“Off limits,” Richard said. “Protected by the police. And you don’t want to mess around with the Goblin Police. They’re…spooky.”

“It sounds like a lot of Goblin is spooky.”

“See the cemetery over that way?” Richard pointed to a crowded lot. Stones very close together.

“Yes.”

“In Goblin the dead are buried standing up.”

Charles’s eyes grew wide. The image associated with this information was crystal clear, Richard knew, as it was for him when he learned it, too.

What pride Richard felt, painting this detailed picture of his hometown for a new friend to view!

“You see that great brown building, Charles? With the white windows?”

“Yes.”

“That’s Goblin General. Where I was born.”

Richard told Charles how the hospital was once quarantined when it was discovered that an RN had contracted leprosy. How no one was allowed to leave, for fear of contaminating the city at large, and how all two hundred and twelve people inside gradually deteriorated, peeling to pieces, before all of them died and Goblin sanitation removed what remained with mops.

“And the one with the sort of crisscross design is where my mom works.”

Richard told Charles how there used to be a drive-in theater. How the theater got shut down because too many kids were sneaking up on hilltops or climbing trees to watch R-rated movies.

“That’s how I saw movies for years. From Pride Hill in Perish Park.”

Perish Park, what a place! Where every winter people reenacted the death of Jonathan Trachtenbroit, who was strangled by a political rival, Henry Sherman.

“One time,” Richard said, “some bad people set fire to many trees in Perish Park. People were worried the whole square would go up. But that’s crazy…what with all the rain.”

Charles stopped walking. He pointed to the city’s modest skyline. “Are you taking me there?”

“You mean downtown? Yes.”

Charles smiled. “Take me, Richard. Tell me everything.”

With a heart full of happiness, Richard did. He’d never met anybody exactly like Charles. Nobody who spoke like him, moved like him, stared at the skyline like he just had. And yet, even that day, that first day, Richard detected something swimming deeper within his new friend. Something dark and formless that could be seen only under certain conditions, under certain light.

But that first day Richard didn’t care. Like the kid who hears that smoking the plants found in the North Woods can lead to a life of debauchery and trouble with the Goblin Police, Richard decided that, whatever was swimming in Charles, whatever would eventually surface and show itself, Richard would chance seeing it for a day like this.

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