The Master

by Melanie Jackson

  Good-bye, Wren, he thought as the flames closed in on her. It may not be our children who bring down the goblins, but the goblins will someday pay. Someday, I promise.

  He suddenly remembered their last kiss—how sweet she had been and how shy, as she had looked up at him with wide golden eyes. There has been mimosa and orange blossoms in bloom then, too, and she’d worn a wreath of them in her hair.

  Qasim allowed himself a moment to savor the only happy recollection of his life, and then he slammed the door on her memory.

  He would never think of her again.

  II

  A HAUNTED MAN

  Chapter One

  December 20, 2005

  Qasim’s face twitched. It still hurt, but the surgery in New Orleans had been largely successful. There were just a few sutures in his mouth holding his skin together at the place where his tusks had been removed by a now dead oral surgeon. Contact lenses hid his eyes, though the irises were still an unpleasant shade of gray that resembled the smoke from burning tires, and he’d learned how to roll up his tongue so that it didn’t show when he spoke. Really, in spite of the pallor that belonged on someone in a crack house, and his size, he looked quite respectable; he could be any exceptionally muscular man involved in a near-fatal car crash and then stuck in a hospital for months to recover in darkness.

  Still, the Christmas crowds tended to part around him, as though these sheep somehow sensed—in spite of his brightly colored shopping bag from Cherries Galore clasped in his now five-fingered hand—that he was not truly one of them. He had actually terrified the clerk in the fruit shop into trembling speechlessness. The boy would probably have to send his uniform to the cleaners after work. It had been an accidental revelation, a moment of unusual discernment on the young man’s part and a rare moment of unguardedness on Qasim’s, when the boy had looked him in the eye and seen the true monster that dwelled behind the colored plastic lenses. It was potentially inconvenient, too, though it was good to know that he could still strike terror into the human heart without even trying. There would be a time to put such fear to use. Still, if the boy talked, he would have to be taken care of, and Qasim would rather not have the police around, fussing over a body. That would make everyone extra watchful and fearful.

  Fear . . . it had its uses, but it was overused in human civilization. Qasim had seen politicians routinely use it to turn the populace into a unified voting block guided to key choices beneficial to society—at least, beneficial to the politicians’ society.

  Advertisers used low-grade fear, too, and quite effectively. Dandruff, facial lines, body odor, bad breath, gum disease, flared or peg-leg jeans—it was universal, this insidious installation of concern about one’s health and appearance. It made the human populace so predictable and dull. Not that they needed much help.

  Qasim stood still, eavesdropping on the thoughts around him. Yes, it was here even now: mild but chronic fear and worry. It was everywhere. Just as he’d expected. And the sheep suspected nothing. They didn’t know that death walked among them; they just milled about, row upon column upon regiment—human clots of worried eyes and troubled brains, looking at watches, looking at their children, mostly looking at the other humans who stood between them and the throne where the fake Santa Claus held court. And when there was nothing else left to stare at, they gazed into the eyes of the mechanical snowmen shoveling fake snow at the outskirts of this fake North Pole, and they grazed on pretzels and popcorn. The snowmen ignored them, as machines almost always did, but that didn’t stop the humans from staring.

  Qasim didn’t understand the human fascination with machines—except for guns, which were useful and had no brains of their own. He didn’t like complex electronic devices. From cars to computers to compact-disc players, machines had to be constantly coddled because they were only semi-predictable in their behavior. And you couldn’t terrorize or cajole them into cooperation. Curse and threaten as he would, cars stalled for no reason when Qasim was in them. Computers decided that routine functions were suddenly “illegal operations” and would shut down. And CD players invariably skipped his favorite tracks, even when he programmed them carefully. Hitting the machines didn’t help, either—especially not computers. Those semi-thinking apparatuses enraged him most of all because, though they claimed to give him what he asked for, he very rarely got what he wanted. Even the porn that computers supplied was substandard. He was sure the machines were laughing at him.

  He knew computers did this to humans, too, but people kept right on confiding in them, trusting them with all their secrets—even their taxes, where they told the biggest lies of all. This blind trust baffled him. Humans: they made no sense.

  Qasim sighed. His mood was odd: He was half-gleeful and half-sad. He looked at the people near him in aggravation. Humans: what a pitiful army they would make. They had so many self-imposed limits. Listening to those around him, he had the sense that this entire nation was suffering from ennui brought on by nervous exhaustion. These people couldn’t seem to get beyond the perceived limits of their lives—their personal appearance and finances, their mental and physical flabbiness, the limits on their credit cards. It was as if their imaginations— even their souls—were limited by worries about money and about how fat they were. And in debt monetarily and feeling starved—and yet getting fatter every day, especially when they compared themselves to the anorexic heroin addicts advertisers insisted were the pinnacle of human beauty—they had run up a creative and spiritual imbalance as well.

  Disgusted, Qasim stopped listening to their thoughts. Their small-mindedness was contagious. And that was a hazard when you had a really long life and were alone. You had to keep busy, needed passions and grand thoughts to keep the boredom at bay. Revenge was a good goal. It kept the blood hot and the mind focused. That was important. Qasim knew his failings, that at times his mind was voracious. If it didn’t find occupation, it would begin to consume itself.

  He turned slowly, his body and not just his head. He was still learning to move like a human, slower and with only a few joints per limb. Wrist, elbow, shoulder—it was so limiting.

  Completing a half-circle, he stopped and sighed again. What a sad sight, a crime. Though other stores were filled beyond fire safety regulations, the book store was almost empty. Books were one of the few human inventions he liked. But he knew from their stray thoughts that most of these mall-goers didn’t read—nothing except diet books and stupid texts promising to reveal the secrets of finding true love. They said to themselves that books were too expensive. He snorted. Too expensive? What of libraries? He personally adored the H.U.G. library. Actually, he loved the old building that housed it. There were so many psychic traps, it practically glowed for magical beings like Las Vegas at night. If he could, he would have sex with that building; he was sure they would both enjoy it. And it housed such precious printed material! But did humans ever see things this way? No. Instead of reading, they sat passively and let their big-screen TVs fill their empty heads with concerns about future impotence, how to achieve spring-fresh laundry and whether they were wearing the right brand of khakis.

  Bah! They were stupid and cowardly—and, worse, useless. They didn’t see they could change the world. In this, they were almost as bad as the goblins.

  Well, most of them were. There were exceptions. . . .

  Feeling the sparkling concentration of power that had called him in the first place, Qasim finally turned toward the electric wonderland that was the heart of the shopping mall. Children’s thoughts were always the purest, the best source of energy, and so easy to sip from. He’d always loved the young. And everyone had heard the saying, You are what you eat. While Qasim couldn’t play mind games with those of the fey, who would make the best meal, human children were easy and available.

  O come all ye faithful, he thought, watching the throngs deepen before the throne of the surrogate saint in the red suit. Santa Claus, Saint Nicholas, Kris Kringle—this was America’s only patr
on saint, not recognized by any church but acclaimed and worshipped by these empty mall people. He wondered how Kris would feel about that. Kris would probably hate the way commercial interests had hijacked the holiday. Not that the elf had anything to say about it now; he had been missing and presumed dead for more than a century. As it happened to a lot of the goblins’ enemies.

  Qasim pushed the thought of Kris Kringle aside, opened up his mind just a little and began drinking in the children’s tiny dreams, nibbling away at their innocent souls. He filtered out the adults, concentrating on the youthful excitement welling up in the children’s small brains. He’d get to the adults soon enough. Maybe he’d start with that neurotically feminine creature dressed up like a parody of a sex goddess from the twenties. He could tell that she was terrified of aging. Such terror was bitter and filling. Or maybe he’d try the man beside her, who had lifted weights until his bulky shoulders impeded the movement of his head. Men usually distorted themselves that way because secretly they were frightened of being weak. That was good. Qasim would gorge on these hidden fears shortly—the kids were just an appetizer.

  Qasim quickly grew light-headed, his thoughts slightly less coherent, but his hatred and disgust failed to abate. Let the human politicians have their petty triumphs of minor fears, he thought, those chronic aggravations of the masses that were like an attack of dry scalp: annoying but not deadly. Qasim didn’t plan anything so mundane. He was going to horrify them. The masses would know soul-shattering fear. For it was time for these treacherous lutins to pay for everything they had done to him— to all his people—and humankind was the tool he had chosen.

  He had thought once to use his daughter Nyssa for revenge, to guide her and her fey friends into an attack on the lutin empire, but he had another plan now. A better one. He could have arranged for a slow campaign of tiny terrorisms to bring certain humans around to doing his will. But they reacted so much more predictably and cohesively—not to mention swiftly—when they were simultaneously horrified and enraged. Fifty or a hundred years ago he would have arranged for the rape of some respected woman—or women—by a hapless goblin to get humankind up in arms. These days, no one would care. Not enough. But even mall people still reacted satisfactorily when their children were in jeopardy.

  Once the humans discovered the horrifying evidence of the massive lutin child-stealing ring that he would plant, most would react swiftly and terribly against the hives. There would be much official outcry and protests from the pacifists, and there would be other exceptions, of course; there were always aberrant humans who enjoyed an auto-da-fé, or a good public hanging. But most humans would move heaven and earth and goblin hives alike to save—or in this case, to avenge—those stolen children.

  Qasim felt a moment of odd emotion. Sorrow? No. Even if he’d been capable of such, it wasn’t murder he planned; it was sacrifice. He wasn’t killing for fun—it was death with a holy purpose. This was about power. These children would die to start a holy war—one long overdue—that would cleanse the United States of goblins. In the aftermath, his hobgoblins would rise. They would feed off the energy of the children’s great sacrifice. And finally—finally—they would be free.

  It would be wonderful, the brave new world he had always dreamed of. And to think that he owed his plan to his half-human daughter, Nyssa, and her husband, Abrial. In an effort to escape a goblin-laid trap, she and Abrial had enlisted the aid of Abrial’s dead uncle, the Pied Piper of Hamelin. And Farrar and his magic pipes had planted the seeds in Qasim’s mind that had germinated into this splendid idea.

  “So Merry Christmas to you all,” Qasim whispered to the mall people in his thick voice. “I’m afraid it will be your last.”

  A new ripple of energy passed through the crowd. Santa was getting up from his throne, and a choir surely composed of hard-of-hearing spastics had closed in and begun caroling, competing obnoxiously with the mall’s piped-in music. Cacophonous, off-key and off-beat—Qasim loved the din. Still, it was time to go. He had people to kill, wars to plan and Santa suits to steal.

  He turned toward the exit the red-suited human imposter had used. It led to the employees’ breakroom; Qasim had checked that already as he paced the mall. He knew where the man’s locker was and that he had arrived on a bus. Like the fake Santa, Qasim had also come on public transit; the traffic around this House of Mammon on the last weekend before Christmas was tire-to-tire and all but unmoving, in spite of the constant use of horns.

  Near the door to the breakroom he felt it again— that slight psychic tingle, that mere hint of exotic sweetness on his tongue, which interrupted his almost ceaseless mental tirade. Qasim paused, his hand on the latch, rolling his tongue around his lips and then touching it against the twin pits in the roof of his mouth that drew scent from the air. Yes, it was the same girl. He had been watching her earlier as she guided two children to the imposter. And she had passed this way only a few minutes earlier. Perhaps he could still find her. The young woman standing in line at the pet shop—half-goblin and part human-fey—had come as a complete surprise, both because goblins did not usually venture out in the day and also because she looked and felt a great deal like his Wren. Had he not been so distracted by her unexpected appearance, he would not have lost track of the two half-goblin children with her. Unfortunately, she had sensed his scrutiny immediately and been frightened of him—had, in fact, seemed to know what he was, though that wasn’t likely; his kind had been forgotten even by most lutins.

  A pity, that there had been no time to explain to her that he hadn’t wanted her children in order to hurt them. Not at that moment. Far from it. He had just wanted to see them up close, to taste their strange but fair skin, to peer into their minds for a while and know what they were and how they thought.

  And the girl herself? Well, he wasn’t sure what he might have done with her if there had been opportunity. Probably something distressing and stupid. She really did feel like a reincarnation of Wren. His lost lover had been much on his mind of late—too much on it, in fact. He didn’t like the memories that were both bitter and sweet.

  Qasim pushed his softer thoughts and speculations away. This was no time for female distractions— not of any species. The large fake Santa he had been stalking was slipping out a side exit, looking for a place to enjoy a cigarette away from the children Qasim knew he despised. Large as the man was, the costume would be a tight fit. But Qasim didn’t have much choice; he would squeeze into it somehow. He was a hobgoblin on a mission, and today was the day.

  And unlike the bored Santa, he would enjoy what came next. He would sit on the plastic throne and accept the mall people’s worship as they gave their children to him, because it added to his power. He would sit like a lazy spider in a web, the little kiddies would come and nestle in his lap and he’d eat up all their happy little thoughts. Then he’d give them some thoughts—thoughts about how they would all be leaving home on Christmas and coming away with Santa Claus to live at the North Pole.

  Qasim laughed silently. Sometimes he really loved his work.

  He slipped out through the metal door and crept up quietly behind the man in the red suit. The odor-trail made him frown. This creature had the smell of someone who combined many vices—in this case nicotine and alcohol, favorite choices of weaker humans. But Qasim could also see that this man had a sicker aura, and Qasim was willing to bet that if he bothered to search the inside of this creature’s elbows, he would find scars of darker, less healthy addictions.

  Tsk, tsk! The people the mall would entrust with their customers’ children! There should be a law . . . Qasim chuckled again, still feeling a bit high after drinking in all the youthful excitement. First a little innocent sweetness, now he’d imbibe of a little experienced bitterness. Variety was the spice of his life.

  Qasim silently passed a bank of lockers and saw movement inside one. He looked carefully as he ghosted by, though he was certain he knew who hid there; the mall employees kept a pet cat that had often w
atched him as he explored the abandoned tunnels roping the mall’s metal guts.

  But that wasn’t who was observing him today. That cat was off hunting somewhere, having left behind a small nest of tiny vigilants. Qasim eyed the three furry bundles indulgently. He felt their scrutiny and their tiny feline questions as they memorized his smell and walk and face. As a rule, he left none alive who could describe him, but though these were witnesses to his passing, he made no move toward them; his secret was safe with these creatures of large eyes and appetites, soft purrs and brown fur, because cats knew how to keep secrets from goblins and humans alike. He had learned that long ago. They were the only creatures he trusted.

  Qasim lengthened his stride and allowed his steps to become audible. Belatedly sensing danger, the fake Kris Kringle swung around. But he was too late. The hand of Fate had long, strong fingers topped with unbreakable talons, and it was buried in Santa’s throat and pinching off the blood supply to the brain, and it wouldn’t let go until the deed was done.

  Qasim didn’t finish off the man immediately, though. He waited until he had pulled the red velvet trousers away from the thrashing legs and then torn off the coat. He didn’t want either getting messed up with bodily fluids if this creature died untidily. Even the excited children might notice that.

  Soon Santa was completely unconscious, and the man’s trachea crushed easily in Qasim’s fist, making a sound a bit like someone eating potato chips with his mouth open. His head flopped to the side, his neck like a broken stalk of corn, when Qasim dropped him on the ground. The thud of his head hitting the cement floor sounded like a cantaloupe breaking.

  Which reminded Qasim, he hadn’t had any lunch. Maybe he’d stop by the pizza place and have a quick snack before he went back to work.

  Or . . .

  Qasim looked down at his victim, his eyes narrowing.