioli, and a pork slider with an artful zigzag splash of sauce around it on the plate. “Oh my God, can’t he just FedEx us the food instead of torturing us with pictures?” she said.

  “I know, right? We’ve got to learn to cook. Meanwhile—shall we?” He tilted his head toward Carol’s.

  She handed him back his phone. “Yeah. I’m starving.”

  They’d been fulfilling their promise to get together often with Grady and Skye. The four of them met for dinner each month. On the evening of every full moon, Kit and Livy drove to Olympia to see them, so they could celebrate Kit not having any goblin obligations that night. Grady cooked for them, and Livy always got to choose the menu. It made her self-conscious, but the other three insisted, and she’d come to enjoy browsing ambitious recipes and emailing them to Grady. So far he was never daunted and turned out all the dishes fabulously.

  She tried not to choose recipes involving sweetened fruit, though. Neither Grady nor Skye wanted to eat them, even though Grady had the skill and willingness to make them. “But we’ve worked our way back up to eating fresh fruit,” Skye told her brightly, “so that’s something.”

  Livy didn’t blame them. She still had the occasional nightmare about cave trolls and centipedes, kelp tangling her legs underwater, a forest fire trapping someone she loved, or a fall from a stratosphere-high tree branch. At least when she did have those dreams, she now usually woke up next to Kit, and snuggled into his warmth and remembered she had been sufficiently brave after all.

  Carol brought Kit and Livy their menus. “Dang, Sylvain,” she boomed, “good to see you sticking with the same woman for so long, though I’m hearing lots of weeping and wailing from all the others who had their eye on you.”

  “Stop.” Kit smirked, scanning the menu.

  “I’ve had death threats,” Livy confided to Carol.

  Carol laughed. “Bet you have. It is cute how your hands match up. Shows you’re meant for each other. Even though you and Skye were born that way, and he lost his finger being careless with a chainsaw.”

  Kit scowled. “It’s just insulting how you all believe that.”

  “Like we don’t remember it, Sylvain? Nice try.” Carol winked at Livy. “What’d you do to get him to settle down, anyhow? Put a spell on him?”

  Livy and Kit’s gazes met, and they smiled.

  “Actually,” she said, “I took a spell off him.”

  AFTERWORD

  “Nature is awesome, but be careful, that shit’ll kill you.” So said cartoonist (and my friend from high school) Astrid Lydia Johannsen to me a few years ago via Twitter. Her sentiment is the basic philosophy I worked under for this story. Like Livy, I love the natural world and want to preserve and help it, but like most pampered city dwellers, I’m also kind of scared of the gazillion ways nature can kill us. Humankind has always felt that way in general, I suppose, thus all the legends, faery tales, and myths involving gorgeous yet dangerous forces of nature. These forces became the stars of our longest-lasting stories, personified as gods and faeries and goblins and other beings, dressed up by human imagination (i.e., the wilderness inside our heads rather than outside).

  In writing this, I also operated under the notion that even in our urban society, fae and spirits could be hiding in the scraps of the natural world that do remain, and we wouldn’t know, because we rarely even notice the natural world. How often do we really look at the tops of trees? Or ponder the bottoms of rivers and lakes and oceans? Or notice whether exotic invasive plants are growing in our own gardens?

  My original inspiration for this story was, of course, the poem “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, published in 1862. I became aware of it in 2011 when a longtime online friend of mine named Aaron brought it up in a blog comment, in which he related a story from his high school years. In his words:

  …an English Lit teacher (let’s call her Judith) announced to her room full of sixteen-year-old charges, including me, that each of us would have to memorize and recite a poem to the class; she suggested “anything from the Oxford Book of English Verse.” Some of my classmates raced to find the shortest and easiest to memorize. (Should you ever need to do this, it’s “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”) Meanwhile I took a moment to make sure I was awake and had really been handed such a blank check, then sat down to memorize “Goblin Market.” I was looking forward to my classmates’ reactions to:

  She cried ‘Laura,’ up the garden,

  ‘Did you miss me?

  Come and kiss me.

  Never mind my bruises,

  Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

  Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,

  Goblin pulp and goblin dew.

  Eat me, drink me, love me…’

  Came the day, and alas I had got no farther than “Clearer than water flowed that juice/She never tasted such before” when Judith woke up, realized what was coming next, and stopped me in my tracks with a frosty “Thank you, that *WILL* be all.”

  Much amused by this story, I Googled the poem, read it, and commented back to Aaron:

  Ooooh la la! This poem is gold to the paranormal romance writer! And um, yeah, surely even the Victorians noticed the overt biting and sucking going on. Still, I may actually have to stick this in my “story idea file” and use it sometime. For a modern paranormal romance, however, I’d need more nuance than “maiden good, goblin evil.” This day and age, after all, it’s “maiden conflicted, goblin sparkly and heartthrobby.”

  As it turned out, of course, I did more or less go with “maiden good, goblin evil.” By the time I got around to writing this novel, I had just come off a long, epic trilogy about Greek gods (Persephone’s Orchard and its sequels), and was tiring of immortality and special powers being the goal. Ordinary human life appealed to me this time around.

  But I also didn’t want the fae to be only troublesome; that would imply forces of nature were inherently sinister, which isn’t my opinion at all. For that matter, it would be unfair to the larger body of faery lore, in which the fae are all kinds of things, ranging from benevolent to lethal. So I invented some local fae, the native species, to balance out those invasive species, the goblins. All of them, in keeping with ancient faery tales, live by very different rules and morals than we humans, so their behavior is never going to make perfect sense to us. Glimpsing them and their ways would be fascinating, but all things considered, most of us (as Livy, Skye, Kit, and Grady would agree) would prefer to live in the
human world.

  Bellwater and Crabapple Island are fictional locales, but lots of small towns and islands in the Puget Sound area could stand in for them, including some I’ve vacationed at my whole life. My grandparents bought property in Mason County that my family still visits, and everyone who goes there sees the alluring mystique of the area—the tall evergreens, the calm water slipping in and out with the tides, the little islands, the modest marinas and one-lane bridges, the smell of forests and saltwater. My sisters and I loved our visits there (and still do), wading in the cold shallows, rowing boats around, eating huckleberries in the woods, building bonfires on the beach, and examining the mossy stumps with their fantastical shapes. My grandmother told us those were the houses of Teenyweenies, which became the inspiration for Livy and Skye’s Teeny-tinies.

  I decided Bellwater stood on the shore of Hood Canal—which despite its name isn’t a human-dug canal at all, but merely one of the many long segments of the Sound. That way their backs could be right up against Olympic National Forest, in which, of course, “Here be goblins!,” as I wrote on my homemade badly-drawn map of the area.

  To find out the depth of Hood Canal—something Livy has to experience firsthand—I talked to my husband Steve, who’s an environmental scientist. He gamely consulted official maps to find out some numbers for me. I was guessing the Canal would be maybe twenty or even fifty feet deep, but apparently most of it, in spite of its narrowness, is more like four hundred to five hundred feet deep. Yikes! Daunting indeed. However, if there was an island right offshore, as is the case for my imaginary Crabapple Island just across from Bellwater, then probably the water in between would be somewhat shallower than all that. So I settled for “around a hundred feet,” which is still plenty daunting enough, thank you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In the writing of this novel, I must thank:

  My husband, Steve, for fun geography tasks, for answering “what would this character drive” queries because I know nothing about cars, and for generally tolerating my “creative temperament” moodiness.

  My kids for tolerating same, and for making me laugh, and for having fabulous imaginations that make this story look tame.

  My editor, Michelle Halket, for handling this book and many others of mine with complete professional care, and for supporting me and cheering me on with each new story. She’s created a group of true friends out of her stable of authors, and I’m proud to be part of it.

  My beta readers! Dean Mayes and Abbie Williams provided expert back-and-forth email discussions about all kinds of plot points, and didn’t bat an eyelash when I was all, “Here’s a longer sex scene I wrote; what do you think of it?” Fellow writers are tolerant that way. Tracey Batt wrote me up a superb and pro-level outline of detail issues she caught and questions for me to consider, and even treated me to tea in person under the Space Needle—a great day! Melanie Carey brought her own vivid imagination and keen eye to the draft, and made me see aspects of it in a whole new light; and of course shared lots of in-person tea with me as well—conversations which will always be cherished. Ray Warner and Beth Willis lent their delightful enthusiasm to this story, as they have for many others of mine, and I always treasure their feedback.

  And of course my parents and grandparents for securing and taking care of that odd little cabin on the beautiful Puget Sound, which has been our family’s favorite spot for decades now. May its magic never fade.

  The Chrysomelia Stories

  The Greek gods never actually existed. Did they? Sophie Darrow finds she was wrong about that assumption when she’s pulled into the spirit realm, complete with an Underworld, on her first day at college. Adrian, the mysterious young man who brought her there, simply wants her to taste a pomegranate.

  Soon, though she returns to her regular life, her mind begins exploding with dreams and memories of ancient times; of a love between two Greeks named Persephone and Hades. But lethal danger has always surrounded the immortals, and now that she’s tainted with the Underworld’s magic, that danger is drawing closer to Sophie.

  New immortals are being created for the first time in thousands of years thanks to Persephone’s tree of immortality. But Sophie Darrow is not one of them. Nikolaos, the trickster, gave the last ripe immortality fruit to the reincarnations of Dionysos and Hekate: currently Sophie’s and Adrian’s best friends.

  Disappointed, Sophie struggles to remember Hekate and Dionysos from ancient Greece, and she must still face her life as a mortal university freshman. Tabitha and Zoe struggle with their own haunting dreams of past lives and loves. The evil committed by Thanatos invades all of them in heartbreaking memories, and worse still, Sophie and her friends know their enemies are determined to kill again. And even the gods can’t save everyone.

  Sophie Darrow said yes once to a young man offering a realm of Greek gods and immortality. Now her home has been shattered, and her friends and family pulled along with her as they run from an evil cult and take shelter in the gloomy Underworld. To love, trust, and smile again seems almost out of Sophie’s reach. But remembering the life of the original Persephone may prove the best therapy, as well as their key to victory.

  In ancient times too, the murderous cult Thanatos attacked and eventually wiped out the Greek immortals who sought to bring good to humankind. But those immortals planted seeds in both their realm and ours to ensure that their season would bloom again someday. And spring is finally coming.