Trollhunters (8 page)

When midnight came, I learned it from pop-up warnings on my phone and laptop. I had set the alarms to make sure I got some sleep after the long day, but I dismissed both of
them in disgust. All the lights in my room were off and my eyes were straining at the screen, yet sleep wasn’t going to happen, not anytime soon.

I wasn’t making it any easier on myself with the subject of my surfing. Instead of studying math, I’d been scouring the most popular video sites, and some lesser-known ones, too, on
a hunt for anyone else who’d seen what I’d seen. My initial searches, limited to subjects like “sewer drains” and “locker rooms,” came up empty, but after ninety
minutes of tweaking I’d found a second layer of content, videos so unpopular and poorly indexed that you had to learn a new language of misspelling to have a shot at uncovering them. Most of
these were blurred snippets of absolutely nothing, while drunken voices hollered off-camera, “Look at that! Look at that right there!”

It was when I began noticing location tags that I started to sweat. I found no less than six videos posted within the past six years uploaded from right here in Saint B. To call these videos
amateur would be putting it nicely, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something moving through those dimly lit alleys and behind those distant dumpsters. The videos were marked with
only one or two “likes” and underscored with comments along the lines of
omg so fake
. But to someone who’d seen hands and feet and shoulders of unimaginable dimension,
the shapes looked eerily familiar.

It got so I couldn’t take any more. I tore out my earbuds. Right away I wished I hadn’t done it. The stillness in the house was unnatural. I can’t put it better than that. It
was as if there were new mouths in the house sucking up our supply of air. I could hear things I normally couldn’t: the buzzing from the front porch security camera, Dad’s breathing
from his bedroom.

The idea that someone could be inside, though, was insane. The place was a fortress. You couldn’t get through our doors without a chainsaw and blowtorch, not to mention the screaming of
multiple alarms and the arrival of three different security company vans. Through the crack in my door, I could see the proof on the other side of the living room: two red lights signifying that
the various security systems were armed. I had been watching those two lights from bed all my life. So why did they seem wrong to me?

The two lights blinked.

Yes, that’s what was bothering me.

They weren’t console lights at all. They were eyes.

I lay there, unable to breathe, as the red eyes shifted about. Floorboards moaned beneath a great weight. I heard an exhale like the nickering snort of a horse. And then the red eyes moved from
the far edge of the living room, revealing the much smaller security console bulbs behind it. Whatever it was, it was coming toward the bedrooms. It was about the worst thing I could possibly
imagine. Until the next thing happened.

More eyes opened: three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Each of them swam in the same space of air as if connected to the same head, though each operated independently, some snaking to the left,
some to the right, some glancing backward, and the rest straining right at me. Whatever this thing—or things—was, it filled the entire hall. I looked over the edge of my bed for some
kind of weapon, but all I could see was kids’ stuff: half-built models, unfinished homework, and random other evidence of a guy trying to figure out what he was good at. None of it had helped
me before, and it wasn’t going to help me now.

The first door it reached was Dad’s. Like me, Dad kept it cracked open and all I could do was hope that he was already crouched for attack. A few of the red eyes disappeared from view as
they entered his room. I heard a jangling, as if the thing were reaching into pockets filled with change, and then an unpleasant, moist noise that continued for a good minute:
Sluuuurp.
Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp.

My shoulders shook so violently I grabbed the laptop to steady them. Yes—the laptop! The screen had gone to sleep but all I needed to do was jog the touch pad and it would fill the room
with white light. I reached for it but hesitated. Something warned me that what I might see would haunt me forever. I might end up like my dad. If I was too afraid to do it, though, wasn’t
that just as bad?

A shadow fell over me. I know that seems strange, as the house was completely dark, but this dark had weight: I could feel it cover my body like a layer of mud. It had texture, too: scaly, cold,
slithering across my skin. And it most definitely had a smell: a brackish funk like a dead animal rotting at the bottom of a well. Though the slurping noise was still emitting from my
father’s bedroom, several of the eight eyes had squirmed their way through the crack of my bedroom door and orbited the foot of my bed like slow, radioactive bugs.

Faces filed through my mind: Tub, Claire Fontaine, Dad. It was a good-bye, I think, because, in a way, I was doing this for them. I spun the laptop around and swiped the touch pad.

There was no moment of adjustment; light was everywhere. My eyes, so wide and frightened, instinctively shut, and I had to blink and blink and blink before the spots swam away and I could see
beyond the foot of my bed. I saw the closet at the other end of my room, the door, the hallway outside, the living room.

Nothing was there.

Here is the truth. I didn’t feel relief. I didn’t feel joy. I shoved the computer off my lap and sunk my head into my hands, clawing my fingernails into my scalp. This was it, then.
My sanity was bidding me adieu. Impulsively I threw back the covers. I would get out of bed, turn on all the lights, and scour the rest of house. I had to. Maybe there would be some evidence that
absolved me from my derangement. I swung my legs around and was about to stand when my eye caught the closet.

Like I’d told Tub, it had been my closet that had scared me the most when I was little. Still, it was awful small for the thing I had seen drifting through the house—though with all
those eyes moving around it had been impossible to accurately gauge its size.

My heart was hammering as I put one foot down. The floorboards creaked. I winced at the noise but kept my eyes on the closet, trying to catch any motion behind the slats. Then, carefully, I put
my other foot down. Again, the floor creaked. Still no movement inside the closet. All the fears of my childhood came rushing back. I had no choice but to go up to it, fling it open, and take
whatever came next.

I stood and craned my neck for a better look.

The computer’s light revealed that the closet was empty.

Then two massive furred paws shot out from under my bed and locked around my ankles, sinewy palms greased with hot sweat, jagged yellow claws cold as a river. After the paws yanked but before my
head struck the floor, I had but a single, rueful thought:

Tub was right. Under beds, that’s where the monsters live.

Water dripped into my eye. It was acidic and stung. I rubbed at it and became aware of stiff needles of straw poking at my skin. More drops of liquid splashed down, and I sat
up, wiping at my face with an elbow. I saw that I still wore my bedtime sweatpants and T-shirt. A pile of dirty straw, though, had replaced my bed, and a cave had replaced my room.

On unsteady legs I rose, brushing off the straw. The room looked to be carved from rock, though what I could see of the ceiling was threaded with the bottommost layer of the real world:
gurgling, ancient water pipes; openings of moss-coated sewer canals; and scorched electrical grids covered with soot. Orange rust water dripped steadily from a dozen outmoded joints. A single
passageway led out of the room into a hallway. A claustrophobic instinct told me to take it.

My sight adjusted as I walked, and I began to make out piles of junk all around me. Had it been random trash, I would have been less frightened. Instead, it was painstakingly organized. To my
left was a hill of typewriters, old-timey ones with manual return carriages as well as models from the 1980s featuring miniature display screens. The whole pile reeked of ink. To my right was a
wall of microwave ovens stacked like brickwork—black ones, white ones, brown ones, red ones—some of them old and dusty, others newer and still spattered with the remains of their last
meals. All of them were unmistakably broken.

I moved into the hall. To my surprise it was illuminated by oil sconces hung higher than I could reach. Lamps didn’t light themselves—I reminded myself to walk softly, though it
didn’t much matter. The place was loud with the hissing of the lamps, the babbling of water through the overhead pipes, and a subterranean rumble that must have been the foul-smelling air
churning through the underground passages. This was worse than any Trophy Cave I’d ever imagined.

The hall branched off into several rooms, each stocked with other detritus of human life. One room contained a quicksand of watches: digital, analogue, calculator; men’s, women’s,
kids’; and so many of them that you’d have to wade waist-deep through the glittering moat. Another room was filled with fans: dust-coated ceiling fans, plastic desk fans, big industrial
fans that stood on thick metal poles. Cords from a few wreathed up into the tracery of pipes and wires, and those fans were on, the blades clanging and the gears grinding with every oscillation.
The last room I dared look inside was the worst: refrigerators, maybe fifty of them in every condition, standing like headstones in a grassless graveyard.

The end of the hall opened into a spacious cavern lit by a bright fire, though I struggled to make out any details through the rain of fetid water dripping from the towering entryway—a
stone arch that looked as if it had been grafted from a sixteenth-century church. I began to pass through but paused in astonishment, the oily water weighing down my hair.

It was a cathedral of junk. Everywhere I looked, piles were gathered against grimy brick walls, these artifacts even more frightening because they were the stuff of kids. There was a mountain of
cheap toy weapons. Jumbled in a corner were a thousand mismatched roller skates, one or two of which were squeaking as they rolled across the uneven floor. There were two dueling towers of
lunchboxes emblazoned with happy cartoon faces. Most disturbing of all was the gigantic pyramid that dominated the room: bicycles, hundreds of them dissolving into rust, tangled together and
reaching twenty feet into the air.

Clusters of flickering fluorescent lights were bundled together with wire and rigged into some source of stolen power. But their sick blue glow paled next to the hot white fire that burned from
an oven at the far side of the room, crackling as if recently fed. I could not resist walking toward it as humans had done since the dawn of time.

A butte of discarded dolls blocked my view of the oven’s mouth. I began to circle my way around the dolls when the flames revealed a large stone mural carved into the wall. It was
rough-hewn but of jagged complexity. On the right it seemed to depict a series of beasts exiting from beneath a series of bridges to board a large sailing ship. This same ship was present on the
left of the mural, with more beasts departing and ducking beneath new bridges.

Spanning across the entire ocean was a rendering of what seemed to be the most important bridge of all. Carvings of grasping hands, paws, tentacles, and claws all reached up toward the central
stone, which depicted a horrid lording figure with six arms. Its eyes were uneven: one was a sparkling ruby embedded in the stone, the other a gaping abscess.

Those details were lurid, but what was carved beneath them was worse. It seemed to suggest a war between beasts and humans so tumultuous that you could not tell where one raised club melded into
another firing gun, or where one biting mouth blended into another swinging axe. I averted my gaze to the border of the mural, which was made up of portraits of individuals I could only assume were
important figures. All of them were hideous. One had a dog’s snout and fangs. The next had practically no head at all, its beady eyes centered upon its smooth chest. The third had scarlet
eyes, eight of them on long stems.