The Magic Spectacles by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page B

and crackling of things moving swiftly in the leafy darkness.
    “Go!” John shouted, and the three of them took off running again, up the hill toward the house, into the misty darkness where the roadside trees blocked the light of the moon.

Chapter 11: The Fight on the Road
    Goblins swarmed out of the darkness ahead of them, twenty or more, running silently in their rat shoes. Ahab leaped straight into the middle of them, nearly pulling Danny over onto his face and knocking the little men this way and that way into the dirt. John yelled, trying to scare them off, and Danny let go of Ahab and swung the backpack at the closest goblin. Halloween candy flew out onto the road, and one of the backpack straps caught around a goblin’s neck.
    The goblin jerked away, yanking the pack out of Danny’s hand. Four other goblins began pulling on it, trying to reach inside. Others crawled on the road on their hands and knees, picking up fallen candy and shoving it into their mouths.
    “Run!” John shouted. But Danny didn’t run. He chased the goblin with the pack and grabbed one of the straps. Immediately a goblin climbed onto his back like a smelly little ape. Another clutched his leg. Their hands snaked into his pockets. The goblin still holding the pack acted as if he were playing tug of war until Danny pulled him straight over onto his face.
    John pushed goblins aside, trying to help his brother, and Ahab ran back and forth, chasing goblins up the hill and into the trees. Within moments the same goblins leaped back down onto the road and went charging after the candy and the backpack again, fighting madly with each other, poking and gouging and wrestling.
    In the thickening fog, the trees were dark ghosts along the roadside. Goblins appeared and disappeared. John hit and kicked at goblins. Maybe the spectacles were broken, and didn’t work, but he wasn’t going to give them up. He grabbed a goblin that held onto Danny’s back and yanked it off, throwing it sideways into three more goblins just then coming down out of the trees. All four were knocked sprawling, but then were up again, capering forward, their eyes whirling and wild.
    Then there was an explosion. Someone was running toward them down the road – not a goblin, but a man waving some kind of weapon. The goblins stopped fighting and stood still. There was another explosion, a kind of a whoosh, like a firecracker going off in a bucket of water, and the man ran out of the tree shadows and into the moonlight.
    He was pretty fat, and he ran heavily, but he looked as if he meant business. He threw the gun to his shoulder and shot into the trees, and a spray of misty bubbles flew out of the gun. The breeze caught the bubbles and blew them across the road. A couple of the goblins slunk away into the trees. The rest hesitated, as if making up their minds.
    “I’ll shoot!” the man with the gun yelled. ‘Back away!” Two or three goblins started laughing, pretending to be fat men shooting guns.
    “Here now!’ the man yelled, “Go on now!”
    When one of the goblins made a sort of raspberry noise with his lips, the man’s eyes flew open. “Well!” he shouted, suddenly furious. “I’ve decided to shoot! It’s time for a
bath!”
    The sound of the word “bath” seemed to put the fear into them, and suddenly, as if they were all thinking with the same brain, they ran howling away into the woods. The fog seemed to lift right then, and the bonfire blinked out. Once again the woods were dark and silent.
    The man turned to John and Danny and bowed, although he couldn’t bow very far. “Allow me to introduce myself…” he started to say, but before he was finished he stopped and looked behind Danny, where one last goblin sat in the dust of the roadway, eating Halloween candy.
    He shoved a piece into his mouth, not bothering to unwrap it first. He smelled as if he had been wrestling with dead fish and hadn’t taken a bath afterward, and his hair was like spider