Tub and I wandered closer. If not for the laborers, we could have passed beneath the bridge without ducking. Cobwebs swayed from spires at either end and moss grew in moist patches around many of the intricate carvings. The bridge was practically a living thing—you expected rats to come pouring out of the innumerable small chasms. The air was unaccountably cold and I shivered as I tried to see over a man in a houndstooth coat.
He whirled around, nose raised as if he’d sniffed me out. It was Professor Lempke. His left hand clutched a clipboard but the right hand shot out, somehow snaring both of our collars in a single fist.
“Aha!” he cried. “My perennial trespassers! My shadow skulkers! Young masters Sturges and Dershowitz, reporting for duty!”
We squirmed but his grip was iron.
Lempke’s hyena grin widened. The effect was troubling. His teeth were caked with crud and his breath was sour. In fact, everything about him suggested lack of sleep, if not some worse affliction. His bloodshot eyes rolled within a pudding of violet flesh, and his jaundiced cheeks were dusted with gray stubble. A tide of pimples swept out from his hairline and there was a pink rash extending from his shirt collar.
“No bounding about like wildebeests, not today, not whilst such a delicate artifact rests in proximity. You intrude on an auspicious afternoon! What you see before you is the grandest achievement of my career. Eighteen years I’ve worked with Scottish historians to protect this edifice from destruction, a destruction that simpletons of the Scottish Highlands insisted upon because of primitive, archaic superstition. Can you believe it, my boy busybodies? Those ignoramuses wished to destroy quite possibly the most important piece of architecture in all of Europe. I saved it. I did that. And now it’s right here in the Golden Valley.”
His fevered eyes began to swim with tears. Both Tub and I recoiled, hoping to evade contaminated spatter.
“Do you undereducated brats have the slightest idea what you’re looking upon?”
Tub dared to shrug.
“A bridge?”
Lempke’s cheeks slackened in mortification. Two hard tears rolled like ball bearings, one from each swollen eye, though he did not seem to notice. His horrified expression slowly screwed into one of mordant amusement.
“A bridge,” he mused. “Amusing. Not yet, my pubescent meddlers. You see, the head stone that connects the two halves…alas, it has yet to arrive.”
The assistant who cleared his throat had been standing there for some time. Lempke’s fingers loosened enough for Tub and I to extricate ourselves and massage our throats. Sweat dropped from the assistant’s face onto a stack of paperwork. He clicked a pen nervously.
“The head stone,” he said. “I’ve got news.”
“Out with it,” Lempke barked.
The assistant consulted a scrawled note. “Okay. The cargo was shipped to San Sebastián by mistake.”
“San Sebastián, Puerto Rico?” Lempke seethed.
The assistant gulped down his nervousness.
“San Sebastián, Spain.” While Lempke’s jaw fell open, releasing a stink, the assistant hurried on. “It should arrive there within a day and the historical society has been given instructions to reroute it to us immediately.”
Lempke’s whole face had gone the color of his rash. He raked jagged fingernails across his whitehead pimples.
“Explicit instructions?” he raged. “Were explicit instructions given? I know those boobs in San Sebastián. They’ll want a look. They’ll crack open the casing and say it happened during transport, just to get a peek, without even thinking about the lighting conditions under which they’re exposing the stone, the moisture in the air, anything! They’ll take photos. Flash photos!”
“Yes, explicit,” said the assistant. “I was very explicit—”
“Call them again. Underscore the sobriety, the gravity of our instructions. Those thickheaded dunderheads are to wait outside nibbling their pinxchos until the shipment arrives. I don’t care if they stand there all night. I did, and I was proud to do it. You cannot trust some adolescent dropout minimum-wage Spaniard with a shipment of this caliber.”
“Yes, sir, day and night. Sir…you’re…bleeding. Are you all right?”
Lempke was itching the back of his right hand. He’d dug bloody furrows.
“This wool coat,” he muttered. “It bothers me.”
For a quick moment, he pushed up the sleeve of his jacket to itch beneath it. We all saw it: the rash had devoured Lempke’s entire forearm. A yellow glaze of hardened mucus glistened in the sunshine pouring from the skylight. The sleeve fell back into place and the assistant forced himself to stare at his notes.
“Ah, the, uh, head stone should be here Friday. Just in time for the final day of the festival—”
Lempke flapped his ruined right hand. Skin, loosened from scratching, floated in the air. Tub and I dodged it.
“Trifles! What’s happening in this museum dwarfs some measly street fair! Mark my words, the halfwits who populate this town will regret squandering so much of their limited energy on street processions and athletic events and teenage theatrics, when they could have been studying up on their Scottish history. They will self-castigate. Wait and see. Apologies will be made to me personally.”
A foreman shouted out to his workers: “People, step back! Okay, men, on three!”
Lempke’s head shot up and he gasped like a man spotting his long-lost beloved. A second later, his hands—those hot, suppurating pincers of disease—clamped down on our necks. He steered us past the assistant, who skittered aside, so that we faced the great stone structure at the moment of unveiling.
“One…” the foreman yelled.
Lempke’s chapped lips moved in silent recitation.
“Two…”
Lempke’s razored nails sunk into my neck flesh.
“Three!”
With that, the workers pulled downward on the panels that protected the sides and underside of the bridge. Beneath was a thick layer of industrial carpet and beneath that a layer of straw, both of which fell to the floor with a loud whump. A cloud of dust flew upward and a thousand pieces of straw were tossed into the air. Workers squinted behind their goggles and museum personnel shielded their faces with their elbows. Only Lempke did nothing, beaming at eighteen years’ worth of his most fervent dreams. Black dust rolled into his open mouth. A piece of straw nicked his eyeball and he didn’t flinch.
“The Killaheed Bridge,” he whispered.
Tub coughed and turned away. But I couldn’t.
I’d seen this bridge before.
The central image of the stone mural in the troll cave had been a reproduction of this very bridge, though the depiction hadn’t been able to replicate the real thing’s impregnable power. Each twisted tentacle and gnarled claw was so deeply etched that your eyes got lost inside the voids, and each one grasped toward the missing head stone. I could not forget the central character as depicted by the mural: a towering troll with six arms, one empty eye socket, and another of sparkling ruby.
Clouds interrupted the sun, throwing the atrium into unexpected gloom.
“My, my, my, yes,” tittered Lempke. “Scotland reborn. Looks so much more commanding bathed in gray, don’t you think, my juvenile jesters?”
A cry of pain slashed the silence. Lempke leaned toward the source of the sound with too much eagerness. A worker retracted his hand from where he had been feeling around inside one of the bridge’s clefts. I saw only a smear of blood before he shoved the injured hand beneath his opposite arm.
“It bit me!” he shrieked. “Damn thing bit me!”
Concerned others swarmed around the man to help. Lempke placed his rash-covered hands on his hips. Tub motioned his chin at our usual escape door, and we crept away from the scene. The stairwell was unguarded and we were thankful. But we didn’t move fast enough to escape Lempke’s final words.
“Stop your whining. It doesn’t hurt that bad. It’s an honor, in fact. Be proud.”
&nb
sp; By eleven o’clock that night the two of us were squeezed inside the cramped confines of my closet. Tub snored from behind a hockey mask, the hockey stick across his chest rising and falling with every lion purr. The previous hour had been spent griping—“My legs are asleep because you’re sitting on them,” “Can you remove your knee from my ear?” and so forth. Finally, though, Tub snoozed, the string of the archery bow digging a temporary scar into his cheek. Easy for him. He still didn’t believe a word of what I’d said. Me, I’d be up all night. I leaned back into a pile of clothes and distracted myself by thinking through our attempts at preparation.
The first thing we’d done after returning from the museum was give my room a thorough examination. For a guy who had a tough time putting on his own socks, Tub didn’t hesitate to get down on his stomach and squeeze beneath the bed, flashlight in hand. I stood as far away as I could, heart pounding.
Finally he pulled himself out. His frizzy hair was clotted with dust bunnies and his face was drawn and serious.
“There’s something terrible under there,” he whispered.
“Ha! Now do you believe me?”
“I do. And it’s worse than I thought. I’ve never encountered a sock of such stink. We should arm ourselves, my liege, before it’s too late, and see if we can best it in battle. Alas, we may not survive but history shall treat us well.”
The bedsprings giggled as Tub took a seat.
“Sorry, Jim. No monsters. No trap door. There’s not even a crawl space in this joint. This is your basic, boring mid-’80s suburban house plan, same as fifty more down the street, same as my place. It’s like I said: there’s nothing special about our homes, nothing special about us. Get that through your dumb head.”
The following hour was nonetheless spent setting up the nanny cam. To the untrained eye it looked like a teddy bear, but its mouth held a wide-angle camera and its butt housed various cables for connecting to a TV. The quality was worse than the camera on my phone but the stuffed bear had better stamina: it could record for up to twelve hours. I posed it on the dresser facing the door, and it grinned at me like an imbecile. I sure felt like one.
Next we built a fake me that we named Jim Sturges Jr. 2: The Decoy. We fashioned JSJ2’s body out of a sweatshirt and sweatpants and stuffed it with dirty laundry. For a head we appropriated a bowl that had last seen use five years before, during my unintentional slaying of five innocent goldfish. After Tub got done threatening, again, to report me to a local animal rights organization, we covered JSJ2 with a blanket and grunted our satisfaction. Now all we needed was for something to take the bait.
We waited for Dad to go to bed. Tub killed time browsing for naked celebrities on my laptop while I studied RoJu, and after the late news we heard Dad going through his nightly triple-check of the doors and windows. The chimes of the armed security systems made me feel even lamer. How was what Dad was doing out there any different from what I was doing in here?
Dad poked his head into the room to say good night—Tub knew how to conceal computer-screen boobs faster than anyone I knew—and afterward we withdrew the archery set from the duffel bag. Tub thumbed the single arrowhead and pronounced it nice and deadly. I brought out the athletic equipment that I’d collected in a hamper, and Tub claimed the hockey gear, leaving me with the less-impressive whiffle ball bat. The last thing I did was spread marbles all across the floor. Finally, we opened the closet, realized how closely we’d have to squish together, and made each other swear we’d never mention this to anyone else. Ever, ever, ever.
For two hours, the only sound was the soft whirring of the nanny cam.
It was midnight when I heard a creaking noise through the wall.
I elbowed Tub.
“I don’t want dentures, Grandma.”
“Tub!” I hissed. “Wake up!”
He snorted, looked around, and pulled the hockey mask to the top of his head. I pressed a finger to my lips and pointed to my ear. He nodded.
Nothing for several minutes. Tub’s eyes began to droop.
Again: a creak, this one long and tortured.
“Tub. Tub. This is it.”
“Just your dad, Jim.”
“Dad would be checking all of the locks. We’d hear him.”
Tub opened his mouth to protest before his sleepy brain realized that I was right. A third floorboard creaked, then a fourth. Whatever it was out there was getting closer. I looked through the closet slats at the crack beneath the bedroom door. A moment of unbearable tension passed. Then a shadow daggered the moonlight. My breath caught in my throat. I wanted to tell Tub to get the arrow into position but couldn’t utter a word.
Then the shadow slipped away.
Tub was oblivious. He raised the head of the stick to his nose.
“This thing smells weird.”
“Shhh!”
“Not like sweat. It smells, I don’t know. Brand-new.”
“Never got used. Shhh!”
“Oh. Well, don’t feel bad. It’s not your fault you lack muscle tone. It’s glandular.”
I pressed my sweaty forehead against his and hissed. “Dad took this stuff away because sports are dangerous. Too many late nights and away games. So he took it all away. Never even let me try.”
Something metallic crashed to the kitchen floor.
Tub and I jumped. Our foreheads peeled apart and our eyes widened.
His knuckles went white around the hockey stick.
“You want to try now, Jim? Give this stuff a spin?”
There’s no telling how long we stared at each other in the darkness of the closet, ratcheting up our bravery through a sequence of manly nods and the throttling of our athletic gear. Fifteen minutes might have gone by before we were properly psyched up to go exploding from the closet like a sports team, albeit one that wasn’t sure what sport it was playing.
Right away my foot hit the marbles. I grabbed for Tub, but he was skidding on marbles, too. While he went face-first into the artificial crotch of JSJ2, I went sprawling backward into the dresser. A slew of forgotten objects fell upon me in succession: a broken kite, a bottle of foul-smelling cologne, a plate of half-eaten scrambled eggs, and, of course, the nanny cam.
Even in this shameful state, I recognized momentum as the only thing we had going for us. I raced from the dresser. The teddy bear bounced along behind me, tangled up in kite string caught around my foot. Tub was throwing open the bedroom door, the bow slung across his back, the hockey stick and arrow in either fist, and a few delirious seconds later we were charging down the hall with weapons raised. Distantly I realized that Dad would not be waking up to join us. From his bedroom came that awful noise again: Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp.
We hesitated at the edge of the kitchen. The lights were off but sounds poured out: the clanging of tin, the crinkling of plastic, the rustle of paper, the crude slamming of ceramic to Formica. Substances, some hard, some soft, were dropping to the linoleum floor in irregular patterns. Blurting between each noise were inhuman snorts.
“Tub,” I hissed. “What do we do?”
He bared his shiny steel teeth and lowered his hockey mask.
“We do not. Negotiate. With terrorists.”
He lifted the brand-new hockey stick and bounded into the kitchen. With the tangled nanny cam trailing after me, I secured my baseball helmet and followed, rearing back with a bat that had waited all its life to swing.
The first thing I noticed was that the ceiling fan was shoved into the corner, smashed to pieces. All in all, it was an odd thing to notice first, given that there were two enormous trolls contorted inside my humble little kitchen. I hated to admit that I was on a first-name basis with terrifying monsters of any sort, but these two I knew all too well. Blinky’s eight eyes were weaving in and out of the cabinets, down the sink drain, through the nooks of the dishwasher. ARRRGH!!! was grasping, and inadvertently crushing, various human-sized items upon the counter. The beast growled and its hunched back scraped against the d
angling guts of the ceiling fan.
For some reason, the microwave was on, the plate inside empty and spinning.
With my free hand I gripped the back of Tub’s shirt.
“What…what are they…doing?” I managed.
Tub’s voice gurgled back with feeble horror.
“Sandwiches, Jim. They’re making sandwiches.”
Two of Blinky’s tentacles took turns diving into a jar of peanut butter, emerging each time with a beige glob that he smeared across an array of white bread scattered across the counter. Far too much force was used, and the bread tore into puffs that flew about the kitchen like scraps from a wood chipper. Some of it made its way into the gash of Blinky’s mouth, and through his scaled skin I could see the chunks as they made their way down two separate throats before landing in one of several quivering stomachs.
ARRRGH!!! was even less artful. It snatched whatever scraps it could from the air and shoved them at its slobbering jaw. Not all of it hit the mark: pieces of white bread were adhered via peanut butter all across the troll’s fur. There was no doubt it was enjoying itself; with every mighty swallow, its horns gored enthusiastically at the cabinet and its gargantuan feet stamped the dropped bread and peanut butter into a brown paste.
Neither paid us any attention. They were focused on the task, blurting incomprehensible remarks around mouthfuls of mashed food.
Tub pushed his hockey stick into my hands and unslung his bow. His eyes were glazed but determined and I felt a surge of pride. Dad was in some kind of irretrievable slumber. This was up to the two of us and Tub knew it.