Trollhunters (16 page)

“I’ve missed,” he whispered, “so much.”

“Come up with me,” I urged. “Dad will be so happy. He never really stopped looking for you.”

Jack examined me as if looking for proof that we were related.

“You’re a Sturges,” he said.

“I guess.”

“You know what the name means? Did Jimbo—your dad, I mean—did he ever tell you?”

“No.”

“And Dad—I mean, your grandpa—he never told you, either?”

“Sorry.”

Jack pressed his lips together in disappointment.

“Comes from the ancient word
styrgar
. Means spearhead or battle spear. It’s the name of a warrior.”

“Great,” I said.

Jack leaned in with a snarl.

“No,” he said. “It is not great. It is the worst kind of burden. Before we’re through, you’ll wish you had been born with a different name. You’ll wish you
could wake up a different
person
. Because warriors? They go to war. And war is not fun. War is bloody. Things that were alive end up dead and sometimes you’re the one who has to burn
what’s left over. And when they go, Jim, they don’t go quietly. They make sounds. For the rest of your life, when you try to sleep, those are the sounds that will keep you
awake.”

Back a few bends in the tunnel, I heard the crushing footfall, serpentine slither, and tennis-shoe stumble of the absent characters.

“Hey, look,” I said. “You’ve convinced me. I don’t want in your club or whatever.”

“Got no choice,” he grunted. “Every few generations, the Sturges clan produces a warrior of consequence, a paladin. It might be you, Jim. It might not. Either way, we have to
find out. I can’t do this by myself anymore. Something’s happening. And we’re going to need every paladin we can round up.”

“There’s more? Why can’t you get them instead? Where are they?”

Jack shrugged. “Sure, there’s more. From other families. Probably. Somewhere. If they didn’t die out. But the lines have been lost. For now it’s just you and me.”
He gave my skinny body another dubious perusal. “You and me and the battle of our lives.”

Tub came around the bend with a ghastly pasted-on grin. Behind him loped and slunk the two mismatched trolls, leaving in their wake tumbleweeds of hair and a trail of sludge. Jack turned on his
boot heel and recommenced his stomping.

Tub grabbed me by the shoulder. He kept his voice cheery.

“Gee,
Jim
. Thanks for leaving me all alone with the troll patrol.”

“Sorry, Tub.”

He pushed me in the direction of Jack and lowered his voice.

“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 vessels 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.