by Emby Press
“If you show me what you found in the woods, or where you found it,” she said, “maybe I’ll notice something you don’t.”
*
A few minutes later, we were standing in front of the forgotten playground. “That’s where I found the sock,” I told Ellie, pointing to the base of the jungle gym.
“Forensics scoured every inch of this place,” Todd grumbled. “There’s nothing here!”
The woods around us was silent and still. Nothing moved, except for a slight breeze that played through Ellie’s hair as she stared around her. Then, without speaking, she stepped up to the jungle gym, pushed aside some vines, and ducked between the bars, disappearing behind an unruly curtain of foliage. I followed her.
Inside the ruined dome of the jungle gym, the ground was bare earth, as if not enough sunlight got through to allow anything to grow. My eyes adjusted to the dim light as Todd stumbled in to join us. A detail nagged at my brain, and it took me a minute to realize what was wrong. “All the footprints are gone,” I observed. Todd, the forensics team, and I had tromped all through this place yesterday, but the dirt was just as smooth as if we had never been there.
“It’s a thin place,” Ellie said quietly.
“What?”
“That must be where the baby went, and the kidnapper. The other side of here.”
“What are you talking about?” Todd and I asked at once. I was mystified. My partner was angry.
Ellie turned back to us. “I’m going to do something. Close your eyes.”
“What? Why?” Todd protested.
From out of nowhere, a wind sprang up and struck us full in the face, forcing our eyes closed. I suddenly got a crawling sensation, like you sometimes feel when you are alone in the dark in a familiar place. That instinctive sense that something has changed. My legs wobbled underneath me for a second. My ears popped. Then it was over, and I could opened my eyes again.
I let out a little gasp of shock. Behind me, Todd swore. The vines, the brush, the whole woods, they were just gone. We still stood in the abandoned playground, underneath the rusted-out jungle gym, but now the landscape was barren. Above us the sun could barely be seen behind a thick gray haze, leaving us in twilight. Ruined buildings loomed in the distance. The air smelled stale, stagnant, and cold. “Um, what just happened?” I asked stupidly.
Ellie smiled reassuringly. A little breeze stirred her hair, the only movement in that place. “I activated the thin place and brought us through to this world. The transition can be pretty disorienting if you don’t know what to expect. Some people puke and stuff. Best to go eyes closed the first couple of times.” She looked around her. “Well, here we are.”
“Wh-where is that exactly?” I stammered.
“Not sure. One of the shadow-worlds, but I don’t know any of them well enough to be sure which one. It’s a place that draws off the energy of your world and makes a parallel, a reflection.”
“I don’t believe this!” Todd took several menacing steps toward the girl. “What did you do? Hypnotize us?”
Ellie stared at him seriously. “You know I didn’t. Look around you. Feel it. You know this is real. I get that you’re a skeptic and all, but don’t be a baby about it. We have a little kid to find, maybe several. We don’t have time for that crap.”
Harsh, I thought. I wanted to disbelieve too, but Ellie was right. I knew in my gut this was real, and any other reaction than to roll with it would just be a waste of time.
“These shadow-worlds are mutable,” Ellie went on. “When a being crosses into one of them, it forms to fit images or emotions in their mind or memories. This strengthens its connection to the world it links to.”
“So we did this?” I asked. “It looks like this because of us, where we just came from?”
Ellie shook her head. “I’m pretty sure it was like this before we got here.”
Todd opened his mouth, probably to complain some more, but whatever he had to say was forgotten as we all spun toward the sound of something laughing at us.
Perched atop the rusted-out slide was a small figure, the size of a toddler, but thinner. It’s face was round and flattened, with a cartoonishly wide mouth, and big ears that stuck out. It was dressed in loose gray trousers, but the rest of its body was covered with thick dark hair. Altogether, it looked more like a monkey than a human child. It giggled again, clinging to the rails and bouncing its baby-plump body up and down. “Big people!” it cheered. “Come for a lookie-loo? Or do you want something?”
“They don’t know what they want,” teased a second voice. Another child-like creature crawled out from under the merry-go-round. It’s face was more or less feline, and its fur was gray and striped.
“The bright girl does,” the monkey-child responded, “but the two grown-ups don’t know their heads from a hole in the ground. Let’s have some fun with them! Hey, pretty lady, wanna play with us?”
I was pretty sure it was addressing me, but I shuddered to think what kind of games it might want to play. There was definitely something wicked in its laughter. I looked at Ellie. She eyed the strange beings warily, but said nothing. “We’re not here to play,” I told the thing. “We’re looking for missing children. What do you know about that?”
“Might know something. What are you willing to give us if we tell you?” The monkey-child flipped over the slide’s rails so that it was hanging from them.
The cat-child prowled closer to us. “She has pretty eyes. Maybe she’ll give them to us to play with.”
The monkey-child looked at us greedily, then down at its companion. “There’s three of them, brother. And three little ones. Three sets of eyes, one for each little one we’ve hidden.” The cat-child made a purring sound in response, and licked its lips with a very pink tongue.
“You have the children?” My hand went to my gun, but I wondered if these things would know what a gun was or be threatened by it enough to cooperate.
“As is our right,” the cat-child purred. “We are the Childkeepers. When a child is unwanted we may claim it as our own.”
The monkey-child nodded. “Three children, freely given, between Beltane and Samhain. That is our due each year. It has been so for time unending.”
“Freely given?” I objected, drawing my gun from its holster, but not quite pointing it at either creature. “You kidnapped them.”
“Did not! Did not!” both of them shouted.
“Their caregivers didn’t want them!” the monkey-child insisted. “They wished them gone, away, never born at all. They came to us by right.”
“The single mother, sick of days and nights of crying,” the cat-child explained. “The girl angry at the child who interrupted her kisses. The mother with no time for her naughty little girl. They didn’t want them.”
“They’ve changed their minds,” I replied. “They want their children back.”
“No backsies!” howled the monkey-child. “Unwanted children are ours. Ours!”
Todd’s gun barked beside me. The cat-child didn’t even flinch as the bullet threw up a chunk of dirt just to one side of its feet. “Our law says different,” Todd growled. “You are hereby under arrest for kidnapping. You will tell us where the children are. Now.”
The cat-child arched its back in a pounce-ready crouch and hissed. “Dull-witted thing, you will regret starting a fight with us.”
“Detective Mills,” Ellie whispered, “They’re very magical. I don’t know how well your gun will work against them. Or what kind of powers they can bring to a fight. Let’s avoid violence if we can.”
Todd just gaped at her, clearly out of his depth. Roll with it. I thought furiously. I might not know what was going on, really, but this put me in mind of the kinds of stories I used to read as a kid. In those fairy tales, when fighting was a bad idea, the hero would try to bargain or trick his way out of whatever dangerous situation he’d gotten into. “Maybe,” I suggested, “we have something we can trade you for the children.”
“No trades!” the monkey-child shouted. “Not unless you trade different children for these. But those children must be yours to give. Do you have any children, lady?”
My six year old nephew sprang to mind. I cringed.
Ellie stepped forward. “I don’t know what world you come from,” she said in a quiet but menacing voice, “but it isn’t this one. Your auras are all wrong for this place. And your magic looks like the wrong kind for opening thin places and doors. Who brought you here? Whom did you bargain with?”
The cat-child hissed again. “You won’t get any answers out of us, bright-girl.”
The monkey-child dropped to the ground and started toward us. “We know who you are, World-Orphan. We don’t belong here, but you don’t belong nowhere. The Master won’t like you trying to break up our bargain. Where will you end up if he casts you from this world?”
“You don’t want to mess with me like that,” Ellie said. Thunder growled overhead. The two creatures looked at each other uneasily, then scampered off so fast we could never have caught them.
Ellie started walking in their direction anyway. “Come on. Maybe we can find this Master of theirs and figure out what’s going on.”
I followed her, and Todd matched my pace. He held his gun in a ready grip at his side, and his expression said that he had no idea what was going on, but the next threat he saw, he was damn well going to shoot it, whether he knew what it was or not.
“It called you ‘bright-girl’,” I said to Ellie as we walked. “I don’t think it said that because you’re smart. And ‘World-Orphan.’ What’s all that about? Who are you, anyway? And you never really explained where we are, either. I’m a detective. I need to be able to make sense of things.”
“Well,” Ellie began, “your world and this one are just two of many, many worlds. Once, there was just one world. Regular humans like you lived there, and humans with magic, and magical creatures. There was a war, between the magical beings, and the humans who felt threatened by the magic. Actually, ‘war’ isn’t really sufficient to describe it. It was terrible, and it went on for centuries. Finally, a group of powerful magical folk came up with a plan. Split the world in two, one world with magic, and one without. The spell took years of preparation, and skill beyond imagining. But even with all that, something went wrong. Instead of splitting in half, the world shattered, into hundreds of thousands of worlds, no two alike.”
“And what about you?” I asked.
“I was there. And the piece of world I belong to is out there, somewhere, too.” She looked away. “Except that I lost it. I went too far, to the wrong place and time, and I can’t get home again. So now I travel from world to world.”
“What the hell do you mean, you were there?” Todd scoffed. “How long ago did this supposedly happen?”
Ellie shrugged. “I’m not sure. Your geological history kind of rewrote itself to make it so your world was always the way it is now. Some time in what you call the Dark Ages, maybe?”
“Yeah, right. I thought you said you were sixteen.”
“That’s a good approximation of my physical age.”
“You’re not human,” I concluded. That was no more crazy than the rest of what was going on.
“No. My father was human, but my mother was a Fae. Highly magical, ageless. Some call us magical people ‘bright souls’. That’s what the Childkeepers meant. I don’t age, either. And anyway, I’ve been in and out of so many worlds and times I’ve lost track of how many years I’ve actually been alive. So yeah, I tell people I’m sixteen. It’s easier.”
*
A few minutes of walking brought us close to the building we had seen from the playground. It was an abandoned shopping mall, surrounded by cracked and cratered parking lot. A few junked cars stood here and there. As we got up to the building itself, we had to walk carefully around giant piles of twisted metal and broken glass, the remains of the sign for a department store. Ellie hauled open the glass double door, and we went inside.
The store was vacant except for a few naked mannequins, which stood like ghosts among empty clothing racks. The electric lights weren’t working, but somehow the place was illuminated with the same level of twilight as outside. Scuttling feet and the laughter of the Childkeepers echoed back to us from an unclear source.
“If we have to search this whole mall for those children, we could have a problem,” I noted. “We might do better to follow those animal things to their master and try to get some information out of him.”
Ellie looked worried. “He didn’t really sound like the kind of guy we can bargain with.”
I shrugged. “Maybe not. Or maybe those creatures were just making threats, trying to scare us off. The master still seems like our best shot.” I considered for a minute that my next question might sound ridiculous, but what the hell. “Ellie, you don’t have any, um, powers or something, anything that would help us here, do you?” Todd snorted. I ignored him.
“Not really,” she answered. “I see auras around people. That might be useful if we find the Master, but not until then. And the wind speaks to me sometimes. But I’m not hearing anything useful right now. The air in here is too stagnant. It doesn’t know anything.”
“Oh,” I said. I wondered if I should worry that her answer made sense.
Ellie stopped for a moment, standing very still, eyes closed. “I think I can sense where the Childkeepers have been, though. Come on.”
She led us out of the store and into the main space of the mall. It was all the same, completely empty except for left-behind junk and the sort of detritus that fills abandoned places. A chair, an empty rack, part of a broken advertising display, papers, wrappers, styrofoam cups, soda bottles. Some of the stores we passed had their doors locked or were blocked off with those chain screens that pull down from the ceiling. Others stood open. But all were completely deserted. We reached an escalator. It wasn’t running, but we headed up it anyway. The second floor was no different than the first. I thought, however, that the laughter we were following sounded closer now.
Without warning, the kiosk in front of us exploded. Instinct took over, and I tackled Ellie, forcing her to the ground as glass and shrapnel rained down on us.
“You are not welcome!” a male voice boomed. “Leave this place at once and you may live. Stay and your lives are forfeit.”
“Looks like we found the Master,” Todd said. He was crouched behind me, gun out and looking for a target.
It was my turn to roll my eyes at him. “You think?” I scanned the area, then spotted him, lurking in the shadows of what a sign declared had been a candy store. He was wearing a black robe, with a hood pulled down so that it obscured his face, and a big silver pendant around his neck. Todd saw him too, and fired off several shots. What looked like a misty gray curtain appeared just in front of the hooded figure. It must have magically absorbed the bullets or something, because Todd was a great shot and should have been able to hit him at that range, but the stranger didn’t even flinch. Todd swore and fired again, with the same results.
“Fools!” the Master yelled. He waved an arm and bellowed something in a language I didn’t recognize, and a bolt of purple lightning erupted toward us.
Ellie raised a hand, and a suddenly a gale wind whirled around us, deflecting the bolt.
“Wait!” I cried. “We’re here to bargain. We want to made a deal for the kidnapped children.”
“Bullshit,” Todd growled at me. “We need to arrest this crazy son-of-a-bitch, Nora.”
“Does he look like he’s going to let us arrest him?” I grumbled back. “We can’t shoot him. What do you think we’re going to do? Talking is our only option.”
I don’t think the Master could have heard that exchange between us, but he laughed at us anyway. “There will be no bargains. You are at my mercy, and I have none. You will die.” He let loose another energy bolt, but this time it was aimed not at us but at the ceiling. The tiles shattered, and a heavy light fixture came crashin
g down on top of us. Ellie’s wind slowed its fall enough that we all just managed to roll out of the way. This was not looking good.
“He’s human,” Ellie called to us over the howling wind. “See the talisman he’s wearing? All his magic comes from that. None of it is actually his.”
Todd nodded. “How are we going to get close enough to take it away from him?”
Todd was thinking like a cop. Secure the situation, subdue the suspect, then put the facts together. He was thinking with his gun. But sometimes facts were more useful than a gun. I tried to focus my thoughts, block out the chaos around me. If our perp was human, from our world, he must have some kind of motive. Why kidnap those kids? Arcane rituals and human sacrifices came to mind, but that theory gave me nothing to work with so I put it aside. Besides, the Childkeepers had said the kids were theirs, part of a bargain with their Master. So if they got the kids, what did this guy get? It had to be something to do with lost or unwanted children, since that’s what the Childkeepers were all about. And Ellie had said this weird place we were in would be shaped by the thoughts of a person who entered it, so he had to have some kind of emotional connection to the old mall.
Suddenly, I knew. “Peter Dougan.”
The hooded man had been readying another blast of energy to throw at us. He stopped, stiffened. I had his attention. Ellie noticed, and the wind died down.
“You’re Peter Dougan,” I repeated, coming out from behind the wreckage of the kiosk and ceiling tiles. “You used to own the mall and the park behind it. I found your old case file when I was researching the area. Your eleven year old son went missing, and when the police couldn’t find him, you supposedly went off the reservation, chasing conspiracy theories and the occult, and finally disappeared altogether. So this is where you went. Am I right?”
The man pulled back his hood, revealing a middle-aged face, balding and lined by worry and struggle. “So now you see why I can’t let you have those children. I’ve spent years gathering power, searching for answers, learning to open the doors to the realms of magic. The Childkeepers have promised to find my son for me. I can’t risk anything that would get in the way of that.”
