Trollhunters (18 page)

Fortunately, they had strong numbers and a stronger leader. At the tender age of seventy-five, she was yet a child, but already possessed of a strong will, an optimistic outlook, and an aptitude
for adventure. Her name was Johannah M. ARRRGH!!!.

(“What’s the
M
stand for?” I asked. “Mmmm,” Blinky replied.)

Johannah M. ARRRGH!!! would lead an army of trolls on a hunt for the Gumm-Gumm lair. With great pomp and fanfare they dug up chests containing some of the most prized possessions in all
trolldom: ancient astrolabes that, according to lore, had been gifted by the faerie folk of lower Scandinavia after a tribe of Snicksnuck trolls rescued a coterie of faeries from torture at the
hooves of a deranged faun.

Guided by these mystical compasses, the trolls began searching for the Gumm-Gumms. At the same time, an up-and-coming scribe and record-keeper of the Lizzgump clan who went by the name of Blinky
was tasked with the study of genealogical scrolls in hopes of locating a human paladin who could aid them in their oncoming battle. Day and night, Blinky scoured eight scrolls at once, devoting one
eye per scroll, until the strain was so great that, one by one, the eyes went blind—but not before discovering a family of Sturgeses right there in San Bernardino.

(“Sorry you lost your eyesight,” I said. “Indeed it was a happenstance most disagreeable,” Blinky replied, “seeing how I was but a lad of forty-four and four
hundred years. I, of course, devote a full volume of my dissertation to this tragedy.”)

The drafting of a paladin was considered a great risk. Living in peace beneath humans was one thing. But fighting alongside one? It had never been done. But with the Milk Carton Epidemic in full
swing, it was a necessary gamble. So it was that on September 21, 1969, Jack Sturges was taken against his will into Troll City, where he rapidly matured into a prominent warrior.

With Jack working in tandem with ARRRGH!!!, the troll army ransacked the Gumm-Gumm lair. While Jack single-handedly dispatched dozens of lesser trolls and commanded his legion of warriors with
unflagging vigor, it was Johannah ARRRGH!!! who took on the Hungry One. It was a battle long in the making: eleven hundred years earlier, Gunmar had lost an arm to Remmarah ARRRGH!!!,
Johannah’s grandmother, in a fantastic midnight skirmish along the Austria/Hungary border. Since that night, Gunmar had not only sworn his revenge, but had also begun to notch each kill on
the makeshift wooden arm he’d rammed into his still-bleeding stump.

The first wave of the onslaught was bleak. Gunmar, a beast so indescribably awful that he cannot, at this particular moment, be described, toyed with Johannah ARRRGH!!!. It was only when Gunmar
embedded a boulder in the hairy troll’s cranium that the tide began to change. Instead of killing Johannah ARRRGH!!!, the injury seemed to squash whatever small amount of hesitation existed
in her brain. She became an uncontrollable, rampaging beast who came at Gunmar in a tornado of teeth, claws, and fur. One of Gunmar’s eyes—the Eye of Malevolence—was torn out in
the fray. Soon Gunmar fell, his minions were killed or captured, and it was left to Jack, the human hero, to deliver the killing blow to the Hungry One.

Exhausted of bloodshed, Jack instead banished Gunmar into isolation among the deepest of earth’s caves. Gunmar slunk away, swearing revenge upon Jack, Johannah ARRRGH!!!, and all of their
offspring. These curses were difficult to understand, for Gunmar was chewing upon his tongue in rage. Every sound he released hissed like a serpent:
SSSSSSSSS
.

Jack’s mercy was a success in one sense: the remaining Gumm-Gumms swore to switch to a four-legged diet and enlisted in several eleven-step programs to keep them on the non-human-eating
wagon. Festivity reigned in the troll kingdom for months. As a sign of respect, trolls began referring to Johannah by her last name alone, and parent trolls would hold up their babies when
ARRRGH!!! passed by so that the young ones could touch the boulder still sticking out of the back of her skull.

(“That chunk of bedrock remains there to this day,” Blinky said. “It is the reason for my friend’s impaired speech.” ARRRGH!!! agreed: “Rock make unhappy
talk.”)

What Jack realized too late was that he’d doomed himself to a subterrestrial life. His mercy had been a distinctly human thing—no troll would have hesitated to destroy
Gunmar—and so he felt a responsibility to keep watch should Gunmar ever return. If Jack returned to the human world, he would grow older, and eventually the doorways to the troll world would
be lost to him. He would need to stay young to defend against Gunmar, and the only way to do that was to remain underground.

Jack, forever thirteen, trained every day, every year, ever watchful, ever paranoid. He was the only one not surprised several months before when the Eye of Malevolence showed them
Gunmar’s slow trek back from the bowels of the earth. Jack had made speeches in Troll City, but nobody listened. The trolls there had become fat, complacent, consumed with their food and
trinkets, and certain that nothing like the Gumm-Gumm War could happen again.

So defensive efforts were up to Jack, Blinky, and ARRRGH!!!. As Gunmar’s power grew, Jack decided with great regret that Jim would have to be tested for paladin potential. But Jack had
figured on having months, even years, to properly train his nephew. Now with the news of a bridge being reconstructed in the San Bernardino Historical Society Museum, those months and years had
been shaved down to mere days.

The Killaheed Bridge had been the ancestral home of Gunmar the Black in the far northern region of Scotland known in Gaelic as
A’ Ghàidhealtachd
. It is where he murdered
every blood relative, erasing his surname in favor of “the Black,” and began the Gumm-Gumm cult with himself as the principal deity. The bridge was the nexus of his ancient power, and
its shipment from across the ocean toward California must be what was powering his quick regeneration and drawing weak-minded trolls, a new army of Gumm-Gumms, back under his influence.

For months, trolls had been infiltrating San Bernardino at night and creating havoc. Nothing so far as abduction, not yet, but Jack, Blinky, and ARRRGH!!! had been kept busy enough that
they’d had little chance to search out Gunmar himself. It had been a gamble revealing themselves to Jim, and, inadvertently, Tub. But in war, such wagers were necessary. This was the lot of
the trollhunters.

(
Trollhunters
. I couldn’t help smiling a little. I liked the sound of it.)

Jack waited for us in an unlit clearing with the burlap sack over his shoulder. The clay wall before him was cracked to reveal patches of intricate tile mosaics and begrimed
frescoes created by troll artists of yesteryear. Entering this clearing from the tunnel was like traveling from throat to stomach; the rumble of motor vehicles, somewhere far above us, completed
the illusion.

He seemed smaller inside that scrap-metal armor than he had before, more the dimensions of an adolescent boy than an inscrutable devil. Surely he had heard our approach, yet he did not react. I
was about to say something when I noticed a group of trolls off to the right. Tub and I skittered aside, but Blinky and ARRRGH!!! showed no alarm. In fact, in their strange faces I saw pity.

It was the same routine I’d seen in the red-light district. These trolls stood in a trance before a leaning tower of flickering, half-busted TVs, their faces pressed to the sets, their
long tongues lapping at the screens.

“Do not stare,” Blinky said. “It is a lamentable sight.”

“What’s with you guys and TVs?” I asked.

Blinky spoke in a hush. “Do not be quick to judge, small-brained one. There is no sun in the life of a troll, indeed scarce little light at all. Is it any wonder that we cherish your
televisions, that some of us even worship them like primitive man worshipped his sun gods—Ra, Helios, Apollo, Sol Invictus, Huitzilopochtli?” His tentacles rippled haughtily.
“There is not a troll alive who possesses fewer than two sets.”

“What shows do you guys like?”

“What you would consider lacking in entertainment value, we prefer. Commercials, in fact, are prized among us for their accelerated pace and bright colorings. Nothing, though, satisfies
like pure static. Should you find time to study this liquid weave, you will discover beauty, divinity. So many sifting layers, so many patterns of meaning, so many whispered secrets.”

Drool poured from the slack mouths of at least two of the mesmerized trolls.

“So it’s like a drug?” I asked.

“It is precisely a drug. The calming effect is unlike anything else, and it is perfectly healthy in moderation. Today’s troll experiences almost daily televisual contact. Nurses use
them to ease the dementia of the elderly. Mothers use them to quiet their brood. I myself once spent a period of years riveted by an extraordinary signal from a faraway place called the BBC. I like
to think that it contributed to the melodious harmonics of my voice.”

“It did,” I said. “Trust me.”

“But I am one of the fortunate. Like any drug taken in excess, it can ruin a mind. Those poor souls there will give every coin they have to try new signals, better signals, any signal at
all, and while doing so will forget to eat, forget to drink, forget to excrete their waste. It is no coincidence that many cemeteries are located near Static Dens.”

“Why doesn’t it affect people that way?”

“Doesn’t it, dear boy?”

“All right. I see what you’re saying. But why—”

Jack slapped the brick with his right hand and snarled without turning around.

“You ask too many questions. Why this? Why that? How does it all work? What does it all mean? Down here things are what they are. You better get used to it. Or better yet, stop caring.
Because there will never be enough answers to satisfy you, and even if there were, we don’t have the time.”

From within his suit of metal he withdrew yet more metal—the intersecting discs and dials of an astrolabe. I knew from school that astrolabes were used in the Middle Ages to identify
stars. But none that I’d seen in textbooks measured up to this clockwork contraption. It was no larger than a teacup saucer but intricate beyond imagination. At least four rings, each pitted
within the other, rolled about on sharp bronze teeth, while two hands notched with indecipherable measurements struck collision points. The whole thing was encased in a lattice of gold and
decorated around the circumference with a forest silhouette so detailed that I could make out the etchings of individual leaves. Craftsmanship notwithstanding, the gold was burnished, the bronze
stained, the various components bent and chipped.

Jack held the weathered astrolabe in the air, spun the wheels, and swept it across an increasingly small stretch of wall until he was able to touch one single brick with a finger. This was
ARRRGH!!!’s signal. She shouldered her way closer, footfalls disrupting the TV signals. Several trolls broke from their trances and threw us spiteful looks.

ARRRGH!!! placed both paws to the wall. The muscled carpet of her back rippled and the wall opened along the irregular pattern of the brick. I covered my face against the specks of stone sent
swirling by the churning cloud of dust. Tub and I shooed away the grit and watched as Jack and the two trolls made their way into a place that looked oddly familiar. We, too, passed through the
door and were so amazed by what we saw that we weren’t startled by the sound of the wall sealing shut behind us.