On the eve of October thirty-first, within the last few decades or nearabouts, a small, angry little man waddled the streets of suburbia, swearing, hissing, and spitting to himself over his stout puffs for air. And though none of this was unusual in either behaviour nor appearance, the identity of the man himself was of note: he was a goblin. Oh, Ivrint fit in well enough as far as human looks went – perhaps his belly was a bit too round, perhaps his head a bit too bald, maybe his teeth were too crooked and spiky and his eyes sparkled too delightfully when in the presence of small evils – but it was all for nothing in the face of his voice: he talked so thoroughly through his nose that a head cold rendered him utterly mute, and there was no hiding this from even the most complacent, bored, lackadaisical suburbanite.
Fortunately, those same qualities of his neighbours lent themselves quite thoroughly to apathy, and so though almost anyone who met him guessed Ivrint’s identity before he could say ‘boo’ few cared even slightly.
Well, very few.
Almost no one.
Ivrint sighed as he neared his home – Jack O’Lantern pointedly NOT on display – and the drear reality of his doom sank down over him, slumping his shoulders even lower than their natural angle. Really, it had all seemed so reasonable to him at the time; what reasonable home-owner’s association would not permit a pillar of the community to fend off pests from their yard? Yes, the pests were pets, yes, they were cats, yes, nonlethal traps were encouraged but scarcely mandated, and yes, it was in poor taste to skin and eat the things on your front lawn, but he defied any man or woman to find a specific regulation in the book that he’d actually broken as such. The spirit of the rules had been violated, perhaps, but the letter remained pristine. This was North America, that sort of behaviour was meant to be celebrated, was it not?
Regretably, his punishment was as extrajudicial as his sentence. He was under no official obligations, penalties, censures, fees, or geasa. This was simple a friendly annual request by good honest hard-working friendly pillars of the community who would knock over all his garbage cans every morning for the rest of his life and steal his recycling bins if he refused to bow to their every command.
And it was only one command. Just one. A tiny, teeny, insignificant little command. But it was a command all the same, and the one thing a goblin hates more than not being able to order people around is being forced to do the same.
The sprawling mob in front of his home looked up from their stashes. Rough-spun robes fluttered in the air. Drool dripped from oversized fangs, eyes glowed, knives were brandished against the cool autumn breeze.
A single creature stepped forwards, a head taller than Ivrint and nearly as broad, its face smeared with crimson and hastily stitched together. “Let’s go, stumpy,” it said.
And if there was a second thing a goblin hated yet more, it would be human children. The more the hatefuler.
(A third thing, perhaps, would be peanut butter. The damned holiday was infested with it, and the scent always took days to fade from his nose)
Ivrint’s final stop before his home had been the general store.
“Cindy let go of the stop sign.”
It had been a small, simple purchase, but it was an annual tradition.
“I don’t care if you want to, we’re not walking down to Beachfront Avenue, that’s six miles and the little ones’ legs will fall off. No, you can’t tape that, nobody you want to know would be interested in paying for it.”
Also, a necessary one.
“Clyde, don’t open that gate; there’s no pumpkin and that dog will bite you. Leo, stop hitting Suzy unless you want her to bite you again. Teresa, don’t dare Francis to eat that, you know he’s diabetic and the police would be on you like fleas on puppies. Simon would you…”
Ivrint gagged momentarily, pulled out his bag of horrible throat lozenges that didn’t quite taste like cherries soaked in vinegar, and popped three into his mouth at once – one for swallowing, one for chewing, and one for sucking for ten seconds and then accidentally chewing. He’d empty the thing halfway through the night, if he was any judge.
“… put that d- okay good you already did. Hurts, doesn’t it? Well now you know why you’re not supposed to pick them up. No, Jess, we’re not allowed to play tricks, just take your damned treats. No, your parents won’t care if you tell them that I said that word because they say worse themselves. Tell all you like, just shut up. Oh, you want to tell them something? Tell them this: Ivrint Gattlekrik says your father is the fattest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve hunted denning bears. Your father is fatter than that. And genetics says you’ll be fatter still. That’s right, you eat that candy. Eat it through the tears, fatty. Your fat, fat tears.”
There was always a casualty, of course.
“Look, just put it back on the stoop. Yes, I’m sure they’ll notice; they put out a pumpkin, not ten pounds of smashed shell and guts. No, I don’t care. No, you can’t light the candle again, you’re too stupid to know how – no, I don’t care if you have your mother’s lighter. Hands off – OFF, Cindy! Cindy listen to me NO I AM THE BOSS OF YOU.”
And in the ensuring chase – of course there was a chase, of course there was, every damned year he ended up chasing some kid for some reason for some distance – it all ended as it usually did. The kids split. The kids vanished. And Ivrint stood alone in the middle of the street, one hand locked around the collar of Herman Gish, the tubbiest and least-aerodynamic of them all, and swore ‘till his feet turned blue. Occasionally Herman would chime in with an effort to rhyme along.
Eventually, Ivrint’s jaw got tired and he stopped with a creaking, wistful sigh. There was a job to do, or he’d never hear the end of it. They’d made enough of a fuss about a few cats gone missing, although he was prepared to argue that even a cat was a more enjoyable companion than the presence of Cindy Warburn. Probably. On most nights.
He looked down at Herman. The boy stopped mid-swear, his chins still wobbling.
“C’mon. You can hold the bag.”
Goblins are thieves. Everyone knows that who knows anything about goblins. And like most things that everyone knows, it’s not really true at all. It would be more accurate to say that goblins often like stealing things. It’s sort of a family pastime.
And like most pastimes, it had become a hobby, then nearly a sport. Now it was just one of those things you did. Most Americans followed baseball, most goblins kept an eye on America’s Most Wanted, and for largely similar reasons.
Ivrint could have gone pro back in his youth, a century ago. Nowadays he mostly kept his looting sack around for nostalgic purposes. Nostalgia, and Halloween.
He squinted upwards into the boughs of the tree. It was some sort of spruce that had long ago left its species behind in favour of becoming as large as physically possible, and maybe a little bit bigger. “C’mon down, Suzy.”
Branches rattled at him, followed with a hiss. He sighed. “No, Suzy. I know you’re not a velociraptor. And they don’t climb trees, awright? I saw Jurassic Park four times in theaters, I know this shit. Now get down here.”
The hiss rose to a screech, and a cone bounced off his bulbous nose.
Ivrint spat into his palms. “Awright, don’t say you didn’t have a fair chance.” He grasped the tree and shook violently. After a few seconds, a thought struck him.
“Oh yeah – hey Herman, hold that bag open, will y-“
Around then, Suzy struck him. Head-first.
Two blocks and five children later, the goblin sack was a good deal plumper and squirmier, and Ivrint a good deal sorer and angrier. Suzy had been just peachy – the average goblin skull was lacking in bone, using instead a sort of jelly-like cartilage – but half his head was one big bruise now, and she’d been bitey besides. He could still hear her hissing at him from the inside of the bag, where she’d clambered to the top of the pile. It reminded him of a rattlesnake.
“Get outta there, Leo,” he said.
Silence. The wind rustled down the street in a casual sort of way, sneaking through lawns and peeking in the windows for blackmail material.
“Leo, I’m going to count to five. Ready? Gonna start now, but it’ll take a while. One.”
He waited for a moment, looked up at the stars. Wondered if any of them had to deal with shit like this. “Two. Hey, Leo, you want to know something cool about that yard you’re hiding in? Three.”
Silence.
“That’s old man Murray’s place. You remember how he used to run that alligator farm, right? Four.”
A small splash.
“Well, when he retired, they decided they’d give him a bit of his work to take home with him, and that’s around when he installed that pool you’re standing next to.”
A noise somewhere between a rumble and a gurgle filled the night.
“Fi-”
Leo dove over the fence, muscled Herman out of the way with unnecessary force, and fought his way to the bottom of the sack. Ivrint snatched up the bag hurriedly as Suzy’s gleaming eyes appeared at its entrance again, but even the brief wrestling match that followed couldn’t dampen the haunting sensations of job satisfaction that had filled him at that moment.
An hour later, Ivrint would’ve given an arm and a leg (someone else’s, of course; he wasn’t stupid) to bring back that feeling. One two three fourteen kids in his bag – including Herman, who’d started whining about how tired his legs were – and no Cindy. His voice was growing hoarse, he was out of lozenges, and to top it off the sewers were alive with scurries and guffaws as the imps and bogeys and nasties rustled along their tiny tunnels, giggling and gargling to themselves with delight as they gorged themselves on extinguished pumpkins.
Ivrint’s face puckered inwards with un-delight as he considered the merriment of his near cousins. As bad as kids, they were. No doubt they’d get along like houses on fire.
Oh. Right. That would explain it.
Ivrint dropped the sack in the middle of the road for a moment (ignoring the squeaks, swears, and gut-churning growls – and fumbled in his pockets for a moment, eventually producing a single, jagged key that looked like it had been cold-forged from half a cobblestone. With careful bludgeoning love he hammered it into the nearest storm drain, wrenched violently, and dropped down into something incredibly unpleasant that called his mother something regrettable.
“Yeah, and same to you,” he growled into the face of the imp.
It gave him the wrong finger, failed to correct itself, then hoisted all of them at once as a salvage effort.
Ivrint rolled his eyes. “Right, right. You win. Where’s the kid?”
“Kd?”
Ivrint was round and slow, but his arms were whip-thin and much longer than they looked, which was how they made it around the imp’s neck before the end of this sentence. “Talk or squeeze. C’mon, even imps know this game. Pick one.”
“’lk.”
“I don’t hear it, so I guess I squeeze it.”
“T’LK!” squealed the imp.
“There, that so hard? Go on.”
The imp gabbled a stream of sewer addresses, navigator’s-marks, and tramp-signage that would’ve been indecipherable to anybody with good solid primate in their ancestry, then made a hasty retreat before Ivrint decided to bite its head off.
Not that he would’ve. Probably. He was all full on lozenges and nausea caused by lozenges, but then again a snack might’ve settled him.
Midnight was a dangerous time of night. Halloween was a dangerous time of year. The sewers were a dangerous place to be most anytime, at least if you were easily turned around and annoyed and lost your bearings and slid down the wrong pipe three times running.
Ivrint hadn’t done that, of course. It was something like six times by now.
He trudged down the latest in a series of tiny, cramped, mostly-rusted metal sludgetubes and wished the bag he was dragging would stop griping at least. He could hardly hear himself think, which was probably why they were lost.
“WAUGH!”
Or maybe not.
Ivrint looked up from his feet into someone else’s feet. A bit farther up and he made eye contact with something’s chest. If he nearly fell over backwards, maybe a chin would be visible.
“P’sswurd,” grumbled the troll.
“’Password,’” said Ivrint. It wasn’t a guess. It was a troll. Trying to get it to learn anything else would’ve made its head explode.
“’K,” it agreed, and it slouched back lazily into its burrow as he hurried past it into the main chambers of the undersewers.
Now THIS… this was a bit much. Ivrint lived up above, and he liked it. There was tap water on demand, sugary foods, and best of all, minimal lurking involved, which was a fine thing when you were as round and fat as the average goblin. Waddling was a far more effortless mode of transit, and one that seemed to be catching on in popularity among humans. He fit right in.
Down here it was different. Imps and bogeys and bograts and boogums all LOVED to lurk. Lurking was their bread and butter, their Christmas present, and their favourite colour all at once. It was what they were, not merely what they did. He’d tried sixteen damned times to get the little bastards to come topside to start some sort of co-op with him, and each time he got as far as explaining ‘sunlight’ to them before the shrieking and cowering began. They had less spine than centipedes.
Except on midnights. And Halloween. Halloween midnight especially. They didn’t get braver, but they certainly got rowdier and more moxious. Moxious enough to, say, kidnap a human child and pit her in a knife-fight with blunted butter knives against a hobgoblin.
Despite Cindy losing her knife, Ivrint noted that the hob was faring poorly. Most likely because she’d misplaced it somewhere in his left eyeball, just shy of the pupil. He felt strangely proud at that.
“Alright,” he shouted over the din. “Show’s over. Past midnight. Up and at ‘em. Cindy we are LEAVING. We are LEAVING NOW. We are LEAVING NOW or you WON’T GET CANDY. Are you listening to me?”
Cindy gave the grandest, slowest eye-roll possible and strode over to him with forced casualness, the squelch of her footsteps the only sound in the suddenly quiet and extremely staring hall.
“Into the bag,” said Ivrint.
“What-ev-err-r,” she said. One last, languid roll, and Ivrint was alone with a sack full of children and seven hundred and forty-nine point six extremely annoyed, bored, and curious bogeymen.
A chase scene followed, much of it paint-by-numbers, although it almost got interesting when the bottom of the sack – and Herman – almost got stuck in the mouth of the manhole Ivrint was trying to exit through. But then Suzy got loose, and after that the pursuit waned with remarkable speed. Ivrint considered attempting and then immediately gave up trying to get her to spit out the imp-finger that she’d claimed as a trophy; the girl had tough jaw muscles.
“Right!” he announced to the assembled children as they filed out of his goblin-bag onto his lawn, under the annoyed gaze of their parents. “That’s it! Halloween’s over, you all have candy, clear off. Pick whichever set of adults flinches the least at your funk and head home with ‘em, thank you very much, happy Halloweehaahahah can’t finish that sentence. Good riddance!”
He stomped up the door, slammed it, sat down to undo his laces, and fell over as someone opened it into his backside.
“WHAT?!” he shouted.
“Heyit’smeee…” said Cindy. Muttered Cindy. Cindy made some sort of a noise, at least.
“What d’you want? Go home. Eat too much candy. That’s what Halloween’s for, right? Treats. We already did tricks, you little hooligan. Go for it.”
Cindy chewed her lip and whined a little through her nose. “Liiiiiiiisten.”
Ivrint rubbed his head and tried to figure the bruise from the headache. This seemed to encourage her.
“SolikeIwantedtosaythankssohere’satreatbye.”
“What?”
“Treat! Bye!”
“What?”
Something bounced off Ivrint’s head, the door slammed, and he was happily, blissfully alone.
With a chocolate bar.
Of course the damned thing had peanuts in it.