October 18, 1993

To anyone who finds this letter,

Obviously, if you are reading this, then they have gotten to me. I’m sorry, Mom, Dad, CJ, Liz, and most importantly, I’m sorry, Grandma.

I suppose I should explain what I am writing this for. Don’t worry, I have a lot to explain. Looking at the papers in front of me as I write, I think I might need to make multiple letters, just to get out everything I have to say… and warn about.

My grandmother, bless her heart, is one of those people who believe in the supernatural. Up until most recently, like many others, I did not believe her. Mostly because what she believes in is especially… unique. Plenty of people believe in spirits, or ghosts or whatever… they say they’re mediums or spirit bridges… they have the talismans and whatnot. Of course, it is hard for people to believe, because they can’t see them. But by the same standard, it’s easy to go along with it. Something good happened? It was the spirits. Something bad happened? It was the spirits. Something inexplicable happened? Damn those nasty spirits.

The thing is, ghosts and ghouls aren’t the supernatural entities my grandmother keeps an eye out for. She’s more concerned with what she calls… Varmints.

To anyone who will listen, she claims to see creatures like goblins and gremlins and whatever else. I know there are more, but I can’t remember. Not that it matters anyway. They already got me, it’s not going to do me any good to be technical about what they were.

Anyway, like many other weird grannies, mine keeps our home “protected”. My family lives in a lone house secluded in the woods of Canada. My dad is a logger who wanted to be “closer to work”, and my mom always fantasized about the "cabin life" even before having kids. Her mom, though, my grandma, was not as excited. When she had to move in with us, she raved about all the varmints that lived within the woods around us, and how it wasn’t safe. Of course, none of us listened much, so she took it upon herself to take action.

Grandma lined the property boundary of our house with garlic salt, specifically garlic salt, at all times and made sure none of the family ever messed with the circle. She also told all of us never to leave the boundary of the salt ring past sundown. Ever. Come to think of it, were vampires ever a part of this? Is that what the garlic is for? Probably. She claims it works on all varmints, so maybe it has a bit of something for all of them. Again, what does it matter now?

Back to my grandma, though. She has the salt, she has talismans that are supposed to ward off varmints, and most notably, she has a bag. A faux leather bag with silver stamps along the straps. My grandma once, and only once, showed me what was in this bag, and I was… taken back. Inside her bag was a variety of tools… and weapons. She claims to go hunting every Sunday night just before it becomes Monday. She does leave the house every Sunday night, not that I ever thought she was actually going hunting. But every night she leaves, she brings with her that bag. She goes into the woods that are our backyard, trotting along with her little cane, and looks for varmints that may be lurking. And every time, just before leaving, she makes sure we are all listening when she reminds us, for the millionth time, not to mess with the salt.

So then we get to last night, where I made the impulsive decision to follow her. We had a fight earlier that day, a simple conversation about her beliefs that quickly escalated into needless arguing. It was my fault, I know that, I didn’t need to get riled up. In truth, I was the only one between the two of us that really did. That’s what really got to me at the time. My grandma didn’t get worked up. She never does. It’s one of my grandma’s best qualities. No matter how much she may disagree with you, or even get angry with you, she never lets it show. She remains calm and respectful. It is kind, and yet still, sometimes it only makes you angrier.

She left the house disappointed in me, not because I didn’t believe in her varmints, but because of how upset I was with her for believing in them. She doesn’t mind that I think it’s all kind of nonsense, the whole family does, in fact. But none of that gets to her. What does get to her is trying to make her feel like a fool for thinking whatever she wants, whether it's true or not. I’m sorry, Grandma.

Following her for a bit, she eventually stopped about a quarter mile from the house. I watched as she set up a small circle of totems and trinkets, like she was preparing for some sort of ritual. Most notably, she laid out in front of her a small bowl that held several pebbles of gold. This bowl was the only thing that she set down outside the circle. From behind a tree, staying out of sight, I watched as she waited, sitting on her knees, with her bag by her side. I thought about the things I had seen in there. The stake, the silver knife, the gun… I wondered if she planned on using any of them.

Soon enough, I heard some rustling in the nearby bushes. I expected some animal, maybe a deer or rabbit. For a brief moment, I even thought that maybe it was going to be a person, and this was all just some… really weird date. Yet what showed up was nothing short of bizarre. Emerging from the bushes was a small creature, about a meter tall, maybe a bit shorter, with green skin. It had spots over its chest and forehead that were a darker green, and long, widespread ears. The thing was relatively thin, with a slight belly and thin, scraggly arms and legs. It looked like something out of a children’s book, but darker.

My grandma didn’t move. She waited patiently as the creature crept closer. It walked halfway on its hands, somewhat like an ape bouncing on its knuckles, slowly toward the bowl of gold. Seconds later, two more emerged from the shrubbery on either side of the first one. Still, my grandma was calm inside the circle. I didn’t understand. Did they not see her? Slowly, I reached for my cellphone, thinking I should take a picture, yet something was going off in my brain telling me not to.

As the little green monsters crawled toward the bowl in front of my grandma, she slowly reached inside her bag. She pulled out the knife she had shown me, the one that was lined with salt. Just before the first creature could grab at the gold pieces, she lunged forward and waved her knife, cutting the thing’s scraggly hand clean off. As the detached hand fell, the rest of the creature started to wrinkle and wither up, losing its color and eventually falling as well. It was nasty. The thing looked like it had been juiced of all its fluids.

The other two perked up erratically, jumping around like wild monkeys. Not pausing for a moment, my grandma lurched forward toward one of them, slashing their chest and leaving an open wound, causing the green man to shrivel up just like the first one. The third creature jumped at my grandma, its thin arms stuck out wide in front of it. My grandma was not deterred. She spun around and slashed the incoming creature’s hands off, the same way she had the first one, and let it fall to the ground as it lost its color without any worry. She walked back to the inside of her circle, shook her blade, and justput it back in the bag.

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I thought she was going to pack up the rest of her little ritualistic circle, but she kept most of the stuff out. She sat back in the center and closed her eyes, humming a small tune. Some kind of hymn, I think. I still don’t really know what it was. I’ll have to ask her.

While she sat there undisturbed, the shock of the moment started to get to me. That… that was a goblin. Wasn’t it? I remember thinking. Those things that just attacked Grandma, those were goblins. Real goblins. Also, who the hell was that?? There’s no way that’s my grandmother, what the hell was all of that?

I remember all these thoughts flooding my brain, the creatures, my grandma, the way they shriveled up in an instant. I didn’t understand any of it. My head just could not comprehend any of it. After what felt like forever, I finally found the adrenaline to move, to get back home. Trying to take a step back, I found that there was some resistance against my movement. What the hell? I thought. I was trying to walk backward, away from my grandma’s setup, but for some reason it felt like something was pulling against me. I looked down to see what I was snagged against, and saw that what had grabbed ahold of my leg was no ordinary branch or bramble.

The goblin was crawling up my legs, holding each of them in each of its hands. All of a sudden, the awareness of my senses kicked back on and I actually felt the thing. How had I not sooner? Of course something was crawling onto me! It could not possibly feel like anything else. How could I have thought my leg was just caught on a root or something? Its claws dug into my legs, the pain climbing up my spine. Despite all my previous efforts to be quiet and stay hidden, the primal reaction I was having to this wretched green ape-thing climbing my legs was taking priority. The scream I let out was visceral, terrified and desperate. I’m sure if I had grown up with more resolve, I could’ve taken action sooner… that’s probably what my dad would tell me… but I couldn’t. I mean, how could I have possibly been mentally ready for something like that? I don’t know, maybe CJ would’ve been. Even Liz probably.

Of course, the scream got my grandma’s attention. While I didn’t see her, I imagine she awkwardly shuffled back up, grabbed something from her bag, and rushed over to where I was writhing around on the ground just a few meters away. I remember the dried leaves of the season and loose twigs chaffing my back as I wriggled along the ground, desperately trying to kick off the gnawing creature. It kept reaching up closer to me, to my face, and I just had to keep doing my best to shove it off me. The thing was surprisingly strong, its frail arms more powerful than my legs pushing against it, and its head seeming tougher than any attempt I made to give it a concussion with a punch. I mean, I know in media and stuff, goblins aren’t scary or they’re played as weak, but this thing was terrifying. Maybe that was just from seeing it outside of a cartoon, though. Anyway, eventually my grandma reached us and stabbed the thing with the same knife she had used earlier right in the back of the head, leaving the freckled green creature to quickly rot onto my writhing legs.

I shoved it off of me as fast as I could and looked up at my grandma. I thought she would be mad, maybe worried for me or relieved that she had saved me. But… the look on her face showed none of those. She stared at me, far into the deepest depths of my eyes, past anything I thought was there, until I practically saw her through my brain, looking at me from the tunnels that were my eye sockets. In her face, beyond any anger, or worry, or relief, or disappointment… was pure, insatiable fear.

I still remember the words like it happened five minutes ago. I remember the tone with which she spoke, the cadence with which she said each word, the aura that surrounded her as the message left her lips. “Go home. Get the olive oil and a fire poker. Come back here.”

Sometimes in stories or movies, you have your main character tell somebody to go do something and they freeze up for a moment, so the main character yells, “Now!” and that gets the other person moving, kind of jumpstarting their nerves to actually go do the thing. That was not needed here. Even though I was in shock, even though my grandma had just killed something that wasn’t supposed to exist as it was crawling on me, even though I had every reason tossup down… I couldn’t. Something about my grandma’s words, the near-desperation with which she spoke, as if she wasn’t just telling me to go, but was begging. It got me moving without her having to say another word. Home. Oil. Poker. Back. Got it. And I did. Just like that, I was running home, moving faster than I ever thought my body could.

“And leave—“ My grandma wearily shouted at me as I left, seemingly trying not to be too loud despite trying to yell.

At the time, I didn’t know what she was telling me, or that it would have drastically changed the course of the succeeding events had I heard her and listened. If only I had waited a moment before leaving, or just… paused to ask her what she said… or… I don’t know… I just, I should have known. I should have known.

I didn’t know what was going on, I didn’t know what my grandma was dealing with as I left her behind, but I knew I couldn’t stop to wonder or worry about it. If I stayed to check on her, I would just be hesitating to do the thing she asked me to, which would certainly be less helpful than whatever I was worried about.

Finally, I made it into the backyard, passing from the woodsy, unkept area into our fenced-off, gardened property. I raced up to the back door and swung it open recklessly, not caring for a second that it might wake up somebody. I knew it was late. I knew most people were probably asleep or getting there, but that didn’t matter now. My grandma was in danger. I thought. Or I was. I didn’t know. What I did know was that she needed me, she needed the stuff, now. It was awkward today though, because my dad had me do a few extra chores for making such a ruckus so late. It felt weird that last night I experienced… what I did and still have yet to explain, and yet here I am the next day just raking the lawn. Whatever. I’m writing this because chores quickly became the least of my worries, clearly. Sorry, Dad.

I ran into the living room where our fireplace was, completely forgetting that we had one in the backyard too, and likely a fire poker. Whatever, I thought. You’re still getting one. Just grab it and move.

Snatching one of the pokers off from the little hanger that holds them, the rest of the thing tipped over from the reckless gesture, crashing onto the brick tile that lines about a meter around the fireplace. Shit. It didn’t matter. Like everything else, it didn’t matter. I just went into the kitchen and looked for a bottle of olive oil, doing my best to ignore any commotion I was making that might’ve disturbed my parents. I pulled one from under the cabinet, unopened. Perfect. I raced back out the back door, poker and oil in hand, just as I heard my dad come out of his and my mom’s room. “What’s going—“ I didn’t hear the rest of it. I was already halfway out of the backyard, worried only for my grandma and myself.

Sincerely,