The Last Guardian (Disney)

by Eoin Colfer

  But Lord Teddy was all too aware that he had yet to hit the jackpot, therapeutically speaking, in regards to his quest for an unreasonably extended life. It was true that he had eked out a few extra decades, but what was that in the face of eternity? There were jellyfish that, as a matter of course, lived longer than he had. Jellyfish! They didn’t even have brains, for heaven’s sake.

  Teddy found himself frustrated, which he hated, because stress gave a fellow wrinkles.

  A new direction was called for.

  No more penny-ante half measures, cribbing a year here and a season there.

  I must find the fountain of youth, he resolved one evening while lying in his brass tub full of electric eels, which he had heard did wonders for a chap’s circulation.

  As it turned out, Lord Bleedham-Drye did find the fountain of youth, but it was not a fountain in the traditional sense of the word, as the life-giving liquid was contained in the venom of a mythological creature. And the family he would possibly have to murder to access it was none other than the Fowls of Dublin, Ireland, who were not overly fond of being murdered.

  This is how the entire regrettable episode kicked off.

  Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye reasoned that the time-honored way of doing a thing was to ask the fellows who had already done the thing how they had managed to do it, and so he set out to interview the oldest people on earth. This was not as easy as it might sound, even in the era of worldwide-webbery and marvelous miniature communication devices, for many aged folks do not advertise the fact that they have passed the century mark lest they be plagued by health-magazine journalists or telegrams from various queens. But nevertheless, over the course of five years, Lord Teddy managed to track down several of these elusive oldsters, finding them all to be either tediously virtuous, which was of little use to him, or lucky, which could neither be counted on nor stolen. And such was the way of it until he located an Irish monk who was working in an elephant sanctuary in California, of all places, having long since given up on helping humans. Brother Colman looked not a day over fifty, and was, in fact, in remarkable shape for a man who claimed to be almost five hundred years old.

  Once Lord Teddy had slipped a liberal dose of sodium Pentothal into the Irishman’s tea, Brother Colman told a very interesting story of how the holy well on Dalkey Island had come by its healing waters when he was a monk there in the fifteenth century.

  Teddy did not believe a word of it, but the name Dalkey did sound an alarm bell somewhere in the back of his mind. A bell he muted for the present.

  The fool is raving, he thought. I gave him too much truth serum.

  With the so-called monk in a chemical daze, Bleedham-Drye performed a couple of simple verification checks, not really expecting anything exciting.

  First he unbuttoned the man’s shirt, and found to his surprise that Brother Colman’s chest was latticed with ugly scars, which would be consistent with the man’s story but was not exactly proof.

  The idiot might have been gored by one of his own elephants, Teddy realized. But Lord Bleedham-Drye had seen many wounds in his time and never anything this dreadful on a living body.

  There ain’t no fooling my second test, thought Teddy, and with a flash of his pruning shears he snipped off Brother Colman’s left pinky. After all, radiocarbon dating never lied.

  It would be several weeks before the results came back from the Advanced Accelerator Mass Spectrometer Laboratory, and by that time Teddy was back in England once again, lounging dejectedly in his bath of electric eels in the family seat: Childerblaine House, on the island of St. George in the Scilly Isles. Interestingly enough, the island had been so named because in one of the various versions of the St. George legend, the beheaded dragon’s body had been dumped into Cornish waters and drifted out to the Scilly Isles, where it settled on a submerged rock and fossilized, which provided a romantic explanation for the small island’s curved spine of ridges.

  When Lord Teddy came upon the envelope from AAMSL in his pile of mail, he sliced it open listlessly, fully expecting that the Brother Colman excursion had been a big waste of precious time and shrinking fortune.

  But the results on that single page made Teddy sit up so quickly that several eels were slopped from the tub.

  “Good heavens!” he exclaimed, his halo of dark hair curled and vibrating from the eel charge. “I’m off to Dalkey Island, begorra.”

  The laboratory report was brief and cursory in the way of scientific reports:

  The supplied specimen, it read, is in the four-hundred- to five-hundred-year-old age range.

  Lord Teddy outfitted himself in his standard apparel of high boots, riding breeches, and a tweed hunting jacket, all topped off with his old commando beret. And he loaded up his wooden speedboat for what the police these days like to call a stakeout. It was only when he was halfway across the Irish Sea in the Juventas that Lord Teddy realized why the name Dalkey sounded so familiar. The Fowl fellow hung his hat there.

  Artemis Fowl.

  A force to be reckoned with. Teddy had heard a few stories about Artemis Fowl, and even more about his son Artemis II.

  Rumors, he told himself. Rumors, hearsay, and balderdash.

  And even if the stories were true, the Duke of Scilly’s determination never wavered.

  I shall have that troll’s venom, he thought, opening the V-12 throttles wide. And I shall live forever.

  The Goodies (relatively speaking) Dalkey Island, Dublin, Ireland. Three Weeks Later.

  Behold Myles and Beckett Fowl, passing a late summer evening on the family’s private beach. If you look past the superficial differences—wardrobe, spectacles, hairstyles, and so on—you notice that the boys’ facial features are very similar but not absolutely identical. This is because they are dizygotic twins, and were, in fact, the first recorded nonidentical twins to be born conjoined, albeit only from wrist to little finger. The attending surgeon separated them with a flash of her scalpel, and neither twin suffered any ill effects, apart from matching pink scars that ran along the outside of their palms. Myles and Beckett often touched scars to comfort each other. It was their version of a high five, which they called a wrist bump. This habit was both touching and slightly gross.

  Apart from their features, the fraternal twins were, as one tutor noted, “very different animals.” Myles had an IQ of 170 and was fanatically neat, while Beckett’s IQ was a mystery, because he chewed the test into pulpy blobs from which he made a sculpture of a hamster in a bad mood, which he titled Angry Hamster.

  Also, Beckett was far from neat. In fact, his parents were forced to take up Mindfulness just to calm themselves down whenever they attempted to put some order on his catastrophically untidy side of the bedroom.

  It was obvious from their early days in a double cradle that the twins did not share similar personalities. When they were teething, Beckett would chew pacifiers ragged, while Myles chose to nibble thoughtfully on the eraser end of a pencil. As a toddler, Myles liked to emulate his big brother, Artemis, by wearing tiny black suits that had to be custom-made. Beckett preferred to run free as nature intended, and when he finally did agree to wear something, it was plastic training pants, which he used to store his pet goldfish, Gloop (named for the sound it made—or at least the sound the goldfish was blamed for).

  As the brothers grew older, the differences between them became more obvious. Myles became ever more fastidious, 3-D–printing a fresh suit every day and taming his wild jet-black Fowl hair with a seaweed-based gel that both moisturized the scalp and nourished the brain, while Beckett made zero attempt to tame the wild blond curls that he had inherited from his mother’s side of the family, and continued to sulk when he was forced to wear any clothes, with the exception of the only article he never removed—a golden necktie that had once been Gloop. Myles had cured and laminated the goldfish when it passed away, and Beckett wore it always as a keepsake. This habit was both touching and extremely gross.

  Perhaps you have heard of the Fowl famil
y of Ireland? They are quite notorious in certain shadowy circles. The twins’ father was once the world’s preeminent crime lord, but he had a change of heart and reinvented himself as a champion of the environment. Myles and Beckett’s older brother, Artemis II, had also been quite the criminal virtuoso, hatching schemes involving massive amounts of gold bullion, fairy police forces, and time travel, to name but a few. Fortunately for more or less everyone except aliens, Artemis had recently turned his attention to outer space, and was currently six months into a five-year mission to Mars in a revolutionary self-winding rocket ship that he had built in the family barn. By the time the world’s various authorities, including NASA, ASCO, ALR, CSNA, and UKSA, had caught wind of the project and begun to marshal their objections, Artemis had already passed the moon.

  The twins themselves were to have many adventures, some of which would kill them (though not permanently), but this particular episode began a week after their eleventh birthday. Myles and Beckett were walking along the stony beach of Dalkey Island, where the Fowl family had recently moved to Villa Éco, a newly built, state-of-the art, environmentally friendly house attached to a renovated Martello tower. The twins’ father had donated Fowl Manor, their rambling ancestral home, to a cooperative of organic farmers, declaring, “It is time for the Fowls to embrace planet Earth.”

  On this summer evening, the twins’ mother was delivering a lecture in Dublin’s National Library with her husband in attendance. Some years previously, Angeline had suffered from what Shakespeare called “the grief that does not speak,” and, in an effort to understand her depression, had completed a mental health doctorate at Trinity College and now spoke at conferences around the world. The twins were being watched over by the house itself, which had an Artemis-designed Nano Artificial Neural Network Intelligence system, or NANNI, to keep an electronic eye on them.

  Myles was collecting seaweed for his homemade hair gel, and Beckett was trying to learn seal language from a dolphin just offshore.

  “We must be away, brother,” Myles said. “Bedtime. Our young bodies require ten hours of sleep to ensure proper brain development.”

  Beckett lay on a rock and clapped his hands. “Arf,” he said. “Arf.”

  Myles tugged at his suit jacket and frowned behind the frames of his thick-rimmed glasses. “Beck, are you attempting to speak in seal language?”

  “Arf,” said Beckett, who was wearing knee-length cargo shorts and his gold necktie.

  “That is not even a seal. That is a dolphin.”

  “Dolphins are smart,” said Beckett. “They know things.”

  “That is true, brother, but a dolphin’s vocal cords make it impossible for it to speak in the language of a seal. Why don’t you simply learn the dolphin’s language?”

  Beckett beamed. “Yes! You are a genius, brother. Step one, swap barks for whistles.”

  Myles sighed. Now his twin was whistling at a dolphin, and they would once again fail to get to bed on time.

  Myles stuffed a handful of seaweed into his bucket. “Please, brother. My brain will never reach optimum productivity if we don’t leave now.” He tapped an earpiece in his right ear. “NANNI, help me out. Please send a drobot to carry my brother home.”

  “Negative,” said the house system in a strangely accented female voice, which Beckett instinctively trusted for some reason. “No flying Beckett home. Mother’s orders.”

  Myles could not understand why his mother refused to authorize short-range flights for Beckett. In tests, the drone/robots had only dropped the dummy Becketts twice, but his mother insisted the drobots were for emergencies only.

  “Beckett!” he called. “If you agree to come back to the house, I will tell you a story before bed.”

  Beckett flipped over on the rock. “Which story?” he asked.

  “How about the thrilling discovery of the Schwarzschild radius, which led directly to the identification of black holes?” suggested Myles.

  Beckett was not impressed. “How about the adventures of Gloop and Angry Hamster in the Dimension of Fire?”

  Now it was Myles’s turn to be unimpressed. “Beck, that’s preposterous. Fish and hamsters do not even share the same environment. And neither could survive in a dimension of fire.”

  “You’re preposterous,” said Beckett and went back to his whistling.

  The crown of Beck’s head will be burned by the evening UV rays, thought Myles.

  “Very well,” he said. “Gloop and Angry Hamster it is.”

  “And Dolphin,” said Beckett. “He wants to be in the story, too.”

  Myles sighed. “Dolphin, too.”

  “Hooray!” said Beckett, skipping across the rocks. “Story time. Wrist bump?”

  Myles raised his palm for a bump and wondered, If I’m the smart one, why do we always do exactly what Beck wants us to?

  Myles asked himself this question a lot.

  “Now, brother,” he said, “please say good night to your friend, and let us be off.”

  Beckett turned to do as he was told, but only because it suited him.

  If Beckett had not turned to bid the dolphin farewell, then perhaps the entire series of increasingly bizarre events that followed might have been avoided. There would have been no nefarious villain, no ridiculously named trolls, no shadowy organizations, no interrogations by a nun (which are known in the intelligence community as nunterrogations, believe it or not), and a definite lack of imaginary head lice. But Myles did turn, precisely two seconds after a troll had surged upward through the loose shale at the water’s edge and collapsed onto the beach.

  Fairies are defined as being “small, humanoid, supernatural creatures possessed of magical powers,” a description that applies neatly to elves, gnomes, sprites, and pixies. It is, however, a human definition, and therefore as incomplete as human knowledge on the subject. The fairies’ definition of themselves is more concise and can be found in the Fairy Book, which is their constitution, so to speak, the original of which is behind crystal in the Hey Hey Temple in Haven City, the subterranean fairy capital. It states:

  Fairy, faerie, or faery: A creature of the earth. Often magical. Never willfully destructive.

  No mention of small or humanoid. It may surprise humans to know that they themselves were once considered fairies and did indeed possess some magic, until many of them stepped off the path and became extremely willfully destructive, and so magic was bred out of humans over the centuries, until there was nothing left but an empath here and there, and the occasional telekinetic.

  Trolls are classed as fairies by fairies themselves, but would not be so categorized according to the human definition, as they are not magical—unless their longevity can be considered supernatural. They are, however, quite feral and only slightly more sentient than the average hound. Fairy scientists have discovered that trolls are highly susceptible to chemical-induced psychosis while also tending to nest in chemically polluted sites, in much the same way as humans are attracted to the sugar that poisons them. The toxins ingested by trolls often result in uncharacteristically aggressive behavior and uncontrollable rage. Again, similar to how humans behave when experiencing sugar deprivation.

  But this particular troll was not sick, sluggish, or aggressive—in fact, he was in remarkable physical health, all pumping limbs and scything tusks, as he followed his second most powerful instinct:

  REACH THE SURFACE.

  Trolls’ most powerful instinct being EAT, GOBBLE, DEVOUR.

  This troll’s bloodstream was clear because he had never swum across a chromium-saturated lake and he had never carved out his burrow in mercury-rich soil. Nevertheless, healthy or not, this specimen would never have made it to the surface had the Earth’s crust under Dalkey Island not been exceptionally thin, a mere mile and a quarter, in fact. This troll was able to squeeze himself into fissures that would have made a claustrophobe faint, and he wriggled his way to the open air. It took the creature four sun cycles of agonizingly slow progress to break through,
and you might think the cosmos would have granted the fellow a little good fortune after such Herculean efforts, but no, he had to pop out right between the Fowl twins and Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, who was lurking on a mainland balcony and spying on Dalkey Island through a telescopic monocular, thus providing the third leg of a teetering tripod of fate, which, considering the personalities and intellects involved, could not result in anything but skulduggery.

  So, the troll emerged, joint by joint, reborn to the atmosphere, gnashing and clawing. And in spite of his almost utter exhaustion, some spark of triumph drove him to his feet for a celebratory howl, which was when Lord Teddy, for diabolical reasons that shall presently be explored, shot him.

  Once the shot had been fired, the entire troll-related rigmarole really got rigmarolling, because the microsecond that NANNI’s sensors detected the bullet’s sonic boom, she upgraded her alert status from beige to red, sounded the alarm Klaxon, and set the security system to Siege mode. Two armored drobots were dispatched from their charging plates to extract the twins, and forty decoy flares were launched from mini mortar ports in the roof as countermeasures to any infrared-guided missiles that may or may not be inbound.

  This left the twins with approximately twenty seconds of earthbound liberty before they would be whisked into the evening sky and secured in the eco-house’s ultrasecret safe room, blueprints of which did not appear on any set of plans.

  A lot can happen in twenty seconds. And a lot did happen.

  Firstly, let us discuss the marksman. When I say Lord Teddy shot the troll, this is possibly misleading, even though it is accurate. He did shoot the troll, but not with the usual explosive variety of bullet, which would have penetrated the troll’s hide and quite possibly killed the beast through sheer shock trauma. That was the absolute last thing Lord Teddy wanted, as it would void his entire plan. This particular bullet was a gas-powered cellophane virus slug that was being developed by the Japanese munitions company Myishi and was not yet officially on the market. Known as “shrink wrappers” by the development team, the CV bullet released its virus on impact and then wrapped the target in a coating of cellophane that was porous enough to allow shallow breathing but had been known to crack a rib or two—and did, in fact, crack four of the troll’s ribs and both his femurs.