William Alexander - Goblin Secrets

Rownie ran from that silence. He pushed himself forward, through the dark of the Southside Rail Station.

The station was a vast, open space. Rownie could tell by the way sound moved through it. His feet smacked the polished stone floor. The sound went out away from him, echoed, and got lost somewhere in the open space. He tried to move quietly, but his feet still smacked against stone.

There was a tiny bit of light. The ceiling was glass, and moonlight shone dimly through its smudged surface. It made the ceiling visible, high overhead, but it did not illuminate very much beneath. Dark shapes loomed around Rownie, and he tried to avoid them.

He moved as quickly as he dared, with both arms groping in front of him. He hoped to find obstacles with his hands before he found them with his face. He found one with his shin instead. It was metal. The pain in his leg made lights flash inside his eyes. He shut them. He also shut his mouth. He didn’t cry out. He wouldn’t cry out.

Rownie felt with his hands to see what he had run into. It was a bench made out of wrought iron, curved and stylish, for important people to sit on while they waited for the railcar to take them to Northside. He crawled underneath it. It was big enough to hide him, and to keep anyone else from bumping into him in the dark.

He waited. He couldn’t hear anything except his own heartbeat and his own breathing, and he tried very hard to silence both of those things. He was sure the Grubs would be able to hear his pounding heartbeat from all the way across the station floor.

The floor was cold. It felt cold under his hands. It smelled cold, and dusty.

Rownie tried not to think about all of the possible things that might haunt the station around him. He tried not to think about diggers, especially drowned diggers, crawling up from the flooded tunnel. He tried not to think about ghouls. He tried not to think about the gearworkers who used to be sane, who used to make sense when they spoke, before the Lord Mayor of Zombay gathered them all together to make grand and glorious projects like rail stations. Now the gearworkers were all as cracked as Mr. Scrud, and nothing they said ever made sense. Rownie tried not to wonder what it was that cracked them all, and he tried not to imagine that it was still here, somewhere in the station. He tried not to imagine that he could hear it breathing. He was fairly certain that he could hear something breathing, something big, somewhere in the dark.

Many pairs of bare feet smacked the stone. The sound echoed all around him.

“Rownie-Runt!” Blotches called. It was Blotches’s voice, but the syllables sounded like Graba.

“Stop your hiding, now,” called Greasy. He spoke like Graba.

“I’ll be so much less angry if you come out,” called Stubble, his voice rising and falling the way Graba’s voice rose and fell. “I’ve got things to ask of you.”

“Come out, you Changeling thing!” Blotches shouted, his voice rusty and furious.

Rownie stayed where he was, as still as he could manage. He stopped wondering about what else might haunt the station. It was haunted by Grubs, and he didn’t think that there could be anything worse. He focused on breathing silently. He got ready to run, if he needed to run.

Someone passed near Rownie’s bench. Rownie heard him muttering. It sounded like it might be Greasy. Rownie hoped so. Greasy wasn’t very fast. Whoever it was moved off again.

Rownie heard pigeon wings overhead. He peered out from underneath the bench to see dark, feathered shapes pass beneath the faint glow of the ceiling. They circled. They searched.

“Vass, are you here?” Stubble asked loudly, still in Graba’s voice. “Make light for me now.”

Rownie heard Vass chanting, somewhere in the dark, and then it wasn’t dark anymore. Light bloomed and blinded him.

Large clocks hung from the ceiling by great lengths of chain, like the pocket watches of giants. Each clock was also a lantern, and now every lantern burned. They swayed slowly back and forth as pigeons landed on them and pushed off again. The light that they cast made long and swaying shadows.

Rownie watched the Grubs from underneath his iron bench. He watched them search for him in the rows of railcars. The mirrored, brass finish of the cars looked tarnished and old, even though they had never been used.

He waited until he was sure that no one looked in his direction, and then he crawled away from the bench and into the shadow of a stone pillar. He crept carefully down the length of the shadow, farther into the station.

The whole place looked like Northside, with its polished stone and precise angles. It was strange to be south of the River, but seem to be in Northside. Rownie tried not to let it bother him, because he had worse things to be bothered about, and quirks of architecture were down among the very least of his concerns—but he still found it distracting and disorienting. There was a logic to moving through Southside, and that logic no longer worked inside the rail station. Rownie had to make a gear shift in his head, and in his movements, to make sense of his surroundings and to find somewhere to hide. He had to pretend he was north of the River.

Stubble called to him, somewhere very close by. Rownie’s insides jumped at the noise. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from. He climbed up inside one of the railcars to get quickly out of sight.

Rows of chairs filled the inside of the car. The chairs looked soft and comfortable. They were made out of polished wood, and had faded red cushions. Small, round tables stood between some of the chairs, with streaks of green patina across their copper surfaces. A few lanterns burned on the walls to either side, lit by Vass’s chant.

Rownie knew that Vass had a little talent for curses and charms—or at least he knew that she bragged about it—but he had never seen her do anything so grand before. He had also never seen a sibling look at him with Graba’s look, or speak with the rhythms of Graba’s voice, before Vass did so in the Market Square. She can wear us like masks , Rownie thought, and he wondered if it was something Graba might do to him. He started to panic at the thought. The weight of everything he didn’t know about his own home pressed down on him and squeezed like Graba’s talon-toes. He did not feel like a giant. He felt like the furthest thing from a giant. A bug, maybe. A burnbug or a beetle.

Graba can’t wear me , he decided. She can’t. She won’t. She wouldn’t have to send everyone else to look for me, if she could.

He moved carefully down the railcar’s center aisle. He felt trapped inside the car, and he knew that he shouldn’t stay. The others were already searching railcars, one by one. They would find him if he stayed. Rownie didn’t know what would happen then. He didn’t want to know.

He glanced up at the far entrance. Vass stood there, watching him.

ROWNIE TOOK IN A LONG BREATH, and let it out. He stood up. He did not run. She would catch him if he ran. He showed her that he would not run by the way that he stood there, and he waited to see what would happen next.

Vass continued to watch him. She smiled her cruel smile, and otherwise she did not move.

“Do you see him, now?” asked Stubble from outside the car. “Have you found him?”

Vass looked directly at Rownie. “No, Graba,” she said. “He isn’t here.”

“Be sure about it,” said Stubble. “And bring me back a mirror if you can find an unbroken one, and also a new cushion for my chair.”