Scott watched helplessly through the van’s windshield as the last gas station and bus stop of Goodborough passed behind him and Walnut Crescent lay beyond like the curled body of some huge, regal animal. This was the rich suburb of Goodborough. Scott had never been here before.
“Nice, huh?” said Haskoll from the driver’s seat.
“Very pretty.”
Each estate sat past a vast lawn of deep pile and tasteful flower beds. Some were behind high walls and massive yet girlishly patterned gates. Even the zoo didn’t go to this much trouble.
The van turned in toward one of these gates, which parted and swung open at the touch of a keypad outside Haskoll’s window. They pulled up to a house made of great dark beams and old stone.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” said Scott as soon as the vehicle came to a stop.
Haskoll let them in the tall front doors and disabled an alarm system that had just begun to beep for his attention. “It’s the first door down that hall,” he said. “Meet me back here when you’re done, and I’ll show you the trophy room.”
The hall smelled like tobacco and vanilla. Scott closed and locked the bathroom door behind him, and unzipped his backpack. Up gasped Mick like a trout.
“I know you’re a super-old magical leprechaun and all—” Scott hissed.
“Clurichaun,” said Mick.
“—but nowadays, getting into a van with a weird adult is considered a very bad idea.”
“I only want to find out wha’ these two know. I’ll have a wander and come back to this bathroom. Please, lad. If yeh get into a pickle, just call an’ I’ll come runnin’.”
Scott privately wondered what the elf could do to help, what with his short stature and complete lack of cool magic powers. “This Haskoll guy might see you.”
“Aw, chicken teeth. If Haskoll could see me, he’d have already asked yeh about me.”
“I guess so.”
“I overheard somethin’ about a spyglass. Did it have a pink lens?”
“Yeah,” said Scott, remembering. “I saw some other guys with pink goggles the day I met Harvey, too.”
“Ultraviolet-vision glasses,” said Mick. “Helps regular people see the Fay. They don’t work so well in the daytime, though. But, lad—if these two are hunting Harvey, then they’d be really interested in someone like you. Someone who can see the Fay without a pair o’ goggles. Watch what you say.”
Scott nodded and left Mick alone in the darkened bathroom. It wasn’t until he’d returned to the front door that Scott pictured Haskoll’s binoculars clearly—heavy and black and with perfectly ordinary lenses.
“There you are. Fall in? Just kidding. Wanna see the trophy room?”
Scott let Haskoll lead him through the marble entry hall to a wood-paneled wall flanked with facing staircases. Between these was a narrow door.
Scott took a breath and forced a question to his lips. They were here to learn, after all. “What was that rock you and Papa were talking about? The one you were going to use to check the … droppings?”
Haskoll opened the narrow door and ushered Scott inside with a theatrical bow. “Cold iron,” he answered. The hall beyond was dark, with the faintest outline of another door at its end. “Iron from a meteor, ‘never heated by any human agency.’ We have a few hunks of meteor rock, and we always take the smallest one on a hunt. Go ahead and push through that door—it’s unlocked.”
Scott did as he was told and entered a high, octagonal room that was indistinctly lit by thin ribbons of blue window glass near the ceiling. But some overhead lamps flickered on, and in the yellow, flickering lights … heads.
Heads.
From eye line to ceiling, the paneled rear wall was lined with severed heads. Having never hunted himself, Scott had imagined a trophy room filled with silver cups and little marble pillars topped with gold figures frozen in the act of shooting or bowling or whatever; but these were heads: heads of the most extraordinary shapes. The head of a dark-haired woman with feline features. An eagle’s head that was as big as a lion’s. A row of toadish boys with bloodred skin. A giant—an honest-to-god storybook giant, his round pink face as big as a beach ball. A unicorn. It couldn’t be anything else, though this was no horse head. It was more like some cross between a horse and a fawn: white as cream, with a long, plaited horn of pearl. It was beautiful. Even disembodied and mounted on a rosewood plaque it was so beautiful it made Scott’s stomach turn.
There was a cabinet of skulls. Some were grotesque, with fierce curves of tooth and bone, but many, too many, were to all appearances human. Scott wondered what pointed ears or elegant, almond eyes might once have adorned these. One set of skulls, seven in all, were as small as dice.
Scott crossed the room like a sleepwalker, toward the skulls and heads, to stand under the unicorn. He looked up at the unicorn’s head and neck jutting out from that rosewood plaque. There was a brass plate set into the plaque, just beneath the soft fur of the throat, and an inscription. The inscription read MIDWEST REGIONAL SALESPERSON OF THE YEAR.
Scott blinked and read the plate again. Then he stepped over to the massive head of the giant, who had been the Roosevelt High School District Swim Champ of 1963, apparently. The eagle was either World’s Greatest Dad or else his head had been a Father’s Day gift—it wasn’t clear to Scott. Even less clear was why a row of beheaded toad-boys might be considered appropriate awards for perfect attendance, or even what sort of place you’d have to attend to be given something like that.
Haskoll sniffed behind him.
Suddenly it all came clear to Scott as he felt a headache coming on. He forced a smile and turned.
“Nice plaques. Papa sure has won a lot of awards. I really should be getting home.”
“They are nice, aren’t they,” said Haskoll, stepping forward. “I think that one’s my favorite,” he added, indicating the unicorn. “Of course, not everyone can see what’s so great about them. But you and I can.”
So Haskoll was special. Special in the way Scott was special, and Haskoll knew it. He’d probably seen Mick in the park….
“Sure. Yeah, I have a soccer trophy at home myself. Well, not really a trophy, more like a ribbon for participation.”
… and Haskoll did not strike him as being one of the good guys. Scott would deny everything and get out of there as quickly as possible. It was a classic kid strategy, and he couldn’t think of a better one offhand.
“You asked about cold iron,” Haskoll intoned. “Look over here.”
“That’s okay, I really need to—”
“I insist.” Haskoll took Scott by the arm to a glass cabinet against the sidewall. Inside were three pockmarked lumps of dark metal on wooden stands. Haskoll opened the cabinet and removed the smallest piece. “A real meteor. Nickel-iron. You can hold it.”
Scott held it. A faint trill traveled through his hand and up his arm. He didn’t like it.
“Feels weird, right?” asked Haskoll, his face close, his breath hot.
Scott shrugged. “Feels like a rock. Heavy.”
“We call them coldstones. Papa and me. Watch this.”
He produced the bag of animal droppings and held them near the metal. Scott watched, but not much seemed to be happening.
“These droppings are nothing,” said Haskoll. “They’re rabbit turds. Now watch this.” He reeled Scott back to the cabinet of skulls and tapped the coldstone against the glass. At this it sparked with purple light and gave off angry flashes.
“Weird, huh?”
“I don’t see anything,” Scott lied.
Haskoll turned to face Scott fully. He stared (with the joyless smile of a boy who likes pulling the wings off things) and said nothing. Then a phone rang. Haskoll stared, and it rang again.
“Is that … is that your phone? Are you going to—”
“It’s just Papa, calling to tell me that our smallest coldstone has been in his left waist pocket all along.”
“Um … well, shouldn’t you—”
“He’s an idiot, Papa. A complete tool. I do all the hunting. All of it. Papa just shoots where I point, because he likes to shoot things.”
The phone rang a seventh time, and an eighth, and stopped.
“That backpack of yours looks about ten pounds lighter. Why don’t you call for your little friend, and we’ll all talk about this rabbit-man that Goodco misplaced.”
Scott breathed. “Okay. Can I see that coldstone again?”
“Sure.”
Scott took it and threw it as hard as he could through the cabinet glass. Then he ran back for the front door, screaming.
“MIIIIIIIIIIICK!”
He tore through the narrow hall, slamming doors behind him, and slid to a stop on the marble floor of the foyer just as Mick emerged from the bathroom.
“Trouble, lad?” the elf asked before Scott scooped him up.
“Shh!”
Scott didn’t suppose he could outrun Haskoll to the main gate, so he pulled the front door open wide and hid the two of them behind it. He pressed his back against the inside wall and counted to give his mind some focus. He’d only counted to two before hearing the sound of a door, and the patter of feet running past, and then silence. At fifteen, Scott and Mick came around the side for a peek.
“Wore out your welcome fast, did yeh?” whispered the elf.
“Not even. I think we were about to get invited to stay permanently.”
They squinted out into the sunshine. There was no sign of Haskoll.
“I woulda gotten us free,” said Mick. “I always escape, eventually.”
“Remind me to tell you about the trophy room.”
Outside, birds were singing. Wind ruffled the tops of trees.
“We’re going to have to run for it, aren’t we?”
“On three?”
On three they ran. Scott, for his part, thought he’d never run like this before. He was a pinwheel of limbs. He remembered the president’s Physical Fitness Test at school and how he’d only earned a lousy Participant ribbon for that, too. If only the president could see him now—he just needed to be chased is all.
Mick was faster than you’d expect for someone with no real legs to speak of. He skidded right between the bars of the gate and stopped to look back.
“Mind your house, lad! He’s behind you!”
Scott made for the center of the gate where the double doors met—it was especially thick with curlicued iron that would be good for climbing—but found that it had not quite latched. Luck o’ the Irish, or whatever it was he had for being part changeling. He slipped through the gate and shut it firmly behind him, and then Haskoll was there. The gate shuddered as the man slapped against it and glared, grinning, his fists clutching the ironwork, his face straining against the bars. Scott and Mick ran off down the hill before he had a chance to recover, or work the keypad.
“It’s been really fantastic spending time with you, Scotty!” he called after them. “I hope you’ll both come back and visit!”