“Me t-t-too,” Luke said.
I said, “What do you mean?”
“It was too damned easy,” Jelly said. “Ain’t never been a time since I knew him that Kelsko was that cooperative. Something’s wrong.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“I wish I knew,” Jelly said.
“S-s-something’s up.”
“Something,” Jelly agreed.
The mayor’s office was not as plain as that of the chief of police. The elegant desk was mahogany, and the other pieces of tasteful and expensive furniture—in the English style of a first-rate men’s club, upholstered in hunter’s-green leather—stood on plush gold carpeting. The walls were festooned with civic awards and photographs of His Honor involved in all manner of charitable activities.
Albert Spectorsky, elected occupant of the office, was a tall, florid man, conservatively dressed in a blue suit and white shirt and blue tie, with features formed by indulgence. A fondness for rich food was visible in the moon-round shape of his face and in the plentitude of chins below his ripe mouth. A taste for fine whiskey was evident in the broken blood vessels that gave his cheeks and bulbous nose a ruddy glow. And there was, in everything about him, an undefinable but unmistakable air of promiscuity, sexual perversion, and whore-chasing lust. What made him electable was a marvelously warm laugh, an appealing manner, and an ability to concentrate so intently and sympathetically on what you were saying that he could make you feel as if you were the most important person in the world, at least as far as he was concerned. He was a joke-teller, a back-slapper, a hail-fellow-well-met. And it was a sham. Because what he really was, beneath it all, was a goblin.
Mayor Spectorsky did not ignore Luke and me, the way Kelsko had done. He even offered us his hand.
I shook it.
I touched him, and somehow I maintained control of myself, which was not easy, because touching him was worse than touching any of the four goblins that I had killed over the past four months. Touching him was the way I would imagine it would be if you came face-to-face with Satan and were required to shake his hand; like an outpouring of bile, evil surged from him, gushing into me at the point of contact made by our clasped hands, contaminating me, sickening me; a lightning bolt of unrelenting hatred and a fierce rage exploded from him as well, blasted through me, and kicked my pulse rate to at least a hundred and fifty.
“Glad to see ya,” he said, smiling broadly. “Glad to see ya. We always look forward to the coming of the carnival!”
This goblin’s performance was every bit the equal of Chief Lisle Kelsko’s superb portrayal of humankind, and like Kelsko, this one was an especially repellent example of its species, snaggletoothed and withered and wart-covered and pockmarked and nearly left pustulant by the passage of uncountable years. Its radiant crimson eyes seemed to have taken their color from oceans of human blood that it alone had caused to be spilled, and from uncharted depths of red-hot human agony that it alone had inflicted upon our abused race.
Jelly and Luke felt a little better after our meeting with Mayor Spectorsky because he was, they said, the same as always.
But I felt worse.
Jelly had been right when he had said that they were up to something.
A deep, thawless chill had reached into every part of me. Ice hardened in my bones.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.
God help us.
The Yontsdown County Courthouse was across the street from the city municipal building. In the offices adjacent to the courtroom, various county officials conducted their business. In one of these suites of rooms, the president of the county council, Mary Vanaletto, was waiting for us.
She was a goblin too.
Jelly treated her differently from the way he had treated Kelsko and Spectorsky, not because he sensed that she was a goblin or anything more—or less—than human, but because she was a woman, and attractive as well. She appeared to be about forty, a slim brunette with big eyes and a sensuous mouth, and when Jelly poured on the charm, she reacted so well—blushing, flirting, giggling, eating up the compliments he paid her—that he began to get sincere about it. He clearly thought he was making one hell of an impression on her, but I could see that she was putting on a performance far superior to his. Within the clever human disguise the goblin—not nearly as ancient and decadent as Kelsko and Spectorsky—desired nothing more intensely than to kill Jelly, kill all of us. As far as I could tell, that was what every goblin wanted—the pleasure of slaughtering human beings, one after the other, though not in an unrelieved frenzy, not in one long bloodbath; they wanted to parcel out the slaughter, kill us one at a time so they could savor the blood and misery. Mary Vanaletto had that same sadistic need, and as I watched Jelly hold her hand and pat her shoulder and generally make nice with her, I required all my self-restraint to keep from tearing him away from her and yelling, “Run!”
There was something else about Mary Vanaletto, a factor other than her true goblin nature, that made my skin break out in gooseflesh. It was something I had never encountered before and, even in my bleakest nightmares, had not imagined. Through the transparent human glaze I saw not one goblin but four: a full-size creature of the sort to which I was accustomed and three small beasts with closed eyes and half-formed features. The three seemed to exist within the large goblin that was pretending to be Mary Vanaletto—specifically, within its abdomen—and they were curled motionlessly in recognizably fetal positions. This frightful, gruesome, abominable monstrosity was pregnant.
It had never occurred to me that the goblins could breed. The very fact of their existence was enough to deal with. The prospect of generations of goblins yet unborn, destined to ride herd on us human cattle, was unthinkable. Instead I thought of them as risen from Hell or descended from another world, their numbers on earth limited to whatever they had begun with; in my mind they were all most mysterious and immaculate (though sinister) conceptions.
Not anymore.
As Jelly teased and entertained Mary Vanaletto, as Luke grinningly followed their witticisms from his perch on the chair beside mine, I rebelled at the sickening mental image of a dog-mouthed goblin ramming its vilely deformed penis into the cold and mutant vagina of a red-eyed and pigsnouted bitch, both of them panting and slobbering and grunting, wart-covered tongues lolling, their grotesque bodies convulsed in ecstasy. But as soon as I managed to push that unbearable image out of my mind, a worse picture came to me: newborn goblins, small, the color of grubs, smooth and shiny and moist, mad red eyes glimmering, with sharp little claws and pointed teeth not yet grown into wicked fangs, three of them, slithering and pushing and squirming out of their mother’s stinking womb.
No.
Oh, Jesus, please, no, if I did not put such a thought out of my mind at once, I would reach for the knife in my boot and destroy this Yontsdown County councilwoman in full view of Jelly and Luke, and then none of us would leave this town alive.
Somehow I endured.
Somehow I got away from that office with my sanity intact and my knife still in my boot.
On our way out of the county building, we passed through the echo-filled foyer, with its marble floor and huge mullioned windows and arched ceiling, off which the main courtroom opened. On impulse I stepped to the massive, brass-handled oak doors, opened one of them a crack, and peered inside. The current case had reached the stage of concluding arguments, so they had not yet recessed for lunch. The judge was a goblin. The prosecuting attorney was a goblin. The two uniformed guards and the court stenographer were fully human, but three members of the jury were goblins.
Jelly said, “What’re you doing, Slim?”
Further shaken by what I had seen in the courtroom, I let the door ease shut, and I rejoined Jelly and Luke. “Nothing. Just curious.”
Outside, at the corner, we recrossed the street, and I studied the other pedestrians and the drivers of the vehicles halted by the traffic light. Out of about forty people on that dingy thoroughfare, I saw two goblins, which was twenty times the usual ratio.
We were finished making payoffs, so we headed past the municipal building to the parking lot behind it. When we were twenty feet from the yellow Cadillac, I said, “Just a minute. I got to take a look at something.” I turned and strode back the way we had come.
Jelly called after me. “Where you going?”
“Just a minute,” I said, breaking into a run.
Heart hammering, lungs expanding and contracting with all the flexibility of cast iron, I went past the side of the municipal building, around to the front, up a set of granite steps, through glass doors, into a lobby less grand than the one at the courthouse. Various agencies of the city government had their public offices on the first floor, and police headquarters was to the left. I pushed through a set of walnut-framed, frosted-glass doors, into an antechamber encircled by a wooden railing.
The on-duty desk sergeant worked on a platform two feet higher than the rest of the floor. He was a goblin.
A ballpoint pen in one hand, he raised his eyes from a file on which he had been working, looked down at me, and said, “Can I help you?”
Beyond him was a large open area that held a dozen desks, a score of tall filing cabinets, a photocopier, and other office equipment. A teletype chattered in one corner. Of the eight clerical workers, three were goblins. Of the four men who worked apart from the clerks and appeared to be plainclothes detectives, two were goblins. Three uniformed officers were present at the moment, and all were goblins.
In Yontsdown the goblins not only walked among the ordinary citizens, preying upon them at random. Here, the war between our species was well organized—at least on the goblins’ side. Here, the subversive masqueraders made the laws and enforced them, and pity the poor bastard who was guilty of even the slightest infraction.
“What was it you wanted?” the desk sergeant asked.
“Uh . . . I’m looking for the City Department of Health.”
“Across the hall,” he said impatiently.
“Yeah,” I said, pretending befuddlement. “This must be the police station.”
“It’s sure no ballet school,” he said.
I left, conscious of his crimson eyes burning into my back, and I returned to the yellow Cadillac, where Jelly Jordan and Luke Bendingo were waiting, curious and unaware.
“What’re you up to? Jelly asked.
“Wanted to have a closer look at the front entrance to this building here.”
“Why?”
“I’m a nut about architecture.”
“Is that so?”
“Yeah.”
“Since when?”
“Since I was a kid.”
“You’re still a kid.”
“And you’re not, but you’re a nut about toys, which is a whole lot stranger than being a nut about architecture.”
He stared at me a moment, then smiled and shrugged. “Guess you’re right. But toys are more fun.”
As we got in the car I said, “Oh, I don’t know. Architecture can be fascinating. And this town’s full of terrific examples of Gothic and medieval style.”
“Medieval?” Jelly said as Luke started the engine. “You mean like the Dark Ages?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, you’re right about that. This burg is straight from the Dark Ages, sure enough.”
On our way out of town, we approached the burned-out elementary school again, where seven children had died the past April. The first time we had passed the building, I had received precognitive vibrations of more tragedy to come. Now, as I stared at the blasted windows and soot-smeared walls, and as we drew relentlessly nearer, a wave of clairvoyant impressions flowed off those fire-scorched bricks and swept toward me. To my sixth sense it was a wave every bit as real as an onrushing wall of water, with a weight and force to be reckoned with, a churning mass of possibilities and probabilities and unthinkable tragedies. Such an extraordinary amount of human suffering and anguish was associated with this structure that it was not merely wrapped in an ominous aura but was afloat in a sea of death-energy. The wave was coming with freight-train speed and power, like one of those giant combers rushing toward the beach in every film you have ever seen of Hawaii, but black and ominous, unlike anything I had encountered before, and I was suddenly terrified of it. There was a fine spray of psychic energy flung out in advance of the wave itself, and as these invisible droplets spattered across my receptive mind I “heard” children screaming in pain and terror . . . fire roaring and hissing and making a snick-snap-gabble-crackle sound like sadistic laughter . . . alarm bells clanging . . . a wall collapsing with a thunderous crash . . . shouting . . . distant sirens. . . . I “saw” unspeakable horrors: an apocalyptic conflagration . . . a teacher with her hair aflame . . . children stumbling blindly through smothering smoke . . . other children desperately and futilely taking refuge beneath schoolroom desks as smoldering slabs of the ceiling slammed down on them. . . . Some of what I was hearing and seeing was from the fire that had already been, the April pyre, but some images were from a fire not yet lit, sights and sounds of a nightmare that lay in the future, and in both cases I perceived that the school’s abrupt combustion was neither accidental nor caused by human error nor attributable to machine failure, but was the work of goblins. I was beginning to feel the children’s pain, the searing heat, and beginning to experience their terror. The psychic wave bore down on me, towering higher . . . higher, growing darker, a black tsunami so powerful that it surely would crush me, so cold that it would leech all the warmth of life from my flesh. I closed my eyes and refused to look at the half-ruined school as we drew nearer it, and I tried desperately to build the mental equivalent of a lead shield around my sixth sense, to shut out the unwanted clairvoyant radiations that, instead of water, composed the oncoming destructive wave. To turn my mind away from the school, I thought of my mother and sisters, thought of Oregon, the Siskiyous . . . thought of Rya Raines’s exquisitely sculpted face and sun-spangled hair. Memories and fantasies of Rya were what effectively armored me against the onslaught of the psychic tsunami, which now hit me, battered me, and washed through me without breaking me to pieces or carrying me away.
I waited half a minute, until I felt nothing paranormal whatsoever, then opened my eyes. The school was behind us. We were approaching the old iron bridge, which looked as if it were constructed from fossilized black bones.
Because Jelly was in the backseat again, and because Luke was paying strict attention to his driving (possibly fearing the slightest infraction of the Yontsdown traffic laws would bring one of Kelsko’s men down on us with particular fury), neither of them noticed the peculiar seizure that, for a minute, had rendered me as speechless and helplessly rigid as any afflicted, unmedicated epileptic. I was grateful that there was no need to make up an explanation, for I did not trust myself to speak without betraying my turmoil.