Goblins by Philip Reeve Page A

An odour reached his nostrils: cheesy, and yet not quite cheese. Henwyn had known socks that smelled like that.
    He looked round. In the silence of the cheesery the lid of the vat he’d doctored rattled softly, like a pot coming to the boil. A wisp of pale green vapour curled out from under it. Something was happening to the cheese after all. . .
    He was halfway back across the room, reaching out to lift the lid, when the lid lifted itself. It shot up and shattered against the ceiling. From beneath it something white and glistening came boiling out of the cheese vat, stretching forth thick, cheesy, quivering ropes like tentacles in all directions. One found Henwyn’s ankle and wrapped around it.
    It was only then that he understood the cheese was alive.
    A tug from the tentacle tipped him off his feet. The cheese was still rising from the vat; far more cheese than a vat should hold, as if the mixture he had added had made it grow as well as move. It formed itself into a lumpish shape, like a bad snowman. The tentacles kept whipping out of it, sticky hawsers of cheese, and whenever they touched something that was not nailed down – a chair, a spoon, his sister Gerda’s best apron hanging on the door – they started to retract, reeling the captured objects in until they vanished with soft sucking sounds into the body of the cheese-thing. It was reeling Henwyn in too, pulling him across the tiled floor by his ankle, but only slowly, as if his weight was more than it could easily drag. He saw a curd knife pass him, one of the big slotted paddles which were used for cutting the curds. He snatched at it and tugged, and the leash of cheese which held it parted, the end that had been wrapped around the paddle hanging limp, the rest withdrawing quickly into the cheese-thing. Gripping the curd knife in both hands, he used it to strike at the thicker strand which held his ankle. After a few blows, that parted too, and he was up and out of the room, slamming the door behind him, leaning against it to catch his breath.
    Through the door’s planks came the sound of falling furniture and clattering pans. That monstrous cheese would dismantle the whole cheesery if he didn’t stop it. What would his parents say? What would the neighbours think? At all costs he must not let it escape.
    He dragged a bench across the door and went up the stairs, two at a time, to his room. His second-hand sword lay under the bed and he took it out and strapped it on. His hands were shaking, but he told himself not to be such a coward. Wasn’t this what he had always waited for? A chance to prove himself in combat? And it wasn’t as if it were a dragon or a troll crashing about downstairs; it was only cheese gone bad. . .
    He reached the foot of the stairs just in time to see the door he’d barricaded give way; the cheese oozed through the splintered planks, bulked out with all the objects it had eaten, reaching out its pale, whiplike tentacles to seize more. Soon the whole cheesery was festooned with the sticky strands. Henwyn swung his sword at them, chopping and lopping, but although the strands parted, the cheese stuck to the blade like some awful fondue, dulling the cutting edge and making the weapon heavier and heavier. And all the time more strands were lashing at him, sticking to his face, his arms, his hair, until at last with a great wrench he broke himself free of them and ran, crashing out into the street, where passers-by stopped to stare at him, surprised by this cheese-stained swordsman, and by the crashes and clangs, the weird belching sounds and vile sock-like wafts that were emerging from inside Henmor’s usually quiet cheesery.
    “It’s nothing,” said Henwyn, as casually as he could, trying to put his sword back in its scabbard and discovering that it was so thick with cheese that it would not fit. He felt sure that if the city authorities found out he had created this cheese monster he would be banished, and the cheesery closed