The goblins rushed towards the basement, but they did not enter it. Instead, they turned invisible and climbed up the pipes, swinging and leaping for sheer joy.
They skipped the first floor - there was only a single, lonely girl there, listening to the music - and swarmed up to the second. There dozens of demonic cultivators were hard at work, compiling, computing, compounding, and most importantly, conniving.
It takes a lot of effort to destroy Christmas - more, in fact, than it takes for Santa to make Christmas. For running Christmas is a jolly, fun affair, replete with merrily dancing elves, whereas ruining Christmas is an irksome and boring affair which drains on the soul. Consequently there was little to no noise in the office, and what noise there was was mere complaints, rather than laughter.
The goblins settled in to wait for the signal, lurking transparently in the support beams and behind the desks.
“Man, I can't wait for this venture to be over. I'm so sick and tired of hearing about Christmas,” one employee muttered, downing his coffee. His coworker nodded.
“Awful holiday - mere consumerist dreck for the sentimental, and those too banal to grasp for power. If it's any consolation, however stressful we found this project, can you imagine how bad the Fat Man must feel right now?”
***
“Who wants fresh fudge?” Santa cried, bursting open the door to the workroom.
The elves, who'd been bopping along to groovy tunes as they finished their work, dropped everything they'd been doing and rushed over crying “me, me, me, me.”
Arius just sighed. This was their second snack break of the morning.
***
Silently, sneakily, the goblins waited. And then they heard it - the signal, the sign, the signifier: the opening bars of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique: Songe d’une nuit du sabbat. With a cry and a cackle they manifested, hundreds of smeary green bodies spinning into being atop the desks, in the aisles, and in the middle of unused filing cabinets.
Vines sprung from the ground, the scent of loam and petrichor inundated the room, and somehow it started to rain. The goblin king cantered over the cubicles on his unicorn, and weird crackling lights flew through the office to the accompaniment of poorly composed poetry.
The other day I saw a dog,
And then I tripped upon a log,
I flew and fell into a bog.
Oh mama! Suzie ate the hog.
The employees panicked, momentarily, but demonic cultivators are not easily fazed even when poorly trained - and Das Gleiche did not stint on training - and it wasn’t long before they began to fight back. In and between the sounds of goblin poetry were heard the dread and dire chanting of mathematicians, wheels and bolts of demonic qi flying into the jigging goblins.
These did precisely nothing.
Why? A goblin, of course, is not particularly deadly; but it is bloody hard to kill and, what is worse, is uncommonly skilled in the art of illusion, such that you can't be sure if you're even attacking the thing in the first place.
The goblins jigged and pranced through the explosions of malefic force, kicking over desks and ripping up the paperwork. Their arms pumped as they vibed amidst the devastating lights, the ease with which they shimmied to one side of the bolts driving the demonic cultivators to fury.
Somegoblin was sticking forks in the electrical outlets, and another - probably Mossfoot - set up the Groovy Disco Time Formation Array in the breakroom, terrorising hungry employees with only the raddest of tunes:
Whether you’re abutter or whether you’re an udder
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You’re eating a pie, eating a pie.
Feel the topping flaky and all the tasty pastry
And you’re eating a pie, eating a pie.
Ah ah ah ah, eating a pie, eating a pie,
Ah ah ah ah eating a piiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeee.
The goblins had even made it into the marketing department, bringing their effervescence and childlike enthusiasm with them.
I thought I saw a dirty faucet
But it was a pig who flosset.
Zara screamed and kicked at the thing - how dare he rhyme at her in doggerel - but the squishy shape in blue and red just yahooed and did three backflips.
“Hey, Ramirez, have you called management yet?” She swore at Ramirez from Marketing. In answer, he held up the rotary phone. It gave him a quack and then started to swim away.
She uttered something that is unrepeatable in print and attempted to run to the door, but her escape was blocked by her ergonomic office chair. It stood on its back and started to lecture her in French about grammatological psychoanalysis.
“Mademoiselle, c’est la vie, c’est la vérité que: la jouissance, c’est le diference,” it observed, declaring this utterly ludicrous statement as if it were the most self-evident in the world.
“Quoi? Non,” she said perfunctorily, and tried to leap over it to get at the door. It did a cartwheel in place and somehow ended up on top of her, as she struggled on the floor.
“Oui, mais non maintenant. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose - et la femme est un haricot vert.”
She was about to argue with it further when it occurred to her that she was having a dispute with her chair which was as nonsensical in content as it was in form, and with a heave and a sound of fury she kicked the chair off her.
It turned into a refrigerator and whizzed out the window, spinning like a saucer.
Not one to dwell on lost chairs, Zara leapt back onto her feet and dashed for the open doorway, determined to escape this nightmare and reach management.
She slammed into it headfirst. The paint, still wet, clung to her as she fell.
Snurgle the goblin - who was in the middle of painting the wall to look like an open doorway, and the open doorway to look like a wall (a rare skill, to paint on thin air, and one he’d worked hard to master) - looked down at the stunned, paint-coated employee and shrugged. It wasn’t his fault if she hated art so much she wanted to headbutt it.
Three of the goblins announced that since the employees disliked a symphony orchestra, they’d try some other form of music and see if they wouldn’t prefer that. Thereupon they staged an impromptu concert in the middle of the floor, but since it consisted of the bagpipes, the accordion, and a dented cowbell it’s doubtful if the employees preferred it over the classical music that could be heard, dimly, from outside.
In fact they disliked it so much they set the desks aflame in that part of the room (or possibly it was the goblin sticking forks in electrical outlets - alas, we’ll never know), trying to stop their beautiful, if entirely out of tune, concert. But the goblins were true musicians, unfazed by the harsh vicissitudes of life, and through the fire and the flames they carried on.
Zara slowly climbed back to her feet, groaning, and went to find Ramirez from Marketing. He was dragging himself across the pumpkin spice latte-spattered floorboards - his shoes had gone on strike, announcing that they expected a living wage and smoke breaks - and needed to be helped onto his feet (bare feet - the shoes had to be removed, complaining about strikebreaking and scandalous, anti-union conduct all the while).
“We have to leave,” he panted, as the coffee machine began producing soap and the entire IT department was caught up in the Involuntary Shakespearean Dialogue Trap Array.
“But you can’t leave,” one of the goblins protested, “not on Thanksgiving.”
“It’s not Thanksgiving,” Zara said snootily.
“Sounds like somebody is ungrateful,” the goblin declared. Zara didn’t bother to respond, trying to get away, but the goblins had surrounded her on all sides by this point. They began to push Ramirez from Marketing and her towards a table they’d set up in the middle of the chaos, encouraging them all the while to join the goblins for Thanksgiving Dinner.
The table was gorgeously decorated, with silver cutlery, pure porcelain dishware, and embroidered napkins. At each plate was a steaming hot helping of roast turkey. Zara protested, but she was forced into a seat. Ramirez from Marketing was forced down on the other side of the table, as were several other employees.
A goblin dressed in purple and yellow and wearing a bed sock on his head stood on one end of the table. He began to address them in the most pompous tone conceivable.
“My gentle salmon, glorious wallabies, it is with the most gracious and benevolent grace and benevolence that I dribble you for coming to our Thanksgiving Dinner. Without you… wait just a moment…”
And the goblin began to count the places at the table, a worried look on his snout. “No, no, this can’t be right. Where’s the host? Filbert… oh yoohoo, Filbert. Where are you… Oh, there you are!”
There he was indeed - the host. He stared at the sweating, nervous employees, at their plates full of steaming hot roast turkey… and then then foot tall turkey squawked.