“They jabbered at me so crazy I thought I’d puke. I don’t know if they were asking if I wanted a juice box or if they were planning my dissection. I can’t understand them, Jim. Please try to remember that. It was like being trapped in a preschool. Except where the toddlers could eat you.”
Blinky sidled up next to me with those mysterious legs, his kilt of medals creating wind-chime music.
“Do not sodden your battle scarf with tears,” he said. “I fear your uncle was, shall we say, coarse when addressing your concerns? Understand that this rushed introduction is far from ideal. The ideal way, incidentally, according to customs in which I am fully literate, is through cuneiform tablet invitation to a midmorning tea complete with the competitive gobbling of succulent goat pudding and the call-and-response recitation of the ode to amity, ‘The Epic of Greinhart the Grinning,’ in which both you and your man-at-arms, and we, as well, would recite alternating stanzas in the voices of the Old World Elders. O-ho! How I would savor lending full vociferation to Stugnarb the Affectionate while you responded in the agreeable tones of Funkletta the Affable. Alas, we live in a time ill-suited for long-form poetry. For this reason and more, I beg that you forgive your uncle’s brusqueness. Since the very hour we brought him into our realm, his life has been hardship.”
“You’re the ones who stole him?”
“Technically, it was ARRRGH!!! who did the stealing.”
“Boy stole,” said ARRRGH!!!. “Boy sad. Sad boy.”
So it was all true. The legendary monster that had taken Uncle Jack in 1969 was not a figment of my father’s screwed-up imagination. That monster was real and she was right here, communicating with me, walking on all fours so as to fit through the tunnel, her long red tongue licking stray globs of peanut butter from her fur. Unexpectedly I felt anger rather than fear.
“You two have no idea what you did. To my Dad. To his whole family. To me, too—my life has gotten ruined right along with everyone else’s, you know.”
Several of Blinky’s eyes drooped so low they touched the stone floor.
“Many a long day have I spent undulating in regret rather than sleeping. Shall I admit to you a shameful truth? Indeed, I shall! The night we took Jack we were uncertain that we had claimed the correct child. In fact, we’d tried to take both brothers and failed in spectacular fashion. But Jack, frightened though he was at being taken from your remedial world and plunged into our advanced kingdom, would not permit us to go back and exchange him for your father. He said—and this I shall never forget, for it fills my seven cold bellies with warmth—‘Keep me. I’ll do what you ask. Just leave my little brother alone.’”
I tried to imagine my dad, uncredited inventor of the Excalibur Calculator Pocket and lawn-mower-for-hire, down here among the trolls. But I could only imagine him rolled into a ball in the corner. Nonetheless, Dad had been right about one thing: Uncle Jack might be the bravest kid who ever lived.
“Translate, Jim, translate,” Tub hissed.
“No time,” I murmured. “This one talks a ton.”
“Oh, okay. I’ll just keep on being completely terrified, then.”
“Nothing so drowns me in melancholic murk as does Jack’s uneasy fate,” Blinky continued. “Yet I rouse myself from that lachrymose lugubriosity by recalling the forty-five years of peace that followed. The hundreds of human children whose lives were saved. Your uncle is responsible for that, with the humble assistance of present company. Jack Sturges brought an end to what you call the Milk Carton Epidemic.”
“Why did it happen? Who took all those kids?”
Blinky’s eyes grew redder. Half blind though they were, every one of them found me.
“Gunmar the Black.”
ARRRGH!!! howled. Lamps flickered. Stones spilled from the sides of the tunnel.
“An apropos reaction from my shaggy sidekick! Jack helped us vanquish Gunmar the Black—alias the Hungry One, alias He Who Sups of Blood, alias the Untangler of Entrails—thereby draining Gunmar of his considerable power. Now, for reasons we do not yet understand, Gunmar is once more growing stronger. It has always been his goal to invade the human world and feast at will, and that is precisely what will happen if we do not locate him soon.”
The tunnel darkened as we passed through a stone portico opening into a spacious cavern. Once my eyes adjusted to the brighter light I recognized it as the place I’d been before. There was the steaming stove and the mountain of old bicycles lording over the various other foothills of junk. Above, the packets of hot-wired fluorescent lights spat irritably and radiated sickly glows.
“Oh, neat,” Tub said. “Can I have one of these bikes?”
He reached out and I slapped his wrist.
“Dead kid bikes!” I hissed.
Tub scrubbed at his hand as if he’d plunged it into a bowl of spiders.
Across the cave, Jack was standing before a large, flat stone and sifting through a pile of sharp metal that glinted in the firelight. I found that I didn’t especially want to know what he was doing. Instead, I turned back to the trolls.
“This Gunmar guy,” I said. “How do you know for sure he’s getting stronger?”
Four of Blinky’s eyes performed a nodding gesture at ARRRGH!!!. The hairy beast squirreled a massive paw into her thick pelt and after some rustling around emerged with a battered old cardboard box. Gently she lowered it to our level. The box itself seemed irrelevant: it bore the stamps and stickers of a shipping company and it was addressed to a San Bernardino address. The top flap, though, was moving as if nudged by something inside. My feet felt cemented to the ground.
“Fine,” Tub sighed. “Tell Grandma I love her. Make up something nice about the cats, too.”
He psyched himself up with a few quick breaths, then threw open the flap and looked in.
“Oh, Jim.” His voice was monotone. “Jim, oh. Oh, oh, oh. Jim, Jim, Jim.”
I gritted my teeth and bent over the open flap.
Inside the box was a giant eyeball. The iris was the mixed colors of pea green and cantaloupe orange, the vitreous humor was a sickly yellow, and laced throughout was a grasping network of desperate red blood vessels. Not only was it the same size as Steve Jorgensen-Warner’s ill-famed basketball, but it made that infamous threat seem downright benign.
“The Eye of Malevolence,” Blinky said. “ARRRGH!!! ripped it from Gunmar the Black during the final confrontation in 1969. Let me assure you that the Eye is a bad thing that ought to be destroyed, in the off chance that is not self-evident. But pray give pause to your urges to squash it! The Eye serves a dark purpose. As owner of the accursed orb, ARRRGH!!! has the ability to use it to see what Gunmar sees. For decades, it was darkness, obscurity, despair. In recent weeks, however, the view has changed. And ARRRGH!!!—dear dutiful, selfless ARRRGH!!!—has been tasked with looking through the Eye far more frequently than advisable.”
“Glurrrgrrummmfahfrummmph, eh?” Tub said. “Fascinating!”
I apologized to Tub before giving him a quick recap.
“Okay, that’s actually pretty interesting,” Tub said. “Can we see it? Can you put on the eye right now?”
It was strange to see a being as large as ARRRGH!!! cower. Blinky’s eight eyes arranged themselves in sympathetic formation. But the hairy troll rolled her massive jaw and found the courage to throw back her shoulders until they were as big as the sails of a ship.
“Boy human. Favor ask. I do. For friend.”
We bent over the cardboard box in anticipation of the Eye’s removal. The pupil was blacker than black, an abyss so absolute that I felt my body tipping toward its promised oblivion. It had a salty seaside odor, strong enough to make me dizzy. Yet I wanted to inhale its pungent gases until I’d absorbed all of its sick power. I leaned closer, just inches away, fantasizing about what the Eye of Malevolence might feel like against my skin. Hot? Cool? Silky? Rubbery? I had to know.
The Eye contracted like a bicep. The vessels thickened as if pumped full of paint. One of the v
essels popped, spilling greasy orange blood that fizzed as if carbonated. The black pupil yawned like a mouth and the iris shattered into triangular daggers of teeth, which gnashed at my eyelashes before someone yanked me back to safety.
“Bad idea.”
Jack slapped the box flap shut, wrapped ARRRGH!!!’s fingers around it, and shoved the hand away with all of his might. The towering beast snorted as if awakening from a daydream and discovering with honest surprise that the wilted box was resting in her great gray palm. Ducking her gigantic head like a chastened child, the troll tucked the box into her draperies of fur. Jack glared at Blinky, whose guilty eyes found eight different things to look at. Then Jack found someone else to glare at: me.
“You connect too often with the Eye, you start seeing things like Gunmar. Start acting like him, too. Not good. Believe me.”
Given that I was doubled over coughing the Eye’s invasive stink from my lungs, I believed him. If this was the effect of one small piece of Gunmar the Black, I had little interest in meeting the rest.
Jack hitched up a loaded burlap sack.
“Come on. Long night. Let’s get to it.”
Eager to return to Jack’s good graces, ARRRGH!!! and Blinky hurried by on either side of me. I took a personal moment to expectorate the rest of the Eye’s residue from my mouth. While bent with hands on knees, I glanced at the stone mural and remembered how the bridge depicted as stretching across the Atlantic Ocean was identical to the one procured by Professor Lempke.
“Hey,” I said. “What does the Killaheed Bridge have to do with all of this?”
The cellar dwellers halted in unison. First, Blinky’s wide red eyes oscillated in my direction. ARRRGH!!! moved next, turning her slobbering snout over her goliath shoulder. Jack was the last to look at me, his face unreadable in the chiaroscuro light.
I wiped the spit from my lips and cleared my throat.
“Did I say that wrong? Killa-hide-y? Killa-hoo-dee?”
Nobody moved.
“I just noticed it on your wall there. Tub and I saw the real one at the museum. It opens to the public on Friday. Tub and I could probably sneak you in free if you—”
Jack dropped his sack with a metallic crunch, stalked across the room, leapt over the pile of dolls, and collided with me straight on. He snared my collar with both gloves, his pin-studded knuckles ripping through the fabric.
“Here? How? What the hell are you talking about?”
Tub, my hero, patted ineffectually at Jack’s shoulder.
“Let up, man! It’s just part of a stupid exhibit!”
Jack threw me to the floor and charged Tub, who fell to his butt against the hill of bicycles.
“The Killaheed Bridge?” Jack shouted. “In San Bernardino?”
“Yes!” Tub pleaded.
“And Friday? What happens on Friday?”
“I don’t know, man! Something about the head stone? It shows up on Friday or something?”
Jack’s shoulders raged up and down. He forced himself to back away, as if afraid he might accidentally tear us to pieces, and in a swift motion pulled his mask back over his face. With those emotionless glass eyes in place, he withdrew both swords from their scabbards, twirled them once, and held them with trembling fists. Then he leaned back and bayed like a coyote through the metallic filter of the mask. The pipes overhead buzzed and shed filaments of rust. Tub and I held our ears.
Before the shout finished echoing, Jack whirled around and decapitated a doll with his left sword and sliced the handlebars off a bike with his right. Both items toppled into the mouth of the oven. Jack did not pause to bask in this impressive feat but instead stomped across the cave, sheathed his swords, picked up the burlap sack, and marched into a side tunnel. He vanished into the darkness.
I watched the doll’s happy face melt into a disfigured blob.
Tub helped me up.
“That uncle of yours is going to kill us.”
“I know,” I said.
Tentacles enveloped our shoulders, more than we could count, each quivering suction cup attaching to our flesh painfully and pushing us forward.
“There, there, nothing but a spot of dirt. Just some good-natured roughhousing between boys, eh?” His sigh was jittery. “Goodness, this is trickier than I expected. But worry not, dwarfish brave ones. We’ll be at the training ground in three stones, no longer.”
“Three stones?” I mumbled.
“Apologies, apologies.” Blinky whisked us into the dark tunnel through which Jack had vanished. “Stones are a troll measurement of time. It’s quite literal. Three stones being the amount of time it takes an average troll to eat three stones. In other words, not long at all.”
“You eat rocks?”
“Not if it can be avoided. It’s a bitter meal for the sophisticated palette. But culinary preferences are of little consequence right now. Hurry along.”
Blinky’s eyes emitted a pale red light, just enough for us to see by. Up ahead we heard the jangling of Jack’s armor. He wasn’t waiting for us to catch up, that was for sure. What’s more, I no longer wanted to catch up. Maybe my uncle had been valiant in saving my father from a life beneath the world’s surface, but the forty-five years spent down here had twisted his mind, turned him into a madman.
I put on the breaks and held back Tub with an arm.
“Feckless little leprechauns!” Blinky cried. “Your temerity shall be the death of me! Oh, why do I allow this life of conflict to interrupt the cozy solitude of the scholar? Favor me, runt animals, by continuing on?”
“Explain,” I said. “That’s all I ask.”
At full volume Blinky’s scornful tone was plenty intimidating.
“My emotional state is not to be trifled with!”
“The Killaheed Bridge, Gunmar the Black,” I said. “We can’t protect ourselves from that psycho up there if we don’t know what you’re even talking about.”
Tub held onto my waist like a drowning man.
“Our Father,” he mumbled, “who harks from heaven…shank us this day…some daily bread…”
“Tub!” I hissed. “You’re Jewish!”
“I know,” he hissed back, “that’s why I don’t know the damn words!”
ARRRGH!!! growled from behind us. Her hot breath dampened our necks.
“Explain!” I said, bracing myself against an outcropping of brick.
“And forgive us our bread,” Tub continued, “as we forgive those who bread against us…”
Blinky recoiled his tentacles. With dry rustles, they twisted, untwisted, and laced into patterns the meaning of which I couldn’t begin to guess. Ooze hung from his pores in beads; the effect was like that of a great inhale.
“Very well. You do, after all, have standing before you the foremost living authority on troll movement in America. But hark, young scamps! My explanations come with two conditions. Condition one! That I might save time by quoting liberally from my unfinished eleven-thousand-page, thirty-eight-volume dissertation, Troll Migration from the Old World and Suggestions for Future Growth and Sustainable Materials; Featuring an Account of the Great Gumm-Gumm War in America and Appendices on Euro-American Troll Type, Size, Smell, and Hue. Condition two! That we keep locomoting in this direction during the education. The night is not infinite in length. All agreed?”
“Sure. Fine. Start talking.” I nudged Tub. “He’s going to tell us stuff.”
Tub sniffled from where he nuzzled my armpit.
“Amen,” he concluded.
Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we
live: his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.
This origin, Blinky said, is considered a fairy tale by modern trolls. Some even bristle at the very word troll, derived from an ancient Norse word meaning “one who walks clumsily.” Regardless of what you call them, there is little doubt that human civilization after the Ice Age was frequently interrupted by the six varieties of troll: mountain, forest, sea, water, farm, and hulder-folk—all of whom held great hatred in their hearts for the humans who ruined the forests, fields, and rocks that had long been the trolls’ domains. Thankfully, humans also built plenty of bridges, structures so laden with symbolism (the crossing from one place to another) that trolls were able to use them as shortcuts into the underworld.
(“All bridges?” I asked Blinky. “Yes,” he said. “Even foot bridges?” I asked. “Yes,” he said. “What if I just laid a plank over a hole, would that work?” I asked. “You need to let me finish this story,” he replied rather sternly.)
Trolls also had the ability to come and go from beneath the beds of innocents. For all means and purposes this meant children, though these gateways were less practical than bridges for numerous reasons. If the child was deep in sleep, for example, trolls could become infected with their dreams, resulting in something like the flu, the severity of which would depend on what kind of dream it was. Though rare, human children, too, could use these doorways.
Despite these cunning entryways into our world, trolls had limited ways to fight. Sunlight turned them into stone, so their retaliation against humans was relegated to evening hours. Stories from the ninth century feature trolls protecting their habitats by any means necessary, often focusing their aggression on churches, which were, quite simply, convenient gathering spots for humans. One activity that brought trolls endless amusement was tossing boulders at these churches. This undying wrath, more than any inherent flavor, made human meat the most prized of all troll dishes.
But for as long as there have been human-eating trolls, there have been humans to fight them. The Sturgeon/Sturges family were the subjects of many a ballad, hymn, and shanty. Armed with sword and bow and shields painted with their crest (Esse quam videre: “Be—do not seem”), they defended their camps from troll attacks before adopting the more proactive stance of flushing trolls from their hiding spots. From this lineage rose several celebrated warriors. In 1533, Ragnar Sturgeon used his teeth to bite the head off a troll to save Wales from an invasion of Mugglewumps. In 1666, Rosalind Sturgeon was partly responsible for the Great Fire of London while fending off a horde of large Irish Batmuggs. Possibly the most controversial was Theobald Sturges, who rescued a battalion of English soldiers during the Battle of Mons from a pack of Gizcullders who attempted to burrow upward through the trenches.