“Rumpelstiltskin may have, in fact, been a goblin.”

–Guidebook to Gregar, page 389

That night, Orer tried to go to bed early. He tried to get some rest. But he still saw things crawling along the tree line when he looked out his window, and he still closed his eyes to fitful nightmares. Try as he might, the midnight screech still woke him with a start, and he found that he couldn’t fall back asleep.

As he sat there wide awake, trying to calm a racing heart with deep breaths, he heard a thump from downstairs. He told himself–he reassured himself adamantly–that it was simply one of the returned staff members getting some work done. But then he heard two more thumps, and it was too much for him to simply stay in bed. Orer got up and put on a t-shirt and shorts before heading down the stairs with his handy flashlight.

Thankfully, the sound wasn’t coming from the hallway leading to the basement door. That much he could discern from the direction of the noises. But it also wasn’t coming from the staff’s quarters. Orer began walking in the direction of the drawing room.

Moonlight filtered in from the windows where the curtains still sat drawn. Orer flicked the flashlight around the room, from the rug, to the couches, and to the mantle. Nothing was out of place. Off to the corner, however, was the entryway into the living room.

Thump. Orer turned off the flashlight and moved over to lean against the wall. He’d seen it be done in the movies, and it couldn’t exactly hurt at the moment to try and be sneaky.

Thump. Thump.

“Gah!”

It was now or never. Whatever had just made that cry was definitely something…other. Flashlight clutched to his chest, Orer flipped himself around the corner and turned on the light switch at the wall.

Standing right there, on top of the ottoman, was a green, bulky creature. With the extra height, it stood eye-to-eye with him. And as soon as it made eye contact with him, it dove behind the couch, landing next to the bookshelf. Casings came down, papers flew, and the bookshelf fell forward onto the couch.

“Aw, sheesh,” Orer muttered, raking a hand through his hair.

The little monster took the opportunity to give a high-pitched wail.

“Whaaaat!” it screeched. “What did you saaaay?”

There was not enough time to register that the thing was actually talking when it shouldn’t have been.

“I said, ‘Sheesh,’” Orer replied, “and now I’m telling you to ‘shush.’ Be quiet or else you’ll wake the whole house up.”

Surprisingly, the creature did as he was told. Yet he began to shake, his ugly shoulders bobbing. “But how did you knoooow?” it asked, muffled. There were two fat droplets trailing down from the creature’s eyes. Crying? It hardly deserved such emotion after what it had done.

“How did I know what?” Orer said, still in disarray at the state of the room. He didn’t have time for crying when the situation at hand couldn’t just be explained away.

The creature fell face-forward on the ground and flailed its arms. “My naaaaaame. How did you know? Who told you!”

“No one told me anything. I came up here and found you making a mess, and now you’re going to describe to me what, exactly, you were doing.”

“Jewelsies!” the creature cried, still on the ground. “I was looking for jewelsies to bring baaaaack.”

“So you were stealing.”

“Not stealing! No stealing. Just taking!”

Orer tilted his head. “Two sides to the same coin. Why were you taking them?”

At this question, the creature began make a noise that sounded somewhere between a growl and a rumble.

“Well, then,” Orer said, crouching to get on the creature’s level. He realized he wasn’t scared of this thing, whatever it was. “What can you tell me?”

The creature sniffled, then looked up at him under heavily lidded eyes. It reminded Orer of a frog in some ways. The green, slimy color; the large, bellylike throat. But its legs were stubby, and it didn’t seem to use its arms to crawl on all fours.

Then it stuck out a fat, pink tongue, beginning to pant.

Back in his boyhood years, Orer had a friend named Tesin Grovano. The two of them got along great in their early years, in part because Tesin’s family owned a pug, and often that pug would come with Tesin over to play at Orer’s house. He didn’t remember much about the dog except for two things: one, it was terrible at playing fetch; and two, in the summer heat, the pup would often run straight into the tile kitchen and plop down on the cool flooring in a sprawled-out manner, heaving the whole time.

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This thing in front of him seemed to be doing exactly that, heaving and all. Orer’s first thought was that the creature was the result of some sort of experiment to create a humanoid with frog- and dog-like features. He would settle with that theory, for now. The original alien idea he had been toying with since the basement scare hadn’t made much sense, anyway.

“She told us!” it wailed. “She told us to come get them.”

Gram popped into Orer’s head suddenly and surprisingly. He quickly brushed the thought away. Gram wouldn’t be trapping and killing these things, would she? Orer tried to picture her doing something of the sort, and the image in his head just wasn’t coming together with the person he knew Gram to be. Gram a hunter? No, “she” had to be someone else.

It wouldn’t be Kena, either. That girl had hardly any capacity to go down basement stairs, much less take interest in something like this.

Maybe it was Mrs. Tasgi.

“Who told you?” he asked. “Who’s ‘she’?”

“Can’t say! She made us promise not to saaaaay.”

Another dead end, then. He moved on: “What are you, then?”

“Goblin,” the creature croaked.

Orer had read about them in the guidebook. While he was positive the book was more myth than fact, he would settle with the theory that someone out here in Gregar had done some experiments gone awry and convinced the guidebook’s author to come up with more than a couple fantastical ideas to satisfy the average tourist. But Orer was not stupid.

“Alright,” he said. “If you’re a goblin, where’s your kingdom? And where’s that great big king of yours?”

“Downstairs, downstaiiiiirssss,” the goblin drawled. It hopped back over the couch, around the bookshelf still leaning sideways, and onto the ottoman, standing straight up to look Orer dead on. Maybe he had underestimated the froglike nature of those legs.

An underground laboratory made enough sense. Plus, he couldn’t deny that there had been another door in the basement, one that certainly led somewhere.

“Alright,” he said again, “you’re going to take me down to see this goblin king.”

The goblin’s eyes bulged. “Take you?” it spluttered. “Aghhhh!”

“Sheesh!” Orer exclaimed in surprise, taking a step back. The goblin’s sudden mood swings were a bit too much.

“What?” it asked, pausing mid-yell. It stared at him for a couple more seconds as if trying to understand something. “You truly want me, Sheesh Orororororo, to take you to see the goblin king?”

The goblin said its–his–last name like he was croaking up a storm. His large chin bobbed up and down with each syllable, tongue falling in and out of that large maw. For his part, Orer was finally putting two-and-two together on the name bit. It had been a stroke of luck, he realized, that the name of this experiment-gone-wrong just happened to be Sheesh.

“Yes,” he replied. “I, Orer Janesh, would like you, Sheesh Orororo, to take me to the goblin king.”

Hopefully he had added enough repetitions to the last name to fit the bill. It was time to figure out Gregar’s secrets, and fast. All Orer wanted was a night of peace, and he wasn’t going to get it until he had this mystery solved.

The goblin hopped up and stretched himself out. “Your name! How kind of you to share. It is very similar to my family name.”

He smiled then, tongue lagging and a row of teeth on display.

“Yes it is.” Orer wasn’t going to point out the obvious differences, namely the croaking, when the goblin suddenly seemed so dangerously chipper.

“I, Sheesh, shall take you, Oro, to meet the king.”

“Thank you. But we need to grab Kena before we leave.” It would be best not to go alone, Orer remembered the guidebook saying. The goblin didn’t count, of course.

“Canine?” Sheesh asked hesitantly, putting a finger to his mouth in a nervous, almost human-like manner. Orer suddenly had a pang of sympathy for him. Whoever had gone about and made some bad science, they clearly had done a lot of psychological damage to make this creature scared of the very animal he was meant to emulate.

“No, Kena. My cousin.”

“Mmmmm,” the goblin rumbled. “The king does not like visitors. Only one at a time.”

“How will I know that no danger will come to me?” Orer asked. He wished he hadn’t skimmed the guidebook. It probably had some hidden gems for dealing with these lab rats.

The goblin went into a crouch. “A goblin’s word is very true. We are not brownies, agh!”

Orer put his hands up. He seemed to have agitated Sheesh. “Alright, just checking,” he said.

Sheesh’s eyes narrowed into slits, and then he folded his arms across his chest. “I have decided something.”

“Oh? And what would that be?” Orer had gone back to looking at the mess around the room and was a bit distracted. He was going to have to clean this all up himself. Kena didn’t know that he had seen this goblin downstairs, and Gram knew what was downstairs but thought nothing made it up. If Orer wanted to keep his secrets, he was going to have to pull his own weight in the situation.

The goblin pointed a finger at Orer, then back at his own chest. “You and me, Oro and Orororororo–we are related. That is the only way our names match so well.”

Orer blinked, then stared at the creature. He bit back the first words that came to his mind, before replying, “Hmm. Well they are good names, aren’t they? At least we both know we have smart families.”

It was enough to avoid offending the goblin. He smiled another toothy grin and nodded. “Yes, yes! Very smart. I am glad to find kin among your strange people. The king will be excited to meet you. He doesn’t like visitors, but he will like a brother of Sheesh!”

Orer put his free hand to his chest. “Thank you, Sheesh. I am quite honored.”

“Well, time to go!” Sheesh hopped down from the ottoman and ran toward Orer. Orer had to fight the urge to get away and put more distance between himself and Sheesh. He wasn’t exactly confident goblins were kinder than brownies, whatever their programming, and he wasn’t going to let himself make a lethal mistake when it could be prevented.

The goblin hugged his leg. It was…disconcerting. Orer had expected Sheesh to be slimy, and while the arms wrapped around his leg were definitely cold, they also didn’t seem as gross as he would have thought they'd be. He patted Sheesh on the head. “Um, let’s wait to go until we’ve cleaned up.”

Maybe he could convince the goblin to help out a bit, since they were in on this secret adventure together.

“I’ve never really talked to sun-folk before,” Sheesh said, looking up at him with round eyes. “But I’m glad you’re my relative.”

“Yes, well,” Orer said, taking a step forward, “I’m glad too. Let’s just finish cleaning this before we decide what to do next.”

The goblin loosened his grip and began hopping up and down. Thump, thump, thump.

“Sheesh!”

The thumping stopped, but Orer couldn’t help putting a hand through his hair again. It was going to be a long night, and that was only if this weren’t one of his nightmares.