Joe Golem and the Copper Girl: A Short Story by Christopher Golden

Author:Christopher Golden [Golden, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-02-28T06:00:00+00:00

“Daddy?”

The word floated across Joe’s sleeping thoughts without any significance. His unconscious mind did not recognize the voice, ignoring the intrusion into his slumber. Even the rattle of the window in its frame did not cause him to stir, for the windows had been rattling all night. But he heard the flap of the curtains and his body felt the new chill as a fuller gust of wind stormed into Jillian Blum’s bedroom. Droplets of moisture touched his right arm, and he shivered in his sleep.

And opened his eyes.

He found himself gazing at the hand-painted rose on the glass globe of Jillian’s lamp. Blinking once, he focused beyond it and saw the girl huddled in bed with the covers pulled up to her chin, copper skin almost unearthly against the linens. Her purple-limned eyes were open wide in confusion and fear. In the same instant, Joe’s mind raced backward, pulling together the strands of the waking world that had immediately preceded his own awakening.

The girl was staring at the window.

Joe turned, fully awake at last, and saw the dark figure silhouetted against the storm. Cadaverously thin, it was still not slender enough to have slithered through the few inches Mr. Blum had allowed, so it had pushed the window open, letting the wind and the rain blow in. When it had first begun visiting Jillian, the girl had thought she was dreaming, and so had her mother. But the monster was neither nightmare nor imagination; it was entirely real.

Now it slid itself halfway across the windowsill, hands clutching the frame. It wheezed damply, moving slowly and with obvious effort, though its body had almost no mass. Pale and wizened, the creature seemed little more than the husk of a man, and Joe understood what Mrs. Blum had described better now. Drenched with rain, struggling to move, it looked entirely inhuman. Not a demon or a ghost, but perhaps something quite like a goblin after all.

“No,” Jillian whispered.

Her voice drove Joe to action. Perhaps the thing had not noticed that she wasn’t alone, or perhaps it didn’t care. Either way, he had to act before it saw its own peril.

Bolting from the chair, he lunged toward the creature. In motion, he heard a shout of alarm and rage, and out of the corner of his eye he saw Mr. Blum rising as well, but his focus was on the creature. Hearing the commotion, it looked up as Joe reached it. He grabbed a fistful of its wet, greasy hair, feeling some of it come out at the roots as he started to drag it further into the room.

“Kill it!” Mr. Blum roared. “Kill it, damn you!”

Jillian began to shriek, covering her ears and driving herself up against the headboard of her bed as if she could escape right through the wall.

His grip on its hair giving way, Joe yanked the goblin’s head back and clutched its throat, hauling it bodily into the room. Its mottled, pale skin left a trail of filth and slime on the sill, and it almost slipped out of his grasp, so oily was its toadlike flesh.

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