Killing Goblins

1.

Look, you should know up front that I don't go in for the interpretation of dreams. I don't own a single crystal, I couldn't tell you what my zodiac sign is, and my tarot deck is purely ornamental--I like the art, what can I say?

I can tell that you're rolling your eyes already, and that's fine. I would too, alright?Sometimes I'll pick up a book and read a couple pages, and if I find out that what I just read was all a dream? I'm putting the book down like a dog. Got it?

So roll your eyes all you want.

But my story does start with a dream, okay? If I could tell it any other way, I would. It's just that I've got no practice telling stories, so I have to tell the story the way I tell it because I don't know any other way to tell it. And if you can't handle that it starts with a dream, then I guess this is where we part ways. And maybe that's for the best, you know? I'm afraid that if you get on this roller-coaster, you can't get off midway. I sure as Hell couldn't.

And trust me: I am very sure of Hell.

2.

In the dream I'm at a parking lot for a church where I went as a kid. I don't know why. Sometimes, in the waking world, I walk past that church because it's still in the neighbourhood, but I haven't been inside in ten years or more, and I'd be happy to keep it that way. It's not one of those quaint little churches either. It's a big building with a sprawling parking lot, and it looks more like a big-box store than a chapel.

There's always broken glass glittering under the parking lot's big lights, residue from the nights where kids will bring their cars and party. Sometimes you'll see a car or two sitting in the corner of the lot, and if you watch closely you can see some guys exchanging little baggies and money. It's not exactly a place where I choose to go on a date.

And yet, in the dream, that's almost what it was.

There was a whole group of people, but they were dream people, you know? Impressions and shapes, nothing more. And then there was a beautiful woman with stunning blue hair, and I recognized her at once. She was my ex. If I've ever loved anyone, it was her. The sight of her broke my heart, but then it also inspired hope. I hadn't seen her--not even for a second in passing--since she told me that it was over, but maybe this could be the night when everything changed.

"Hey," I said.

"We can't do this." Her voice sounded as beautiful as ever. It reminded me of the laughter and the I love you moments that were now only memories.

I just wanted to take her in my arms and hold her. Did I think about how I'd never seen her with blue hair before? No. Did I think about how some of her tattoos were unfamiliar to me? No. It was a dream, and you don't think about those things in dreams.

"But we can," I said.

"No," she said, and she backed away from me, towards that crowd of dream people. "Not until the goblin is dead."

That should have been enough to kick me over the edge. The goblin? Oh, shit, this is just a dream-sequence, I get it. But I wanted it to be real so badly. I missed her so much, and she was right there, but she was slipping away. I tried to follow her towards the crowd, but someone screamed and I tried to see the origin of that scream. When I looked back to where she was, I only saw those dream-strangers.

3.

Okay, so I guess the story didn't actually start with the dream, did it? Fine, the story starts with my ex, but if you think I'm going to spin the whole sappy tale of our time together, you're wrong. What was her name? None of your business.

Here's the deal: you get the story about the goblin. The story about my love-life? That's mine. I'm sure someone else is willing to hand over their love stories, so if that's what you're looking for you can go find them. All you need to know is that I don't believe that you have one specific soulmate, one love of your life, except when it comes to her. She made me believe those things.

Before the dream there was my ex. Before my ex, there was my childhood, and her childhood, and my days as a young, hopeful Christian sitting in that church, and before that there was our Lord Jesus Christ dying on a cross two thousand years ago and before that there was--

Nah.

Our story starts with the dream. With that cleared up, we can go back to it.

4.

The dream-strangers scattered around me, and at the far end of the parking lot, there was a cackling little vermin. He stalked towards us, laughing with every step, beady little eyes darting back and forth. His smiling mouth hung open, exposing needle-like teeth. Every person he looked at screamed and rushed away, which only made him laugh more.

"Where are you?" His voice came out as a sing-song. "I know you're here somewhere."

I thought he would look at me, and then I would understand all of the stranger's terror, but I was the one person at the party he never even glanced at.

"Where are you?"

He had to be looking for me, though. I felt it in my bones. If I was heroic, maybe I would have stepped forward and said, I'm right here. What do you want? But I'm not heroic, so I just stood there.

And then he saw my ex.

Not until the goblin is dead.

The goblin's smile grew wider. "There you are..."

She screamed, and I woke up.

5.

I tried to ignore the dream, but I couldn't go back to sleep. I'd organised my life so that I only woke up with enough time to feed my dog and shower before running out the door to start my shift. I hated realising that half the bed was empty. I didn't want to linger in that moment any longer than necessary. But when the nightmare woke me up, it was still dark outside, and sleep simply wouldn't return to me.

Instead, I lay there in my mostly-empty bed, remembering the warmth of my ex's body, remembering the softness of her hair, remembering the way her breath smelled when she first woke up. I had no where to go.

You know how dreams fade over a very short period of time?

I know this is crass, but I've always thought of nightmares as terror-orgasms. You reach that explosive climax, but then everything mellows out, and soon you're back to your usual self.

This dream didn't fade any faster than any memory from my waking life. I didn't have to invent dialogue to take the place of what my ex said to me in that nightmare. Even now, I can remember it perfectly. Give me a pencil and I'll sketch out the unfamiliar tattoo she had at the top of her spine. The slight grind of crushed glass underneath my boots at the parking lot is still clear to me.

Of course I didn't know that at the time, so I lay there and waited for the dream to pass.

Not until the goblin is dead means two things. First, there is no chance right now. Second, that might change in the future.

6.

It's amazing that obsessions don't announce themselves when they arrive. You can really only see them when they're already full-grown. That gestation period feels like any other passing interest, except that it never passes, and one day it's the first thing you think about in the morning and the last thing you think about at night.

Here was my obsession: I wanted to have that dream again. However, after the night when I saw my ex-girlfriend and the goblin, I stopped have any dreams at all.

Meanwhile, in the waking world, my ex had disappeared completely from my life. I told you that our sappy love story is mine, and I'm not going to share it with you, but I guess I need to give away one key detail for any of this to make sense. We'd met in a class we'd both taken outside of school. We'd sat next to each other, and I'd been attracted to her immediately. The more we spoke, the more attracted I felt.

You don't need to care about any of that. I'd prefer it if you didn't, frankly. But what you need to understand is that we had no mutual friends, so when she ended our relationship she disappeared completely from my life. There was no one who I knew well enough to text and say, Hey, how's she doing? If I tried it, any of her friends would just block me.

And she had no online life, so I couldn't even sneak around and see how she was doing that way.

I started to wonder if she was even still alive. Would any of her friends have told me if she was in a horrible accident?

Every night, I went to bed and I hoped that I would see her again. If not in reality, in the dream.

7.

Your reality is created by your brain, right? Light bounces off your eyes, but then it's translated in your skull. Ultimately, your reality is just the chemicals in your head.

I believe that dreams are just misfiring neurons. I'm a materialist, like I said before. I don't go in for souls or spirits or ghosts or whatever. Certainly not goblins.

But if reality is just chemicals in your brain, how is a dream any less real than the waking world?

8.

The word Goblin has been in the English language for seven hundred years. It descends from other languages where it's been rattling around in human mouths for even longer.

Just as I can remember my ex's face from the dream, I can remember the goblin's too.

Malevolent. That's the word for something like him. Debased in some way. Corrupt. Wrong. Foul. And yet there was a sort of power to him, like a rodent. You looked at those needle-like teeth and you knew that he wouldn't hesitate to bite. When I learned that the word Goblin has been in human usage for a thousand years, I wasn't surprised. That thing from my nightmares might have been skulking around for that long.

And I needed to kill him.

It would have been easier, except I was locked out of my dreams.

9.

Hey, I just want to catch up. You said that we might be able to catch up in the future. I'm not trying to hold you to that or anything, but yeah. You'd said you were open to it, so here I am, following up on it. Just friends, obviously.

I miss you.

See you soon?

She never replied.

10.

I sat in that parking lot at dusk. There wasn't a party full of dream-people mingling around, but I felt like they could be there. My concept of the universe had become a little unhinged, I'll admit it. I felt disconnected. I kept thinking about dreams, but of course all of those dreams were just a reflection of the dream. They were all chemicals, after all. But some of them were good chemicals.

A rat watched me from the gutter.

Not until the goblin is dead.

I stood up, but the moment I moved the rat scurried away. So I stood alone in that church parking lot at dusk, staring out at a bland sunset, feeling an ache in my chest and deep, wretched shame. How stupid had I been to come here expecting anything?

It was just a dream.

It didn't mean anything.

No matter how much I wanted it to.

11.

It started with a dream. I already told you that. I guess I need to tell you how it ends too.

You must already be thinking it through. Maybe I found the goblin, and through some deep magic the world became right again. Maybe the goblin found me, and I am still fleeing from him to this day. It started with a dream. Should I end it with a nightmare?

Again, I can only tell you the story as I know how to tell it.

So here I have to introduce another element. I probably should have told you about this before, but I didn't know when to do it. I thought I could work around it. I've never told anyone any of this before, and I didn't really think about the way that everything connects to everything else.

How am I supposed to do it? Should I have mentioned the class my ex and I took together before I told you that she left me? Should I have mentioned the night we first kissed, and how it took me so completely by surprise that my first words were "holy shit"? Should I have mentioned the late nights or the early mornings or the time I needed to drive her to get her car repaired first thing in the morning and I realised that I must love her with all my heart in order to be out of my bed before six AM to make everything work out?

Should I have mentioned her grandfather, or my father, or the people we lost, or the reason why she left me?

No.

Never. I'll burn this before we get there.

Some things are mine. Get your prying hands away from them.

But to understand how this ends, you have to know about the pastor.

12.

She was the youth pastor when I was fifteen, and I guessed that she was about twenty years older than me. I only found out later that the last time I stepped inside that church was almost the same time as she did. There was a vote within the church on its official policy regarding "non-traditional marriages." This was after a six-part sermon series that seriously tipped people's hands towards "traditional." The vote came in, and I went out.

So did she, but I didn't know it.

My mother tried to talk me out of it. "If you want to change anything, you have to invest."

"Invest?" I sounded angry, and I knew it.

"You know those folks. They don't mean any harm. That's just how they were raised. And they know you, so if anyone's going to change their mind, you're better suited to it than some outsider."

I became Some Outsider fairly quickly after that. So did the youth pastor.

13.

I don't mean to bother you, her message said. But are you still in the area?

We'd remained friends online since the time that she was our youth pastor.

Yeah. Why?

I thought you might have moved. You're always online late at night.

Haha. I don't sleep well.

Me neither.

We caught up. After a decade, it went by surprisingly quickly. She'd found herself in one of those "non-traditional marriages," and she and her wife were quite happy. They lived just outside of town. She was a relationship counsellor and her wife was a mechanic. They had two boys.

What about you?

I've got a dog. The dog in question was sleeping on my feet as I typed my response. Just because my sleep schedule was interrupted didn't mean that hers needed to be.

I didn't really think about it before typing it, but the message popped out anyways. I should have talked to you before my ex left me.

There was a long pause before her reply came in. I'm sorry to hear that. I didn't know how to reply. I kept typing comments and then deleting them. I hadn't thought of anything compelling when she responded, This might sound weird, but I had a dream about you.

14.

If you've gotten this far, how do you want it to end? What could I say to you that would satisfy everything? All of this keeps me awake, but it keeps me awake because it happened to me. What do you hope to get out of it?

I wish I could tell you my story better, but I can't.

15.

In her dream, I am walking out of the church, into the parking lot. It's probably the day of the church-policy vote, but I'm older than the version of myself she knew. She follows me out, and she intends to say something, but there's someone beside her, following right along with her, cackling.

Some kind of monster-man, was how she described it in text.

"Don't worry about him," the monster-man says. "I've already handled that."

The monster-man chased my old pastor, but the world beyond the church is fuzzy and indistinct.

She ends her text version of the story with a question: Weird, right?

16.

After that, I finally dreamed again.

I searched for my ex, but she was no where to be found. I was in a dark labyrinth, hearing something laugh behind me--always right behind me--but I never saw who it was.

When I woke up, I found that I'd pissed myself.

Cleaning myself up in the bathroom, I saw my reflection, and for a brief moment my skin looked gray and rotted. My hair was thin, and my teeth were needle points.

17.

I told you I believe in Hell.

This is it.

I know where the goblin lives, now, and I need to kill him. He's inside of me. I dream, and I hear that laughter. I wake up, and I recognise there's something wrong with my skin. It's an idea that's wormed into my brain so deeply. The goblin is me. I am the goblin. But am I just the goblin?

If I kill the goblin, can I be with my ex again? What does that even mean?

I go through my life while these ideas echo around in my head. The goblin swims through my blood like a poison. But when was the poison transmitted into me? How did it get in there? How can I get it out? And if I get it out, can I be saved?

18.

On her last night with me, my ex asked, "Do you believe in anything?"

I didn't realise that it was our final conversation. If I had, I wouldn't have been drinking. But I shrugged. It was a lazy, foolish response. I know. I'm ashamed of it. You don't have to judge me. I'm already judging myself.

"Do you believe in anything?"

"I don't know."

"What about marriage?"

I started to tell her the story of the church. The debate over non-traditional marriage. But I was drunk, and my mouth felt clumsy, and the story got all jumbled.

"I just need to know. Do you believe in marriage?"

You want to know how the relationship ended, don't you? That's what you're here for. You're counting on the fact that I will break down, I'll cave, I'll spill my guts and give you all the steamy details, huh? Do you want to know how her skin felt? Do you want to know how her muscles felt when I held her tight? You want to know about her favorite restaurants, and the way she sounded in bed, and all of the dirty details that you secretly wonder about your friends. All of the questions that you'd never admit to but that keep dragging you back to gossip columns, right?

And most of all, you want to know how my heart got broken.

Well, here's your twist. I don't know for sure. I was too drunk to remember. I know the last time she saw me, I was coated in my own vomit because I was starting to realise how bad the conversation was going, and I couldn't handle the thought of finishing it sober.

There. Now you know. Are you happy?

19.

I sit down and watch the church. The goblin is there. He came with me, and he was always here. I don't know why he got me, but he didn't get my pastor. I don't know why he's showing his hand now after waiting under my skin for so long.

But he's here.

My ex posted a picture on her facebook. She has gotten that new tattoo. Her hair is dyed blue.

Does it matter, though?

I still don't know how to kill the goblin.