Fantastic Metropolis

Lord Peter Midnight was silent for a time. Finally he nodded, slowly.

“I can’t say I disagree,” he said. “I hadn’t really admitted it, even to myself, but I suppose that the encounters themselves have taken on a greater significance than anything else I’d hoped to accomplish.”

“We are not,” the Goblin King said, “so much unalike.”

“Not,” Lord Peter Midnight agreed, “so unalike at all.”

Lord Peter Midnight and the Goblin King regarded each other for a long moment, waiting to see who would speak first.

“Well,” Lord Peter Midnight said, clearing his throat, “my apartment is not far from here, and it seems like we’ve done all we can up here this evening.”

“I quite agree,” the Goblin King said. “We’ve well established that I won’t be taking over the world, not tonight at any rate, and that there’s really nothing further to be said on the matter, pro or con.” He grinned, slyly, and added, “Besides, I’ve always wanted to know what your sanctum sanctorum looked like.”

Lord Peter Midnight and the Goblin King climbed down from the roof to the busy streets, and arm in arm made their way to Lord Peter Midnight’s apartment which was, thankfully, vacant of fashion model, actor, actress or musician on this particular evening. They spent the hours before dawn in one another’s company, and when the morning came the Goblin King went on his way. He was not seen in San Francisco again for many years, and never again would he face off against Lord Peter Midnight.

When Lord Peter Midnight reportedly perished in a particularly brutal fashion a short time later, a memorial was erected in a quiet corner of a private cemetery in San Francisco. Rumor has it that every year, on the occasion of a particular street festival in the Mission District, a secretive figure deposits a handful of honeysuckle roses at the base of the memorial statue, and then quietly disappears into the night.

The current whereabouts of the Goblin King are not known.

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Chris Roberson is the author of Voices of Thunder, Cybermancy Incorporated, and Set the Seas on Fire, all from Clockwork Storybook, an independent publisher. This story has appeared in a slightly different form in The Clockwork Reader, an anthology/catalogue from Clockwork Storybook.