Secrets of Goth Mountain Read online

Secrets of Goth Mountain

  By

  Gary J. Davies

  Secrets of Goth Mountain

  Copyright 2014 Gary J. Davies

  Thank you for downloading this free e-book. Although this is a free book, it remains the copyrighted property of the author and may not be reproduced, scanned, or distributed for any commercial or non-commercial use without permission from the author. Quotes used in reviews are the exception. No alteration of content is allowed. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own free copy.

  This novel is a work of fiction created by the author and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are a production of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. Thank you for downloading this e-book. This book is the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the author.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to my wife Susan, who puts up with my time consuming hobbies, to my book loving daughters Kristin and Kimberly, and to my favorite author James P. Blaylock for his enchanting early elven fantasy novels. Also I thank William Shatner for his inspiring writing efforts; presumably if he can write novels, so can anyone else. I thank my artist-brother Robert Davies for help with my book covers. Thanks also to Microsoft for their spell-checker; which enables the formation of recognizable words even by engineers. Finally, special thanks to Rista of Goodreads for his review which led to significant 'clean up' corrections to the initial version and the March 2014 re-release of this novel. I apologize for any remaining errors.

  ****

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1 JOHNNY

  CHAPTER 2 ELIZABETH

  CHAPTER 3 ELVIS

  CHAPTER 4 THE SIMPLES AND MR. DARK

  CHAPTER 5 SKUNK PROBLEMS

  CHAPTER 6 HOMECOMING

  CHAPTER 7 LIFE-EATER

  CHAPTER 8 AMBUSH

  CHAPTER 9 SUSPICIONS

  CHAPTER 10 THE LOST

  CHAPTER 11 NIGHTMARES

  CHAPTER 12 ANN GOTH RETURNS

  CHAPTER 13 DOOLEY FRIENDS

  CHAPTER 14 COUNCIL MEETING

  CHAPTER 15 ARTISTIC LICENSE

  CHAPTER 16 HIDEY HOLE

  CHAPTER 17 THE LIFE SOURCE

  CHAPTER 18 BETRAYED

  CHAPTER 20 FALLEN

  CHAPTER 21 WHITE WOLF

  CHAPTER 22 CLIFF

  CHAPTER 23 CONFRONTATION

  CHAPTER 24 THE LAND AND THE PEOPLE

  CHAPTER 25 SWITCHED

  CHAPTER 26 LOST

  CHAPTER 27 REVELATIONS

  CHAPTER 28 TREE TALKER

  CHAPTER 29 FRUSTRATION

  CHAPTER 30 ELIZABETH DISCOVERED

  CHAPTER 31 SHAMAN POWER

  CHAPTER 32 MOUNTAIN STRUGGLE

  CHAPTER 33 AFTERWARD

  About the Author and Other Publications

  ****

  CHAPTER 1

  JOHNNY

  “Fudge,” cursed Johnny Goth, as he glanced at the ancient gold pocket watch that he always carried. He was again late for the Boxes Unlimited Company (BUC) weekly management meeting. The LA traffic he was driving in was slow as cold molasses, or at times frozen molasses, even though it was supposed to be ‘rushing’ at this hour, and this was the fourth intersection in a row where he had to stop for a red light. On top of that he was possibly lost.

  Not that his absence from the meeting was significant; there was no real practical value to his presence at the meetings that he could distinguish. On the other hand, that didn’t seem to matter one bit. As the fiancé of the daughter of the owner and general manager, he was supposed to be there anyway, soaking up entrepreneurial wisdom, even though the BUC’s twisted, insidious business dealings were totally beyond him and boring as hell.

  As far as he could tell, his recent university industrial engineering and business education was of no relevance whatsoever to the baffling art of cardboard carton manufacture and sales. Study of TV soaps and Machiavellian political tactics doubtlessly would have been much more useful.

  He took advantage of the driving delay to hurriedly grope through his old leather briefcase with his right hand without even looking, skillfully burrowing past paperback novels and science magazines with folded-over page-corners, sticky half-eaten candy bars, and several dangerously sharp number-two pencils, to fish out a wrinkled pre-tied necktie of unknown and irrelevant color.

  As he slipped it over his head he managed to further muss his already unkempt bushy brown hair and knock the thick, metal framed glasses off of his face, to fall between his knees and onto the thinly carpeted floor of the old Ford.

  “Double fudge!” he complained. If he had worn the contact lenses that Angela made him buy he wouldn’t have a glasses problem, but he was a glasses man through and through, as they helped him maintain his geeky image. Unknown to Angela that was the only reason that he wore corrective lenses in the first place; he could easily fix his deep gray eyes at will whenever he wanted to. However, since he had already managed to retrieve his glasses from the floor of the Ford that little trick would be unnecessary today.

  As he regained corrected eyesight a horn honk from behind conveniently alerted him that the light had finally changed, and he eased the ancient Tempo forward, gently releasing the clutch and bearing down on the accelerator to baby the old engine and transmission and to keep the Ford from staling.

  He could of course ditch the glasses and pretend to wear the contacts to please Angela, but that wasn’t the point. If it weren’t for Angela and her father, he wouldn’t have a tie problem in the first place, and hence he would have no glasses problem. Personally he had no use at all for suits and ties, but Angela’s dad, his new boss, required him to wear one, and Angela was always after him to spiffy up his image. The cruel shift from tea shirts and blue jeans to dress shirts, suits and ties had been only one of many painful transformations he had put up with since meeting Angela.

  He was sort of a Clark Kent or diamond in the rough, Angela claimed. She was right about that, more right than she knew, figured Johnny. He wasn’t exactly superman, but he had special abilities which he kept well hidden. He had long cultivated a shy, wimpy image so that he could blend into the background; so much so that after many years of doing it he wondered now if that is what he had actually become ... totally shy and wimpy.

  Not that he cared very much about his image, as lately his life felt totally meaningless and directionless anyway. Angela had once described him as a wrinkled shirt, and vowed that she would smooth out his odd wrinkles. Johnny couldn’t imagine Angela ironing a shirt, but she certainly tried to work him over. Lately Johnny wondered what, if anything, would be left of himself after her ironing. Maybe he wasn’t sure what he wanted in life, but he had a growing suspicion that it wasn’t Angela or Angela’s image of him as a yuppie businessman.

  The next intersection looked familiar. A familiar looking intersection could be a hopeful sign, but Johnny knew better than to be so easily encouraged. Unfortunately, nearly all the streets and intersections in L.A. looked nearly the same to him: improbably wide streets lined by inexplicably tall and strikingly exotic appearing palm trees and other tropical plants, impossibly priced, dilapidated stucco houses on postage-stamp-sized lots, and ramshackle motels, convenience and liquor stores, coin laundries, and other odds-and-ends shops. He reckoned that the entire area must have been built brand new a few decades earlier, but was by now showing signs of extreme age and appeared to be poised on the brink of extinction. One inevitable modest earthquake and it would all be rubble.

  People were strolling about on the sidewalks, but without apparent urgency. Pedestr
ians also formed part of this so-called rush hour, Johnny supposed, but like the traffic on freeways and side streets, they didn’t seem to be even trying very hard. Their strides were too relaxed and meandering, as if they had all morning or even longer to get to wherever they were wondering off to. Perhaps these casual rushers weren’t involved in anything as critical as the cardboard box business, Johnny enviously speculated.

  He glanced over at the bumper-to-bumper traffic that crawled along the nearby freeway and shook his head in wonder. The freeway traffic was moving even slower than the traffic on his side street. The LA commuting phenomenon seemed totally insane. The concept of millions of people shifting about daily this way was so absurd and out of character for Californians that it must signify something else, something deeper, he reflected. Monumental hidden forces were at work perhaps; pheromones or Moon-shifted gravity or Druid magic was compelling folks to swarm like locusts on weekday mornings until common sense finally triumphed and caused all of them to return home later in the day.

  Or perhaps these commuters were wasting time as part of some gigantic hoax, gamely keeping up appearances that they were up to something productive until they could get back to drinking beer or surf boarding or whatever their real interests were. Johnny wouldn’t be surprised if half of them, once they reached their work destinations, regularly decided to blow off the whole thing, and turned right around and went home or straight to a golf course or bar. After all, the other half probably wouldn’t even notice.

  Californians. Johnny didn’t understand them; there were too many contradictions. He was from Ohio, farm and industry country that had its own water, halfway decent air if you weren’t downwind from a coal burning power plant or a field spread with fresh manure, and a more straightforward and solid work ethic. An up in the morning and work until dark on the farm or in the factory and get it over with to free-up the weekend sort of state, without too much useless driving around, except sometimes in Cleveland or Columbus.

  Of course almost everything in California was imported, including most of its people. Johnny peered about at his fellow commuters, looking for some sort of indication that there were other sensible Ohioans among them, also playing along with this crazy commuting business but in on the joke, but nobody looked back at him knowingly. Most stared straight ahead like zombies through their windshields, or bopped around in their seats, hopefully while listening to music from their radios, IPODs, or other electronic gadgetry. Perhaps it was too late for the Ohioans among them; perhaps they were already too far gone.

  Maybe he’d have Mom mail an Indians or Reds baseball-cap to him from home, so he could more easily be recognized as a sensible sort. Besides, his mother Ann Goth had strongly opposed his moving to California, and would probably be cheered by his wearing an Ohio cap.

  Almost magically, the BUC building abruptly materialized to his right, a large, decaying factory and warehouse that could have been transplanted by unknown forces directly from anywhere in the Eastern rustbelt, except maybe for the Spanish graffiti that covered most of it. Johnny understood a word or two of Spanish, but didn’t recognize anything painted on the box factory, though he could appreciate the bright flashy colors and stylish calligraphy. California at least earned some points for its artful graffiti, in his view. The unintelligible Spanish gibberish on the box factory seemed mysterious and artsy, if viewed while in a positive frame of mind; in comparison, the pseudo-English graffiti sprayed on the buildings back home in Ohio was too obviously crude and banal.

  Johnny eased the ancient Tempo into his VIP parking space between the new Cadillac and the classic Mercedes and climbed out, stretched his tall, lean, muscular frame and blinked in the bright sunlight. Without the thick glasses and suit he might have passed for a basketball guard or a football wide receiver instead of a tallish geek, for he moved with athletic grace and power that was impossible to totally conceal.

  In college he had steered clear of playing competitive sports to avoid winning everything, though when he felt fairly certain that nobody would notice he sometimes personally tested himself to see what he was capable of doing. He found that he could easily run, jump, swim, and throw and lift things with much better than world-record ability, even when he wasn’t trying very hard.

  He locked the Tempo’s door, a habit that he was forcing himself into since moving to the big city, and affectionately knocked his knuckles on the hood. It was a good car; after two hundred and fifty thousand miles it still had most of its original sky-blue exterior paint and hardly burned any oil. It had made the entire trip west across the mountains without overheating, though of course he had used his special abilities extensively to help it along. He used telekinesis to help push the car up mountains, and to provide improved circulation of oil and coolant through its old engine.

  Now that he had a good salary, Angela wanted him to buy a new car, preferably a fancy Lexus or Acura that she wouldn’t mind being seen in, but Johnny was solidly into buying old used Fords, Chryslers, and Chevys and driving them until they died a natural death, ideally leaving nothing but a pile of rust in the driveway framed by a couple of pairs of worn-out tires, ready to return to the soil with the next heavy rainfall. It was a matter of principle not money, he tried unsuccessfully to explain to her. Angela didn't seem to understand principles.

  Dozens of little birds congregated along the building, hopping about while scrounging for seeds or trash brought in by gentle off-shore breezes or by transient loiterers. They looked like some sort of sparrow, but the colorful feathers weren’t quite the same plain brown colors as good, solid, Ohio sparrows. Maybe they had been once, but like the people here they had also been tainted by California glitter and ballyhoo.

  One flew by him with what looked like a French-fry in its bill, pursued by several squawking, jealous others. Apparently here in California even the birds ate junk food. They disappeared noisily into some kind of exotic red flowering bushes that were totally unfamiliar to Johnny.

  He shook his head in empathy with the small bird with the fry; the poor bastard just wanted something to eat, but had been sucked into an urban rat-race. He couldn’t see the pursuing birds now but he could psychically sense them; within the bushes they were relentlessly closing in on the harried food-bearer.

  Johnny considered for a moment helping the bird with the fry. Birds weren’t difficult for him to control; he could easily divert the pursuers. He could either use his will to directly control their little bird-minds, or he could use telekinesis to push them away. He quickly rejected the idea, even though taking the short view it would have been more fun and taking the long view it would probably more beneficial than what he would soon be doing inside the box factory.

  Moments later what had been one of the pursuing birds fled the bush, victoriously carrying the fry. The little flock followed, squawking noisily, including the first bird, which he could recognize by its disturbed thought patterns. Natural selection was brutal, even when it involved French fries.

  Whatever the flowery bushes were, they were probably imported also, and like the rest of the area inhabitants were dependent on water imported from out of state. Despite the near desert climate, Johnny noticed that his feet had gotten wet, from grass already watered earlier by hidden underground sprinklers that had probably sucked the life-giving liquid from someplace in the mountains that used to be nice.

  He frowned and hesitated still longer at the factory door, squinting up at the bright sun. It was a damn shame to go inside on such a nice day, but then all his days here had so far been sunny and nice. Too nice actually; Johnny liked much better days that had more character to them, particularly days that were cool, partly cloudy and gusty; a day with fluffy little Peanuts or Simpsons clouds that streamed across the sky endlessly. Some rain to shake things up a bit would be good too; hail or snow would be better yet. All the bland sunny southern California days like this one, lined up monotonously one after another, had already become tiresome after only a couple of weeks.
Like Angela?

  What really had caused him to pause before entering the Company building was not the sunshine, but an unsolicited self-examination of his life, past, present, and future. Was this pretty much what he was setting himself up for? Was his entire life going to be like this? Rush hour traffic on impossibly sunny days? Box factory by day and Angela by night?

  So OK, the Angela part was good, or at least the sex was. But their relationship had changed as time went on, particularly since they had both graduated from Ohio State and moved here two weeks ago. Changed for the worse.

  They used to treat each other more or less as equals. Angela had always been pretty assertive and that was fine, but now that she had him back home on her turf she was trying to become downright domineering. “This isn’t the boonies of Ohio. I know the ropes here and you don’t,” she explained. “Look where you found an apartment for yourself for example. It’s out in the middle of nowhere halfway to Oxnard. There's nothing going on out there.”

  Johnny was rather pleased with the isolated shack in the rocky hills that he had managed to rent when he arrived in California. “Exactly right, there's nothing going on out there at all; that's why I like it so much. I also like the mountainous setting. It reminds me a little of when I was a kid and stayed summers with my Dad’s folks out West.” Johnny was fascinated with mountains, perhaps partly because Ohio was relatively flat, all of it. Topographically challenged, folks would say nowadays, if they were the sort that favored mountains and lingual correctness.

  Even the modest sized, rocky, bush covered hills that surrounded his new apartment looked enormous to Johnny. In his mind’s eye though, he envisioned far greater mountains. When he was a kid, Dad and Mom had shown him mountains so high that they had snow on the tops, even in August. He longed in particular for one special mountain: Goth Mountain, a towering black obsidian volcanic monolith capped in glistening white that was actually owned by the Goth family.

  “Western Ohio mountains?” asked Angela.

  Ohio mountains? Huh? Sadly, Angela wasn't joking, Johnny realized. She wasn't stupid, she was merely ignorant about things out of her field of interest, which, he was increasingly finding out, seemed to take in just about everything that he was interested in. “No, somewhere far out West. Exactly where is a big family secret that Mom won’t tell me to this day. I told you all of this already, remember?”

  “You know my memory, Johnny. With your brains and my good looks we’ll really go places.” By places, she didn’t mean the box factory; for Angela that was already a done deal, and just a starting point for much grander things.

  For now, yuppie parties were apparently the places she meant. She dragged Johnny to parties almost every night now, where she cultivated ‘important’ people, putting on airs in order to get the two of them invited to still more parties, given by ever richer folks.

  This was the ideal life, according to Angela. It was much like hungry birds chasing after other birds that had bigger French fries, Johnny reflected. All of them were after the fast buck. The shared primitive instinct had probably passed between birds and mammals through some mysterious loop in evolution hidden by a gap in the fossil record, Johnny speculated.

  That gene had missed Johnny completely. Johnny had no use whatsoever for yuppie parties. He particularly didn’t like dressing up for the parties; it was bad enough to have to dress up for work. Clothes he didn’t even like to wear were already cluttering up his small new apartment.

  At the parties, Angela expected him to drink mind-numbing alcohol. He certainly didn’t mind a beer now and then, but he’d rather drink it at home in front of a TV, in semi-clean jeans and tee-shirt, watching football, a PBS nature documentary, or an old Star Trek re-run, while washing down some pizza with everything on it except anchovies. Anchovies too, if he felt like really letting loose.

  Being outdoors provided a better high for Johnny. As soon as he could break away from Angela and the box factory for a few days, he planned to drive up the coast, while parking the Ford now and then to check out natural wonders as he ran across them. There were countless mountainous parks and coastal beaches that he was dying to see. He’d completely fill the trunk of the old Tempo with sand-encrusted sea-shells, drift wood, and pinecones.

  He especially wanted to experience forests. He loved forests more than anything else; he felt vibrantly alive and connected to life when he was in a forest. Here in the big city he felt like a fish out of water.

  Above all he’d look for Goth Mountain on his trip, no matter what he had promised Mom. He had never broken his word to Ann Goth or to anyone else for that matter, but this would have to be the exception. As long as he could remember he had felt drawn to Goth Mountain, and that feeling had greatly intensified since he moved West and his life with Angela had gotten even more pointless.

  All of this and more seemed foreign to Angela. “What about kids?” he had asked her last night.

  She had stared at him blankly, as if she didn’t even know what kids were.

  “You know, little people that live with you as they grow bigger, spending all your money and driving you crazy, but sort of making up for it somehow anyway,” he had patiently explained.

  “I don’t know,” she finally said, though she clearly didn’t even want to talk about it. “Maybe never. Certainly no time soon, I’m much too busy now. Ask me again in maybe ten or twenty years.”

  Johnny was dismayed. The party gene had missed him somehow, but his family instincts were very strong. How could Angela say that she was too busy for something as vital as children? All she did was party! That was time uselessly flittered away, as far as he was concerned. “And pets. You said pets are OK.”

  “No, I said that someday they MIGHT be OK, Johnny, when we have a big enough place. You want us to live on just your salary, remember? All the apartments I’ve been looking at for us to live in together after the wedding don’t even allow pets.”

  “That’s totally unsat!” he protested. “You know that I have a cat, not to mention a goldfish.”

  “That cat you took in when you moved here probably has a real owner. It will be better off without you. Anyway, cats are practically free, and so are goldfish; they can easily be replaced someday.”

  Johnny was stupefied. “Replaced? What on Earth are you talking about? Moocher and Goldie can’t be replaced!”

  “Johnny baby, it’s not worth getting excited about. Of course they can be replaced. Anything can be replaced, it just takes cash.”

  “They aren’t THINGS, Angela, they’re living beings. My adopted family.”

  “Well of course they’re alive; but they’re just animals. Cheap ones. You paid fifty-cents for the goldfish and nothing at all for the cat!”

  “Angela, your points are pointless; money doesn’t even enter into it, and we’re all ‘just’ animals.”

  “Science geek, you know what I mean. Money enters into everything, and unlike animals, we humans think and have feelings.”

  “So do they; or at least Moocher does. He has a prune-sized cat brain, but the infinitely vast, righteous soul of a poet. A penniless, self-centered, self-indulgent, lazy, idiot sort of poet, which is probably the best kind.”

  “Johnny, you’re talking nonsense. You have to focus on your responsibilities now.”

  “Responsibilities are exactly what I’m talking about. They both depend on me.”

  “And I depend on you, and the Company depends on you. What you need to focus on now is money and position. You’re a grown man, not a kid. Grow up!”

  He would have argued further, but at that point Angela seduced him, right there in her parent’s basement, while her folks were out to dinner. Actually, the basement was a hell of a lot bigger and nicer than his apartment, as it was part of a multi-million-dollar house; it was incredible luxury that he had to admit attracted him on some level, perhaps in the perverse sort of way that Angela did. When he thought about it objectively, he had to admit that he had made it big; he wa
s engaged to a beautiful, sexy woman who would someday inherit a multi-million dollar cardboard box business. What could be better?

  The problem was, in his gut none of it added up at all, not one damn bit of it. He knew for example that he should feel really good about everything this morning, but instead he mostly felt empty, emptier than he could remember ever feeling before, except for when Dad had disappeared on the Mountain that summer many years ago and Mom shortly thereafter returned both of them to Ohio for good.

  School had been Johnny’s main passion since then. Maybe because he was afraid of what might came after school he took three extra years to finally settle on arbitrary double-majors and graduate from Ohio State, even though all school work was very easy for him. Graduation wasn’t a total crisis though, because by then Angela had become his next passion, at least during the times they were in the sack.

  Until Angela he had avoided having close friends since leaving Goth Mountain. Avoiding friendships had been painful, but he had too many secrets to hide and too many temptations to avoid. In fact, his whole life seemed to be centered on avoiding things. So far that hadn’t added up to very much of a life.

  At first he thought that Angela was a huge positive turning point in his life, but he didn’t think so anymore. Perhaps he had been totally adrift before being snagged by Angela, but by now he felt like he was in the wrong sort of river altogether, suffocating while being swept downstream to unknown and undistinguished ends, hopelessly swimming, when he bothered to at all, directly against an unrelenting current instead of cleverly angling out of it.

  He didn’t believe in destiny, but felt that there must be something more he could do with his life, something that meant something. Should he reveal his abilities to the world? No, definitely not. The Government would probably secretly cut him to pieces to figure him out, though on the plus side there might actually be some value to that from a science viewpoint. Worse, if he were to be found out, so would the Tribe and all the mysteries that were hidden on Goth Mountain. So it all came back to still keeping secrets, at least until he found someone he could totally trust.

  Was there such a person? There had to be; there were already hundreds of people on Goth Mountain that he could trust, and of course there was his mother. But no, he couldn't trust Angela.

  He found himself still standing outside the box company, so confused that he was not even altogether sure what he was confused about. He should go inside, he finally decided. These people were paying him; he should at least provide an honest day’s work. After all, he had his Ohio work-ethic to live up to. Besides, he had nothing better to do at the moment. He stepped forward, reaching out his hand towards the door handle.

  And froze. From impossibly far away came a voice. It was so faint that he couldn’t tell if it was real sound, or just something in his head drawn in by his psychic abilities. “Johhhnnnny, Johhhnnnny; come play with Ned, Johnny,” bleated the voice, goat-like.

  Johnny’s head spun dizzily and he staggered, nearly falling down. He had heard that voice before, a lifetime ago on Goth Mountain and in his dreams since then. An abrasive, Billy-goat gruff voice; it was Ned, one of Uncle Mortimer’s strange companions and one of Johnny’s closest childhood playmates during those wondrous summers when his parents took Johnny to visit the magical Goth homestead.

  His mother had since tried to convince Johnny that it was all merely dreams. She wouldn’t talk about those days and she didn’t keep any photos or other memorabilia of Goth Mountain. She had tried to erase Johnny’s memories of those summers long ago, but the memories always returned.

  He reached into his pants pocket and ran his fingers over the lid of the gold watch, and the ornate forest scene on it that featured a unicorn in the center. He didn’t have to look at it; he could recall perfectly every tiny detail of the watch, as well as his uncle, his father, Goth Mountain, the Tribe, Ned, and many other wondrous friends.

  He smiled, but the memories weren’t all good. He would never forget the day that his uncle Mortimer gave him the watch … his father’s. Mort had gone up on the Mountain to look for Dad and had returned with only the watch. “Sorry boy,” old Uncle Mort had told the young boy. “I still haven’t given up; I never will. But your dad has lost his way boy, lost his way but good. He’d want you to keep his watch close to you. It’s very special. It has your Dad’s likeness on the back of it. Someday you’ll need it, I have a notion.”

  That was the last time that Johnny saw Uncle Mort. After a few days of frantic searching for his father with Mort, his mother, weeping the only time he had ever seen her do so, had taken him away from Goth Mountain and the Goth cabin, from Mort, Ned, and the Tribe, and from his father Mark, back to the Ohio of her childhood, never to return.

  She let Johnny keep the watch, but in all other ways Ann Goth had tried to erase all evidence of his father’s existence and anything having to do with the Goths. She was trying to hide from the pain he realized, as he grew older, and trying to help him do the same. Perhaps it worked to a degree when he was younger, but now his need to return to Goth Mountain was growing steadily.

  Johnny wasn’t even sure what state Goth Mountain was in, but he knew that it was near the Pacific, because once they had taken a short side trip to the ocean shore. The Mountain had monstrous trees, but not redwoods, so he figured it had to be somewhere further north than California: in Oregon, Washington, or perhaps even Canada.

  To simply Google Goth Mountain would spoil things. If he found Goth Mountain on his computer without being able to immediately go there that would drive him crazy. On the other hand, if he looked but couldn’t find it on the internet, that would drive him even more crazy. No, after he had settled in here in California a little longer, he’d go find Goth Mountain in person. He’d simply drive north along the coast until he sensed its presence. He had to do it. Maybe it was the real reason he had come to California with Angela.

  Johnny looked up and down the street but saw nothing of Ned. He had been unsuccessfully looking for Ned for many years, behind Ohio bushes and trees, in closets and under beds, after imagining that he had seen or heard the goat man. But it had never been Ned, not for real.

  It wasn’t Ned this time either. Wherever Goth Mountain and Ned were, they were a long way from southern California. The voice in his head had already faded away. His mother was probably right; it was simply his imagination acting up again. “Your father and I told you wonderful stories, but they are only stories, they aren’t real,” she had told him, whenever he tried to talk to her about his memories. “As a small child, you saw things differently, with a child’s imagination. Normal things seemed like magic to you. The Indian tribe was real, but you only think that you saw Sasquatch, unicorns and other strange things. Now as you grow up, you’ll see things as they really are.”

  Maybe Mom was right, but she had still never explained very well the unusual things that he could himself do, even as a small boy. Things that he had quickly learned to avoid doing in front of other people.

  She had never explained the mysterious pocket watch either, which on its own had gradually changed its appearance over the years. On one side it showed his gradually aging father. Johnny's own face also mysteriously appeared next to his father's on the watch shortly after it was given to him. Over the years both of their images changed to match their ages.

  On the other side of the watch an ageless unicorn changed its appearance in other ways. Usually the unicorn reared up high on its hind legs, but sometimes it stood quietly on all four legs, or lay still in tall grass. Sometimes only its head was visible, and sometimes only its all-seeing unicorn eye filled the entire face of the watch. The unicorn was white, but its eye was black. The colors weren't coatings painted over the gold of the watch, they were part of the watch material itself. The white glowed brightly, while the black swallowed all light like a bottomless pit. Johnny suspected that the gold itself was a disguising veneer, and that the white and black of the unicorn displayed we
re the true characteristics of the watch.

  What did it all mean? Would he ever know? Johnny shook his head sadly, and without enthusiasm finally entered the box factory.

  “They’ve already started, Mr. Goth,” said Sally, the elderly receptionist, as he walked past her desk towards the hallway that led to the conference room.

  “Thanks, Sally,” he replied, as he paused and returned her smile before continuing on towards the meeting. Sally was a very nice lady; one of the few people here at BUC that Johnny truly liked.

  Johnny eased open the conference room door and entered quietly, hoping to sit inconspicuously in the back of the room near the door, totally unnoticed by the dozen people already sitting around the big table.

  “Well, well, it’s the Ohio kid, late for his third weekly meeting in a row,” boomed Frank Welborne gruffly. The big cardboard box magnate and future father-in-law at the far side of the table stood up and towered over even Johnny, dominating the room. “The BUC starts here, Goth. You've come to straighten us out using your college education, have you?”

  “No sir,” replied Johnny, politely. “The other way around; I’m just here to learn the box business,” he tried to say with sincerity.

  “Damn straight, kid,” Welborne replied. “Pull up a fucking chair and have a fucking doughnut.”

  Johnny wasn’t particularly offended by Welborne’s posturing and crude language, he just didn’t see any point to it. It seemed to him that the big man's behavior was some sort of cheap, juvenile, macho-power thing that didn’t register meaningfully, at least not with Johnny.

  As Johnny pulled out an unused chair and sat down in an open stretch of the big round table, Welborne slid a half-empty box of doughnuts across the table towards him, and turned to face Mike Wells, the factory foreman. “Now, what the hell were you just saying, Wells? You say we’ve got to meet the specs now, and if we don’t, we might blow the Beltright contract?”

  Wells, a large, muscular, dark haired, rugged looking man in his early thirties, shook his head. He was the only person present in blue collar work clothes; everyone else was suited up neatly in deference to Welborne. “Right. We can’t pass spec with the box materials we've been using. Explain it to him, college boy; it’s your can of worms.” He glared at Johnny.

  “Sure,” said Johnny with a shrug, though it definitely wasn’t HIS can of worms. “Our standard cardboard uses about eighty percent recycled paper. That’s a good thing, from both cost and environmental perspectives, but fibers in the pulp aren’t as long or strong as in pure virgin pulp. Using our standard pulp, we can’t satisfy both strength and weight contract requirements.”

  “No shit?” said Welborne sarcastically. “Is that all? Well, screw their spec requirements. Beltright won’t even notice.”

  “They already have,” said Wells. “College boy here sent them a sample from right off the production line and they tested it. They phoned late yesterday with the results. They’ve rejected the box.”

  “What the hell? How?” Welborne stared wide-eyed at Johnny.

  Johnny shrugged. “They asked last week that we send them a sample box, so I sent one. I didn’t know there was a spec compliance problem.”

  Welborne’s face turned a deeper shade of red. “You sent them a regular sample box from right off our production line? Are you crazy? Didn’t they teach you bait and switch techniques at that damn school of yours?”

  “I guess I missed that class. Anyway, all we have to do is use a slightly higher grade material; add some virgin wood fiber, or better yet add fiberglass and save both money and trees. The basics are easy; simply give the customer what they want.”

  “And how the fuck do we afford that? Grow our own trees? I bid the job based on using our standard cheap recycled wood pulp and no fiberglass. Besides, we already produced half of the boxes to their non-standard size and shape specifications; nobody else will want those boxes. It’s too damn late to switch materials now.”

  “Got any bright ideas, college boy?” asked Wells, smiling. Wells had it in for Johnny from the beginning. Johnny thought at first that Wells was jealous of his position as a production engineer, gained so quickly from a college education. Lately he suspected that Wells was also jealous of his position with Angela. Most recently, based on snickering and other antics from Wells and others, Johnny even suspected that Wells and Angela actually may have had an affair.

  Johnny shrugged. How was he supposed to fix something that shouldn't have happened in the first place and wasn’t his fault? They were the ones trying to cheat a customer!

  “I know,” said Jenkins, from sales. Jenkins was a mousy little man, but he was slippery as a greased weasel and had one hell of a slick sales pitch. “For making the rest of the order we use new material, and we deliver some of those boxes first. Then later we switch back to the other boxes.”

  Smiling, Welborne got up, laughed and slapped Jenkins heavily on the back. “Well of course that’s what we’ll do, it’s obvious as hell. Beltright will be on their guard though. If they catch on we might end up taking an even bigger loss.” He pointed a thick forefinger at Johnny. “If that happens I’m going to take the difference out of your fucking salary, college boy.”

  Wells snickered and someone else laughed out loud. Everyone knew that Johnny was on the payroll due to his relationship with the boss’s daughter. Fucking salary indeed.

  Johnny was speechless. He didn’t see how he would ever fit in with this bunch. Business to them was a web of scams, lies and half lies, moved along by behind-the-back deals, posturing and intimidation. They reminded Johnny of the gang of little thugs that dominated the schoolyard at recess at his old elementary school. He had managed to steer clear of that crowd then, but now he had unavoidably fallen in among these alien pod people. Luckily, Sally peeked in through the doorway at that moment. “Excuse me Mr. W., Mr. Goth has a visitor that insists on seeing him immediately.”

  Welborne dismissed Johnny with a wave of his big hand and a snarl, and Johnny slipped out of the conference room to a chorus of jeers and hearty laughter from the group. They reminded Johnny of a troop of baboons that he had recently seen in a nature documentary.

  “Thanks, Sally,” said Johnny. “I was getting killed in there. Do I really have a visitor?”

  “Of course you do. You know I’m the one person around here besides you that tells only the truth. It’s a weird little man, Johnny; and I do mean weird. I thought at first he was a homeless person or some kind of drug addict; they come in off the street sometimes. But he gave me your name, Johnny-Eee-Eee-Eee Goth.” She laughed. “He’s strange, but he seems harmless enough, and desperate. Said he needs you to come out and play with him. He calls himself Ned. Hairy face and voice like a goat.”

  Johnny stopped in his tracks, his jaw dropping. “Ned? A hairy little goat-like man?”

  “Hairiest, most goat-like little man I ever saw.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Down the hall. I left him in the lobby at my desk.”

  The lobby was empty when they got there.

  “Johhhnnnny, Johhhnnnny, Eee-Eee; come out and play with Ned, Johnny,” came a bleating voice from outside, but very close by. Johnny felt that he surely must be hearing things again.

  “That sounds like him outside calling to you, Johnny Eee-Eee,” said Sally, confirming the reality of the voice.

  His heart pounding and his gold watch in hand, Johnny opened the door. Standing next to his Tempo and staring back at him with wide, sad, frightened brown eyes was someone who at first glance appeared to be a short, nervous, little hairy man, no more than four feet tall. He wore a much too-big plaid flannel shirt with sleeves that covered his hands, and shredded and muddy baggy jeans that ended around floppy, tattered sneakers of unknown original color.

  A baseball cap covered the top of his head. The face was inhumanly pointed and hairy, with short black fur over everything except blunt black nose tip, thin black lips and gaping eyes. The legs were bent
at wrong angles and bow-legged. Given closer inspection, it was perhaps a humanoid, but certainly not a human, that stood staring at Johnny.

  “Naaaaaaaaaah,” it bleated, goat-like, and abruptly bounced at Johnny with stunning speed, launching up through the air at him with open arms that wrapped around his neck and hugged him fiercely. Johnny staggered with the impact and fell down backwards to lie on the sidewalk, hairy little goat-man-thing on top of him.

  “Oh, my!” exclaimed Sally, from the doorway, as she ducked inside.

  Johnny was squeezed so hard he could hardly breathe; yet he was so happy and excited that his heart raced and tears formed in his eyes. “Ned? Ned? It’s really you?”

  “Baaaaaaaaaaah,” was all that the excided goat man could say.

  Laughing, Johnny finally was able to push the little guy away such that they could both sit on the sidewalk facing each other.

  “Hi Cub!” said the goat man, smiling. "You got big. We was almost the same size, last I saw yah."

  “Ned, Ned, you ARE real! Where did you come from? What are you doing here?”

  “I came to get you, Cub. It’s trouble. We need you home; baaaaaah.”

  “Trouble? Home?”

  The little goat man’s smile faded and Johnny sensed in him great sadness and weariness. “Big trouble. We got to go right now.” The little fellow stood up slowly and walked unsteadily to the Tempo, his sneakers flopping loosely. In greeting Johnny so vigorously he had evidently expended all of his strength; now he teetered as though he was on the verge of collapse.

  His disguise was also in disarray. One of the sneakers had ridden up a few inches, exposing a cloven hoof that poked through its bottom. When he leaned against the car to steady himself and turned to face Johnny, the baseball cap fell completely off, revealing a pair of two-inch long, curly horns that sprouted up from the top of his forehead, and a pair of floppy Billy-goat ears that were growing longer by the moment. Ned’s snout had also grown longer and hairier. All his human-like features were disappearing; Ned was slipping into his normal, more goat-like appearance. “This old heap of rust is yours, Cub, I can sense it,” he said as he tapped the Tempo with a fore hoof. “Climb aboard and let’s go. Time for you to come home to Goth Mountain, Johnny.”

  With a sigh, the exhausted little goat-man sank senseless to the ground next to the Tempo.

  ****