The Goblins of Bellwater

by Molly Ringle

  Livy snatched the pages from Kit.

  “Go ahead.” Kit folded his arms, copying Livy’s former position. “Read it.”

  Livy smoothed the top page. The paper crackled, as if brittle with age. She began reading aloud.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  7 August 1954

  I, Élodie Fabre Roux, now that I am ill and do not have long to live, write this confession of the goblin curse I brought upon myself and my descendants. I hoped it would die with me, but the last time I was strong enough to go into the woods and see the goblins, they told me it would transfer to one of my children, that it was a curse that would run through our bloodline for a thousand years. I cannot bear this thought and I write all this down for my children in the hopes that they will find some way to break the curse. Even if they cannot, it is only fair they know what has happened to them and why.

  As you know, I was born in France and lived there for my first twenty years, before we came to America. I was of a poor family, in Nantes, in Brittany. From childhood I loved your father, Jean-Baptiste Roux, or Jeannot as we called him. He loved me too, but he was from a prosperous family, and when we were eighteen he gave in to pressure from his parents and became engaged to a girl who met their approval. Her name was Françoise. I did not hate her nor even know her very well. She seemed meek and well-meaning. But my heart was broken and I knew there was no love between them, nothing like what Jeannot and I felt for each other.

  We were Catholic, of course, but in Brittany the ancient ways were also strong, and I had always felt an affinity for the spirits of the land, the fae. I had sensed them, heard their music and voices at night in wild places, seen glimpses of them, and understood there were many kinds of them, in different forms and with a variety of powers.

  I also knew it was dangerous to call upon them to use their powers. There were many stories about how this had gone badly for people. But I was young and heartbroken, and determined to try even if it meant danger.

  I went into the woods alone at night under the full moon. I cried out to the fae to appear for me.

  It was my ill fortune that it was a goblin who answered. I did not know, at that time, how devious they are.

  The creature looked no larger than a goat at first, and all composed of branches and earth, or so it appeared. But as it crawled down the tree and into the moonlight, it changed before my eyes until it became a strong old woman in peasant dress. She would have looked normal enough in passing, but when she spoke I saw she had sharp teeth like a wolf. It made me shudder.

  She said her name was Redring, and I told her mine.

  At those words, Skye sucked in her breath, and everyone paused to glance at her.

  Livy had felt the hard resistance in her own voice soften like melting wax the further she read, as confused wonder took over her anger. Skye’s gaze darted to the sketchbook, which Kit had set upon the square side table.

  Kit leaned down and picked it up. He held up Skye’s drawing of the goblin for everyone to see: limbs like branches, teeth like a wolf’s, a ring strung around her neck with its stone filled in with blood-red pencil, the only color on the page.

  “Redring,” Kit said. The name hung in the quiet room.

  Livy felt chilled all over with fear, the way she’d felt watching scary movies as a kid. Grady looked like he felt the same, silent, his arm rigid around Skye. Skye and Kit gazed steadily at Livy, willing her to understand.

  Kit set the sketchbook back down and folded his arms. “Go on.”

  Livy drew in a breath, found her place, and kept reading.

  Redring asked what favor I wished from the fae, and I told her my predicament.

  Yes, she said, they could make it so Françoise would not marry Jeannot. All they’d ask in return was my ongoing cooperation: a monthly gift of gold, for as long as I lived. “Just a tiny bit, an amount equal to the weight of this little ring,” she said, holding up the silver one she wore on her necklace.

  Indeed the ring was an ordinary size, but I knew gold was costly. I told her I was poor and could not get it, not every month certainly.

  Redring said, “We will gift you with magic so you can always steal and not be caught, as long as you steal for us.”

  I thought of the rich who treated people cruelly and kept getting away with it. Certain clergymen, politicians, merchants, unkind society women. It would only be fair to steal gold from them, I reasoned. Besides, they were rich and would not miss it. I could live with this rule.

  But I wanted to make sure they would not kill Françoise if I accepted. Of course not, Redring assured. They would just make her not want to marry Jeannot anymore. She would wish to leave him. Then the marriage surely would not happen.

  I agreed. God help me, I agreed.

  Redring shook my hand to seal the pact, and in so doing she sliced my palm with her nail, which was like a cat’s claw. I cried out. She licked away the blood, which repulsed me, then she told me my tribe and hers were now linked. She let me go, telling me to come back at the next full moon with my first payment of gold. She promised that in the meantime Jeannot and Françoise’s engagement would fall apart.

  And so it did, but not in the way I expected. Within a few days, I heard Françoise was acting strangely, hardly talking, seeming withdrawn and ill, but no doctor could find anything wrong with her. Not in body, at least, only in her mind. She never seemed happy anymore.

  Fearful, I spoke to Jeannot. He seemed troubled, but he did smile for me before we parted, and said he was grateful I was still my old self. It filled me with guilt, yet also with hope.

  From gossip over the next few weeks I learned of Françoise’s increasing distance from everyone. She slipped away to wander in the woods often. She didn’t want to eat or speak. She had no interest in Jeannot or the upcoming wedding anymore.

  Then one night she disappeared. Her family, the police, and Jeannot searched the woods and neighboring villages for days. Finally, deep in the woods they found the clothes she had been wearing, all except her gold engagement ring, which was gone along with her. They never found any other trace of her. Most people assumed she had been kidnapped or murdered. Some speculated she had run away with another lover, and we all hoped so. I hoped so most fervently, even if it meant the goblins had enchanted her with a love spell.

  Jeannot was upset but not heartbroken. Meanwhile, I had to begin to steal my ration of gold.

  I started by picking the pockets of rich folk right under their noses, taking rings and watches and coins. When I said the magic phrase beforehand, “For the tribe,” no one paid any attention at all to what I was doing. Those thefts were enough for the first month’s payment, and when I brought the gold at the next full moon, I dared to ask Redring if she knew what had happened to Françoise.

  “Of course I know,” she said. “She is alive and well, stronger than ever.”

  “And she is happy?” I asked. For truly I did not wish her to be otherwise.

  Her whole tribe was laughing—they laughed at everything, it seemed. “As happy as we are,” Redring said.

  I had no way to know if she told the truth. I hoped she did. I returned to my life as best I could.

  Jeannot eventually came back to me. We became engaged.

  I kept stealing. From the church I took a candlestick. I walked right into the mayor’s house and carried off several of their gold serving plates. I never liked it. Getting away with it was not satisfying, not even when I reflected on the pomposity of the people who owned these things. But it was the deal I had struck, and I feared what Redring and her tribe might do if I failed to come at the full moon with their gold.

  Then, about a year after I married Jeannot and was pregnant with our first child, I found out what had really happened to Françoise.

  Livy stopped speaking and paged ahead, needing to know what became of people under this curse, unable to take the delay involved in reading aloud.

  Kit told her, after a spell of silence, just as her searching eyes f
ound the information herself. “She became one of them. A goblin. Far as I can tell, she’s still there. Their whole tribe came here, followed our great-grandma to America when she moved. My ancestors say Françoise became known as Flowerwatch, and…there’s still a goblin they call that. I’ve heard them say it. I’ve seen her.”

  Livy stared aghast at Kit, then at Skye. Skye didn’t look shocked, just miserable. Like she already knew, and had known for some time.

  Livy sank into a wicker chair by the fireplace. Her legs felt weak, her insides hollowed out. “So that’s…”

  “That’s likely the curse on you,” Kit said, his gaze on Skye.

  Grady, pale and grave, nuzzled Skye’s head. Great, Livy thought, a new relationship to make this mess even more complicated. But that hardly mattered right now.

  She leafed frantically through the pages. “Then how do we stop it? What did they learn? Where’s the goddamn handbook on this?”

  “Oh, I’ve got lots of information.” Kit sounded exhausted. He still stood with arms folded. “Whole box of it. Every liaison kept records, as best they could. We’ve put together some clues, at least, about how the goblins do things. But how to stop it…” He rubbed his face. “That, I don’t know. No one’s ever caught one of these enchantments early enough to have a chance to stop it. Seems like in every case so far, no one realized it was a goblin curse until after the person had disappeared for good. After that, I’m not sure there’s any bringing them back.”

  “Then this time we’re lucky, right?” Livy refused to give up. Not when Skye still sat right there in front of her. “We can figure out a—I don’t know, a counter-curse. A way to break it. There has to be one.”

  “Look…I want to say yes.” Kit paced back and forth. “But I also have to point out that if there was a way to break it, my family’s done a shit job at figuring out what it is, because we’re still stuck with this curse, four generations on now.”

  Everyone absorbed that for a moment.

  Kit caught Grady’s glance, and added, “You’re protected. I mean, from getting enchanted. So even though you’re in the family, at least you don’t have to worry about them trying to take you. As to whether they’d make you liaison if anything happens to me…I don’t know. I don’t think I get to choose what they do there.”

  Grady and Skye exchanged a silent, charged look. “Protected?” Grady said.

  “It’s all in there.” Kit gestured toward the pages Livy held. “Once our great-grandma realized the goblins sometimes enchanted people into leaving the human world forever, she got scared they’d do that to someone close to her. Her kids, her husband, who knows. So she asked them for some sort of guarantee, and they said she could request one person a year, and they’d never enchant that person for their whole life. In return for that clause, of course…” Kit sighed. “The monthly payments in gold would have to keep going through future generations too. That’s why I’m stuck with it, and my dad, and his mom, and so on.”

  “Why would anyone agree to that?” Livy said.

  “If you read through it, you’ll see. She was tricked. That’s how they operate. There’s always loopholes. They said, ‘We’ll let you protect one person a year, but if we do that, we have to make your agreement go for a thousand years.’ And she said, ‘But I’m not going to live a thousand years,’ and they said, ‘Exactly, then go ahead and agree to it.’ So she did.”

  “Okay, damn it.” Livy rose to her feet, reanimated by anger. “I want to meet these people, these things. I need to see this. And if it’s for real, I’m going to find out how to end this.”

  “I doubt it’s as simple as that,” Kit said.

  “Just tell me how to see them! I have to start there. I can’t even believe all this until I see it, or hear it, or something.”

  Skye made an urgent sound, a sort of whimper. Livy and Kit glanced at her. Her eyes were wide, and she managed a small head-shake at Livy.

  “If she doesn’t take their path, it’ll be okay,” Kit assured Skye. “They can’t get her if she doesn’t take it.”

  Skye looked back to Livy, and acquiesced with a nod.

  “How do I do it?” Livy asked Kit. “How do I summon them?”

  “I’m not sure they’ll come, but…here.” He sighed, and held out his hand. “Let’s see your phone.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  LIVY HAD LEFT ON HER OWN, UNDER KIT’S INSTRUCTIONS. GRADY AND SKYE STAYED BEHIND WITH KIT, WHO DRAGGED out the box of goblin-related files and sat at the kitchen island with it, digging through notebooks and scowling.

  Grady remained seated on his bed, with Skye huddled under his arm, and examined the ghoulish picture that had finally crystallized into focus in his mind.

  Desperate words clogged his throat like a logjam. He would have spoken if he could have, lots of times. He would have told Kit and Livy how the woods had been calling to him too, how this all wasn’t exactly a surprise because the eerie truth had been sneaking up on his brain ever since he met Skye. After all, for the past couple of weeks—and he wouldn’t tell them this part, but—he’d been having various kinds of sex with her daily, out there in the woods, despite drizzle and chill, despite having to lie on damp moss or prop themselves against muddy trees. He could have done all this with her in her room, so why had they kept at it that way instead? The forest must have drawn them, made them unable to resist. He had worked that out already, bizarre though it was, though he didn’t know why it was happening.

  Mostly, he wished he could tell Kit he must be wrong about Grady being “protected,” because the goblins had fucking gotten him anyway.

  By now Grady couldn’t speak of it either. His words had been getting locked down inside him more and more over the past few days, and now that he was dying to speak, he couldn’t. About other topics, he could still talk more freely than Skye could, but not about that.

  Grady glanced at her, and their eyes held for a long moment. The curse was spreading in him, and he could tell she knew it. Had known it from the first day. Her gaze overflowed with sorrow, as it always did when she looked at him, and now he fully understood why.

  He ought to be furious at her for doing this to him. But he couldn’t be. Help me had been her first words to him; she had been drowning, casting out for anyone’s hand, and Grady’s happened to be available. He couldn’t regret going to her. She was his mate and he never wanted to be separated from her, and soon he would never have to be, and that, at least, was a comfort.

  But everything else in his human life—his parents, siblings, hometown; the career he might have had; the man he might have been—for all that, about to be swept into the trash heap of history, he felt immense sadness. Because he was still human, not a gleeful, callous goblin. Yet.

  Skye stirred, slipped out of his grasp, and walked across to the bathroom.

  As soon as the bathroom door shut, Kit glanced over at Grady. “You’re quiet.”

  Grady let his hands dangle over his knees. “Yeah.”

  “I get it. I was pretty freaked when I first found out too. Also I guess you and her are…” Kit sighed, and chucked a notebook back into the file box, then plucked out a different one. “Shit, man. If I’d honestly thought that was what was wrong with her, I’d have warned you. I’d have done something. What, though, I have no idea.”

  “Yeah,” Grady whispered again.

  Kit paged through the notebook. “Look, maybe Livy’s right. Maybe catching it early this time, there could be some way to break it.”

  “Maybe.” Great, now he was echoing words too.

  “But it’s like I said.” Kit kept leafing through pages. “At least you’re protected, so you don’t have to worry about yourself. If that’s any consolation.”

  Grady stared at him, furrowing his brows, willing Kit to look up and understand that he wasn’t protected, that it hadn’t worked, that he was cursed right along with Skye. Kit kept searching through their ancestors’ records without looking up, his face grim. “If she doesn
’t call after half an hour, I’m going out to find her,” he muttered.

  Kit said you had to go to the woods alone at night, so that’s what Livy was doing. He also said it was rare for the goblins to show up on Crabapple Island, so she drove back across the bridge and through Bellwater toward the national forest. He reported he’d only seen the goblins on the island a couple of times, when he was trying to avoid them and they came to bug him anyway. They didn’t like it out there, probably because they had to get people alone to work their magic. That tended to be tricky on the island, where there were too many houses close together, which, Livy figured, must be why Kit continued to live out there instead of on the mainland. That way, at least at home, he could usually avoid them.

  Good God, how was she even thinking about this rationally? As if goblins were a real thing? She gripped the steering wheel tighter, continued on out of town, and made for the nearest Forest Service road. First things first. She’d test this “summoning” procedure and see if anything even happened.

  She bumped Skye’s car along the muddy road, her headlights washing across dark tree trunks, fallen fir needles, and the waving arms of ferns growing over into the roadway. A couple of miles out of town, she decided she’d gone far enough, pulled over, and turned off the engine.

  She creaked open the car door and stepped out. Cold wind whispered. The forest canopy moved high above, just visible against the night clouds. She told herself she wasn’t afraid.

  She tapped the voice-memo option on her phone, and listened to the playback of the six notes Kit had whistled as a recording. She let it play a couple of times into the darkness, and looked up, waiting.

  The wind gusted, the trees swished. Nothing else.

  Maybe it had to be her own voice, not a recording. She whistled it herself, imitating the notes. The partial tune sounded eerie to her; a minor key, if she wasn’t mistaken, more suited to Halloween than to the middle of winter. She wondered what the rest of the song sounded like, and her heart pounded at the possibility that she’d know in a minute, if anyone answered.