Project Elfhome

by Wen Spencer

  Jane didn’t know the woman but Brandy did.

  “Hi, Grandma Gertie,” Brandy said.

  Oh, this was famous Grandma Gertie Betts, and she was over a hundred years old, having been born in the late 1920s. She’d been slowly annexing large sections of the South Hills to her farm, producing everything from apples to zucchini. She didn’t have any children but a horde of adopted “grandchildren” that helped her run her various businesses.

  “Well, God damn it, you could have fucking told me that you got my fucking e-mail!” Gertie came to glare at Jane. “If I’d know it was PB&G down here, making all this fucking noise, I wouldn’t have called the fucking police!”

  Note to self, Jane thought, make an effort to swear less. I so don’t want to grow into this woman. “We’re sorry. Thank you for the tip.”

  “I would have shot the fucking thing myself but it’s always such a hoot to see Hal be Hal.” Yes, all stories of Grandma Gertie fully indicated that she would. If nothing else, there were two rifles on the gun rack in her pickup. “You two didn’t smash up anything, did you? This is Hal we’re talking about.”

  Jane considered a moment. Normally they did do property damage but today they’d been fairly conservative. “No. We didn’t damage anything.”

  “Good. It’s been a pain in the ass to get some of these hauled in from all over Pittsburgh but it makes a nice place for all my kids to come play.”

  Brandy escaped, leaving Jane to fend with Grandma Gertie. Jane in turn handed her over to Hal to keep busy while they finished shooting. Unfortunately the tiny woman reminded Hal of the nuns of Mercy Hospital and he kept sending Jane pleading looks to rescue him.

  Once they wrapped, she rescued Hal with an autographed official WQED slickie on the show.

  Jane escorted the old woman back to her pickup. “Thanks again for the tip. New York gave us a very tight schedule which we’ll only be able to keep if we can find subjects to film.”

  “I’ll tell my kids to keep their eyes and ears open.” Gertie slid the cattle prod in behind the seat and used the stepladder to climb the several feet up into her pickup. “But now, I’ve got a bull to find and chase home.”

  There was a little troll doll in the shadows of Grandma Gertie’s dashboard, slyly grinning at Jane. The sight of it made Jane’s heart go heavy and sink. She was about to pull back when the other details sunk in. The troll doll was wearing a little Viking helmet.

  “Oh my God! Helga!” Jane snatched up the doll. There was a black smudge on the upturned nose and the cascade of white hair was dirty and ratty, but it was Helga. On her bare toes were the touches of purple paint for nail polish. Jane could barely breathe. “Where did you find her?”

  “Those troll dolls used to be popular way back. I never saw a Viking girl before though.”

  “Where did you find it?” Jane shouted.

  “I didn’t find it, it found me.” Gertie touched old thin fingers to the doll. “A few weeks ago I gathered up a herd of the kids and took them all to Sandcastle to get the dragon. I didn’t think anyone would be there and everything would be free for the taking, but there were a bunch of people squatting there, using the swimming pools as fish tanks, although God knows why. There’s been plenty enough fish in the river since we took to visiting Elfhome. We pulled the ride apart to get the statue and took it. Sometime in the confusion, the doll slipped into my truck.”

  * * *

  For first time in her life, Jane abandoned Hal and her schedule. She wanted to head straight to Sandcastle, but her father had trained her too well to go alone. She raced after Brandy, knowing that this close to lunch she’d stop at the only food place still open.

  McMicking’s was a little deli at the Arlington light-rail stop. It was actually two tiny houses built on trailers. Ellen ran a tightly stocked deli and lunch counter out of one while she slept in the other. She made her store mobile just in case business became too poor she would be forced to move. Arlington was her third location. She had started at Library and worked back toward Pittsburgh, keeping to the light-rail tracks.

  Brandy was perched on the hood of her squad car, finishing off a bowl of Ellen’s famous pumpkin and spinach curry over jasmine rice.

  Jane waved the troll doll. “Look! Look!”

  “Yeah, I see it.” Brandy twiddled her fingers in a “give me” sign. “It’s a doll. An ugly doll. Use your words. Tell me why it’s important.”

  “Boo had this when she disappeared.” Jane pushed the troll into Brandy’s hand. “It showed up in Grandma Gertie’s pickup when they were at Sandcastle. Boo is at Sandcastle.”

  Brandy examined the toy, shaking her head. “How can you know it’s the same one? We had a couple of these when I was a kid. They all look alike. Same beady eyes, big grin, pug nose and wild-looking hair.”

  “With a Viking helmet?”

  “No. But my personal experience isn’t a true statement of how many Viking trolls there are in Pittsburgh.”

  Jane snatched the doll back and smacked Brandy with it. “Stop talking like your grandmother!”

  “You come roaring up, waving a doll, talking all crazy about your little sister? I know what comes next. You’re going to want me to go busting down doors and get ugly in someone’s face. I’m just telling you what my grandmother is going to say when this hits her court.”

  “This is Sergeant Helga Teufel Hunden. She was my mom’s doll before she gave it to me.” All their toys were hand-me-downs and secondhand store finds. Everything had been battered and ugly and half-broken even before they got hold of it. Helga had the virtue of being seemingly indestructible. “Before I gave her to Boo, I replaced her hair and repainted her helmet, and I made her a purple dress and I painted her toes to match. I can guarantee that even if there is a shitload of these dolls in Pittsburgh, this is the only one with purple toes.”

  “Good enough. But it’s been eight years. Someone could have found it lying on the ground in the Strip District the day she went missing and it’s been drifting person to person since then.”

  “Someone put it in Grandma Gertie’s truck when they were at Sandcastle…”

  “It could have been put into her truck at anytime, anywhere, by anyone. You know she doesn’t lock her truck and has dozens of kids underfoot all the time. Everyone calls her Grandma for a reason.”

  “Why are you being so pig-headed about this?”

  “Because I’ve watched your family tear itself apart and then have to rebuild itself every time we find anything even remotely connected to your sister’s disappearance. That girl’s body that we found in the woods two years ago. And the boy’s skeleton two years before that. It’s suddenly the day that she disappeared and you’re all blaming each other for not keeping close enough watch on her.”

  “So for peace of mind, you want us to just say ‘she’s dead, end of story.’ ”

  “No, that’s not what I said,” Brandy growled. “Look, it doesn’t make sense. If Boo was the person that put the doll in Grandma Gertie’s truck, why didn’t she just stay there?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Jane, I love you like a sister, and if this was any other time, I’d round up some people and go tear Sandcastle apart. No one seems have noticed, but the shit hit the fan thirty days ago. A week after Windwolf was nearly killed, EIA started major housecleaning. They have two NSA agents going through all their personnel files and they started Gestapo-level seizing EIA employees and throwing them in jail.”

  “I—I haven’t heard that.”

  “No one has. Someone is keeping a tight lid on the news. They opened up the county jail to hold them all.”

  “Wait? They’re holding them? Why didn’t they ship them to Earth for trial?”

  “Because they’re not human. The EIA has been infiltrated by the oni. It went as high as Director Maynard’s personal assistant, who turned out to have a tail and dog-ears. The oni were using magic somehow just to look human. The EIA was spending too much time trying to keep more o
ni from slipping into Pittsburgh to transport the ones in holding to the border.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this?”

  “Because it’s coming down from on high that hush-hush is best for Pittsburgh. Let the EIA clean house. The thing is that the EIA did most of the heavy lifting, and we have been picking up the slack. Now Tinker’s been kidnapped and we do not have the resources to follow ghost leads.”

  “Please!”

  Brandy looked away, shaking her head. “Jane. I can’t. I can’t drop everything because of a toy found in a pickup truck weeks ago. Grandma Gertie is getting old. That doll could have been in the truck for days before she noticed it. She could have been anywhere when it was put into her pickup. And why would a little girl who disappeared eight years ago put a doll in a truck, and do nothing else?”

  “Brandy!”

  Brandy’s shoulder radio crackled and her dispatcher directed her to head to a shooting and added that an ambulance was responding. “I have a job to do! I have to do it because no one else is going to!”

  * * *

  The Chased by Monsters production truck pulled into McMicking’s parking lot just as Brandy raced away.

  “How’d you find me?” Jane snapped. She didn’t want them there, reminding her that she had her own job to do, one that no one else could do.

  All three men tapped their right temple to indicate the headset she was wearing.

  “Oh, freaking hell!” Jane cried. “Don’t tell me you heard everything I said?”

  “Okay. We won’t.” Hal pointed at the deli. “It’s lunch time. Let’s do food.” He turned to Nigel. “This place has amazing food. Good as anything you’d find in New York.”

  “Gypsy wagons!” Nigel clapped his hands in delight. He’d attached his backup set of feet, so only the faint blood staining through his clean shirt remained as proof of how close a call they’d had. “Oh, how charming.”

  “Are you okay?” Taggart asked.

  Jane nodded mutely as tears started to burn in her eyes. Somehow last night had broken down her defenses around him and it left her emotionally fragile.

  He carefully took the doll out of her hands. He brushed the ratty, dirty hair back from its impish smile.

  “People used to ask if Boo was half-elf because she was so beautiful. She had hair so pale blond that it looked white, the bluest eyes and skin like china. When she was clean and still—which was usually only when we were at church or a wedding or something—she was like an angel that had fallen from heaven. But with us, most the time, she was half-naked, muddy, and grinning. To me, she was just as impish as this doll. And her hair. Her hair would be this mass of untamable curls. When I fixed Helga for her, I made the hair just like Boo’s.”

  “We’ll find her,” Taggart said.

  Jane shook her head, taking back the doll. “I can’t put you at risk.”

  Hal came back carrying biodegradable takeout containers that perfumed the parking lot with the smell of rice and pumpkin curry. “I say we film a show.”

  Jane smacked him.

  “Ow! I mean it! Everyone in Pittsburgh knows PB&G. Even if you don’t own a television, there are those billboards of me all over town. We just do our normal shtick.”

  “Shtick?” Jane echoed.

  “Come in with cameras, walk all over the homeowner, and blow the hell out of their property.”

  Jane stared at him for a moment as she realized that he was right. Shy of the viceroy and the director of the EIA, the various TV personalities were the most famous faces in Pittsburgh. Unlike some of them—like Chloe Polanski—Hal was well liked. People sensed that at his core, what Hal wanted more than anything, more than ratings, was to honestly save people. It was the main reason that Jane put up with his craziness. Despite the homeowners’ misgivings and the chaos PB&G caused, they kept the dangerous flora and fauna from killing countless people.

  But would his fame actually protect him?

  Jane shook her head. “I can’t ask you…”

  “You’re not asking,” Hal said. “This is my plan and I’m quite proud of it.”

  “I think it’s a good plan,” Nigel said.

  She glanced at Taggart and he gave a sheepish grin as he nodded.

  Oh, God, this was what she was most afraid of: she was outnumbered by crazy men. Vague plans to call her little brothers evaporated as she started thinking of damage control. The fewer crazy men she needed to corral, the less chance of something going wrong. Hopefully.

  * * *

  Pittsburgh was full of forgotten corners. It was nearly two thousand square miles of space transported to Elfhome. For every handful of empty houses there was an empty quickie mart, gas station, dry cleaners, Starbucks and McDonalds. And with every failed business, there came another handful of empty houses. Desolation grew like a cancer. Homestead had been home of the famous steel mill, a fairly new mall, the sprawling water park of Sandcastle and sixteen hundred households. When she was little, there had been a strip of houses clustered around West Street, eking a living from the still-open Sandcastle. When the park closed, the neighborhood went under.

  The entrance of the park looked no different from all the abandoned buildings that they’d passed coming in. Jane’s heart sank. The squatters must have moved out after Grandma Gertie’s tribe descended on them.

  “What is it?” Taggart’s question made her realize she had sworn softly.

  “It’s empty,” she said.

  “How can you tell?”

  “There’s no takens.”

  “Takens?”

  “Pittsburghers do stuff to show that a building is taken. Set up a planter with flowers. Paint the door Wind Clan blue. Put out a welcome mat. Install an obvious doorbell. Or put up a new mailbox, even if they can’t get the mail delivered. It keeps other people from trying to move into their space.”

  “What if they don’t want people to know they’re here?” Taggart said. “They’ve got a little girl they’ve kidnapped and God knows what else. They don’t want to be noticed.”

  He had a point.

  On the theory that Hal was the recognizable one, he got out and pushed open the gate. It swung easily and silently open. Beyond them was the massive parking lot, cracked and weed-choked. The tall waterslides towered on the other side like twisted dreams.

  Everyone but Nigel cautiously got out of the truck. Silence reigned, broken only by the calls of crows.

  Jane shouldered a backpack stuffed with every tool she imagined she might need for a jail breakout. She hefted the big light reflector like a shield while her heart hammered in her chest. There was a tiny little voice deep inside her that she currently was ignoring. It whispered that the only reason she was letting the men talk her into this was because she was being selfish. She was supposed to be the smart, level-headed one who knew when it was time to ditch and run.

  Taggart glanced at her and read her face. “Oh, you can’t back out now.” Taggart brandished his camera like a weapon. “You promised us.”

  She didn’t remember making any promises. In fact, that was so unlikely that she knew he was lying. It felt weirdly better, though, to know control had slipped from her hands, and with it, responsibility.

  Hal took his place out in front, his pith helmet on, and his grab-stick tucked under his arm like a riding crop. He was grinning hugely like he did just before he got to blow things up. Probably because explosives were well in the realm of likely outcomes of their rescue attempt.

  Chesty stood at her side in heel. The elfhound scanned the lot with open suspicion, which meant they weren’t as alone as they seemed.

  They went through an over-the-top mime of setting up to shoot. Don’t mind us, we’re harmless.

  Hal, however, seemed slightly confused what their real mission was. “Should I intro as PB&G or Chased by Monsters?”

  Jane bit down on the automatic “We’re not actually filming!” No need to announce that to anyone who might have very sharp ears. Besides, she was fairly certain th
at Taggart was filming—in fact probably would keep filming even if gunshots and explosions occurred. “Do both. Depending on what we get, we’ll use the video for one show or other.”

  “Welcome to Pittsburgh Backyard and Garden. I’m your host, Hal Rogers.” Hal paused and straightened nervously. “Welcome to Chased by Monsters. I’m Hal Rogers.” He half-turned, giving the camera his handsome profile, the raccoon mask of bruising covered up with half a bottle of concealer. “And this”—he waved a hand at the twin square towers that made up the front entrance; the landlocked builders had tried to combine Cape Cod, lighthouse and castle themes for the gatehouse and utterly failed—“is Sandcastle: an eighty-seven-acre water park with fourteen water slides and multiple swimming pools located on the banks of the Monongahela River. Opened in 1989, it bravely continued operating even after it found itself on Elfhome. It closed its doors…” Hal paused to shove open the accordion steel gate stretched between the two towers. “…in 2020 after a sudden outbreak of deadly Elfhome water creatures in its water supply. Despite heavy chlorination and an extensive filtering system, creatures such as river plankton, elf shrimp, and water fairies took over.”

  And in they went.

  No one came forward to stop them. The place looked completely deserted. Jagger bushes grew waist high in every inch of lawn. Weeds choked the cracks in the cement sidewalks. Chesty nearly quivered at her side, nostrils flared, jerking his head from one target to another. They were being watched by half a dozen things that Chesty considered dangerous.

  So Boo’s kidnappers wanted to pretend that Sandcastle was deserted? Fine. Jane and her crew would play ignorant.

  Hal marched forward a dozen feet, pointing out the park’s three large pools and the fact that the river lay just feet beyond. The pools had been covered by some kind of odd-looking tarps.

  “Camo netting,” Taggart murmured.

  More evidence that someone was hiding something. Behind the buildings that lined the boardwalk, Dragon’s Den lay dismantled by Grandma Gertie, the massive statue at the slide’s heart missing. All that remained was the two stories of open wooden stairs leading to the now-vanished launch point. Considering how big the dragon was, Gertie must have had dozens of people with her. It was little wonder they could come in and go without a fight. But why hadn’t Boo just gone with them? Hidden herself in the truck instead of the doll?