Trollhunters (21 page)

I booted the crib aside and drove Claireblade through the second troll’s softies, all the way out the other side. It uttered a death caw and dropped the baby. On instinct I let Claireblade
clatter to the floor and dove to catch the child. She landed in my hands, smacking her lips through the daubs of secretion still covering her body. I held the baby to my chest, relieved not only to
have saved her but also thrilled to have killed a troll. Jack had been right—I
did
love it.

The Nullhuller that had made the plaster cast flattened itself against the wall. I swiped Claireblade from the floor and swung it. The troll was too fast; it hopped, using the blade as a stair
step, and bounded over the edge of the crib. The sword continued its movement—and cut the changeling baby in half.

It was the grisliest thing I’d ever seen. Feelers of skin tried in vain to cover the exposed innards. The chest cavity’s organs, half human and half troll, clung to each other like
blind kittens fresh from their amniotic sacs. Only the changeling baby’s top jaw had been completed, and it gummed helplessly upon the air. The eyes, though, were pure troll—blinkless
black orbs glowering at me in condemnation. The half-formed human skull exposed the troll brain hiding beneath, a glossy green thing nippled with twitching nodules.

I was crying when I killed it. It was an abomination; the job had to be done. But the changeling had already mastered a baby’s voice, and it sobbed as I hacked it into smaller and smaller
pieces while holding the real baby in my other arm. By the end of it my entire body was shaking so badly that Claireblade fell from my grip.

The crib was thrown aside. Jack was in my face. I saw my numb, blood-spattered reflection in his goggles. He sheathed his sword and wrenched out his horseshoe, bringing it to the baby’s
face.

“She’s not…” I said.

“Shut up,” he said. He took a shuddering breath. I saw his fist tighten around his scimitar. Then he pressed the horseshoe against the infant’s forehead. The baby scrunched up
her face in annoyance. Jack sighed in relief and stuck the horseshoe back into his armor, then grabbed me by the front of the shirt.

“Where’s the last one?” he demanded.

I blinked around the room and saw nine dead Nullhullers, including the one I had lanced. Vaguely I remembered the one who had dodged my sword and vaulted away.

“I think…it went…”

I gazed at the open window.

Jack cursed and bolted from the room. ARRRGH!!! spat hot foam and bounded after him, angling her massive shoulders to fit through the door; still, the tips of her horns drew squiggles through
the sunny yellow paint. I felt a tugging in my arms and found two of Blinky’s tentacles taking the baby. He did it with such gentle assurance that I did not object. Two other tentacles joined
to shift the baby this way and that so that a fifth tentacle could daintily wipe the troll secretions from her body with a towel. The infant giggled and grabbed her feet with her chubby hands.

I retrieved Claireblade and began backing from the nursery, astounded by the sight of a dozen other tentacles at work: pushing the crib back into place, gathering the scattered toys into a
semblance of order, righting fallen lamps, reinserting pictures that had popped from their frames, and who knew what else. I’d have thought we’d never been there if not for the terrible
feeling that I’d failed.

The backyard stunned me with its normalcy. Studded gardening gloves draped drowsily across a deck chair. A clear sky pinpointed with stars hummed with the faraway progress of
red-eye airplanes. Two dogs down the block had a conversation from their respective yards. Even the grass at my feet had reclaimed its territory: the piles of innards had dissolved, leaving ten
patches of moisture no more threatening than dew.

The actors populating this easygoing stage looked as though they had wandered into the wrong play. ARRRGH!!! stood at the far edge of the lawn, her giant horned head swinging back and forth as
she searched for the escaped Nullhuller. Streetlights glinted from Jack’s twin scabbards as his upper body expanded and contracted with infuriated breaths. Even Tub looked out of place: a
regular kid, sure, but with orange hair frizzed into a clown wig and a shirt slopped to his chest with pink paint. He gave me a helpless look.

“It happened so fast,” he said.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It was just one.”

“You know
nothing,
” Jack snarled.

“Uncle Jack.” I thought the formal title might help. “We killed nine of them.”

“The bag of gallbladders? Did you forget that? We killed zero.”

A sinking feeling overtook me. I looked to Tub, who shrugged.

“It flew down here, gobbled its own guts, and took the bag. What was I supposed to do?”

“This is not your friend’s responsibility,” Jack snapped. “He is
not
a trollhunter.”

“It was just one,” I pleaded.

“That ‘just one’ will go to Gunmar. It will tell him about us. About
you
.”

“Look, I’m sorry—”

“I
told
you to stay out here. Why couldn’t you listen?”

“But I thought you guys needed—”

Jack ripped the mask from his face and whirled around.

“Who asked you to think? Don’t think.
Listen
. What, you believe it’s just your precious little life at stake here? You’re going to fail your math test? Screw up
your stupid play? There could be another
war
. Dozens, hundreds, more than you’d believe could lose their lives. Trolls you might think are worth the dog crap on your shoe, but who
just happen to be my
friends
. Humans, too, people you know—does that make it worse? We have a week, Jim. One
week
.”

The ground shook. The three of us turned to see that ARRRGH!!! had fallen to her knees. Jack took off across the lawn. I followed but tripped on my own feet. Tub was there, though, to catch me
by the bloody shoulder. Groaning in disgust, he placed Cat #6 in my hand so he could wipe the troll goo onto his jeans. We quickly came upon Jack, standing alongside his bowed friend. He had, for
some reason, drawn both swords.

ARRRGH!!!’s posture was wracked. Her mighty back hiccupped with pain and her neck was so weak that her great horns weighed down her head. I took a step closer, hoping to comfort.

Jack halted me with the tip of Doctor X.

“No closer.”

I’d made a few mistakes, but that hardly warranted an outright threat with a weapon. I was preparing to voice my grudge when I noticed a cardboard box discarded in the mown grass.
Instantly I understood and my aching shoulders slumped farther. I began circling at a safe distance, Tub fighting me for every step.

The Eye of Malevolence was fastened to ARRRGH!!!’s face. The writhing stems had twined their way into the troll’s orifices, streaming down her throat in red plaits, corkscrewing up
both nostrils, and sliding beneath each eyelid. Pulling ever tighter at ARRRGH!!!’s brain, the Eye had flattened into a gelatinous oval that bubbled like pancake batter. ARRRGH!!!’s
spine curled with agony beneath her lathered pelt.

“Get it off,” I told Jack. “It’s killing her.”

Jack’s muscles tensed, but he made no such move.

I clashed Cat #6 against Claireblade. Jack flinched, just a little.

“I’ll do it!” I shouted. “Move!”

The tree-trunk legs pistoned and ARRRGH!!! sprung to her feet, paws curled upward as if holding two planets, head thrown back. Where I expected a howl came instead multi-octave laughter,
cacophonous as a herd of trumpeting elephants. The curled horns struck a tree branch and it exploded into a hail of wood chips. Jack kept his swords ready as the spray dinged off his metal
armor.

ARRRGH!!! swooped her head toward Tub and me. The Eye of Malevolence convulsed in delight, and the green-orange iris opened in a toothed yawn.

“SSSSSSSSSSTURGESSSSSSSSSS.”

It was the soggy voice of one who’d spent decades gnawing on his tongue. Gunmar the Black, the Hungry One, saw me, smelled me, wished to eat me. From somewhere within the pupil’s
void I could hear the splintering whack of what I knew was his wooden arm. He was aching to add another few slash marks of conquer, and as much as he’d prefer to do it in person, he
wasn’t strong enough yet, so he’d just use this handy, four-ton puppet.

One of ARRRGH!!!’s clawed hands barreled at us, big as a school bus. The wind of it knocked us down before the paw itself arrived. Tub and I clung to each other in the grass, too scared to
scream.

The paw never reached us. Gunmar bawled through ARRRGH!!!’s muzzle. Tub and I scrabbled away on all fours and saw Jack withdrawing his long-sword from ARRRGH!!!’s calf. Her hackles
stiffened and she turned on my uncle, baring skewed teeth. But when she saw the boy bravely wielding his little blade, her shoulders fell. Both paws made fists and landed on the ground, and from
there she eased her body to a seated position atop the broken tree branch. Tub and I were jostled by the impact.

The Eye of Malevolence fattened and wobbled like dough. Dozens of veins retracted from ARRRGH!!!’s skull, each one unchaining her from bondage. The Eye quavered upon her muzzle for a few
seconds before falling, bouncing once on the ground, and rolling to a halt amid the manicured grass. ARRRGH!!! dropped her weary face into her massive paws. Jack sheathed his swords, put his hands
to his friend’s neck, and whispered in her ear. The suburbs were quiet enough for me to hear.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t cut deep. Just a scrape.”

“Boy humans. Me want in belly. Ashamed.”

“Shhh,” Jack whispered. “I wouldn’t let that happen.”

“Not mean it!” ARRRGH!!! cried.

“Tell me what you saw.” Jack pet the damp fur. “Before you forget.”

“Nullhuller go to Gunmar. Gunmar send more. Gumm-Gumms find fuel. Fuel for Machine.”

Even in the dim light I could see the paling of Jack’s face.

“The Machine? We destroyed the Machine. I was there, I saw it.”

“Gumm-Gumms work hard. Gumm-Gumms fix. Boy humans right. Killaheed make strong. Much sad. Much sad is ARRRGH!!!.”

From my seat in the grass I forced out a question.

“What’s the Machine?”

Jack’s expression of dread unnerved me. He shrugged away my query.

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it. What’s important is that ARRRGH!!! confirmed everything. And none of it’s good. Trolls like these tonight? That’s nothing. Gunmar
will keep sending them, every night, to occupy us while he waits for the Killaheed to be finished. It’s a perfect plan and we have to deal with it. If these Gumm-Gumms are out gathering fuel
for the Machine—”

Jack cut himself off. He searched for solace in the lines of houses, the fences, the roads, all of the comforting right angles of the suburbs. But at last he drove both swords into the lawn with
the red-faced frustration of a thirteen-year-old.

“Why does everything have to be so hard?”

The subsequent quiet would have been unbearable if Blinky hadn’t chosen that moment to slither back to us. He used a single tentacle to lift Tub and I to standing positions as he passed.
With curt movements, he plucked the Eye of Malevolence from the grass, gathered the cardboard box, and then put the former in the latter so as to save us from its blinkless stare. He tucked the box
into ARRRGH!!!’s fur and began his jovial report.

“The nursery is as dandy as ever. Even dandier if you want the truth. I could not resist rearranging a few elements so that the room had a better flow. You wouldn’t believe the
wonders that can be achieved by a more cunning placement of a nightstand! I do believe I missed my calling.”

Blinky waited for adulations. Instead he was met with a fatigued foursome rendered voiceless by a night of defeat. He sighed and looked to the east, where a line of orange razored the
horizon.

“We’ve had worse days,” he said softly. “Come, come. Let’s take these boys home.”

It was with some effort that Jack dislodged his swords from the dirt. Following this signal, ARRRGH!!! raised herself to her feet, favoring her left calf just a little. Blinky took the lead back
toward the bridge, and the other warriors began shambling after. I lagged behind just enough so that I could grab Jack’s arm. The web of notebook spirals swallowed my fingers.

Jack looked at me with bloodshot eyes.

“Why?” I asked. “Why are you dragging me into this?”

Jack’s reply was as hushed as branches blowing in the night breeze.

“It’s a terrible thing, isn’t it? To be dragged under?”