The Peacock Cloak by Chris Beckett Page A

picked out by the bluish electric lights around the fence. Neither one of them was looking at the house. Both seemed engrossed in some object that the squatting one was holding up for the other’s inspection: a shell, perhaps, or a piece of stone.
    “Get a grip now, Paula,” muttered David. “You know quite well they’re completely harmless.”
    Sheema put her arm round Paula’s shoulders.
    “Easy now, love,” she said in a warm and gentle voice.
    But the look she gave her husband wasn’t warm at all, and seemed to Cassie to refer to some prior exchange between the two of them. Sheema hadn’t wanted to come here, was Cassie’s guess: Sheema had warned Ernesto that Paula would be difficult and make some sort of scene.
    David and Ernesto went out through the kitchen door and starting running across the unnatural green of the grass towards the fence, shouting and waving their arms, each one of them with his own set of multiple shadows thrown out by the floodlights.
    “There there,” Sheema murmured soothingly to Paula. “There there. Remember it’s just a silly trick they play. Just a silly trick they play on our minds.”
    Cassie stepped just outside the kitchen door, so she could watch everything: the women indoors, the goblins and men outside. The caramel smell wafted from the forest, carrying its faint hint of decay. The moss under the trees glowed softly. The many ponds shone with phosphorescence. And creatures were moving out there, whichever way you looked. The stage was no longer empty.
    “Go away !”
    David ran up to the fence, kicking it and banging on it with the flats of his hands. After a few seconds, the squatting indigene rose very slowly to its feet, and then both it and its companion turned their narrow faces towards David and regarded him with their black button eyes. Their V-shaped mouths resembled the smiles in a child’s drawing.
    “Go on, be off with you!” David shouted again, quite pointlessly, for the creatures had no ears.
    Both goblins tipped their heads on one side – sometimes indigenes could look thoughtful and cunning; at other times they seemed as devoid of intelligent thought as a tree or a toadstool – but neither of them moved away. Behind them, far off in the softly glowing forest, a column of white unicorns was making its way through the trees.
    Cassie started to walk down towards the fence.
    “Cassie darling,” called Sheema without much conviction. “Don’t you think you ought to…?”
    She tailed off – she had no confidence with children – and in that same moment Cassie heard in her head the voice that always spoke in the presence of goblins: her own voice, speaking her own language, but not under her control.
    “Fear,” it said, “but no love.”
    Again David banged impotently on the fence. This had no effect on the goblins, but it brought Juan out of his hut, swearing in Luto, with a heavy pulse gun in his hands. He limped to the fence and pointed the gun at the goblins at point blank range, barely acknowledging his employer or his employer’s guests.
    “Be careful Juan,” began David, “no need to…”
    Ignoring him, Juan pulled the trigger. The gun only made a faint thudding sound, like a beanbag dumped on a table, but the goblins staggered and clasped their heads.
    “I think that was excessive Juan,” David said, as the creatures loped off into the forest.
    “You want them to go or not, senar?”
    Juan shrugged and turned back to his hut. Cassie knew his children – they went to the same school as her and Peter – and she knew that, if Juan had been given the choice, he’d have killed the goblins without compunction, or maybe caught them and nailed them to a tree. It was what Juan and his friends did for fun when they went hunting out in the forest, with no Agency do-gooders there to pry or to spoil things.
    David and Ernesto walked back to the house. Cassie, unnoticed, followed behind them. She could see how David deliberately turned