Lets give this thing a go then

[romney.livejournal.com]

Here is a page of the start of something which I can continue with if anyone for some strange reason wants to read more.


The goblin adjusted its mirror-shades and sipped cappuccino.
"I am pleased to say it is a very usual misconception". Its fingers are ancient: wrinkled and liver-spotted but nimble at unwrapping biscotti.
For our second meeting the creature had chosen a table outside a cafe in Soho. Clearly very much at home, it had ordered in fast and loud Italian, queue jumping the thirsty tourists at the next table. The waitress seemed to know it and deftly avoided its attempt to accidentally touch her behind.
The biscuit disappeared between yellow pointed teeth, alarmingly fast. "You thought to look for the likes of me in London, and you have searched where you believed we must have hidden ourselves. But we do not bother now to even to hide in plain sight. We just live here."

For months I had trudged around old London, forgotten London, where my sources had assured me that its kind would if anywhere be found, scratching a supposed poor living from the edges of the city. So I'd sought ways into closed tunnels, explored beneath disused railway arches and in the crypts of shuttered churches. I had ventured behind the fading hoardings protecting long-closed buildings and scraps of wasteground. Searched piles of rotting refuse in rooms opened by decay to the sky, and forded the stagnant water in collapsed basements. Disturbed the hidden lives of pigeons, of urban foxes and of men.

For everywhere there had been people, whether the homeless, the dispossessed, the criminal or the crazy, a population who had slipped through the cracks of the city to live beneath its notice. In my searches I'd found two corpses, survived three muggings and witnessed one death. But all the sorrow had been human sorrow. Sad, tragic stories yes, but not the stories I was determined to find. For I had need of a legend.

The goblin wore a new Umbro shirt, smart chinos and a baseball cap on its bald head. Its bony finger gestured to draw my attention, then drew a vague circle that captured the adjacent tables, nearby cafes and the street life passing by. Silently asking "What do you see?"
The answer was obvious. Around us bustled the inhabitants of London and its visitors; a hundred shades of humanity, sometimes wildly dressed, hair wildly coloured, skin tattooed and pierced, or just plain, just old, just young.
"I understand." For all its strangeness, the Goblin was well towards the middle of the bell curve.
The creature pursed thin lips. "Perhaps not yet. But after your many adventures, tell me where you then did look."
"Well, I switched tactics and searched at night. I thought some of you might be nocturnal..."
"Delicious!" Its pursed lips widened to a grin. "Even I do not consider it safe walking the streets at night. Too many humans out and about, up to no good with their guns and knives." It lent towards me as if confiding a secret. "It is not a safe city after dark, and it never has been."
It sat back and pointed at an overweight man standing in the road, his back to an oncoming taxi as he photographed a phone-box. "Better for you would have been to become a tourist and to take the night-tour that looks for the ghosts of old London."
"Would I have seen one?"
"No, but one of the tour guides is the youngest ogre to live in the city. But you would not have noticed. Nobody ever does."