ARRRGH!!! was less impressed. The troll bounded through sawhorses and fences. TVs were destroyed, board games scattered, and mead cups overturned. Countless trolls bayed their chagrin. Heart pounding, I wove through the smallest thoroughfares I could find, sliding between tightly packed shacks so the troll couldn’t follow.
It didn’t work. ARRRGH!!! began tearing these shacks to pieces. It was like trying to outrun a tornado. I fled with my arms above my head to protect myself from the hailstorm of wood and metal siding, and kept jagging around every bend I could find. The lights of the gambling district faded, and I became aware of a dramatic decrease in population. The slap of my feet against brick was replaced by squirts of mud. Each landing of ARRRGH!!!’s feet sounded like the dropping of a boulder into a thick mire.
Right away I identified the sparkle of water. Buildings were growing sparse, so I had no option except to sprint for it. With ARRRGH!!!’s hot breath burning my neck, I made it in thirty seconds. It was not the cool, rippling brook I had imagined but a sweltering ditch of excrement that twined through the underworld. Four or five trolls with ornate tusks were scattered along the bank using nets to capture junk that tumbled along in the current. This looked to be the main point of entry for much of the trash with which the troll city was built. Hills of it, yet to be categorized, towered behind each fisherman.
I sprung across the creek at its narrowest point and clawed my way up the bank. This was the edge of the city. Sporadic campfires lit by solitary trolls revealed the wooden braces that kept the cliffs from collapsing. The light was dim as I raced past and I was grateful, because the body parts I glimpsed were hideous—ancient, powerful beings whose quietude suggested that they wanted only to die in peace. Their flesh was covered in lichen and toadstools from decades of inactivity.
A figure swung down from an overhead pipe and landed on two legs in front of me. Firelight reflected from his aviator goggles and soda-cap forearms. For an instant I felt the notebook spirals around his biceps before pushing away, but there behind me, emerging from the gloom, were the eight red eyes of Blinky. I spun on my heel and started in a third direction but was met by ARRRGH!!!, whose cemetery teeth gleamed from the darkness.
“You’ve wasted so much time.” The metal man’s voice crunched from his stereo speaker between blasts of static. He raised a spiked glove. Dangling there was the bronze medallion. “Don’t make me say it again, Jim Sturges. Put this on before it’s too late.”
It took a few seconds before I recognized my own name. This had been no random abduction, which meant Dad had been right: there had been things in the night trying to get me. I thought of the ten locks on our front door and for the first time ever longed to hear their protective rhythm.
The man of metal read my mind.
“Your father refused this once,” he said. “Don’t make the same mistake.”
My muscles trembled with overdue exhaustion, and my mind gave out beneath the madness of all that had happened. I wanted to cry but didn’t have the energy. I slumped and hung my head, defeated by the stink of troll breath and the icy realization of a terrible truth. I covered my face with my hands.
“You’re the ones,” I said, “who took Uncle Jack.”
“Yes.”
“Who ruined Dad’s life.”
“Yes.”
“And now you want to ruin mine.”
“Take this.” The medallion jangled. “Take this and you’ll see.”
A piercing ululation tore through the air. I dropped my hands. Bells rang throughout the city and shepherds’ horns were blown. I turned to look and saw the snuffing of a hundred fires at once, the lowering of flags and the folding of scaffolds, the silhouette of carts and wheelbarrows pushed from the center of town to the edges. The ground began to shake as every single troll hurried to clear the streets. Many were headed in our direction. The stampede was coming.
That’s when I saw the ray of sunshine.
It broke through a crack somewhere overhead, firing like a lightning bolt into the mud near the sewage creek. The ray of light widened, and I heard the strangled yelp of one of the fishermen as he went down. That began the panic. Shrieks rose up, one after another. A second ray of light struck a leaning tower in the center of the city.
“You!” The man of metal thrust the medallion at me. “Take this! Now!”
“But they’re coming—”
“Happens every morning,” he snapped. “Put it on!”
Sunlight stabbed through dozens of cracks then, turning the cavern into a quilt of light and dark through which threaded the scattering forms of a thousand unbelievable ogres. A large blade of sun shot down just ten feet away. I couldn’t help it—I took a step toward it and the warmth it offered.
ARRRGH!!! and Blinky recoiled from the beam.
Hadn’t the metal man said I would go home at dawn? I tore my eyes from the advancing surge of monsters and looked at him. He was strangling the medallion chain, unafraid of the sun that had his two companions edging away. Droves of trolls began teeming past us, dancing around the light with multifarious legs and screeching at such volume that the cave sounded like a steel tower being crushed in a giant fist. Larger trolls dove into tunnels while smaller ones scrambled up vertical walls like lizards.
I took another step toward the sunlight.
“If you don’t take it now,” raved the metal man, “we’ll come back for you tomorrow night. And the night after that. And the night after that. And that will be your life, Jim Sturges, until you do what we say.”
It was an excellent threat. I teetered between the options. There was no more stone or concrete or mud that I could see, just a writhing mass of grotesque bodies that devoured the world like a plague.
The man of metal ran out of patience. He withdrew both swords in a way that communicated some sort of signal. ARRRGH!!! charged, a great paw falling at me like a bulldozer shovel, and Blinky sailed in as well, tentacles reaching, eye stems tightening into a single, tortured braid. I felt stiff fur and the powerful suckers of an octopus, but I was already diving for the sunlight, watching my hands turn white as they entered its beam, and then going blind when the ray hit me dead on. My skin hurt, my sinuses filled with the smell of cinder, the back of my throat clotted with the taste of my own fear, and then I was on my back with all of my bones aching as if they had been bent to the breaking point. My head was on a soft, sweaty pillow.
Dad paused by the crack in my bedroom door. He was wearing his weekend mowing gear and was fussing with the button on his left sleeve.
“Morning, son,” he said.
He moved along down the hallway.
Something dropped to the mattress beside me. I held in a scream.
It was the medallion.
I spent less than twenty minutes at home before I left, and every one of them was upsetting. I stashed the medallion beneath my pillow to get it out of my sight, and a few seconds later, the sweat on my body began to cool as I convinced myself that it had all been a nightmare brought on by a monumentally crappy day. Relieved, I threw aside my covers only to find legs crusted with dry sewage and feet blackened with mud.
I scrubbed the crud in the shower as if it were a flesh-eating disease. The gray water swirled down the drain, and I watched it until I remembered where drains led. I fled from the bathroom, threw on clothes, and after some deliberation brought out the medallion. Menacing though it was, it felt no different in my hand than any earth-built piece of jewelry. There was no more magic in this thing than there was in a class ring, and there was one way to prove that to myself.
I put it on.
Nothing happened. Absolutely nothing.
I exhaled in relief—a small victory for common sense. I tucked the medallion beneath my shirt. After a full day of wearing it, maybe the rest of the suffocating fear would go away, too.
My plan was to dart into the kitchen to grab my sweatshirt and be out of the house in seconds. But as I was throwing it over my head, I smelled the strangest t
hing. I poked my head from the top of the sweatshirt to find my dad putting strips of crispy bacon upon a plate and transferring that plate to the table, where a steaming stack of pancakes awaited. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I hadn’t seen such a feast since before Mom left. Dad sat down and took a satisfied pull of his coffee.
“Great timing, Jimmy. Pull up a chair.”
Dad was whistling. Sure, it was Don and Juan’s “What’s Your Name?” but still—whistling? It was so unprecedented that for a moment I forgot everything else.
“You okay, Dad?”
“Better than okay. Had the best sleep of my life last night. Jimmy, I tell you, I haven’t slept that well since I was little, back when I shared a room with my brother, Jack. Never thought I’d sleep that well again.”
He absently touched his Excalibur Calculator Pocket, as if fantasizing about how he might even find the courage to stand up for himself at work. His fingers moved to the Band-Aid on his glasses, and he nodded as if deciding to fix those frames once and for all. I’d never seen him so happy. I couldn’t help it; I smiled back. He reached across the table for the syrup.
That’s when I saw the little trail of sores leading from the corner of his lip, across his jaw, and down his neck, and remembered that terrible sound coming from his bedroom the night before: Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp. Sluuuurp.
He beamed at me and a scab from one of the sores flaked onto his pancakes.
“Have a seat,” he said. “I think things are finally turning up Sturges.”
The tableful of food was left behind. I was out the door and on my bike in seconds. It was the first day of the Festival of the Fallen Leaves, and all sorts of roads were blocked off. I made the mistake of heading straight toward the Kids’ Jubilee on Main Street, but managed to cut across the town square before having to dodge three hundred costumed kids. Ignoring every honked horn and middle finger offered by affronted motorists, I swerved down side roads like my life depended on it, which, at this point, I was pretty sure it did.
At last I reached Papadopoulos Dental Solutions, threw my bike into the bushes, rocketed through the front door, and crashed into the front desk. The receptionist flinched. I gasped for air. The smooth jazz piping from the speakers mocked my frantic state.
“Mlookinfortub.”
“Slow down, dear. What now?”
I gulped a quick lungful of air.
“I’m looking for Tub.”
“I still don’t understand—”
“Toby D.”
“I don’t know who that—”
“Tobias F. Dershowitz.”
The receptionist adjusted her glasses and consulted her ledger. Her gaze ticked down the list of names.
“Dershowitz…Dershowitz…oh!” Her smile quickly faded as she examined her notes more closely. “Oh.”
The sound of a drill sliced through the walls.
Moments later I ducked into the third, and most serious, patient room to find Tub alone and strapped into a chair with his lips stretched wide in four directions courtesy of a spiderlike metal contraption. His new braces made the old ones look debonair. Big chrome nodules were attached to every tooth, while steel wire twisted about in dizzying patterns. An acrid cloud of smoke hung above his head, the manifestation of his mood.
Tub couldn’t move his head from the grips, but he managed to raise an eyebrow.
I rushed to the side of the chair.
“It came back,” I gasped. “The thing from the parking lot.”
He raised his other eyebrow.
“They took me! The thing from the parking—I didn’t tell you, but there was a thing—when I was under—it had claws—Tub, no one’s gonna believe me! I was in this place—there was all this stuff, and I think it was from when all those kids—there were three of them, one with all these eyes—Tub, you wouldn’t believe it, all these eyes flying around all crazy—and a guy wearing all this junk and he was smaller but really scary—but the worst was the one with the claws—Tub, it was huge! Arms like a mile long! Teeth—a million teeth! Huge as, like, traffic cones—”
“Teeth that big I’d like to see!”
Dr. Papadopoulos came striding in holding a fistful of X-rays. I stepped back from the chair. Tub had always said that Papadopoulos was a hairy guy—when he wanted to gross me out, Tub would pretend to find curly pieces of Papadopoulos’s arm hair stuck in his braces. It was no exaggeration. Papadopoulos’s black mane began about an inch above his unibrow, and each of his four gigantic rings was lost in knuckle hair. He grinned at me. Perfect teeth, of course.
“What are we talking about? Some movie you saw?”
I felt myself nodding.
“Don’t get a chance to see many movies myself. What can I say? Teeth are my life. Tobias here will be with you in just a couple minutes. He just needs a wee bit of tightening.” He tossed the X-rays onto the counter, peered into Tub’s open mouth, nodded to himself, and headed out of the room again.
I swept back to Tub’s side.
“Tub. Tub. What am I gonna tell Dad? I can’t tell him, can I? He’ll go mental. He’ll lock me up with chains. We need to do something. You and me. Maybe we can set up a trap. Oh, man, Tub—they said they’d come back. Tonight. Tonight! We don’t have time—”
“Always time for proper dental care,” Papadopoulos said, cruising back in.
He had in his hands a tray of the most horrifying medical devices I’d ever seen: misshapen hooks so sharp they glinted, a scalpel with form-fitting plastic grips, a thing that looked like tongs except much sharper, and a svelte handheld rotary blade. Each tool was constructed of lustrous silver. I’d consider them pretty awesome if they didn’t exist for the sole purpose of torturing Tub.
Papadopoulos bent over the instruments, fingers wiggling.
“Tobias’s case has been an inspiration to me. These tools here I invented in my personal lab. Forged and soldered them myself. It would not surprise me if I received an invitation to this year’s Dental Association Conference in Anaheim. No, it would not surprise me one bit.”
Papadopoulos took up a wrench and leaned over Tub with the look of a man eyeing a succulent turkey and deciding where to make the first cut.
“Ah, yes,” he purred. Metal squealed and popping noises came from teeth being driven tightly into sockets. The dentist’s body blocked the specifics of the attack, though I saw plenty of flailing from Tub’s limbs. Papadopoulos proceeded, unconcerned. “Aha. Yes. Yes. My, my, my!”
An unbearable five minutes later, the mad scientist straightened and exhaled with a great amount of pride. He released the prongs holding the four sides of Tub’s mouth and began to remove his rubber gloves.
“Rinse and spit. I’ll see you next week.”
Papadopoulos’s eyes caught mine as he passed. Rather, it was my agape mouth that caught his attention. He frowned and leaned in, inspecting my unbrushed rows.
“Mmm-hmm. There are things I could help you with. Make an appointment. It’ll change your life, son.”
He winked. I shuddered. He strode out the door with a clipboard containing the details of his next victim. He paused in the hallway, sniffing the air. He scowled, sniffed some more. He pressed an intercom button on the wall.
“Betty, I distinctly smell sewage. Could you get a plumber out here ASAP?”
Several curly hairs fluttered in the air after he was gone.
I clutched at the arm of the dentist chair.
“This isn’t a joke, Tub! I’m in trouble. We’re all in trouble, the whole town, the whole world! You have no clue. You have no idea what kind of things we’re dealing with here. There’s a whole land of—”
Tub held up a single finger. He sat tall, carefully picked up the paper cup of water, sipped it daintily, swished it around his cheeks, and then spit into the basin. He repeated the routine with fastidious care: sip, swish, spit. Then he took up the end of his paper bib and dabbed at his mouth until he was all clean and sat back in the chair. He sighed and turned to look at me. H
e parted his lips to speak and I squinted as the fluorescents shone off his mouthful of new metal.
“Are you nuts?!”
Tub shouldered open the door. A knitted cat above the peephole rang its belled tail.
“Grandma! I’m home!”
Somewhere between fifteen and twenty cats, live ones, coordinated their assaults from ground and aerial positions. As always, I flinched from their overenthusiastic claws and desperate mewling. Tub, though, had mastered the art of harmlessly toeing aside felines without even looking. They hissed with annoyance and leapt to the plastic-coated sofa and the coffee table that no one was allowed to put coffee on. The whole place was decked out in the gewgaws of classic Americana: framed cross-stitches imploring God to bless this house, shelves containing ceramic miniatures of angelic cats, and endless baubles of wicker and crystal, none of which, under any circumstance, were you to touch. Adding unity to the hodgepodge was a fine layer of cat hair and the delicate bouquet of cat urine.
“Tub,” I pressed. “What are we going to do?”
“Do? We? Well, I’m going to go lock myself in my room until I can come up with some way to hide these deal-breakers on my teeth. I think Grandma’s got some thread, maybe I can just sew my lips shut. Leave a little gap for a straw. Live on liquid meals. I mean, what girl is going to be seen within ten feet of me now? These things on my teeth look like bullets. Bullets, Jim. Girls hate bullets!”
“Tobias, you took off your shoes?” The voice came from the kitchen.
“Yes, Grandma!” Tub shouted. With two practiced kicks, both shoes rocketed down the hall. I bent down to untie mine. I hated this part. Shoe removal was mandatory in the Dershowitz household, which was a real shame, considering how the shag carpet was soggy with hairballs. Also, possibly, dung.