The Ghouls’ Grasp
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Two weeks later the Freedom limped into the vicinity of the tumor. The captain suggested they get off far from the docks.
“Judson and his crew are expecting us to bring you. I don’t want trouble, so I hope you are good to walk. We’ll tell him you died in the boarding,” he said. “Locals aren’t too friendly that far in, but you seem to be able to take care of yourselves.”
And so now they sat, dressed in goblin clothes, in a little shuttle piloted by a nervous goblin crewman down to a service port near where the grotesque structure was attached to its host planetoid.
It smelled of outlands, more strongly than the last one. The tumor was a busy open port, and gave all of the signs. While anything particularly deadly would have dispatched any crew making for the station before their arrival, the unwholesome aroma of alien metabolisms tainted every breath. Molecules of uncouth chirality sparked vague memories of proper aromas twisted into nightmarish caricatures. As they went on, it was augmented by the more mundane but equally unpleasant stench of human filth and rotting meat.
The corridors were lit, to some extent. Light enough to make your way, but dark enough to elicit some ancient fear of lurking danger in the dark recesses of side passages and galleries.
After some time in silence, Sharon began to hear little noises around them, faint and sporadic at first, growing closer and more constant with the passing miles. They would emerge briefly at first. A flash of a face with mousy hair. A flash of frail limbs skittering between portals as they rounded a corner. Some grew bold, and began following them openly. At a safe distance, of course.
They were smaller and skinnier than the other goblins they had encountered, and seemed almost brittle. Their faces, while not quite right, were not misshapen or cruel. They looked at the trio with almost playful curiosity.
Eventually one girl drew closer to them than the others, looking wistfully at Sharon, as if she wanted to talk. She had some sort of speckled yellow growth along her hairline. Sharon dropped back a few paces to try to gently encourage the girl to come nearer. The girl obliged by scampering up, placing her hand on Sharon’s arm, and scampering back.
Sharon smiled at the girl’s curiously intent expression. She approached more boldly, and Sharon held out her hand. The girl took it, and they walked so for a while. The girl stared at Sharon in a way that made her feel uncomfortable, but it was perhaps worth a bit of discomfort to show these people their good intent.
The girl looked up into Sharon’s eyes, and they seemed to connect. Then the girl’s eyes fell. Her pupils dilated, and she bit Sharon on the arm. Not a sharp, snarling bite of a feral animal, but a smooth, quick, purposeful bite.
“Ow, hey! You’re biting me,” Sharon complained, more confused than anything. She tried to push the girl away with her left hand. Someone wrapped their arms around her waist, and she felt teeth biting into her side. Sharon struck down at the new offense, but another had rushed up behind, and grabbed her left arm, pulling her backward.
In an instant another was on top of her. She pulled her chin down and raised her shoulders as his teeth probed for her neck. The first girl was writhing and twisting, attempting to pull off a piece of Sharon’s triceps.
Sharon heard Amy giggle. “Look, they are trying to eat Sharon!”
“Crap,” grumbled Richard, and she heard his heavier footsteps coming toward her.
The mass of Sharon’s attackers undulated sickeningly against her. The man who was after her neck nuzzled frantically around her chin and ears. Grasping hands and clamped teeth, all an eerie muffled tangle of labored breathing and seeking limbs.
Dimly Sharon saw Richard plow through a mass of goblins that had thought to swarm him. Those he did not fling aside like chaff fled in a panic. He then began ripping them off of Sharon, one by one.
Finally Sharon sat with her arms clasped around her knees next to Richard. “Why didn’t you hit them when they started coming too close?” he asked.
“Well, they didn’t look vicious,” Sharon explained. “I didn’t want them to think they had anything to be afraid of.”
“When a predator is hunting, it doesn’t have to look vicious.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
Things had gone suddenly quiet after Richard and Sharon had extracted themselves from the mass. They looked back at Amy. She was kneeling quietly with her cloak spread out around her in a neat circle.
“I am sure glad you aren’t my real mommy and daddy,” she scolded. “You should have seen them come running when you abandoned me to save Sharon! I would have been watching as they chewed my guts out in the corner.”
“You could have given me a hand too,” Sharon complained. “Then we wouldn’t have had to kill so many of them.”
“You could have warded them off instead of drawing them in, Sharon, then we wouldn’t have had to kill any of them,” Richard countered.
“Oh, let’s not bicker. The ones that are left won’t mind,” Amy explained. “They’ll have food now, when we move on.”
Sharon blanched. Not at the scratches and chunks taken out of her skin, or even the idea of the fallen goblins being torn by their comrades, but the wretched life that the goblins led. Their little world deep in the heart of the tumor, far from real light.
Sharon opened her book, and began a low chant, and a ring of warning light circled them. A spirit orbited around them with menace. Word seemed to precede them, and the travelers were not accosted again.