Joe Golem and the Copper Girl: A Short Story Read online

  What aren’t you telling me? he thought.

  As the girl settled down again, drawing her floral duvet up around her neck and nestling deeply into her pillows, Joe studied what little of her face he could see. She’d turned from him, and her wild hair obscured part of her profile, but still he found himself fascinated by her strange luminescence. Her hair had a bright sheen and her skin had a radiant glow, in a hue like burnished copper. Rachael Blum had shown Joe photographs of her daughter, and the girl had always been pretty. But in those old pictures, Jillian’s complexion had been more like her mother’s, pale with the faint blush of rose at her cheeks.

  He had also seen a photo of Jillian when she had been ill, and the contrast was startling. She had been thin, drawn, and gray. Only her eyes had been the same, for Jillian had striking eyes, with flecks of gold and green surrounded by a ring of purple. She must have inherited them from a grandparent or great-grandparent, Joe figured, since neither of her parents had such startling eyes.

  In that old photo, there had been a small scar on the girl’s cheek, the result—according to her mother—of a mishap involving an uninterested cat, an enthusiastic but unsteady toddler, and the corner of a fireplace. The new Jillian, this copper girl, showed no evidence of that injury. The scar had healed.

  Unusual as her eyes, her remarkable recovery, and her vibrant health were, however, Jillian’s most arresting feature was the coppery cast of her skin. Her hair was lush and had the same golden orange hue, and her flesh seemed almost to have been forged by a metalsmith. The curves of her face gleamed in the dimly lit room, the copper color warm and rich. Whatever had gifted her with this new vitality had left her more than cured.

  Joe watched the sleeping girl for another moment. She snored lightly, but even from this angle he could see a slight crinkling of her brow. She did not rest easily.

  Troubled, wishing he could look inside the minds of these people to learn what it was they were not telling him, Joe settled deeper into his chair and wished he had brought a book. If he could have read, it might have been easier for him to keep his eyes open. Instead, he tried to focus on the two tall windows, which rattled in their frames with every gust of wind. Rain pelted the glass as the storm howled outside. The whole building seemed to groan with the waxing and waning of the storm’s strength, and the gossamer curtains billowed in the cool breeze that slid in through the gaps between window and sill. Mr. Blum had wanted to keep the windows closed and locked, which Joe had informed him would be foolish. If some nighttime creature actually was tormenting Jillian, hoping to spirit the girl away, they didn’t want to keep it out. They wanted to let it in, so Joe could teach it a lesson about preying on little girls.

  The clamor of the rain began to blur into white noise and he grew drowsy again. Focusing on the lamp beside Jillian’s bed—an antique brought from downstairs to replace the one her mother had broken—Joe tried to practice a meditation technique that Mr. Church had taught him, but to no avail. A dim light burned inside the hand-painted glass globe of the lamp, but it was more soothing than illuminating. The pink, white, and crimson rose patterns painted on the glass made him feel warm and content, until his thoughts blurred like the sound of the rain.

  “Daddy?”

  The word floated across Joe’s sleeping thoughts without any significance. His unconscious mind did not recognize the voice, ignoring the intrusion into his slumber. Even the rattle of the window in its frame did not cause him to stir, for the windows had been rattling all night. But he heard the flap of the curtains and his body felt the new chill as a fuller gust of wind stormed into Jillian Blum’s bedroom. Droplets of moisture touched his right arm, and he shivered in his sleep.

  And opened his eyes.

  He found himself gazing at the hand-painted rose on the glass globe of Jillian’s lamp. Blinking once, he focused beyond it and saw the girl huddled in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, copper skin almost unearthly against the linens. Her purple-limned eyes were open wide in confusion and fear. In the same instant, Joe’s mind raced backward, pulling together the strands of the waking world that had immediately preceded his own awakening.

  The girl was staring at the window.

  Joe turned, fully awake at last, and saw the dark figure silhouetted against the storm. Cadaverously thin, it was still not slender enough to have slithered through the few inches Mr. Blum had allowed, so it had pushed the window open, letting the wind and the rain blow in. When it had first begun visiting Jillian, the girl had thought she was dreaming, and so had her mother. But the monster was neither nightmare nor imagination; it was entirely real.

  Now it slid itself halfway across the windowsill, hands clutching the frame. It wheezed damply, moving slowly and with obvious effort, though its body had almost no mass. Pale and wizened, the creature seemed little more than the husk of a man, and Joe understood what Mrs. Blum had described better now. Drenched with rain, struggling to move, it looked entirely inhuman. Not a demon or a ghost, but perhaps something quite like a goblin after all.

  “No,” Jillian whispered.

  Her voice drove Joe to action. Perhaps the thing had not noticed that she wasn’t alone, or perhaps it didn’t care. Either way, he had to act before it saw its own peril.

  Bolting from the chair, he lunged toward the creature. In motion, he heard a shout of alarm and rage, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Mr. Blum rising as well, but his focus was on the creature. Hearing the commotion, it looked up as Joe reached it. He grabbed a fistful of its wet, greasy hair, feeling some of it come out at the roots as he started to drag it further into the room.

  “Kill it!” Mr. Blum roared. “Kill it, damn you!”

  Jillian began to shriek, covering her ears and driving herself up against the headboard of her bed as if she could escape right through the wall.

  His grip on its hair giving way, Joe yanked the goblin’s head back and clutched its throat, hauling it bodily into the room. Its mottled, pale skin left a trail of filth and slime on the sill, and it almost slipped out of his grasp, so oily was its toadlike flesh. The creature squeezed its eyes shut and cringed like a frightened child, wishing its pain away.

  “What the hell are you?” Joe asked. “And what’ve you done to the girl?”

  Not what did it want with the girl, but what had it done to her. He hadn’t meant to phrase it that way, but one look at her bright copper skin and he’d known that was the real question.

  “Don’t talk to it!” Blum snapped. “Demons are liars. Just kill it. We don’t know what it’s capable of!”

  A hammering on the bedroom door was followed by cries from Mrs. Blum, out in the hall. In the back of his mind, Joe registered that Mr. Blum had locked them all inside his daughter’s bedroom, and locked his wife out.

  “Kill it!” Blum shouted angrily.

  But that wasn’t the way Joe worked. He and Simon Church had destroyed their share of monsters, but they had also helped restless spirits find peace. They didn’t kill without reason. He was firm in this conviction, though he could barely think above Jillian’s shrieking, Mr. Blum’s shouting, and Mrs. Blum’s hammering on the door.

  “What do you want here?” Joe demanded, shaking the goblin.

  The creature opened its eyes and Joe was taken aback by the depths of its anguish…and by the startling color of its irises. Flecks of green and gold, ringed in purple.

  “My baby,” the goblin croaked.

  Joe stared. “What the—” he began.

  Then he saw the creature’s eyes go wide—eyes like Jillian’s—as its focus shifted to something behind him. Alarmed, he turned, but too late. Steven Blum’s fist connected with his temple, and Joe staggered aside, catching himself on the footboard of Jillian’s bed.

  Mr. Blum began to beat the goblin, pummeling its face and body with strength Joe would not have credited if he hadn’t seen it himself. With a savage snarl, Blum dragged the creature toward the open window as it scrabbled for purchase on the pine plank flo
or.

  “Daddy!” the girl screamed.

  Joe saw the goblin look up at her with those eyes that matched her own, and suddenly he remembered something Rachael Blum had said about the night she’d walked in on the thing slinking into her daughter’s room. I threw the lamp, she had said, but it leaped out into the dark. Jillian screamed for her father…

  “Son of a bitch,” Joe muttered.

  He crossed the room in two long strides. In addition to being smarter than he looked, Joe was also faster than he looked. As he tried to manhandle the creature out the window, Mr. Blum heard him coming and twisted around, but not in time. Joe splayed a huge hand across the man’s head and shoved, bouncing his head off the window frame hard enough to crack the glass.

  Lightning split the sky, and as the thunder rolled across the city, Mr. Blum turned toward him, hatred and desperation burning in his eyes. Then the man hissed, revealing rows of small, jagged teeth and a raw, red gullet. The goblin was forgotten as Blum stalked toward Joe, but of course the creature sprawled on the floor, weak and in pain, was not a goblin at all…any more than the man now advancing upon Joe was Steven Blum.

  “Please!” Jillian cried, now scrambling to the end of her bed and looking on in fear and hope. “Please help us!” She clung to the footboard as if her bed were a sailing ship and the wooden floor below a sea full of hungry sharks. With the wind and rain howling in and the thunder booming again, the illusion was complete.

  “Nobody wants you here!” Blum cried. “It’s my turn, damn it. My turn!”

  With these last words, his voice became ragged and bestial, and it was laden with so much anguish that Joe didn’t know which was the more pitiful creature: the one sprawled on the floor, or this thing masquerading as the father of Jillian Blum.

  It grew taller and thinner as it came at him, but Joe only noticed the way its fingers had lengthened into wicked claws when it swung at him. He rolled with it, thinking a punch was coming, but the thing that had been Blum slashed him instead, and he felt the sting and smelled the metallic tang of his own blood.

  It pissed him off.

  The thing that had been Blum grabbed Joe by the arms and darted its mouth toward his neck, as if it meant to tear out his throat. Joe drove his head forward, smashing its nose and breaking teeth. With a roar, the thing shoved him backward, and he struck the chair it had been sleeping in when it was Blum. Joe and the chair toppled with a crash that shattered a lamp and a side table, but he was up again a moment later.

  Joe grabbed the toppled chair and hefted it, intending to beat the Blum-thing to death with it, but by then the creature had reached Jillian’s bed. The girl shook her head in mute horror, glancing pleadingly at the hideous goblin, which only now began weakly to rise from the floor. Rachael Blum’s pounding on the bedroom door matched the pounding in Joe’s head.

  Reaching for the girl, the Blum-thing smiled a terrible, jagged, yearning smile.

  Joe drew his gun and shot the Blum-thing three times, the first shot spinning it away from the girl’s bed, the second and third pinning it against a wall, spattering it with the creature’s blood. Jillian clapped both hands over her mouth as the Blum-thing’s legs gave out beneath it and it collapsed to the floor, small pools of black blood quickly spreading across the pine and running in little streams between the planks.

  Joe didn’t like guns. Didn’t like killing.

  Though lighter now by three bullets, the weapon felt heavier as he slid it back into its holster. He glanced at the goblin-creature as it staggered across the room to Jillian Blum’s bed. The filthy, withered husk with its oily toad skin should have terrified her, but of course she reached for it, and the two embraced, girl and monster both weeping. Daughter and father both weeping.

  Joe unlocked the bedroom door to stop Rachael Blum from pounding on the wood. Mrs. Blum hurried in, but she made it only three steps before she froze, staring at the bizarre scene. Joe stood and watched with her as the dead Blum-thing on the floor began to wither, looking less and less like Steven Blum, while the goblin embracing Rachael’s daughter filled out, gaining strength and vitality.

  Jillian and her father turned and looked at Rachael and Joe, both with those startling, almost hypnotic eyes, and Mrs. Blum nearly fainted. She would have fallen if Joe hadn’t been there to hold her up. Filthy as he was, there was no denying that the man holding Jillian was her husband.

  “Steven?” Rachael ventured.

  “How…” he began, his voice a weak rasp. “How could you not have known it wasn’t me?”

  Stricken, Rachael began to cry. She glanced at the crumpled thing bleeding on the floor and then back at her husband and daughter.

  “I saw it. Your eyes. But you said…” she replied, and then shook her head. “He said it was part of the ritual, part of the life energy that he’d given to heal Jillie.”

  Joe sighed, a tired smile touching his lips. So even Mrs. Blum had known more than she had said.

  “It’s been a long night,” Joe said. “If you all don’t mind, I’m going to go home and get some rest.”

  Steven Blum looked at him. “You have to understand, I didn’t ask for this. He…it found me.” They all glanced at the withered, dying thing. The goblin, or whatever it was. “Somehow it knew Jillian didn’t have much time left. It said it could help, that if I would give up half of my own strength and life, it knew a ritual that would give that life to my daughter. And it…it worked.”

  Now Blum looked at his wife. “But it came that night, while we were sleeping. The ritual wasn’t done, it said. And it took the rest of me, leeched the life from me and into itself, and when it was done…”

  “It had your face,” Joe said.

  Steven nodded, glancing at the thing one last time before turning to look at his daughter, suddenly examining her more closely than before. Joe knew what he sought—some sign that the effects of the ritual were wearing off. But no, Jillian’s skin still shone with that unearthly vigor, gleaming like burnished copper. Wherever she went in life, she would draw appreciative stares for her strange beauty and the vibrant energy that seemed to flow from her.

  “Look,” Joe said, yawning, “I’m glad I could help. Really. But I’m stiff as hell from sitting in that chair, and”—he touched the gashes on his face—“I wanna clean these up. I heal pretty good, but still.”

  Jillian leaped off the bed and ran to him, crushing him in an embrace. She looked up into his face with those beautiful, peculiar eyes.

  “Thank you.”

  Joe endured the hug. “Any time.” When she released him, he turned to leave. “Good luck, kid.”

  “Wait,” Rachael Blum called. She pointed to the goblin thing in spreading pools of dark blood. “What about that thing?”

  Joe arched an eyebrow. He’d just saved her little family, and now she wanted him to clean up after them, too? Grumbling with irritation, he crossed the room, rolling up his sleeves. He stepped carefully, avoiding the blood as best he could.

  Only when he crouched beside it did he see that the goblin-thing was not quite dead. It twitched, perhaps sensing someone near, and opened its eyes halfway, but whatever those pale, blanched orbs saw did not exist in this world. Joe wondered if, as creatures breathed their last, they might have a view into the afterlife.

  “Not fair,” the dying thing said in a thin, reedy voice.

  Rachael Blum let out a gasp when it spoke, but Jillian and her father only stared sadly at the thing. Perhaps they had seen the tears streaking its face.

  “Tricked,” said the goblin. “Tricked me.”

  “What?” Steven said, thinking he was being accused. “That’s—”

  Joe shushed him.

  “Who tricked you?” he asked.

  The goblin’s lower lip trembled and its tears came faster. “It said it could…save Danny. Make him…better. Half a life to save…my son.”

  “Oh, my God,” Mrs. Blum whispered.

  “But he took it all…took them…and moved away.” The
last two words held more anguish than Joe had ever heard in a human voice. A human voice.

  “My turn,” the dying creature said, as blood began to bubble between its lips and its chest began to hitch. “My turn for a…family. My turn…for a…”

  The man—not a monster; just another father—took rattling breath, eyelids fluttering.

  “Life,” he rasped.

  And then was still.

  Joe stared at the dead man a moment then rose to his feet. The Blum family watched him as if waiting for some bit of wisdom. He left them there, still waiting, because he had no words sufficient to express how much he wished that he had never met them.

  The storm still raged outside, waves crashing along the canals of the Drowning City, more perilous than ever. Morning was a ways off yet, but Joe welcomed the darkness and the storm. It felt right to him.

  Exhausted as he was, he would not sleep tonight.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JOE GOLEM AND THE COPPER GIRL. Copyright 2012 by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4668-0791-4

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