“De La Rosa! We’re in De La Rosa! We could walk home from here!” He addressed Jack. “Is it cool if we walk home from here?”
Jack was still consulting his astrolabe. Cars crossed overhead, oblivious of the creatures that lurked below. After an interminable silence, he snapped shut the golden device and pointed.
“Nullhullers. Two blocks away. They’re converging. We need to make this quick.”
He threw down the sack. I flinched at the violent clashing noise. Jack jabbed his chin at it.
“Go ahead.”
Accepting the bag’s contents seemed like it would solidify my position in this bizarre brigade. I hesitated. The thirteen-year-old unsheathed a sword and drove it into the pavement. Alarmed ants scrambled out of the fresh fissure. Jack’s voice crackled from the boom box speaker.
“Gunmar the Black gets stronger every day. More and more trolls, dangerous ones, are disappearing because they’re drawn to do his bidding. Every night minions like these Nullhullers stray farther. They’re in De La Rosa tonight. You want them to be at your house tomorrow? You want kids on your block to start disappearing? You want to know what that’s like?”
Tub made an impatient gesture at the bag. I took a breath, leaned over, and opened it. Inside were two weapons: a dull, pockmarked long-sword and a short, curved cutlass. I held them in either hand, so thrown off by the uneven weight that I wondered if I’d be able to take two steps without pitching over.
“What about me? I don’t get any weapons?” Tub asked.
“No,” Jack replied. “You want to walk home? Walk.”
Tub’s shoulders slumped. He looked hurt.
If Jack cared, you couldn’t tell through that mask. He pulled his sword from the cement and swirled it through the air with such speed that it seemed to become liquid mercury. It caught the yellow streetlights and drew upon the nighttime canvas like holiday sparklers.
“Three rules,” Jack said. “Rule number one: be afraid.”
“No problem,” Tub said. “We’re going to nail that one.”
“Being afraid means being aware. Think of the rabbit.”
The sword drew a simple sketch of a rabbit. It was so graceful and unexpected that I gasped. Then it was gone so quickly that I was left wondering if I had imagined it.
“The rabbit is nothing but vulnerable parts and good meat: throat, belly, thigh. Yet it is hard to catch. It watches and listens, all of the time, because it is afraid. Trolls smell fear and charge it. You can use this to your advantage.”
Again the sword swirled through the sky. This time the golden outline of a bull burned into my retinas long after it had dissipated from the air.
“Just like a toreador in a bullfight. Use their weight or velocity or anger against them. When you do strike, do it hard and do it fast.”
Jack squiggled the blade across the sky and I saw an elegant sketch of a python with a forked tongue and a long tail. I tried to follow the tail to its end but I blinked and the delicate artwork was lost.
“Imagine you’re injecting poison. Attack and retract. Attack and retract.”
Rabbit. Bull. Python. My imagination assembled a mythological beast with parts of all three. How this amalgamated monster related to my own theoretical fighting tactics should have been entirely unclear. And yet it wasn’t. A strange clarity swept over me regarding how these three animals made the perfectly lethal mix.
Jack swung the sword like a golf club, shooting two stones—one that hit my knee, breaking me from my fantasies, and one that struck Tub in the stomach. I hopped up and down in pain and Tub grunted, clutching his tummy. He had our attention, all right.
“Rule number two: there are three vulnerable spots on a troll.”
Jack pointed his weapon at ARRRGH!!! and she shuffled over and leaned down, an eager model. Jack swung his sword at her body. I held my breath as the sword halted just short of her chest fur. ARRRGH!!! wiggled like it tickled.
“The heart,” Jack said.
He spun around, weaving reflected light around him so that he was ribboned in temporary golden lace. The tip of the sword swooped toward ARRRGH!!!’s lower belly.
“The gallbladder.”
The sword cut downward and Jack hopped over it as easily as skipping rope. It passed behind his back, from one hand to the other, before Jack extended his limbs and the tip of the blade rested at the side of ARRRGH!!!’s neck. There, I noticed, a small growth bulged beneath the fur.
“The softies.”
ARRRGH!!! yawned—a ghastly sight.
“Softies,” Tub repeated. “I must’ve missed that day in biology. What’s a softie?”
Jack whirled around. Yellow light burned off his lenses.
“It’s a part that kills trolls when you stick it,” he snapped. “This is what we’ll be doing this week—all we’ll be doing this week. If you’re right about the Killaheed, we have seven nights, counting tonight, before the bridge reaches completion. We have to eliminate the Gumm-Gumm minions before then and be ready to take on Gunmar. Heart, softies—that’s how you kill a troll. The gallbladder—that’s how you make sure he stays dead. That fire in our cave? That’s where we burn them. Collect and burn. Got it? A gallbladder left behind can sprout the troll back to life like a seed.”
I felt nauseated. The frog dissection in seventh grade had been difficult enough.
“You know, this week’s not so good,” I said. “It’s the Festival of the Fallen Leaves. Wouldn’t surprise me if Dad needs help mowing some of the parks. And I’m in this play? We’ve only got this week to rehearse it. And math! There’s a huge math test on Friday, too, and Ms. Pinkton says if I don’t get eighty-eight percent I’m going to flunk. So I’ve really got to study—”
“You will study. With me. Out here. Every night.” He swung his blade so that the tip rang across both of my own swords, causing them to twirl in my hands. I had to grip them more tightly so they wouldn’t clatter to the pavement; I wondered if that had been the point.
“Name them. Quick.”
My palms were still stinging.
“Name what?”
“Your swords. A trollhunter must name his sword before he draws first blood.”
I looked blankly at the long-sword and cutlass.
“Now,” Jack seethed. “The Nullhullers are gathering.”
“I…”
“Something that’s important to you. Just say it. Whatever comes out is the right answer.”
“Claire,” I blurted, holding up the long-sword.
Tub gave me a sidelong smirk.
“Claire?” he repeated.
I hoped that the darkness covered the flush of my cheeks.
“Claire…blade. Claireblade.”
Tub covered his laugh with his hand. “Whatever, man.”
“Quick,” Jack urged. “The cutlass.”
“Uh…” I stared at the sharp, pocked metal. The dull, stubborn surface revealed nothing. I turned to Tub. “What was the name of that cat you had?”
“That cat? We’ve had sixty or seventy.”
“The cat! You know, the one that liked me.”
“Oh, right. Cat #6.”
It would have to do. I held up the cutlass and flashed a desperate grin.
“Cat #6!” I shouted.
Jack stared at me. Even through his armor I could feel the chill of his disappointment. Behind me, I could hear Tub’s muffled snickers and the tut-tutting of Blinky. Even ARRRGH!!!’s shoulders quaked in a manner that suggested laughter. I squeezed the handles of Claireblade and Cat #6 and glared at Uncle Jack.
“What are yours named? If you’re so great at naming inanimate objects.”
Blinky and ARRRGH!!! went silent. Tub, too, sensed the change in mood and stifled his laughter. Even the vehicles on the bridge above seemed to sense the weight of the moment—there was no traffic for the longest time. Jack contemplated the long-sword he held in his right hand. After a time, he reached back and withdrew a shorter blade. He held both with tenderness
, as if they were not weapons but monuments to the dead.
He indicated the long-sword.
“Victor Power.”
He raised the scimitar.
“Doctor X.”
All of us could feel in our guts the significance the words held for Jack.
He rolled his shoulders to rouse his body from contemplation. His stance broadened and the bike chains wrapped around his legs crackled. He lifted both swords, one high and one low, in a threatening attack formation; the die-cast trucks on his chest spun their wheels and the notebook spirals around his biceps clicked like barbed wire.
“Pay attention,” he said. “This is going to be fast.”
He wasn’t kidding. Over the next ten minutes, he swung, thrust, parried, feinted, and jabbed with dazzling agility and coordination, Doctor X barely finishing one breathtaking stroke before Victor Power blurred by with the speed of the next. The lessons were furious: attack formations, defense positions; footwork for advance and retreat; techniques for battling those taller than you, as well as those far smaller; jarring changes in tempo to bewilder your foe; the combination of both blades to redirect an onslaught; fighting one-on-one as well as taking on an entire group; the calculations of speed versus brute strength that determined a one-handed versus two-handed grip.
Each technique, drawn from renaissance and medieval schools of combat, had a name and he barked them out: Boar’s Tooth, botta secreta, double rownde, durchführen, false edge, imbrocata, kissing-the-button, on-the-pass, scandiaglio, volté. Then he added a few techniques from the Jack Sturges school—showier moves with names more befitting a thirteen-year-old boy: the Drunken Chicken, Blah-de-blah-de-blah, the Blue Jean Surprise, Idiot Gets a Face Full, and his magnum opus, Fling the Poop.
Right away it was clear that I was expected to memorize this menu of mayhem.
The reason I can repeat them to you in alphabetical order is because I did.
I didn’t mean to. If I couldn’t memorize the banal bits of information hurled at me by Ms. Pinkton, and if I couldn’t muster the minimal athletic ability demanded by Coach Lawrence, how was I expected to combine the two, and do so under the duress of a swashbuckling, back-from-the-dead uncle, two hideous trolls, and the promise of hunting down something called a Nullhuller? Yet I felt the information file into never-before-used compartments of my brain, as if the cerebral space had been waiting all this time, absorbent and hungry, for the right kind of facts to fill it.
ARRRGH!!! sniffed the air. Her orange eyes blazed and she drove the points of her horns into the underside of the bridge. Crumbles of cement colored a patch of her hair gray. Jack understood and reached for the astrolabe. But ARRRGH!!! was already loping away from the bridge, nose lifted, drool hanging down in eight-foot strands. Jack made a hand motion to Blinky. Instantly, tentacles curled around my and Tub’s shoulders.
“Courage can ebb when the moment of confrontation is nigh. But worry not, diminutive pixies. Fate would not allow a troll of my character to be struck down upon such an undistinguished field of battle. Not before my greatest wish is fulfilled. I speak, of course, of my unfinished historical dissertation.”
That wasn’t enough to put me at ease. I pointed at ARRRGH!!!.
“What’s her greatest wish?” I asked.
“Better dental hygiene,” Blinky answered without hesitation.
ARRRGH!!!, crooked, crud-covered teeth and all, was quickly leaving us behind. We exited the velvet darkness of the bridge and entered the menacing coolness of an autumn evening. ARRRGH!!! avoided streetlights by adopting a low, four-legged trot and keeping beneath an overhang of trees alongside the road. I was the last to pass Jack, who was sheathing his swords, waiting to bring up the rear.
His gloved hand shot out and nabbed my arm.
“Don’t be nervous.” His voice was a low rasp. “You’ll love it.”
It did not sound like a promise. More like a curse.
Suburbia looked vulnerable to me now. The houses were built of flimsy walls instead of solid stone; the picket fences were laughable in their meager attempts at claiming a piece of land; the ornamental mailboxes and flower lattices cried out for indifferent destruction. Each identical row of houses looked like a line of eggs waiting to be stomped on.
We rested on our elbows among the bushes in a backyard. ARRRGH!!! concealed herself in the opposite fashion, standing straight enough to be mistaken for another tree. Fifty feet away was a house painted a pale pink, and I strained for signs of trolls in the flower bed, the scatterings of garden tools, the swinging porch bench, the coils of water hose.
“There,” Jack said. “There. There. There. There.”
It took me several minutes before I could see the Nullhullers. Concealed in shadow by scruffy gray coats, they were the size of monkeys and had noodly arms and legs unequal to the task of carting around their obese bodies. Their eyes were large and completely black and their noses dark and runny. Most notable were mouths so wide that the corners almost met at the back of the head. As they crawled, the top halves of their heads popped up and down like garbage can lids.
“Dammit,” Jack whispered. “There’s number six.”
“Why, is that one worse?” I asked.
“Nullhullers, the odious cretins,” Blinky replied. “They travel in packs of five.”
Indeed, four more fat, long-limbed creatures wobbled onto the scene, and then there were ten giggling and snorting Nullhullers. Eight of them were gesturing at a second-floor window, though I could not imagine how creatures so fat would scale the wall. Meanwhile, the remaining two began scribbling across the side of the house with what looked like red chalk. They made a circle, then within that circle drew an upside-down star. I recognized it as the sign of Satan cherished by all the heavy-metal kids at school.
“Nullhullers are Satanists?!” I hissed.
“Don’t be silly,” Blinky scolded. “They’re Irish. More to the point, the Nullhullers are such a disorderly bunch that they are attracted to order wherever they can find it. Hence the traveling in fives; hence the attraction to drawing symbols of perfect symmetry. It was only by accident that they discovered that this particular symbol struck fear into the hearts of suburban adults, who would blame attacks on humans with impure beliefs. An ingenious cover, I must admit.”
There was a nattering among the Nullhullers indicating that they were ready to act. The ten of them drew together in a loose circle, quivering in excitement, their mouths lifting open to reveal sparse, square teeth that looked like chunks of granite.
“How lucky you are,” Blinky said. “You are about to witness possibly the most vile ritual in all of trolldom.”
The Nullhullers’ squat bodies began to hitch and jiggle. Thick drool poured from their agape mouths, followed by a brown lard. A symphony of choking sounds emitted from their bodies as a plump, translucent sac began to emerge from each gaping throat. The sacs were nearly the size of a Nullhuller itself and crammed with soft objects of different shapes and colors. They squirted out of the Nullhullers’ mouths and landed upon the grass with moist splats, where they palpitated and shivered.
“We’re spending Saturday night watching trolls barf,” Tub said. “Good times, Jim. Legendary times.”
“The Nullhullers are nothing if not cunning,” Blinky said with a measure of respect. “Knowing that their weight prevents swift movement, they eject their organs for a short time—all but their hearts—making them among the most nimble of all trolls.”
Now as light and empty as pillowcases, the Nullhullers scrambled up the side of the house with the dexterity of squirrels. Beside me, Jack reached into the bramble of bike chains around his thighs and withdrew three corroded old horseshoes. He handed one to Blinky and one to ARRRGH!!!.
“I’ll schmoof the parents,” he said. “If there are siblings, grandparents, anything like that, use the horseshoes.”
“Horseshoes,” I repeated, trying to keep up. “Why horseshoes?”
“Didn’t we mention?” Bli
nky asked. “Ye gods, there is so much ground to cover! Nullhullers are changelings. They are here to replace a human baby with one of their wretched own. It’s an abominable practice. If left undetected, a troll changeling can grow to full adulthood under its human skin, terrorizing the world with ruinous behavior. A good deal of your world’s top CEOs and politicians are Nullhullers, I’m sorry to say. Thus we must test the family members for trollhood. The quickest way is by pressing a horseshoe to the forehead. Iron works best, but in a pinch, anything of horseshoe design will suffice.”
“Well, give me one!” I cried.
“You’re not coming in,” Jack said. He shoved into my hands the burlap sack in which he had transported my swords. “You cut open those organ sacs, throw the gallbladders in the bag, and stand guard if any of those things start coming out the windows. If they do, remember your lessons.”
“Hold on!” Tub cried. “What the hell am I supposed to do?”
Jack pointed at the satanic stars.
“Wash those stupid symbols off the wall. Use that hose.” He scanned our faces. “Everybody ready?”
“No!” Tub and I cried in unison.
“Let’s go!” Jack shouted.
ARRRGH!!! smacked her frothy lips and tore across the lawn. Jack ran at a full sprint at her side, the moonlight splashing across the metal edges of his armor. Blinky, too, raced along on his unknowable legs, though Tub and I were able to keep up with him.
“It was with unflagging dedication that I taught myself to move by touch and smell,” Blinky narrated for our listening pleasure. “Tonight that is a mixed blessing.”
Seconds later I knew what he meant. The organ sacs were rancid. Tub and I stopped short, gagging and coughing. Blinky continued without us, joining Jack at the back door he’d just jimmied open with Doctor X. Jack hurried inside the house, followed by Blinky. ARRRGH!!! was too large to fit inside, but mere physics didn’t stop her. She popped both arms from their sockets and twisted her oversize simian body in startling ways, then, somehow, disappeared inside.