The Time Master

by Dmitry Bilik

  “Are you OK?” a high-pitched voice asked me.

  “I’ve been better,” I admitted.

  “Can I help you get to the bus stop? There’s a bench there.”

  “Please don’t. Freezing solid on the snowy sidewalk is my demise of choice.”

  I lifted my head and looked at my good Samaritan. I saw a simple Russian face: a bit wide, amiable, but at the same time attractive. A snub nose, enormous eyes, and flushed cheeks.

  Faces like this are rare in the large cities where the fashion requires yellow-tinted complexion and dark circles under the eyes. The cheap Chinese down jacket, plain clothing... and on top of that, she was hardly wearing any makeup. Where had this oddity come from? The nuttiest thing of all was that the word “Altruistic” was floating above her head among all the question marks.

  “You do realize that approaching strange men at night isn’t safe, don’t you?”

  “But aren’t you in a bad way?”

  “Maybe I just randomly lure altruists like you, and then do vile, nefarious things to them?”

  The unwitting Samaritan’s cheeks grew even redder. No, I definitely liked her.

  “But today I’ll make an exception and save you instead,” I said. “From myself. On one condition.”

  She frowned. This false anger of hers didn’t suit her at all. “What’s that?”

  “We’ll meet again at a more appropriate time of day and in a more appropriate place.”

  “In your dreams!”

  “OK, then, let’s make it so you know I play fair,” I said. “If I guess your name, you go out with me. If I don’t, you won’t. I have a one in a thousand chance.”

  She wavered for a few seconds. But then some mischievous, reckless impulse seemed to stir in her. “You’re on!”

  “No cheating. If I don’t guess, you tell me your real name.”

  “And I won’t go out with you.”

  “Fair enough,” I paused theatrically and massaged my temples, as though activating my special powers. “Lena.”

  “Ha,” she said triumphantly. “You’re wrong. It’s Julia! So...”

  I didn’t listen to her finish.

  [ ∞ ]

  Once again, I tried to look pensive and pretended to search deep within me. “Julia,” I said tragically.

  To say that she was surprised would be an understatement.

  “Please don’t say that your name isn’t Julia. The astral ghost can’t cheat.”

  “Are you really — what is it you call these people — a psychic?”

  “Yes, in the fifth generation. No, scrap that. It’s just that I have a talent for guessing people’s names by looking at their faces.”

  Funny how I’d recently started to lie much more than before.

  “So, did I win?”

  “You did,” Julia took out a cheap Chinese phone. “What’s your number?”

  I gave her my number, waited for my cell to ring, then added her to my contacts.

  “Just one date,” she said. “That’s it.”

  “Am I really asking for more?”

  “Well, then, see you.”

  That sure lifted my mood. Incidentally, while we were chatting, my Vigor had restored to its usual reading. I wasn’t even upset about the charge points I’d wasted on rewinding time, even though they sure could help me in my upcoming confrontation with the house goblin.

  I happily trotted the rest of the way to the Grand Grocery Market and stopped in front of it.

  It was an old-fashioned self-service grocery store, a mothballed relic of the Soviet era complete with the crumbling refrigerator cases, sales clerks in light-blue aprons and aisle after aisle of half-empty shelves which had witnessed the collapse of the Soviet superpower. And here I thought those monsters had all died off, like the dinosaurs.

  I activated the mission. When the paper materialized in my hand, I took out my little mirror and held it over the sheet. Heh! To an untrained eye, this indeed looked like an exterminator’s license. Of course, the arrival of a rat killer at 7 p.m. could raise a few eyebrows — but then again, did my reluctant clients even know how these things were supposed to unfold? If the Game had given me a go-ahead, it probably knew better.

  There was another odd thing. As I examined the paper in the mirror, I happened to catch a glimpse of the clothing I’d bought earlier. Instead of the stylish sweater, I was now wearing a bona fide brown and green uniform complete with a graphic of a rat inside a circle with a line drawn through it. Did that mean that our in-game clothing appeared different to commoners depending on the situation? Interesting.

  I went inside and headed toward the most garishly made-up sales clerk, a woman with purple hair. She was surely at the top of the food chain in the hierarchy of these post-menopausal ladies. A bit like the shaman in a tribe of cannibals who always wears the shiniest beads.

  “Good evening. I’m looking for your supervisor or manager.”

  “What do you want with her?”

  I was right. As I’d guessed, this was the Cerberus guarding the passage. Now it was crucial that I play my role correctly. I couldn’t mumble or overexplain because these alpha ladies always sensed one’s weakness.

  “I just need to see them. Otherwise, you can deal with the problem yourself. I have two other calls to make.”

  “Rose!” she shouted into the depths of the store. “Go get the manager!”

  The manager turned out to be a heavyset woman of about forty. She appeared from near the storeroom, menacingly waggled her badly plucked eyebrows, and made her way toward me. Her entire bearing made it clear that I’d torn her away from something important. I needed to call on my talents and get ahead of her.

  I pulled out the paper with the mission and was pleased to see the manager’s expression change as she read it.

  “Oh, we’d already lost all hope. Let’s go.”

  “Why didn’t you close the store when you discovered you had rats?” I thundered, starting to warm up to the role.

  “Please don’t shout like that,” the manager whispered. “We haven’t seen any rats. We only suspect that we have them.”

  “How can that be?”

  “We have an old storeroom. Well, it’s like a storeroom. It’s just a room. We dump all the junk in it. Recently the workers have started hearing noises coming from inside it. It’s a scratching sound. We went in and looked, but there was nothing there. So we decided it must be a rat.”

  I nodded. “We’ll take care of it.”

  “How come you don’t have a bag? How do you collect what you catch?”

  “Let me take a look around first. Then if I find something I’ll go out to my car.”

  We passed through a long, narrow corridor, descended to the basement and went toward the farthest door. It was encased in iron and snugly fitted to the jamb. There was no way you could hear a sound behind something like that. How loud must this creature have been scratching?

  The manager pulled out a bunch of keys and fiddled with them until she found the right one. Two turns of key later, we found ourselves in an impromptu storeroom, piled up with old cold-storage boxes and rotting wooden crates. A heap of filthy price tag holders was rotting in the corner. The place was quite big, around 20 square yards if not more.

  “Let me take a look around,” I said. “Shut the door. Whatever happens, we can’t let it get out.”

  The absurd warning worked like a charm. The manager squealed. With an agility I didn’t expect from her, she slammed the heavy door from the outside. That’s what fear of God does to people.

  I took out my phone, turned on the flashlight, and advanced slowly. I didn’t touch my knife. The sentence said “catch,” which meant this was an intelligent creature. So I’d need to come to an agreement with it.

  “House goblin! House goblin! Come out now wherever you are, near or far.”

  I felt ridiculous. Here I was, a full-grown man walking around a basement trying to lure a house goblin out with a nursery rhyme. I gue
ss I hadn’t yet lost all my commoner reflexes. Even though I was now a Player, my psychological transformation was far from complete.

  “House goblin...”

  “Is that really how you summon a house goblin, blockhead?” a raspy voice asked. “You could at least put out a bowl of milk and be polite.”

  “Most honorable house goblin, please accept my apologies for not having studied your culinary tastes. Please excuse me. Try to understand and put yourself in my shoes. Please show yourself so that I don’t have to keep talking to the air.”

  Your Persuasion skill has increased to level 1.

  The house goblin appeared on top of one of the cooling systems that was lying on its side. He was no more than two feet tall, hairy, his eyes blazing with a yellow flame. If it weren’t for the arms and legs, I would have mistaken him for a furry bun.

  But the text box above his head didn’t lie: House Goblin and Unlucky Bastard.

  “Good evening. My name is Sergei. What’s yours?”

  “I don’t have a name. House goblins have names, but I’m on my own now.”

  “I thought it was impossible?”

  “Anything is possible. Pigs can get wings, if you know what I mean.”

  “The thing is, the Order of Guards has explicitly requested that I find you.”

  I can’t pinpoint the moment when something shifted. There was a flash in front of my eyes, then I was flung at the wall. Holy shit!

  [ ∞ ]

  “The thing is, the residents and salespeople are complaining about the noise.”

  “What am I supposed to do if I feel like crying? I was banished from my home and I had nowhere to go, so I holed up in here. I sit down and sometimes I howl or start to scratch.”

  “So why don’t you find a new home?”

  “As if a new home were mine for the asking, sir! D’you think you could invite me into your own house?”

  I was about to refuse emphatically when a new mission message lit up to my right:

  Feral House Goblin

  Mission type: Variable

  Option I:

  Sentence: Capture and take to the branch office of the Order of Guards within 24 hours

  Reward: 25 grams

  Option II:

  Sentence: Relieve the local inhabitants of the house goblin within 24 hours

  Reward: 15 grams

  Aha. So I wasn’t obliged to turn him over to the Guards, after all?

  Still, I had to get him out of here somehow. Brute force wasn’t an option: this little guy wasn’t just any dumb goblin. He seemed to be quite vulnerable. That meant I’d need to coax him out.

  “And if I invite you, what will I get out of it?”

  “A house without a house goblin is like a dinner table without a loaf of bread,” the creature said, brightening up. I even had the impression that his voice was no longer as grating. “I can lend a hand with anything you need. I can cook and tidy up. And no burglars will ever darken your door while I’m in the house.”

  “Let’s suppose I don’t have a house. I live in an apartment block.”

  “Old build, new? Which period?”

  “1970s, I think. Why?”

  The house goblin sighed. “It’ll have to do, I suppose. Now it’s up to you.”

  I started to think. The many superstitions about these creatures couldn’t have been all wrong. In the past, people thought that it was bad luck for a household not to have a house goblin. People would even poach them from their neighbors’, then invite them along whenever they moved.

  Naturally, until this point, I thought this was all legend. Now I could see that there was a lot of truth in old wives’ tales.

  “OK, you can come live with me. What’s your name?”

  +25 karma points.

  Current level: -65.

  You gravitate to the Dark Side.

  The furry creature jumped off the cooling unit, came over to me, and held out a tiny hand. “I do have a name, but it’s for my inner circle. My owners called me Bumpkin for the last few centuries.”

  “Nice to meet you, Bumpkin. I’m Sergei. Let’s go. I’ll carry you out so no one asks any questions.”

  I folded back the flap of my jacket, expecting objections, but the goblin sprang into my arms. I closed my jacket and started toward the door.

  “Excuse me?” I called out to the manager.

  “Yes! Already done? What did you find?”

  “Just a mole who somehow got in. No idea how that happened. It got stuck in here, so it was wailing and scratching.”

  “Moles make noise?”

  “It was in a tight spot, so it probably felt like crying,” I repeated the goblin’s earlier words.

  “Is it... in there?” she pointed a chubby, sloppily polished fingernail at my bulging jacket.

  “Yes.”

  “Did you...”

  “No, it just died on its own. It crawled into the corner where it probably died from dehydration. It’s strange that none of your people saw it. I’ll just take it out now and no one will ever notice.”

  “Yes, yes please, thank you very much. You have no idea how much you’ve helped us.”

  She held out a bank note that she’d clearly gotten ready in advance. Had I had the cheek, I could have haggled a little. Just to level up the Bargaining skill, you know. Except that I’d done a pretty good job of raking in the rewards: I’d raised my karma, completed the mission and got myself a house goblin.

  Speaking of which, he was beginning to stir unhappily. I grabbed the bill from the manager and rushed outside.

  “Sit still, Bumpkin,” I said into my jacket.

  Since the shop manager was sponsoring my trip home, I caught a gypsy cab. I even managed to talk the price down to a quarter of what I’d just earned.

  “What do you have there?” the driver asked.

  “A puppy.”

  “Oh, I love dogs. I have two Dachshunds and a German Shepherd at home. Can I see him?”

  There was such a menacing growl that the driver and I simultaneously stopped talking.

  “He’s nervous. He’s not used to traveling.”

  “He’d better not soil my seats,” the driver snarled.

  We spent the rest of the trip in grievous silence. Only Bumpkin whined from time to time, apparently enjoying his role.

  We made it home without any mishap. As I reached the entrance, I lifted my head and looked at Uncle Nick’s windows. They were dark. I just hoped he was all right.

  “D’you want us to freeze our asses here for much longer? House goblins don’t like the cold,” a voice came from under my jacket.

  “It’s all right. Keep your hair on.”

  I walked upstairs, unlocked the door and turned on the light, then reached under my jacket, helping him out. “This is where we live.”

  “We’ll see,” he said curtly and disappeared with a light clap.

  I heard rustling under the bathtub, followed by knocking sounds coming from the balcony and bottles jangling in the refrigerator. Oh, right, I still had some beer left. I flung off my jacket, kicked off my boots, and went into the kitchen.

  I opened a bottle while listening to the uneasy, almost ringing silence. What if I’d jumped the gun with this house goblin?

  Chapter 8

  MY MOM USED TO have a whole bookshelf of those esoteric books about “magick” and stuff. One of them claimed that while a person is sleeping, their spirit travels between worlds. And apparently if you’re not careful when you wake them up, their spirit may not return in time.

  You can laugh all you want, but had this been true, I’d have had major problems. Because my morning started with the crash of a frying pan falling to the floor.

  Sitting bolt upright in my bed, I caught a whiff of an unusual smell. It was like singed hair mixed with something pleasant. I tugged on my trousers and headed toward the source of the noise.

  I wish I were an artist, because the scene was a real beauty.

  Tiny Bumpkin was stand
ing on a stool by the stove, holding the frying pan in one hand and a piece of burned dough with trash from the floor stuck on it in the other. The table held a plate piled high with perfectly shaped pancakes, rosy and dripping with butter. All around this island of deliciousness, it looked as if Attila’s entire army had just strolled through.