Trollhunters (9 page)

The eyes swayed.

They were not part of the mural.

The thing from my house glided toward me with surprising grace for something with an indeterminate number of legs, all of which were hidden behind a patchwork kilt scaled with layers of medals,
prizes, trophies, and award ribbons. An incalculable tangle of tentacles twined around one another as if dying to squeeze something to death. As it passed the oven, the firelight revealed the
thing’s olive-green coloring, reptilian texture, and lacquer of slime lubricating its undulating appendages. Its mouth, a horizontal gash, opened and released a strangled bleat:

“Grrruuuuglemmmurrrrrph.”

My feet caught in a knot of doll hair and I fell.

The thing came faster, nattering with nonsensical grunts. I was on my back and covered with grinning, poseable plastic. I could feel the heat of the stove and wondered if it might house a poker
or some other sort of weapon. But there was no time. The thing was stomping dolls flat and leaning right over me. Tentacles threaded the air. Eight eyes hovered over my field of vision. I braced
for destruction.

But a few of the eyes behaved as if uncertain that I was there. Like an idiot, I passed a hand back and forth in front of one of them. It did not react. I considered running. Was I fast enough
to bolt before feeling one of those tentacles tighten around my neck?

“He can’t see you,” a voice said. “He’s nearly blind.”

The horrid thing straightened up and turned toward the oven. It gibbered a few more indescribable syllables. I looked in that direction, too, and saw, rising from a squatting position by the
mouth of the oven, a man made of metal. Rising with him were two long, glimmering swords. The blades of both were stained with blood. He flicked them to expel the excess carnage and then, in a
single expert movement, sheathed the weapons in twin scabbards bolted to his back.

“His name’s Blinky,” he said. “Trolls have a sense of humor about their names.”

He paused.

“Not about much else, though.”

The man’s voice squawked with feedback, as if forced through a ramshackle stereo speaker. In fact, that looked to be the case: covering his mouth was the metal grill of an antiquated boom
box. He was not, I saw, a robot, but rather a human-sized being equipped in specialized gear. Like everything down here, the suit was constructed of junk. The mask was dominated by an oversize pair
of aviator goggles, but also featured part of an old football helmet, ear protectors made out of industrial headphones, and a chinstrap fashioned from a child’s slingshot.

All of the junk had once belonged to children.

The missing children.

The Milk Carton Epidemic.

I found that I couldn’t move.

His armor, if that’s what it was, was just as incredible. His fingers flexed within mismatched winter gloves coated with sharp tacks. His forearms were studded with soda caps, each one of
them dimpled from bottle openers. His biceps were protected with the wire from a hundred spiral-bound school notebooks. His chest was plated with relics from a little girl’s baking set,
miniature pans in the shapes of hearts and stars and horses. All down his stomach were die-cast cars and trucks, their little chrome parts shining in the firelight. Both of his legs were wrapped
over and over in bike chains. Some were red with rust, but a few still glimmered with oil.

When he moved, it sounded like a bowlful of nails being stirred.

I rolled away from both him and the troll—Blinky, if that was to be believed—and leapt to my feet. The man stopped advancing. The handles of his swords jutted up behind his head like
horns. I had not forgotten that they dripped with blood.

The metal man held up a hand. The tacks glinted in the firelight.

“You need to listen to me.”

“Why?” I asked. “Who are you? Where am I?”

“We don’t have much time.”

“Why not? What are you going to do to me?”

“You overslept. It’s almost dawn.”

“What happens at dawn?”

“You go home.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“There’s no time to explain.”

“Talk fast, then.”

He sliced a hand through the air. Metal chimed against metal.

“We do
not
have
time
!”

From a distant chamber came a growl of something large awakening.

“Now you’ve done it,” he said. “You’ve woken ARRRGH!!!.”

The battle cry slammed around the cavern. When it was gone, the only sounds were the man’s quick breaths and the toy cars attached to his chest, spinning their tiny wheels.

Then even those sounds were overtaken. Massive footsteps began crashing from inside a tunnel next to the stone mural. Everything in the cave reacted to the vibration: roller skates escaped,
plastic guns tumbled and made electronic shooting noises, bikes spun their flat tires.

I backed away.

“Arrrgh?”

“You’re not listening. I told you to listen.” The metal man took a deep breath. “ARRRGH!!!.”

I backed away some more.

“Three
R
s, three exclamation points. Take my advice and don’t mispronounce it.”

“I won’t mispronounce it, I swear.”

The goliath emerged from the tunnel as comfortably as a dog from a doghouse, coarse black fur pouring into the chamber before I could make out any actual arms or legs. It rose to its full height
after passing beneath the archway and stretched its arms as if working out the kinks of a nap. Even beneath the fur I could see huge loops of muscles flexing. The same clawed paws I recognized from
the manhole, as well as from under my bed, tightened into fists.

ARRRGH!!! was built like a gorilla but three times larger: two arms, two legs, and, thankfully, just two eyes. Horns, curled like those of a ram, nicked across low-hanging pipes. One of the
pipes sprung a leak and gray water spilled across greasy fur. The thing’s orange eyes cast about with animal perceptiveness, and it raised its snout and sniffed. Its mouth fell open to reveal
a purple, slavering mouth armed with haphazard daggers of teeth.

It had smelled me.

I retreated until I was backed against a pile of bedsprings. ARRRGH!!! crossed the room in four colossal lopes that shook rust from overhead pipes like falling snow. The beast loomed over me,
then bent at the waist so that its wet nose was inches from my face. It sniffed once, then exhaled. The blast blew the hair back from my face. Viscous drops of saliva fell from a chipped tooth and
pooled warmly on my stomach. Its avid eyes, each the size of a softball, catalogued my details.

It snarled and the bedsprings sang.

The metal man slipped a gloved hand between two cake pans of his chest plate, scrounged for a moment, and then withdrew a bronze medallion swinging upon a dirty chain. The symbols were clear
even from a distance: a long-sword, an unrecognizable language, and the howling mug of a troll.

“Put this on,” he said.

ARRRGH!!! took one look at the medallion, turned its awful face to the ceiling, and let loose with a tyrannosaurus roar. Its horns struck a patch of fluorescents, and sparks spilled upon the
metal man like molten rain. Whether ARRRGH!!!’s cry was one of rage or elation, I couldn’t tell. What I could tell was that both characters were distracted.

I bolted for the nearest corridor, passing the metal man so closely I could have swiped the medallion had I wanted to, which I did not. They all noticed: I heard a jangle of bike chains, an
apelike snort, and the moist slurp of multitudinous feet scrambling across the cave.

“Prrrruuummfffffllllarrrrggg!”

Blinky’s cry rattled my bones as I dove into the passageway. I collided against a cold wall. There were no lamps. I pressed one hand to the wall and kept moving. The tunnel crooked left; I
managed not to flatten my face. It crooked right; I lost contact with the wall and spent a few seconds floundering in the eclipse. Drifting from behind were ominous sounds of pursuit.

Instantly, I was lost.

“Stop! Don’t go any farther!”

The man of metal was closing in. I took the darkness at a suicidal sprint. Then I noticed a light. It was dim, but I picked up my pace until I found myself hurtling through a hall so narrow that
I could feel the walls press at both of my shoulders. There was a glow here just bright enough to allow me to avoid crashing into the tunnel’s dead end. What a sad, dark place this was to
die.

Something wet ran down my cheek, and I looked up to see that the light came through a drain pipe just wide enough for me to crawl through. The idea of wedging my body inside was the worst thing
I’d ever considered, but at least ARRRGH!!! and Blinky, both of whom were getting closer, would be too large to follow. I gripped the edge of the pipe and hauled myself into it.

Sewage filled the bottom few inches, and the fecal stink had me gagging. The metal man would hear; the only option was to crawl farther. Using my elbows and knees I inched through the morass. My
head bumped along the pipe’s ridges and sewage soaked through my clothes, but I kept moving—the light was growing brighter.

The end of the pipe took a dramatic downward slant. I peered over the edge and could see nothing but mud. But there were light sources down there, potentially hundreds, flickering in restless
patterns. There was noise, too, not the industrial drone of the sewers but voices, shouts, laughter, the clunking of wood, the ringing of metal, the rattle of what sounded like coins.

I had no other choice. I wiggled myself forward. For a terrible second I thought I was stuck and entertained a fantasy of being drowned in sewage over a period of weeks, but then I pushed off
with my feet and shot out the end of the pipe.

For two seconds I was airborne. Then I landed in a soft pile that, given its placement beneath a sewer pipe, I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn was not, in fact, mud. I sat up and
glopped the muck from my face in handfuls. Finally I gave up and sat there, panting and reeking. It took a minute for me to appreciate that I could see quite well by the torchlight. It took even
longer to appreciate the sound of a bustling marketplace. I had not looked up from my lap yet. I wondered if I should. The lights and the sounds seemed so familiar, so
ordinary
, until I
remembered that I was somewhere deep underground and nothing down here was ordinary.

I looked.

It was an entire city of trolls. The landscape of narrow pathways and askew structures stretched for a good mile before dropping into darkness. Sloppy, mud-packed dwellings
were everywhere but largely empty, having voided their troll contents so that they might take part in the clamorous bazaar. Smoke rose from food stands, where small skinned corpses of what I hoped
were squirrel and rabbit roasted on spits. Other lean-tos offered up strange works of art: foreboding crests printed on rawhide, stones polished so that they glowed as if lit from within, bizarre
periscopes and outlandish metronomes and other devices. Steam billowed from shop fronts where glowing metal rods were hammered into shape. Cauldrons of mysterious goo were stirred and poured into
crude wooden bowls. And everywhere there was bartering: misshapen coins going from tentacle to paw, satchels of croaking frogs traded for jars of lightning bugs, and seemingly indistinguishable
rocks scrutinized through a magnifying glass and set upon scales before their cautious exchange.

Crawling, stomping, and slinking through this demented metropolis was a pageant of beasts of indescribable variety. The first to notice me was a trio of ten-foot behemoths pulling behind them
the remains of a car frame with every square inch wrapped in Christmas lights. The three trolls were of alarming complexion, sported gray beards down to their knees, and were identical aside from
the pattern of their scars. Actually, there was one more difference: only one of them had an eye, a bulging sphere that flicked around with birdlike sensitivity. The cyclops saw me and held up an
arm to halt his companions, each of whom had a single empty eye socket. When the eyeless ones began to yammer unhappily, he removed the eye, which looked wrinkled and dry, and handed it to the left
one, who stuffed it into his own socket. In this slow fashion, they each took a turn staring.

I stood up, dripping sewage. I could dash past them, but was I safer right here?

From somewhere nearby came the earsplitting answer. It was ARRRGH!!!.

I raced at the left troll, currently eyeless, and though he swiped an arm in my direction, I ducked beneath it and found myself barreling down a main avenue. Suddenly there were trolls on every
side of me, their bizarre anatomies brushing across my skin. Some were gargantuan, and I dove between their legs. Others were less than a foot high and scurried about like vermin, clambering over
one another and rattling tiny shields and sabers. Some wore threadbare capes and tattered gowns complete with frayed insignias. Others wore makeshift tunics of thistledown and thornbush. Most,
though, were naked, and I saw them as a blur of colors: jet black, burnished bronze, pink as tongue, red as blood.

Bursting from the crowd, I found myself inches from a butcher counter. I collided with it. Carcasses swung wildly. A noseless, cross-eyed troll wearing a dirty apron and holding a rusty butcher
knife bellowed in outrage. I backpedaled into a mass of hungry customers, who at last had time to notice the human invader in their midst. Deafening foghorn bellows were joined by high-pitched
snarls and resounding grumbles. Answering their call, from two aisles over, was ARRRGH!!!.