Trollhunters (14 page)

The following hour was nonetheless spent setting up the nanny cam. To the untrained eye it looked like a teddy bear, but its mouth held a wide-angle camera and its butt housed various cables for
connecting to a TV. The quality was worse than the camera on my phone but the stuffed bear had better stamina: it could record for up to twelve hours. I posed it on the dresser facing the door, and
it grinned at me like an imbecile. I sure felt like one.

Next we built a fake me that we named Jim Sturges Jr. 2: The Decoy. We fashioned JSJ2’s body out of a sweatshirt and sweatpants and stuffed it with dirty laundry. For a head we
appropriated a bowl that had last seen use five years before, during my unintentional slaying of five innocent goldfish. After Tub got done threatening, again, to report me to a local animal rights
organization, we covered JSJ2 with a blanket and grunted our satisfaction. Now all we needed was for something to take the bait.

We waited for Dad to go to bed. Tub killed time browsing for naked celebrities on my laptop while I studied
RoJu
, and after the late news we heard Dad going through his nightly
triple-check of the doors and windows. The chimes of the armed security systems made me feel even lamer. How was what Dad was doing out there any different from what I was doing in here?

Dad poked his head into the room to say good night—Tub knew how to conceal computer-screen boobs faster than anyone I knew—and afterward we withdrew the archery set from the duffel
bag. Tub thumbed the single arrowhead and pronounced it nice and deadly. I brought out the athletic equipment that I’d collected in a hamper, and Tub claimed the hockey gear, leaving me with
the less-impressive whiffle ball bat. The last thing I did was spread marbles all across the floor. Finally, we opened the closet, realized how closely we’d have to squish together, and made
each other swear we’d never mention this to anyone else. Ever, ever, ever.

For two hours, the only sound was the soft whirring of the nanny cam.

It was midnight when I heard a creaking noise through the wall.

I elbowed Tub.

“I don’t
want
dentures, Grandma.”

“Tub!” I hissed. “Wake up!”

He snorted, looked around, and pulled the hockey mask to the top of his head. I pressed a finger to my lips and pointed to my ear. He nodded.

Nothing for several minutes. Tub’s eyes began to droop.

Again: a creak, this one long and tortured.

“Tub. Tub. This is it.”

“Just your dad, Jim.”

“Dad would be checking all of the locks. We’d hear him.”

Tub opened his mouth to protest before his sleepy brain realized that I was right. A third floorboard creaked, then a fourth. Whatever it was out there was getting closer. I looked through the
closet slats at the crack beneath the bedroom door. A moment of unbearable tension passed. Then a shadow daggered the moonlight. My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to tell Tub to get the arrow
into position but couldn’t utter a word.

Then the shadow slipped away.

Tub was oblivious. He raised the head of the stick to his nose.

“This thing smells weird.”

“Shhh!”

“Not like sweat. It smells, I don’t know. Brand-new.”

“Never got used. Shhh!”

“Oh. Well, don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault you lack muscle tone. It’s glandular.”

I pressed my sweaty forehead against his and hissed. “Dad took this stuff away because sports are dangerous. Too many late nights and away games. So he took it all away. Never even let me
try.”

Something metallic crashed to the kitchen floor.

Tub and I jumped. Our foreheads peeled apart and our eyes widened.

His knuckles went white around the hockey stick.

“You want to try now, Jim? Give this stuff a spin?”

There’s no telling how long we stared at each other in the darkness of the closet, ratcheting up our bravery through a sequence of manly nods and the throttling of our athletic gear.
Fifteen minutes might have gone by before we were properly psyched up to go exploding from the closet like a sports team, albeit one that wasn’t sure what sport it was playing.

Right away my foot hit the marbles. I grabbed for Tub, but he was skidding on marbles, too. While he went face-first into the artificial crotch of JSJ2, I went sprawling backward into the
dresser. A slew of forgotten objects fell upon me in succession: a broken kite, a bottle of foul-smelling cologne, a plate of half-eaten scrambled eggs, and, of course, the nanny cam.

Even in this shameful state, I recognized momentum as the only thing we had going for us. I raced from the dresser. The teddy bear bounced along behind me, tangled up in kite string caught
around my foot. Tub was throwing open the bedroom door, the bow slung across his back, the hockey stick and arrow in either fist, and a few delirious seconds later we were charging down the hall
with weapons raised. Distantly I realized that Dad would not be waking up to join us. From his bedroom came that awful noise again:
Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp.

We hesitated at the edge of the kitchen. The lights were off but sounds poured out: the clanging of tin, the crinkling of plastic, the rustle of paper, the crude slamming of ceramic to Formica.
Substances, some hard, some soft, were dropping to the linoleum floor in irregular patterns. Blurting between each noise were inhuman snorts.

“Tub,” I hissed. “What do we do?”

He bared his shiny steel teeth and lowered his hockey mask.

“We do not. Negotiate. With terrorists.”

He lifted the brand-new hockey stick and bounded into the kitchen. With the tangled nanny cam trailing after me, I secured my baseball helmet and followed, rearing back with a bat that had
waited all its life to swing.

The first thing I noticed was that the ceiling fan was shoved into the corner, smashed to pieces. All in all, it was an odd thing to notice first, given that there were two
enormous trolls contorted inside my humble little kitchen. I hated to admit that I was on a first-name basis with terrifying monsters of any sort, but these two I knew all too well. Blinky’s
eight eyes were weaving in and out of the cabinets, down the sink drain, through the nooks of the dishwasher. ARRRGH!!! was grasping, and inadvertently crushing, various human-sized items upon the
counter. The beast growled and its hunched back scraped against the dangling guts of the ceiling fan.

For some reason, the microwave was on, the plate inside empty and spinning.

With my free hand I gripped the back of Tub’s shirt.

“What…what are they…doing?” I managed.

Tub’s voice gurgled back with feeble horror.

“Sandwiches, Jim. They’re making sandwiches.”

Two of Blinky’s tentacles took turns diving into a jar of peanut butter, emerging each time with a beige glob that he smeared across an array of white bread scattered across the counter.
Far too much force was used, and the bread tore into puffs that flew about the kitchen like scraps from a wood chipper. Some of it made its way into the gash of Blinky’s mouth, and through
his scaled skin I could see the chunks as they made their way down two separate throats before landing in one of several quivering stomachs.

ARRRGH!!! was even less artful. It snatched whatever scraps it could from the air and shoved them at its slobbering jaw. Not all of it hit the mark: pieces of white bread were adhered via peanut
butter all across the troll’s fur. There was no doubt it was enjoying itself; with every mighty swallow, its horns gored enthusiastically at the cabinet and its gargantuan feet stamped the
dropped bread and peanut butter into a brown paste.

Neither paid us any attention. They were focused on the task, blurting incomprehensible remarks around mouthfuls of mashed food.

Tub pushed his hockey stick into my hands and unslung his bow. His eyes were glazed but determined and I felt a surge of pride. Dad was in some kind of irretrievable slumber. This was up to the
two of us and Tub knew it.

“I’ll take the smaller one,” he whispered.

“That’s your plan?” I hissed.

“What? The smaller one looks tricky.”

“Tricky? He’s almost blind!”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I bet he’s got perfect hearing.”

With trembling hands, he fit the arrow into the string and began to pull it back.

“Aim for the heart,” I urged.

At least five different spots on Blinky’s chest beat in spasmodic rhythm.

“Which one?” Tub demanded.

“Any of them!”

“Fine, fine!” Tub winced as he pulled the bowstring as far back as he could. The arrowhead dodged around like crazy—up, down, left, right. I took a step back, uninterested in
falling victim to a spectacular misfire. Tub squinted and aimed. “You get ready to go apeshit on the furry one.”

I raised the puny baseball bat and insignificant hockey stick. They felt about as lethal as a couple of pretzel rods. The only optimistic thought I could conjure was that ARRRGH!!! filled the
entire room. No matter where I struck, no matter how sorry the attack, it would be impossible to miss.

Tobias F. Dershowitz had spent his entire youth as the target of ridicule. The Trophy Cave was only the latest in a long series of treacherous locations, Steve Jorgensen-Warner only the most
infamous of those who’d dedicated their lives to his debasement. But on that night, in that kitchen, against the most daunting of foes and armed with the flimsiest of weapons, Tub’s aim
was true. The bowstring fired with a melodic
bing
and the arrow cut through the air, hard and fast, right at the center of the multi-tentacled monster. It was entirely possible that Tub
might have felled the troll had not the man of metal leapt in from the living room and deflected the arrow with his leg of bicycle chains.

The microwave beeped, its nonexistent meal done cooking.

The metal man came for us.

I backed against the wall and hit the lights. ARRRGH!!! flinched from the brightness and Blinky’s eight eyes dove for dimmer cover. Rude fluorescents shone off the man’s armor but we
were the only ones fazed. He withdrew both swords from his back with such force that a sugar bowl was sliced cleanly in two. The sugar itself seemed to suspend midair before scattering.

Tub wailed and threw the bow at him, but the metal man flicked a sword and the wood split in half. I let loose with a strangled cry and swung the bat. The metal man stepped easily to the left,
caught the head of the bat with his spiked glove, and used the forward momentum to send me flying against the stove. The hockey stick clattered to the ground, but Tub picked it up and with a
girlish yelp swung a spastic uppercut. The man of metal brought both swords together in X formation, catching the stick in the crux before giving another shove and chopping the blade of it clean
off. Tub dropped the rest of it like it was hot.

The kitchen was a maelstrom of noise. Tub was screaming. I was screaming. ARRRGH!!! and Blinky were doing the troll version of screaming. The man of metal spun his swords in either hand, cutting
the air with swooping sounds until both weapons faced skyward. The bottle caps on his arms jangled and the die-cast cars on his torso spun their wheels. He roared.

“QUIET!”

With simultaneous swipes, he sliced the hockey mask free from Tub’s face with one sword while splitting the bill of my baseball helmet with the other. Tub reached to his temple and I did
the same to my forehead, but neither of us found so much as a scrape. We had stopped screaming, though, and so had the trolls. Tub and I blinked at each other, unarmed and unmasked.

The man of metal sheathed his swords and put both gloved hands behind his head. The aviator goggles of his eyes wiggled out of place and the boom box grill of his mouth pulled to one side. He
next unlatched the slingshot band that served as his chinstrap and lifted off the headphone ears, along with the football-helmet exterior. I braced myself for the kind of scarred, gnarled visage a
lifetime of sci-fi films had prepared me for.

The smooth, healthy face I saw was a less welcome surprise.

I knew that face.

It was my Uncle Jack.

Not Uncle Jack if he had lived and matured to be fifty-eight years old. This Uncle Jack was the same kid who stared at me every day from the milk carton photo on our living room shelf: tall for
his age, loose blond hair flopping over his forehead, eyes flashing with intelligence and courage. The difference was that this boy was not freshly scrubbed and smirking with confidence. Instead,
his frowning face was scored with mud and grime, and he sniffed at the air as if uncomfortable with the smells of dish soap, pine air freshener, and peanut butter.

“Uncle Jack?” I managed.

His eyes were guarded.

He nodded once.

“Get a grip, Jim.” Tub’s voice was shaky. “That’s nobody’s uncle. That’s some kid. Some crazy kid. Some crazy kid with swords who broke into your house
and…” Tub leaned forward and the recognition hit him. “Oh, wow. Oh, geez. Jim, you know who that is? That’s Uncle freaking Jack.”

The trolls moved into positions behind Jack. ARRRGH!!! lowered its boulder-sized head so that the straggly hairs of its chin tickled Jack’s ear. Blinky’s tentacles twisted around
Jack’s arm while two of the long-stemmed eyes hovered about Jack’s head as if lending him doubled sight. Both trolls made noises back and forth. Jack nodded as if he understood. I
gripped the oven door and brought myself to my feet.