The room shifted from light, to dark, and back to light again in the span of a couple of blinks. Matt yawned, trying to rub the sleep from his eyes. He could smell the rich, earthy and spicy scent of the brewing coffee from down the hall and prayed silently that the machine would hurry up and finish.
Clarence droned on about his presentation—something about free-roaming Class IV entities that he’d found some records of in the New York City Public Library—but Clarence was all about research. It was all theories and postulations to him, nothing real, nothing solid.
Nothing solid. Matt snorted at his own joke.
Ray took my internal snort as a outward laugh and Matt felt the blazing eye of SauRay fall upon him. He felt like Sam and Frodo cowering in the plain before the Black Tower. Ray zapped him with question. “You got something to add, Olsen? Or are you just so ready to begin your presentation that you’re ready to interrupt Dr. Valis?”
Matt yawned, stretching theatrically. “Sure, Ray. I can go if you need me to. Clarence was just putting me to sleep, that’s all.” Matt shot a wink to the presenter to let him know that this was about zinging the boss and had nothing to do with him. “But what’s new?”
Ray chomped down on his tongue—a habit so severe that Matt had often wondered if the man would bite his own tongue off one day—and ground his teeth. “You’re up, Olsen,” he spat.
Matt stood and pulled up his presentation with a couple of clicks. “Cool.” A single slide appeared. The slide was filled with images, an artist’s compiled conception of an odd-looking, fantastical creature. It appeared small and vaguely bat-like, but it was bipedal and clothed. All in all, it looked like something that Weta Workshop would have a blast building and bringing to life.
Eyebrows around the room went up.
Matt didn’t even notice. “Goeblins,” the words hit the table like a stack of flapjacks.
“Goblins? Really?” Ray sighed, ripping off his glasses and tossing them on the folder in front of him. “You expect me to send you off on some wild goose chase looking for a goblin just because you dreamed up this goofy image of one?”
“Not goblins, goeblins. And I didn’t dream these up, Ray. This is an image that an eyewitness produced—an artist in Mortain, France—after seeing these creatures first hand. Two weeks ago, a rash of sitings occurred and I have over thirty eye-witness accounts, all pretty much describing the same thing. Swarms of these guys,” Matt jerked a thumb towards the screen, "ransacking small isolated towns, stealing supplies and then vanishing almost as quickly as they appeared.”
Ray was silent now, which was exactly where Matt wanted him. It was time for the coup de grace.
“And here’s the kicker, Ray. All of these reports come from a two-mile radius around an ancient site in France. A site known as the Gap of Goeblin.”
Matt was on a plane headed east two hours later.
Story and Characters: (c)/by Brannon Hollingsworth
#MMWW, #Makes, #Me, #Wanna, #Write, #BrannonHollingsworth, #MattOlsen, #OrbisObserver, #Mortain, #France, #goeblin, #GapOfGoeblin, #Matt, #Ray, #Clarence
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