Goblins Attack the Office and Take Sophie

The goblin attack on the J.W. Wells & Co. office is the first direct confrontation between Paul Carpenter and the creatures occupying the firm’s workplace, and the moment Sophie Pettingell is taken makes the firm’s everyday strangeness a matter of immediate danger. Paul’s instinctive responses help disperse the attackers, but his effort to drive them away also creates the opening through which Sophie is seized. Her recovery depends on Dennis Tanner, whose calm familiarity with the goblins sharply contrasts with Paul’s alarm and inexperience.

Causes and Background

Paul and Sophie are new clerks at J.W. Wells & Co., where they have been given little useful explanation of the work around them. On Paul’s first day, Dennis handed him a lengthy employment contract and offered the choice of reading it or signing both copies. Sophie’s hurried induction included practical rules about office equipment, keys, filing, and the long stapler, but gave her no context for the firm’s unusual business. That mismatch between routine administration and unexplained circumstances leaves the pair unprepared when the office becomes the scene of an attack.

The immediate disturbance is first registered as a problem in Dennis’s office. When Paul and Sophie look in, Dennis is absent and the room is in disarray: papers cover the floor and chairs, one chair has been overturned, and several tomahawks are missing from the collection on the wall. Sophie proposes checking the photocopy room. Paul, meanwhile, has noticed a red eye at the letter-box flap, a detail Sophie does not appear to share. The signs point to an intrusion, but neither clerk yet knows what has entered the building.

The Attack in the Office

A door swings open and knocks Sophie down. In the doorway stands a goblin dressed in a leather jerkin, chain mail, and an ill-fitting helmet; it carries one of Dennis’s tomahawks. A second goblin appears behind it, armed with a spear. Paul recognizes the creatures as the goblins he has encountered in his imagination, while Sophie is left on the floor and the immediate danger holds both Paul and the intruders in a tense pause. Paul senses that moving first or breaking eye contact would be unwise, though he cannot explain how he knows.

The stalemate ends when a third goblin enters, carrying a curved sword. Its sudden arrival and startled cry prompt Paul to shout for the goblins to go away. They recoil, and Paul follows with a forceful step and a shout. The tactic sends all three toward the exit, but the spear-carrier is left behind and retreats in panic. Paul presses forward, trying to herd it out, and overdoes the display: the goblin bumps into Sophie as she gets up, then seizes her and holds a knife beneath her chin. Paul judges that another shout could trigger a more dangerous reaction, so he stays still while the goblin backs through the doorway with Sophie. The moment changes the scene from a frightening office encounter into a rescue attempt.

Paul’s Pursuit and Improvised Defence

Once Sophie has been taken, Paul resists the safer option of returning to Dennis’s office to call for help. He believes that following is the right course, although he has no way to know which direction the goblins have gone. Hearing crashes farther into the building, he makes for reception, still unsure whether the sounds come from the group that has Sophie. His decision is driven by the immediate need to find her rather than by a considered plan.

Reception contains at least twenty goblins, gathered around a large metal waste-paper basket. Paul enters with the spear dropped by the earlier attacker and shouts at them; most flee. One larger goblin stays behind and throws an iron club at him. Paul evades it, then grabs the long stapler from the desk and uses it to strike and pin the creature’s hand long enough to make it drop its knife and withdraw. The object is an ordinary piece of office equipment, but in this confrontation it becomes the only weapon Paul can reach.

The struggle shifts when the goblin backs into a bookshelf holding 103 bound volumes of the Journal of Meteorological Studies, covering June 1949 to December 1957. The impact breaks one of the shelf’s wooden supports. The books fall in succession and knock the goblin down, allowing Paul to seize it by the ear. He is about to strike again when Dennis appears and demands to know what Paul is doing. Paul can offer only the essential explanation: a goblin has taken Sophie.

Sophie’s Recovery and the Attack’s Significance

Dennis does not respond as though the creature in reception is an unknown intruder. He tells Paul to stay put, then leaves and returns about a minute later with Sophie. She is dazed, but has no visible injury. Dennis orders her to sit, then approaches the goblin trapped beneath the fallen books. He reaches out and answers its cries with cries of his own; the goblin takes his wrist and allows him to help it up. Dennis escorts it gently across reception and out of the building, even as it points back at Paul and shrieks. Paul, who had just been fighting the creature, can only watch this unexpected exchange.

The contrast establishes two sharply different kinds of knowledge within the office. Paul has learned to respond under pressure, using judgment, a dropped spear, a stapler, and the contents of a waiting-area bookshelf. Dennis, by contrast, can deal with a goblin without treating it as an ordinary enemy, and he returns Sophie without explaining his actions in the moment. The attack thus exposes both the danger concealed within the firm’s workplace and Paul’s limited understanding of the world he has joined.

The explanation that follows makes the contrast part of the firm’s identity rather than an isolated oddity. Dennis gives Paul and Sophie letterhead identifying J.W. Wells & Co. as supernatural consultants, paranormal engineers, and practical metaphysicians. Later, Dietrich Wurmtoter describes the Mortensen Counter, the firm’s system for recording supernatural activity worldwide, and explains that goblins interfere with the company’s collected printouts. Those details recast the attack within an organization whose clerical routines and supernatural operations already occupy the same space. The raid is therefore both a rescue crisis and a practical demonstration of how little the new clerks have been told about their employer.