The Suburb Beyond the Stars

by M. T. Anderson

  For a while, Brian and Gregory couldn’t speak. Brian was biting his own lips and staring at the boy in the wall. Gregory sagged on the bed, elbows on his knees, as if all comedy had drained out of him forever. He couldn’t look at Brian. To look at Brian would mean he’d have to speak, and Brian would have to speak, and together, they’d have to acknowledge that this was the world they lived in. They would have to start doing something.

  Brian got up and went to the girl’s side. He examined the slashes in the wallboard. He could not see her legs behind the slashes. It was like she went no farther than the wall itself.

  Brian pulled at her arm. She swayed forward. Her head rocked. She didn’t respond otherwise. Brian tugged harder. He tried to pull her out of the wall. He said to Gregory, “Come see if we can yank her out.”

  Gregory didn’t get up. He looked at Brian once, accusingly, then dropped his gaze to the white rug. They had tracked in mud. It was easy to see how dead Deatley had found them in the closet. Their footprints led right to it.

  Brian still pulled at the girl. The wall around her midriff buckled, but more like flesh might.

  “Everyone will be like that,” said Gregory. “Everyone. Your mom and dad. My mom and dad. Imagine whole streets like this. As far as you can see. People fading into their walls. Or that guy downstairs, trying to fade into his floor. No one talking. No one —”

  “I know,” said Brian. “I know.”

  “Well, then stop pulling on that stupid wall girl.”

  “We need to figure out how to save them.”

  “You’re not going to figure it out from just yanking on her arm.”

  “I might.”

  “You won’t be —”

  But he didn’t finish what he was saying.

  From downstairs — a tremendous roar — a scream — the man in the floor, squealing, “MONSTER!”

  Something was sprinting across the foyer.

  Something was bounding up the steps, three at a time.

  Clad in metal.

  Tearing down the hallway.

  Screaming with hatred and rage.

  Coming right for them.

  SIXTEEN

  It burst into the room. They heard it through the closet door. It was heavy. The floor shook when it stomped.

  Gregory slid back farther among the shelved toys, shoving aside a hanging backpack.

  “Deatley!” the thing yelled in a voice that was not human.

  It threw the door open.

  Gregory dropped to the floor and covered his head with his arms.

  Brian stood awkwardly on one leg — the other raised slightly in panic — and stared the monster in the eye.

  It was about seven feet tall, armed with a huge battle-ax, and encased in a strange armor, curiously wrought, with acanthus inlay on the plates and spikes. The visor of the helmet had a huge, hooked snout, from wherein came the terrifying voice of the giant, which, from a throat inhuman, through fanged teeth, rang in the metal as the beast spoke. It said:

  “Brian?”

  Brian stared at the giant and its battle-ax. “Kalgrash?” he said.

  The monster looked quickly around. “Is, um, Milton Deatley here?”

  “He left,” said Gregory from the floor.

  “Darn.” The monster put his ax down. “I wanted to cleave him,” he explained. Hands free, he raised his visor.

  It was indeed Kalgrash the troll. It was hard not to recognize his spiky nose and uneven, nail-like teeth.

  “Kalgrash!” said Brian, jubilantly.

  Kalgrash laughed and gave Brian a big hug.

  “Ow!” said Brian. “Ow, your, you know, your plate mail is completely — ow!”

  “Oh. Sorry,” said Kalgrash, releasing the boy. “I’m still not used to being as strong as a hundred oxen.”

  Gregory stood up. “Great to see you,” he said. “You’re about three feet taller than last time.”

  “Milk,” said Kalgrash. “Kidding.”

  “You are taller,” Brian pointed out. “Way taller.”

  “Yup, I was, how could you say it, refitted?”

  “What? How?” Brian asked.

  “A while ago — I can’t tell how long — I can’t tell anything anymore — well …” The troll clunked over to the bed and sat down. “We began to see the houses going up, and there was something wrong with them. At first, we thought it was just a normal development. But then Prudence sensed there was something wrong, that there was an eel in the Jell-O, so to speak, and I didn’t like how things were going. So I went up to Wee Sniggleping’s workshop and I said to him, ‘Look here. I think a hard time’s coming, and I need to be taller and armored.’ So just in time, he fit me up with some new body parts and this armor. I drew it on a piece of paper for him and designed it myself. He just took my crayon drawing and he built all of this to my specifications. It was really nice of him. Then he transferred my … you know … brain, I guess, and face.” Kalgrash paused. “He’s gone,” he said. “Wee Snig. He’s gone. Everything’s gone. I haven’t been able to find my house for weeks.”

  “Prudence is gone, too,” Gregory said.

  “I know. I’m terrified. And these kids,” said Kalgrash, gesturing to the kids in the walls. “Look at them. It’s awful, awful, awful. They’re sleeping like that and there’s a great summer day outside. They could be out eating popsicles and playing catch with a very small beagle.”

  “It’s more than popsicles and beagles,” Gregory pointed out, still thinking of Prudence.

  “I know,” said Kalgrash. “Don’t tell me. I know, I know, I know. I’ve been living here, hiding between the houses. And in the cellars. Running around and trying to get people out of their walls and their floors. It doesn’t work. They’re really part of the wall.”

  “That was you?” said Brian, pointing at the slices near the girl’s legs.

  “That was stupid me.”

  “Why were you looking for Milton Deatley?” Gregory asked, a little suspicious.

  “To kill him again. I think his corpse is possessed by one of the Thusser. He needs a good smiting. Wham! Smack! Shklunk!”

  Brian would normally have said that a good smiting wouldn’t solve anything, but in this case, he suspected a good smiting was a great place to start.

  “But that’s too much about me. Tell me about you,” said Kalgrash. “I haven’t seen you in stacks of time. Have you had a good year?”

  “Um,” said Gregory, “do we really have time for a chat? With sandwiches, and the photo albums laid out on the ottoman?”

  “Right,” said Kalgrash, standing. The bed creaked as he rose.

  “We’re here to find Prudence,” said Brian. “Then we have to somehow stop the Thusser Horde from settling here.”

  “You have a plan! Hunky-dory!”

  “‘Hunky-dory’?” said Gregory. “When is that even … from?”

  “I’m a troll dressed in Renaissance battle armor. Don’t get snitty about when things are from. Let’s get out of here. We may still have time to catch Deatley. I saw his hearse outside.”

  “Great,” said Brian. “He just …” He didn’t know how to describe what they’d just seen. He didn’t want to think about it. So he simply said, “Let’s go.”

  Gregory looked ill. But Kalgrash grinned, slammed down his visor, gripped his ax with both hands, and led the charge.

  With that, they set out to catch the undead developer.

  SEVENTEEN

  They ran out the sliding doors and into the backyard. The grass looked sparse. Several young trees had been planted in rings of wood chips, supported by cables. The white horses weren’t there.

  Milton Deatley was already gone.

  The two kids and their troll pal ran back and forth, checking to see if Deatley was farther down the street. There was no sign of him, except the pale tracks of his wheels across the crushed grass.

  “All right, we spent too much time greeting each other joyfully,” said Kalgrash, miffed. “Next time, smit
e first, hug later.”

  “Can he be killed … again?” said Gregory. “If you run into him?”

  Kalgrash shrugged, his shoulders rattling. “At least he can be chopped up into little enough pieces that he can’t lurch around the place. So … now that I have some backup, I say we go rescue Prudence and Wee Snig.”

  Brian asked, “You know where they are?”

  “No,” said Kalgrash. “Not know as in ‘know.’ But I bet they’re underground. In the ruins of the city under the mountain. A few weeks before Prudence disappeared, she visited me. I was still short. I was in my cave back then. I loved that cave. It was the best cave on cold winter nights. I loved sitting down there near the fire.”

  “Okay,” said Gregory impatiently.

  “So Prudence comes by, and she tells me she’s worried, because she thinks that the development around her house is moving awful fast, and she’s not sure it’s normal. And she’s just been down in the City of Gargoyles, and she says that there are big things growing on the sides of some of the houses.”

  “Things?” Brian asked.

  “Like sacs. Sacs were growing on the sides of houses down in the city. Do you remember the city? With all the crazy carvings?”

  “Sure,” said Brian. “What kind of sacs?”

  “Like gray mushrooms. Growing all over the place. And she was worried that they were growths from some other world, you know, like spores that had blown into our world through one of the holes left around here, and then they start to get big down there. So anyway, she talked about that. And then about a week later — at least, I think it was a week, but time is all confused nowadays. You never know when the sun is going to set or come up. Grrr, grrr, grrr. Anyway, by my reckoning, a week later, she comes back and says she’s been down there again, and the fungi are larger. Much larger. And she told me that something was seriously wrong, something was invading. I was already getting worried, so I had talked to Sniggleping about getting body extensions so I could do smiting. It’s a good thing, too, because that night the earthmovers started to rip away the top of my burrow — you know, my kitchen? — and I ran out screaming and yelling, but the workmen didn’t stop or even notice me, and I kept swinging my ax around and breaking stuff and hcha! cha! pfwam! That slowed them down a little, but then this creature was there that hardened every time I hit it, so I couldn’t stop it, and it kept on attacking, and it tore me up pretty bad, and I just managed to escape and —”

  “We killed it,” said Gregory, proudly. “We figured out how to kill it. It was pretty easy, really.”

  “You killed one,” Kalgrash corrected. “They’ve got a bunch of them. They call them kreslings.”

  Brian asked, “Who are the people actually building the houses? Are they human?”

  “All mesmerized or hypnotized or something,” said Kalgrash. “Undead Deatley controls them all. Can I go on with my story, in which our charming troll hero has been battered and torn up by a monster and is running for safety, close to death? Or is it not exciting enough for you?”

  “We know you lived,” said Gregory sourly.

  “You don’t know that. I could be dead.”

  “You’re not dead.”

  “Deatley’s dead, and he’s more spry than I am.”

  “Um, Kalgrash?” said Brian. “Could we just hear the rest of your story?”

  “Oh. So, my leg is broken, and my chest has been slashed up, and I’m in all this pain.”

  “You’re not in pain,” said Gregory.

  “I’m in pain. I was there. In pain.”

  Gregory said harshly, “You can’t feel pain.”

  Kalgrash looked at Gregory with an anger approaching hatred. He said, very distinctly, “It feels to me like I can feel pain. You can call it a mechanical failure, if you like.”

  Gregory was a little taken aback by Kalgrash’s anger. He didn’t interrupt again.

  “So. The stupid machine troll goes up the mountain, pulling himself along, because he stupidly believes he’s in pain. And though he’s starting to lose consciousness, he gets to Wee Sniggleping’s workshop before he collapses. He passes out. Having just lived through a ferocious attack. And having seen his own home destroyed. Which seems, to him, like it makes him really intensely sad and angry. Even though he’s a machine.”

  “Gregory didn’t mean that,” said Brian.

  “What did he mean?”

  “I didn’t mean to be a jerk,” said Gregory, uncomfortably. “I don’t know why I said it.”

  “Can I continue?” said Kalgrash.

  Brian said, “Kalgrash, you’re not a machine. You’re our friend.” He glared carefully at Gregory.

  “When I woke up, it was a couple of days later. Snig had built me taller. According to my specifications. With armor accessories. So I bounded back down the mountain, but I couldn’t find my house anymore, or where it used to be. There were just houses — houses, houses, houses. All over the place. So I had to hide so the humans wouldn’t see me. I hid in little ditches and near the river and things, looking for my burrow. I decided to go back up the mountain and ask Sniggleping what was going on. I get to his lair, and the door’s open. Nothing’s there. It’s been cleaned out or he’s evacuated. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know if something had happened and I hadn’t been told. So I ran down the mountain and went to Prudence’s house. I knocked on her back door and she let me in, and she said she had a really bad feeling that Sniggleping had been taken away. She thought that something was living down in the caverns and had taken him prisoner down there. She tried scrying for him, and she got an image. It looked like he was in the dungeons under the old Norumbegan palace. I told her I’d go down and look around. I went out to try to spelunk but I couldn’t figure out where the entrances into the caverns were anymore. I mean, I used to know them all, but the whole landscape is different now that there are all these houses. I walked around and around but it was just backyards and lawns and garages.

  “So I went back to Prudence’s house to tell her she’d have to help me find a way into the mountain. I got there at about midnight. Her car was there, but she didn’t answer. I went in and searched the place. Nobody. I waited for her for a day. The sun rose and came through the windows onto the carpet and I sat there waiting, and then the sun went down on the other side of the house and she still wasn’t there. It was creepy. Something was wrong. Really wrong. When I went back out, I saw people were getting stuck in their houses or taken away at night. So I started to try to save them. But people — humans — they tend not to believe trolls when we say, ‘Come here! Run, quick! Run for safety!’”

  Brian nodded somberly.

  “And recently I’ve been looking for a way down into the caverns, because I bet that somewhere down there, Prudence and Sniggleping are being held. I’ve been walking around at night, when I won’t be seen, but I can’t find any of the old landmarks. Now it doesn’t even matter, daytime or nighttime. Nobody notices. Everything is so crazy that a troll walking down the street doesn’t seem unusual.”

  “So we need to get down into the caverns, you think,” said Brian. “Down to the prison cells under the palace.”

  “That’s where I think they are. That’s where Prudence guessed Snig had been taken, and my gut tells me she’s right.” He looked pointedly at Gregory. “You know, I pretend to have a gut.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “Actually, you didn’t.”

  “Well, I meant to say it.”

  Kalgrash looked down. “Does a potbelly count as a gut?”

  Brian said, “Kalgrash, you’re one of the most alive people I know.”

  “We can stop talking about me and start talking about getting subterranean. Now, where do you remember the entrances to the caverns being?”

  “That sort of gazebo thing,” said Gregory.

  “Fundridge’s Folly,” Brian recalled. “And then there was an entrance hidden in the Ceremonial Mound. In all of those pine trees. And there was a stairwa
y from the top of the mountain down into Snarth’s Cavern.”

  “Okay,” said the troll. He thought for a moment. “That’s what I remember. So. Which one’s closest?”

  “Well, where are we now?” said Brian. “Roughly?”

  They looked around them. Nothing but houses, lawn, sunlight. Brian walked the route in his mind from the River of Time and Shadow … through the Tangled Knolls … all those little mounds and hillocks … and then that street that ran through the Tangled Knolls…. It hadn’t been a street, though, he didn’t think…. It wasn’t paved, it was … He thought harder. It was a path. A forest path. He remembered that much. Or had it been paved? Had it been just dirt, or was it a sidewalk? He knew he remembered houses there…. So a sidewalk made sense…. But there couldn’t have been houses. It was the forest … it was …

  “I can’t remember anything,” said Kalgrash. “I’m trying to remember the way we used to go through the neighborhood to get to the mountain, and I can’t. I am sure it used to be forest, but I can only catch a glimpse.”

  Brian knew what the troll meant. He recalled the shape of trees against the morning sky … branches … a clearing … the path an invitation … yes, those branches, growing like that, with one splayed out and some bushes on either side … and he tried to hold on to them, but then recalled a clapboard wall behind them. And if he focused for a second on that clapboard wall, tried to recall how exactly it looked, he found his memory of trees evaporated.

  “This is what it’s been like,” complained the troll, knocking his own barbaric skull with his fist. “The Thusser are settling in our minds. They’re moving into our memories.”

  Brian tried harder and harder to recall the look of the Haunted Hunting Grounds, where once the gentry of Norumbega and their Emperors had ridden in cavalcade, wimpled and crowned, horses caparisoned and bedecked with cloth of gold — and he saw them hemmed in by pastel porches, or pausing nobly in living rooms, a shaft of light falling through the panes of a Palladian window to glint upon a fair steed’s barding as some knight wandered past the units of a sectional sofa.

  He could not recall how the forest had looked before the coming of the houses.