Trollhunters (13 page)

“I’ll never figure out how that nut sack made a living writing,” Tub said.

“Flames,” I groaned. “I’m going to go down in big fiery flames of fire.”

“I’ll show Mr. Shakespeare a renaissance. A renaissance of my
fist
.”

“Nobody can say those sentences without sounding like a jerk. Right?”

“Generally you’re right,” Tub said. “It’s definitely an elite club of superstars who can wrap their tongues around that baroque bullcrap. Sir Lawrence Olivier, Sir
Kenneth Branagh. We’d be remiss, of course, to leave out that legend of stage and screen, that matinee idol of the ages, Sir Jim Sturges Jr.”

Tub slapped me on the back. He had a big hand; I stumbled. I heard chuckles from the direction of the football field. I kept my head down and picked up the pace. We were heading home, but the
talk of the audition would not die. I looked at the
RoJu
script in my hand. Only forty-five pages, but it felt a whole lot heavier.

“How am I going to memorize all this?” I asked.

“Here’s a tip,” Tub said. “You forget a line, just shout ‘Saint B. Battle Beasts rule!’ and those morons in the stands will go crazy.” He winked at me.
“That one’s a freebie. Next one costs.”

By now we were passing the San Bernardino Historical Society Museum, a lure too great for Tub not to bite at. He gave me his usual impish grin.

“Not today,” I pleaded. “I don’t have the required speed.”

“Speed? You? You’re not the one schlepping this bag, Sir Jim.”

What could I say to that? He was doing me a favor. So we made our way down the walkway, passing beneath a new vinyl banner. It didn’t make a lot of sense, though the heavy block letters
were nonetheless imposing.

KILLAHEED
THE COMPLETE STRUCTURE

WESTERN HEMISPHERE DEBUT

It snapped in the breeze as if preparing to swoop down on bat wings.

Neither of us was encouraged by what we found inside. Carol was absent from the ticket booth. We peeked around the corner. No one was manning the coat check. We perked up our ears. There were
sounds, dim vibrations of voices, but there was no telling from which direction they came. Tub shrugged, hitched up his duffel, and pushed his bulk through the turnstiles. I followed and we
proceeded, more carefully than usual, up the stairs and beneath the bison. Tub didn’t touch the chin hairs this time.

The Sal K. Silverman Atrium looked no different from the outside. But when we pushed through the smoked-glass doors we were greeted by a hive of activity. Museum staff, everyone from Carol to
docents to board members, were buzzing about with frowns, while men with hardhats and work gloves called back and forth to one another from behind packing crates and the seats of small forklifts.
Tub and I were dumbstruck. When we approached not a single person paid us notice.

Spanning the entire length of the room was a stone walking bridge. Had it been stretched across a country stream somewhere, it might have looked harmless enough. But indoors it pushed against
the room’s paltry boundaries with a formidable, primordial force. It was ancient, its every notch and outcropping scoured with the nicks and discolorations of centuries. Fiberglass cushioning
hid much of the detail work, though a dozen workers were preparing to remove it. Clearly the bridge had been delivered in sections; both ends had been reconstructed, but a center monument
connecting the halves was missing.

Tub and I wandered closer. If not for the laborers, we could have passed beneath the bridge without ducking. Cobwebs swayed from spires at either end and moss grew in moist patches around many
of the intricate carvings. The bridge was practically a living thing—you expected rats to come pouring out of the innumerable small chasms. The air was unaccountably cold and I shivered as I
tried to see over a man in a houndstooth coat.

He whirled around, nose raised as if he’d sniffed me out. It was Professor Lempke. His left hand clutched a clipboard but the right hand shot out, somehow snaring both of our collars in a
single fist.

“Aha!” he cried. “My perennial trespassers! My shadow skulkers! Young masters Sturges and Dershowitz, reporting for duty!”

We squirmed but his grip was iron.

Lempke’s hyena grin widened. The effect was troubling. His teeth were caked with crud and his breath was sour. In fact, everything about him suggested lack of sleep, if not some worse
affliction. His bloodshot eyes rolled within a pudding of violet flesh, and his jaundiced cheeks were dusted with gray stubble. A tide of pimples swept out from his hairline and there was a pink
rash extending from his shirt collar.

“No bounding about like wildebeests, not today, not whilst such a delicate artifact rests in proximity. You intrude on an auspicious afternoon! What you see before you is the grandest
achievement of my career. Eighteen years I’ve worked with Scottish historians to protect this edifice from destruction, a destruction that simpletons of the Scottish Highlands insisted upon
because of primitive, archaic superstition. Can you believe it, my boy busybodies? Those ignoramuses wished to destroy quite possibly the most important piece of architecture in all of Europe. I
saved it. I did that. And now it’s right here in the Golden Valley.”

His fevered eyes began to swim with tears. Both Tub and I recoiled, hoping to evade contaminated spatter.

“Do you undereducated brats have the slightest idea what you’re looking upon?”

Tub dared to shrug.

“A bridge?”

Lempke’s cheeks slackened in mortification. Two hard tears rolled like ball bearings, one from each swollen eye, though he did not seem to notice. His horrified expression slowly screwed
into one of mordant amusement.

“A bridge,” he mused. “Amusing. Not yet, my pubescent meddlers. You see, the head stone that connects the two halves…alas, it has yet to arrive.”

The assistant who cleared his throat had been standing there for some time. Lempke’s fingers loosened enough for Tub and I to extricate ourselves and massage our throats. Sweat dropped
from the assistant’s face onto a stack of paperwork. He clicked a pen nervously.

“The head stone,” he said. “I’ve got news.”

“Out with it,” Lempke barked.

The assistant consulted a scrawled note. “Okay. The cargo was shipped to San Sebastián by mistake.”

“San Sebastián, Puerto Rico?” Lempke seethed.

The assistant gulped down his nervousness.

“San Sebastián, Spain.” While Lempke’s jaw fell open, releasing a stink, the assistant hurried on. “It should arrive there within a day and the historical society
has been given instructions to reroute it to us immediately.”

Lempke’s whole face had gone the color of his rash. He raked jagged fingernails across his whitehead pimples.

“
Explicit
instructions?” he raged. “Were
explicit
instructions given? I know those boobs in San Sebastián. They’ll want a look. They’ll
crack open the casing and say it happened during transport, just to get a peek, without even thinking about the lighting conditions under which they’re exposing the stone, the moisture in the
air, anything! They’ll take photos.
Flash
photos!”

“Yes, explicit,” said the assistant. “I was very explicit—”

“Call them again. Underscore the sobriety, the gravity of our instructions. Those thickheaded dunderheads are to wait outside nibbling their
pinxchos
until the shipment arrives. I
don’t care if they stand there all night. I did, and I was proud to do it. You cannot trust some adolescent dropout minimum-wage Spaniard with a shipment of this caliber.”

“Yes, sir, day and night. Sir…you’re…bleeding. Are you all right?”

Lempke was itching the back of his right hand. He’d dug bloody furrows.

“This wool coat,” he muttered. “It bothers me.”

For a quick moment, he pushed up the sleeve of his jacket to itch beneath it. We all saw it: the rash had devoured Lempke’s entire forearm. A yellow glaze of hardened mucus glistened in
the sunshine pouring from the skylight. The sleeve fell back into place and the assistant forced himself to stare at his notes.

“Ah, the, uh, head stone should be here Friday. Just in time for the final day of the festival—”

Lempke flapped his ruined right hand. Skin, loosened from scratching, floated in the air. Tub and I dodged it.

“Trifles! What’s happening in this museum dwarfs some measly street fair! Mark my words, the halfwits who populate this town will regret squandering so much of their limited energy
on street processions and athletic events and teenage theatrics, when they could have been studying up on their Scottish history. They will self-castigate. Wait and see. Apologies will be made to
me personally.”

A foreman shouted out to his workers: “People, step back! Okay, men, on three!”

Lempke’s head shot up and he gasped like a man spotting his long-lost beloved. A second later, his hands—those hot, suppurating pincers of disease—clamped down on our necks. He
steered us past the assistant, who skittered aside, so that we faced the great stone structure at the moment of unveiling.

“One…” the foreman yelled.

Lempke’s chapped lips moved in silent recitation.

“Two…”

Lempke’s razored nails sunk into my neck flesh.

“Three!”

With that, the workers pulled downward on the panels that protected the sides and underside of the bridge. Beneath was a thick layer of industrial carpet and beneath that a layer of straw, both
of which fell to the floor with a loud
whump
. A cloud of dust flew upward and a thousand pieces of straw were tossed into the air. Workers squinted behind their goggles and museum
personnel shielded their faces with their elbows. Only Lempke did nothing, beaming at eighteen years’ worth of his most fervent dreams. Black dust rolled into his open mouth. A piece of straw
nicked his eyeball and he didn’t flinch.

“The Killaheed Bridge,” he whispered.

Tub coughed and turned away. But I couldn’t.

I’d seen this bridge before.

The central image of the stone mural in the troll cave had been a reproduction of this very bridge, though the depiction hadn’t been able to replicate the real thing’s impregnable
power. Each twisted tentacle and gnarled claw was so deeply etched that your eyes got lost inside the voids, and each one grasped toward the missing head stone. I could not forget the central
character as depicted by the mural: a towering troll with six arms, one empty eye socket, and another of sparkling ruby.

Clouds interrupted the sun, throwing the atrium into unexpected gloom.

“My, my, my, yes,” tittered Lempke. “Scotland reborn. Looks so much more commanding bathed in gray, don’t you think, my juvenile jesters?”

A cry of pain slashed the silence. Lempke leaned toward the source of the sound with too much eagerness. A worker retracted his hand from where he had been feeling around inside one of the
bridge’s clefts. I saw only a smear of blood before he shoved the injured hand beneath his opposite arm.

“It bit me!” he shrieked. “Damn thing bit me!”

Concerned others swarmed around the man to help. Lempke placed his rash-covered hands on his hips. Tub motioned his chin at our usual escape door, and we crept away from the scene. The stairwell
was unguarded and we were thankful. But we didn’t move fast enough to escape Lempke’s final words.

“Stop your whining. It doesn’t hurt that bad. It’s an honor, in fact. Be proud.”

By eleven o’clock that night the two of us were squeezed inside the cramped confines of my closet. Tub snored from behind a hockey mask, the hockey stick across his chest
rising and falling with every lion purr. The previous hour had been spent griping—“My legs are asleep because you’re sitting on them,” “Can you remove your knee from
my ear?” and so forth. Finally, though, Tub snoozed, the string of the archery bow digging a temporary scar into his cheek. Easy for him. He still didn’t believe a word of what
I’d said. Me, I’d be up all night. I leaned back into a pile of clothes and distracted myself by thinking through our attempts at preparation.

The first thing we’d done after returning from the museum was give my room a thorough examination. For a guy who had a tough time putting on his own socks, Tub didn’t hesitate to get
down on his stomach and squeeze beneath the bed, flashlight in hand. I stood as far away as I could, heart pounding.

Finally he pulled himself out. His frizzy hair was clotted with dust bunnies and his face was drawn and serious.

“There’s something terrible under there,” he whispered.

“Ha! Now do you believe me?”

“I do. And it’s worse than I thought. I’ve never encountered a sock of such stink. We should arm ourselves, my liege, before it’s too late, and see if we can best it in
battle. Alas, we may not survive but history shall treat us well.”

The bedsprings giggled as Tub took a seat.

“Sorry, Jim. No monsters. No trap door. There’s not even a crawl space in this joint. This is your basic, boring mid-’80s suburban house plan, same as fifty more down the
street, same as my place. It’s like I said: there’s nothing special about our homes, nothing special about us. Get that through your dumb head.”