Trollhunters (11 page)

That’s when I saw the little trail of sores leading from the corner of his lip, across his jaw, and down his neck, and remembered that terrible sound coming from his bedroom the night
before:
Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp.

He beamed at me and a scab from one of the sores flaked onto his pancakes.

“Have a seat,” he said. “I think things are finally turning up Sturges.”

The tableful of food was left behind. I was out the door and on my bike in seconds. It was the first day of the Festival of the Fallen Leaves, and all sorts of roads were blocked off. I made the
mistake of heading straight toward the Kids’ Jubilee on Main Street, but managed to cut across the town square before having to dodge three hundred costumed kids. Ignoring every honked horn
and middle finger offered by affronted motorists, I swerved down side roads like my life depended on it, which, at this point, I was pretty sure it did.

At last I reached Papadopoulos Dental Solutions, threw my bike into the bushes, rocketed through the front door, and crashed into the front desk. The receptionist flinched. I gasped for air. The
smooth jazz piping from the speakers mocked my frantic state.

“Mlookinfortub.”

“Slow down, dear. What now?”

I gulped a quick lungful of air.

“I’m looking for Tub.”

“I still don’t understand—”

“Toby D.”

“I don’t know who that—”

“Tobias F. Dershowitz.”

The receptionist adjusted her glasses and consulted her ledger. Her gaze ticked down the list of names.

“Dershowitz…Dershowitz…oh!” Her smile quickly faded as she examined her notes more closely.
“Oh.”

The sound of a drill sliced through the walls.

Moments later I ducked into the third, and most serious, patient room to find Tub alone and strapped into a chair with his lips stretched wide in four directions courtesy of a spiderlike metal
contraption. His new braces made the old ones look debonair. Big chrome nodules were attached to every tooth, while steel wire twisted about in dizzying patterns. An acrid cloud of smoke hung above
his head, the manifestation of his mood.

Tub couldn’t move his head from the grips, but he managed to raise an eyebrow.

I rushed to the side of the chair.

“It came back,” I gasped. “The thing from the parking lot.”

He raised his other eyebrow.

“They took me! The thing from the parking—I didn’t tell you, but there was a thing—when I was under—it had claws—Tub, no one’s gonna believe me! I was
in this place—there was all this stuff, and I think it was from when all those kids—there were three of them, one with all these eyes—Tub, you wouldn’t believe it, all these
eyes flying around all crazy—and a guy wearing all this junk and he was smaller but really scary—but the worst was the one with the claws—Tub, it was huge! Arms like a mile long!
Teeth—a million teeth! Huge as, like, traffic cones—”

“Teeth that big I’d like to see!”

Dr. Papadopoulos came striding in holding a fistful of X-rays. I stepped back from the chair. Tub had always said that Papadopoulos was a hairy guy—when he wanted to gross me out, Tub
would pretend to find curly pieces of Papadopoulos’s arm hair stuck in his braces. It was no exaggeration. Papadopoulos’s black mane began about an inch above his unibrow, and each of
his four gigantic rings was lost in knuckle hair. He grinned at me. Perfect teeth, of course.

“What are we talking about? Some movie you saw?”

I felt myself nodding.

“Don’t get a chance to see many movies myself. What can I say? Teeth are my life. Tobias here will be with you in just a couple minutes. He just needs a wee bit of tightening.”
He tossed the X-rays onto the counter, peered into Tub’s open mouth, nodded to himself, and headed out of the room again.

I swept back to Tub’s side.

“Tub.
Tub
. What am I gonna tell Dad? I can’t tell him, can I? He’ll go mental. He’ll lock me up with chains. We need to do something. You and me. Maybe we can
set up a trap. Oh, man, Tub—they said they’d come back. Tonight. Tonight! We don’t have time—”

“Always time for proper dental care,” Papadopoulos said, cruising back in.

He had in his hands a tray of the most horrifying medical devices I’d ever seen: misshapen hooks so sharp they glinted, a scalpel with form-fitting plastic grips, a thing that looked like
tongs except much sharper, and a svelte handheld rotary blade. Each tool was constructed of lustrous silver. I’d consider them pretty awesome if they didn’t exist for the sole purpose
of torturing Tub.

Papadopoulos bent over the instruments, fingers wiggling.

“Tobias’s case has been an inspiration to me. These tools here I invented in my personal lab. Forged and soldered them myself. It would not surprise me if I received an invitation to
this year’s Dental Association Conference in Anaheim. No, it would not surprise me one bit.”

Papadopoulos took up a wrench and leaned over Tub with the look of a man eyeing a succulent turkey and deciding where to make the first cut.

“Ah, yes,” he purred. Metal squealed and popping noises came from teeth being driven tightly into sockets. The dentist’s body blocked the specifics of the attack, though I saw
plenty of flailing from Tub’s limbs. Papadopoulos proceeded, unconcerned. “Aha. Yes.
Yes
. My, my, my!”

An unbearable five minutes later, the mad scientist straightened and exhaled with a great amount of pride. He released the prongs holding the four sides of Tub’s mouth and began to remove
his rubber gloves.

“Rinse and spit. I’ll see you next week.”

Papadopoulos’s eyes caught mine as he passed. Rather, it was my agape mouth that caught his attention. He frowned and leaned in, inspecting my unbrushed rows.

“Mmm-hmm. There are things I could help you with. Make an appointment. It’ll change your life, son.”

He winked. I shuddered. He strode out the door with a clipboard containing the details of his next victim. He paused in the hallway, sniffing the air. He scowled, sniffed some more. He pressed
an intercom button on the wall.

“Betty, I distinctly smell sewage. Could you get a plumber out here ASAP?”

Several curly hairs fluttered in the air after he was gone.

I clutched at the arm of the dentist chair.

“This isn’t a joke, Tub! I’m in trouble. We’re all in trouble, the whole town, the whole world! You have no clue. You have no idea what kind of things we’re dealing
with here. There’s a whole land of—”

Tub held up a single finger. He sat tall, carefully picked up the paper cup of water, sipped it daintily, swished it around his cheeks, and then spit into the basin. He repeated the routine with
fastidious care: sip, swish, spit. Then he took up the end of his paper bib and dabbed at his mouth until he was all clean and sat back in the chair. He sighed and turned to look at me. He parted
his lips to speak and I squinted as the fluorescents shone off his mouthful of new metal.

“Are you
nuts
?!”

Tub shouldered open the door. A knitted cat above the peephole rang its belled tail.

“Grandma! I’m home!”

Somewhere between fifteen and twenty cats, live ones, coordinated their assaults from ground and aerial positions. As always, I flinched from their overenthusiastic claws and desperate mewling.
Tub, though, had mastered the art of harmlessly toeing aside felines without even looking. They hissed with annoyance and leapt to the plastic-coated sofa and the coffee table that no one was
allowed to put coffee on. The whole place was decked out in the gewgaws of classic Americana: framed cross-stitches imploring God to bless this house, shelves containing ceramic miniatures of
angelic cats, and endless baubles of wicker and crystal, none of which, under any circumstance, were you to touch. Adding unity to the hodgepodge was a fine layer of cat hair and the delicate
bouquet of cat urine.

“Tub,” I pressed. “What are we going to do?”

“Do? We? Well, I’m going to go lock myself in my room until I can come up with some way to hide these deal-breakers on my teeth. I think Grandma’s got some thread, maybe I can
just sew my lips shut. Leave a little gap for a straw. Live on liquid meals. I mean, what girl is going to be seen within ten feet of me now? These things on my teeth look like bullets. Bullets,
Jim. Girls hate bullets!”

“Tobias, you took off your shoes?” The voice came from the kitchen.

“Yes, Grandma!” Tub shouted. With two practiced kicks, both shoes rocketed down the hall. I bent down to untie mine. I hated this part. Shoe removal was mandatory in the Dershowitz
household, which was a real shame, considering how the shag carpet was soggy with hairballs. Also, possibly, dung.

“Hey,” Tub said. “You about to lay down some dope rhymes?”

“What?”

He indicated his braces. “Bling don’t impress me, J-Fresh.”

I looked down at my chest. While I’d been working on my second shoe, the medallion had slipped from under my shirt. I caught it in my fist.

“Yes! Look! This is proof, right here! One of them gave this to me.”

“Which one? King Kong? The Incredible Squid? Or Mr. Roboto?”

“Mr. Roboto,” I said, then shook my head in irritation. “You have to listen to me!”

He continued into the kitchen, so I followed, ignoring the cat surprises beneath my socks.

Grandma Dershowitz was a short, hunched woman with thick glasses strung upon a beaded chain and gray hair colored an unconvincing magenta. I had never seen her without her frilled, polka-dotted
apron, and that day was no exception. She was baking cookies, which she was always doing, bowls and bowls of them that Tub devoured for no other reason than to clear the counters for the next wave.
Tub reached for a blob of cookie dough and Grandma slapped his wrist.

“You’ll get worms.”

“That makes no sense, Grandma.”

“You want to help, wash some of those dishes.”

Tub shrugged his shoulders at me.

“I washed last time,” he said, nabbing the dishtowel.

I rolled my eyes and took up my usual station.

“Oh, Jim Sturges!” Grandma cried. “Welcome, welcome. There will be cookies for all.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Dershowitz.”

“It’s so nice to have a man around the house.”

“Grandma!” Tub raised his palms in disbelief. “What the heck? I’m a man.”

“Yes, but Jim is older.”

“By three weeks, Grandma!”

To say the least, we’d been through this before. I plunged my hands into the suds. With one hand I withdrew a dirty measuring glass. With the other, I withdrew a small head with pointy
ears and fangs. It hissed at me and I almost screamed.

“In the
sink
, Tub?”

The cat jumped from the water and landed on the counter next to me, shaking suds from its body. It was Cat #23. Tub had long since given up trying to remember the names of the fifty or so
felines that had come and gone, and had therefore instituted a streamlined numerical system. Somewhere in his room was a highly valuable laminated list of their actual names in case of emergency,
but Tub hadn’t seen it in a while.

“Cats aren’t supposed to be hiding in sinks,” I said. “They hate water.”