(“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.
Fortunately, they had strong numbers and a stronger leader. At the tender age of seventy-five, she was yet a child, but already possessed of a strong will, an optimistic outlook, and an aptitude for adventure. Her name was Johannah M. ARRRGH!!!.
(“What’s the M stand for?” I asked. “Mmmm,” Blinky replied.)
Johannah M. ARRRGH!!! would lead an army of trolls on a hunt for the Gumm-Gumm lair. With great pomp and fanfare they dug up chests containing some of the most prized possessions in all trolldom: ancient astrolabes that, according to lore, had been gifted by the faerie folk of lower Scandinavia after a tribe of Snicksnuck trolls rescued a coterie of faeries from torture at the hooves of a deranged faun.
Guided by these mystical compasses, the trolls began searching for the Gumm-Gumms. At the same time, an up-and-coming scribe and record-keeper of the Lizzgump clan who went by the name of Blinky was tasked with the study of genealogical scrolls in hopes of locating a human paladin who could aid them in their oncoming battle. Day and night, Blinky scoured eight scrolls at once, devoting one eye per scroll, until the strain was so great that, one by one, the eyes went blind—but not before discovering a family of Sturgeses right there in San Bernardino.
(“Sorry you lost your eyesight,” I said. “Indeed it was a happenstance most disagreeable,” Blinky replied, “seeing how I was but a lad of forty-four and four hundred years. I, of course, devote a full volume of my dissertation to this tragedy.”)
The drafting of a paladin was considered a great risk. Living in peace beneath humans was one thing. But fighting alongside one? It had never been done. But with the Milk Carton Epidemic in full swing, it was a necessary gamble. So it was that on September 21, 1969, Jack Sturges was taken against his will into Troll City, where he rapidly matured into a prominent warrior.
With Jack working in tandem with ARRRGH!!!, the troll army ransacked the Gumm-Gumm lair. While Jack single-handedly dispatched dozens of lesser trolls and commanded his legion of warriors with unflagging vigor, it was Johannah ARRRGH!!! who took on the Hungry One. It was a battle long in the making: elev
en hundred years earlier, Gunmar had lost an arm to Remmarah ARRRGH!!!, Johannah’s grandmother, in a fantastic midnight skirmish along the Austria/Hungary border. Since that night, Gunmar had not only sworn his revenge, but had also begun to notch each kill on the makeshift wooden arm he’d rammed into his still-bleeding stump.
The first wave of the onslaught was bleak. Gunmar, a beast so indescribably awful that he cannot, at this particular moment, be described, toyed with Johannah ARRRGH!!!. It was only when Gunmar embedded a boulder in the hairy troll’s cranium that the tide began to change. Instead of killing Johannah ARRRGH!!!, the injury seemed to squash whatever small amount of hesitation existed in her brain. She became an uncontrollable, rampaging beast who came at Gunmar in a tornado of teeth, claws, and fur. One of Gunmar’s eyes—the Eye of Malevolence—was torn out in the fray. Soon Gunmar fell, his minions were killed or captured, and it was left to Jack, the human hero, to deliver the killing blow to the Hungry One.
Exhausted of bloodshed, Jack instead banished Gunmar into isolation among the deepest of earth’s caves. Gunmar slunk away, swearing revenge upon Jack, Johannah ARRRGH!!!, and all of their offspring. These curses were difficult to understand, for Gunmar was chewing upon his tongue in rage. Every sound he released hissed like a serpent: SSSSSSSSS.
Jack’s mercy was a success in one sense: the remaining Gumm-Gumms swore to switch to a four-legged diet and enlisted in several eleven-step programs to keep them on the non-human-eating wagon. Festivity reigned in the troll kingdom for months. As a sign of respect, trolls began referring to Johannah by her last name alone, and parent trolls would hold up their babies when ARRRGH!!! passed by so that the young ones could touch the boulder still sticking out of the back of her skull.
(“That chunk of bedrock remains there to this day,” Blinky said. “It is the reason for my friend’s impaired speech.” ARRRGH!!! agreed: “Rock make unhappy talk.”)
What Jack realized too late was that he’d doomed himself to a subterrestrial life. His mercy had been a distinctly human thing—no troll would have hesitated to destroy Gunmar—and so he felt a responsibility to keep watch should Gunmar ever return. If Jack returned to the human world, he would grow older, and eventually the doorways to the troll world would be lost to him. He would need to stay young to defend against Gunmar, and the only way to do that was to remain underground.
Jack, forever thirteen, trained every day, every year, ever watchful, ever paranoid. He was the only one not surprised several months before when the Eye of Malevolence showed them Gunmar’s slow trek back from the bowels of the earth. Jack had made speeches in Troll City, but nobody listened. The trolls there had become fat, complacent, consumed with their food and trinkets, and certain that nothing like the Gumm-Gumm War could happen again.
So defensive efforts were up to Jack, Blinky, and ARRRGH!!!. As Gunmar’s power grew, Jack decided with great regret that Jim would have to be tested for paladin potential. But Jack had figured on having months, even years, to properly train his nephew. Now with the news of a bridge being reconstructed in the San Bernardino Historical Society Museum, those months and years had been shaved down to mere days.
The Killaheed Bridge had been the ancestral home of Gunmar the Black in the far northern region of Scotland known in Gaelic as A’ Ghàidhealtachd. It is where he murdered every blood relative, erasing his surname in favor of “the Black,” and began the Gumm-Gumm cult with himself as the principal deity. The bridge was the nexus of his ancient power, and its shipment from across the ocean toward California must be what was powering his quick regeneration and drawing weak-minded trolls, a new army of Gumm-Gumms, back under his influence.
For months, trolls had been infiltrating San Bernardino at night and creating havoc. Nothing so far as abduction, not yet, but Jack, Blinky, and ARRRGH!!! had been kept busy enough that they’d had little chance to search out Gunmar himself. It had been a gamble revealing themselves to Jim, and, inadvertently, Tub. But in war, such wagers were necessary. This was the lot of the trollhunters.
(Trollhunters. I couldn’t help smiling a little. I liked the sound of it.)
Jack waited for us in an unlit clearing with the burlap sack over his shoulder. The clay wall before him was cracked to reveal patches of intricate tile mosaics and begrimed frescoes created by troll artists of yesteryear. Entering this clearing from the tunnel was like traveling from throat to stomach; the rumble of motor vehicles, somewhere far above us, completed the illusion.
He seemed smaller inside that scrap-metal armor than he had before, more the dimensions of an adolescent boy than an inscrutable devil. Surely he had heard our approach, yet he did not react. I was about to say something when I noticed a group of trolls off to the right. Tub and I skittered aside, but Blinky and ARRRGH!!! showed no alarm. In fact, in their strange faces I saw pity.
It was the same routine I’d seen in the red-light district. These trolls stood in a trance before a leaning tower of flickering, half-busted TVs, their faces pressed to the sets, their long tongues lapping at the screens.
“Do not stare,” Blinky said. “It is a lamentable sight.”
“What’s with you guys and TVs?” I asked.
Blinky spoke in a hush. “Do not be quick to judge, small-brained one. There is no sun in the life of a troll, indeed scarce little light at all. Is it any wonder that we cherish your televisions, that some of us even worship them like primitive man worshipped his sun gods—Ra, Helios, Apollo, Sol Invictus, Huitzilopochtli?” His tentacles rippled haughtily. “There is not a troll alive who possesses fewer than two sets.”
“What shows do you guys like?”
“What you would consider lacking in entertainment value, we prefer. Commercials, in fact, are prized among us for their accelerated pace and bright colorings. Nothing, though, satisfies like pure static. Should you find time to study this liquid weave, you will discover beauty, divinity. So many sifting layers, so many patterns of meaning, so many whispered secrets.”
Drool poured from the slack mouths of at least two of the mesmerized trolls.
“So it’s like a drug?” I asked.
“It is precisely a drug. The calming effect is unlike anything else, and it is perfectly healthy in moderation. Today’s troll experiences almost daily televisual contact. Nurses use them to ease the dementia of the elderly. Mothers use them to quiet their brood. I myself once spent a period of years riveted by an extraordinary signal from a faraway place called the BBC. I like to think that it contributed to the melodious harmonics of my voice.”
“It did,” I said. “Trust me.”
“But I am one of the fortunate. Like any drug taken in excess, it can ruin a mind. Those poor souls there will give every coin they have to try new signals, better signals, any signal at all, and while doing so will forget to eat, forget to drink, forget to excrete their waste. It is no coincidence that many cemeteries are located near Static Dens.”
“Why doesn’t it affect people that way?”
“Doesn’t it, dear boy?”
“All right. I see what you’re saying. But why—”
Jack slapped the brick with his right hand and snarled without turning around.
“You ask too many questions. Why this? Why that? How does it all work? What does it all mean? Down here things are what they are. You better get used to it. Or better yet, stop caring. Because there will never be enough answers to satisfy you, and even if there were, we don’t have the time.”
From within his suit of metal he withdrew yet more metal—the intersecting discs and dials of an astrolabe. I knew from school that astrolabes were used in the Middle Ages to identify stars. But none that I’d seen in textbooks measured up to this clockwork contraption. It was no larger than a teacup saucer but intricate beyond imagination. At least four rings, each pitted within the other, rolled about on sharp bronze teeth, while two hands notched with indecipherable measurements struck collision points. The whole thing was encased in a lattice of gold and decorated around the
circumference with a forest silhouette so detailed that I could make out the etchings of individual leaves. Craftsmanship notwithstanding, the gold was burnished, the bronze stained, the various components bent and chipped.
Jack held the weathered astrolabe in the air, spun the wheels, and swept it across an increasingly small stretch of wall until he was able to touch one single brick with a finger. This was ARRRGH!!!’s signal. She shouldered her way closer, footfalls disrupting the TV signals. Several trolls broke from their trances and threw us spiteful looks.
ARRRGH!!! placed both paws to the wall. The muscled carpet of her back rippled and the wall opened along the irregular pattern of the brick. I covered my face against the specks of stone sent swirling by the churning cloud of dust. Tub and I shooed away the grit and watched as Jack and the two trolls made their way into a place that looked oddly familiar. We, too, passed through the door and were so amazed by what we saw that we weren’t startled by the sound of the wall sealing shut behind us.
A road sign. That’s what we were looking at. Not in troll language, not featuring some multiheaded beast, just a regular yellow road sign warning truck drivers that the bridge had a low clearance. Yes, that’s right—we were under a bridge. More specifically, a highway underpass in a darkened, industrial corridor in what looked like an anonymous suburb. We looked around and found worthless crap that now was the most welcome sight in the whole world: obscene graffiti on the concrete, six-pack rings collecting against a chain-link fence, and the red-and-yellow lights of a fast-food joint just over the next rise in the road. There were street signs, too, and Tub was excitedly pointing them out.