“Now the thing is,” said Eddie, to Edward, as their pickup truck crunched its way into a resting position on the gravel driveway, “not to take things too fast. Hastiness makes mistakes. Slow and steady can’t hurt anything but patience, and we’ve got enough of that.”
Edward nodded at his father. Or maybe he was just listening to his iPhone, it was hard to tell.
“Well, I expect you’ll pick it up,” said Eddie as he swung himself out of the cabin and dug through the truck’s back. Extracting a large toolbox, he peered into it, then shut it with a satisfied grunt. “Allrighty. Pay attention.”
Ringing the doorbell produced no reply for approximately thirty seconds, after which the sound of something heavy falling end over end could be heard. There was a brief pause, and then a wincing, heavy-set man opened the door.
“Eddie North and sons,” said Eddie.
The man looked at them. “Where’re the others?” he asked, after a pause that was just long enough to be uncomfortable.
Eddie shrugged. “Give ‘em two, four years and they’ll both be in highschool and I’ll start bringing them along. Just don’t want to have to change the business name twice, you know?”
“If you say so.”
“You got a boggart in your fusebox, you said?”
The man nodded wearily as he beckoned them inside. “Alan Thompson, and yes to your question. Two weeks now. Little bastard’s got it worked out top to bottom – he turns the lights off right when I go down the stairs, pulls the plug on my computer before I can save anything, and if I use anything rechargeable he just waits until it needs a fresh shot of juice and then he gives it a power surge. I’ve been living out of my neighbour’s sockets for a week.”
Eddie nodded thoughtfully as they were led to the fusebox, its flat, grey face an impenetrable mask. “Righty-o. You try dislodging it yourself?”
Alan looked embarrassed. “Yeah. I would’ve called you in sooner if I’d known it could get this bad. At first I tried chalking a circle around the fusebox and burning mistletoe, but then it just set off the fire alarms. Then one of the guys at work suggested mare’s blood, but that’s hard to get ahold of. Took me four days to beg so much as a half-pint, and when I tried to use it, the damned thing took the power out of the fridge and hasn’t let it back on since.”
Eddie nodded solemnly as he wrenched open the box and peered at its contents. “Righto. Well, I hate to bear bad news, Mister Thompson, but you’ve made no mistakes that aren’t common. See, maybe some of those tricks might’ve worked if you’d caught the little bastard right away, before he could worm a grip in, but now he’s got a firm hold on your wiring. No, we can’t win this one by playing his game anymore. Son, hand me the screwdriver. Phillips”
“’Kay,” said Edward, putting as much sullen wretchedness into the demi-word as possible. The tool was extracted and handed over – rubber-handled, with a silvery tip.
“Now the thing with your basic boggarts,” said Eddie, as he sized up the fusebox’s innards, “is that they’re scarperers. You want to get rid of them, you got to get them when they don’t expect it and nail ‘em with one go. Sir, would you mind flicking the lights on and off repeatedly, just to get its attention?”
The man hesitated, but did as asked. There was a whiff of smoke in the air and a sharp and ear-cleaning whistle erupted from the fusebox, which turned into a truncated yelp as Eddie stabbed his screwdriver viciously into it, puncturing metal and something more insubstantial. The handle hissed, and he swore and let go.
“You okay?”
“Fine, fine. They like to leave a bit of a bite for you to remember them by now and then.” Eddie sucked his fingers as he watched the screwdriver’s handle gently ooze apart, flowing down its own blade. “Damn and blast. I’ll have to fix that up over the weekend. Should be fine now, unless it left a trail for its relatives. I’ll give you some milk spiked with holy water, leave that out a few nights.”
The man looked worried. “Have you got anything less… lethal? Only I think I’ve got pixies in the back garden, and I don’t want any collateral damage.”
“Nah, they’ll be fine,” said Eddie. “A little holy water might give ‘em diarrhoea, but it’ll all come out in the end. So to say.”
“Now that,” he told Edward, as they drove away, “was an easy one. They’re not always like that, and that’s why you’ve got to be careful, take as much time as you need. Plus, on some jobs – big jobs, the ones you don’t want to screw up or some silly thing runs off with your shadow or head or something – you get paid by the hour and there’s no sense at all hurrying it then. Understand?”
A half-shrug, delivered while staring out the window. Oh well, good enough.
The next stop, he was careful to point out, also wasn’t a big deal. A regular customer, a middle-aged woman named Susan who lived just a little too close to the park and didn’t keep her security wards running in the daytime – “to save on bills,” she said. Eddie was more than happy to take the money that would’ve gone to the magitechnical company.
“It’s goblins again,” she told him morosely, leading them down to the cellar door. “I just don’t know how they do it. I turn on security as soon as the sun so much as looks at evening, everyone says they’re nocturnal, no questions asked, and the little bastards still make it in. Just don’t ask me how.”
Eddie chewed his lip as he examined the door. What may have been ambient house-sounds leaked out from behind it, hinting at something more sinister than mere settling foundations or creaky boilers. “Son, go get me the sledgehammer – back of the truck. It’s all right,” he explained hurriedly at Susan’s pained wince, “I’ll be careful. You renovated recently?”
“Yes,” she said.
“More’s the better. They like the dark and damp, so I’ll have ‘em off-kilter. And they won’t have had any time to dirty the place up to feel like home yet.” Probably, he added in the privacy of the realm underneath his baseball cap. Then, after a moment, he appended: much.
Edward returned, sledge in tow, having taken neither an offensively long amount of time nor a particularly quick go at it. Eddie felt a little twist at his heartstrings – so, he had been listening to him earlier. He took up the big rusty instrument with a grunt, and reminded himself to polish it later – there was still some congealed ichor on it from its last use, an ice troll inside an industrial ice-cream maker.
“Righto,” he said, taking off his hat and replacing it with the special one from the toolbox. “Wish me luck.” And then he pushed the door open and stepped inside, shutting it carefully behind him. The click was extraordinarily loud, and gave the impression of having cut off a number of inaudible conversations, leaving the room that special sort of quiet you can’t hear, only feel crawling across your skin.
“All right boyos,” he said, words too loud, intensifying the silent feeling of incredible creepiness, “you know how it works. I’ve got iron in my hand, you’ve got hives from nice clean furniture and carpets. Clear out or it gets messy quickly.”
A high-pitched giggle – no, giggles were for children. That was most definitely a snigger.
“Right then,” said Eddie. “Don’t say I didn’t give you little shitheads fair warning.”
He flicked the light switch and was completely unsurprised to find that it did absolutely nothing. For effect, he jiggered it up and down a few times, then started swearing softly under his breath. The sniggering sounded in the dark, maybe five feet from him, and he heard the quickly-moving pitter-patter of little flat webbed feet.
Right, he thought. That’s enough of that. He flipped the headlamp on.
The first through seventh things he saw were an assortment of screaming, terrified goblins frantically covering their light-sensitive eyes and dropping their assorted nasty little murder implements. The tenth, eighth, and ninth things were the tasteful sofas that they’d overturned and pushed together to use as makeshift lairs. Past that the details got awfully vague because he was busy and there wasn’t time to waste – walk quickly up to a spasming light-blinded goblin, bludgeon with the hilt of the sledgehammer, repeat. The seventh one had time to shake off its paralysis before he got there, and received a somewhat more businesslike and vicious soporific in exchange for most of its front teeth and quick dose of impromptu rhinoplasty.
“All clear,” he called, signalling Susan and Edward to come in with flashlights. Susan looked weary at the mess, but somewhat pleased at the relative lack of carpet-staining carnage. Edward was mildly interested, or possibly bored. It was hard to say.
“Found your culprit too,” he added. He showed her the shiny little metal loop dangling with charms that he’d yanked from the trophy-festooned vest of the chief goblin. “They swiped your keys somehow. Keep an eye on them, will you? I don’t mind the business, but I think you could use the break.”
Susan looked equal parts irritated and thankful for his concern, and waved off offers to help right furniture. They departed while she was gathering cleaning materials to rinse up the sticky black goblin nosebleed from the carpeting.
“Right,” said Eddie. “One last job – best for last too. Some lady says she’s got a changeling hiding in her plumbing. Haven’t heard of that before, but they’re little bastards, and I wouldn’t put it past them; it’s not like they can’t breathe water or fit through a u-bend.”
A shrug, one-shouldered. Good as an answer, really. Within five minutes the truck’s tires crunched on gravel, in seven they’d been escorted inside the house by a nervous-looking woman named Holly, and now they were carefully examining the toilet.
“Most likely outlet,” Eddie was explaining confidently. “Sure, they CAN squeeze ‘emselves through a faucet and into a sink, but it’d take longer, and they get bored easily. I think we’ll need the plunger for this one – hand it over.”
Edward rummaged through the box and silently, languorously handed over the ash-handled, rune-engraved plunger. Holly hovered behind them as Eddie bent low over the toilet, accepting the tool with one hand.
“Right. So what we’ve got to do here is flush ‘im out – not literally, we don’t want to get rid of him, we want to keep him here, so what we’ll do is get that scaly creeping bastard GET HIM!”
By the end of the sentence the bathroom tableau had been slightly altered. Eddie was now standing, Holly now looked at least as angry as she did worried, and Edward was being pinned headdown in the toilet bowl by both of them.
“Right,” said Eddie in a menacingly cheerful voice as Holly yanked Edward’s head out of the water, “tell me where my son is or you get plungered.”
Edward was showing his first emotion all day, a mixture of befuddlement and confusion. “Dad, what are you –” the sentence ended in brisk plunging, with all the unpleasant sounds that came with it.
“Don’t you dad me, mister. My son is a cheerful and helpful young man and you are a walking cliché that was obviously manufactured by something with only the foggiest ideas of human nature based off of wild stereotypes. Also, my son would presumably recognize his own house, own bathroom, and own mother. You didn’t even take a proper look around when you took him, did you, you little attention-deficited moron? Now spill it: where’d you stash him?”
“I don’t –“ Vigorous plunging once again commenced, this time more forcefully.
“I can keep this up all day, you shapechanging son-stealing little shit,” said Eddie. “Where is he?”
The changeling looked at least as bedraggled as resentful now, but also slightly terrified and very much out of wind. “Attic. Bound. Unharmed. Please stop. Plunging.”
Eddie nodded. “Right. Holly, could you hold this for a minute?” The nasty glint in his wife’s eyes as she accepted the plunger hinted that she may have something more unpleasant in mind, and Eddie felt something almost close to sympathy as he left for the attic. The first squelching sounds of furious plunger-hammering began immediately behind him, and he winced as he opened the attic trapdoor.
Ah, there was Edward. Tied up in the Christmas tree lights and gagged with tinsel, but otherwise apparently intact. More annoyed that injured, really, as he proved by his first words upon freedom, which were “What took you so long?”
“I didn’t realize it wasn’t you ‘till we were out of the driveway, and by then, well, why waste time? My clients expect promptness. It was a tight thing squeezing you in before lunch as it is – we may have to eat and run.”
Edward brightened up at the thought of food, at least. Well, he had missed breakfast. “What’s lunch then?”
“Sandwiches. Your mother was going to make something, but she’s a bit busy with your changeling right now and I don’t think she’ll be through making an example of him for about an hour. We may have a cleanup job when we get home.”