The Unseen World of Poppy Malone: A Gaggle of Goblins

by Suzanne Harper

  “Look,” she said.

  Will and Franny looked.

  Amid the rocky outcroppings, half hidden in the shadows, was a small carving of a face. Its expression was impish. Its eyes were gleaming with mischief. And Poppy was quite sure that, if she could see its teeth, they would be pointed. That was impossible, however, for one simple reason: the goblin was sticking its tongue out at them.

  Poppy couldn’t help herself. She knew it was childish and pointless, but still she found herself sticking out her tongue at the carving in return.

  “What is that?” Franny squeaked.

  “That,” Poppy said with some satisfaction, “is a goblin. Now will you believe me?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “I think it’s getting darker,” Franny whispered. “Does it seem like it’s getting darker to you? I mean, it was black before, but now it looks like a blacker black, don’t you think?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Will snapped. “It’s impossible to get darker than no light at all.”

  “And don’t worry so much,” Poppy said irritably. “We have extra flashlights and extra batteries, plus three candles and matches.” She couldn’t resist adding, somewhat smugly, “That’s what comes of being prepared.”

  “I don’t care what you say,” Franny said, hugging herself. “It is getting darker! And we’re probably surrounded by spiders. And it’s getting colder, too. Remember what Mom told us about hypothermia that night we tramped all over the Yukon looking for Nuk-luk? We’ll get colder and colder and then we’ll feel sleepy and that’s the last thing we’ll ever know because we’ll all be dead.”

  Sighing, Poppy stopped and took off her backpack. “No one’s going to die of hypothermia,” she said. “Here—”

  She pulled out a sweater and tossed it to Franny, then handed a long-sleeved shirt to Will (nobly resisting the temptation to remind them how they had mocked her for packing extra clothes, back when they were all sweating in the Texas heat).

  Poppy, of course, had put on a cardigan and a knit cap within moments of setting out to explore the cave. As she waited patiently for Will and Franny to pull on their extra clothes, she moved her flashlight over the rough walls and wondered exactly how long it would take someone to carve a face into that rock. . . .

  A scuttling sound made them all jump.

  “What was that?” Franny said, her voice shrill.

  “Just some cave creature,” said Poppy. Her heart was thumping wildly, but she tried to keep her voice even. “If I had to guess, I’d say it was a trogloxene, but it might have been a troglophile, I suppose—”

  “What are you talking about?” Franny snapped.

  “I’m talking about a cave’s ecosystem,” said Poppy, her heart gradually slowing down to a normal rhythm. Simply saying scientific words like trogloxene and troglophile made her feel calmer, more in control. It was what she loved about science—the idea that discovering facts and naming things could help you understand what was going on around you. “It just so happens that last month’s issue of Science Today had a very interesting article about caves. Animals that can live either inside or outside a cave are called troglophiles, which means ‘cave lovers.’ That includes beetles, centipedes, snails, spiders—”

  “I knew this cave felt all spidery,” Franny muttered, brushing a hand nervously over her hair.

  Poppy ignored this. “While trogloxenes, or cave guests, are animals that live in caves but go outside at some point in their lives,” she continued. “Everyone thinks of bats, but there are other creatures that come and go, like pack rats—”

  “Of course there are,” Franny said, her voice edged with hysteria. “Rats. Yes. We wouldn’t want to forget the rats.”

  “Now troglobites, or cave dwellers, have to live their whole lives underground, so they become completely adapted to the dark.” Despite their fraught circumstances, Poppy was beginning to enjoy herself. She did like sharing knowledge, even when her audience wasn’t as receptive as she would have liked. “Actually, it’s quite interesting how they adapt to constant darkness. There are sightless worms, fish with no eyes—”

  “Okay, Poppy, you really have to stop talking now,” said Franny, glaring at her. “Because I’m warning you, if I have to deal with blind worms and goblins, I’m going home right this second—”

  “Hey,” Will said. He was standing a few feet away, staring at the ground. “Look at this.”

  His flashlight beam was trained on a small gap between two rocks. Nestled in the gap was a Choc-O-Bomb candy wrapper.

  “We can’t turn back, Franny,” Will whispered. “Poppy’s right. We’ve got to keep going, no matter what.”

  As they kept walking, they gradually started talking more softly. Soon they found that they were moving closer together as they continued down the tunnel, occasionally even bumping into one another by accident.

  When that happened, their flashlight beams would bounce crazily around the cave, sometimes startling them with strange sights, like a rock formation that (just for a second) they had all thought was a woman dressed in a long cloak, standing still and watching them, or a cluster of sleeping bats, hanging upside down from the ceiling.

  Once in a while, a draft of cold, dank air would brush their faces, as if something large and unknown were moving deep inside the earth. There were no sounds except water dripping and their own whispers.

  Every time they had turned down a different tunnel, Poppy made a small pile of stones to mark the spot, then wrapped a piece of glow-in-the-dark tape around a Popsicle stick and stuck it in the pile. She also made Franny and Will turn around and look back the way they’d come.

  “That’s so we remember how it looks when we leave,” she explained. “A lot of cave explorers get lost because they don’t look back and can’t recognize any landmarks.”

  Franny didn’t find this explanation reassuring. “How do you know we won’t get lost? We’ll never find our way back; I don’t care how many little signs you make!”

  Still, as strange and otherworldly as the cave was, at least everything they saw and smelled and heard made a certain kind of sense.

  At least, until they turned another corner and saw the wall of socks.

  ***

  There were hundreds of them. They were hanging from the walls of the tunnel: brightly striped socks in blue, pink, red, green, and purple; dull men’s socks in brown and black and navy; dainty white cotton socks with lace edging; tiny babies’ socks; cartoony socks with popular TV characters or jaunty pictures of palm trees; dignified socks with tweed and herringbone patterns; lumpy knitted socks the color and texture of oatmeal; saucy red-mesh socks that fluttered in the slight breeze. . . .

  The Malones stared, their flashlights moving back and forth over the display.

  “You know,” Will said finally, “this is really weird.”

  “Weird?” Franny’s voice had developed a slightly hysterical edge. “Is that all you have to say? This is beyond weird, it’s, it’s . . .”

  She stopped and threw up her hands, unable to find the right words to express how completely unexpected and strange this was.

  “Like I said,” said Will with some satisfaction. “Weird.”

  Poppy moved closer to the wall, playing her flashlight over each sock in turn. “Look,” she said. “Every single one is different. At least, I don’t see any pairs, do you?”

  “Who cares about whether there are pairs or not? We’re not doing laundry, for heaven’s sake,” Franny said.

  Poppy ignored this. “It might be a clue.”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know; that’s the whole point of a mystery,” Poppy snapped. “Hey!” She pulled a red-and-white striped sock off the wall. “This is my sock. I was looking for it everywhere last week.”

  “Oh, well, that’s just great,” Franny said. “You lost a sock and now you’ve found it. Falling into a hole and getting lost in a cave and maybe dying will be completely worthwhile, now that you’ve comple
ted your sock collection.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Franny,” said Will. “Don’t you see, this means something. . . .”

  “Yes,” said Poppy, stuffing the sock in her pocket. “The question is, what does it mean?” She swept her flashlight beam over the socks again. “Who took these socks? Who put them on display? Why did they do it and what can we deduce from what we’ve found . . . ?”

  “Aaggh.” Franny groaned and clutched the sides of her head in what Poppy thought was an overly dramatic manner. “Enough already! Let’s just find Rolly and get out of here!”

  At that moment, Poppy heard a low, humming, gravelly sound in the distance.

  “Shh,” she said. “Listen.”

  The humming got closer.

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know,” Will said. “We’d better hide.”

  He slipped behind a large boulder and Poppy followed.

  “Come on,” she said to Franny.

  Franny glanced fearfully over her shoulder, then wrinkled her nose. “I’m not crawling back there. It’s all slimy and gross and—”

  “Hidden. Do you want to meet a goblin face-to-face?” Poppy grabbed her arm and pulled her sister behind the boulder.

  Franny stepped on her toe, hard. Poppy bit her lip to keep from yelling and shifted toward Will. His elbow poked her in the ribs. With the three of them wedged into the narrow space, there was barely room to breathe.

  “I don’t know what you’re making such a fuss about,” said Franny.

  “Shh!” Poppy and Will both said together.

  She opened her mouth to say something else, but at that moment, a goblin came trudging down the tunnel, humming a dirgelike tune. A smaller goblin (Poppy thought she recognized the one who had turned the sprinklers on while her parents were dowsing) trotted along at his heels, carrying a glass jar.

  “I wonder what we’re going to have for dinner,” the smaller goblin was saying. “I hope it’s something good. Maybe we’ll have baked eels or boiled parsnips or even fried worm cakes. What do you want to have for dinner?”

  “Whatever Bother makes is fine with me,” said the bigger goblin. “Do you suppose you could stop talking now, Muddle? Just for a minute or so? Just to please me?”

  “Oh, sure, Glitch. No problem,” said Muddle, nodding earnestly.

  Two steps later, he stopped. “Oh, hey, wait! I forgot! I have a trophy to hang up—” He dropped his pack to the ground and began digging through it. “I know it’s here somewhere. I remember putting it down at the bottom so I would be sure not to lose it. . . .”

  “Can’t we hang it later, Muddle?” Glitch asked. “I’m tired and hungry and ready to get out of these pustulous clothes—”

  “No, look, I found it!” The smaller goblin bobbed back up, holding a dingy gray sock with pride. “See, I knew it wasn’t lost.”

  “Great, fine, hang it up quickly so we can go home.”

  “But what about the ceremony?” Muddle asked. “This is the first sock I ever stole! And I almost got trapped inside the dryer, too! If I hadn’t managed to wedge a dish towel in the door, I might have been captured!”

  “Okay, okay, enough!” Glitch heaved a deep sigh, then said rapidly, “In recognition of his boldness and courage, in deep appreciation of his daring and cunning, we hereby allow the gremlin Muddle to hang his sock on the Wall of Valor, where it will remain in perpetuity as a tribute to the Goblin Spirit and our unwavering commitment to outwitting mortals, in every time and every place and every way that we can.”

  Muddle solemnly wedged a small stick in a crack in the stone and hung his sock from it, then stepped back and saluted.

  Tapping his toes, Glitch paused for a few moments in what was obviously meant to be a reverent silence, then applauded in a perfunctory manner. “Very good,” he said briskly. “Congratulations. Now let’s go.”

  “Okay,” said Muddle. He trotted along for several steps before adding, “I wonder what Mom will say when she sees all the fireflies I caught. I bet she’ll be really happy, don’t you? I bet she’ll be impressed. What do you think? Don’t you think she’ll be impressed—”

  “Yes, yes, I’m sure she will.” Glitch sighed. “I did tell you I had a headache, right?”

  “Oh yeah, you did.”

  “And that it would be very nice to have some peace and quiet for a while? Even for just a little while?”

  “Oh yeah, you said that.”

  “So do you think you manage it?”

  “Manage what?”

  There was a strange sound, almost as if Glitch were grinding his teeth. “Could you possibly manage to stop talking until we get home? If you weren’t my own brother, I’d think you were part elf!”

  “Well, I’m sorry,” said Muddle. “I didn’t know I was bothering you. I was just trying to make conversation. I was just trying to be friendly. But okay, fine. I won’t say a word from now on. I’ll just keep my mouth shut. You won’t hear a single, solitary thing cross my lips for the rest of the night—”

  They turned the corner, Muddle’s voice gradually fading away as they walked out of sight.

  Poppy cast a triumphant look at Franny and Will.

  She was gratified to see that Franny’s mouth had formed a perfect, astonished O and that Will’s eyes were wide with disbelief.

  “See?” she whispered. “What did I tell you? Goblins.”

  “What a day I’ve had, Bother,” Glitch said, striding over to the fire to warm his hands. “I was almost spotted again. It’s getting worse and worse up there; nothing but mortals everywhere you look these days.”

  The Malones were huddled behind another boulder, peering through a windowlike opening into a small cave off the main tunnel. Poppy was fairly sure they had gone undetected. They had followed the goblins as quietly as they could. True, Franny had tripped more than once, and Will had been so eager to keep pace with their quarry that he had rounded a curve too quickly and had to dart backward when he saw the goblins only a few feet away. Fortunately, Glitch had been showing Muddle how to detach a phosphorescent fungus from the wall, and they had both been too absorbed to notice Will.

  Finally, the goblins had stopped. Safely hidden, the Malones had seen Glitch open a small wooden door and usher Muddle inside, calling out, “Hello, Bother. We’re home.”

  The door had closed behind them. Poppy signaled to her brother and sister that they should wait before making a move. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could see a carving next to the door. Like the one at the cave’s entrance, the carving portrayed a goblin’s head, but the goblin was grinning a wide grin that showed off all his pointed teeth.

  Poppy studied it for a few moments. Why, she wondered, did goblins need such very sharp teeth? What did they use them for? They looked very much like the kind of teeth one would see on a vicious predator—a bear, say, or a shark. . . .

  Before her thoughts could travel any further along these unwelcome lines, Poppy motioned to Will and Franny. Together, they crept up to the door, which was flanked on both sides by rough-cut openings that served as windows.

  When they peeked in, they saw a cozy room aglow with light. A half-dozen hurricane lamps were placed on shelves and small tables, while a fire crackled in a large hearth. Several chairs, each one plump with cushions and covered with dark velvet, were clustered in front of the fire. To the left was a long wooden table lined with trays of cookies. Even from a distance, Poppy could smell sugar and cinnamon and some strange spice that she couldn’t identify.

  Another goblin was tending to several pots that bubbled on top of an iron stove; when she opened the stove door, the aroma of fresh-baked bread wafted through the air, making Poppy’s stomach growl with hunger.

  “It must be dreadful, dear,” the goblin said, calmly stirring the stew. “But you’re both back safe; that’s all that matters. Did you manage to pick up any batteries while you were Above Ground?”

  “I did!” Muddle said proudly, reaching into his pocket. He pulled o
ut a handful of batteries and held them up for her inspection. “I lifted six of them!”

  The goblin beamed at him. “That’s wonderful, Muddle. You’re turning into quite the scavenger, aren’t you? I wouldn’t be surprised if you graduated to goblin within the year.”

  Muddle looked gratified by this praise. “Look what else I brought back,” he said, holding up the cage of insects. “Forty-two lightning bugs! That’s a new record! Last week Blister caught forty lightning bugs and he was bragging about it, but I knew I could do better and I did! I got forty-two! That’s two more than Blister, because he only got forty—”

  “Yes, dear, very nice. You are coming along quite nicely.” She put the batteries into a small lava lamp, then switched it on. She smiled as red and orange bubbles began hypnotically rising and falling. “Oh, that is nice. It’s good to have the lamp turned on again. I think it makes the kitchen look so cheery, don’t you?”

  “Uh-huh.” Muddle snuck a cookie off the tray.

  “Stop that.” She slapped his hand playfully. “Dinner’s almost ready.”

  “You know, Glitch didn’t get any batteries, and when he tried to catch a firefly he fell in the creek,” said Muddle. “You should have heard what he said! Do you want to hear what he said? Because I memorized all the words so that I could tell you what he said.” He stopped to take a breath. “Glitch wouldn’t tell me what some of the words mean, so I thought I would ask you. Do you want me to tell you what he said now?”

  “That won’t be necessary,” she said. “Go and wash your hands for dinner.”

  He opened his mouth to protest and she gave him a stern look. “Now.”

  When he left the room, Glitch gave her a martyred glance. “You see what I have to put up with,” he said. “I believe I might be going mad.”

  “I know that training gremlins is hard, but you’re doing a wonderful job with him,” she said, setting a bowl of stew on the table.

  “It gets in the way of my own work, though,” Glitch said. “Like today. I had to stand absolutely still for almost half an hour while some silly woman pruned her roses. And a bee landed on my nose! I was in mortal fear the whole time that it would figure out I wasn’t made out of ceramic and sting me!”