A troll door opened from the concrete and knocked Blinky to the ground in a spill of tentacles. ARRRGH!!! bellowed and took advantage of the moment, placing a giant foot on either side of the Lizzgump scholar and raising a fist for the killing blow. I aimed Cat #6 but was too far from the Eye to strike.
Seconds before Blinky was to be crushed I became aware of a song.
The sun slides into darkness,
At midwinter stands it still
And out the trolls of Christmas come from the hollow cave and hill.
Since Saturn penned the Titans
Imprisoned in the earth
The children of the gods return to walk the winter earth.
Shrieking and capering down they whirl
When the veil is thinned to the underworld.
The melody was fragile and inexpert, but it was this very roughness that brought poignancy to the wistful tune. I took a handful of fur and leaned to the side to find Jack coming closer, his mask and astrolabe dangling from either hand, his swords stashed across his back. The kid warrior, unbelievably, was singing.
Shouting and galloping down the sky
Comes Odin’s band, the Jolerei.
’Tis Death to see them, thunder rolls
O’er this poor lost band of hungry souls
The veil is thinned to the underworld.
ARRRGH!!!’s right arm shot out like an out-of-control garbage truck. It passed inches in front of Jack’s face, whipping the astrolabe from his hand and sending it clattering into the gutter among the broken bottles. Jack took a single swallow of fear before continuing the song.
Crockery shattered and feasts spoiled sorry.
This must be the work of the callicantzari!
From down the Greek mountains these winter trolls scurry
To carry off children born of winter’s hurry.
ARRRGH!!!’s infested snout twitched with a distant memory of this lilting melody. She lowered her fanged head to get a better look at this curious little being, and then her hairy forehead peaked in surprise as Blinky’s voice, a distinguished tenor, joined in on harmony.
If you’d ward off their mischief, build your Christmas fire big
And hang upon your mantel the jawbone of a pig.
Just picture it. Forty-five years before, there was Jack, just months after leading the trollhunters to victory over the Gumm-Gumms, finding the glow of battle fading as October and November passed into December. To a kid, Christmas is Christmas, and the urge to return to his family must have been overwhelming. Thankfully there was an old song about the holiday known to few trolls outside of their foremost scholar, and Blinky sang it to the little boy while ARRRGH!!! cradled him in her furry arms—their first family ritual. Bonds forged by war are one thing. Those formed by love are something else.
It was easy to climb a troll so still.
The Eye of Malevolence flicked my way at the last instant, the red veins fattening to the size of my forearms and the pupil widening into that tempting pool of darkness. Not tempting enough—I chopped with Cat #6, severing half of its stems. The holiday song cut off as the Eye gobbled in pain and withdrew its tendrils from its host’s body. ARRRGH!!! spat until eye stems were flying everywhere and hitting the ground like bisected worms. With the same paw that had threatened Blinky and Jack, ARRRGH!!! ripped the Eye from her face, along with a great deal of fur. She threw it against a cement pillar, and it hit the ground with a wet splat.
ARRRGH!!! fell into a sitting position, wrapping her hands around the boulder embedded in her skull. Jack hopped onto her legs and stroked her face despite the pus leaking from her eyes and the blood draining from her lips. Blinky, too, slid forward to run a gentle tentacle over the fresh wounds. I lowered myself to the ground and leaned against the sticky pelt to catch my breath.
It was by chance that I saw the Eye of Malevolence crawling like a slug and leaving a trail of translucent slush in its wake. What none of us had realized was that all of the doors to the troll word had shut except one. I stammered and stamped my foot. One of Blinky’s eyes took note; seconds later I had the attention of all eight.
“Corpulent one!” Blinky shouted. “Follow that Eye!”
Tub and I looked at each other.
“Me?” I asked. “Him?”
“Avoirdupois child! Zaftig boy!”
“Him?” Tub asked. “Me?”
“Heavyset! Stout! Husky! Go! Go! Go!”
“Husky! Husky!” I pushed Tub. “That’s you!”
Tub’s expression hardened into a righteous one and he bared his metal teeth. Braying like a sick donkey, he picked up a softball-sized hunk of concrete and charged. The Eye doubled its inchworm speed. As fast as Tub moved—and I’d never seen him move faster—the Eye outpaced him and the tail of its eye stems slithered through the door seconds before Tub got there. The door began to swing shut, but Tub tossed the chunk of concrete and it landed in the door’s path, blocking it.
“Hell yes!” Tub shouted. “Did you see that? Did you guys see that?!”
“O-ho! Ha-ha! Hee-hoo!” Blinky cried. “You have not failed us, pudgy warrior! Fellow hunters, gather round, for it is nigh time to hunt!”
While we panted for breath, Blinky extended each of his tentacles and quilted them, over and under, into a shifting, liquid pattern that seemed to capture the entire nighttime in its net. I found myself at a cadet’s attention. Blinky at last began to speak, softly at first, but with a rising, rousing grandiloquence.
“There will be no more despair—no, friends, not tonight. If sorrow or regret or anger chills your bellies, permit me to warm you with the whiskey of anticipation. Oh, how each of my four stomachs roils to smell troll blood darkening the underground mud. There may have been scores of trollhunters in wars past and only five of us here tonight, but so much greater will be our glory. Follow me now, with courage the size of the fabled Old World mountain trolls! Follow me with your blades whetted sharp enough to split the very oaths of vengeance that fall from our throats! Look around you, soldiers! These are the nights of legend! These are the grim circumstances that inspire the greatest of songs! And when we destroy the destroyer, brothers and sister, we shall be fêted like kings and queens in the Promenade of Victors!”
My chest swelled with pride.
“The Promenade of Victors!” I shouted.
“To watch as they carve our names in the Tower of Truth!”
“The Tower of Truth!” I echoed.
“Or, alternately, into the headstones of the Graveyard of Glory!”
“The Graveyard of…hang on, the what?”
“Either fate we shall welcome as eagerly as a stein of boiled bile!”
“Yes.” Jack unsheathed his swords. “Yes!”
ARRRGH!!! brought herself to unsteady legs. “It be yes.”
“Urrrmmg, bleennhh, plaarff,” Tub griped. “Don’t mind the guy without a translator.”
The trollhunters rushed for the door. I took a breath and stared at my battered sneakers, hoping for a similar burst of bravery. There, lodged between a dented flask and a foam container stained with barbecue sauce, I saw the mangled remains of the astrolabe. I kneeled down to gather them.
“Don’t,” Jack said. “It belongs here.”
His eyes were blazing but calm. I looked from him to the bridge that towered above us to the rest of this dingy, littered catacomb. It was as broken as Dad, but it also had provided us a way to put all of the wrong things right. Jack held out a hand. I took it around the forearm, preferring the circled notebook wire to the tacks of his glove, and after he helped me up, we stood in place, gripping each other a few seconds longer than necessary. History had witnessed stranger handclasps of brotherhood, but not many.
Before the door sealed shut behind me, I caught a glimpse of a lone vehicle that had opted to use the Holland Transit Bridge. It was a large shipping truck and the metal sides of its trailer bed had been dented from the inside as if something in there were fighting to be freed. The truck’s g
eneral direction suggested that it was heading toward the area of town best known for its shopping district, its well-kept parks, and, perhaps most notably of all, its world-class museum.
We cornered the Eye four hours later in a cave toothed with stalactites. It didn’t thrill us to discover that the Eye could scale rock faces like a spider. Tub, in a fit of bravery, grabbed for it and was whipped with its stem—poisonous, we discovered, when the welt began to inflate. The injury slowed us, and the Eye squeezed itself through a one-foot drainage pipe with the sound of a straw sucking up the last liquid in a glass.
Without the Eye to chase, without the astrolabe, without a healthy ARRRGH!!!, the wrong turns multiplied until we were lost. Frustrated and tired, we turned a blind corner to find ourselves in a tunnel bisected by a ray of light—it was morning already. ARRRGH!!! and Blinky retreated like spooked livestock and I could see the rocky stiffness that had already set in their joints. They were in pain, but neither Jack nor I permitted them recovery time.
The arrangement was awkward: ARRRGH!!! led with her nose, but because of the danger of sunlight, Jack, Tub, and I had to walk in front. It was slow and arduous, and as we continued along a downward labyrinth of forgotten sewers and abandoned mines, the air grew colder and thicker. When we came upon yet another tunnel that split in three directions, it was Jack who sat down on a boulder and held his masked head in his hands. The trolls stopped, too, out of ideas.
Their despair was contagious. I squatted and stared at the obdurate rock between my shoes, thinking of everything I was missing back in the brightly lit human world: Pinkton’s math test, preparations for the big game, the final ragtag rehearsal for a play now missing its female lead, the fitting of the head stone into the Killaheed Bridge, and whatever panic or self-delusion Dad was going through. We’d been down here for almost a day. Hope was dwindling.
Tub’s voice surprised all of us.
“Huh,” he said. “Don’t normally see a whole lot of pink down here.”
He was pointing near my feet. I shifted my gaze a few inches and saw a scrap of polyester still clinging to a rubberized zipper. It was pink and I’d seen it a thousand times before.
“Claire’s backpack,” I said.
“Claire’s backpack?” parroted Tub.
“Claire’s backpack!” I leapt to my feet and flapped my arms at the despondent trollhunters. “Claire’s backpack! Claire’s backpack!”
Their glances were easy to read: the Sturges kid had finally gone insane. I laughed, rather insanely, and ran down the center tunnel. Just before the light from Blinky’s eyes ran out, I spotted a second pink scrap, this one a silky fabric fringed with lace. It was the dress she wore at her da’s request, the one she hated, the one she was now tearing to pieces. She might as well be tearing up all the lies of her past life, for this was life and death, and she was fighting with what weapons she had on her.
I marveled at the turn of events as the rest of the gang gathered behind me. It would be the bold breadcrumbs of a sixteen-year-old girl, not the combined talents of a trained regiment of trollhunters, that would lead us to Gunmar.
And they did. We followed Claire’s pink clues through hidden crevasses and over unlikely crags. Pinpoints of sunlight slowed us at times, but the sun couldn’t stay up forever. When it set, Blinky and ARRRGH!!! were renewed with the vitality of the night, and they scampered across treacherous terrains as only underground dwellers could. The blood pounded in my ears and my skin prickled in anticipation of battle. I can’t speak for Tub, but I’m pretty sure he felt the same: I’d never seen the guy look so alive.
The tunnel tightened like a closing fist before releasing us, one at a time, into a limestone cavern as wide as a hockey rink. Tall, contorted objects jutted at haphazard angles from the ground. We walked among them in silence until we were surrounded. Blinky kept his eye-light low. There were no living creatures about and yet I felt a frosty dread.
“The Cemetery of Souls.” Blinky was hushed with reverence. “So long have I heard whispers of this fabled place, though never did I dare dream of seeing it with my own eight eyes. But of course the Hungry One would position himself so as to relish the agony of those who died the most painful of deaths.”
“What’s the most painful way to die?” I asked.
“See, Jim?” Tub said. “That’s the kind of question I could live without.”
“Being caught in sunlight,” Blinky said. “It is said that the pain goes on for decades.”
“Is that why they were given these weird gravestones?” I asked.
“Gravestones?” Blinky raised several of his mournful eyes. “These are not gravestones.”
The glow of his red eyes intensified and revealed the terrible truth.
These were not monuments to fallen trolls, but rather the trolls themselves. Multiheaded and multilimbed bodies twined into postures of ultimate torment, jaws caught wide open in eternal screams, arms and tentacles and wings raised in final failed efforts to shield themselves from the dreaded light. I was so stunned that I kicked aside a few stones by accident, which was fine until I remembered that they were not stones at all. They were horns, ears, fingers, teeth.
I returned each of the stones to its rightful spot.
We passed through the rest of the Cemetery of Souls without further comment. By the time we reached the end, it felt as though I’d witnessed the genocide of an entire species. The last of Claire’s pink scraps was speared on the stone antlers of a troll who’d died on all fours, and I took a knee so that I could remove the inappropriate color.
My fellow trollhunters were waiting up ahead. It took me a moment to realize that the light flickering across their bodies was not originating from Blinky. In fact, the illumination came from the chamber that awaited us around the bend: deep, fiery reds; white-hot razors of yellow; churning brown smoke that curled around their ankles like affectionate rodents. I didn’t need to see for myself to know that we had found the Gumm-Gumms.
Black oil dripped from above in long, sticky threads that burned like ant bites when they touched skin. The walls seeped white pus that crawled to the ground like fattened worms. Each step we took eddied the hot steam shooting from shuddering contraptions of delinquent metal. The clangorous moans of these devices added to the wail that thickened the air into fog.
We climbed over a berm of melted steel and found ourselves behind a conveyor belt, a crudely sewn patchwork of stained textiles that shuttled cargo into a large tin funnel. At the moment the belt was empty of everything except greasy stains, but nonetheless I followed the progress. The funnel fed into a thundering box the size of a treehouse, held together with railroad spikes and constructed from miscreant metals: a dented go-cart frame, a child’s red wagon, a neon sign from a strip club. Scorched wires snaked in and out, while virulent fumes poured from electrical circuits gone haywire. The box shook like a laundry machine about to explode and I could hear from inside it the whirring of saw blades and the music-box plinking of a grinder churning through gristled remains. It all led to a spout on the other end.
A gloved hand took my shoulder.
“The Machine,” Jack said. “Be sure you really want to see.”
His goggles gave up nothing but didn’t need to—the force of his grip said it all.
With Tub at my side, I climbed over a hill of decayed pinball machines to get a closer look. A corroded pipe held aloft by spindly stilts ran from the Machine, and from inside it I could hear the squish of pulpy matter. It stunk like death, but I leaned toward a section of pipe that had been rusted away.
Inside was meat, a lumpy sausage equal parts red muscle, white bone, and gray tendon mashed together with the multicolored gristle of internal organs. The fleshy sludge slugged through the pipe in uneven spurts as the Machine shoved it along. The kaleidoscopic viscera dazed me, and so I was caught unaware when the meat squirted forward and revealed something else sunk into the ground flesh.
A girl’s barrette.
Vomit lurche
d up my esophagus.
The little girl with purple glasses from the flyer was all I could think of, and I dropped my face into the Machine’s steam and let it bead upon my face like tears. But Jack was there in seconds to push me back toward the pipe, a cruel thing to do. All at once I wanted to kill him, I wanted to dig my teeth into his neck and pull out his throat in a wet chunk.
The tacks in Jack’s gloves dug into the sides of my head. Blood streaked down my cheeks.
“Look at it!” he demanded.
“I hate you! I hate you!”
“The Gumm-Gumms are infecting you! This whole place is toxic! Will you look?”
“I’ll kill you!”
“Just look!”
The tacks in my scalp forced my head within inches of the pipe and I choked on the smell. I couldn’t help but see what he wanted me to see: loose teeth, embedded in the meat, white as pearls. This made me all the sicker until the meat rolled and I saw that the teeth were tiny and pointed.
“Rats!” Jack shouted. “The meat is mostly rats!”
Within the threads of muscle I saw a long pink tail.
“Can’t you smell it?” Jack demanded. “This meat is ancient. Left over from the last war. He’s had to cut it with animal parts to keep him strong until the Killaheed is finished. Which means your friends aren’t in there, not yet. You’ve got to pull it together, Jim.”
He let up and pointed at the rickety tube that rose high into the air on rusted risers.
“Follow that meat,” he said.
We dove through black smoke and emerged in a bowl-shaped arena surrounded by natural rock columns. The meat conduit passed over our heads like a miniature roller coaster, dripping rank fluids onto our cheeks before rising even higher on swaying, deteriorated poles. We craned our necks and stumbled across a desert surface to follow the pipe. It crisscrossed the space above us in the most illogical of paths before reaching a dirt plateau twenty feet off the ground. Here the pipe angled sharply downward and was lashed to a Y-shaped brace by a knot of barbed wire. From the open end of the pipe, clods of meat plopped like wet dog food into the open mouth of Gunmar the Black.