Yes, they were Jack O’Lanterns. Two rows of them, one to either side of the cobblestone path, grinning at him from dozens of differently carved expressions. There was a corn wreath on the door, and strange faces leering out of the windows.

Caedes pinched himself. “This isn’t real, right?”

“And why shouldn’t it be?” Yaaroghkh asked, buffing his pointy elf cap as they walked down the pumpkin path.

“Because it’s Christmas, not Halloween.”

“Which is an excellent reason for you not putting a pumpkin out of doors, but you stand at the Autumnal Gates of the Old Old House, and the inhabitants who live within are above such things as the passage of time.”

And with that he grabbed the door knocker - which was carved in the shape of a grinning skeleton - and banged it twice. The door creaked open.

They padded down velvet carpet, through crooked, creaking halls decorated utterly out of season, with weird masks and hideous mummified things and something that looked like a cross between a mole rat and a skink, if either had wings.

And then the walls gave out, and the hall led into the night - but no earthly night. No fields or streets were there for the moonlight to shine down on, nor indeed was there any floor at all. The carpet continued to run, but surrounding it on every side was the black of an endless midnight. Stars twinkled above and beneath them, flickering like fireflies.

The scurrying sensation Caedes had felt as they walked through the night grew stronger, but now it had an object as eyes the sizes of saucers danced glibly in the moonglow. They lacked any sort of pupil or colouration, and were one with the moonlight.

There must have been hundreds of them, huddling owlishly or leaping around. When they did become visible - only for a moment - Caedes saw that they had squiggly, willowy bodies lacking any definite shape, olive green or brown skin, wings like bat ears, and hooked noses. Their claws scrabbled and grasped at the fireflies as they leapt from star to star, and their clothing was a hilarious mishmash of brown robes and brightly coloured jester’s garb.

Now Caedes had lived in the City of Tombstones all his life, and other than a troll or two and several gnomes had never met elves or dwarves or dragons or the two-headed mole people who lived under the earth. But Cindy liked fairy tales, and hence he was well aware of the nature of the creatures confronting them. What he wasn’t aware of, however, was why in the ballyhoo the elf had decided he needed goblins to help him save Christmas, or why they even appeared as good children in the first place.

The goblins watched them as they journeyed through the hallway of stars, playing with the fireflies or drinking pumpkin spice lattes, but saying nothing (at least, nothing intelligible). They seemed to be waiting for someone, a someone who joined the scene slowly, soon enough.

A small goblin wandered towards them down the endless hallway. He looked young - his features clear, his unbuttoned frock coat the latest in style, and his cane clearly a fashionable affect - but his presence brought with it a sense of nigh indescribable age, as if Caedes was looking back before the creation of the world. He stopped twelve feet before them, banging his cane in the middle of the ground.

“Fall is coming to a close: the snow falls thick, the leaves are dead, and an elf of Santa’s workshop comes through ice and sleet to seek counsel with the Goblins of All Hallows’ Eve. What can we do for you, Yaaroghkh Yeserakir?”

Yaaroghkh spread his coat, stepping back into a formal bow, and began addressing the goblin using distinctly formal language. “Yaaroghkh Yeserakir, janitor of Santa Claus, greets the king of the goblins. He comes in respect to the recent assault on Santa’s workshop, having determined that the ones responsible were Das Gleiche, a demonic sect of the city known to all and sundry as the City of Tombstones.”

“And what are the particulars of his coming?” The king of the goblins said pleasantly.

Yaaroghkh straightened. “The nights grow long, the nights grow cold. The bones they creak with stones and mould. As for the nighttime imps and devils, I’ve come to ask them to a revel.”

The goblins got excited, whooping and clattering, and swinging from the stars like monkeys. The goblin king grinned, revealing a mouth of what were not pearly whites. “Your hospitality knows no bounds. The time for a summertime song has passed, yet we are still invited to a party. We understand - without us, would it really be a fun one? Humans these days are so dreary and serious.”

Caedes was lost, and absolutely bewildered as the elf’s face brightened (a terrifying sight to see - it literally glowed, nor was the colour pleasant to look upon). The latter spread seven of his hands in a gesture of welcome, but Caedes interrupted whatever he was planning to say.

“But we can’t ask the goblins to help!” Caedes cried, forgetting that the goblins were right there, and had feelings too.

“Hmmm? Why not?”

“Because they’re the spirits of Halloween.”

“Oh, well, if that’s a problem we can always ask the Easter Bunny. I hear Eostre has taken up pro-wrestling lately - goes by the name of ‘La Primavera.’”

An image entered Caedes' mind of a petite blond girl in a luchador’s mask delivering a chokeslam to a corporate executive, and he hurriedly shook it from his head.

“No, that won’t work either-”

“Then there’s always the Saint Valentine’s Day Romance Shrew.”

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

“No, you don’t understa-”

“How about the Maple Moose Man, who brings maple syrup to all the polite little boys and girls on Maple Moose Man Day (May the Fourth)?”

“No, I mean that they have nothing to do with Christmas.” Caedes finally managed to get out. Yaaroghkh just looked confused.

“So? The spirit of the holidays have diverse manifestations and imports, but their souls are as one. Those who carry the spirit of Halloween in their hearts understand those who carry the spirit of Christmas as well as the latter do themselves.”

The king of the goblins chuckled. “Patience, little demonic cultivator, patience. There’s no need to call the Saint Valentine’s Day Romance Shrew and his squeaks of snuggly fury quite yet. As a wise old man once said (back in chapter three), ‘the days grow bleaker, the nights more deadly’… yet is this not a double-sided statement, for Santa only brings his presents in the blackest pitch? It was with reason that the Poet once said, ‘Indeed all little ones adore, any savage carnivore.’”

He pulled a pipe out of an inside pocket, tamping a nub of tobacco down. “It is raining out, yet the sky is filled with stars. Come; we will have a walk and then, a carnival. ‘A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the snowy beach,’ and we’ll see if we can’t threaten this Snark’s life with a railway-share…they’re not all boojums, after all.”

Caedes clasped his hands together, for a moment. The goblin king didn’t seem too angry - which was good, for he could have crushed Caedes like a bug - but Caedes had sworn never to let fear keep him from the truth, and pressed forwards.

“Respectfully, sir, it still seems unnecessary to go so far afield…”

“To go so far afield? … ‘far and few, far and few, are the lands where the Jumblies live. Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, and they sailed to sea in a sieve.’ So might say our elfin friends - who are, as they say, not merely amphibious but amphigorous.”

And with that the goblin king started to waddle down the hall past them. His followers called and cackled, jumping and spinning down the hall before him, rushing down towards the door in a green and un-grokely wave. Yaaroghkh spun around and walked behind the goblin king, his steps oddly militaresque.

Caedes stood there for a moment, then hurried to keep up, vaguely annoyed that a creature who couldn’t have been more than three feet tall was moving so swiftly.

“But of course, you need not me to tell you that,” the goblin king continued, somewhat nonsensically, “for no awful darkness and silence reign over your great Gromboolian plain; you have found your Jumbly Girl, and your lurid light goes not hither and thither. But what of the Quangle Wangle Quee? He has jam, and jelly, and bread, which are the best of food for him — yet how few are the people who come his way!”

And then it clicked for Caedes, and he started to laugh. He understood, and he laughed. He laughed so hard that he nearly keeled over, steadying himself on a mummified moose. The goblin watched, bemused. “I’m glad you find me so hilarious.”

“Ah, it’s that - not that,” Caedes said, gasping as he tried to catch his breath. He was fairly certain that the goblin king wouldn’t kill him over a verbal offence - strange to say, but over the past week or two, as he’d met more and more powerful cultivators, he’d found them to be infinitely less likely to take offence than the ones who were veritable gnats - but he still didn’t want to insult the man (err, goblin). “It’s simply that I’m feeling rather beamish, and had to outgrabe.”

The goblin king shook his head, and uttered a mock sigh. "Just make sure that if you have to gyre, you do not gimble."

They had passed out of that strange, twilight hallway and back into the house proper, although as the rooms were folding up like so much paper behind them Caedes suspected that what could be seen was no more real than what wasn’t there.

The door to the house spilled open, and a torrent of goblins gallivanted out, backflipping and cartwheeling and making a general nuisance of themselves. They carried carved turnips in their hands, which had been filled with candles to light the way. It was no silent daemon cavalcade which passed by, but vast shadows of fulgent magic, squawking and clammering down the street.

Behind this tumultuous cacophony of unfettered joy came the goblin king, and Yaaroghkh, and Caedes, and no sooner had the last - still wheezing - passed out the doors of that haunted house than even the door collapsed in on itself, and they were left alone on a hill outside the city.

Down below Caedes could see the lights of the city, lamplights along the path, and somewhere among them the streetlamp marking the bridge on Poppycock Street. Caedes walked behind the others down the road, enjoying the feel of the night breeze and the sleet still falling overhead. And for the first time, he thought everything would be alright.

***

The Editor examined the manuscript in his paws, raised one fuzzy eyebrow, and gave the Author a dubious stare. The Author was scritching furiously with his pen, writing out a storm, but the degree of scepticism expressed by that stare was so strong that he paused what he was doing and turned around.

“What's wrong?”

The Editor considered his reply carefully, stroking his whiskers.

“It's just… you've written down what the king of the goblins said verbatim, yes? Why?”

“What do you mean, Why? What else would I write - what he hadn't said?”

“Hmmm. You told me your readers don't know you're merely transcribing real events as they happened, correct?”

“Correct. I doubt most of them even know that Santa Claus is real.”

“Right. So then surely none of them would notice if you had amended the goblin king's words to something more… intelligible. I doubt they're fluent in amphigory.”

“More’s the pity; it's the only language worth speaking.”

“You won't be able to pull off that literary legerdemain with me, you old rascal. Think about this. If, instead of posting a whole lot of blather about Quangle Wangles and Jumblies, you'd done a titch of translation and said something to the effect of: ‘All holidays manifest the magic of the world, but in different ways, so those who truly understand one holiday understand all the others. You may already be living a magical life, but what about all the poor sods who aren't?’ what the goblin king wanted to communicate would be much clearer.”

“But more brutish. Beauty is like a coy nymph, hiding in the woods. She should be drawn out with sweet words and gentle deeds, not boorishly hounded down by-”

“Oy, Romeo, I'll ask you to avoid that particular simile - do you want us to get dinged for the ‘no explicit content during Writathon’ rule?”

The Author sighed. “What I mean is show, don’t tell.”

“Which is called encoding, and is presumably done with the expectation that the other party can decode your nonsense. Where in the ballyhoo did you learn to write - the Mother Goose School for Birdbrains?”

“Hey, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” the Author quipped.

“Hand me much more of this and I’ll have you take a gander at the outcome of my Christmas Goose recipe,” the Editor returned, and went to post the story. The Author returned to writing the scene where the ghostly cow jumped over the moon (while playing a piano), pausing only as he realised that the Editor was doing too much typing.

“You’re not rewriting the story, right?” He asked nervously.

“Me? Never; not unless I get credit for co-writing. I can assure you, the story ends precisely where you wanted.” (But the post ends here.)