Goblin Secrets

A tiny scare for Halloween

        It first happened when I was but seven years old. I lay in my bed one night. Slowly, as I watched, a grinning face with slanted eyes and wicked horns rose above my windowsill. It looked at me and its grin grew broader still showing a plethora of needle teeth. It beckoned me to the window- to follow it- to join it and run away. I stepped to the window quite unafraid, but was stopped by my father's hand. He told me "Not now. You have things to do."

        That was odd to me, for I had nothing to do but go to sleep. Yet it has been true for many years. I've always had something to do.

        For a year, while I was that age it used to come to my window at the dark of the moon. It would sign to me, its importunate claw entreating me to follow. I never did, but sometimes from the window, I would watch it stumble away toward the woods in a shambling lope, its back hunched and its claws near to the ground. I wanted to follow. After that, I did not see it as often.

        When I was nine, I rode with my family down a rainy highway in the dark and I caught a glimpse of its entreating wave and inviting grin from a high branch above the road.

        In High School, during a night game I saw a familiar grin peer out from the dark beneath the bleachers and glimpsed an importunate extremity waving me to its side.

        In my frat-house days, sleeping drunk on the lawn at the dark of the moon, I woke to find its face close to my own. I looked fearlessly at it and sighed. It took me by a shoulder and began to pull me to the darkness of the woods that seemed every nearby me no matter where I lived. Drunken partygoers drove it off without ever seeing it. It seemed sad to leave without me.

        On my wedding night, I saw it hanging upside-down outside my bedroom window as I undressed my bride. It gave a wicked grin and a sort of nod and slid away into the dark.

               As I lifted my pregnant wife from my car into the wheel chair and pushed her toward the hospital emergency entrance and the delivery room, a now-familiar grin watched and toothily approved. So it did with my daughter and my second son.    

        After my wife passed, it came once again to my bedroom window at the first dark of the moon. Lifting its face above the sill it entreated me, still silent, and loped away across the lawn when it saw my will to remain was still strong.

        The time, though, has come now. My children are grown and do not need me. My wife is gone and does not need me. My life is done. There is plenty of time left but nothing that needs doing.

        The moon is dark and he is here! I open the window and step across the sill. He lopes away before me, no longer importunate but exulting. As I follow, I stumble as does he, my run becomes his shambling lope. My already bent spine bends more and my clothing sloughs away from me. My shoes burst as my claws come out.

        I reach the woods and there I find him and a dozen brethren, a hundred kin. We look at one another and smile. We lift our heads to the dark of the moonless sky and howl our laughter. How rich the jest! How fine the sport! What a prank we play upon mankind that we let him raise our children!

 

Author's Note

I'm striving for the style of the inimitable Lovecraft.