When they got to the end, she had to turn and face them. They looked just like they had in the station. Still wore their sunglasses. Still looked uncomfortable in their own skin.

Or maybe they didn’t. Hard to say.

“Did…he…know…we…were…coming?”

The same pitch-shifted voice. A tape slowed down. The kind of voice teenagers said sounded like Satan.

Margot swallowed. Had she forgotten to mention that Wayne knew they were coming back at the station?

“Yes,” she managed to say. “But I told him to stay put. I swear.”

There was silence. Then the officer removed his glasses.

15

At about the time the officers following Margot discovered the key had been carried away, Wayne was crossing the Goblin city limit, heading south. He passed between the pair of leviathan topiaries he’d erected himself and imagined them growing over, till the two city luminaries looked covered in hair and tumors. He drove the speed limit. Soft music came through the truck’s small speakers and he tried very hard to ignore the fact that a little girl had changed his life; that the Goblin Police couldn’t be far behind.

As far as he could tell, he was driving through one of the worst rainfalls in the history of the city. As a lifelong Gobliner, this comforted him. He felt sheltered, under cover, hidden. And with the speedometer at a steady fifty-five and all headlights working, he believed he was going to make it.

The spinning lights in his rearview mirror told him he might not.

Wayne was six, perhaps seven, car lengths over the border when he pulled to the side of the road, his wipers feeble against what fell from the sky.

In the mirror he saw the cruiser door open. It had gotten dark since Wayne pocketed the key to the city and he wondered, now, how much time he’d spent thinking, sitting in his truck, after he left The Hedges. When had night come? By what meek announcement?

Tap tap.

The officer was bending toward the window, signaling for Wayne to roll it down. The rain seemed to be doing something to his face.

Wayne rolled the window down. Halfway. The rain came in, spraying the arm of his raincoat.

“Wayne…Sherman?”

Yes, I’m Mr. Sherman, and there used to be a Mrs. Sherman, too, but something horrible happened and I couldn’t wake her one morning. I found the key to the city after her funeral, and I kept it rather than turning it in to you guys. Kept it because I heard it sets the ghosts of Goblin free.

“Was I speeding, Officer?”

Wayne Sherman was a Goblin celebrity. A statue of himself might be standing next to Carroll and Trachtenbroit one day. Maybe the man just wanted an autograph.

“Get…out…of…the…car…Mr….Sherman…”

Wayne looked ahead, up the road, into the rainfall, farther from Goblin.

“Mr. Sherman?”

Wayne turned to the officer slowly. “I’m about fifty feet outside Goblin, Officer. Isn’t this out of your jurisdiction?”