I always try to get paid for my work. I think my time is valuable, and I like the input of an editor to make my stories as good as they can possibly be. So I don't tend to self publish stories for free on my blog. I’m making an exception for this one because even those a good story can still be good years after its subject matter is in the public eye, there are some stories that might be best enjoyed now, rather than a few years down the line when it is finally published.
In this case, I wrote it during the previous presidency, hoping beyond hope that it would be irrelevant soon.
I don't talk about politics much. I care, and my views probably come through in my stories, but I generally don’t write politics into my stories on purpose. This time, I did.
My story is set before the 2020 election. It does not mention any actual politicians by name, but it should be clear which red hats I'm talking about. If the idea of there being a conspiracy to have figures from Irish mythology murdering political opponents throughout history, up to and quite possibly including the opponents of a certain recent cantaloupe in chief, bothers you, I have plenty of other stories that don't involve politics you might enjoy.
So without further ado, here is a story you will not read anywhere else… Make America Goblins Again
Make America Goblins Again
By Jennifer Lee Rossman
Ordinarily, the sight of no blood shouldn't be so distressing. No blood is good. No blood means no injury, no cleaning up, no calling the cops to report that my boss has been murdered.
But when there was absolutely blood–like, half a body's worth at least although I'm not an expert–a few minutes ago and there's no way anyone could possibly clean it up that fast no matter how many Mr. Clean Magic Erasers they used, no blood is… disconcerting, to say the least.
"It was there. I saw it. Saw him. Laying there, being…" Here, I do my best to mime being a senator with a gaping hole in the head, but I never was any good at charades. "Dead. Very, extremely not alive in a dead sort of way." I'm rambling, I know I am, and I just wish Taylor would say something, anything, so I could stop rambling.
"Do you think the killer is still in the house?" he says quietly.
Anything except that.
They must be. However they cleaned it up, that doesn't matter. The office window is still locked, and Taylor was right by the front door until I ran screaming to get him. They couldn't get out.
I wrap my arms around myself, put my back against the wood paneled wall, hyperventilate a little more for good measure. First time I set foot in this house, it felt like a mansion. Impossibly high ceilings, more bedrooms than people, little elevator just for food because you'll burn more calories walking all the way to the kitchen than you'll get eating the grilled cheese.
But now it's nothing short of claustrophobic. Closing in with every heartbeat, bringing the killer closer and closer.
Taylor has a baseball bat. One of the senator's, a gift from some sports person he met with last year after the World Series.
Right. Weapons. Come on, Susanna, you might be in a horror movie. Time to be genre savvy.
In a distant sort of way, I am aware that my employer–my kinda-sorta friend–is dead. I am aware that his murder was almost definitely politically motivated and therefore was an assassination. But all of this knowledge is trapped behind a thick glass wall of numbness and my inability to focus on anything except getting out of the house and calling the police.
Taylor does that for me, the phone call. And he stops the police from touching me while I give my statement. I might seem good on the outside, but it's just the shock. Inside, my autistic doomsday clock is just seconds from meltdown and all those flashing lights are not helping matters.
In the gloom beyond the lights, pressed against the sawhorse barriers, a crowd has gathered. Media, DC citizens, general gawkers. Whatever their political affiliation, whether Senator Kingsley was their savior or just a nuisance in the way of four more years, something has happened to the man who was about to announce his candidacy for president. It's a big deal.
But something about the crowd doesn't sit right with me and I can't identify exactly what it is right away, not until Taylor leans close and whispers in my ear, "Red Hat Society is here in full force."
Of course. How did I miss it?
Anxiety. But not the point.
Most of the crowd is wearing the red caps that have come to symbolize the values and hatred of the president's more extreme followers. I'm too stressed out to fully parse the feeling of foreboding looming inside my skull, so I whisper back simply, "Not good."
One of the gawkers, not a red hatter, recoils suddenly from the sawhorse she was leaning on, looking at her hand as if she has a splinter. I don't think I would have noticed except everyone in a red hat turns to look at her. All at once, heads swiveling like animatronic pirates that do want to eat the tourists.
One of them, he reaches out and touches her hand, then the brim of his cap. I can't see his face, and I'm not good at facial expressions anyway, but I have the strangest feeling that he looks satisfied.
"Very not good."
***
It barely makes the papers.
"How?" I demand, wishing I had a physical copy of the newspaper to slam down on the table because it's not worth breaking my phone just to be dramatic. Instead, I shove it into Taylor's hand and watch as he reads it.
His eyebrows go up incrementally with every swipe, until they are almost lost in his shaggy blonde bangs. He shakes his head slowly, doesn't say anything for a long while.
"You were there," I say. Plead. I know I've had my share of mental health problems in the past, delusions and hallucinations, but that's under control and it was never this bad. Minor government conspiracies, fleeting glimpses of fair folk… never entire murder scenes that disappear when I leave the room. "You were there, you came to pick me up last night. The police came."
Taylor sets down my phone, slides across the table like he never wants to see it again. "I was. I did. They did." He stares at me, lost and confused.
I can make eye contact with him, better than other people, anyway. His eyes don't lie to me, don't try to figure me out. Usually I find that sort of comforting, but not today. I wish his eyes would lie to me, squint at me and accuse me of losing touch with reality again, because Taylor is the most levelheaded person I've ever met, and if he is scared, that doesn't bode well for what I call reality.
He picks up his phone, starts to type, stops himself. "This isn't the first time it's happened."
He's right. I didn't pay that much attention to the story at the time because the real world was kind of pushed to the background while I was figuring out my mental health, but he's right. There were rumors that the governor of Iowa was going to run, and then she just dropped off the map.
Disappeared into thin air, more like. Car crash, the tabloids said, at least until the articles were deleted and the people who claim to have read them began to think of it as a Mandela Effect. Supposedly, she had been driving alone, but there was no body in the car. No blood.
"Devil's advocate," Taylor says, holding his hands up. "Even if it's not a cover-up, even if they're keeping the details secret during the investigation, there should be something. A blurb. Tweets from bystanders."
"The red hat bystanders," I remind him, pulling the collar of my shirt into my mouth.
There's something nagging at my brain, some bit of folklore I soaked up back when I was hyperfocusing on the mythology of Great Britain a few months ago to identify exactly what I saw that day in the Rose Garden. But it's a nebulous kind of thought, pieces of a puzzle floating in a vacuum, and even if I could put them together, the picture I think they would make is utterly ridiculous.
"What are you thinking?" Taylor asks.
I shake my head. "It's nothing," I say, but my eyes don't lie to him, either, and he gives me a look.
"Susie."
In those two syllables, he gives me a long speech about trusting myself, about trusting him not to think I'm crazy because he's seen me crazy and for some unfathomable reason he still wants to be my friend.
So I relent. "Redcap."
***
I was holding myself together pretty well, if I do say so myself. Acting all neurotypical so they would take me seriously, talking about the weather and I love your shoes and how about those Nationals. (Thankfully, no one asked any follow-up questions about those Nationals, because that is the most I have talked about sports in my entire life and I'm only about 70 percent sure it is baseball season.)
I was calm. I was focused. I was, in a word, Tayloresque. And then I saw the red cap hanging on the coat rack, and all of my cool left in a rush. I think it became sweat. I'm sweating. Like, a lot.
So that was easier than I thought.
This is not exactly something we can go to the papers with. Even if we eliminate the mythological murder goblins from the equation, what we are suggesting is absurd.
Tons of people go missing every year. Just disappear without a trace, becoming unsolved mysteries, something that is beyond belief… Okay, I think I'm just listing TV shows right now. I do that when I get nervous. Anyway. Sometimes, those people who go missing are politicians, and sometimes it's not as easy as deleting an article from the Internet. You can suppress the information, you can press people to change their stories, but you can't eliminate every copy of an obscure local paper printed in the nineteenth century from the world.
The stories line up. Politicians disappearing, always people who oppose the current administration, and the overwhelming majority agree, probably under duress, that there was no murder scene. Except sometimes people like me don't care what people tell us is true. We know we saw a body, blood, and we know we saw a suspicious person in a red hat. A fedora, a beanie, only in recent years has it become the red baseball hat with the white lettering.
The likes of which is hanging in the office of the police commissioner, looking a little faded in this particular instance.
We thought it would be harder, getting into talk to him, figuring out if he was part of the hypothesized cover up.
The phrase "too easy" comes to mind as he invites me to sit down.
"So, Miss…"
"Murphy." A new wave of panic goes through me. That's not my last name. It's not the name I gave them at the front desk when I showed my ID card. I just don't want them to know my real name, the Redcaps, although I feel like they have enough reach, they can find me no matter what I do.
"Miss Murphy. I was told you want to speak to me about an ongoing investigation, the disappearance of your employer, Senator Kingsley."
I force myself to approximate eye contact, staring at the space between his eyes while he glares at me. Can you glare while smiling? He's trying.
"Yes, sir–"
"Well, I'm sorry you came all this way. The senator has taken a leave of absence to treat his alcoholism and will not be announcing his candidacy."
That's not true. Kingsley came from a long family of people with addiction; he never had so much as a drop of alcohol in his life. It also occurs to me that Redcaps don't go after people who drink or do drugs, because even though the hat isn't technically part of their anatomy, they still feel the effects of the blood they drink. In some versions of the mythology, anyway. But that's mythology. It doesn't matter right now.
"It's unfortunate that he did not tell you this last week before he left, leading you to erroneously believe some great harm had fallen him, but these things happen, don't they?"
That's a challenge, isn't it? Him giving me the opportunity to fall in line, to agree with the conspiracy.
I hate myself for it, but I take the opportunity. Maybe it's the paranoia talking–but usually the paranoia sounds more like Jeff Goldblum so I doubt it–but I don't think I'm getting out of here alive if I argue with him.
"Yes, I suppose they do. Very unfortunate. I shall yell at him. Vigorously. Thank you for your time." I go to stand up, and whack my knee on a table that very rudely came out of nowhere and assaulted me.
The overwhelming pain pushes the second hand of my doomsday clock dangerously close to midnight. I'm already stressed and wearing a blazer and trying to make eye contact. I squeeze my eyes shut, tap my fingers together in a desperate attempt at stimming.
I don't hear his chair push back, or the footsteps. It's the heavy breathing, right next to my face, that snaps open my eyes.
But he's not looking at me, he's looking at the blood dripping down my leg. And there goes my last hope that the Redcaps were metaphorical.
He must be hungry. Really hungry, if he's willing to reveal himself like this.
I should've moved by now, but I'm not proactive like Taylor. By the time I can think through the pain, the chief's hat is in his hand and his hand is at my knee.
For a second, just a second, curiosity short circuits my fear. They're real. And if they are, maybe the fairies I saw when Senator Kingsley tried to take my mind off my troubles by letting me be his date to the Correspondents' Dinner…
My blood wicks up into the fabric of the hat, revitalizing the faded canvas like blush coming to the cheeks of someone in love. But it wants more than my blood. I can feel it sucking on my vein, on the muscle and bone beyond.
I am the enemy, an intruder on their territory, threatening to reveal the glamour they have cast over the ruins of democracy. I am the enemy, and it wants to consume me.
I jerk away, but the Redcap is faster; he blocks the door with his body, daring me to try and overpower him. Struggling will only make my blood flow faster.
I stumble back, staying out of the reach of his hat, already feeling lightheaded. How much did he take?
Trying to think like Taylor, I look around the room for something I can use as a weapon. I don't even know what I hope to find. Iron. Silver. Religious stuff. Supposedly poison for fair folk, although there's iron in my blood, so maybe not iron.
"People like you–"
"No!" I shout. "No, you don't get to explain why you're doing this. I don't care, it won't change my mind. Your politics are based on taking away the rights of people like me, and maybe you're going to kill me and eat my blood, but I don't have to listen to your bullshit while you do it."
He opens his mouth again, and something in me snaps. I grab the nearest book and throw it at him, not really expecting anything to happen, just to be annoying in my last minutes.
His head snaps back as he dodges it, smacking into the doorframe.
And then he's on the ground, and there is blood. So much blood.
His hat falls to the floor, just inches from his outstretched, motionless hand. Maybe he isn't dead. Maybe I could call out, save him.
The pool of blood expands outward, creeping, always creeping.
He would not extend me the courtesy of saving my life. He thought it was worth it, taking my life for the betterment of his country.
The brim of the hat comes into contact with the blood and flushes bright red. It absorbs, consumes. The body of the police chief starts to inch toward the hat and I shut my eyes.
When I open them, there is no blood, no body.
***
"The country is under attack and they don't even know it."
"They know it," Taylor promises me. "They just don't know exactly what is attacking them."
And there's no way to tell them. The Redcaps… they're everywhere, they have their hands in everything. The media, the news, the White House.
"So we go after them ourselves," I say quietly, because if I'm quiet, maybe the idea won't be so terrifying. "We… we find them, and we put something in our blood that's harmless to humans but poisonous to them. And then we…"
"Let them feed," Taylor finishes my sentence for me.
I just hope we can get them all before election day.
End
