Elliot and the Goblin War Read online

“Not before dessert. And I’m not going to anyone’s Underworld. My mom doesn’t want me out of the house after dark.”

  “Then where can we talk?”

  “Up in my room. Ten minutes.”

  Elliot glanced up just as his mother set a thick slice of warm cherry pie in front of him. “Who were you talking to under the table?” Mother asked.

  “Oh, uh, my feet.”

  She blinked. “You were talking to your feet?”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Father said. “I used to talk to my feet all the time as a boy. They’re very good listeners.”

  “As long as your feet don’t talk back,” Rufus agreed. “That’s when you should worry.”

  Elliot didn’t have time to worry about whether his feet would ever talk to him. He wanted to enjoy every bite of his pie. Now he had to hurry and eat it so he could see what the Brownies wanted.

  Ten minutes later he ran to his room and shut the door. Mr. Willimaker and the other Brownie stood on his bed. They bowed again.

  “You don’t have to do that,” Elliot said. “I haven’t even agreed to be your king yet.”

  “You probably won’t want to either, when you hear our news,” the mean-looking Brownie said. His thin lip curled in a sneer, and his bushy gray eyebrows were pushed so tightly together Elliot could barely see his eyes. Elliot had seen that same expression on Tubs’s face plenty of times and knew what it meant. For some reason, this Brownie didn’t like him.

  “Who are you?” Elliot asked.

  Mr. Willimaker bowed. “Forgive me, Your Highness—er, Your Elliot-ness, er, Elliot. This is Fudd Fartwick. He was the closest advisor to Queen Bipsy and will be your advisor now. He came with me to share some terrible news.”

  Elliot sat on his bed beside the Brownies. “What news?”

  “The Goblins are causing trouble again. They came into Burrowsville, the Brownie city.”

  “Tell me about the Goblins,” Elliot said. “Why are they at war with you?”

  “At war with us,” Fudd corrected. “If you’re the king, then they’re at war with you too.”

  Elliot sighed. “Okay. Why are they at war with us?”

  Mr. Willimaker coughed and then muttered, “It seems we taste good.”

  “Huh?” Elliot asked.

  “We taste good. To Goblins. And we’re not strong enough to fight back, so it’s very easy for them to come get one of us every now and then.”

  Elliot leaned against his headboard. He would’ve leaned right into Fartwick’s poison dart, except Fartwick had already taken it back when Mr. Willimaker wasn’t looking. It was now stuffed into his pants, making it uncomfortable for him to sit. Not to mention sort of dangerous.

  “I don’t know anything about Goblins,” Elliot said. “I don’t know how to fight them, and I don’t know how to help the Brownies win any war. I can’t be your king.”

  “Good choice,” Fudd said, maybe a little too quickly. “You don’t want to mess with Goblins. They’re nasty creatures.”

  “Will they hurt humans?”

  Fudd shrugged. “The Goblins scared Queen Bipsy to death. I don’t know if they can scare humans to death or not, but I’m sure they’ll try. There is also perhaps the slightest possibility that they’ll blow you up. It’s a Goblin specialty. I assume you’re against that idea.”

  Elliot was very much against the idea of being blown up. He liked all his body parts attached to him just the way they were. He wasn’t too fond of being scared to death either.

  Fudd continued, “Besides, I’m sure we could find someone else who could do a much better job. Maybe a Brownie who’s already been a close advisor or something to someone important, like a queen.”

  “Like you?” Mr. Willimaker said with a scowl.

  Fudd angrily folded his arms. “You have to admit it’s very odd that Queen Bipsy chose a human to replace her when she could have picked me. She must have lost her senses before she died.”

  “Her senses were working fine,” Mr. Willimaker insisted.

  “I want to know more about the Goblins,” Elliot said.

  Mr. Willimaker slowly shook his head. “There’s something I haven’t told you about the Goblins coming to Burrowsville. They took my daughter, Patches, with them. I think it’s because she knows more about humans than anyone else in the Underworld. I need your help to get her home.”

  “Your daughter must have been in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Fudd grumbled. “Where was she? Somewhere dangerous, no doubt.”

  “In school,” Mr. Willimaker said.

  “Aha!” Fudd exclaimed. “What sort of loving father would send his child to school? You might as well have sent Patches to try her luck in Demon Territory.”

  “Will the Goblins hurt her?” Elliot asked.

  “I sent them a large jar of pickles. Goblins love pickles, the only thing they like more than us. I hope they’ll eat the pickles instead of Patches.” Mr. Willimaker’s lower lip trembled a little, and then he placed his chubby hand on Elliot’s arm. “It doesn’t matter how you became king. The important thing is that we need you and that if you don’t help us, we will lose.” He lifted the corner of a blanket to reveal something that looked like a wide and pointy gold bracelet. It was a crown. Several oval jewels were set around the base with a fat ruby in the center. “Will you accept the job?”

  Elliot smiled and picked up the crown. It was too small for his head, so he held it between his fingers and nodded. “Yes, Mr. Willimaker. I am Elliot Penster, and as of today, I am king of the Brownies.”

  Dear Reader, being the smart person you are to have read so far into this book, I’m certain that you enjoy every minute of your day at school. However, you might have one or two friends who sometimes complain that school is boring. You might tell them that even though they get bored at times, it happens to be much better than being carried away from school into the Goblin city of Flog, like Patches Willimaker was.

  Patches had spent the rest of her day in a very deep hole that was made of rock, so she could not tunnel through it. The hole had a dirt floor that was so hard she couldn’t write her will into it with her finger, and no windows, so the only thing to look at was rock. Although even if there were a window, it would still only show her more rock. Patches had tried to poof away several times, even though Grissel had ordered her not to. Since she was Grissel’s prisoner, she should have known poofing wouldn’t work.

  Patches also knew that at any minute the Goblins would come and try to get information about the human, but Patches had a plan. She wouldn’t help them hurt King Elliot, no matter what.

  Her stomach growled at her, which she thought was a little rude, because there was nothing she could do to get more food. Before she could ask her stomach to stop complaining, a rope ladder swung down. “It’s Grissel,” growled a voice from up on top of her hole. “If you want to live, then you’ll cooperate with me.”

  “Actually, you’d better cooperate with me,” Patches said. “I’ve got a big Flibberish test in school next week. If I’m not back to take the test, then my teacher will come here to give it to me, and trust me, you don’t want that. She’ll make you take it too.”

  Grissel was quiet for a moment, and Patches wondered if he’d gone away. Then he called down, “In that case, you’d better tell me what I need to know. I have a question for you.”

  “No, thanks,” Patches called up. “I’m pretty busy right now. Can you come back later?”

  “If you help me, I’ll let you go.”

  Patches shook her head. “You don’t have to let me go. I plan on escaping by myself.”

  “I have carrots,” Grissel said. “Fat, juicy carrots boiled in turnip juice.”

  Carrots. That changed everything.

  Anyone who’s ever eaten carrots boiled in turnip juice will understand why Patches’s mouth began watering. Close your eyes and imagine the yummiest dessert ever. Now pour turnip juice all over it and let the flavors blend together. Mmmmm. It was a good thing Pa
tches already had a plan to help King Elliot, because who knows what she might have done otherwise.

  This wasn’t the first time turnip juice had been used to lure a Brownie. Hundreds of years ago, human mothers could leave a bucket of turnip juice outside with a large pile of laundry. By morning, the turnip juice was gone and the laundry was clean and hung to dry on the line. The mothers thought their plan was pretty clever, but the Brownies always knew they had the better end of the bargain.

  “Give me the carrot,” Patches said. The delicious smell was becoming too much for her. “I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

  Grissel sent the carrot down tied to a string, but it was just out of reach, even when Patches jumped for it. Her short, chubby legs were usually one of her prettiest features, but what a curse they were at this moment!

  “Okay, I give up. What’s your question?” Patches finally asked.

  “How can the Goblins defeat King Elliot?”

  Patches was quiet for a moment. Then she smiled. “You can’t,” she said. “Humans aren’t like Brownies. Humans don’t wait around for something to come and eat them. They fight back. They defend themselves.”

  “We can scare the human to death,” Grissel said. “He can’t defend against that.”

  Patches yawned loudly. “That old trick? I remember the good old days when Goblins were more creative in how they got humans. Do you think humans would’ve written all those fairy tales about you if you were as boring then as you are now?”

  Grissel sighed. Things had been a little ordinary lately. “There’s a lot more that we can do,” he called down to Patches. “We have magic. And really sharp claws.”

  “He expects you to use your magic and your claws. If you want to get him, you have to do what he doesn’t expect.” Patches didn’t actually think Elliot was expecting anything to happen, especially magic and claws.

  “Oh, I have a plan he won’t expect,” Grissel said. “It’s foolproof.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you! He expects the foolproof plan already. That’s how humans are. If you really want to get King Elliot, you have to use your not foolproof plan.”

  Grissel sat back and rubbed his meaty hand along his prickly jaw. In a very strange way, that made sense to him. “Our not foolproof plan, yes, that’s clever.”

  Grissel lowered the string to give Patches the carrot and then called to the other Goblins. They came quickly, pushing into a tight circle around Grissel and standing so closely together that it was hard to tell where one green Goblin started and the other ended. Patches pressed her body against the wall of her hole, because if one Goblin fell in, a bunch of them would fall with him, and she didn’t want to be crushed.

  “I need three of you to come with me right away. We’re going to outsmart the king by not outsmarting him at all!”

  That didn’t make sense to any of the Goblins, but they cheered anyway. After all, Grissel had never led them wrong before.

  The moon was high in the sky when the Goblins poofed themselves into Elliot’s room. There were two beds on opposite sides of the room. One bed was empty, but several packets of pickle relish were on top of the blankets. The Goblins fought over them until Grissel won. This was because he knew the other Goblins’ ticklish spots, and for a Goblin, getting tickled just isn’t funny. He stuffed the packets into his mouth and swallowed them whole.

  Then Grissel pointed to the other bed. Something in the shape of a human was underneath the blankets. Dangling on the bedpost was his crown. King Elliot was within their reach.

  The Goblins smiled at each other, proud to be a part of the war against the human king. Grissel smiled the widest, unaware of the packet of pickle relish stuck between his pointy front teeth. This was almost too easy for a Goblin of his talents. In just a few minutes, he could return and tell Fudd Fartwick their Brownie king was no more.

  Grissel knew exactly what Fudd’s next move would be. He’d hurry back to Burrowsville and tell the Brownies the sad news about Elliot. Maybe he’d pretend to cry over Elliot’s death for a minute or two, and then he’d wipe away his fake tears and declare himself king. It would be perfect.

  Except Fudd wouldn’t be able to do any of that, because the hole Grissel had tunneled out for Fudd was even deeper than the one Patches was in. With Fudd out of the way and no Brownie king to lead them, it would be a simple thing to defeat the Brownies once and for all. He smacked his thin lips just thinking about his delicious victory.

  Grissel handed some rope to the other Goblins, who climbed up on Elliot’s bed. They rolled him around in his blanket, surprised that the human could sleep so deeply. They tied the rope in a double knot, then a triple knot, then finally, in the never-before-untied four-way knot. There was no going back now.

  They lifted his body into the air and tossed it toward Grissel, who already had a large trunk at the foot of Elliot’s bed open and empty. Elliot could wait in the trunk until they had a chance to get rid of him properly. Most of him landed inside the trunk, except for his legs, which fell limp onto the floor.

  Grissel walked over and kicked at Elliot’s legs. They rustled softly, something Grissel didn’t think human legs normally did. Then his lip curled in anger. He bared his sharp teeth and bit through the knots around the blanket. He pulled the blanket wide and growled. These weren’t legs! They were pants stuffed with bags of rice.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Grissel yelled. “We’ve been tricked!”

  The Goblins jumped onto the floor beside the trunk and pulled the rope away from the rest of the blanket. They couldn’t have been tricked. Not by a human child!

  “Aha!” a voice yelled behind them. They turned just in time to be splashed in the face with a bucket of icy water.

  The Goblins yelped and screamed and fell backward into the trunk. All except for Grissel, who had escaped the worst of the water by hiding behind the other Goblins. He poofed back to Flog with only three water welts on his arm.

  Elliot darted forward and slammed the lid to his trunk closed, locked it, and then sat on it. This was very difficult to do, because the Goblins were beating against the inside of it very angrily. More than once, they nearly tipped Elliot and his trunk sideways onto the floor.

  “Quiet down in there, Elliot,” his father called from the bedroom down the hall. “You should be sleeping, not playing.”

  “Sorry,” Elliot called back, although none of the playing he’d ever done before involved real Goblins trying to stuff him in a trunk.

  The trunk rumbled again. “Are you sure they’re stuck in there?” Elliot asked Mr. Willimaker, who had just tiptoed out from his hiding place in the closet.

  “You’re a king in the Underworld,” Mr. Willimaker said. “Command them to stay in there and they must, until you release them.”

  Elliot’s eyes widened. “I just say ‘stay in the trunk’ and they have to do it?”

  Mr. Willimaker shrugged. “You could wave your arm around so it looks fancy, but only if you want to. It doesn’t really matter, because as long as you say the words, they have to obey.”

  “Can I command them to do anything I want?”

  “Not with Brownie magic. Possibly you can command them to sing your favorite song in three-part harmony. But unless you want your ears to shatter, I’d recommend against it. All you can do is command them to remain as your prisoners and not poof away. Since you rule in the Underworld, they’re bound by your command to stay.”

  “It’s still pretty cool.” Elliot waved his arms the way he’d seen a wizard in a movie do it once, then said, “Hey, you Goblins in the trunk. Stay in there.”

  The pounding got louder, but the trunk stopped banging around as much. “I don’t think they liked my command,” Elliot said.

  “They’ll give up after a while and go to sleep,” Mr. Willimaker said. “They’ll be fine until we figure out what to do with them.”

  “Was that magic?” Elliot asked. “Can I do magic now?”

  “I do
n’t know.” Mr. Willimaker stretched out his arms then flicked his fingers apart. In his palm was a small puff of smoke that swirled in the air and disappeared. “Can you do that?”

  Elliot stretched his arms and flicked his fingers apart. Mr. Willimaker looked at his palms and said, “Oh, my!”

  “What do you see?” Elliot asked.

  “Dirty hands. You should’ve used some of the water you threw on the Goblins for yourself.”

  Elliot looked at his hands and then shoved them in his pockets.

  “You don’t have magic,” Mr. Willimaker said. “But as long as you are king, your command for a prisoner to remain where he is must be obeyed.”

  Elliot thought of his younger twin brothers. “I wish I could make Kyle and Cole obey my commands.”

  Mr. Willimaker coughed. “That’d take a miracle, not magic.”

  “Very impressive,” Fudd Fartwick said, coming forward from the shadows. “I must say the Goblins were no match for you, Your Highness.” He raised his voice loudly enough so the Goblins inside the trunk could hear him. “It appears the Goblins didn’t realize that Mr. Willimaker would tell you about the water. They should’ve planned something more foolproof.” He turned to Mr. Willimaker. “Go poof somewhere and get King Elliot a glass of water. I’m sure he’s thirsty.”

  Elliot wasn’t. Half his room was soaked in water. But Mr. Willimaker was gone before he had a chance to say so. However, he quickly understood that Fudd was only trying to get Mr. Willimaker out of the room.

  “Be careful of taking any advice from Mr. Willimaker,” Fudd warned. “In Burrowsville he’s nothing more than a joke. Not a joke as in, ‘Why did the giant cross the road? His foot was already on the other side.’ But still a joke.”

  “Queen Bipsy trusted him enough to give him my name as king.”

  “Only because nobody else was around at the time. Trust me instead. I’ll keep you safe.”

  Elliot nodded. “Thank you, Fudd. I’m sure I’ll need your help too. But Mr. Willimaker has given me good advice so far. I don’t care what the rest of Burrowsville thinks of him. He’s my friend.”