I was just catching steam on my report for work, when my daughter shoved a sheet of paper in my face.
It was a new picture of Narsh, a goblin she’d invented a few weeks ago after watching “Labyrinth” with her older sister. Narsh was an ugly brute with stocky legs and big feet, large eyes and tufts of hair that came out of his ears. Narsh looked like a nasty piece of work, but Sunte always insisted he was friendly and had a castle of toys and sweet foods he liked to share with children.
“That’s a nice picture, honey,” I said, and I flashed her an encouraging smile before I turned my eyes back to the monitor. I had a presentation coming up on how to increase our market penetration, and needed it to be topnotch.
“Daddy!” Sunte whined, and I stopped typing again. “You’re not even looking.”
“Of course I am, Sunte,” I said, and I looked at the picture again. Sunte was 5, and there are limits to what you can do with crayons, but there was no denying that she had talent. The way those gray brows furrowed on his pale green face, Narsh looked like an angry little goblin. He was drawn head-on – what 5-year-old knows how to show perspective? – but you could still feel his crooked spine and how it twisted his body, and see the strength in his left arm as he leaned on a walking stick for support. He was ugly and brutish, and he reminded me of the goblins of folklore. They always promised wonderful things but never delivered them. All they ever gave was pain and misery. “You did a really good job drawing him.”
“Thank you, daddy,” Sunte said, and her blonde hair fell across my face she gave me a hug. “I’m going to miss you when I go to Narsh’s castle.”
I smiled and let the comment pass. David Bowie’s performance as Jareth had enthralled her. Between him and the muppets the Jim Henson Workshop had created for the movie, it had been impossible to get Sunte to understood that the whole idea of the movie had been to rescue a child from the goblin king. She’d imagined Narsh and his castle soon after, and had been drawing pictures of him every night since.
“I’ll miss you too, honey,” I said. “Why don’t you go brush your teeth and climb into bed? Daddy’ll be by to tuck you in, in about twenty minutes.”
There was another kiss to my cheek, and a lingering hug to my neck, and then Sunte skipped down the hallway to the bathroom while I chased down my train of thought before it escaped forever, and began outlining ways we could get our clients to create positive buzz for us.
By the time I finished, an hour had passed, not twenty minutes. The light in the bathroom was off, but the light in Sunte’s room was still on. I opened the door and stepped through to chide her for leaving the light on, and stopped cold.
Sunte wasn’t in her bed. She wasn’t even in the room.
I fought to stay calm, and I almost succeeded. In a controlled panic, I raced around the house calling Sunte’s name. The doors were all locked, the windows all shut. I checked every room, and she was in none of them. I ran out to the back yard to see if she was playing on the trampoline her mother and I had bought her in happier times, before divorce had entered our vocabulary. She wasn’t there either.
“Sunte!” I shouted into the night, but no one answered. Out in front of the house, one of the street lamps buzzed sharply and went out.
I called the police. They came and asked their questions. They dutifully wrote down my answers in their little notebooks, and checked the entire house from the basement to the bedrooms. Then they checked around the back yard and the neighbors’ yards while the neighbors came out to see what was going on and kept a sympathetic vigil from their driveways.
The police left, making empty promises to keep me informed of anything they found, and I went inside to Sunte’s room. That’s when I knew she was gone.
There was a new drawing of Narsh in the room. This one was on her desk, crayons at its side, right where I would find it. The goblin smiled his contemptible smile as he held his walking stick with his left am, and in his right hand he held the tiny hand of a trusting little girl with blonde hair.