The orchestra and the goblins blended together and poured down the main street, a riotous return of the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons. Everywhere chaos and music followed in their wake, and it was hard to say who was the more chaotic, or the more musical.

It could have been the orchestra, singing and playing and doowop a doowop a bopping, or it could have been the goblins, who danced and pranced and occasionally romanced, or it could have been the crowd, who let themselves be drawn into the fun and the frenzy. Or it could have been any who they met, for as they went down the street the goblins worked their magic, and every last lamppost, bushel of flowers, and horse cart came alive.

Every last disconnected object, and many a connected one too. Handbags and shoes and hats joined in the parade, sometimes with their owners still attached. It cannot be said the owners were too upset - the goblins were good sports about the bother, and the music and the laughter was so thrilling that many found themselves joining in even if their shoes tried to go without them. (Santa, after all, is a sort of goblin who breaks into your house to leave you presents; and goblins are a sort of Santa who kidnaps you to set you free.)

Goblin and man and instrument and shoe gambolled down the street, the choral part to the can-can firm on their lips, a thousand fiddles singing as the goblins brought out their own instruments, and everywhere they went the magic and wonder of the revels followed in their wake.

***

Oscar heard the low of a cow outside his window, and rolled his eyes. The ghostly cow had been haunting him for weeks now, not to his fear but to his annoyance, and he was getting tired of it. He’d paid for the beef, so he could do what he wanted with it - even if he wanted to do nothing, save let it rot.

He opened the door and was about to swear at the cow, when he froze. For the cow was not alone - behind Daisy was a horde of misshapen, leaping little blighters, dancing and frolicking into his house. They upset the furniture, and ate all the tupperware in his fridge (leaving the food behind), and turned his goldfish into a flying dragon of pure gold.

“Happy Chinese New Year!” one of the creatures cried, as the water flew out of his toilet and became a moon of silver. The toilet grew legs and walked away, vowing to get revenge on the muskrat who’d murdered its parents.

Oscar had been frozen this entire time, but at the sight of his toilet leaving to begin its epic wuxia journey he unfroze.

“Wait- you can’t do this- this is my house, and-” and he would have said more, but a goblin with a skipping rope accidentally swept his feet out from under him, and he fell back on his piano bench. He was momentarily confused as to what, exactly, his piano bench was doing in the parlour when it (and the piano) were being stored in his basement, but had his question answered as he felt the wind under him, and realised that he and his piano were no longer in the fields we knew.

Hey diddle diddle, the cat cried as he played the fiddle (and very well I played it, too ~ the Editor), the cow jumped over the moon. She was playing the piano at the time, and one very wasteful mortal was clinging onto her hoof and screaming in terror.

“I’ll be good! I’ll never waste food again!” He cried.

“Moo,” said the cow.

The little dog laughed to see such sport, and the dish ran away with the spoon.

“Hey,” Laetitia said, as her pasta - liberated from its ceramic binds - fell all over the floor, “I was using those.”

Then she saw why the dish ran away with the spoon as the night parade galloped into view, and her eyes lit up. A party! Oh, how she’d missed these - as she wandered through the cavernous halls of her own blasted mind, lost in the nightmare of her twisted thoughts, her only regret - barring what an horrible arse she’d been in life - had been that she’d spent far too long worrying about power and wealth and fame and fortune, and far too little just enjoying life.

She kicked her chair back, tossed the waiter three times what he was owed, and gallivanted out into the street. Her shoes left her, as did her coat, but she didn’t notice. She was too engrossed in dancing with Officer Oleandra and the cello section.

***

Down and down, and through the town, down in the deep of goblin town and up in the fields we know came the goblins, and the orchestra, and the people, and many others besides. Trolls lumbered out of their underground kingdoms, standing on the surface of the earth for the first time in an age, gnomes and pixies flew clambered from their hidden homes at the news of a night of a revels, and more than one party-goer wondered if that flipper-footed, long-necked monster flapping along might not just be the famed inhabitant of an old loch.

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Nor was it only the goblin king who rode down the street on the back of a unicorn, Anna alongside him, as the extent of the goblins’ nonsense caused the boundaries between realms to fracture, with unicorns cantering through. (And a very good thing they did, too, lest some accuse me of staging a party for the naughty - for unicorns gallop only with the pure of heart, after all.)

Cymbals clashed, Christmas carols were sung gloriously out of tune, and ye merry gentlemen let nothing they dismayed. But not all were happy.

Laetitia, you see, had a cousin. She was also a Young Mistress in the family corporation, but unlike Laetitia she was not of the direct line, and in normal circumstances she would never have had a chance to inherit.

‘Normal’ being the operative word, for some weeks back Laetitia had gone quite mad. Formally she’d been an excellent role model in the family corporation, doing whatever it took to advance the interests of the conglomerate.

But now that she was free to be the good person she never knew she was, she was trying all sorts of things that, frankly, were trying the family’s patience, and her cousin Aayla intended to take advantage of this fact to seize a fate she’d never have otherwise had.

And she was doing so by doing what was right by the conglomerate, and getting the goblins out of their streets. (‘Their’ being not the city, but her and her kind - the peasants dancing below ought to know their place.)

Which is to say, she had gone to the mayor and demanded he do something about this unlawful assembly.

‘Demand’ is, perhaps, too polite a term for it - in more brutally honest words, she showed up and started yelling at him for failing to do his job and allowing goblins to sweep over the streets.

Goblins! How she hated them. Oh yes, she knew of the world of cultivation, and the idea that there were those who used magic, not for power, but to make the world a more magical place… well, it was frankly absurd. It was ridiculous. It was, to quote a great criminal mastermind, inconceivable. The very idea was the epitome of preposterous poppycock.

And so she had come to rant and rave, and poor Mayor Rella had no choice but to listen, for she was of the Families and the Sects. And rant and rave she did, and for quite longer than he had the patience for.

But once she was done, ah, then he was free to talk.

Mayor Rella steepled his fingers, his expression serene, and spoke as if to a child.

“My dear mademoiselle, much as I would like to oblige you, it troubles me to say that what you request just can't be done. I can't send anyone to battle against the goblins or otherwise remove them from the streets. There is a good reason for this - I cannot get rid of the goblins, since the goblins do not exist.”

The goblin standing on the edge of Mayor Rella’s desk nodded approvingly. If there was one thing he knew, it's that he was not (Descartes be darned).

“As is made quite clear in city law, there are no such things as goblins, ghouls, or ghastlies. Belief in them is the product of superstition, of benighted minds who lacked our critical theories and superior reasoning faculties. The idea that I should dispatch crucial city resources on such frivolous nonsense is beyond tolerable.”

“That's right,” the goblin who wasn't concurred.

“But there’s one of them right there,” Aayla swore, motioning outside the window. There a well-dressed goblin could be seen, pretending to swim as he drifted lethargically by, heedless of the fact that the mayor's office was on the twelfth story.

Mayor Rella didn’t even blink.

“That? That’s a social construct - and one with an excellent backstroke.”

The swimming goblin spit water from his mouth in a little mini fountain.

Aayla went to argue with him, and he held up one hand to silence her. “Do be quiet. You are more than welcome to say what you will, but to promote antiquated ideas of goblins in the night is, as I have said, intolerable, and as a public servant I have wasted quite enough of my time on it already. I will ask you not to trouble me again unless you have something reasonable to discuss, like new ways for the university to embezzle money.”

Aayla slammed her hands down atop the mayor’s desk, fracturing the wood and saying some very unladylike things, and the situation would doubtless have deteriorated further had there not at that very moment come the sounds of horrible screaming and fighting from outside.

There was the bang, bang, bang of gunfire, and the sound of metal clanging against metal, and the cackling of something small and green, and one of the guards she’d brought with her as a show of strength fell through the office door and onto the floor, clutching his stomach and groaning.

A half dozen goblins would have waltzed into the room behind him, if goblins existed, and if goblins existed they would have been wearing over the top, multi-coloured trench-coats and carrying miniature rifles, firing them to the boing, boing, boing of funfire.

But of course goblins didn’t exist, so no such thing could have occurred. That Aayla doubled over wheezing (with involuntary laughter) after their purported arrival is of course a coincidence, and those who claim there to be a link between their shooting her and her collapsing are merely confusing correlation with causation.

Mayor Rella took a sip of his tea, putting the cup on top of the desk goblin’s head.

The goblins lined up in a row, funs raised to their shoulder, and saluted. One of them stepped forward and handed the mayor a form from the Ministry for Organised Crime. (Offering him a merry Maple Moose Man Day as he did.)

Mayor Rella read through it and raised one eyebrow. “Well then, I see my daughter has been busy. Impressively so - almost as if she knew you were coming. Almost, of course, and anyways you don’t exist so you can’t be here. Well, do what you must.”

And, pulling out their accordions and collection of rare glass gryphons, the goblins did.