Why Gnomes Don't Go To The Dentist, or,
How To Get To The Forest Of Death
As he walked further into the cave the entrance to the cave got smaller and smaller until it was no bigger than basketball. It was darker than John had ever seen dark. He reached into his backpack and pulled out the lantern and turned it on. Immediately the cave blossomed into light, and just as immediately there was the gnome, not more than five feet from him. His crystal teeth glittered in the lantern light, almost blinding John.
John looked at the gnome as if he had all the time in the world. The gnome looked a little like Joe, except for the one eye in the middle of the forehead. His skin was green and warty, like a toad's, and his clothes (if you wanted to call them clothes -- they were more like a collection of rags tied together with string) reeked of garlic, persimmon, and a touch of ammonia. John didn't know a whole lot about gnomes, but he knew a little. He couldn't kill them with a knife or an axe or a sword because the gnome just grew back whatever body part got cut off. Acid didn't work; the gnome just drank it. The gnome's skin was so slimy that a rope just kept slipping off, and he knocked away things like rocks and boulders as if they were pesty flies. Their favorite method of eating people was to bake them in a huge pot with onions, celery, and apples. The only weak spot on a gnome was their teeth. Made out of crystal, they were very hard until a sound reach a certain frequency. At that frequency the crystal teeth would begin to vibrate, and the gnome would give out the most lovely sound, almost like the clear tone of a perfect bell, until its teeth shattered. Then, without its teeth, it became so embarrassed that it melted into a puddle of shame and evaporated.
John reached into the bird cage and grabbed the bird carefully in his hand. The gnome watched him, apparently unaware of what was going on. The lantern played off his teeth in brilliant rainbow colors. The gnome said, "What do you want?"
"I want to go to the Forest of Death," said John, realizing how stupid that sounded: why would anybody want to go there?
The gnome picked up on it. "Why would anyone want to go there?"
John, feeling a little stupid, had to keep on going. "I'm going to kill the Evil One."
The gnome laughed, and his teeth gave out the most beautiful sound, a little tinkling bell that rings when someone opens a shop door. "You!! " the gnome howled, and John began to get irritated.
"Yeah, me. I'm in a hurry. Let me get by." John took a step, and the gnome stopped laughing immediately, his face twisting into a scowl and his one eye blinking furiously. He just simply said "No."
By this time the gnome had pulled out a rather long ugly- looking knife (John imagined that he could hear the gnome's stomach growling) and started taking steps toward John. "Look," said John, not sure why he was arguing with a creature that had the intelligence of an Oreo cookie and wanted only to make him into a stew, but not wanting to kill him if he could avoid it, "I don't want to hurt you. I only want the Evil One because he hurt friends of mine."
The gnome stopped. "Friends? What are friends?" The gnome looked as confused as any one-eyed slimy-skinned creature could, and John felt immediately felt sorry for him. It almost got him killed. Momentarily off his guard, he didn't see the gnome leaping at him until the last second, and the gnome's knife glanced off the iron shield with a loud clang. The gnome grabbed his mouth, the cave echoing with the shield's iron gonging. "What have you got in there?" the gnome finally managed to say, but he didn't wait around for John to answer.
John felt something warm in his hand as he dodged the gnome's knife, and realized that it was the bird. He let it go. "Sing, damn you!" John yelled, and the bird, sitting up on one of the out-thrusts of rock, began the most beautiful tune John had ever heard. The gnome stopped, too. The bird trilled and ran up and down the scale, and the cave was filled with joyous music.
And then it got louder and louder, and even John's ears began to hurt. Under the music he could also hear the ringing hum of the gnome's teeth, and the gnome was grabbing his mouth in pain, jumping up and down like a cat on a hot stove. Finally, with the bird singing as loudly as it could, and John hunched over, his head buried between his legs and having the worst headache he'd ever had, he heard a big explosion. He looked up. The air was filled with glinting crystal dust; the lantern light threw up rainbows all over the place. The gnome himself was dead on the cave floor (or at least the puddle of him was there, slowly evaporating away in a thin slimy steam). The bird stopped immediately, and then flew straight for the small ball of light that showed where the cave entrance was.
John sat up, shaking his head. The puddle had almost disappeared. The quiet of the cave was almost unnerving. The rocks were covered with the fine particles of the former gnome's former teeth. That was it, that was all; he could get on with the adventure. He wished that the gnome had listened; but he also knew that gnomes were gnomes, and there wasn't any getting around that.
He picked up the lantern and started moving down the cave. Eventually the light at the entrance to the cave disappeared. Just behind John, just outside the circle of his light, were a pair of eyes. They started moving, too.
