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Once, when Madeline Cobb was 27 years old, she almost killed a West Virginia celebrity. In her defense, Indrid Cold had what many have called “a very punchable face.”
You see, Madeline Cobb was something of a secret keeper, and the kind of secrets she was keeping could have torn her little hometown apart like a chainsaw through a rotting poplar. She had a rundown little cabin with more leaks than it had shingles. She had half a fine arts degree from a university she didn’t care to go back to. And she had three refugees from an alien planet depending on her for food, shelter, and protection. That was a lot of responsibility to shoulder even before you added in the otherworldly threat of the bimonthly abominations and the worry about what might happen if the government ever discovered this little dimensional anomaly. It wasn’t that Miss Cobb thought she was the best person for the job, but she was there and it needed doing so she might as well do it. Madeline wasn’t the kind of person to shirk important work.
That was what she was trying to keep in mind when she took the long weekend trip out to Pittsburgh. It was a long hot drive in an old truck with no air conditioning and she didn’t fancy talking to strangers. But having responsibilities meant doing things you didn’t want to do sometimes and Mr. Rodenburg had information that she needed. The sun beat down through the treetops as she followed his charmingly given directions down twisting Pennsylvania country roads. Madeline drove with the windows rolled down and the radio blasting talk shows and static full volume, but if you’d asked her about it she couldn’t have told you a single thing they said. Her carving tools and hatchet sat in a pouch on the passenger seat, wrapped in a checkered flannel blanket. They burned there in her mind like something red hot and dangerous.
Madeline Cobb had done a lot of things she hadn’t exactly wanted to do in her lifetime, but the number of things she’d done that she had really wanted not to do was a much shorter list.
It was well and truly late by the time she arrived at her destination. The sun was firmly below the horizon and the fires of the campground roasted more marshmallows than hot dogs and heard more ghost stories than games of catch. The campground was more crowded than Madeline was comfortable with, nearly every parking space packed with the moving behemoth structures of Fleetwoods and Ramblers, but as she moved back she realized there was one Winnebago parked separate from the crowds as if something instinctual told the happy vacationers to stay away. Madeline guessed she’d found what she was looking for. She parked a few spots away, pulled far enough off the road that hopefully any passing park ranger might miss her truck. Arlo would have suggested that she park across the preserve near the hiking trails and blaze through the underbrush to her destination, but Madeline didn’t have the time or patience for any of that. She strapped her tool belt around her waist, hefted her hatchet in her hand, hardened her resolve.
The door to the Winnebago swung open when she was a foot away and Madeline Cobb felt her whole body tense like a deer ready to bolt. A thin man with a wild halo of silver hair stood backlit by the weak yellow light of the camper, shabby and disheveled and vaguely grinning.
Before she could even ask, he answered her. “Yes, I am Indrid Cold, miss Cobb. Why don’t you come inside?”
Madeline’s skin crawled like a tree covered in 17 year cicadas and her danger sense screamed out in chorus, also like a tree full of 17 year cicadas. But she had secrets to keep and a responsibility she just couldn’t shirk and so, with hands that didn’t shake and a step that wasn’t even remotely hesitant, she followed the strange man into what she hoped was not a trap.
The inside of the Winnebago was hot and stuffy and absolutely filthy. Trash lay strewn about the floor, dirty dishes piled up in the sink, charcoal fingerprints decorated every drawer, counter and window. Even the lights were speckled with little patches of grey. Madeline wasn’t exactly a neat freak by any stretch of the term, but she felt like he could have made a bit of an effort, since he obviously knew when she was going to show up. There was a packet of snack cakes on the folded out table in front of her and two bottles of water. Indrid Cold took a seat on the other side and gestured to the chair in front of the snack cakes but Madeline didn’t make a habit of accepting hospitality from spooky men or strangers. Especially not when those strangers looked like haunted art school dropouts. As a haunted art school dropout, herself, the irony of this decision didn’t strike her until a few days later when she forgot to take the keys out of her truck and Moira had to float through the door to help her open it from the inside. Even then, she still stood by her decision.
Indrid Cold did not seem bothered by this slight. He folded his hands around the clear plastic water bottle and gazed up at her from behind red tinged reflections of her own stony face.
“You’re upset with me, miss Cobb. You are quite angry at me and we haven’t even met.” Madeline didn’t say anything. She hadn’t planned on having a conversation with this man. Surely he knew that already. She glanced down at the snack cakes on the table. Indrid noticed. “Peanut butter Kandy Kakes,” he grinned as if he had said something funny and insightful. “You mentioned you preferred them. Or you would have if I hadn’t picked them up already.”
Madeline didn’t know all that much about magic, but she felt like that was a weird way for a person to use future vision. “What-“
“Tastyklairs, of course,” Indrid interrupted. “They’re the classics.” Madeline frowned around her unspoken question and Indrid Cold’s smile grew wider. The air hung thick in the buzzing yellow light of old lightbulbs.
“Is this-”
“-how every conversation I have usually goes? Yes, unfortunately,” the look on his face didn’t seem to say “unfortunately” at all, in Madeline’s opinion. “One of the side effects of seeing things before they happen, I’m afraid.”
She wanted to argue. If he was really able to see what was about to happen, wouldn’t he have fled the scene long before she got there? Why would he have let her in? Why would he be sitting there without a care in the world while a complete stranger stood in his kitchen with a big fuck-off hatchet in her hand? She said nothing.
Indrid sighed. “Yes, a woman of few words. You’ve got me there. If you say nothing then there’s nothing for me to hear, is there?” He traced a finger along the condensation of the water bottle, leaving a little grey creek on the table’s surface. “Still, I do wonder… what is it that makes you dislike me so much?” Madeline resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Not now, of course, I understand why you might find me-” he paused as if searching for the right word. Madeline could have suggested a few (obnoxious, arrogant, unsettling) but she didn’t feel particularly helpful in that moment. “-disagreeable now that we’ve had a few moments to chat. But you couldn’t have known that before. Why did you dislike me so much?”
Madeline didn’t flinch. She held his gaze, grip steady on the handle of her hatchet. “Dislike’s got nothing to do with it, Mr. Cold.”
Indrid tilted his head to the side. “You’re here to kill me.”
It felt like she had been slapped in the face, hearing it laid out like that in exactly that many words, but it wasn’t exactly like she could deny it. “I am,” she agreed.
“You don’t think there’s a certain amount of dislike inherent in that action?”
“I’m not doing it cause I hate you, Mr. Cold. I’m doing it ‘cause it has to be done.” She meant to leave it at that, but something stirred in her. Some kind of feeling she couldn’t place twisted her up and spurred her tongue. “You’re doing things that put people I care about in a lot of danger and I can’t have that.”
Indrid Cold looked up at her with the face of someone who’s just been delightfully surprised, as if with a basket full of kittens or a spontaneous vacation and not a motive for murder. “Really? Well, I certainly didn’t see that coming. What have I done?”
Madeline’s frown deepened and she hesitated. Somehow this responsibility had gone from hard to harder. Abominations never looked delightfully surprised or asked what they had done wrong. Abominations never talked in general or bought her favorite snack cakes, either. Indrid Cold might have been annoying but he was not an abomination.
Almost on an impulse, Madeline pulled the folded up pamphlet out of her back pocket and threw it down on the table in front of him. “You remember Mr. Rodenburg?”
Indrid Cold froze, staring down at the slightly crumpled issue of Truth magazine. Madeline studied his face. “Yes, I remember Mr. Rodenburg.”
“You’ve been talking to him recently.”
“Well, I wouldn’t say recently.”
“You’ve talked to him since the gate moved.”
Indrid looked up and again Madeline was taken aback by the look of delighted surprise on his face. “Is that what this is about? You’re going to kill me because I told Harvey Rodenburg the Sylvan gate moved to somewhere in West Virginia?”
“No, not just that, Mr. Cold,” Madeline sat down in the seat across from him. Her hatchet hit the table a bit more forcefully than she’d intended, “I’ve read Mr. Rodenburg’s book, too. ‘The Sylvan Tourist?’ You know that one? The one that goes into a lot of detail about sylphs and sylvan laws and the many different reasons somebody might get kicked out of Sylvain to the other side of the gate. You know it?” She didn’t give him time to answer, “It’s actually a kinda popular book in certain circles. And the thing is, some of these circles don’t take kindly to the idea that there might be alien refugees living among them in common society. Which means that the people who are supposed to be keeping those hypothetical refugees safe really gotta keep an eye out for any information that might lead to their discovery, you understand?” She wasn’t yelling. Not quite. But she was close and she wanted to. She wanted to yell about how unfair it all was, about how scary it all was, about how she hadn’t had a date in two years, about how she had no friends, about scraping by on her salary from the general store and how it wasn’t enough to pay all the bills and couldn’t even begin to cover repairs on the house. “You understand why a person who’s gotta keep this information a secret might have a problem with the way you seem to be going around throwing it all out in the open like this?”
The air rang with the echo of her not-yelling. Somewhere outside a dog barked. Indrid let out a hesitant breath. “Oh, it’s you.” He leaned forward. “You’re the owner of the Amnesty Lodge.” Something about the string of nonsense words deflated all the anger Madeline was holding. She sighed and leaned back in her seat.
“I don’t know what that means, Mr. Cold.”
“Of course you don’t, it doesn’t mean anything to anyone right now,” he mused, “but it will.”
Madeline shrugged. “Sure. Whatever you say.”
He eyed her a bit longer with his head cocked to the side again. “How old are you, miss Cobb?”
“27.”
“Fuck.”
Madeline laughed. She couldn’t help it. It was so ridiculous, so out of line with his enigmatic spooky man act. She laughed until her stomach hurt and when she finally looked up, Indrid was grinning at her again. It was still a creepy smile, but she might have almost called it friendly, too. More like a goofy jack-o-lantern, less like a cat watching a mouse.
“I’m just saying, you carry yourself like you’re… well, I guess ages are different between our two worlds anyways. I don’t know how I keep forgetting that,” he trailed off for a moment. The water bottle crinkled in his hands. “I’ve always been very careful not to be caught, miss Cobb. I’ve come close before and I tell you I do not care to follow through on the futures where I’m being vivisected and experimented on. But I haven’t given as much thought to how my little chats could be influencing other sylvans on this side of the gate.” He turned to her and Madeline could see her own surprise reflected in the red lenses. “I’m sorry I’ve caused you so much trouble.”
The thing about doing the hard work because it needs to get done is that it’s often a thankless job. And when you’re a person who does that work, people don’t usually apologize when they make more work for you to do. An apology was the last thing Madeline had expected. It was a nice gesture. That being said…
“I appreciate that,” Madeline admitted, “but there’s not much I can do with ‘I’m sorry’ Mr. Cold.” She leaned back and let the tension drain from her body. She wasn’t going to kill Indrid Cold. She couldn’t, not anymore. She wondered if it was ever something she’d even been capable of in the first place.
“What if I tried to obscure the point?”
Madeline raised an eyebrow at him. “Pardon?”
“Harvey and I-“ Indrid flinched like a conman caught mid-grift, “I’ve always been honest and perhaps uncharacteristically straightforward with Mr. Rodenburg, but I don’t need to be. I could call up a few contacts, give some false leads, try to draw attention away from Kepler and any projects you have going on there.”
She stared at him. “You’d do that?”
“In exchange for my life?” He laughed, “of course I would.”
Madeline said, “I’m not gonna kill you, Mr. Cold.”
“Hm, I was getting that feeling, yes. Still, it’s the least I can do.”
The lights buzzed and flickered. A muffled campfire song wove its way through the screen and glass and corrugated steel. Madeline picked up a peanut butter Kandy kake.
She meant to ask “so how did you know these were my favorites?” But instead, like a dog going after a stick only to find itself chasing a squirrel, she found herself saying, “Did you know this whole time that I wasn’t gonna kill you, Mr. Cold?”
Indrid laughed, “Oh absolutely not! Miss Cobb, you must understand, my future sight only shows me some possibilities of how things might turn out. I have seen many creative ways in which you might kill me over the past few days. It was quite exciting.”
Madeline didn’t like that revelation one bit. “Exciting isn’t the word I’d probably use.”
“Exciting, interesting, traumatic,” he waved the words away. “Trust me when I say I’ve seen worse. I was more interested in the timelines where you just left. Without saying anything. I was curious. I simply had to meet you, and I’m very glad I did.”
Madeline couldn’t say the same. She’d needed this responsibility like she’d needed a medically unnecessary amputation. She wasn’t glad for the stress of this weekend and the knowledge that under other circumstances she might have killed this man. Madeline stood up and tucked her hatchet into its loop on her tool belt. She thought for a moment and then scooped up the other Kandy kake and shoved them both in her pocket.
Madeline turned back when she reached the door to the Winnebago. “I’m glad I didn’t have to kill you, Mr. Cold.”
“I’m glad you didn’t have to kill me, too, miss Cobb. Thank you for that.”
And Madeline Cobb, art school dropout and imminent proprietor of the eventual Amnesty lodge, left the campground.