Twilight Eyes Read Free Page A

of the smug superiority that is characteristic of all the goblins I have ever encountered, he tried to bluff me.
    “Here, what’s this?” he asked gruffly. “What’re you doing here? Are you with the show? Never seen you around. What’re you up to?”
    Looking down at him, heart pounding, sick with terror, I could see what others could not. I saw the goblin within, beyond his masquerade.
    And this is the most difficult thing of all to explain, this ability to perceive the beast within, for it is not as if my psychic sight peels back the human countenance and reveals the lurking horror underneath, nor is it that I can discard the illusion of humanity and obtain an unobstructed view of the malignant illusionist who thinks he deceives me. Instead I see both at once, the human and the monstrous, the former superimposed upon the latter. Maybe I can best explain by way of an analogy drawn from the art of pottery. At a gallery in Carmel, California, I once saw a vase with a gloriously transparent red glaze, luminescent as air at the open door of some mighty furnace; it gave the impression of fantastic depth, magical three-dimensional realms and vast realities, within the flat surface of the clay. I see something much like that when I look at a goblin. The human form is solid and real in its own way, but through the glaze I see the other reality within.
    There in the Dodgem Car pavilion I saw through the midnight mechanic’s human glaze to the demonic masquerader within.
    “Well, speak up,” the goblin said impatiently, not even bothering to rise from his knees. He had no fear of ordinary human beings, for in his experience they could not harm him. He did not know that I was not ordinary. “Are you part of the show? Do the Sombra Brothers employ you? Or are you just a stupid, nosy kid poking into other people’s business?”
    The creature within the human hulk was both porcine and canine, with thick, dark, mottled skin the shade and character of aged brass. Its skull was shaped like that of a German shepherd, the mouth filled with wickedly pointed teeth and hooked fangs that seemed neither canine nor porcine but reptilian. The snout more closely resembled that of pig than dog, with quivering, fleshy nostrils. It had the beady, red, malevolent eyes of a mean hog, around which the pebbled amber skin shaded darker until it was the green of a beetle’s wings. When it spoke, I saw a coiled tongue unfold part way inside its mouth. Its five-fingered hands were humanlike, although with an extra joint in each, and the knuckles were larger, bonier. Worse, it had claws, black and gnarled, pointed and well honed. The body was like that of a dog that had evolved to such an extent that nature meant for it to stand upright in imitation of a man, and for the most part there was an appearance of grace in its form, except in its shoulders and knotted arms, which seemed to contain too much malformed bone to allow fluid movement.
    A second or two passed in silence, a silence occasioned by my fear and by a distaste for the bloody task confronting me. My hesitancy probably seemed like guilty confusion, for he started to bluster at me some more and was surprised when, instead of running away or making a flimsy excuse, I flung myself upon him.
    “Monster. Demon. I know what you are,” I said through clenched teeth as I rammed the knife deep.
    I struck at his neck, at the throbbing artery, missed. Instead the blade plunged into the top of his shoulder, slipping through muscle and cartilage, between bones.
    He grunted with pain but did not howl or scream. My declaration stunned him. He wanted interruption no more than I did.
    I tore the knife out of him as he fell back against the Dodgem Car, and taking advantage of his momentary shock, I stabbed again.
    If he had been an ordinary man, he would have been lost, defeated as much by the temporary paralysis of terror and surprise as by the ferocity of my attack. However, he was a goblin, and although