A butte of discarded dolls blocked my view of the oven’s mouth. I began to circle my way around the dolls when the flames revealed a large stone mural carved into the wall. It was rough-hewn but of jagged complexity. On the right it seemed to depict a series of beasts exiting from beneath a series of bridges to board a large sailing ship. This same ship was present on the left of the mural, with more beasts departing and ducking beneath new bridges.
Spanning across the entire ocean was a rendering of what seemed to be the most important bridge of all. Carvings of grasping hands, paws, tentacles, and claws all reached up toward the central stone, which depicted a horrid lording figure with six arms. Its eyes were uneven: one was a sparkling ruby embedded in the stone, the other a gaping abscess.
Those details were lurid, but what was carved beneath them was worse. It seemed to suggest a war between beasts and humans so tumultuous that you could not tell where one raised club melded into another firing gun, or where one biting mouth blended into another swinging axe. I averted my gaze to the border of the mural, which was made up of portraits of individuals I could only assume were important figures. All of them were hideous. One had a dog’s snout and fangs. The next had practically no head at all, its beady eyes centered upon its smooth chest. The third had scarlet eyes, eight of them on long stems.
The eyes swayed.
They were not part of the mural.
The thing from my house glided toward me with surprising grace for something with an indeterminate number of legs, all of which were hidden behind a patchwork kilt scaled with layers of medals, prizes, trophies, and award ribbons. An incalculable tangle of tentacles twined around one another as if dying to squeeze something to death. As it passed the oven, the firelight revealed the thing’s olive-green coloring, reptilian texture, and lacquer of slime lubricating its undulating appendages. Its mouth, a horizontal gash, opened and released a strangled bleat:
“Grrruuuuglemmmurrrrrph.”
My feet caught in a knot of doll hair and I fell.
The thing came faster, nattering with nonsensical grunts. I was on my back and covered with grinning, poseable plastic. I could feel the heat of the stove and wondered if it might house a poker or some other sort of weapon. But there was no time. The thing was stomping dolls flat and leaning right over me. Tentacles threaded the air. Eight eyes hovered over my field of vision. I braced for destruction.
But a few of the eyes behaved as if uncertain that I was there. Like an idiot, I passed a hand back and forth in front of one of them. It did not react. I considered running. Was I fast enough to bolt before feeling one of those tentacles tighten around my neck?
“He can’t see you,” a voice said. “He’s nearly blind.”
The horrid thing straightened up and turned toward the oven. It gibbered a few more indescribable syllables. I looked in that direction, too, and saw, rising from a squatting position by the mouth of the oven, a man made of metal. Rising with him were two long, glimmering swords. The blades of both were stained with blood. He flicked them to expel the excess carnage and then, in a single expert movement, sheathed the weapons in twin scabbards bolted to his back.
“His name’s Blinky,” he said. “Trolls have a sense of humor about their names.”
He paused.
“Not about much else, though.”
The man’s voice squawked with feedback, as if forced through a ramshackle stereo speaker. In fact, that looked to be the case: covering his mouth was the metal grill of an antiquated boom box. He was not, I saw, a robot, but rather a human-sized being equipped in specialized gear. Like everything down here, the suit was constructed of junk. The mask was dominated by an oversize pair of aviator goggles, but also featured part of an old football helmet, ear protectors made out of industrial headphones, and a chinstrap fashioned from a child’s slingshot.
All of the junk had once belonged to children.
The missing children.
The Milk Carton Epidemic.
I found that I couldn’t move.
His armor, if that’s what it was, was just as incredible. His fingers flexed within mismatched winter gloves coated with sharp tacks. His forearms were studded with soda caps, each one of them dimpled from bottle openers. His biceps were protected with the wire from a hundred spiral-bound school notebooks. His chest was plated with relics from a little girl’s baking set, miniature pans in the shapes of hearts and stars and horses. All down his stomach were die-cast cars and trucks, their little chrome parts shining in the firelight. Both of his legs were wrapped over and over in bike chains. Some were red with rust, but a few still glimmered with oil.
When he moved, it sounded like a bowlful of nails being stirred.
I rolled away from both him and the troll—Blinky, if that was to be believed—and leapt to my feet. The man stopped advancing. The handles of his swords jutted up behind his head like horns. I had not forgotten that they dripped with blood.
The metal man held up a hand. The tacks glinted in the firelight.
“You need to listen to me.”
“Why?” I asked. “Who are you? Where am I?”
“We don’t have much time.”
“Why not? What are you going to do to me?”
“You overslept. It’s almost dawn.”
“What happens at dawn?”
“You go home.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“There’s no time to explain.”
“Talk fast, then.”
He sliced a hand through the air. Metal chimed against metal.
“We do not have time!”
From a distant chamber came a growl of something large awakening.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said. “You’ve woken ARRRGH!!!.”
The battle cry slammed around the cavern. When it was gone, the only sounds were the man’s quick breaths and the toy cars attached to his chest, spinning their tiny wheels.
Then even those sounds were overtaken. Massive footsteps began crashing from inside a tunnel next to the stone mural. Everything in the cave reacted to the vibration: roller skates escaped, plastic guns tumbled and made electronic shooting noises, bikes spun their flat tires.
I backed away.
“Arrrgh?”
“You’re not listening. I told you to listen.” The metal man took a deep breath. “ARRRGH!!!.”
I backed away some more.
“Three Rs, three exclamation points. Take my advice and don’t mispronounce it.”
“I won’t mispronounce it, I swear.”
The goliath emerged from the tunnel as comfortably as a dog from a doghouse, coarse black fur pouring into the chamber before I could make out any actual arms or legs. It rose to its full height after passing beneath the archway and stretched its arms as if working out the kinks of a nap. Even beneath the fur I could see huge loops of muscles flexing. The same clawed paws I recognized from the manhole, as well as from under my bed, tightened into fists.
ARRRGH!!! was built like a gorilla but three times larger: two arms, two legs, and, thankfully, just two eyes. Horns, curled like those of a ram, nicked across low-hanging pipes. One of the pipes sprung a leak and gray water spilled across greasy fur. The thing’s orange eyes cast about with animal perceptiveness, and it raised its snout and sniffed. Its mouth fell open to reveal a purple, slavering mouth armed with haphazard daggers of teeth.
It had smelled me.
I retreated until I was backed against a pile of bedsprings. ARRRGH!!! crossed the room in four colossal lopes that shook rust from overhead pipes like falling snow. The beast loomed over me, then bent at the waist so that its wet nose was inches from my face. It sniffed once, then exhaled. The blast blew the hair back from my face. Viscous drops of saliva fell from a chipped tooth and pooled warmly on my stomach. Its avid eyes, each the size of a softball, catalogued my details.
It snarled and the bedsprings sang.
The metal man slipped a gloved hand between two cake pans of his chest plat
e, scrounged for a moment, and then withdrew a bronze medallion swinging upon a dirty chain. The symbols were clear even from a distance: a long-sword, an unrecognizable language, and the howling mug of a troll.
“Put this on,” he said.
ARRRGH!!! took one look at the medallion, turned its awful face to the ceiling, and let loose with a tyrannosaurus roar. Its horns struck a patch of fluorescents, and sparks spilled upon the metal man like molten rain. Whether ARRRGH!!!’s cry was one of rage or elation, I couldn’t tell. What I could tell was that both characters were distracted.
I bolted for the nearest corridor, passing the metal man so closely I could have swiped the medallion had I wanted to, which I did not. They all noticed: I heard a jangle of bike chains, an apelike snort, and the moist slurp of multitudinous feet scrambling across the cave.
“Prrrruuummfffffllllarrrrggg!”
Blinky’s cry rattled my bones as I dove into the passageway. I collided against a cold wall. There were no lamps. I pressed one hand to the wall and kept moving. The tunnel crooked left; I managed not to flatten my face. It crooked right; I lost contact with the wall and spent a few seconds floundering in the eclipse. Drifting from behind were ominous sounds of pursuit.
Instantly, I was lost.
“Stop! Don’t go any farther!”
The man of metal was closing in. I took the darkness at a suicidal sprint. Then I noticed a light. It was dim, but I picked up my pace until I found myself hurtling through a hall so narrow that I could feel the walls press at both of my shoulders. There was a glow here just bright enough to allow me to avoid crashing into the tunnel’s dead end. What a sad, dark place this was to die.
Something wet ran down my cheek, and I looked up to see that the light came through a drain pipe just wide enough for me to crawl through. The idea of wedging my body inside was the worst thing I’d ever considered, but at least ARRRGH!!! and Blinky, both of whom were getting closer, would be too large to follow. I gripped the edge of the pipe and hauled myself into it.
Sewage filled the bottom few inches, and the fecal stink had me gagging. The metal man would hear; the only option was to crawl farther. Using my elbows and knees I inched through the morass. My head bumped along the pipe’s ridges and sewage soaked through my clothes, but I kept moving—the light was growing brighter.
The end of the pipe took a dramatic downward slant. I peered over the edge and could see nothing but mud. But there were light sources down there, potentially hundreds, flickering in restless patterns. There was noise, too, not the industrial drone of the sewers but voices, shouts, laughter, the clunking of wood, the ringing of metal, the rattle of what sounded like coins.
I had no other choice. I wiggled myself forward. For a terrible second I thought I was stuck and entertained a fantasy of being drowned in sewage over a period of weeks, but then I pushed off with my feet and shot out the end of the pipe.
For two seconds I was airborne. Then I landed in a soft pile that, given its placement beneath a sewer pipe, I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn was not, in fact, mud. I sat up and glopped the muck from my face in handfuls. Finally I gave up and sat there, panting and reeking. It took a minute for me to appreciate that I could see quite well by the torchlight. It took even longer to appreciate the sound of a bustling marketplace. I had not looked up from my lap yet. I wondered if I should. The lights and the sounds seemed so familiar, so ordinary, until I remembered that I was somewhere deep underground and nothing down here was ordinary.
I looked.
It was an entire city of trolls. The landscape of narrow pathways and askew structures stretched for a good mile before dropping into darkness. Sloppy, mud-packed dwellings were everywhere but largely empty, having voided their troll contents so that they might take part in the clamorous bazaar. Smoke rose from food stands, where small skinned corpses of what I hoped were squirrel and rabbit roasted on spits. Other lean-tos offered up strange works of art: foreboding crests printed on rawhide, stones polished so that they glowed as if lit from within, bizarre periscopes and outlandish metronomes and other devices. Steam billowed from shop fronts where glowing metal rods were hammered into shape. Cauldrons of mysterious goo were stirred and poured into crude wooden bowls. And everywhere there was bartering: misshapen coins going from tentacle to paw, satchels of croaking frogs traded for jars of lightning bugs, and seemingly indistinguishable rocks scrutinized through a magnifying glass and set upon scales before their cautious exchange.
Crawling, stomping, and slinking through this demented metropolis was a pageant of beasts of indescribable variety. The first to notice me was a trio of ten-foot behemoths pulling behind them the remains of a car frame with every square inch wrapped in Christmas lights. The three trolls were of alarming complexion, sported gray beards down to their knees, and were identical aside from the pattern of their scars. Actually, there was one more difference: only one of them had an eye, a bulging sphere that flicked around with birdlike sensitivity. The cyclops saw me and held up an arm to halt his companions, each of whom had a single empty eye socket. When the eyeless ones began to yammer unhappily, he removed the eye, which looked wrinkled and dry, and handed it to the left one, who stuffed it into his own socket. In this slow fashion, they each took a turn staring.
I stood up, dripping sewage. I could dash past them, but was I safer right here?
From somewhere nearby came the earsplitting answer. It was ARRRGH!!!.
I raced at the left troll, currently eyeless, and though he swiped an arm in my direction, I ducked beneath it and found myself barreling down a main avenue. Suddenly there were trolls on every side of me, their bizarre anatomies brushing across my skin. Some were gargantuan, and I dove between their legs. Others were less than a foot high and scurried about like vermin, clambering over one another and rattling tiny shields and sabers. Some wore threadbare capes and tattered gowns complete with frayed insignias. Others wore makeshift tunics of thistledown and thornbush. Most, though, were naked, and I saw them as a blur of colors: jet black, burnished bronze, pink as tongue, red as blood.
Bursting from the crowd, I found myself inches from a butcher counter. I collided with it. Carcasses swung wildly. A noseless, cross-eyed troll wearing a dirty apron and holding a rusty butcher knife bellowed in outrage. I backpedaled into a mass of hungry customers, who at last had time to notice the human invader in their midst. Deafening foghorn bellows were joined by high-pitched snarls and resounding grumbles. Answering their call, from two aisles over, was ARRRGH!!!.
Pelted arms and scaled hands and chilly tentacles tried to hold me in place, but I wriggled free, rolled beneath the butcher counter, and shot out into a side alley, cutting through a family of pudgy blue trolls with skeleton wings that flapped in agitation. A six-foot mass of yellow hair—which, oddly, was topped with a pair of lit candles—slumped down the alley toting a pig’s head on a stick, which I assumed was a kind of scepter before I saw him nibble on it. It was a snack. I veered away and came upon a line of crude wheelbarrows filled with goods. I skittered aside and butted into a troll so withered his ribs poked out from his flesh, each one adorned with bejeweled rings that jangled like a tambourine as he squabbled his dissatisfaction to a troll resembling a giant, armless worm. There was a gash in the worm’s stomach, and I thought it was a stab wound until four smaller worms poked their heads out of the marsupial pocket.
Both trolls halted their argument and looked at me.
“Sorry to interrupt,” I said. “It looks good. Really. I wish I had my wallet.”
It did not look good. The wheelbarrow was stacked with jars of a granola-like substance, except instead of oats, nuts, and raisins, it was roaches, hair, and teeth. I turned to reverse my direction when I saw a familiar black-furred giant poke its snout into the alley. Its orange eyes lasered in on me.
ARRRGH!!! huffed with such force that two smaller trolls were taken down by the spray of snot.
I jumped over the wheelbarrow. My toe caught a jar and it s
hattered on the ground, white teeth bouncing across brick and roaches racing away into crevices. From behind came the pound of my pursuer’s feet. Up ahead, a troll with a leathery baby face mischievously tied together the ponytails of two spotted trolls locked in separate disputes. I ducked beneath the knot, leapt over a smolder pit, and kicked through a low wire fence surrounding two little green creatures with long, furry tails facing off in battle. I spun around and found myself surrounded by gambling trolls clutching coins and howling at the disruption of the fight. I shouted apologies and hurtled over the opposite fence, the furry green gremlins snapping at my heels.
Vice was all around me. Intertwining strains of music cranked out of a busted accordion and a warped Victrola. Neon beer signs, flashing crosswalk signals, and whirling bits of carnival machinery, all stolen from the human world, lent a hallucinatory, strobe-lit feel to this red-light district. I whirled around like a drunkard until I bounced off a large-breasted female troll who had proudly modified her body with the contents of a human sewing kit. Her toes had been replaced with thimbles, several of her fingers with pinking shears, her nipples with mismatched buttons, her hair with unraveling spools of yarn. She smiled at me luridly. Her toothless gums had been fitted with hundreds of sewing needles.
I stumbled down another alley. Groups of trolls hunched over strange war games built of stone, and all of them were cheating—I could see extra playing pieces stuffed into their fur. Other gangs tossed hubcaps at a weathered old tetherball pole while one troll kept score by making claw slashes on a board. Everywhere I looked, fights broke out. These scuffles were sudden, savage, and generally short-lived; after a few blows, the disgruntled beasts returned to their games and their stone steins of foamy mead.
Strangest of all were the TVs. In this district they were everywhere. Oversize cabinet models from the ’70s, portable black-and-white sets from the ’80s, sleek monitors from the ’90s, and the occasional high-definition brands of the modern day. Some were piled on the ground and others lashed to wooden poles with barbed wire, but all of them were jerry-rigged with makeshift antennae and attached to dozens of extension cords that snaked into the overhead power grid. Not a single program played on these sets. Instead, they broadcast different patterns of static. Trolls handed over money (or small rodents) for the privilege of standing slack-jawed and glassy-eyed in front of the bad signals.
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