Trollhunters (10 page)

Pelted arms and scaled hands and chilly tentacles tried to hold me in place, but I wriggled free, rolled beneath the butcher counter, and shot out into a side alley, cutting through a family of
pudgy blue trolls with skeleton wings that flapped in agitation. A six-foot mass of yellow hair—which, oddly, was topped with a pair of lit candles—slumped down the alley toting a
pig’s head on a stick, which I assumed was a kind of scepter before I saw him nibble on it. It was a snack. I veered away and came upon a line of crude wheelbarrows filled with goods. I
skittered aside and butted into a troll so withered his ribs poked out from his flesh, each one adorned with bejeweled rings that jangled like a tambourine as he squabbled his dissatisfaction to a
troll resembling a giant, armless worm. There was a gash in the worm’s stomach, and I thought it was a stab wound until four smaller worms poked their heads out of the marsupial pocket.

Both trolls halted their argument and looked at me.

“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “It looks good. Really. I wish I had my wallet.”

It did
not
look good. The wheelbarrow was stacked with jars of a granola-like substance, except instead of oats, nuts, and raisins, it was roaches, hair, and teeth. I turned to reverse
my direction when I saw a familiar black-furred giant poke its snout into the alley. Its orange eyes lasered in on me.

ARRRGH!!! huffed with such force that two smaller trolls were taken down by the spray of snot.

I jumped over the wheelbarrow. My toe caught a jar and it shattered on the ground, white teeth bouncing across brick and roaches racing away into crevices. From behind came the pound of my
pursuer’s feet. Up ahead, a troll with a leathery baby face mischievously tied together the ponytails of two spotted trolls locked in separate disputes. I ducked beneath the knot, leapt over
a smolder pit, and kicked through a low wire fence surrounding two little green creatures with long, furry tails facing off in battle. I spun around and found myself surrounded by gambling trolls
clutching coins and howling at the disruption of the fight. I shouted apologies and hurtled over the opposite fence, the furry green gremlins snapping at my heels.

Vice was all around me. Intertwining strains of music cranked out of a busted accordion and a warped Victrola. Neon beer signs, flashing crosswalk signals, and whirling bits of carnival
machinery, all stolen from the human world, lent a hallucinatory, strobe-lit feel to this red-light district. I whirled around like a drunkard until I bounced off a large-breasted female troll who
had proudly modified her body with the contents of a human sewing kit. Her toes had been replaced with thimbles, several of her fingers with pinking shears, her nipples with mismatched buttons, her
hair with unraveling spools of yarn. She smiled at me luridly. Her toothless gums had been fitted with hundreds of sewing needles.

I stumbled down another alley. Groups of trolls hunched over strange war games built of stone, and all of them were cheating—I could see extra playing pieces stuffed into their fur. Other
gangs tossed hubcaps at a weathered old tetherball pole while one troll kept score by making claw slashes on a board. Everywhere I looked, fights broke out. These scuffles were sudden, savage, and
generally short-lived; after a few blows, the disgruntled beasts returned to their games and their stone steins of foamy mead.

Strangest of all were the TVs. In this district they were everywhere. Oversize cabinet models from the ’70s, portable black-and-white sets from the ’80s, sleek monitors from the
’90s, and the occasional high-definition brands of the modern day. Some were piled on the ground and others lashed to wooden poles with barbed wire, but all of them were jerry-rigged with
makeshift antennae and attached to dozens of extension cords that snaked into the overhead power grid. Not a single program played on these sets. Instead, they broadcast different patterns of
static. Trolls handed over money (or small rodents) for the privilege of standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed in front of the bad signals.

ARRRGH!!! was less impressed. The troll bounded through sawhorses and fences. TVs were destroyed, board games scattered, and mead cups overturned. Countless trolls bayed their chagrin. Heart
pounding, I wove through the smallest thoroughfares I could find, sliding between tightly packed shacks so the troll couldn’t follow.

It didn’t work. ARRRGH!!! began tearing these shacks to pieces. It was like trying to outrun a tornado. I fled with my arms above my head to protect myself from the hailstorm of wood and
metal siding, and kept jagging around every bend I could find. The lights of the gambling district faded, and I became aware of a dramatic decrease in population. The slap of my feet against brick
was replaced by squirts of mud. Each landing of ARRRGH!!!’s feet sounded like the dropping of a boulder into a thick mire.

Right away I identified the sparkle of water. Buildings were growing sparse, so I had no option except to sprint for it. With ARRRGH!!!’s hot breath burning my neck, I made it in thirty
seconds. It was not the cool, rippling brook I had imagined but a sweltering ditch of excrement that twined through the underworld. Four or five trolls with ornate tusks were scattered along the
bank using nets to capture junk that tumbled along in the current. This looked to be the main point of entry for much of the trash with which the troll city was built. Hills of it, yet to be
categorized, towered behind each fisherman.

I sprung across the creek at its narrowest point and clawed my way up the bank. This was the edge of the city. Sporadic campfires lit by solitary trolls revealed the wooden braces that kept the
cliffs from collapsing. The light was dim as I raced past and I was grateful, because the body parts I glimpsed were hideous—ancient, powerful beings whose quietude suggested that they wanted
only to die in peace. Their flesh was covered in lichen and toadstools from decades of inactivity.

A figure swung down from an overhead pipe and landed on two legs in front of me. Firelight reflected from his aviator goggles and soda-cap forearms. For an instant I felt the notebook spirals
around his biceps before pushing away, but there behind me, emerging from the gloom, were the eight red eyes of Blinky. I spun on my heel and started in a third direction but was met by ARRRGH!!!,
whose cemetery teeth gleamed from the darkness.

“You’ve wasted so much time.” The metal man’s voice crunched from his stereo speaker between blasts of static. He raised a spiked glove. Dangling there was the bronze
medallion. “Don’t make me say it again, Jim Sturges. Put this on before it’s too late.”

It took a few seconds before I recognized my own name. This had been no random abduction, which meant Dad had been right: there had been things in the night trying to get me. I thought of the
ten locks on our front door and for the first time ever longed to hear their protective rhythm.

The man of metal read my mind.

“Your father refused this once,” he said. “Don’t make the same mistake.”

My muscles trembled with overdue exhaustion, and my mind gave out beneath the madness of all that had happened. I wanted to cry but didn’t have the energy. I slumped and hung my head,
defeated by the stink of troll breath and the icy realization of a terrible truth. I covered my face with my hands.

“You’re the ones,” I said, “who took Uncle Jack.”

“Yes.”

“Who ruined Dad’s life.”

“Yes.”

“And now you want to ruin mine.”

“Take this.” The medallion jangled. “Take this and you’ll see.”

A piercing ululation tore through the air. I dropped my hands. Bells rang throughout the city and shepherds’ horns were blown. I turned to look and saw the snuffing of a hundred fires at
once, the lowering of flags and the folding of scaffolds, the silhouette of carts and wheelbarrows pushed from the center of town to the edges. The ground began to shake as every single troll
hurried to clear the streets. Many were headed in our direction. The stampede was coming.

That’s when I saw the ray of sunshine.

It broke through a crack somewhere overhead, firing like a lightning bolt into the mud near the sewage creek. The ray of light widened, and I heard the strangled yelp of one of the fishermen as
he went down. That began the panic. Shrieks rose up, one after another. A second ray of light struck a leaning tower in the center of the city.

“You!” The man of metal thrust the medallion at me. “Take this! Now!”

“But they’re coming—”

“Happens every morning,” he snapped. “Put it on!”

Sunlight stabbed through dozens of cracks then, turning the cavern into a quilt of light and dark through which threaded the scattering forms of a thousand unbelievable ogres. A large blade of
sun shot down just ten feet away. I couldn’t help it—I took a step toward it and the warmth it offered.

ARRRGH!!! and Blinky recoiled from the beam.

Hadn’t the metal man said I would go home at dawn? I tore my eyes from the advancing surge of monsters and looked at him. He was strangling the medallion chain, unafraid of the sun that
had his two companions edging away. Droves of trolls began teeming past us, dancing around the light with multifarious legs and screeching at such volume that the cave sounded like a steel tower
being crushed in a giant fist. Larger trolls dove into tunnels while smaller ones scrambled up vertical walls like lizards.

I took another step toward the sunlight.

“If you don’t take it now,” raved the metal man, “we’ll come back for you tomorrow night. And the night after that. And the night after that. And that will be your
life, Jim Sturges, until you do what we say.”

It was an excellent threat. I teetered between the options. There was no more stone or concrete or mud that I could see, just a writhing mass of grotesque bodies that devoured the world like a
plague.

The man of metal ran out of patience. He withdrew both swords in a way that communicated some sort of signal. ARRRGH!!! charged, a great paw falling at me like a bulldozer shovel, and Blinky
sailed in as well, tentacles reaching, eye stems tightening into a single, tortured braid. I felt stiff fur and the powerful suckers of an octopus, but I was already diving for the sunlight,
watching my hands turn white as they entered its beam, and then going blind when the ray hit me dead on. My skin hurt, my sinuses filled with the smell of cinder, the back of my throat clotted with
the taste of my own fear, and then I was on my back with all of my bones aching as if they had been bent to the breaking point. My head was on a soft, sweaty pillow.

Dad paused by the crack in my bedroom door. He was wearing his weekend mowing gear and was fussing with the button on his left sleeve.

“Morning, son,” he said.

He moved along down the hallway.

Something dropped to the mattress beside me. I held in a scream.

It was the medallion.

I spent less than twenty minutes at home before I left, and every one of them was upsetting. I stashed the medallion beneath my pillow to get it out of my sight, and a few
seconds later, the sweat on my body began to cool as I convinced myself that it had all been a nightmare brought on by a monumentally crappy day. Relieved, I threw aside my covers only to find legs
crusted with dry sewage and feet blackened with mud.

I scrubbed the crud in the shower as if it were a flesh-eating disease. The gray water swirled down the drain, and I watched it until I remembered where drains led. I fled from the bathroom,
threw on clothes, and after some deliberation brought out the medallion. Menacing though it was, it felt no different in my hand than any earth-built piece of jewelry. There was no more magic in
this thing than there was in a class ring, and there was one way to prove that to myself.

I put it on.

Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing.

I exhaled in relief—a small victory for common sense. I tucked the medallion beneath my shirt. After a full day of wearing it, maybe the rest of the suffocating fear would go away,
too.

My plan was to dart into the kitchen to grab my sweatshirt and be out of the house in seconds. But as I was throwing it over my head, I smelled the strangest thing. I poked my head from the top
of the sweatshirt to find my dad putting strips of crispy bacon upon a plate and transferring that plate to the table, where a steaming stack of pancakes awaited. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
I hadn’t seen such a feast since before Mom left. Dad sat down and took a satisfied pull of his coffee.

“Great timing, Jimmy. Pull up a chair.”

Dad was whistling. Sure, it was Don and Juan’s “What’s Your Name?” but still—whistling? It was so unprecedented that for a moment I forgot everything else.

“You okay, Dad?”

“Better than okay. Had the best sleep of my life last night. Jimmy, I tell you, I haven’t slept that well since I was little, back when I shared a room with my brother, Jack. Never
thought I’d sleep that well again.”

He absently touched his Excalibur Calculator Pocket, as if fantasizing about how he might even find the courage to stand up for himself at work. His fingers moved to the Band-Aid on his glasses,
and he nodded as if deciding to fix those frames once and for all. I’d never seen him so happy. I couldn’t help it; I smiled back. He reached across the table for the syrup.