THE COBS' CREATURES
ABOUT this time, the gentlemen whom the king had left behind him to
watch over the princess, had each occasion to doubt the testimony of his
own eyes, for more than strange were the objects to which they would
bear witness. They were of one sort--creatures--but so grotesque and
misshapen as to be more like a child's drawings upon his slate than
anything natural. They saw them only at night, while on guard about the
house. The testimony of the man who first reported having seen one of
them was that, as he was walking slowly round the house, while yet in
the shadow, he caught sight of a creature standing on its hind legs in
the moonlight, with its fore feet upon a window-ledge, staring in at the
window. Its body might have been that of a dog or wolf--he thought, but
he declared on his honor that its head was twice the size it ought to
have been for the size of its body, and as round as a ball, while the
face, which it turned upon him as it fled, was more like one carved by a
boy upon the turnip inside which he is going to put a candle, than
anything else he could think of. It rushed into the garden. He sent an
arrow after it, and thought he must have struck it; for it gave an
unearthly howl, and he could not find his arrow any more than the beast,
although he searched all about the place where it vanished. They laughed
at him until he was driven to hold his tongue; and said he must have
taken too long a pull at the ale-jug. But before two nights were over,
he had one to side with him; for he too had seen something strange, only
quite different from that reported by the other. The description the
second man gave of the creature he had seen was yet more grotesque and
unlikely. They were both laughed at by the rest; but night after night
another came over to their side, until at last there was only one left
to laugh at all his companions. Two nights more passed, and he saw
nothing; but on the third, he came rushing from the garden to the other
two before the house, in such an agitation that they declared--for it
was their turn now--that the band of his helmet was cracking under his
chin with the rising of his hair inside it. Running with him into that
part of the garden which I have already described, they saw a score of
creatures, to not one of which they could give a name, and not one of
which was like another, hideous and ludicrous at once, gamboling on the
lawn in the moonlight. The supernatural or rather subnatural ugliness of
their faces, the length of legs and necks in some, and the apparent
absence of both or either in others, made the spectators, although in
one consent as to what they saw, yet doubtful, as I have said, of the
evidence of their own eyes--and ears as well; for the noises they made,
although not loud, were as uncouth and varied as their forms, and could
be described neither as grunts nor squeaks nor roars nor howls nor barks
nor yells nor screams nor croaks nor hisses nor mews nor shrieks, but
only as something like all of them mingled in one horrible dissonance.
Keeping in the shade, the watchers had a few moments to recover
themselves before the hideous assembly suspected their presence; but all
at once, as if by common consent, they scampered off in the direction
of a great rock, and vanished before the men had come to sufficiently to
think of following them.
My readers will suspect what these were; but I will now give them full
information concerning them. They were of course household animals
belonging to the goblins, whose ancestors had taken their ancestors many
centuries before from the upper regions of light into the lower regions
of darkness. The original stocks of these horrible creatures were very
much the same as the animals now seen about farms and homes in the
country, with the exception of a few of them, which had been wild
creatures, such as foxes, and indeed wolves and small bears, which the
goblins, from their proclivity toward the animal creation, had caught
when cubs and tamed. But in the course of time, all had undergone even
greater changes than had passed upon their owners. They had
altered--that is, their descendants had altered--into such creatures as
I have not attempted to describe except in the vaguest manner--the
various parts of their bodies assuming, in an apparently arbitrary and
self-willed manner, the most abnormal developments. Indeed, so little
did any distinct type predominate in some of the bewildering results,
that you could only have guessed at any known animal as the original,
and even then, what likeness remained would be more one of general
expression than of definable conformation. But what increased the
gruesomeness tenfold, was that, from constant domestic, or indeed rather
family association with the goblins, their countenances had grown in
grotesque resemblance to the human. No one understands animals who does
not see that every one of them, even amongst the fishes, it may be with
a dimness and vagueness infinitely remote, yet shadows the human: in the
case of these the human resemblance had greatly increased: while their
owners had sunk toward them, they hod risen toward their owners. But the
conditions of subterranean life being equally unnatural for both, while
the goblins were worse, the creatures had not improved by the
approximation, and its result would have appeared far more ludicrous
than consoling to the warmest lover of animal nature. I shall now
explain how it was that just then these animals began to show themselves
about the king's country house.
The goblins, as Curdie had discovered, were mining on--at work both day
and night, in divisions, urging the scheme after which he lay in wait.
In the course of their tunneling, they had broken into the channel of a
small stream, but the break being in the top of it, no water had escaped
to interfere with their work. Some of the creatures, hovering as they
often did about their masters, had found the hole, and had, with the
curiosity which had grown to a passion from the restraints of their
unnatural circumstances, proceeded to explore the channel. The stream
was the same which ran out by the seat on which Irene and her king-papa
had sat as I have told, and the goblin-creatures found it jolly fun to
get out for a romp on a smooth lawn such as they had never seen in all
their poor miserable lives. But although they had partaken enough of the
nature of their owners to delight in annoying and alarming any of the
people whom they met on the mountain, they were of course incapable of
designs of their own, or of intentionally furthering those of their
masters.
For several nights after the men-at-arms were at length of one mind as
to the facts of the visits of some horrible creatures, whether bodily or
spectral they could not yet say, they watched with special attention
that part of the garden where they had last seen them. Perhaps indeed
they gave in consequence too little attention to the house. But the
creatures were too cunning to be easily caught; nor were the watchers
quick-eyed enough to descry the head, or the keen eyes in it, which,
from the opening whence the stream issued, would watch them in turn,
ready, the moment they left the lawn to report the place clear.