The long slanting light of afternoon found Viv in a spacious, sunny café, where she bought a spinach-filled pastry from the counter, and tucked herself in a booth near an old pay phone. She didn’t need it, of course, but its presence made her feel better about using her cellphone indoors—everyone else seemed to do it, but she didn’t want to be rude.
She held the sword, swathed in its scarf, between her knees as she dialed. It had occurred to her to worry about the legality of carrying a real sword around the city (did the scarf make it a concealed weapon?) but nobody had given her much of a second glance as she passed, and the weight of it was beginning to feel natural in her arms.
Each of the numbers she’d collected on her walk was answered by a machine, listing prices, requirements, and open house times for the available apartments. Of the six leads she’d gathered, four explicitly forbade pets. One of the others proved to be a two-bedroom apartment leasing for more than two thousand dollars a month, but the same recording also listed other openings managed by the same realtor, and there were a couple of studios asking $1500 and $1450 a month, respectively. Viv wrote down the address and open house times for the $1450 studio, inwardly recalculating how much such an exorbitant rent would leave from her paycheck for ramen and cat food. The last spot—the building in the Tenderloin that she now thought of as the “pee place”—included a studio leasing for $1375, with the next showing in five days, a Wednesday evening. Her first day of work would be Monday. She felt, unhappily, the certainty that she’d been foolish to leave only one weekend for apartment hunting. But that’s all she would have needed in Ohio.
The last number she dialed was for home—no, she inwardly correctly herself, for her parents’ home. The sound of her mom’s “Hello?” brought a sudden lump to her throat.
“Hi Mom!” Viv said brightly, forcing cheer into her voice. “I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier, but it’s been kind of a whirlwind.”
“How are you? How was the flight?” Her mom’s voice sounded distant across the line, crossed with a touch of static.
“It was fine—we landed safe, no problems with the hotel. I got Silk to the kennel and I spent the day apartment-hunting. I’ve got some good leads already.”
“That’s good, that’s good. Are the people being nice to you there?”
“Some of them seem strange,” Viv said. “I’m still getting my bearings, I guess.”
“We love you, honey,” her mom said. “Your dad wants to talk to you.”
A second later: “How’s my Oberlin grad?”
Viv’s parents had been so proud when Oberlin accepted her. They’d insisted that she go, even though the scholarship the school offered wasn’t enough to pay her way. Viv had taken on a lot of student loan debt, but her parents had sacrificed as much as they could, even making early withdrawals from their own retirement plans to cover the tuition costs. They told her a hundred times that a name like Oberlin would open doors for her. In the year after graduation, when she was scrounging for tips and deferring payments on her loans, Viv had wondered bitterly if they’d been wrong. But now a door had opened, and it was up to her not to botch the opportunity she’d been given.
“I’m doing great, Dad,” she said.
She kept the conversation short and sweet, putting the best possible spin on the prospects before her. She told her parents about the silver guy in Union Square, but not, for some reason, about the hippie lady and her sword.
Be brave, be secret, and be wise.
No, it wasn’t because of the strange woman’s ravings that she didn’t want to talk about the sword: it was because she didn’t want to her parents to worry about her, and that whole episode was just a little too weird to make a funny story. She told them instead that San Francisco was beautiful, and that she’d seen the ocean. She also told them some of the rental prices she’d seen quoted, and her father actually gasped, which made Viv feel obscurely better.
After they said their goodbyes, the lump was threatening to come back in Viv’s throat, so she headed back onto the streets with the idea of maybe being able to visit her cat before the kennel locked up for the night. But Silk would not understand why she was being left alone in what surely must seem a nightmarish gulag, and Viv would not be able to explain, so she dragged her feet as she made her way back toward the kennel. Anything, she prayed silently, I’ll take anything, but I need it now, please, pretty city, I need a home.
The sword leapt in her hands, and she nearly dropped it. Astonished, she stared down at the length of metal, certain she had not imagined the motion: it had moved like a living thing. As she stood dumbfounded on the sidewalk, it twitched again, almost tugging her off in a rightward tangent. There was a little side street leading off in that direction: Cypress, it was labeled, though there were no trees at all visible along its narrow concrete confines. It was barely wide enough for a car to edge through, lined on both sides by unpretentious buildings with fading paint.
Wide-eyed, Viv took a few tentative steps down Cypress alley, her mind running through potential explanations for the phenomenon she was witnessing. Magnetism? What were the physical principles behind dowsing? People used sticks for that, she knew, but couldn’t it be done with metal rods?
Or maybe it was magic. Maybe it really is Excalibur, the young man had said. Her rational mind scoffed at the idea; but the thought persisted.
About halfway down the alley, the sword stopped tugging. It hung heavy and inert in her grasp. Bewildered, she looked around. One of the doors facing the street was open, and she caught a glimpse of a spacious room with tiled floor, no furnishings that could see. Then a workman in paint-spattered coveralls emerged from the inside, catching her looking.
“Hello,” he said curiously.
“Oh, hi,” Viv said. “I’m sorry, I was just—looking for vacancies.”
“Well, this is one,” he said. He had his hand on the doorknob, as if to draw it closed behind him, but he hesitated. “Or, it will be. We just finished spackling the bathroom. Haven’t listed it yet...”
“Oh! When, um. When do you think it will be available?”
The man shrugged. “Really it could be now. We’ve got the wiring done, put in the carpet, the water runs—we’ve got some cosmetic stuff left to do, but do you want to have a look?”
Viv blinked. “Yes! Yes please!”
He pushed the door wider and stood back. “Watch out, there’s a step down.”
Viv gingerly stepped inside. The tiled room was a kitchen, a big one, with the fridge, sink, counters, and stove all stretching along the length of one wall, the rest of the space left open. It was half-sunken into the ground, with a concrete step down from the front door, and it was dim despite a single window facing the street. Everything looked clean and new, although there was a gaping hole above the sink, exposing the wiring in the wall. A cosmetic issue, she assumed.
“I’m Alberto,” said the man, following her inside. “Alberto Rodriguez.”
“Viveka Janssen,” she said, proffering her hand. “Are you the landlord?”
“I’m the property manager,” he said, returning her handshake. “If you move in, I’ll be your point of contact. —This is the eat-in kitchen. Back here is the bedroom.”
Viv followed into the interior of the apartment. The bedroom (significantly smaller than the kitchen) was also sunken and shadowy, with one window and a back door facing an interior courtyard. It had dark gray carpeting and smelled of new paint. The last room in the house was the bathroom—small enough that it was equipped with only a shower, no tub, but it was nicely tiled with sparkling fixtures.
“It’s all new,” Alberto volunteered. “This whole apartment is new, nobody’s ever lived here before.”
“What was it before?” Viv asked.
“A toolshed,” he said frankly. “Times being what they are, the landlord decided to convert the space into a rental unit. But of course that means new plumbing, new wiring, new fixtures, new countertops—it’s all state of the art.”
Viv wandered back into the bedroom. The upper halves of the walls were white, but the underground portion was exposed concrete, and it was pretty easy to imagine shovels and rakes standing in the corners. But looking out the window at the courtyard she could see that it was framed by the backs of the adjoining buildings, with fire escapes scaling up from the ground to their roofs. A cat would enjoy climbing those stairs, and nosing about the potted plants that people had set out.
“I have a cat,” she said anxiously. “Do you think that would be all right with the landlord?”
Alberto shrugged. “There would be a pet deposit,” he said. “But yeah, the guy upstairs has a cat too.”
“How—how much will they be asking?”
“Well, this is a pretty big studio,” he said. “And there’s the walk-in closet.” He pulled back a sliding mirrored door, and Viv silently observed that, under the narrowest definition, a person could indeed walk in there, although not if there were any clothes hung inside. “I think they’ll want at least eight hundred a month. Maybe eight-fifty with the cat. Plus utilities.”
“I want it,” Viv said immediately.
He grinned. “I’ll give you a lift to the office and you can fill out an application.”
Thankfully, he didn’t ask her about the sword, even as she eased it into the passenger’s side of his Honda Civic. The real estate office turned out to be some distance away, in the western portion of the city. It was outfitted with several cubicles and a plastic ficus. Viv took a seat near the door, accepting a pen and a one-page Xeroxed rental application. Alberto asked her permission to run a credit check while she filled it out; she gave him her social security number, worrying about a couple late credit card payments and her deferred student loans, but when he returned he assured her that her credit was fine. He barely skimmed his eyes over the application when she was done.
“For the deposit we’ll want first and last month’s rent, plus a $500 deposit for the pet,” he told her. “And for that we’ll need a certified or cashier’s check. We’ll pro-rate the first month from your move-in date—when do you want to move in?”
“I don’t have a bank account here in the city yet,” Viv said nervously. “I’m not sure how long it will take to get the check—can I call you tomorrow?”
He nodded. “We’ll hold the apartment for you for up to three days. That’s about when I was planning to put the listing up anyway. We still need to finish up a few things. But you could move in tomorrow if you wanted.”
She thanked him profusely, pocketed his business card, shook his hand again, and backed out of the office, her sword tucked under her arm. A thick fog had fallen on the streets while she was inside; the day’s warmth was abruptly gone, replaced by a chill ocean wind, and she wasn’t at all sure where she was. She wandered down the sidewalk in what she hoped was a easterly direction, looking for a street sign. Her teeth chattered. She clutched the sword close to her body, not quite ready to think about the magic it may have just performed on her behalf.
Somewhere in the foggy distance a street musician was playing something that sounded like a flute, a beautiful and lonely sound. Viv found herself walking in the direction of the music. It made sense when she thought about it: buskers would need to set up somewhere with a lot of foot traffic, which probably meant that she could find a bus, or one of the streetcars to take her back downtown.
And in fact, the next street she crossed had train tracks laid into it. They curved and dipped down, disappearing into a tunnel, but there was a small stucco shelter that must be the streetcar stop. As Viv made her way over to it, a movement caught out of the corner of her eye caused her to look over again at the dark tunnel mouth.
There was someone coming out of it. A small person, walking between the train tracks. He raised his head, met her eyes with his own—strangely bulbous and misshapen, and lit with a cold orange fire.
Viv stood in the middle of the street, rooted in place with terror and shock. There was, this time, no mistaking the evidence of her eyes. It was a little man, his limbs twisted and his fingers bent like gnarled twigs, capped with long yellow nails. He wore rags, and a dull red-brown cap, and as he stared at her with those huge eyes he began to smile—a malicious, hungry smile that spread from ear to ear. He broke into a loping run, bounding directly at her, and there were other figures coming out of the tunnel behind him.
Viv screamed, a high, thin noise of terror that was whipped away by the wind and swallowed in the fog. She fumbled with the sword in her arms, letting the scarf fall away as she swung it up in a two-handed grip—not out of any reasoned impulse to self-defense, but only an animal desire to put whatever she had between herself and the monster. The goblin-thing came leaping for her, claws outstretched, making a dry cackling sound like the clatter of winter branches against a window. He was terribly fast.
Viv lashed out with the sword in a desperate, clumsy arc, realizing as she did so that she would be much too slow. The goblin sprang at her, hurtling towards her face. His hideous nails were making for her eyes.
But at the last second the sword heaved in her hands, lurching up, so that the creature’s leap carried him onto the point of the blade. He howled in burbling agony as inertia carried his body forward, impaling it father along the sword. In cold horror Viv shook the sword with both hands until the goblin’s body fell off to the ground, where it did not move.
But there were more of them behind him, maybe a dozen, circling around to come at her from all sides. Viv swung the sword again with all her strength, and managed to catch two of them. The metal cleaved through them like water, as they shrieked and fell—and again the sword itself extended her movement, arcing around to catch a third that came at her from the right. But she’d left herself exposed. Two of them grabbed onto her legs. Their claws cut through her jeans and the fabric of her shirt, sinking into her flesh. She screamed again, this time in pain; and with their weight hanging off her she could not manage to swing the sword again. She stumbled, fell to one knee on the pavement: dragged down to their level, all she could see was their jagged mouths opening wide.
The flute music she’d heard before was suddenly very loud, and no longer wistful, but skirling and aggressive and quick, a whirlwind of aharmonic sound. The goblins abruptly released her, falling back. In fact, they were running outright, leaping back for the darkness of the tunnel. In another instant they had vanished beneath the ground, dragging their dead and wounded with them.
Panting, bleeding, Viv turned, still holding up her sword in shivering arms. The music stopped, and she found herself facing the musician.
He at least looked human—a young man about her own age, dressed as if on his way to a club, in black leather pants and a shirt of some shining iridescent material, the colors shifting and swirling across his lean frame. His fawn-colored hair brushed his shoulders, and his chiseled face was pale, with bright long-lashed eyes. Those dropped a bit as he looked her over. "Mm," he said, almost humming it, and tucked the wooden flute into his back hip pocket. “New blood.”