Trollhunters (17 page)

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.

(“Damn,” Tub said after translation. “Ragnar is a cool-ass name.”)

Trolls spread like fire across the Eurasian continent. Iceland, Sweden, Finland, Germany, France, and Scotland were the locations of the most storied underworld kingdoms, though troll
populations rose up as far away as China. However, as recently as the early seventeenth century—and seeing how trolls can live for up to a thousand years, that’s pretty
recent—there was not a single troll on American soil.

That changed when a ship called the
Mayflower
set off from Plymouth, England, on September 6, 1620, carrying an official list of one hundred thirty passengers. Human passengers, that
is. As for the unaccounted trolls hiding in the cargo section, it is anyone’s guess. Estimates range from two dozen to triple digits, especially if you count the green, furry-tailed gremlins,
which could easily pack thirty to a barrel. Not that any serious scholar would bother counting gremlins, of course.

The
Mayflower
trolls were not just courageous explorers willing to risk life and limb on a perilous voyage across a sunlit ocean, but also staunch separatists. A philosophical argument
had riven the troll communities of the British Isles into two factions. Most kept a traditional conservative view of troll/human relations. That is, humans would continue to spoil the natural
resources the trolls held dear, and the trolls, in return, would eat the humans.

But a splinter group led by Ebenezer ARRRGH!!! of the Lincolnshire ARRRGH!!!s believed that this relationship was not only unsustainable but immoral, and promoted to his believers a program of
better living through four-legged consumption. Abolished were the tender main courses of human children. Gone were the spicy after-dinner snacks of human sausage straight from the smokehouse.
Forbidden were the breakfast treats of sugared old-person skin. These trolls favored rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, rats, certain varieties of bird, and the occasional seasonal cat.

(“Are there any vegetarian trolls?” I asked. “In fact, for a time there was a sect called the Nilboggians,” replied Blinky, “who believed that trolls could live on
plant matter alone. ’Twas a most virtuous experiment, though after nineteen days every Nilboggian spontaneously dissolved into a puddle of green slime.”)

No sooner had they landed in America than the separatist trolls fled the
Mayflower
by night and found bridges beneath which they could enter the underworld and begin to build livable
homes. The Eastern seaboard flourished with fertile cave ground, and the trolls spread to new quarters in their characteristic fashion: slowly but steadily. No sooner would a new bridge be
inaugurated than a troll and its family would take residence beneath it. Few trolls made the dangerous trek to the West and fewer made it alive, but many of those who did found themselves drawn to
quiet San Bernardino, “The Cupped Hand of God.” At last trolls had found a temperate home that did not require the stocking of food for long winters.

The Sturges family arrived in the New World not fifty years after the trolls, settling first in Boston and Maine. The American Sturgeses, however, found themselves without reason to fight the
peaceful Euro-American trolls, and over time their warrior lifestyle was overtaken by pursuits far more useful for a developing nation: the art of tannery, the brewing of ale, the growing of
soybeans, and, much later, the perfection of the calculator pocket.

Three hundred and fifty years passed with little more kerfuffle than the occasional irate cat owner. Then something happened that changed the course of troll/human history forever. In 1967, the
London Bridge, which ran across the River Thames and was the busiest hub of traffic in that great city, was disassembled and shipped in its entirety over five thousand miles away to Lake Havasu
City, Arizona. Absurd though this may seem, it is true: a rich engineer purchased the London Bridge as a tourist attraction to bring people to his out-of-the-way real estate development.

The Arizona reconstruction took over three years to complete, but it took only an hour for the trolls who’d stowed away inside the bridge segments to escape. Upon landing in Arizona, the
inhabitants of London Bridge tore apart their crates and fled into the night. By January of 1968, they had crossed the California border and set about doing what Old World trolls did best: eating
children. This treacherous tribe, made up of all the worst elements of every troll family in Europe, was collectively known as the Gumm-Gumms.

(“‘Gumm-Gumms’?” Tub repeated. “That’s pretty much the least scary name I’ve ever heard.” “Imagine what we think of
‘Dershowitz,’” Blinky replied. This comment I didn’t bother to translate.)

The Gumm-Gumms had terrorized the Eurasian continent for well over a thousand years. They were first mentioned in a parchment addressed to King Constantine II circa 920
A.D.
, wherein they were described as “horrid and of putrid breath and hoggish in their appetites.” In the 1100s the Gumm-Gumms descended from the Scottish Highlands, and
just one hundred years later were known to have taken possession of every single bridge in Londinium under the barbaric command of their ageless leader, Gunmar the Black. It is believed that Gunmar
chose to center his clan in San Bernardino specifically to spite the self-satisfied pacifists who populated the local underworld.

Whatever the reason, he and his minions wasted no time stealing children. One per month for the first three months. Then one per week. By the time 1969 began, several children were disappearing
every week in San Bernardino, each one of them dragged screaming to a hidden underground labyrinth and caged for weeks before being grilled over an open flame and eaten.

American trolls had lost their instinct for fighting and allowed the Gumm-Gumm blitz to continue for far too long. At last, the American tribes gathered for a “wapentake,” an ancient
Viking tradition whereupon the leaders of each clan, from the Bluzbumps to the Killtillians, turned over their weapons so that they might speak toward a common goal. Together, they admitted the
consequences of not getting involved: a new war between trolls and humans on the continent they’d worked so hard to keep neutral.