“The scoundrels are piping up the vilest of odors to throw us off the scent! Strawberries! Vanilla! Azaleas! Coffee! I fear I shall faint like a corseted maiden! Or vomit most forcefully! Or both in impressive concurrence!”
“We attack,” Jack said. “Right now. But we need a different door.”
“Anywhere but here!” Blinky moaned. “Or regurgitation will be the evening’s sport!”
“I know the place,” Jack said. “But we need to move.”
There was no argument. Jack strapped on his armor, the metal parts snapping and ringing, harbingers of combat. I kicked aside the clothes sodden with troll puke and chose a shirt and pants that I wouldn’t mind dying in. Blinky handed me Cat #6 and Claireblade, and they felt heavier than ever before.
We swept through the living room, and I grabbed the doorknob. It turned but the door didn’t open. All ten locks had been thrown. I began the unlocking regimen before realizing what this meant. I turned around and there was Dad, clutching his battered briefcase, his face patched with stubble, his clothes matted, his unbuttoned left cuff link stained from whatever fast food he’d been living off for the past day.
Dad’s reaction to seeing an actual troll was so subdued that I worried his brain might politely explode inside his skull. To minimize his size, Blinky folded as many of his appendages behind him as he could. Jack, meanwhile, kneaded the mask in his hand, clearly wishing he could put it on to avoid this encounter. Dad exhaled and inhaled as if both were being done at gunpoint, and reached out to the shelf above the electric fireplace for stability. Various pieces of the Jack Sturges Collection were toppled.
Dad gazed at his brother’s school photos while he spoke.
“Jack,” he said. “Why did you come back?”
“I had to,” Jack whispered.
“Then don’t leave.” Dad’s voice broke. “Stay here with me. I still have boxes of your clothes. I can buy bikes for the both of us, the best they sell, red for you and yellow for me. I’ve still got your radio. We can ride and listen to music, Jack. We can shoot our lasers. We can pedal so fast we won’t have time to remember any of the bad things that happened. We can grow up together after all! Doesn’t that sound like a dream?”
“I can’t grow up, Jimbo. Not with you. Not with anyone.”
Dad slammed his fist onto the shelf. It shook and the framed milk carton picture fell to the floor, where the glass shattered upon the hearth. Jack jumped and Blinky gasped. Dad whirled around, his face streaming with tears.
“I’m lonely up here, Jack! Stay with me. Or take me with you.”
“Jimbo…”
“Wherever you go, I’ll go; it’s what I should’ve done years ago!”
“I can’t—”
“Take me! I’m ready!”
“You’re not—”
“I’m the big brother now, Jack! You have to do what I say!”
“You’re too old!”
Jack’s shout rattled the locks upon the door and made the steel shutters hum. We stood there as the cruel echo made its excruciating exit. Dad’s taut expression of shock reshaped into folds of grief. He lifted a hand dotted with the first liver spots of old age and touched the jowls that in recent years had elongated his cheeks. The hand continued up past the worry lines carved into his forehead to the scalp that had long before given up its hair.
“Then I’m overdue,” Dad said.
Jack’s hand clenched his mask.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
We hitched up our weapons and turned toward the door.
“You’re taking Jimmy?” Dad asked. “You’re leaving me and taking my son?”
“Dad,” I said. “I have to go.”
“I forbid it,” Dad said, emboldened with the concept. “There’s danger—have you seen the news? Danger everywhere!”
“I’ll bring him back,” Jack said.
“And if you don’t? What then? You’d be tearing apart what’s left of this family. When it’s in your power to put it all back together!”
Jack paused with his tack-edged glove on the doorknob. He looked at his boots for a moment and I could see him measure the truth of what Dad was saying. That night’s mission might be one of suicide, and even if that meant a troll invasion and the destruction of the entire continent one city at a time, perhaps it was still unfair to rob a father and son of those precious last days.
“This isn’t up for debate,” I snapped. “I’m going.”
“Jim,” Jack said. “You need to think what we’re about to—”
“I don’t have to think. That bridge will be finished tomorrow. Kids will die. Kids I know. And we’re sitting here discussing it? Look, it’s like what Tub said, except I didn’t believe him when he said it. This is what I’m here to do, Dad. This is the only thing I’m good at. There are times when you have to do the right thing, no matter how scary. Both of you should know that more than anyone! If I don’t fight now, right now, when am I supposed to fight?”
Jack was staring at me. It was a look of warning, then of questioning.
I did not budge.
Slowly a sad smile crept across his lips. He nodded, once.
“We fight,” he said.
“Fight?” Blinky laughed. “Too humble a word for our despoilings and devastations!”
Dad collapsed onto the sofa with mannequin stiffness.
“Your Shakespeare,” he monotoned. “What about your play?”
With practiced fingers I undid all the rest of the locks. Then I saw the keys to the San Bernardino Electronics van hanging on a hook beside the door. We were behind schedule and wheels would sure help us catch up. I took them before I could think better of it.
“I’m heading over to the field tomorrow to give it a final mowing,” Dad continued. “Make it all look nice for your play.”
I ushered Blinky into the night, then Jack, who threw a final, regretful look at his brother. I put my hand upon the die-cast vehicles that covered his torso and pushed him down the steps. I took the doorknob and swung the door behind me, pausing for just a moment to watch my dad stare blankly at the dead TV. This could be the last time I saw him. I wanted him to turn around and tell me that he believed that I could do it.
“I’ll come back, Dad,” I said. “I’ll try. I’ll try really hard.”
“Yes, of course.” He did not look at me. “See you tomorrow night at the play. I know you’ll be fantastic.”
It hurt to leave. But hurting was something every family that had lost a child knew about, and if the trollhunters had one job above all others, it was the ending of that hurt one way or the other before it became something that could never be salved.
That night Jack fulfilled a long-held fantasy: he drove. Ripping the keys from me and saying that he knew as much about driving as I did, he leapt into the driver’s seat while I loaded Blinky into the cargo area that usually held Dad’s mower. Once I was strapped into the passenger seat, Jack lurched the van forward, punching a nice, neat hole into the garage door.
“Mistake,” he said. “My mistake.”
He reversed through the lawn and kept going until the tires had munched up a flowerbed across the street. By this point, though, Jack was having a blast, his eyes sparkling with the kind of intensity I’d only seen in battle. He shoved the gear into drive and stomped on the gas. Once the spinning wheels grabbed hold of the pavement, we accelerated through a cloud of burning rubber, Jack whooping with uncharacteristic glee.
He drove the same way he rode his bike back in 1969: headlong, at top speed, and improvising every step of the way. By the time we heaved to a halt in Tub’s driveway, we’d only dented three cars, demolished one topiary light, and snapped a sapling in half. Jack honked the horn and Blinky used a tentacle to throw open the side door. The van chugged; every fiber in my body was in motion.
We saw movement at the back of the house. Jack gunned the engine, ready to roll. ARRRGH!!! hulked her cautious way along the side of the house, blotting out the yard ligh
ts as she approached the van. Once more, it seemed there was no way she’d fit, and yet she did, turning the entire back compartment into a stinking lounge of black fur upon which Blinky sat. She seemed to find being inside a human’s vehicle almost as novel as Jack did. I adjusted my mirror and noticed something glinting from ARRRGH!!!’s mouth. I turned around in my chair.
Proudly she pulled back her furry lips and grinned. Wrapped around each gigantic, lethal tooth was the same chicken wire I’d helped Tub pull through his bedroom window four days before, expertly tightened by metal screws.
“Braces,” Tub said.
He stood on the driveway decked out in his best approximation of a ninja: black tennis shoes, black sweatpants, a black hoodie, a belt made from a red curtain sash, and an oversize fanny pack holding his gear, probably not throwing stars and nunchakus but who really knew. It was unfortunate that the fanny pack was lime green, but I still was impressed. Tub pointed at his own braces.
“She liked mine.” There was no disguising the satisfaction in his voice. “She’s actually more aware of her looks than you’d think. So I hooked her up. Not bad, huh? She’ll have the best choppers around in just, you know, maybe a couple hundred more treatments. But that’s nothing in troll years, right?”
ARRRGH!!! extended her muzzle from the side door and rested it upon Tub’s shoulder. Her blasts of breath wobbled his mountain of frizzed hair. Absently he patted her on the nose like he’d done it a thousand times, which I realized, he probably had. At once I felt terrible and inspired: this friend whom I’d left to deal with this frightening creature had performed so much better than I’d thought possible.
Five yellow claws wrapped around Tub’s considerable gut and lifted him into the back of the van. There was a bruise on Tub’s jaw from where Steve had thrown him against the locker, but it was nothing—he looked more certain of himself than at any other point in his life. He grinned at me, showing all those glorious braces.
“You watch my back, I watch yours,” he said. “It’s only fair.”
He offered up a hand and I took it.
“My ninja,” I said.
“My trollhunter,” he replied.
I don’t think Jack was thrilled about having another kid to look out for. But he clenched his teeth and popped the van into gear. The bottom scraped against the driveway with the additional weight. Blinky shut the side door with a tentacle while another appendage curled around Tub’s neck affectionately. I felt a sob catch in my chest. We might all be headed to our deaths, but this right here was a family, no matter how unusual it might be.
Off we roared, peeling away strips of lawn and knocking bumpers from cars that, according to Jack, should’ve been parked closer to the curb. Tub shook off the blows and unfolded from his fanny pack a laminated artifact of Dershowitz lore.
“The cat list!” I cried. “You found it.”
“Yeah, well, it wasn’t hard to find once all my video games had been eaten. But I’m happy to report that the killing spree is over. Notice there’s no cat hair stuck in those fancy new braces? I’ve converted our friend to cheeseburgers.”
“Pickle,” said ARRRGH!!!. “Onion.”
“Right, she likes them with pickles and onion.”
“Paper. Is flavor best.”
“Yeah, she likes the wrapping paper left on, too. FYI, you don’t want to know how much two hundred cheeseburgers cost. My god. Point is, she didn’t mean anything by eating all those cats and she’s done with it.”
“Cat no for eat. For chew.”
I translated and Tub’s face fell.
“No, no, no. We’ve been over this. You can’t chew them either, okay?”
ARRRGH!!! gnashed her metal-covered teeth, trying to make sense of it.
Tub sighed and snapped the laminated list.
“I thought a brief eulogy might be in order?”
He cleared his throat.
“For those brave felines who fell in the fight for freedom, I recite these names so that we will not forget that adorable, undeniable sense of curiosity that got them all eaten.”
“Make this quick,” Jack said. “We’re almost there.”
“And now for the naming of the deceased. Curly Fries. CSI. Midichlorian. Dow Jones.” Tub shrugged. “Grandma watches a lot of TV.” He continued. “The Wayans Brothers. Bridezilla. The Secretary of Agriculture. That’s So Raven. The Cat Formerly Known as Prince—”
“Parking now.” Jack grunted as if bracing for impact. “Parking—parking—hold on—”
Jack did indeed park, or, as I would’ve put it, sideswiped a shoulder barrier until both driver’s side wheels were punctured. The van jerked to an unhealthy halt, and the engine coughed until it died. I felt bad for Dad but for only a second: Jack pulled down his mask, planted his hands on the edge of the window, and leapt out.
I heard him land on his feet in a pile of dead leaves and hurry away. The other doors were already opening and so I followed. There was a bank leading down to a dry canal bed, but getting there meant trudging through overgrown weeds. These slowed me down, as did several decades of trash tossed from the street. Only when I had reached the bottom with the others did I realize the significance of the location.
It was the Holland Transit Bridge.
Though I’d heard my dad speak of the location all of my life, I’d always avoided it. It was easily done: for a generation, people had eschewed it because of a nasty urban legend about a boy being eaten beneath the bridge in the ’60s. And then, in the 1980s, a freeway bypass ended its usefulness as a thoroughfare.
Now it existed as the last respite of homeless junkies. I stepped into its shadow and warily examined the chunks of cement dangling overhead by thin iron rods. More empty beer bottles than I’d ever seen had been tossed next to a concrete wall covered in graffiti: demonic beings who bore resemblance to ARRRGH!!!, as well as nonsensical yet ominous declarations like Harpakhrad Lives! The structure was in deplorable shape but held the portent of ancient ruins. Something important had happened here, you could feel it.
Jack wandered about with his astrolabe as one does when trying to find a phone signal. ARRRGH!!! snuffled her nose along every clammy surface, giving experimental licks to mold and bird droppings. Blinky’s tentacles pushed and prodded for any door that might be hiding in plain sight. Minutes went by, then half an hour. Tub and I sent each other private telegrams of panic until Jack kicked at a pillar, sending pellets of cement skidding down the canal.
“This is the place! I know it is!”
“Gumm-Gumms,” Blinky concurred. “I feel them with my every beautiful pore.”
“I can’t single out the door. I just can’t.”
“The Machine, Jack. Remember the Machine and the will to fight shall prevail!”
The discussion was interrupted by a soft thud. ARRRGH!!! was hunched over the wilted cardboard box that she’d tossed to the ground. Dirt scritched against concrete as the box shifted around on its own. Jack did not hesitate: he withdrew Victor Power from its scabbard and bolted for the box as if meaning to run his blade through its center.
ARRRGH!!! held out a gentle paw to block him.
“Choice none,” she said.
“Balderdash!” Blinky cried. “I shall double my efforts! Triple! Quadruple!”
ARRRGH!!! picked up the box with a bashfulness that begged for forgiveness.
Jack’s warning crunched from his boom box speaker.
“I’ll cut it out of your hands, I swear!”
Spittle trickled down ARRRGH!!!’s chin as she gave her human friend a smile of metal-packaged teeth. Then she reached carefully into the box and withdrew the Eye of Malevolence. The yellow orb flopped inside the cage of her hand, its long stems whipping like strings of wet seaweed. A high-pitched, babyish squeak emitted from somewhere inside the feculent flesh.
The thing wanted fed.
“Hold her down!” Jack commanded.
He wrapped himself around ARRRGH!!!’s left arm but was nowhere near stron
g enough and in seconds found himself dangling from the bicep. Blinky knotted his tentacles around both legs but he did not look especially optimistic. Tub gave me a desperate look and we both took handfuls of stiff black fur.
The Eye of Malevolence dug its long, stringy fingers into ARRRGH!!!’s face, and that was it for the trollhunters. Jack’s armor crashed loudly when he hit the dirt. Blinky was thrown into a pillar, setting off a small avalanche of crumbled cement. Tub and I found ourselves rolling over and over, locked in a terrified embrace. I put on the brakes and saw the Eye’s soft body pulsating as it leeched away our friend’s sanity.
A door to the troll world opened in one of the pillars. I was about to announce this news before dozens more began creaking open and snapping shut from every part of the underpass: the belly, the walls, the ground beneath our feet. ARRRGH!!! had done her job, but the Eye had countered by opening additional passages to confuse us. For a bonus we received a deranged ARRRGH!!!; she lurched at her former partners, taking out chunks of concrete and canal bed and sending refuse into the air like filthy insects.
Blinky’s tentacles picked up a dozen jagged pieces of rock.
I withdrew Cat #6. Would we have to hurt her? Or worse?
Or would it be the other way around?
Only Jack, I noticed, had not armed himself. He stood motionless with his hands at his sides.
I pulled Tub closer to the action.
“Jim! No! Bad timing! She’s in a mood! Reschedule! Reschedule!”
“Boost me up!” I shouted. “Now!”
“Oh god oh god oh god oh god,” Tub mumbled as he ran up behind the marauding ARRRGH!!!, kneeled down, and laced his hands together. I planted my foot into Tub’s makeshift sling and he launched me upward, as he’d done a hundred times in the past. For a delirious instant I was airborne and then my face was full of fur. I wrapped my limbs around an arm muscle bigger than me.
ARRRGH!!! jerked the arm as if shooing away a pest but paid me little mind as she cornered Blinky. For me the ride was like being churned up and down on some vomitous carnival attraction. I pulled my face from the carpet of gamy hair, took two handfuls of pelt, and began surmounting the shoulder. The Eye of Malevolence slurped outward to cover ever more of the troll’s face, digging a couple of stems so far into her nose that they reemerged from her mouth, looking as if they’d made a wrong turn.