with a dozen or more toes apiece which grasp the earth as he walks. His skin is very brown and his eyes are very bright, the eyes of the werefolk, which are brighter than those of humankind. They show no whites, only long slits of hazel lustre. He pauses, skimming hillside, house and garden with a gaze that misses nothing, sniffing the air with nostrils that flare individually. Then he continues on down the slope.
‘Why do we see him so clearly?’ Sysselore is easily irritated: she takes umbrage where she can find it. ‘He’s a goblin. A house-goblin. He cannot possibly be important.’
‘Something is important,’ I retort.
More people follow, a succession of faces, overlapping, intermingling, many too dim to make out. Some are familiar, some not. There is a man in a cloak and a pointed hood, trading a potion in an unlabelled bottle for a bag whose contents are muffled so they will not chink. And the same man, older, poorer, though he retains his distinctive garb, striding across an empty landscape under the sweeping wings of clouds. Once he was called Gabbandolfo, in the country of his origin, meaning Elvincape, though he had other names. But he lost his power and his titles and now he roams the world on a mission that can never be achieved, going nowhere. Nonetheless, when his image intrudes I am wary: it is a strange paradox that since his impotence his presence has become more ominous, grim as an indefinite warning. He stalks the smoke-scenes like a carrion crow, watching the field for a battle of which only he has foreknowledge. ‘I don’t like it,’ I assert. ‘We should be the sole watchers. What has he seen that we missed? What does he know?’
Outside, night lies beneath the Tree. I hear the whistling calls of nocturnal birds, the death-squeal of a tiny rodent. In the smoke, a new face emerges, growing into darkness. It belongs to no known race of men, yet it is mortal – sculpted in ebony, its bone structure refined to a point somewhere the other side of beauty, emphasised with little hollowings and sudden lines, its hair of a black so deep it is green, its eyes like blue diamonds. For all its delicacy, it is obviously, ruthlessly masculine. It stares straight at me out of the picture, almost as if the observer has somehow become the observed, and he watches us in our turn. For the first time that I can remember I speak the word to obliterate it, though normally I leave the pictures to fade and alter of their own accord. The face dwindles until only a smile remains, dimming into vapour.
‘He saw us,’ says my coven-sister.
‘Illusion. A trick of the smoke. You sound afraid. Are you afraid of smoke, of a picture?’
As our concentration wavers, the billows thin and spread. I spit at the fire with a curse-word, a power-word to recall the magic, sucking the fumes back into the core of the cloud. The nucleus darkens: for a moment the same image seems to hover there, the face or its shadow, but it is gone before it can come into focus. A succession of tableaux follow, unclear or unfinished, nothing distinguishable. At the last we return to the grey house, and the goblin climbing in through an open window. In the room beyond a boy somewhere in his teens is reading a book, one leg hooked over the arm of his chair. His hair shows more fair than dark; there are sun-freckles on his nose. When he looks up his gaze is clear and much too candid – the candour of the naturally devious, who know how to exploit their own youth. He stares directly at the intruder, interested and undisturbed. He can see the goblin. He has no Gift, no aura of power. But he can see it.
He says: ‘I suppose you’ve come about the vacancy.’
The goblin halts abruptly, half way over the sill. Unnerved.
‘The vacancy,’ the boy reiterates. ‘For a house-goblin. You are a house-goblin, aren’t you?’
‘Ye see me, then.’ The goblin has an accent too ancient to identify, perhaps a forgotten brogue spoken by tribes long extinct. His voice sounds rusty, as if it has not been used for many centuries.
‘I was looking,’ the boy says matter-of-factly. ‘When you look, you see. Incidentally, you really shouldn’t come in uninvited. It isn’t allowed.’
‘The hoose wants a boggan, or so I hairrd. I came.’
‘Where from?’
‘Ye ask a wheen o’ questions.’
‘It’s my hoose,’ says the boy. ‘I’m entitled.’
‘It was another put out the word.’
‘He’s a friend of mine: he was helping me out. I’m the one who has to invite you in.’
‘Folks hae changed since I was last in the worrld,’ says the goblin, his tufted brows twitching restlessly from shock to frown. ‘In the auld days, e’en the Lairrd couldna see me unless I wisht it. The castle was a guid place then. But the Lairrds are all gone and the last of his kin is a spineless vratch who sauld his hame for a handful o’ siller. And now they are putting in baths – baths! – and the pipes are a-hissing and a-gurgling all the time, and there’s heat without fires, and fires without heat, and clacking picture-boxes, and invisible bells skirling, and things that gae bleep in the nicht. It’s nae place for a goblin any more.’
‘We have only the one bathroom,’ says the boy, by way of encouragement.
‘Guid. It isna healthy, all these baths. Dirt keeps you warrm.’
‘Seals the pores,’ nods the boy. ‘I’m afraid we do have a telephone, and two television sets, but one’s broken, and the microwave goes bleep in the night if we need to heat something up, but that’s all.’
The goblin grunts, though what the grunt imports is unclear. ‘Are ye alone here?’
‘Of course not. There’s my father and my sister and Abby – Dad’s girlfriend. We live in London but we use this place for weekends and holidays. And Mrs Wicklow the housekeeper who comes in most days and Lucy from the village doing the actual housework and Gus – the vicar – who keeps an eye on things when we’re not here. Oh, and there’s a dog – a sort of dog – who’s around now and then. She won’t bother you – if she likes you.’
‘What sort of dog wid that be?’ asks the goblin. ‘One o’ thae small pet dogs that canna barrk above a yap or chase a rabbit but sits on a lady’s knee all day waiting tae be fed?’
‘Oh no,’ says the boy. ‘She’s not a lapdog or a pet. She’s her own mistress. You’ll see.’
‘I hairrd,’ says the goblin, after a pause, ‘ye’d had Trouble here, not sae long ago.’
‘Yes.’
‘And mayhap it was the kind of Trouble that might open your eyes to things ordinary folk are nae meant to see?’
‘Mayhap.’ The boy’s candour has glazed over; his expression is effortlessly blank.
‘Sae what came to the hoose-boggan was here afore me?’
‘How did you know there was one?’ Genuine surprise breaks through his impassivity.
‘Ye can smell it. What came tae yon?’
‘Trouble,’ says the boy. ‘He was the timid sort, too frightened to fight back. In a way, his fear killed him.’
‘Aye, weel,’ says the goblin, ‘fear is deadlier than knife-wound or spear-wound, and I hae taken both. It’s been long awhile since I kent Trouble. Do ye expect more?’
