Miriam’s mobile rang in the warm cocoon of the car, making both her and Alice jump. The cat ignored it. Miriam dug the phone out of her coat and frowned at the display.
“Oh dear. It’s Colin. What do I do?”
“Just tell him we’ve gone out for the night. Dammit. I rather hoped he wasn’t at that van back there.”
Miriam nodded, and tried to put on her most normal voice as she answered. “Hello, Colin, love.”
“… ty Mir …” The reception was bad, his voice cutting in and out, and she let out her breath in a gust of relief.
“Colin? Can you hear me?” Now her voice sounded normal. Cheerful, at least.
“… lo?”
“It’s no good, dear, we must be out of range. I’ll call you later.”
“… iam!”
She hung up and looked at Alice. “He sounded a bit agitated.”
“Did he? Oh well. Can’t be helped.” Alice looked at the cat. “Are we on the right track, here, Thompson?”
The cat yawned, exposing neat white teeth, and stared out into the dark.
“I hope he’s not taking us anywhere awful,” Miriam said. “You know, because of the D-R-A—” She stopped as the cat gave her a look which said, as clearly as if he’d spoken, that he didn’t appreciate her doubting his spelling ability. “Sorry.” The cat stared at her for a moment longer, then looked back at the road.
“I’m sure we’ll find out soon,” Alice said.
“Where are we?” Miriam asked. The fields stretched long and dark to either side of the car, barely glimpsed beyond the range of the headlights, and they’d left the last houses behind ten minutes ago, turning onto a rutted, unsealed road. The weeds whispered along the flanks and undercarriage, and if she’d opened the window she could have touched the dry-stone walls outside.
“I don’t know exactly,” Alice said. “I’ve never been up here before.”
“I hope he knows where he’s going.”
Despite the fact that he was looking up at her, the cat somehow managed to look down his nose at Miriam, his tail twitching. She flushed and rubbed her own nose. Being in such close quarters to him was making her snuffly.
They came to a junction, and Thompson indicated left, paws still steady on the dashboard, taking them up a farm track that headed into open ground, leaving the walls behind them. It didn’t need to be marked private. It wasn’t the sort of road you’d find by accident, and Miriam didn’t even think that that you could call it a road without really stretching the definition. It was nothing more than an ill-defined trail climbing into the fells, a mix of mud and gravel making the wheels slip here and there. Miriam clung to the door and hoped they weren’t going to suddenly slide off sideways into a bog.
“You better not get us stuck, Thompson,” Alice said. “My poor little car is not made for this sort of thing.”
“Well, she’s doing better than Bessie would have.” Miriam’s elderly Beetle probably would have taken one look at their route and expired in shock.
Alice snorted. “That’s true enough. I do wish we’d had time for dinner, though.”
Miriam dug through her bag, but only found some Tic Tacs. She offered them to Alice and they drove on in silence, surrounded by the scent of mint.
Lights appeared up ahead, still a long way off, but Miriam took a deep, relieved breath at the sight. She’d been starting to wonder if the damn cat was going to drive them straight off a cliff, out here in the dark. Or just strand them in the fells to freeze. After all, they still didn’t know whose side he was on, if anyone’s. She wondered if cats even had sides. But they’d been safe so far. There had been a few dicey moments when the car had started to slide, but Alice had recovered them before they did more than spin a little sideways on the path. The undercarriage had bottomed out on the raised ridge between the wheel tracks rather nastily more than once, and an unpleasant clanking had started up beneath them. Miriam suspected that something had gone wrong with the suspension. Whatever it was, it sounded expensive.
Thompson looked at Alice, and mewled.
“What?” she said, her voice sharp. “What now?”
He pawed the indicators.
“Stop that! It’s hard enough to keep on the road without you messing around distracting me.”
“I think he wants you to turn the lights out,” Miriam said, as Thompson batted the lever again.
The cat mewled approvingly. Or disapprovingly. Who knew what a cat meant, Miriam thought, as Alice brought the car to a stop. It didn’t take much. They’d been creeping along in first for the last mile, barely quicker than walking, and the car seemed to shudder with relief as the engine died.
Silence rushed in around them, followed by a thick and hungry darkness as Alice switched off the lights. They were high up in the fells now, and with her eyes unaccustomed to the heavy dark, for a moment all Miriam could see were the distant house lights floating ahead of them, like a deep-sea jellyfish in the far reaches of an abyss.
She swallowed audibly, and Thompson started purring.
“We’re here then, are we?” Alice asked, and jumped as the cat walked over her lap to scratch the door. “And you can stop that right now. You’ve done enough damage to my poor car.”
She opened the door to let the cat out, and Miriam followed her lead, the air cold enough on her face to make her gasp as she stepped into the dark. Her back ached after jolting along the rough road, and she stretched the kinks out, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. The stars were painted in broad, crowded sweeps above them, and the night was still. No traffic noises, no mumbling sheep. Just the wide still sky with a sliver of moon and ahead of them, the distance impossible to gauge, the yellow lights of that desperately lonely house.
She could also just make out the cat, standing in the path ahead of them, waiting.
“You sure about this, Thompson?” Alice asked him, and he turned and started padding toward the lights.
“Are we sure about this?” Miriam asked. “There could be anything up there. Those things in the Audi, for a start. And I’ve still got no phone signal. We can’t even call for help.”
Alice considered this for a moment. “Even if we had signal,” she said, “We’ve got nothing to tell the police. ‘Oh, a cat led us up here’? I hardly think even Detective Inspector Adams would buy that one.”
“What about Beaufort?”
“We haven’t seen them since they went back for their own investigations, Miriam. We don’t know what happened. They might have their own problems. And we have no way of getting in touch with them.”
Miriam sighed. “I’m going to get Mortimer a mobile for Christmas.”
“Well, wishes and fishes.” Alice opened the boot of the car and took out a cricket bat. “Can you swing this?”
“Um. I think so?” Well, she knew she could swing it, but Alice probably meant could she hit anything with it. That was another question entirely. She also wasn’t sure why Alice just happened to have one in the car, but she supposed it wasn’t that important right now.
“Good.” Alice handed her the bat, closed the boot and opened the back door, taking a black cane with a silver handle from behind the seat. The cool starlight slid off the silver, revealing the lines of a dragon’s head as Alice gave it a couple of experimental swings. “Ah, yes,” she said. “There we go.”
Miriam tried a couple of moves with the bat, although she wasn’t quite sure it had the same style as the cane. Alice locked the car, and they turned up the path after Thompson, still waiting ahead of them with an impatient line to his tail. As soon as they started walking he jumped up and began trotting away.
“Why a cat?” Miriam asked. “Why couldn’t it have been a big, scary dog, like a Rottweiler or something?”
Thompson looked over his shoulder and hissed.
The house took a long time to get any closer. Alice seemed to be as comfortable as the cat in the dark, following him on light, quiet feet with the cane sometimes resting against her shoulder, sometimes helping her over the rougher ground. Miriam, on the other hand, found herself slipping on loose gravel, suddenly ankle deep in a muddy puddle, and (judging by the smell) she’d also manged to find the only cow pat out here. She tried to carry the cricket bat as casually as Alice was carrying her cane, but eventually resorted to using it for balance, and occasionally as a walking stick.
They staggered – well, Miriam staggered – up a final rise and found the house directly in front of them. It was a big old thing, probably Edwardian, with stern windows and gardens that had likely once been full of topiary and small gravel paths. Now, in the depths of a winter night, the grounds seemed to be mostly populated by skeletal bushes and dead grass, with muddy patches where the rabbits had been at it. There was a light on in one upstairs room, seeping through thin curtains, and another downstairs, where they could see into an empty living room. There were a few ramshackle outbuildings, one with the roof caved in, plus a double garage with a potholed gravel drive leading up to it. Miriam frowned at the drive and squinted into the dark, seeing Alice doing the same.
“That’s a road,” Alice said, stabbing her cane toward it. “We just about destroyed my car on that damn track, and there’s a road?”
Thompson shrugged, and headed toward the garden gate.
“Do we have a plan?” Miriam asked.
“Follow the cat. I need to keep an eye on him so when we’re done here I can skin him for breaking my car.”
Miriam didn’t think it sounded like much of a plan, but she fell into step with Alice anyway. What else was she going to do, stay out here on her own?
Up close, the house didn’t look much better. The mortar was crumbling between the old bricks, and one of the panes in the front door had been replaced with plywood. There was an old rotary washing line lying on its side in the garden, like the bones of something long-dead, next to a dog house with a wall missing and, thankfully, no occupant. Thompson trotted straight to the front door, but when Alice and Miriam reached him he bared his teeth and pointed his nose to the back of the house.
“That way?” Alice asked, and he purred.
“What’re you going to do, cause a distraction?” Miriam demanded.
He gave her a disdainful look and sat down, watching them expectantly.
The side of the house that the cat sent them down was dark, the downstairs windows boarded over and no light coming from above, and Miriam had to admit that the horrible animal had figured out the best way for them to pass unnoticed. She wasn’t looking forward to what might happen when they did get noticed. Given the scorched vans and exploding baubles and unpleasant Audi drivers, she wasn’t even sure if they were expecting to encounter a who or a what.
They paused at the back corner of the house, Alice peering into the yard beyond while Miriam peeked over her shoulder. The patchy lawn at the back of the house was washed with yellow light, and Miriam could hear a TV playing inside. It sounded like Strictly, and she wished with a sudden, hot fervour that she was home right now, curled up in front of her TV, warm and dry and, most importantly, safe. Because she felt a long way from all those things right now. The drive had been almost surreal, guided through the night by the green-eyed cat, but now all she could think of was Alice’s burning door and the scream of the bauble before it exploded. She felt a hiccough-y tightness in her chest and swallowed against it. That was the last thing she needed right now.
Alice leaned in close so she could whisper in Miriam’s ear, and Miriam dragged her attention back to all the cold, damp unsafeness around her.
“Keep against the walls. I’m going to go first and get as close to a window as I can, so we can see what we’re dealing with. Do what I do, and for God’s sake, be quiet.” Alice’s voice was a hiss in Miriam’s ear, and she nodded violently, flattening herself against the wall and bumping it with the cricket bat. There was just enough light for her to see Alice close her eyes and shake her head slightly, then the older woman was gone.
Miriam followed Alice around the corner to the back of the house, holding down the hiccoughs and concentrating on not walking into any shutters, or dropping the bat, or tripping over. Alice eased herself up to the closest window, then peered cautiously around the sill. She stayed there for a moment, then looked back at Miriam, shook her head, and crouched to squat-walk under the frame. Miriam decided that she didn’t need to see inside, and after a moment’s thought dropped to her hands and knees and crawled after Alice. Dignity be damned – she didn’t trust herself not to have the top of her head showing over the sill at the exact moment the bauble thieves walked into the room beyond.
Alice had stopped at the next window, stealing a look inside. She was there for longer this time, and when she looked back at Miriam her mouth was a hard line and her eyes were wider than normal. She beckoned. Miriam, still on her hands and knees, shook her head. She definitely didn’t need to see anything that made Alice look alarmed. Alice beckoned again. Miriam shook her head again, and this time Alice grabbed the collar of her coat and hauled her to her feet. Miriam swallowed a whimper as the older woman pressed her to the wall next to the window, then forced her to lean forward until, like it or not, she was peering into a cavernous kitchen.
There was a long wooden table in the centre of the floor, and it was piled with baubles and boats, some of them still in Miriam’s packaging. There were other baubles there too, with clumsy designs like the one that had been tearing around Jasmine’s house. There were also open cans of sugary drinks and torn packets of sweets, crushed ice cream tubs and empty chocolate wrappers, dirty plates piled anywhere that seemed handy, and drifts of newspaper and dead leaves on the floor. But Miriam registered all that only on the very periphery of her attention. The rest of it was focused on the – the figures around the table.
There were three of them, all with heavy broad shoulders and long skinny legs in filthy jeans. One was eating slices of cake and fruit tarts off a huge catering tray, his hard, pale fingers swamping them. Each morsel vanished in a single bite, and he immediately reached for another, exposing broken teeth that crowded his overlarge mouth as he chewed. That mouth seemed to wrap halfway around his skull, as if he could flip the whole top of his head open like a cartoon character. His teeth were sharp, too. The ones that weren’t broken came to nasty, shark-like points, and his round chin was scarred where he’d bitten it. As Miriam watched, he narrowed bright blue eyes and threw an empty drink can at another creature that was hunched over the baubles. She snarled at him (Miriam decided she was a she, as she was wearing a summer dress as a blouse, her muscular chest stretching the material alarmingly), and her long ears flattened against her bald skull.
“George hungry,” the first creature growled, the words deep and phlegmy. “You get George food.”
“George eat all sweet things. George idiot. Hazel working.”
“Hazel lady goblin. Hazel get George food!”
“Hazel break George head!”
The third creature turned around in his seat, where he had his pointy nose almost touching an old-fashioned TV, and screamed at them both, “Idiot goblins shut up! Clever Sam goblin watching dancy show!” Spittle flew from his mouth, raining merrily down over the table and floor, and Miriam pulled slowly back from the window, the hiccoughs scared into submission, and stared at Alice with horrified eyes. She didn’t think she could ever watch Strictly again. Not while knowing that things like that enjoyed it.
What do we do? she mouthed, and Alice shrugged, then twiddled her thumbs.
Wait.
They waited.
Miriam wondered how long they were going to be waiting out here. And what the cat was going to do for that matter. Was it going to do anything? Or was it just going to lead the goblins out the door to them? You could never tell with cats. He might be an enemy agent.
Her feet were freezing. She was pretty sure one of her boots was leaking, and she just hoped it wasn’t the one she’d trod in a cow pat with. At least she hadn’t worn her clogs this time. It had been a near thing, but at the last moment she’d remembered the alarming regularity with which they seemed to have unexpected excursions. She was hungry, too. She thought longingly of the curry, now sadly cold on Alice’s stove top. Or at least she hoped it was cold. Had she switched it off? It was that cat again, he’d been rushing them. She couldn’t remember. She—
An unearthly shriek split the night, jolting her out of her thoughts, and she slapped her hand over her mouth to hold in a scream. What was out here? What was that? Was it a banshee? Oh, God, not a banshee, they were meant to only come before a death. Was one of them going to die? Was it going to be her?
Alice grabbed her arm and hauled her forward, not bothering to duck under the window this time, and Miriam gave a hic of alarm. What if they were still in there? Those things, those goblins, because that’s what they’d called themselves, and she supposed they’d know. Miriam couldn’t believe she was even thinking that. Goblins. Even the word was scary, never mind those long claw-like nails, and the shark’s teeth, and the arms that looked like they could tear your head off. Not that she’d really thought about it, thankfully, but if she had ever thought of goblins, she’d have thought of something like these—
“Miriam,” Alice hissed in her ear. “Either pull yourself together or I’ll leave you out here. Focus.”
Another one of those terrible screams went up on the other side of the house, and Miriam clutched Alice’s jacket. “What – hicc – is that? Is it a banshee?”
“It’s the cat, Miriam. He’s got them out of the kitchen, and we need to get in there before they come back.”
“I don’t want to go in there!”
“I know, but those postmen might be tied up downstairs. I saw one of them go down to the cellar with some chocolate and crisps. We have to find them if we can.”
Miriam stared at Alice, wondering if she was going to cry, then thought of the bauble screaming around Jasmine’s living room, and the cheerful young DHL man who had been so grateful for his mince pies and Christmas cake. She hiccoughed and nodded. Her legs were shaking, and she was suddenly glad they hadn’t eaten the curry. She was pretty sure she’d be throwing it up right now otherwise. “Okay. Yes. You’re right.”
“Then let’s go.”
The kitchen door was unlocked, and Alice led the way in. Thompson was still yowling, so Miriam supposed he was holding up his end of the bargain. The mud and chocolate-smeared room stank of wood smoke and stale milk and festering food as they hurried across it, and Alice tried the cellar door. It wasn’t locked either. The goblins evidently weren’t too worried about anyone escaping. Alice hit the light switch, and they scurried down creaking steps lit by one bleak yellow bulb at the bottom.
“Oh, sugar,” Miriam whispered, peering over Alice’s shoulder as they arrived on a stone floor covered with a thick wash of mud and dirt. A man and a woman in Royal Mail uniform, the nice DHL driver, and another, older man in a black polo shirt were sat on the floor, heavy chains running from thick iron bands at their waists to heavy rings set in the walls. The woman had a cut on her cheek, and the DHL man had a black eye, but otherwise they seemed unharmed. They stared at the newcomers in astonishment.
“Are you hurt?” Alice asked. “Can you stand?”
“What does it matter?” the woman said. “We can’t get out. We’re chained.” She spoke the way people sometimes do when they’re overseas, and think over-enunciating will magically make everyone speak English.
Alice frowned as her. “That is not the way to look at things.”
“Look, I don’t know how you got in, but you should leave now,” the Royal Mail man said. “That bloody thing that stole my name and goes around calling himself Goblin Sam has the keys. He’s the only one.”
“We’ve tried breaking them,” the DHL man said. “They won’t budge.”
“I’m not surprised,” Alice said, examining the rings on the wall. “These are old, but they’re solid. Driven right into the foundations.”
Miriam wasted a moment wondering why anyone would have old chains in their basement, and was just deciding that she didn’t really want to know when she realised Alice had said something. “Sorry, what?”
“I said, let’s go.”
“Are we leaving?”
“No, we’re getting the keys.”
“What? How?”
“We’re going to catch a goblin.” Alice turned away without waiting for Miriam’s response, not that Miriam could come up with anything more coherent than another hic. Goblin-catching seemed like a very bad idea in a night that was already full of them. She opened her mouth to try and make some sort of protest as Alice started up the stairs, cane swinging casually in her hand.
Then the light went out and the screams started.