by Eoin Colfer
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 family 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.
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.
