Margot sat in a wooden chair next to a long cold table. Her little feet didn’t come close to touching the tiled floor. She leaned on one of the chair’s wooden arms and it creaked and every time it creaked she mistook it for movement by one of the officers. It was mostly dark in the room and other than the slow, deep questions, her answers, and the sound of a pen to paper, the creaking was the only thing she had as proof that she was sitting in the natural world.

The officers themselves didn’t help with that.

Ten of them listened very closely to what she said. Their eyes were hidden by their mirrored aviators and their mouths moved slowly side-to-side, as though chewing small models of The Hedges.

Margot tried to ignore all this. For crying out loud, they were doting on her like she was the star witness for the trial of the century!

That much she loved. That much made her smile. And yet a picture of the mustachioed man at The Hedges with the kind eyes in the clay-ish hands of the Goblin Police worried her.

A little bit.

“Polly Majors told me that Brian Bowen and Carl Nelson tried and failed. They told her it was impossible. They told her there was no way a girl could do it. They said there was no way an adult could do it.”

Margot shook her head. There was no response from the Goblin Police. Just that pen hitting the paper. A distant clacking of a typewriter, too.

“I asked my mom what she knew about The Hedges and she said nothing. Said if you’ve gone there once you’ve seen it all. I asked her why nobody ever figured them out and she said there was nothing to figure out. That the man who runs them just wants to make it more of a mystery so more people come out. She said it was a hoax. A trick. She said she wouldn’t waste eight dollars on a walk through the bushes. Boy, was she wrong.”

The officer nearest her leaned forward, making a creaking sound of his own. But the word that came to Margot’s mind was plastic.

Just under the brim of his gray hat she saw that his hair looked as greasy as an oil change.

“You…went…out…there…on…your…own…?”

There sure was something about the way these officers said things! Margot wanted to punch him in the face. She didn’t even know why exactly. Just wanted to see how far her little fist would go in.

“Yes,” she said. “I went out there alone. I had to wait for a day when Mom would be working late. But you already know that.”

They did. They’d called Margot’s mom at the Goblin Art Gallery (the GAG) and scared the pants off her when they said they had her little girl.