The Grevnoc

Chapter 18


That night, Nifty obviously went into town.
He moved through the dark the way he had before Corey ever knew he existed.
Back alleys.
Drainage paths.
The spaces behind buildings where humans rarely looked unless something had gone wrong.
He carried a can of spray paint.
On a brick wall behind a closed store, Nifty painted a familiar mark.
A crooked smiley face with X eyes.
To a human, it was graffiti.
To a gremlin, it was a gathering banner they called the Grevnoc.
Back home, the same symbol had been carried on banners when gremlins needed to call their kind together. The mark did not need written instructions. Every gremlin knew the old tradition attached to it.
When the Grevnoc was raised, they met beneath the next full moon.
They followed the waters toward their headwaters.
And where the waters connected, they gathered at the tallest waterfall in the area.
Nifty could not remember who had first taught him the tradition, or how old it was. He only knew what the symbol meant the instant he pictured it.
Gather, the word rang out in his mind.
There were no gremlin banners in the human world.
Nifty looked at the brick wall, shook the spray can, and decided it would have to do.
He painted the X-eyed smile beneath a bridge.
Another near the edge of the woods.
Another on the concrete mouth of a drainage tunnel.
Humans would see a strange tag spreading through town.
Any gremlin who saw it would know exactly what to do.
The highest waterfall in the area was miles from the cabin.
Two nights later, Nifty and Thicket went there.
At first, nobody came.
Water thundered down the rock face and disappeared into the dark below. Mist hung in the air. Nifty stood beside Thicket and wondered whether he had remembered the rule wrong, or perhaps they he was wrong. Maybe there were no other gremlins in this world.
Then something moved across the water.
A gremlin stepped from the trees.
Nifty stopped breathing.
He knew that face.
Not the name.
The face.
He had drawn it.
Another shape appeared behind the rocks.
Then another.
And another.
Thicket looked at Nifty. "You know them?"
Nifty slowly shook his head.
Across the water stood a pale gremlin with a damaged ear. Nifty had drawn that ear.
A broad stone-skinned gremlin emerged near the falls.
Nifty had drawn him too.
More figures appeared.
Some Nifty knew.
Some felt familiar without giving him a name.
Some were complete strangers.
But several had lived on the paper covering his cabin walls.
Faces from memory.
Faces he had been afraid he invented.
Now they were staring back at him.
"I know them," Nifty whispered.
Thicket looked around. "You know all these people?"
"No."
Nifty watched another familiar stranger step into the clearing.
"That's the problem."