The Princess and the Goblin

by George MacDonald

  CHAPTER 13

  The Cobs' Creatures

  About this time the gentlemen whom the king had left behind him towatch over the princess had each occasion to doubt the testimony of hisown eyes, for more than strange were the objects to which they wouldbear witness. They were of one sort--creatures--but so grotesque andmisshapen as to be more like a child's drawings upon his slate thananything natural. They saw them only at night, while on guard aboutthe house. The testimony of the man who first reported having seen oneof them was that, as he was walking slowly round the house, while yetin the shadow, he caught sight of a creature standing on its hind legsin the moonlight, with its forefeet upon a window-ledge, staring in atthe window. Its body might have been that of a dog or wolf, hethought, but he declared on his honour that its head was twice the sizeit ought to have been for the size of its body, and as round as a ball,while the face, which it turned upon him as it fled, was more like onecarved by a boy upon the turnip inside which he is going to put acandle than anything else he could think of. It rushed into thegarden. He sent an arrow after it, and thought he must have struck it;for it gave an unearthly howl, and he could not find his arrow any morethan the beast, although he searched all about the place where itvanished. They laughed at him until he was driven to hold his tongue,and said he must have taken too long a pull at the ale-jug.

  But before two nights were over he had one to side with him, for he,too, had seen something strange, only quite different from thatreported by the other. The description the second man gave of thecreature he had seen was yet more grotesque and unlikely. They wereboth laughed at by the rest; but night after night another came over totheir side, until at last there was only one left to laugh at all hiscompanions. Two nights more passed, and he saw nothing; but on thethird he came rushing from the garden to the other two before thehouse, in such an agitation that they declared--for it was their turnnow--that the band of his helmet was cracking under his chin with therising of his hair inside it. Running with him into that part of thegarden which I have already described, they saw a score of creatures,to not one of which they could give a name, and not one of which waslike another, hideous and ludicrous at once, gambolling on the lawn inthe moonlight. The supernatural or rather subnatural ugliness of theirfaces, the length of legs and necks in some, the apparent absence ofboth or either in others, made the spectators, although in one consentas to what they saw, yet doubtful, as I have said, of the evidence oftheir own eyes--and ears as well; for the noises they made, althoughnot loud, were as uncouth and varied as their forms, and could bedescribed neither as grunts nor squeaks nor roars nor howls nor barksnor yells nor screams nor croaks nor hisses nor mews nor shrieks, butonly as something like all of them mingled in one horrible dissonance.Keeping in the shade, the watchers had a few moments to recoverthemselves before the hideous assembly suspected their presence; butall at once, as if by common consent, they scampered off in thedirection of a great rock, and vanished before the men had come tothemselves sufficiently to think of following them.

  My readers will suspect what these were; but I will now give them fullinformation concerning them. They were, of course, household animalsbelonging to the goblins, whose ancestors had taken their ancestorsmany centuries before from the upper regions of light into the lowerregions of darkness. The original stocks of these horrible creatureswere very much the same as the animals now seen about farms and homesin the country, with the exception of a few of them, which had beenwild creatures, such as foxes, and indeed wolves and small bears, whichthe goblins, from their proclivity towards the animal creation, hadcaught when cubs and tamed. But in the course of time all hadundergone even greater changes than had passed upon their owners. Theyhad altered--that is, their descendants had altered--into suchcreatures as I have not attempted to describe except in the vaguestmanner--the various parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparentlyarbitrary and self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments.Indeed, so little did any distinct type predominate in some of thebewildering results, that you could only have guessed at any knownanimal as the original, and even then, what likeness remained would bemore one of general expression than of definable conformation. Butwhat increased the gruesomeness tenfold was that, from constantdomestic, or indeed rather family association with the goblins, theircountenances had grown in grotesque resemblance to the human.

  No one understands animals who does not see that every one of them,even amongst the fishes, it may be with a dimness and vaguenessinfinitely remote, yet shadows the human: in the case of these thehuman resemblance had greatly increased: while their owners had sunktowards them, they had risen towards their owners. But the conditionsof subterranean life being equally unnatural for both, while thegoblins were worse, the creatures had not improved by theapproximation, and its result would have appeared far more ludicrousthan consoling to the warmest lover of animal nature. I shall nowexplain how it was that just then these animals began to showthemselves about the king's country house.

  The goblins, as Curdie had discovered, were mining on--at work both dayand night, in divisions, urging the scheme after which he lay in wait.In the course of their tunnelling they had broken into the channel of asmall stream, but the break being in the top of it, no water hadescaped to interfere with their work. Some of the creatures, hoveringas they often did about their masters, had found the hole, and had,with the curiosity which had grown to a passion from the restraints oftheir unnatural circumstances, proceeded to explore the channel. Thestream was the same which ran out by the seat on which Irene and herking-papa had sat as I have told, and the goblin creatures found itjolly fun to get out for a romp on a smooth lawn such as they had neverseen in all their poor miserable lives. But although they had partakenenough of the nature of their owners to delight in annoying andalarming any of the people whom they met on the mountain, they were, ofcourse, incapable of designs of their own, or of intentionallyfurthering those of their masters.

  For several nights after the men-at-arms were at length of one mind asto the fact of the visits of some horrible creatures, whether bodily orspectral they could not yet say, they watched with special attentionthat part of the garden where they had last seen them. Perhaps indeedthey gave in consequence too little attention to the house. But thecreatures were too cunning to be easily caught; nor were the watchersquick-eyed enough to descry the head, or the keen eyes in it, which,from the opening whence the stream issued, would watch them in turn,ready, the moment they should leave the lawn, to report the place clear.