Page 31 of The Goblin and The Dancer
“Grik,move!” Paul shouted, and Grik was so shocked that the soldier actually called him by his name that it made him jump, and then his foot came down on a slippery rock, and he fell to one side—so he sort of did what Paul asked, but barely.
He cracked open an eye and watched as Paul leaped forward, hewing at the tentacle with his sword until the thing retreated. But it was only for a moment. Another tentacle came snaking up behind Paul and seized him by the back of the tunic.
“Paul!” Grik shouted in horror. He looked around wildly for a weapon to help and spotted the rocket launcher lying nearby.
Paul’s words “highly effective” raced through Grik’s stricken mind, and he lunged for the weapon and whirled around, raising it above his head with shaking limbs and firing at the waving tentacle.
There was a horrible explosion and a great crashing of rock. The tentacle was not blown to bits; it looked just fine—but Grik was not.
He turned slowly, dumbly, as he realized what had happened. He shut and opened his eyes again, hoping what was before him couldn’t be true, but the terrible sight did not go away. The cave wall behind him had changed. Instead of a tunnel leading out of this horrible cave, there was now only a pile of rubble.
He was lucky he hadn’t shot his own head off. He had been holding the rocket launcher backwards.
Grik gaped, still gripping the rocket launcher stupidly above his head, his heart sinking into his toes.
“You fool—you’ve trapped us!” Paul shouted.
“Oh no,” Grik whimpered, letting the rocket launcher slip from his fingers and clatter to the rock. “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”He rushed forward and pushed futilely at a boulder, throwing a few stray pebbles over his shoulder in an attempt to dig his way out. They couldn’t be trapped, they couldn’t be. Grik scuttled to and fro before the blocked passageway like a crazed spider as he pushed at the boulder from all directions, quaking at the sheer enormity of what he had done.
“Don’t just stand there, Grik!” Paul shouted again behind him. “Look for another way out!”
Grik rushed to obey, scrambling up a ledge with a half-angry, half-hysterical little sob. “Why did this have to happen to me?”
He had done it again. He had destroyed them all. But this time it wasn’t because he was bad, it was because he was so unbearably stupid—and afraid. He had to make this right; he had to find a way out. He must!
Grik shut his eyes and focused hard. There! He felt it. A sense of space, a puncture in the solid rock around them, a dark movement of cool air. To his left and far above his head.He scuttled to the right, trying to concentrate and ignore the sounds of battle behind him. If Paul was being eaten, Grik wasn’t sure he could stomach actually seeing it.He craned his head back, his pulse racing, and then he spotted it. It was narrow, little more than a slit of black high up the cavern wall, but it was an escape route.
“Over here!” he hollered. “Paul, I found a way out!” He turned and saw the elf soldier fighting for his life.
Paul was still struggling with the writhing mass of tentacles, dodging behind pillars to avoid the pull of the suction cups and tricking one of the limbs into chasing him into a corner and inserting itself between rocks that it could not pull itself out of again.
Grik waved his hands to get Paul’s attention, but the elf was much too preoccupied to notice. Grik groaned between clenched teeth when he realized that he would have to venture close to the monster once again, but he had to save Paul.
He ran down the slope, then tripped and rolled the rest of the way, slamming into a stalactite with a bump. He stumbled to his feet just as a tentacle flew towards him.
The tentacle was like a blow from a club. Grik fell to the ground into the puddle of water beneath the stalactite. Through the buzzing in his ears, he struggled to sort out his stunned senses.
Paul was suddenly above him, and he drove the sword into the tentacle reaching for Grik, pinning it to the sandy beach. The rest of the tentacles showing above the water writhed in fury. From somewhere beneath the black, roiling water, there came a rush of noise—a horrific moan of primal pain that sounded like the gathering of a wave and the roar of a beast all tangled together. One tentacle reached out and suddenly seized Paul by the ankle of his bad leg and jerked.
The elf fell on his back with a crack and lay there, stunned, as the tentacle slowly retracted, dragging him towards the lapping waves.
“No!” Grik snatched up the rocket launcher he had dropped earlier, made sure it was turned the right way around, and fired with shaking hands.
The rocket blasted into the lake with an explosion of water and the tentacles retreated, jerking back the way hands might snap back to cover a wound on the torso.
Paul stumbled to his feet. “This is our chance!”
“Follow me!” Grik shouted, snatching up the lanterns that they had dropped during the confusion and leading the way.
Everything was horribly bewildering for a few seconds. There was a mad scramble up the slope. Grik nearly killed himself trying to pull Paul up, and Paul flung rocks behind them to fend off the one tentacle that chased them. And then Grik was swallowing dust as he threw himself forward and wiggled through the crack he had spotted earlier, trying not to kick Paul as the elf followed. They tumbled out of the illumination of the cave and into shadow again, and the lanterns flared to life in response to the new darkness as the goblin and the soldier finally picked themselves up from the ground and found themselves in a narrow tunnel.
Paul let out a harsh cry and fell against the wall.
Grik jumped, expecting a tentacle to come thrusting through the hole behind them.“What?” Grik gasped hysterically. “What, what, what?”
“I can’t go on,” Paul said between gritted teeth. “It’s my leg.”
Grik grabbed Paul by the arm and shook him, shouting outright. “Runanyway!”
