We stared at each other, scarcely half a breath between us. This close, I could see that his gray eye was flecked with silver and blue, his green one ringed with amber and gold. Those eyes mocked me, inviting and inciting me into a passion. If I were a smoldering ember, he was the poker, stirring me into flames.
I retreated. I was afraid. Afraid to touch him for fear of starting a fire within me.
“What,” I asked tightly, “do you want from me, mein Herr?”
“I already told you what I want,” he said. “You, entire.”
We did not relinquish each other’s gaze. Let go, his eyes seemed to say. But I couldn’t; if I surrendered to my fury, I wasn’t certain what else I would give up.
“Why?” My voice was hoarse.
“Why what, Elisabeth?”
“Why me?” My words were barely audible, but the Goblin King heard them. He had always heard me.
“Why you?” Those sharp, pointed teeth glistened. “Who else but you?” Even his words were sharp, each slicing through me like a knife. “You, who have always been my playmate?”
Childish laughter rang in my ears, but it was more memory than sound, the memory of a little girl and a little boy, dancing together in the wood. He, the king of the goblins, and she, an innkeeper’s daughter. No, a musician’s daughter. No, a musician herself.
A wife, said the little boy. I need a wife. Will you marry me someday?
The little musician laughed.
Just give me a chance, Elisabeth.
“A chance,” I whispered. “Give me a chance to win. The moon has not yet risen.”
The Goblin King said nothing for a long moment. “The game is unwinnable,” he said at last. “For either you or me.”
I shook my head. “I must try.”
“Oh, Elisabeth.” The way he said my name reached out and stroked some inner part of me. “One could almost admire your tenacity, if it weren’t so foolish.”
I opened my mouth to speak, to plead my case, but he placed his long fingers against my lips and silenced me.
“Very well,” he said. “One last chance. One last game. Find your sister, and I shall let the both of you go.”
“Is that all?”
His only response was a smile, more scary than soothing.
“Fine,” I said, my voice shaking. “Come, Käthe, let us be gone from here.”
But she did not come.
“Käthe?”
I whirled around, but I was alone, my sister vanished. Again.
Find your sister.
I did scream then. The cavern shook with my screams, of rage, of self-loathing, of hatred, of despair. The world around me shifted again, and I was once more in that strange and eerie forest, out in the cold with the stars above. The sky was clear, and the stars watched from a dispassionate distance.
I was in the world above.
“Oh no,” I said. “No, no, no, no.”
In the woods, only the echoes of Der Erlkönig’s mocking laugh lingered.
“You bastard!” I raged. “Come out and fight fair!”
And there he was, standing in a distant grove with Käthe in his arms, her limp body draped across his arms like an altar cloth, her head falling back, her arms splayed. They formed a twisted sort of pietà: the Goblin King the smirking mourner, my sister the dead martyr.
I ran forward, but the instant my fingers touched her skirt, both she and the Goblin King vanished. Where my sister had lain, there was nothing more than a scrap of silk fluttering in the breeze, caught in the branches of a birch tree.
“Liesl!”
Käthe’s voice was muffled. I whirled around, desperately following the sound of her cries. There she was, caught in a cage of branches; but no, it was nothing but a tree growing from a net of brambles. Then I saw her at the mercy of several goblin swains, her arms pinioned behind her back. They no longer looked human despite their comely forms, their lascivious grins no longer inviting, but threatening.
I chased after them, but it wasn’t Käthe in their clutches; it was me. I was surrounded by tall, elegant goblin men, made in the mold of their king—languid, beautiful, cruel. I felt the touch of their lips against my skin, little love bites against my throat, as though they meant to devour me. But no, they weren’t goblin men at all, but dead winter branches: their twigs shredding my clothes and hair to ribbons.
“Liesl!”
Käthe’s cries were faint, but somehow closer. As though she were beneath me, buried somewhere deep in the earth. I fell to my knees and clawed at the dirt, digging frantically.
“Give up, Elisabeth,” the Goblin King urged. “Give up and surrender to me.”
His voice was everywhere and nowhere at once. He was the wind, he was the earth, he was the trees, the leaves, the sky and the stars. I fought against him and the forest fought back, confusing my sense of time, distance, and even self.
“Liesl!”
A muffled thumping. I cleared away the leaves and twigs and rocks and dirt before my hands hit something as hard and smooth as glass.
“Liesl!”
Beneath my hands was Käthe, trapped behind a sheet of ice. A frozen pond? I ineffectually beat at the surface, calling her name. Was she drowning? I screamed with frustration, clawing and scratching and pounding until my palms cracked and bled, leaving bloody smears over the ice.
Suddenly, the frost cleared beneath me, revealing a frantic Käthe. But for the panic on her face, she seemed hale. Yet when I peered closer, everything was all wrong. My head spun; beneath me was not the depthless black of a frozen pond, but the starry infinity of a winter sky. Käthe was not staring up at me, but down, as though kneeling beside the pond instead of floating within. Her hands struck the ice in rhythm with mine, but I could no longer tell which way was up. Was I trapped underground? Or was she?