by Eoin Colfer
And then there was the physicality of the troll itself. There are many breeds of troll. From the ten-foot-tall behemoth Antarctic Blue, to the silent jungle killer the Amazon Heel Claw. The troll on Dalkey Island Beach was a one-in-a-million anomaly. In form and proportion he was the perfect Ridgeback, with the distinctive thick comb of spiked hair that ran from brow to tailbone, and the blue-veined gray fur on his chest and arms all present and correct. But this creature was no massive predator. In fact, he was a rather tiny one. Standing barely eight inches tall, the troll was one of a relatively new variety that had begun to pop up in recent millennia since fairies were forced deep into the earth’s mantle. Much in the same way as schnauzer dogs had miniature counterparts known as toy schnauzers, some troll breeds also had their shrunken varieties, and this troll was one of perhaps half a dozen toy Ridgebacks in existence and the first to ever reach the surface.
Not at all what Lord Teddy had been expecting. Having seen Brother Colman’s scars, the duke had imagined his quarry would be somewhat larger.
When the little troll’s heat signature had popped up in his eyepiece like an oversize Jelly Baby, the duke had exclaimed, “Good heavens! Could that little fellow be my troll?”
It certainly matched Brother Colman’s description, except for the dimensions. In truth, the duke couldn’t help feeling a little let down. He had been expecting something more substantial. That diminutive creature didn’t look like it could manufacture enough venom to keep a hamster alive.
“Nevertheless,” muttered the duke, “since I’ve come all this way . . .”
And he squeezed the trigger on his sniper rifle.
The supersonic cellophane slug made a distinctive warbling noise as it sped through the air, sounding like a juvenile Swiss yodeler, and impacted the toy Ridgeback square in the solar plexus, releasing its payload in a sparkling globule that quickly sprawled over the tiny creature, wrapping it in a restrictive layer of cellophane before it could do much more than squeak in indignation.
Beckett Fowl spotted the cartwheeling toy troll, and his first impressions were of fur and teeth, and so, consequently, his first thought was Angry Hamster!
But the boy chided himself, remembering that Angry Hamster was a sculpture he himself had constructed from chewed paper and bodily fluids and therefore not a living thing, and so he would have to revise his guess as to what this tumbling figure might be.
But by this time the troll had come to rest at his feet, and Beckett was able to snatch it up and scrutinize it closely, so there was no need for guessing.
Not alive, he observed then. Doll, maybe.
Beckett thought the figure had moved of its own accord, perhaps even made a squealing noise of some kind, but now he could see it was a fantasy action figure with a protective plastic coating.
“I shall call you Whistle Blower, little chap,” he whispered into the troll’s pointed ear. The boy had chosen this name after barely a second’s consideration, because he had seen on Myles’s preferred news channel that people who squealed were sometimes called whistle-blowers. Also, Beckett was not the kind of fellow who wasted time on decisions.
Beckett turned to show Myles his beach salvage, though his brother had always been a little snooty when it came to toys, claiming they were for children even though he was patently himself a child and would be for a few more years.
“See, brother?” he called, waggling the action figure. “I found a new friend.”
Myles sneered as expected, and opened his mouth to pass a derogatory remark along the lines of “Honestly, Beck. We are eleven years old now. Time to leave childish things behind.”
But his scorn was interrupted by a deafening series of honks.
The emergency Klaxon.
It is true to say that there is hardly a more alarming sound than a Klaxon, heralding as it does the arrival of some form of disaster. Most people do not react positively to this sound. Some scream, some faint. There are those who run in circles wringing their hands, which is also pointless. And of course there are people who have involuntary purges, which shall not be elaborated upon here.
The reactions of the Fowl twins could seem strange to a casual observer, for Myles discarded his seaweed bucket and uttered a single word: “Finally.”
While Beckett spoke to his sparkling necktie. “Do you hear that, Gloop?” he asked. “We’re going flying!”
To explain: Myles had worked with Artemis to design the security system, so he had a cool scientific interest in putting the extraction drobots through their paces as thus far they had only been tested with crash dummies. Beckett, on the other hand, was just dying to be yanked backward into the air at a high speed and dumped into a security chute, and he fervently hoped the ride would last much longer than the projected half a minute.
Myles forgot all about getting to bed on time. He was in action mode now as the countermeasure flares fanned out behind his head like fireworks painting the undersides of passing cumuli. NANNI broadcast a message to his earpiece, which Myles repeated aloud to Beckett in melodramatic tones that he knew his brother would respond to, as it made him feel like he was on an adventure.
“‘Red alert!’” Myles called. “‘Extraction position.’”
The twins had been drilled on this particular position so often that Beckett reacted to the command with prompt obedience—two words that he would never find written on any of his school report cards.
Extraction position was as follows: chin tucked low, arms stretched overhead, and jaw relaxed to avoid cracked teeth.
“Ten seconds,” said Myles, slipping his spectacles into a jacket pocket. “‘Nine, eight . . .’”
Beckett also slipped something into his pocket before assuming the position.
“‘Three,’” said Myles. “‘Two . . .’”
Then the boy allowed his jaw to relax and spoke no more.
The two drobots shot out from under the villa’s eaves and sped unerringly toward the twins. They maintained an altitude of six feet from the ground by dipping their rotors and adjusting their course as they flew, communicating with each other through coded clicks and beeps. With their gear retracted, the drobots resembled nothing more than the old propeller hats that children used to wear in simpler times as they rode their bicycles.
The drobots barely slowed as they approached the twins, lowering micro–servo cable arms that lassoed the boys’ waists, then inflated impact bags to avoid injuring their cargo.
“Cable loop in place,” said Myles, lowering his arms. “Bags inflated. Most efficient.”
In theory, the ride should be so smooth his suit would not get wrinkled.
“No more science talk!” shouted Beckett impatiently. “Let’s go!”
And go they did.
The servo cables retracted smoothly to winch the twins into the air. Myles noted that there had been no discernible impact on his spine, and while acceleration was rapid—zero to sixty miles an hour in four seconds according to his smart watch—the ride was not excessively jarring.
“So far so good,” he said into the wind. He glanced sideways to see Beckett ignoring the flight instructions, waving his arms around as though he were on a roller coaster.
“Arms folded, Beck!” he called sternly to his brother. “Feet crossed at the ankles. You are increasing your own drag.”
It was possible that Beckett could not hear the instructions, but it was probable that he simply ignored them and continued to treat their emergency extraction like a theme park ride.
The journey was over almost as soon as it began, and the twins found themselves deposited in two small chimneylike padded tubes toward the rear of the house. The drobots lowered them to the safe room, then sealed the tubes with their own shells.
NANNI’s face appeared in a free-floating-liquid speaker ball, which was held in shape by an electric charge. “Shall I activate the EMP?”
Myles considered this as he unclipped the servo cable. Villa Éco was outfitted with a localized electr
omagnetic-pulse generator that would knock out any electronic systems entering the island’s airspace. The Fowls’ own electronics would not be affected, as they had backups that ran on optical cable. A little old-school, but it could keep systems ticking until the danger was past.
“Hmm,” said Myles. “That seems a little drastic. What is the nature of the emergency?”
“Sonic boom detected,” said the comforting female voice. “Origin uncertain. Possibly a high-powered rifle.”
A sonic boom could be many things, and the majority of those things were harmless. Still, Myles now had a valid excuse to employ the EMP, something he had been forbidden to do unless absolutely necessary.
It was, in fact, a judgment call.
Beckett, who had somehow become inverted in the delivery chute, tumbled onto the floor and cried, “Activate the EMP!”
And for once, Myles found himself in agreement with his brother.
“I concur,” he said. “Activate the EMP, NANNI. Tight radius, low intensity. No need to knock out the mainland.”
“Activating EMP,” said NANNI, and promptly collapsed in a puddle on the floor as her own electronics had not yet been converted to optical cable.
“See, Beck?” said Myles, lifting one black loafer from a glistening wet patch. “That is what we scientists call a design flaw.”
Lord Bleedham-Drye was doubly miffed and thrice surprised by the developments on Dalkey Island.
Surprise number one: Brother Colman spoke the truth, and trolls did indeed walk the earth.
Surprise the second: The troll was tiny. Whoever heard of a tiny troll?
Surprise the last (for the moment): Flying boys had sequestered his prey.
“What on earth’s going on?” he asked no one in particular.
The duke expertly broke down his rifle and cleaned the component parts with a chamois cloth, still muttering to himself. “These Fowl people seem prepared for a full-scale invasion. They have flare countermeasures. Drones flying off with children. Who knows what else? Antitank guns and trained bears, I shouldn’t wonder. Even Churchill couldn’t take that beach.”
It occurred to Lord Teddy that he could blow up the entire island for spite. He was partial to a spot of spite, after all. But after a moment’s consideration, he dismissed the idea. It was a cheery notion, but the person he would ultimately be spiting was none other than the Duke of Scilly, i.e., his noble self. He would hold his fire for now, but when those boys reemerged from their fortified house, he would be ready with his trusty rifle. After all, he was quite excellent with a gun, as his last shot had proven. Off the battlefield, it was unseemly to shoot anything except pheasant, unless one were engaged in a duel. Pistols at dawn, that sort of thing. But he would make an exception for a troll, and those blooming Fowl boys.
Lord Teddy reassembled the rifle and set it on the balcony floor, muzzle pointed toward the island.
You can’t stay in that blasted house forever, my boys, he thought. And the moment you poke your noses out from cover, Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye shall be prepared.
He could wait.
He was prepared to put in the hours. As the duke often said to himself: One must spend time to make time.
Teddy lay on the yoga mat, which had been his bed for almost a month now, and ran a sweep of the island through his night-vision monocular. The whole place was lit up like a fairground with roaming spotlights and massive halogen lamps. There was not a square inch of space for an intruder to hide.
Clever chappies, these Fowls, thought the duke. The father must have a lot of enemies.
Teddy fished a boar-bristle brush from his duffel bag and began his evening ritual of one hundred brushes on his beard. The beard rippled and glistened as he brushed, like the pelt of an otter, and Teddy could not help but congratulate himself. A beard required a lot of maintenance, but, by heaven, it was worth it.
On stroke fifty-seven, Lord Teddy’s hunter senses registered that something had changed. It was suddenly darker. He looked up, expecting to find that the lights had been shut off on Dalkey Island, but the truth was more drastic.
The island itself had disappeared.
Lord Teddy checked all the way to the horizon with his trusty monocular. In the blink of an eye the entirety of Dalkey Island had vanished with only an abandoned stretch of wooden jetty to hint that the Fowl residence might ever have existed at the end of it.
Lord Bleedham-Drye was surprised to the point of stupefaction, but his manners and breeding would not allow him to show it.
“I say,” he said mildly. “That’s hardly cricket, is it? What has the world come to when a chap can’t bag himself a troll without entire land masses disappearing?”
Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye’s bottom lip drooped. Quite the sulky expression for a 150-year-old. But the duke did not allow himself to wallow for long. Instead, he set his mind to the puzzle of the disappearing island.
“One can’t help but wonder, Teddy Old Boy,” mused the duke to the mirror on the flat side of his brush, “if all this troll malarkey is indeed true, then is the rest also true? What Brother Colman said vis-à-vis elves, pixies, and gnomes all hanging around for centuries? Is there, in fact, magic in the world?”
He would, Lord Teddy decided, proceed under the assumption that magic did exist, and therefore by logical extension, magical creatures.
“And so it is only reasonable to assume,” Teddy said, “that these fairy chaps will wish to protect their own, and perhaps send their version of the cavalry to rescue the little troll. Perhaps the cavalry has already arrived, and this disappearing-island trick is actually some class of a magical spell cast by a wizard.”
The duke was right about the cavalry. The fairy cavalry had already arrived.
One fairy, at least.
But he was dead wrong about a wizard casting a spell. The fairy who had cast the spell was a far cry indeed from being a wizard of even the most basic level. She had made a split-second decision and was now pretty certain that it was absolutely the wrong one.
EOIN COLFER is the author of the New York Times best-selling Artemis Fowl series, which was adapted into a major motion picture from the Walt Disney Studios. He also wrote the critically acclaimed WARP trilogy, and many other titles for young readers and adults, including Iron Man: The Gauntlet, Airman, Half Moon Investigations, The Supernaturalist, Eoin Colfer’s Legend of . . . books, The Wish List, Benny and Omar, and Benny and Babe. In 2014, he was named Ireland’s laureate for children’s literature. He lives with his wife and two sons in Dublin, Ireland, where he is working on an Artemis Fowl spin-off novel, The Fowl Twins.
To learn more, visit www.eoincolfer.com. He is also on Twitter and Instagram @EoinColfer.