years of age. He could talk and joke all night, incessantly polishing his wirerimmed spectacles.
What he was doing with someone like Olaf Goonasekara as a housekeeper Jilly didn’t know. It was true that Goon looked comical enough, what with his protruding stomach and puffed cheeks, the halo of unruly hair and his thin little arms and legs, reminding her of nothing so much as a pumpkin with twig limbs, or a monkey. His usual striped trousers, organ grinder’s jacket and the little green and yellow cap he liked to wear, didn’t help. Nor did the fact that he was barely four feet tall and that the Professor claimed he was a goblin and just called him Goon.
It didn’t seem to allow Goon much dignity and Jilly would have understood his grumpiness, if she didn’t know that he himself insisted on being called Goon and his wardrobe was entirely of his own choosing. Bramley hated Goon’s sense of fashion—or rather, his lack thereof.
The door was flung open again and Jilly stood up to find Goon glowering at her once more.
“He’s in,” he said.
Jilly smiled. As if he’d actually had to go in and check.
They both stood there, Jilly on the porch and he in the doorway, until Jilly finally asked, “Can he see me?”
Giving an exaggerated sigh, Goon stepped aside to let her in. “I suppose you’ll want something to drink?” he asked as he followed her to the door of the Professor’s study.
“Tea would be lovely.”
“Hrumph.”
Jilly watched him stalk off, then tapped a knuckle on the study’s door and stepped into the room.
Bramley lifted his gaze from a desk littered with tottering stacks of books and papers and grinned at her from between a gap in the towers of paper.
“I’ve been doing some research since you called,” he said. He poked a finger at a book that Jilly couldn’t see, then began to clean his glasses. “Fascinating stuff “
“And hello to you, too,” Jilly said.
“Yes, of course. Did you know that the Kickaha had legends of a little people long before the Europeans ever settled this area?”
Jilly could never quite get used to Bramley’s habit of starting conversations in the middle. She removed some magazines from a club chair and perched on the edge of its seat, her package clutched to her chest.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” she asked.
Bramley looked surprised. “Why everything. We
Jilly nodded. From her new position of vantage she could make out the book he’d been reading.
Old City was real enough; that was where she’d found the drum this afternoon. But as for the rest of it— albino crocodile subway conductors, schools of dogsized intelligent goldfish in the sewers, mutant rat debating societies and the like ...
Old City was the original heart of Newford. It lay deep underneath the subway tunnels—dropped there in the late eighteen hundreds during the Great Quake. The present city, including its sewers and underground transportation tunnels, had been built above the ruins of the old one. There’d been talk in the early seventies of renovating the ruins as a tourist attraction—as had been done in Seattle—but Old City lay too far underground for easy access. After numerous studies on the project, the city council had decided that it simply wouldn’t be cost efficient.
With that decision, Old City had rapidly gone from a potential tourist attraction to a home for skells—winos, bag ladies and the other homeless. Not to mention, if one was to believe Bramley and Riddell, bands of illmannered goblinlike creatures that Riddell called skookin—a word he’d stolen from old Scots which meant, variously, ugly, furtive and sullen.
Which, Jilly realized once when she thought about it, made it entirely appropriate that Bramley should claim Goon was related to them.
“You’re not going to tell me it’s a skookin artifact, are you?” she asked Bramley now.
“Too soon to say,” he replied. He nodded at her parcel. “Can I see it?”
Jilly got up and brought it over to the desk, where Bramley made a great show of cutting the twine and unwrapping the paper. Jilly couldn’t decide if he was pretending it was the unveiling of a new piece at the museum or his birthday. But then the drum was sitting on the desk, the mica and quartz veins in its stone catching the light from Bramley’s desk lamp in a magical glitter, and she was swallowed up in the wonder of it again.
It was tubeshaped, standing about a foot high, with a seveninch diameter at the top and five inches at the bottom. The top was smooth as the skin head of a drum. On the sides were what appeared to be the remnants of a bewildering flurry of designs. But what was most marvelous about it was that the stone was hollow. It weighed about the same as a fat hardcover book.
“Listen,” Jilly said and gave the top of the drum a rapa-taptap.
The stone responded with a quiet rhythm that resonated eerily in the study. Unfortunately, Goon chose that moment to arrive in the doorway with a tray laden with tea mugs, tea pot and a platter of his homemade biscuits. At the sound of the drum, the tray fell from his hands. It hit the floor with a crash, spraying tea, milk, sugar, biscuits and bits of crockery every which way.
Jilly turned, her heartbeat doubletiming in her chest, just in time to see an indescribable look cross over Goon’s features. It might have been surprise, it might have been laughter, but it was gone too quickly for her to properly note. He merely stood in the doorway now, his usual glowering look on his face, and all Jilly was left with was a feeling of unaccountable guilt.
“I didn’t mean ...” Jilly began, but her voice trailed off. “Bit of a mess,” Bramley said.
“I’ll get right to it,” Goon said.
His small dark eyes centered their gaze on Jilly for too long a moment, then he turned away to fetch a broom and dustpan. When Jilly turned back to the desk, she found Bramley rubbing his hands together, face pressed close to the stone drum. He looked up at her over his glasses, grinning.
“Did you see?” he said. “Goon recognized it for what it is, straight off. It has to be a skookin artifact.
Didn’t like you meddling around with it either.”
That was hardly the conclusion that Jilly would have come to on her own. It was the sudden and unexpected sound that had more than likely startled Goon—as it might have startled anyone who wasn’t expecting it. That was the reasonable explanation, but she knew well enough that reasonable didn’t necessarily always mean right. When she thought of that look that had passed over Goon’s features, like a trough of surprise or mocking humor between two cresting glowers, she didn’t know what to think, so she let herself get taken away by the Professor’s enthusiasm, because ... well, just what if ... ?
By all of Christy Riddell’s accounts, there wasn’t a better candidate for skookindom than Bramley’s housekeeper.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
Bramley shrugged and began to polish his glasses. Jilly was about to nudge him into making at least the pretense of a theory, but then she realized that the Professor had simply fallen silent because Goon was back to clean up the mess. She waited until Goon had made his retreat with the promise of putting on another pot of tea, before she leaned over Bramley’s desk.
“Well?” she asked.
“Found it in Old City, did you?” he replied.
Jilly nodded.
“You know what they say about skookin treasure ... ?”
They meaning he and Christy, Jilly thought, but she obligingly tried to remember that particular story from
