The parcel arrives on Christmas morning in the frozen hours before dawn. A mysterious giftbox left upon the manor’s front porch, wrapped in handsome brown paper and made lovely with pinecones and mistletoe. Nana bustles the package inside the hearth-warm foyer, and within this stirring rock-a-bye motion, the velveteen monster’s mismatched button eyes first widen and catch the darkness. The hidden creature knows nothing before this curious awakening. Knows only the shadow-mist whispers wafting into his gloomy paper tomb, gasps of wonder that tickle his pointy, sawdust-stuffed ears.
“But who sent it?”
“Perhaps your brother in the city, sir?”
“Yes, yes, a parcel gift in lieu of his return to the countryside. Good then, place it under the tree.”
A quick jostle, then stillness reclaims the velveteen monster. Stiff thistle-bone limbs, silent pinecone heart. Until at last, a new voice joins the others. Sugared and ripe with sing-song.
“May I open just one before breakfast?”
“Yes, yes, let’s see what your uncle sent.”
The monster’s starless sky shimmies and lifts away, tissue paper crinkles, and sticky hands reach inside. Up and up! He springs into the air, twirling in the arms of a candy-apple-cheeked child. “How neat, a Goblin!”
Reflected in the Boy’s saucer-moon gaze, Goblin first sees himself. Hunched and stitched with patchworks of green velveteen. Batty ears, daggers of plush yellow snaggleteeth. The Boy hugs Goblin against his beating chest. His laughter smells of smuggled peppermints and boyish mischief and forever.
“Why in heaven would my brother send him that?” Father sneers. “It’s repulsive!”
Nana tilts her silvered head. “I think it’s rather charming…for such an ugly thing.”
“Give it here.” Father unfolds a hand. “We’ve had enough nightmares in this house, without his mother.”
“Oh, but it’s only a toy, sir,” Nana protests. “Let him play?”
And play the Boy does! For almost two magical hours, while chestnut flames pop in the fireplace, Goblin and the Boy romp and whisper tricks and have a rascal-good time. They even squirm unnoticed beneath Father’s chair and untie his shoelaces.
When the maid chimes the breakfast-bell, Father stands and tangles inside loose wingtips, staggering into the Christmas tree. Glass ornaments swing riotously and bounce into a shatter across the rug. Scrambling, twisting, Father catches the tree before it all crashes down.
“I’m sorry, Father, I didn’t mean to…” The Boy straightens his posture, and Goblin slips from his hand, knobby mushroom-cap knees slumping to the rug.
“What’s troubled into you? Nightmares, now tricks!” Father turns his back, frowning as Nana cuts her hand tending to the pranksters’ mess.
The breakfast-bell chimes again, and the Boy bounds away toward a fragrant feast in the dining hall. How long will he leave Goblin all alone, slouched beside the tree? Already their short playtime shines dim and distant, a fading warmth. Even the fireplace embers crackle ever-fainter in Goblin’s murky button eyes.
Later, while the Boy finishes his sugarplums, Father creeps into the tree-room. “Not taking chances with you…”
Seizing Goblin by his hunchback, Father whirls him toward the suddenly unkind fireplace. With his velveteen throat stitched closed, Goblin can’t scream—yet a breath of wild-wind swirls down the chimney. Glittering ice-crystals extinguish the embers. Whoosh!
Cursing the soggy ashes, Father scrapes a matchstick against the bricks, but too late. Footsteps patter down the hallway. Before the Boy can see, Father crams Goblin between the Christmas tree’s prickly top branches.
“Ready to see what Santa brought?”
“Oh hooray!”
Giftboxes rustle. Goblin watches with pine-needles scratching his button eyes as the Boy unfurls his new plaything from a paper nest. Much as Goblin himself was once born.
“A rabbit!” The Boy twirls the strange velveteen creature—real-thread whiskers and no patchwork at all—then startles with a yelp.
A red dewdrop bubbles from his thumb.
Father plucks a dripping red shard and holds it to the light. “A broken ornament from your impish trick.”
Sucking his dewdrop thumb, the Boy swallows upset tears and hugs the Rabbit-Thing closer, a newly treasured comfort. And high in prickly shadows, Goblin’s pinecone heart goes very, very still, and he knows.
He’s already been forgotten.
•••
The Christmas tree needles grow brittle, hardening into Goblin’s velveteen hide. Sometimes, the Boy’s laughter gusts between the branches, echoes haunting far-off rooms in the manor. Goblin wishes to follow, but a wish alone cannot lift him in its arms and twirl him. And when the day arrives for the tree to fall, the maid startles to find Goblin hiding at the top. “Well then, you frightful thing, what’re you doing here?”
She plucks him clean of pine-needles and carries him by one pointy ear to the nursery. With a shudder, she tosses him atop a bookshelf, leaving him alone with the tin soldiers and porcelain puppets and clockwork rodents. Slouching lopsided, Goblin feels the slither of a hundred glinting eyes, tin eyes, glass eyes, painted eyes. But the nursery stands silent of voices.
Hello? Where’s the Boy…?
Nobody answers. Everyone seems limp and unkind, empty of wishes.
Only from the corner, where cobweb shadows gather, do wooden teeth begin click-click-clicking…
Who’s there? But Goblin can’t crick his neck to see.
Day-beams shift and hours blur, minutes, eons, the limbo-beat of a pinecone heart. Finally, the nursery door bursts and the Boy rushes in. Life, laughter, whirlwind. Goblin cheers, so giddy he tips forward on his shelf, tumbling horns over toenails. He lands on the rug, and sawdust puffs escape his patchwork stitches.
The Boy freezes mid-step, holding his breath in a fright of uncertainty.
The other toys remain lifeless.
But Goblin’s head droops, withered by the uneasy way the Boy is watching him. Like when Father held him in the fireplace.
But the Boy’s face transforms. “Goblin! Have you been off playing tricks without me?” He swoops him up, and around the nursery they go. A tour of the entire world! The ash-cold fireplace, the toy cabinet, the quilted bed, the window and the frozen darkling forest beyond. Goblin sees it all, and his mossy innards shift. How magnificent to move and twirl again!
Too soon, the Boy releases him into a cartwheel. He lands upon batty ears next to the Skin Horse in the corner. Upside-down, tangled legs dangling over button eyes, Goblin waits for the Boy to dance him up again.
But the Boy hooks an elbow around the Rabbit-Thing, who until now sat throned atop the bed pillow. “Bunny! Time for prayers.” Together, they bid the toys goodnight. Nobody responds. No tin salute, no wink of sleepy doll eyes. Only silence as the Boy and the Rabbit-Thing burrow under the bed-quilt.
Nana arrives at his bedside, and the Boy whispers in her ear, glancing toward the corner where Goblin watches. Nana sits back with a stern smile. “Your father will only be in the city for two more weeks. We must be brave until he returns, yes?”
A tiny chin-nod, then the Boy hugs the Rabbit-Thing closer.
“Good, no more nightmares.” Nana shuffles toward the door.
The nursery’s lamp-glow snaps to darkness. Shadows elongate around Goblin and all the silent toys, and the finger-paintings drip their colors away. Curled in the Boy’s arms, the Rabbit-Thing catches Goblin’s gaze with a twitch of real thread whiskers. Lucky devil.
Beneath the quilt, the Boy whispers secret prayers in its floppy ears. And oh, what heart-riddles does it know? Slowly, the Boy’s candlewax voice melts into the misty breath-rhythm of dreams. Inhale-exhale. A mesmerizing sound. Inhale-exhale, like the music of a rocking chair, like the click-click-clicking of wooden teeth.
The sound, Goblin realizes, drifts from the corner behind him.
Inhale-exhale, click-click-click…
Goblin strains under upside-down hope, and his neck buckles sideways, affording him a crooked half-view.
The Skin Horse dips slowly forward, slowly back. Rocking all on its own!
Hello? Goblin whispers.
Mane and tail sway, muzzle dipping back-and-forth into the moonbeam. Teeth click around a hay-throated murmur. Hello…
Who are you?
A friend.
What’s a friend?
Someone who’s lived in this nursery forever. Someone who knows your heart’s questions.
The other toys watch motionless, without care or curiosity.
What’s wrong with them? Goblin wonders. Why don’t they say hello?
They’re not real, the Skin Horse says. Click-click-clicking.
What is real?
The child is real, and I am real, and the Rabbit is becoming real. Real is what happens when dark fairies escape a child’s nightmares and haunt the forests with nursery magic. Real is when they tap on windows and creep down the chimney. Real is when a child is left alone. Real is when he bleeds.
What is bleeds?
When a child’s hide tears and his ghost spills out, red and dripping.
I saw such a dripping when the Rabbit-Thing was born! Is he a dark fairy? Goblin whispers, worries, hopes. Hopes so he might slay those real-thread whiskers and become a changeling in the Boy’s arms.
No, the Skin Horse warns. The Rabbit is the Boy’s guardian. He frightens the dark fairies away. Without him… I dare not imagine. The Skin Horse’s wooden teeth shiver. Becoming real is much too rare.
But you’re real.
The boy’s uncle made me real. Long ago, when he was a child alone in this house with only his brother and his Nana. Dark fairies circled the eaves, wiggled in through rodent cracks. The child loved me well, and there was nobody else, so I became his battle-horse. But the fairies were too many, too cruel. The child bled and grew scars. When his parents returned, they sent him to the city. He never returned for me. But at least he lives on. At least he’s still real…
It was this uncle who sent me! In lieu of a visit to the countryside. Perhaps to protect the Boy from dark fairies?
We shall see…
Across the nursery, the Boy tosses and whimpers inside darkling dreams.
Somewhere inside the manor, glass shatters.
The Boy startles upright, paralyzed by wild imaginings. The only sound is the rocking heartbeat of the Skin Horse. The Rabbit-Thing’s nose twitches, sniffs the air. The Boy squeezes him closer and shrinks below the bed-quilts.
Beyond the Boy’s ragged whimpers, Goblin strains to hear outside the nursery, out in the echoey silence of the breath-held manor. When no dark fairies scratch the window or squeeze through cracks, Goblin whispers a final question. Does it hurt to become real?
Oh yes, the Skin Horse promises, clicking, rocking, on and on without the Boy’s uncle. It hurts very much.
•••
In the sunrise, Goblin watches, upside-down with a cricked neck, as Nana bustles the Boy from bed. She checks him for ‘fairy bites’ then seats him and the Rabbit-Thing at a small table with two small chairs. When Nana serves the toast and jam, she prepares toast for the Rabbit-Thing, because the Boy insists real rabbits eat real food.
Forgotten, Goblin’s moss-twisted guts ache with hollow pangs while the Boy feeds the Rabbit-Thing, staining its whiskers with mulberry jam.
“How did we sleep?” Nana asks, tidying about, manhandling tin soldiers into toyboxes.
The Boy swallows thickly. “Bunny and I heard noises.”
“Noises?” Nana pauses. “Remember, old manor-homes groan and play tricks on our mindscapes. But look, no harm done to you.”
“Bunny keeps me safe.”
“Indeed. Nothing to fear then.” Nana resumes her chores, reigning terrible over the toys. Her lip wrinkles when she spots Goblin.
“Boys and their uglies!” She tussles Goblin onto the top-most shelf of the toy cabinet. Always up high, always out of sight.
One last aching view of the world; of the Boy praying into the Rabbit-Thing’s ears; of his friend the Skin Horse, real battle-worn hide drooping off antique bones.
The cabinet doors swing inward, lock-and-key. Drenched in gloom, Goblin’s sawdust reality tugs him into a sideways slump. One button eye scrapes the daylight crack between doors, but he no longer sees the Boy.
Only hears those secret rasping prayers.
“Look here!” Nana huffs from beyond. “You’ve mussed its mouth with jam.”
“Yes,” the Boy agrees. “Bunny looks scarier now. To scare dark fairies away.”
•••
Slanted sunbeams bend inward with the hours. Sometimes, daylight flickers outside Goblin’s cabinet-prison, and the Boy dances past with the Rabbit-Thing, dripping mulberry jam. When bedtime shadows overtake the dayglow, Goblin listens as Nana wishes the Boy goodnight. Murmured prayers become the breath-pulse of slumber, and now the click-click-clicking of wooden teeth.
Click-click-clicking, and a slippery fluttering.
Friend, is that you? Goblin wonders. Tell me, why does it hurt to be real?
Shush, you ninny! the Skin Horse hisses. We’re not alone…
Goblin’s ears perk, and his centipede spine crawls with skittery legs of sound. Who goes there?
A crooked shadow twitches past the toy cabinet. Hissing, sniffing, flinging dagger glints of blazing purple eyes. It disappears toward the Boy’s bed.
Screams paint the night!
Red screams, shimmery screams, the Boy’s screams. Echoing, twisting, carving fiery sigils inside Goblin’s snail-shell eardrums.
“Bunny! Bunny, no!”
Like puppet-strings, spider-silk tendons tighten around Goblin’s thistle-stem bones, stirring him into a shudder. With a prayerful pinecone heart-thump, he lurches against the cabinet doors. Once, twice, the lock-key rattles but doesn’t release.
“Bunny!”
Lamplight slices the murk. Nana shadows past. “Good Lord, child, what happened? Have you cut yourself!”
“Bunny, oh no!” the Boy wails.
“Bless my soul, what in heaven is that? Turn your eyes from it. Are you hurt?”
“Not me. Bunny!”
“Nonsense, toys can’t bleed…” But Nana’s voice trembles.
“Bunny’s no toy! He tried to save me, but the fairies got him!”
“Hogwash, no more tricks. Your imagination outgrows you!” But the Boy weeps harder, weeps for Mother in heaven, and Father in the city. Weeps for sunrise when the fairies retreat to their grave burrows. Nana hardens. “Look here, your rabbit’s been rat-bitten, that’s the truth of it. Now settle yourself while I clean this mess. Here, take your bear.”
“No. Teddy’s not scary enough. He must be, or the fairies will keep coming!”
“Yes, well…perhaps for tonight, I know just the ugly thing.”
Footsteps shuffle, cabinet doors rattle, and Goblin tumbles out, practically leaps. Nana catches him mid-cartwheel, flinching at the odd warmth of his patchwork hide. But the Boy perks and reaches. “Goblin!”
On her return to his bedside, Nana walks a wide circle around the red-painted rug.
Shredded tufts of cottontail fur. Real-thread whiskers. A single floppy ear. Oily red stuffing leaking out in ribbons around the pale branches of a ribcage.
The Skin Horse was right. It hurts to be real.
•••
The rest of the night, Nana dozes in the nursery’s rocker, and Goblin guards the Boy from the warm circle of his arms. And how amazing! In slumber, the Boy sobs and tosses up tempests. But Goblin never falters his duty. Not even when the Boy’s embrace snaps something inside him, piercing his pinecone heart with splintery thistle-bones.
Anything to become real.
This morning, Nana seats Goblin at the breakfast table. Nobody speaks of the Rabbit-Thing’s fate, though the ghastly shadows of it smudge their under-eyes. As Nana prepares the toast, she wonders, “What does such an ugly thing eat?”
The Boy grins. “Spiders and fairy hearts and whatever else he fancies.”
“Well then, toast it is.” Nana serves, and doesn’t complain when mulberry jam stains Goblin’s warty maw. How delightful! If he imagines swallowing fairy hearts, his velveteen gums ache and tingle, and his snaggleteeth sharpen.
Breakfast ends, but the Boy doesn’t leave Goblin upside-down in the corner. He holds his hands and dances his dangly feet across the floor, walking him like a yearling out into the manor. He shows him the many shadowy rooms, and the chimneys and mouse cracks where the dark fairies slither inside. “They sneak in through crooked-hanging mirrors,” the Boy says, lowering his voice. “And whisper into keyholes to charm the locks…”
Despite goosebumps, the Boy lets Goblin peek down the cobweb corridor where fairies once chased the uncle when the uncle was small. A deep-dark family secret. “Father says Uncle began hollering and scratching his own face. Wouldn’t stop until they took him to a special hospital in the city.”
Goblin’s button eyes flicker. This must be the battleground where the Skin Horse turned real.
“But dark fairies scratched him, I know it, just like they scratched Bunny…” Tears fatten the Boy’s words and he clutches Goblin against his chest, sharing his troubled heartbeat. “Don’t let them get me too.”
Goblin’s centipede spine shivers, and his head droops into a fearless nod.
They make an earnest game of it. Under the armor of daylight, they whisper tricks and invent fairy traps to cast around the manor. Gumdrops in keyholes, jingle-bells in chimneys, molasses smeared across windowsills. At bedtime, after securing the nursery with marbles, they whisper prayers for Father to take them to the city, away from fairies; prayers for Mother above; prayers to be forever friends.
While the Boy falls into troubled dreams, Goblin guards the silence for hissing purple eyes. And how strange. Growing pains tingle his thistle-stem limbs. Twitching, aching, Goblin rolls over in bed.
I visited your battleground, he tells the corner-shadows across the nursery. We set traps. Will the fairies retreat now?
At first, only gloomy silence answers, then the Skin Horse click-click-clicks. Don’t ask me. I failed my charge, remember?
Next morning, Nana staggers into the nursery, skating atop a rug of loose marbles. She grumbles about troublemakers and warns the Boy to behave.
Morning after that, when she’s greeted by party-streamers of flypaper strung around the nursery, Nana refuses to listen about fairies and spiderweb wings. Even after another restless night of bumps and hisses—even when the Boy discovers a tiny foot in the molasses sticky-trap atop a windowsill. A translucent purple foot with pointy black talons and a jutting pearl knob of ankle bone.
“Enough fantasies, enough trickeries!” Nana pleads. But truth of it is, not every mischief in the manor belongs to the Boy and Goblin. They don’t make the electric lamps fizz and blink in the evenings, and they don’t send ice-flurries down the chimneys.
On the third midnight, it’s Nana’s turn to wake the manor with screams. The maid finds Nana first, in her bedroom, and is already snipping away with scissors when Goblin and the Boy tiptoe to Nana’s bedside. She lies in her nightgown, and it’s as if a goliath spider spun a cocoon. Zigzag webworks of purple yarn pin Nana’s nightgown to the mattress.
“Too far!” she howls, spotting the Boy. “Your shenanigans have dared too far!”
“Not me! The fairies got inside!”
The maid finishes with the scissors. Nana sits upright with frayed yarn sprouting from her edges, as if she’s coming apart at her seams.
“Give it here!” She seizes Goblin, tugging him away. The firmness of the thistle-bones wrapped inside his velveteen hide gives her a start, but she doesn’t drop him. “You’ve forgotten your manners since this dreadful toy arrived.”
“He’s not a toy! He’s real!”
“Your father instructed me to burn it when he heard you were playing with it. I took mercy on you, poor motherless boy. But tricks and fancies are no way to win your father’s attention. Perhaps it’s time for the fireplace.”
“Don’t hurt him!” The Boy scrambles after Nana.
Goblin dangling by one arm, Nana marches into the room where the Christmas tree once stood. In the fireplace, an ember-blaze ripples. Goblin’s pinecone heart flinches at the heat. With a skeletal twitch of shoulder, he swings his arm upward and curls a velveteen hand around Nana’s wrist.
She gapes at his coiling green fingers, and her doughy anger slackens with gasping disbelief. Goblin tumbles from her clutches and logrolls toward the waiting Boy.
“Only Goblin can protect me!” The Boy swoops him up. The manor blurs past, frosted midnight windows and cobweb corridors. Only one escape. A door whooshes, and the whispering ice-dance of a winter storm swirls around them.
•••
Pillow-fight snowflakes billow the air, so bright-white they light the darkness as the Boy runs. Down the porch, past the skeletal raspberry canes, along the forest’s edge where headstones and grave burrows rise from bed-quilts of snow. Sock-footed, flannel pajamas absorbing the howling wind, the Boy sobs in frozen puffs. “I won’t let them hurt you! You’re real, you’re the only one who cares!”
Real. Goblin’s moth-wing lungs fill to bursting, clockwork organs finding purpose in the rhythm. But the Boy isn’t safe out here! He shivers onto his knees and curls against a gravestone, clutching Goblin against his quieting heartbeat. Teeth chittering, they absorb each other’s warmth. Snow-dusted arms fall slack and sleepy.
No more tricks to play.
New voices join the whispering wind, calling them home.
“There he is!” someone shouts, and two silhouettes appear between the gravestones, spectral shadows cut against the white-sky storm. “By his mother’s grave. Quickly!”
Nana and the maid appear, draping a quilt over the Boy. It takes both women to haul the Boy’s frozen weight upward, the maid cradling his legs like firewood, and Nana hooking his arms. His head lolls, and his eyes open to slits. In the bustle, Goblin slips loose, landing atop a grave burrow, his haunted hands flexing.
“Goblin…” the Boy rasps. But he vanishes into the white-out night, leaving Goblin alone beside Mother’s gravestone. Goblin lilts on his spine, watching snowflakes smother his button eyes. The wind calls again, hissing closer from the absolute darkness between the snowfall.
Purple eyes spark inside the void.
Two venomous stars winking against the deep, glowing eyes, feral eyes.
Two more ignite…and two more…a whole sky of them. Like twisted fireflies, they constellate around Goblin, smelling of decay and winter blossoms.
Dark fairies!
Misty darkness swirls and phantoms closer, taking form as a tiny crooked skeleton, translucent lavender hide, jagged wings like moth-eaten lace. The fairy tilts its skull, and rancid purple light blazes inside empty eye-sockets. It steps closer with a limp and a bony pearl stump.
Its left foot is missing.
“The child sssstill has his ghosssst…” it hisses, needle teeth glinting.
Who are you? Goblin gasps.
“Misssst and nightmaresssss…weeee are your makerssss…”
My makers? A meaty grave-beetle heart twitch-twitch-twitches inside the fairy’s ribcage. But the Boy is my maker. He’s making me real.
All around, firefly eyes twinkle with distorted bell-chime laughter.
“Weeee made yoooou…from scraps of foresssst and dead playthingssss…”
But I’m real! Goblin swears, frosty puffs of breath escaping him. The Boy said so!
“Reeeeaaaal… The raaaabbit believed it was reeeeaaaal…weeee made it unreeeeaaal…”
But why?
“To maaaake room for yoooou…” The footless fairy’s bony grin cracks wider. “Weeee sent yoooou…to triiiick the child’s heeeeaaaart…shhhhred his hide…to let us inssssiiiide…instead, you, quissssling, build trapssss…”
Goblin shudders. The Boy needs me!
“Weeee need to drink his ghosssst, red and dripping…to become reeeeaaaal, nightmares into flessssh, we must make him unreeeeaaaal…”
Never!
“Yessss…” The fairy lashes its razor claws, popping Goblin’s purple-thread seams and splitting his velveteen cheek. “You wiiiilllll become reeeeaaaal…with ussss, toniiiight…”
It narrows its purple gaze and flits skeletal wings, melting into a haunted gusting darkness. Hissing, spiraling, dancing the snow, it disappears down a grave burrow. All around, firefly eyes flicker and follow, blinking out, two by two…
Until a single glowing light remains.
Golden and bobbing closer. A lantern.
“There you are, you hideous pest!” The maid snatches Goblin from the burial snow, huffing to herself. “Child pranks the household with snowstorm escapades and molasses messes for me to scrub, and still he demands his plaything. Imagine the nerve!”
As she scurries toward the manor’s butter-warm glow, Goblin’s ghost-innards leak from his ruptured seams.
Not quite red and dripping, but almost.
•••
Inside, the maid marches Goblin down hallways with crooked mirrors. He spies himself, split open along purple-thread seams. The fairy’s claw-gash droops like old snakeskin, revealing new-growth below his cheek, revealing the truth of him. Beneath his tattered velveteen, waits scabby green flesh, and beneath that, a grinning skull.
A dark fairy skull.
The Boy, teary-eyed and bundled in extra bed-quilts, wriggles upright when the maid carries Goblin in. Lamplight buzzes, flickers, shuddering the shadows, and flames crackle in the nursery’s fireplace.
Nana leans back, still frayed at her edges. “That wretched thing! Look what’s become of its face!”
“He’s beautiful and brave!” the Boy sobs, tugging Goblin into his arms.
“Cursed toy isn’t worth our troubles!” Nana reaches.
“Oh, leave it,” the maid sighs. “His father arrives in the morning, let him burn the monster. Unless you wish to go chasing the child through snowstorms again?”
Nana gives up and tucks the quilts around both their chins. “It’s 3:00 a.m. I pray for peaceful sleep, child.”
The women leave the nursery’s nightlamp aglow. Throughout the manor, bedroom doors echo shut for the second time tonight. Ice flurries tinkle the windowpane, and the Boy burrows under the quilts so nothing can eavesdrop their prayers. Will their jingle-bell chimney hold true? The fairies are coming to drink the Boy’s ghost, and Father will return soon with his fireplace matches. Either way, Goblin knows this is to be his final bedtime with the Boy.
Still, he whispers lullaby promises of forever, and soon the Boy’s breath thaws into sunshine dreams. Across the nursery, the Skin Horse sways inside lamplit shadows. Perhaps the old battle-horse has one more fight in him?
Goblin flexes spider-silk sinews and slithers loose, spinning, tumbling to the rug. As he lands with a final sawdust poof, he imagines himself atop the Skin Horse’s saddle, galloping to protect the Boy, and glittery nursery magic ripples inside him. He hoists himself up onto wobbly knees and staggers like a drunken puppet, taking his first real step across the nursery.
Then his next…
Halfway across the rug, electric wires buzz inside the walls, and throughout the manor lightbulbs flare and pop. The nursery plunges into twitching, jagged shadows. Only firelight remains, though swirling ice threatens the fireplace embers.
Jingle-bells chime.
Goblin shudders, zigzagging onward. Friend, the dark fairies are here!
What am I to do? A haunted old failure drained of any ghost… the Skin Horse sighs, clicking, dipping, casting firelit carnival-shadows across the walls.
Help me battle— But Goblin chokes to silence.
Claw marks glisten across the Skin Horse’s well-worn hide, deep and red and dripping.
Goblin falters, knees knocking. You’re hurt?
Always… His wooden teeth stop click-click-clicking. Horse-faced shadows shrink lower upon the walls, and a new silhouette rises high. Tiny misshapen skeleton, moth-tattered wings.
One footless leg.
“Quissssling…!” The dark fairy flits from the saddle toward Goblin, needle teeth wet with the Skin Horse’s ghost.
Bells jingle again, firelight sizzles, and the shadow-mist billows.
Purple eyes swoop from the screaming mouth of the fireplace. Gnarled wings and spines, skulls with hollow noses. Spidery limbs unfold and tiny misshapen hands reach for Goblin. A thousand needle-teeth chitter and open wide.
They encircle him, nipping, plucking his stitches. His patchworks shred apart.
Once they’ve picked his bones clean, they’ll turn teeth on the Boy.
From the corner, comes a great braying war-cry! The Skin Horse lurches forward, shattering from his wooden rocker. He charges, exploding through fairies, sending wings wheeling in all directions. Goblin hooks his reins and catapults onto the saddle. Together, they thunder through shadow-mists and purple eyes. Snatching up fairies midflight, Goblin chews grave-beetle hearts from ribcages and gnaws on tiny ghosts, purple and dripping.
But there are so many!
They swarm Goblin and his steed, clawing up devil-winds of velveteen and horse-hair and gallantry until the Skin Horse collapses onto his side.
Friend! Goblin sobs.
Godspeed, fearless monster, the Skin Horse murmurs, hide and bones twinkling away into antique dust and dreams-come-true. Tonight, our magic wins…
“Godspeed!” Goblin erupts through the fairies in a flurry of hurt and forever-love, shedding his velveteen scraps, letting his true monster shatter through.
Becoming ever-more real.
Snarling and terrible, he pounces like a wild beast, clawing the final dark fairies from the ether. Snapping, gnashing, drinking ghosts.
Until only the footless fairy remains, recoiling inside the fireplace ashes.
Goblin turns, wishing a final prayer, and finds the Boy upright in bed, hugging the quilts, watching the battle with saucer-moon eyes.
Goblin grins at him with real yellow snaggleteeth and a mess like mulberry jam.
“Please don’t go,” the Boy whispers.
But real goblins with reals hearts and real magic aren’t long for nurseries scrubbed clean of nightmares. Real goblins require forests and mucky escapades to perfect their tricks, and Nana would never stand for it. If the Boy ever needs him, Goblin will hear his prayers. But for now, the footless dark fairy is escaping up the chimney. And with purple ghosts shimmering through his veins, Goblin isn’t about let it get away.
He clicks his snaggleteeth, and in a dazzling swirl of ice and moonbeam wishes, he chases the Boy’s last tiny nightmare up the chimney.
•••
After sunrise, Goblin hides in the snow-bitten graveyard and watches Father arrive in his motorcar. Snug in his real scaly green hide, the sharp breath of winter no longer chills him.
The manor’s front door bursts open and the Boy rushes onto the porch. His arms are empty of toys, but he’s no longer alone.
He and Father embrace, and perhaps this is the season’s truest gift.
As their motorcar rolls toward the city, tires crunching hard-crusted snow—and indeed, several fairy skulls—the Boy presses his nose against the window. In the family graveyard, morning mist haunts the empty burrows. Here, amid the spiderweb shadows between stone-carved demons and angels, the Boy spots the monster with the pinecone heart who he helped become real. A creature full of banished ghosts, purple and dripping.
The Boy waves farewell. But he knows, should the murky vapors of nightmares escape him again, should he ever need to set fairy traps or whisper tricks and midnight prayers, his Goblin will be waiting.
And in the wild fancies of a child, that promise is magic enough.
