Something moved with such swiftness that Tom thought a bird had flown into the study. When he heard the CRAAAAAACK beside him, he knew it was Dean Crawford’s skull.

Crushed like a pumpkin, Tom thought, as the gun fell to the desk and the man fell to the floor. And in the hand of the dark silhouette was what it had taken from Crawford’s head.

The brains, the eyes, the ooze all shone in the moonlight through the study window.

The shape turned to face him.

“I’m not a Gobliner!” Tom cried out. He wasn’t exactly sure why this was the right thing to say, but he believed it was.

He was a forty-four-year-old delivery driver who hadn’t been to Goblin since he kissed a girl thirty billion years ago and he didn’t want to die like this. The pressure…the violence…his mind in the hands of history.

What had Tom delivered to Goblin tonight? Was it…misery? Pain? Crime? Corruption?

Was it the kind of bad that can be felt by anyone near enough to feel it? The kind that spreads? Was it irrevocable…unflagging…driven? Tom thought of the map of Goblin he had stuffed in the glove compartment. He saw it now as if under a sheet…lumpy and not easily defined. As if the trees in Perish Park and all the streets had been robbed of their color, stolen by whatever infamy he’d brought with him. Something as living and unliving as the rain. All the great topiaries, that place The Hedges, the Blackwater River…they’d all lost their color, their vitality, their peace. The West Fields. The North Woods. The Woodruff. Transistor Planet. The Milky Way. Goblin’s Magic. Goblin Games.

What other black calamities had occurred, this night, this rainy, rainy night?

“I’m not a Gobliner!” he repeated, holding out both hands as the silhouette reached for him.

Then it had Tom by the collar and it dragged him from the study. Through room after room, kitchen and foyer, until the sky unloaded upon Tom once again.

What had Tom delivered tonight? Was it…loneliness? Fear? Gluttony?

Ambition? Confusion? Loss?

Tom cried out for it all to stop, but it was useless. The unfathomably strong hand that held him, the dead fingers, firm shadows, couldn’t be lifted from his body with a dolly.

Soon Tom felt the metal of the truck against his back. Outside, under the moon, the thing was no easier to see.

Tom had to close his eyes.

“Drive,” it said and Tom opened his eyes slowly, confused and scared, as he wanted to know, needed to know, if the impossibility who pinned him to the truck meant what Tom thought it did.

“Drive,” Tom echoed.

The thing opened the passenger-side door and threw Tom across to the wheel. Tom bashed his head on the window and when he removed his hands from his head he saw it was climbing up into the cabin.

“Drive.”

Tom started the truck.