jordangreywolf

“It’s a goblin SUPER-market,” I quipped.

Dead silence. Well, it was a misaimed joke anyway, and I was just showing my age to my charge with the reference. If anything, it was a goblin shopping mall we had stumbled into from the labyrinth of corridors, a physical embodiment of half-remembered storefronts reminiscent of sometime in the late 20th century on tiered platforms overlooking a central atrium. My ears told me that a fountain must be somewhere down below, perhaps in the middle of a food court, but I didn’t dare go to the glass-paneled safety rails to take a look. Instead, I glanced at my traveling companion cowering behind me, a young man less than half my age and easily twice as strong, but still visibly terrified. He held up his map, but in an annoyed flash I realized he wasn’t actually looking at it so much as holding it up as a talisman to ward off evil spirits.

“It doesn’t work that way, Hamilton,” I said. That was his first name, by the way. “You have just one job. Keep an eye on the map.” Reluctantly he snapped his gaze back to the map, without any real understanding. I pitied him for being the unambitious third (formerly fourth) son of the Chief. The Daddy-in-Chief had finally demanded he prove himself, but that meant sending him along to “help” me, and it might well get both of us dead, or far worse. If he lived, and our mission was somehow a success, of course, he’d get all the glory as the rescuing hero, maybe even give Son #2 a run for his money. Well, except I wouldn’t put it past Jefferson to just arrange for an “accident,” like what happened to the previous Son #2, Roosevelt. It was that sort of family.

The stores were chaotic arrangements, like hastily-painted made-up details in the background of a painting meant to be faux-detail blurry noise, not for you to actually pay close attention to, lest all pretense of sense fall apart. Mannequins weren’t just in the window displays, but occasionally standing near racks and shelves as if they were shoppers. Plenty of signs boasted “SALE” or “CLEARANCE” or “NEW,” but further away from the main approach they might say something like “SAALE” or “CLARANCE” or “NWEW,” and it got even worse if you looked at the smaller print. A “FLASHION!” store I peered into had racks, a counter, something resembling a register, but no hint whatsoever of a door leading to back office space, or any way to get behind that counter to tend customers shy of clambering and sliding over the top. I tried to ignore the supremely generic retro-pop playing over the speakers, the sort of thing that if you were distracted by other things might register as something vaguely familiar, but the lyrics were word salad, best ignored for one’s sanity.

In my hands, I had a notepad. I jotted down counts from my pace-keeper, as unreliable as it might be, sketched landmarks, little pockets of sensible details that felt more “real,” as subjective as that might be: a sign with a properly-spelled complete sentence on it, some convincing weathering on a floor tile, a tiny piece of actual trash peeking out from under the foot of a railing-side bench. Ideally, I would be comparing this with the map, looking for a path that does not shift, but per the Chief’s decree, Hamilton got the map, which of course is seen as the essential key not to get permanently lost in this madness, should we become separated. I, an expendable scribe, would just “take notes” (and lead the way). I had, at the very least, already carefully copied what the map used to look like. To find our way back, if Hamilton would be so kind as to let me briefly peruse it, I could puzzle out the common elements. I didn’t absolutely need it. Not yet. Not so long as Hamilton would at least glance at the accursed thing now and again.

A muffled voice interrupted the constant stream of generi-pop. Hamilton instinctively froze, seeing this as a new threat, and his instincts weren’t necessarily wrong. Something-something “hours” something-something “thank you” something.

“Oh no,” I muttered, as I grabbed his sleeve, casting about for somewhere not quite so open and exposed. I saw an “S-Mart” nearby. I would have burst out laughing if I wasn’t this close to panic. It was clearly off the beaten path, but it had sturdy-looking shelves, and it would have to do. “This way!”

We clambered inside. “We’ll be open again tomorrow at—” the muffled speaker-voice said cheerily outside. It didn’t matter that it was the middle of the day, at least according to my watch. Time was subjective in the faerie realm, the back rooms, or the fevered dream of that accursed global AI that achieved “singularity” and manifested itself by shattering reality and then “rebuilding” most of the planet in its own warped attempt to “procedurally generate” the missing parts of our world.

One thing I and others like me had discovered about the denizens of the fae realm is that when exploring faux urban environments, they rarely looked up. We clambered up the shelves in lieu of a ladder, displacing product boxes, many of which were tellingly light and evidently empty, as the security shutters began rattling down, and lights flickered out. I inwardly cursed my luck halfway up as I turned to see that this was a malformed storefront, as one of the “display windows” was completely lacking glass—not that this would keep out a determined shadow-prowler anyway.

I didn’t dare push up the ceiling tiles to try getting atop the wall dividers: there was too much risk of things up in that space. The top shelves held our weight well enough. Although they looked like standard gondola shelving, as I suspected, the parts were fused solid. (If anything, I was lucky that the faux products on the shelves that we knocked aside weren’t fused in place as well.) “We’re camping here for now,” I whispered. “Tuck the map away for safekeeping—you don’t need to worry about it shifting on you if we’re not moving.” I faintly saw the silhouette of him nodding before the last lights went out, leaving only the faint glow of the false “EXIT” signs.

To my amazement, after a while, I could hear him faintly snoring. I prayed he wouldn’t roll off; I resisted jabbing him awake because that might cause the very thing I was hoping to avoid if he panicked. I still heard the white noise of the fountain somewhere far below, but the jabberwocky synth-wave had mercifully ceased. More importantly, I heard clicks and shuffles of footsteps, and a squeaking noise—a shopping cart? No, perhaps it was a janitor’s push-cart. Was there actually a janitor keeping this place tidy at night, after all? As chaotic as the place looked with the lights on, it was still clean. No broken glass, no burned-out husks, no signs of fights or prey. No debris save for the boxes we’d knocked off the shelves. I felt a chill, worrying that some faerie caretaker would notice the mess and forcefully put things back in their proper place, never mind if we were in the way.

Voices. I couldn’t help but focus upon them, trying to tell where they might be coming from. Someone outside? From the air itself? Bursts of laughter. It started to sound a little livelier. I couldn’t be sure—my ears weren’t that good—but I imagined it to be in the vicinity of that unseen fountain somewhere down below in the atrium, perhaps in a food court. It reminded me of ages gone by, felt like the chatter of “mall rats” gathering in the liveliest part of the mall, whether back in its heyday or in the later “ghost mall” days. I couldn’t be sure the voices were actually connected to living beings; sometimes “ghost” voices would materialize as part of the ambience that just came with one’s surroundings, much like the birdsong that would emanate from completely bird-less trees in an artificial “park” I once found right in the middle of a menhir-circle of doorless skyscrapers. It didn’t feel like it, at least. I didn’t catch those annoying hints of unnatural repetition.

My joints ached from my awkward position. I wasn’t about to stretch out and make myself more comfortable, knocking aside even more empty boxes in the process and creating more noise. I cupped my hand around my watch and held it up to my face, tapping it to get the time. A couple of hours had passed. There was no telling how long the “night” would last here.

More footsteps. Humanoids were definitely shuffling past the storefront. I heard the pitter-patter and jangle of what I imagined to be a wiener-dog with a collar (I guess pets are allowed?), the squeaking wheels of a stroller, the sharp click of high heels, the murmuring buzz of distant mall-noise that I heard nothing of while the lights were on. In the faint light cast by the “EXIT” signs, I caught glimpses of shadows. They were humanoid all right, but something was off. Sometimes way too tall, thin, and lanky, sometimes comically stout with jerky waddling movements. These were goblins, after all, but far more than I expected.

I heard a hiss to my left, up atop the shelves with me. With all the noise, Hamilton had finally awakened and had clued in that we weren’t entirely alone. What was worse, though, I thought I heard a grunt from one of the passersby outside the security shutter. I could occasionally make out shadows slipping by in the faint ambient light, but it took me a while to realize that one of the shadows was standing outside the glassless display window, peering inside. It reached out, as if only belatedly noticing the lack of glass, then began, tentatively, to clamber up and between the mannequins. The others were content to haunt, to go through the motions of a day shopping in the mall, but this one had broken out of its routine. Was it a hunter? Merely curious?

One goblin, we could deal with. But to do so noiselessly was a challenge. If the whole mall were alerted, we’d be better off taking our chances with the things above the ceiling tiles.

The funny thing was, I could hear it bumbling, grunting, knocking things over. A couple more seemed to have noticed its activity, and had stopped in front of the storefront as well. While in their “routine,” the goblins seemed to act as if they could see perfectly fine in the darkness, and I wondered if they were “seeing” some sort of hallucinations or ghosts that guided their actions in that state. They reacted to “bright” lights either with violence or by fleeing, but even in their natural element of the dark they were graceless creatures, frequently tripping over their own feet in a mad scramble to get to or away from whatever had startled them from their reverie.

Hamilton had the sense not to yelp or even curse under his breath, but I could still hear him fussing with something on the shelf. Maybe checking to see if he still had the map, for all the good it would do us right now? I dearly hoped he hadn’t gotten it into his head that it would work as a talisman against goblins. Maybe it was his flashlight: a bright light would buy some time, but would bring the others down on our heads. We might have to move quickly.

I heard a “clunk” of something bumping into one of the empty boxes on the floor below. I had been so focused on where I heard the first goblin that I failed to catch another one practically upon us. Was there another entry point I had missed?

No matter. The jig was up as Hamilton most definitely did yelp, switching on his flashlight, and then to my surprise pulling open a water bottle and splashing the cowering creature with it. It was a girl, or once had been one, wearing a multi-layered mishmash of brightly-colored more-80s-than-the-80s apparel likely pilfered from these same stores. She was a living caricature, no doubt shaped by insecure self-image, having too-big ears, large feet, only four feet tall, with a cartoonish face that looked almost puppet-like, somewhere in the uncanny valley between pitiful, strangely cute, and/or horrifying. I couldn’t get that good of a look at her face, however, because the water he'd splashed on her was sizzling and burning, and she was wailing in agony, covering her misshapen face with cartoonish hands. A fire alarm sounded in the distance, and some sort of emergency/security lights snapped on, letting me get a glimpse of the other goblins stumbling away from the splash zone.

“What was in that bottle?” I demanded, as Hamilton froze in place, flashlight wobbling in his hands, still trained on the simmering goblin. It didn’t smell like acid.

“H-h-h-holy!” he stammered.

Holy water. No, not baptismal water, but water with pinches of silver powder, wolfsbane, cedar sawdust, and whatever else one imagines might be the bane of some monster or another in lore, because surely something in that mix would be proof against monsters! To my shame, I’d heard it was a joke, pointless, worthless, a laughable superstition, but here it seemed to be working, and nastily so.

It dawned on me that we weren’t being swarmed by goblins. What in the world? In fact, once the two other pathetic creatures in the store got a fair distance away, they seemed bizarrely unconcerned, as if they knew that was all Hamilton had, and though their fellow goblin was sizzling away, that was no particular worry of theirs. Nothing to see here, move along. And so they casually made their way back through the open display window, rejoining the throng outside. The security lights made their silhouettes all the easier to pick out, and apparently weren’t sufficient to put them into a panic mode. Nor was the shrieking.

It made little sense, but I couldn’t leave things as they were. This was a goblin, but it had once been human, before it had made the mistake of drinking the water, eating the food, and staying forever in faerie-land. I clambered down and plucked a water bottle from my own pack—refilled countless times, not exactly pure, but definitely not Hamilton’s “holy water” mix, either. I tried pouring it over the creature’s face. Thankfully, its skin hadn’t melted off or anything so grotesque, but it was red with welts rising where the original formula had struck and run off. It belatedly occurred to me that maybe it was water that was causing the trouble, but fortunately that wasn’t the case, and this seemed to actually be helping somehow. The creature’s wails dropped to a mere whimper, at least. “You’re going to be all right,” I whispered, more hopefully than truthfully.

All right, so whatever sort of goblins these were, they weren’t the scream-and-claw-your-face off sort. At least, not under these conditions. “Hamilton, we might be all right. Let’s work on finding the next checkpoint before the rules change on us.” I turned and … the kid was gone. With the security lights on, I hadn’t noticed the sudden absence of his flashlight. No Hamilton. No map. No sign of which way he’d gone. Well, that’s just splendid. Now we’re probably both doomed.

But I still have a mission, even if Hamilton is freelancing it.

“Thank you,” the creature said.

What?

“I’m sorry,” it said.

For what? I expected things to get ugly.

“Go back home. It’s not safe here,” it said.

Well, no doubt. I just nodded. I wasn’t sure if this was really communication going on, or maybe the goblin was repeating, reenacting something from back before it—she—had ceased to be fully human. “I’ve got to take someone home, yes,” I muttered, “before it’s too late.”

The creature’s eyes widened. Her eyes were beady and liquid black, but those brows were expressive, even under that mop of ‘80s-frizz bubblegum-pink hair. “The little one? The boss took her to the office. The top floor. No one goes there.”

I froze for a moment, then flipped through my notepad. I showed her the sketch I had made—Chief wouldn’t let me take a precious photo—of his youngest, a daughter, Harris. (Oh, the names in that family!) The goblin-girl nodded. “That’s the one.” She smiled briefly, then looked serious again. “You can’t beat him. I’m sorry.”

“The pen is mightier than the sword,” I said, holding mine up, and winking at her.

She smiled, but it was a humoring smile. I was clearly out of my mind. “Then you’d better hurry.”

I didn’t disagree.

The map had been attuned to Harris. In theory, somewhere in that maze of details that would slowly creep and shift when you weren’t looking, was a common thread that would indicate the path the Boss had taken to come to our little pocket of reality, to steal away a helpless little girl, for some alien purpose. I had already considered the possibility that with all the dithering and the negotiations to acquire the precious map, the little kid was now a goblin or else dinner for one, but the pink-haired creature’s reference to her in the present tense gave me a glimmer of hope. Without the map, I had to rely on instinct. I took my chances and crawled out of the storefront and, taking a deep breath, found a gap to go with the flow of the meandering window-browsing goblin “shoppers.” I dared glance over the banister, and caught a glimpse of several goblins horsing around at the fountain. Perhaps they were actually having fun? Or were they going through the motions of whatever antics they had been up to just before the world ended?

There is certainly a danger in traveling the faerie lands alone. The lost will be forever taunted by promises of “EXIT” that offer no such escape, and it is only by the stupidest of luck that you might stumble out upon some pocket of stable reality and realize it—and even rarer that it’s one with the basics required for survival. I worry when I’m in Faerie and things start to seem a little too familiar, a little too déjà vu. It’s a matter of philosophy whether the rogue AI “godling” is somehow creating new pieces of fragmented reality in reaction to the psyches and expectations of those who travel it, or whether these areas already exist, and will continue to exist, but that travelers are unconsciously traveling along dimensions they cannot comprehend. Is it being created, or is it being found? And if so, by whom?

With so many goblins who seem to live here—at least for the time being—I’m leaning toward “found,” but the danger is still there: If I deviate too far from the well-trod path, which tends to be the most contiguous and stable one, I run the risk of ending up in some “new” or different area with no means of retracing my steps. So far, this has seemed remarkably stable.

I navigate the winding course that takes me around the atrium. Thus far, I still haven’t found elevators, stairs, escalators, or any other evident means to reach the other floors, let alone the food court at the bottom. However, that only simplifies things for me. This must be part of the haunt of “The Boss.” The breadcrumbs of parts that make sense might either by tiny islands of preexisting reality strung together by the AI, or they could be particularly potent memories—either manifested or “found”—by force of will from the most powerful, strongest-willed creature lairing here. Popular tradition would be to dub it by some mythic name—to call it the dragon, the behemoth, the goblin king, et cetera—but it looks like Miss Goblin spared me the trouble.

At the far wing of the mall, I break away from the shuffling crowd. For a brief moment I tense, wondering if their behavior will shift once I’m no longer going with the flow, but nothing. I continue, past several more security lights and encounter the entrance to … a hotel? It’s better lit inside; that makes more sense than I expect from this place, honestly. It’s not necessarily an anomaly. I actually remember visiting a mall once (single-level) that was directly connected to a hotel, back in the Real Times. At the other end, it had an office building. In fact—no, here I stop, because there’s a connecting, dark but wide passageway with a few more closed storefronts on the non-hotel side; I can clearly see down the length of it, another front that appears to be leading to, not a storefront or a hotel, let alone an exit, but what I suspect is indeed an office complex. Again, that lingering déjà vu that makes me wonder if I’ve left the Boss’s trail and stumbled onto one of my own making, but the goblin did say office.

There’s a logo. “BOSS.”

Subtle, this one.

So, what’s the security like? If there’s any logic to this place, the main lobby should be one or more floors below, level with the food court, but here it looks like I’m at a main entrance. Nobody is seated behind the security desk, not even a goblin pretending to fill the role. At least it’s lit, for now. I haven’t yet found any evidence of shadow-prowlers, but the crowds might be keeping them away.

Lo and behold, an elevator. I’d put my odds at 50/50 that if the door opens, there’s an open shaft. But no such luck; pushing the button causes it to light up for a bit, but then it dims. The floor level indicator is digital, with LEDs in classic “8” formation, but they light up randomly, at a pace that might suggest an elevator is on its way, but each floor’s “number” is just a jumble of bits. After a while, I’m convinced it’s purely for show. I draw a few more sketches, and record my steps for good measure. I find and take the dimly-lit staircase. It goes both up and down. The floor “number” is a distorted squiggle. It’s perhaps a vain exercise, but I chalk-mark the door at my floor, just in case I get lost in the stairwell when I come back down. I assume “up” is the way to go.

Not surprisingly, this takes me a while. Also not surprisingly, the thought occurs to me several times whether or not this stairwell might be eternal. I dutifully sketch each symbol at each floor, checking for repetition. Or, for all I know, I’m doing so in order to anchor reality. It’s really difficult to determine what’s cause and what’s effect in Faerie.

Occasionally, I see scuff marks on the walls. I pace myself. This could go on for a while. Experimentally, I go back down a floor, to make sure the symbol hasn’t just randomly changed. It hasn’t. Back up again.

I’m starting to get exhausted, when I come round and up to the next landing, and find something completely unexpected. The “stairs” going up further are a smooth, diagonal slope. More scuff marks on the wall, but these are different. I look up. There are steps on the underside of the stairs. Or, rather, it seems that the rules have changed.

This is, I fear, going to be a real pain. But then, an idea strikes me. Somehow I just know this should work. I lie down on the floor, and place my feet up on the wall. “Up is down,” I say, and step up onto the wall. The world reels. Momentum suddenly pitches me forward, and I involuntarily run up—no, down—the wall, barely managing to land on my feet when the room rolls around to the point where I’m standing on what a moment ago was the underside of the next landing up.

I take a deep breath. I’m reluctant to look “up,” for fear that the old gravity will reassert itself and I’ll drop on my head, tumble down the stairs and break my neck. Now, instead of following the stairs counterclockwise and upward, I’m—going clockwise and downward? I suppose the office could still be at the “top” from a certain point of view. Whether I’ll still have that perspective when I get there is something I’ll have to find out.

“I wonder if this keeps the rank-and-file goblins out,” I wonder aloud as I pick up my pace going “down” the stairs. “Time to meet the boss.”