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The woman held open the door and Val followed Dave inside, smirking. There was
a marble-lined hall and a staircase railed with old, polished wood. Thehooved
woman led them through sparsely furnished rooms, past a fountain where
silverykoi darted, their bodies so pale that the pink of their insides showed
through their scales, past a music room holding only a double-strung lap harp
on a table of marble, then into a parlor. She sat down on a cream-colored
settee, the brocade fabric worn thin, and beckoned for them to join her. There
was a low table near her and on it a glass, a teapot, and a tarnished spoon.
Thehooved woman used the spoon to measure out some of the amber sand into her
cup, then filled it with hot water and drank deeply. She flinched once and
when she looked up, her eyes shone with an eerie, glittering brightness.
Val couldn't stop her gaze from straying to the woman's goat feet. There was
something obscene about the glimpses of short, thick fur that covered her
slender ankles, the sheen of the black horn, the two splayed toes.
"Sometimes a remedy can seem another sort of sickness," the goat-footed woman
said. "David, be sure to tellRavus there's been another murder."
Sketchy Dave sat down on the ebonized wood floor. "Murder?"
"DunnieBerrydied last night. Poor thing, she was just coming out of her
tree it's horrible how that iron gate fences her roots. It must have scorched
her every time she crossed it. You delivered to her, no?"
Sketchy Dave shifted uncomfortably. "Last week. Wednesday."
"You might well be the last person to have seen her alive," the goat-footed
woman said. "Be careful." She lifted her teacup, swigged down a bit more of
the solution. "People are saying your master peddles poison."
"He's not my master." Sketchy Dave stood up. "We've got to go."
The goat-footed woman stood, too. "Of course. Come in the back and I'll get
what I owe."
"Don't eat or drink anything or you'll be more fucked than you already are,"
Dave whispered to Val as he followed the woman into another room, leaving his
salvaged box of romance novels on the floor. Val scowled and walked over to a
display case. Inside the glass door was a large, solid chunk of something like
obsidian. Beside it were some other things, equally odd. A bit of bark, a
broken stick, a sharp burr in the shape of a pinecone, each fold razor sharp.
A few moments later, Sketchy Dave and the goat-footed woman returned. She was
smiling. Val tried to stare at her without catching her eye. If someone had
asked Val what she would do if she saw some supernatural creature, she
wouldn't have figured she'd do nothing at all. She felt unable to be sure of
what she was seeing, unable to decide if there really was a monster right in
front of her. As they walked out of the apartment, Val could hear her blood
thundering in her head to the speeding beat of her heart.
"I told you to fucking stay over there," Sketchy Dave growled, gesturing
across the street, toward the fountain.
Val was too flustered to be angry. "I saw something a statue moving." She
pointed upward, to the top of the building and the almost-night sky but she
was incoherent. "And then Icame over and& what is she?"
"Fuck!" Dave punched the stone wall, his knuckles coming away raw and
scraped. "Fuck!Fuck !" He walked away, head hunched as though he were leaning
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into a strong wind.
Val caught up to him and grabbed him by the arm. "Tell me," she demanded, her
grip tightening. He tried to jerk away from her, but he couldn't. She was
stronger.
He looked at her strangely, like he was reevaluating them both. "You didn't
see anything. There was nothing to see."
Val stared at him. "And what wouldLolli say? A faerie, right? Except faeries
don't fucking exist!"
He started to laugh. She dropped his arm and shoved him hard. The box of
novels fell, scattering paperbacks into the road.
He looked down at them and then back at her. "Fucking bitch," he said and
spat on the ground.
All the rage and bewilderment of the last day boiled up in her. Her hands
balled into fists. She wanted to hit something.
Dave bent down to pick up the cardboard box and replaced the fallen books.
"You're lucky you're a girl," he muttered.
Chapter 4
We must not look at goblin men, We must not buy their fruits: Who knows upon
what soil they fed Their hungry thirsty roots?
 Christina Rossetti, "Goblin Market"
On the train ride back, Val sat in a plastic seat far from Dave, leaned her
head back against a Plexiglas-covered map of the subway, and wondered how a
person could have hooves. She'd seen shadows move on their own and bottles of
brown sand that had somethingto do with make-believe gossip about murdered
tree people from weird,Upper West Side ladies. What she did know was that she
didn't want to be blind and dumb, the kind of girl that didn't notice that her
mom and boyfriend were having sex until she saw it with her own eyes. She
wanted to know the truth.
When Val got close to the concrete park onLeonard Street she saw Luis sitting
on a ledge, drinking something out of a blue glass bottle. A bird-boned girl
with mismatched sneakers and a swollen belly sat beside him, trembling fingers
holding a cigarette. As Val got closer, she could see sores on the new girl's
ankles, leaking pus. The streets were nearly deserted, the only person close
by a security guard across the street who walked out to the curb every now and
then before she disappeared into the building.
"Why are you still around?" Luis asked, glancing up at her. She was unnerved
by the stare from his cloudy eye.
"Just tell me whereLolli is and I won't be," said Val.
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Luis gestured with his chin to the grate in the ground as Dave walked up to
them both.
The girl dropped her cigarette and then reached for it, her fingers grazing
the hot end without her seeming to notice as she fumbled to put it back in her
mouth.
"What did you do?" Luis asked Dave, his jaw tightening. "What happened?"
Dave looked at the parked cars that lined the street. "It wasn't my fault."
Luis closed his eyes. "You are such a fucking idiot."
Dave said something else, but Val had already started walking toward the
service entrance, the grate that she and Dave had slid out of that afternoon.
She got down on her hands and knees, pulled up the unhinged end of the metal
bars, and lowered herself onto the steps.
"Lolli?" she called into the darkness.
"Over here," came the drowsy reply.
Val waded across the mattresses and blankets to where she'd slept the night
before. Her backpack wasn't where she'd left it. She kicked aside some of the
dirty clothes on the platform. Nothing. "Where's my bag?"
"You trust a bunch of bums with your stuff, I guess you get what you
get."Lolli laughed and held up the knapsack. "It's here. Chill."
Val unzipped her pack. All her stuff was inside, the razor still choked with
her hair, the thirteen dollars still folded up in her wallet right beside her
train ticket. Even her gum was still there. "Sorry," Val said and sat down.
"Don't trust us?"Lolli grinned.
"Look, I saw something and I don't know what it was and I'm done getting
fucked with."
Lollisat up, hugging her legs to her chest, eyes wide and smile stretching
even wider. "You saw one of them!"
The image of the goat-footed woman moved uneasily behind Val's eyes. "I know
what you're going to say, but I don't think it was a faerie."
"So what do you think it was?"
"I don't know. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks on me." Val sat down on an
overturned wood tangelo box. It made a cracking sound, but supported her
weight. "That doesn't make any sense."
"Believe what you can handle believing."
"But, I mean faeries? Like 'clap if you believe in faeries'?"
Lollisnorted. "You saw one. You tell me."
"I did tell you. I told you I don't know what I saw. A woman with goat feet?
You shooting something weird in your arm? Paper that dances around? Is that
supposed to add up?"
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