“An idea most unusual,” Blinky whispered, “but a requiem unforgettable. Plump midget, you have humbled me with your elegiacal instincts. When they think back upon this day, which they will, and often, it will be your contribution that will be remembered first, and fittingly so. It is poetry, and you, my corpulent comrade, are a poet.”
Tub understood none of this, of course, but shrugged anyway, and Blinky whispered the plan to Jack, who squinted across the field as if measuring the difficulty of the task before nodding his agreement. Without explaining the goal, he arranged us on all sides of ARRRGH!!!: Claire and Tub at one leg, Dad and I at the other, Jack at the right arm, and Blinky at the left. At Jack’s call we attempted to drag the great troll from her position midfield. Panting and groaning and sweating, our attempts earned us less than a first down.
Then I felt another pair of hands at my side and looked up to find Sergeant Gulager. He took hold of a horn so that ARRRGH!!!’s head wouldn’t drag across the turf. More people followed: Principal Cole, Coach Lawrence, and Ms. Pinkton, all goggling in disbelief at the arm they lifted from the ground; Carol the museum cashier, the man with the dyed black goatee, and his little girl whom I’d first seen on a flyer lifted up a foot; Mrs. Leach and her thespians took up an entire left leg; and then, in a single wave as if responding to a referee’s whistle, the entire varsity squads of the Saint B. Battle Beasts and the Connersville Colts assembled to lift the torso.
None of the players knew what they’d witnessed that night or if they’d wake up Saturday morning to find this had been a wild fantasy brought on by concussion, but at that moment they were moved by a sense of right, and so they lowered their shoulder pads, flexed muscles trained in weight rooms, and lifted.
The body traveled the entire length of the field as if by miracle, with the noble, snouted face pointed at the stars. When we reached a spot just past the end zone close to the street, Jack gave a signal and we set the body in an upright arrangement. As Jack gathered yard markers and first-down poles to prop up the arms, I began to understand Tub’s plan. Tears sprung to my eyes and I backed way, afraid to be so close to something so beautiful.
ARRRGH!!! was posed in a stance so lifelike I expected her to wink at me one more time. Her crouch made it look as if she were about to spring forward, while her open jaw suggested the earsplitting roar that would never again be heard. Right now it was the macabre posing of a corpse, but in a few hours, when the sun crested over Mount Sloughnisse, she would turn, quite painlessly, into a stone statue. Hers would not be one of those sad things lost in the Cemetery of Souls; hers would memorialize the site of the Battle of the Fallen Leaves and serve as a reminder that the worlds of human and troll could operate in friendship rather than in the age-old cycles of animosity and carnage.
Harry G. Bleeker Memorial Field had always been missing a mascot, and what better icon to represent the Battle Beasts than this one?
We made our way back to the midfield, the football players dispersing into the crowd of people who were only now beginning to rub their eyes and pat their pockets for car keys, objects they barely remembered how to use. Tub wandered over to check on Grandma, though she seemed quite pleased. Everything, after all, had been at a suitable volume for the hearing impaired. Only Sergeant Gulager stood in place, hands on his hips, surveying the normal-looking people of his town who’d performed so far beyond expectations.
“We shouldn’t let those people go.”
It was Jack, cleaning Victor Power against the bike chains surrounding his shins.
“Why not?” I asked.
He gestured at the motionless mountain of Gunmar the Black.
“We’ll need all the help we can get to haul that body underground before morning.”
“They’ll help,” I said.
“Who?”
“The Gumm-Gumms.” I pointed them out. “I think they’ll do whatever we ask.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Something tells me they’ll be open to the non-human-eating message, too.”
“I suppose you’re right.” Jack sighed. “You know the closest bridge?”
“I do.”
“Well, all right. Let’s get this thing started.”
“Okay, but—give me just one minute?”
Jack followed my gaze and smirked. He sheathed his sword.
“Take two.”
Claire was crossing the field, splashing her hiking boots through the gunk blown out by Dad’s mower but not looking disgusted in the least. Her fatigues were crusted with unspeakable fluids and her face was a smudgy mix of mud and blood. And yet she was radiant, her tangled hair bouncing behind her, beaming with the same abandon that I’d been enamored with long before we’d shared a single word a week ago in math class.
She stopped a few inches away and scraped dried blood from Doctor X as another girl might toy with a ring.
“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry? About what?”
“About everything. About letting you get caught. About not realizing you were like us.”
“It all ended well enough,” she said. “A bit sticky, perhaps.”
“And the play. I’m sorry about the play.”
She laughed, that loud bray that made me feel like butter.
“The play? Are you serious, ya silly gowk?”
“That accent, I’m telling you.” I shrugged. “You would’ve been great.”
“It was a lot of lines to memorize for nothing.”
“Tell me about it.”
Claire gave me a sly sidelong glance.
“Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, / Which mannerly devotion shows in this, / For saints have hands that pilgrim’s hands do touch, / And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.”
She held out a small white hand stained with blood.
My stomach fluttering with nerves, I took it.
“Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?” I asked.
“Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.”
“O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do, / They pray—grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.”
Claire moved closer. The frayed ends of her coat brushed against my chest.
“Saints do not move,” she whispered, “though grant for prayers’ sake.”
“Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. / Thus from my lips, by yours, my sin is purged.”
Beneath shattered lights, atop a ruined field, surrounded by an audience of battered survivors and the mangled dead, we kissed, and kissed again. While I closed my eyes and sank into a dark enjoyment, two random thoughts pricked at me like a pesky mosquito. Did someone deal with Gunmar’s gallbladder after I’d tossed it to the field? And where, come to think of it, had Professor Lempke gone?
Those worries were lost as Claire ran her hands over my back. Warmth sealed her body to mine and in the dizzy nirvana of the moment I felt her teeth scrape across my lips as she continued to murmur Juliet’s most lovelorn of lines.
“Then have my lips the sin that they have took.”
I kissed her cheek, her eyelids, raised on my toes to kiss her forehead.
“Sin from thy lips?” I said into her hair. “O trespass sweetly urged! / Give me my sin again.”
Her arms tightened around me in a hug that was every bit as crushing as a Claire Fontaine hug ought to be. I wheezed happily within her grip, feeling her trollhunter heart beat opposite mine, the taste of her warrior’s lips still salty upon my own. I looked through blowing wisps of her hair to find Tub at the sideline next to Grandma, making fake gagging faces through a wide grin that gleamed with the latest in dental technology.
To my surprise, Steve Jorgensen-Warner stood there, too, unaware of Tub’s presence, staring at the field of battle with a face drained of emotion. His uniform was grass-stained from play but free of gore, leading me to believe that he’d managed to hide away during the skirmish and was only now crawling out to absorb the aftermath. Tub looked at
his former tormentor, who no longer looked as intimidating as he once did. I had a feeling that my friend was done paying a toll, and might, in fact, reclaim the Trophy Cave as his own.
Tub regarded Steve for a long time. Then he examined the random pieces of football equipment scattered at his feet. Then, once more, he looked back up at Steve, as if an idea was forming that was every bit as brilliant as tuning the jumbotron to static. Tub gently guided Grandma aside before kneeling down and picking up one of the helmets of the Connersville Colts. Only when he stood up again did I realize what had been staring me in the face all night.
The emblem printed on the Colts’ helmets was a horseshoe.
And what had Blinky once said about horseshoes?
Iron works best, but in a pinch, anything of horseshoe design will suffice.
Acting upon instinct that would make any trollhunter proud, Tub pressed the helmet against the forehead of Steve Jorgensen-Warner. To say that he reacted would be the kind of understatement worthy of a punch to the face. Steve howled as if the mere touch of the emblem had torn him in half, which, a second later, it did. His blond hair self-scalped as a reptilian ridge asserted itself through his skull, and then his face, the lure that had hooked many a lovelorn high school girl, ripped down the center, splitting his forehead to reveal a bone-studded faceplate that spat out both eyeballs in favor of silver orbs that glimmered with coal-hot fury. Steve’s cheeks slopped away like two uncooked hamburger patties and his jaws exploded in a shower of teeth to make way for a massive gray mandible. The football uniform parted like a robe and thin ribbons of human meat began melting to the turf in favor of the hard, gray musculature of a changeling troll.
Claire and I broke our embrace.
Steve, his true form revealed decades before he could mature to a position of global power, screamed at the moon. Tub got out of the way, his work there done, and he motioned for Dad to quit with the heroics for one night and give the professionals room to work. Dad nodded, turned to Jack, and gave his little brother a go-ahead nod.
To my right, Jack unsheathed his sword with a satisfying zing.
To my left, Blinky chuckled, ready to win one more for ARRRGH!!!
Claire gave me a final air kiss and dropped me a devilish wink before using her blade to slice the night into dozens of beautiful shards that dazzled her fellow trollhunters as much as it infuriated the thing that used to be Steve. It was with a weary sigh and more than a few protesting muscles that I took my place beside her, beside all of them. This had been one hell of a long night. But I knew by then the truths of my trade as well as any trollhunter who’d answered the call. Long nights were just part of the deal.
GUILLERMO DEL TORO is known for his critically acclaimed feature films, such as Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy, and Pacific Rim, as well as his best-selling Strain Trilogy.
DANIEL KRAUS is the award-winning author of Scowler and Rotters and is the director of six feature films. He lives with his wife in Chicago.
Guillermo Del Toro, Trollhunters
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends