Tub and I stared at the back door as it shut. The house was dark and quiet. We peered up at the second-floor window, conjuring horrible fantasies of what might be happening just out of sight. At last there was nothing else to look at. We dragged our eyes down to the ten rippling organ sacs.
“That’s all you,” Tub said. “I’m on graffiti duty.”
Tub held his nose and headed for the hose.
I forced myself to edge closer to the ten sacs. They throbbed upon the dark lawn like soft mutant embryos. I leaned over the nearest one. Purple lungs inflated against the translucent film; a slimy stomach surged against it like a red, blobby wave; pooled near the bottom was a white heap of squirming intestines. All of it floated within a snotty glop.
Slowly I withdrew Cat #6. I placed the tip of the cutlass against the sac and pushed gently.
It pierced the skin with a flatulent sound and liquid the color of mustard sprayed across my arm. It reeked of spoiled meat and my eyes began streaming tears. Briefly I considered just walking away, but then, before I knew what I was doing, I jammed the sword down so hard that it embedded in the dirt below.
The sac split down the center with the high-pitched whine of a perforated balloon and the organs spilled out in a multicolored tangle. The second the translucent skin touched the grass, it melted into a foul gel. The bowels traveled the farthest, expanding around my shoes. I minced away in disgust. A tiny wave of movement caught my eye and I realized it was the escape of every ant, beetle, worm, and other insect that lived on that patch of soil. They wanted nothing to do with the sickness soaking into their world.
I surveyed the mess. That brown pouch was a stomach, and that large green thing was probably a liver. But what on earth did a troll gallbladder look like?
From inside the house, a single clash of metal.
Tub and I looked at each other. His fear was broadcast by the sheer amount of his displayed braces. He began scrubbing frantically at the upside-down star with his wet shirt, turning both objects pink. I looked back at the spilled offal and tried to sift through the organs with Cat #6. More noises from the general direction of the second-floor window, this time a thumping and scuffling. There was no time to be delicate about this autopsy. I dropped to my knees and my jeans dampened in the coagulating mucus. I took a breath and plunged both hands into the warm viscera.
The entrails didn’t like my touching them. They spat acidic juices that burned my skin. Ribcage blades scissored down on the tips of my fingers. A net of blood vessels twined up my forearm and gripped with painful ferocity. Each organ cried out in a tiny, angry voice. And still I dug with furious fingers, kneading each slick piece of meat for a hidden surprise.
I knew I had found the gallbladder as soon as I touched it. It was boiling hot. I pulled it from the muck with a loud slurp. The blood vessels around my hand snapped off and the rest of the innards went limp and moaned in tones of pipsqueak loss. I raised the gallbladder in a victorious fist. It was the size of a golf ball and the texture of wet spinach. It roiled in my hand as if it were filled with maggots. I reached for Jack’s burlap sack and tossed the little orange bastard inside. Nine more to go.
From somewhere on the second floor came the sound of splintering wood. I flinched; Tub hit the deck as if under fire. A baby began crying from the upstairs window and I expected to see the parents’ bedroom lights turn on before I remembered that everyone else in the house had been schmoofed. Victory here was up to the trollhunters.
With a battle cry more falsetto than intended, I exchanged Cat #6 for Claireblade and cut through the next sac. In seconds I had the gallbladder; seconds later, it was in Jack’s bag. I hacked and scattered and splattered and grabbed: three gallbladders, four, five, six, seven, eight. Specks of guts sprayed against the house and I shouted for Tub to wipe those off, too. From the second-floor window came an agitated, bat-wing flapping—the loose flesh of the Nullhullers being disrupted from whatever they were doing to the baby. I sliced open the ninth sac with a swordsmanship that was darn near admirable. The gallbladder, as if surrendering, hopped right to the top of the gore, and I snatched it.
Chaos erupted. The trollhunters had breached the nursery. Lights turned on and the battle began to rage. I heard the panting of Jack, the growling of ARRRGH!!!, the sanctimonious snorts of Blinky. The Nullhullers made no other sound than the laundry-line snapping of their skin—after all, their throats had been left down with me on the lawn.
Some instinct, the same one with which I had memorized Jack’s fighting techniques, told me that we were losing. There was a lack of finality to Jack’s sword strikes and too many surprised yips coming from ARRRGH!!!. The Nullhullers grew louder as they flapped their skin in unison. But it was the absence of one noise that disturbed me most.
The baby had stopped crying.
I dropped the sack of gallbladders and hurtled toward the back door.
“Are you nuts?” Tub shouted.
I gave Cat #6 a backhand toss, and it impaled itself in the grass at Tub’s feet.
“Use that if any come out,” I yelled.
“What? Paint, Jim! I’m only authorized to scrub paint!”
Even at my speed the darkened rooms of the house gave off a mausoleum chill. The humming refrigerator, the empty easy chairs, and the random pattern of the scattered remote controls all took on deadly significance. These would be artifacts of the dead if I didn’t hurry. I found the stairs, took the steps by threes, and was at the nursery in seconds, bashing through the doorway with Claireblade gripped in both hands.
The walls were painted a sunny yellow with a motif of pink panda bears. This detail I noticed despite the fact that I could see very little wall. Half of the room was matted, black fur: ARRRGH!!!, looking larger for being confined to such limited space. It had not occurred to me that, in the human world, her size could be a disadvantage, but that was the case: the cramped quarters slowed her down as the Nullhullers nipped at her like angry dogs.
Jack and Blinky were having better luck. I counted five dead Nullhullers, lying tattered on the floor like ripped rugs. The others waged active war, claws xylophoning across Jack’s pinwheeling swords. Even with his face concealed behind a mask, I recognized the thrilled expenditure of energy unique to thirteen-year-olds. For the briefest of moments I saw a glimpse of the kid Jack could’ve been, if only he’d been gifted a life of snagging fly balls on the diamond instead of hacking at unspeakable hell-spawn.
With the flat side of his blade, Jack knocked a Nullhuller across the floor. Instantly one of Blinky’s tentacles lashed out, squeezing the troll with enough force to tear right through the skin. Death was instant and bloodless. Six dead, four more to go.
Even without throats, the remaining Nullhullers could speak in a breathless wheeze, and with the medallion still around my neck I could understand them. These were not conversations. This was, instead, the ritualistic chant of a brainwashed cult, the same three chilling words repeated:
“Change the baby.”
“Change the baby.”
“Change the baby.”
The crib had been pushed away from the window so that it acted as a barrier to shield the Nullhuller duo hiding behind it. The crib itself was empty; these two trolls had the baby. I pressed myself flat against a wall and began skirting the room’s perimeter, booting aside candy-colored toys. So far I was going unnoticed. I reached the edge of the crib and leaned over to have a look.
One of the Nullhullers had wrapped its empty skin completely around the baby. A pale nectar secreting from the troll’s pores had covered the infant from head to foot. Before I could close my astonished mouth, the baby slid out of the ooze and landed supine and sleepy on the floor. But the nectar itself was stiffening, and I realized that the troll had essentially made a plaster cast of the baby. I leaned even farther over the revolting display and saw the baby-shaped space inside the hard nectar begin to weave with veins and nerves that started to grow organ clusters like hanging grapes. Already soft pink mar
row was being fortified with white bone and covered with a pale elastic skin.
They were forging their own fake baby to leave behind.
The second of the Nullhullers reached out with its spindly arms, took the real baby by her feet, and began to lower her into its open mouth. There were no organs left inside, which meant the troll intended to use its empty torso as a bag in which to carry the baby home.
I booted the crib aside and drove Claireblade through the second troll’s softies, all the way out the other side. It uttered a death caw and dropped the baby. On instinct I let Claireblade clatter to the floor and dove to catch the child. She landed in my hands, smacking her lips through the daubs of secretion still covering her body. I held the baby to my chest, relieved not only to have saved her but also thrilled to have killed a troll. Jack had been right—I did love it.
The Nullhuller that had made the plaster cast flattened itself against the wall. I swiped Claireblade from the floor and swung it. The troll was too fast; it hopped, using the blade as a stair step, and bounded over the edge of the crib. The sword continued its movement—and cut the changeling baby in half.
It was the grisliest thing I’d ever seen. Feelers of skin tried in vain to cover the exposed innards. The chest cavity’s organs, half human and half troll, clung to each other like blind kittens fresh from their amniotic sacs. Only the changeling baby’s top jaw had been completed, and it gummed helplessly upon the air. The eyes, though, were pure troll—blinkless black orbs glowering at me in condemnation. The half-formed human skull exposed the troll brain hiding beneath, a glossy green thing nippled with twitching nodules.
I was crying when I killed it. It was an abomination; the job had to be done. But the changeling had already mastered a baby’s voice, and it sobbed as I hacked it into smaller and smaller pieces while holding the real baby in my other arm. By the end of it my entire body was shaking so badly that Claireblade fell from my grip.
The crib was thrown aside. Jack was in my face. I saw my numb, blood-spattered reflection in his goggles. He sheathed his sword and wrenched out his horseshoe, bringing it to the baby’s face.
“She’s not…” I said.
“Shut up,” he said. He took a shuddering breath. I saw his fist tighten around his scimitar. Then he pressed the horseshoe against the infant’s forehead. The baby scrunched up her face in annoyance. Jack sighed in relief and stuck the horseshoe back into his armor, then grabbed me by the front of the shirt.
“Where’s the last one?” he demanded.
I blinked around the room and saw nine dead Nullhullers, including the one I had lanced. Vaguely I remembered the one who had dodged my sword and vaulted away.
“I think…it went…”
I gazed at the open window.
Jack cursed and bolted from the room. ARRRGH!!! spat hot foam and bounded after him, angling her massive shoulders to fit through the door; still, the tips of her horns drew squiggles through the sunny yellow paint. I felt a tugging in my arms and found two of Blinky’s tentacles taking the baby. He did it with such gentle assurance that I did not object. Two other tentacles joined to shift the baby this way and that so that a fifth tentacle could daintily wipe the troll secretions from her body with a towel. The infant giggled and grabbed her feet with her chubby hands.
I retrieved Claireblade and began backing from the nursery, astounded by the sight of a dozen other tentacles at work: pushing the crib back into place, gathering the scattered toys into a semblance of order, righting fallen lamps, reinserting pictures that had popped from their frames, and who knew what else. I’d have thought we’d never been there if not for the terrible feeling that I’d failed.
The backyard stunned me with its normalcy. Studded gardening gloves draped drowsily across a deck chair. A clear sky pinpointed with stars hummed with the faraway progress of red-eye airplanes. Two dogs down the block had a conversation from their respective yards. Even the grass at my feet had reclaimed its territory: the piles of innards had dissolved, leaving ten patches of moisture no more threatening than dew.
The actors populating this easygoing stage looked as though they had wandered into the wrong play. ARRRGH!!! stood at the far edge of the lawn, her giant horned head swinging back and forth as she searched for the escaped Nullhuller. Streetlights glinted from Jack’s twin scabbards as his upper body expanded and contracted with infuriated breaths. Even Tub looked out of place: a regular kid, sure, but with orange hair frizzed into a clown wig and a shirt slopped to his chest with pink paint. He gave me a helpless look.
“It happened so fast,” he said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It was just one.”
“You know nothing,” Jack snarled.
“Uncle Jack.” I thought the formal title might help. “We killed nine of them.”
“The bag of gallbladders? Did you forget that? We killed zero.”
A sinking feeling overtook me. I looked to Tub, who shrugged.
“It flew down here, gobbled its own guts, and took the bag. What was I supposed to do?”
“This is not your friend’s responsibility,” Jack snapped. “He is not a trollhunter.”
“It was just one,” I pleaded.
“That ‘just one’ will go to Gunmar. It will tell him about us. About you.”
“Look, I’m sorry—”
“I told you to stay out here. Why couldn’t you listen?”
“But I thought you guys needed—”
Jack ripped the mask from his face and whirled around.
“Who asked you to think? Don’t think. Listen. What, you believe it’s just your precious little life at stake here? You’re going to fail your math test? Screw up your stupid play? There could be another war. Dozens, hundreds, more than you’d believe could lose their lives. Trolls you might think are worth the dog crap on your shoe, but who just happen to be my friends. Humans, too, people you know—does that make it worse? We have a week, Jim. One week.”
The ground shook. The three of us turned to see that ARRRGH!!! had fallen to her knees. Jack took off across the lawn. I followed but tripped on my own feet. Tub was there, though, to catch me by the bloody shoulder. Groaning in disgust, he placed Cat #6 in my hand so he could wipe the troll goo onto his jeans. We quickly came upon Jack, standing alongside his bowed friend. He had, for some reason, drawn both swords.
ARRRGH!!!’s posture was wracked. Her mighty back hiccupped with pain and her neck was so weak that her great horns weighed down her head. I took a step closer, hoping to comfort.
Jack halted me with the tip of Doctor X.
“No closer.”
I’d made a few mistakes, but that hardly warranted an outright threat with a weapon. I was preparing to voice my grudge when I noticed a cardboard box discarded in the mown grass. Instantly I understood and my aching shoulders slumped farther. I began circling at a safe distance, Tub fighting me for every step.
The Eye of Malevolence was fastened to ARRRGH!!!’s face. The writhing stems had twined their way into the troll’s orifices, streaming down her throat in red plaits, corkscrewing up both nostrils, and sliding beneath each eyelid. Pulling ever tighter at ARRRGH!!!’s brain, the Eye had flattened into a gelatinous oval that bubbled like pancake batter. ARRRGH!!!’s spine curled with agony beneath her lathered pelt.
“Get it off,” I told Jack. “It’s killing her.”
Jack’s muscles tensed, but he made no such move.
I clashed Cat #6 against Claireblade. Jack flinched, just a little.
“I’ll do it!” I shouted. “Move!”
The tree-trunk legs pistoned and ARRRGH!!! sprung to her feet, paws curled upward as if holding two planets, head thrown back. Where I expected a howl came instead multi-octave laughter, cacophonous as a herd of trumpeting elephants. The curled horns struck a tree branch and it exploded into a hail of wood chips. Jack kept his swords ready as the spray dinged off his metal armor.
ARRRGH!!! swooped her head toward Tub and me. The Eye of Malevolence convu
lsed in delight, and the green-orange iris opened in a toothed yawn.
“SSSSSSSSSSTURGESSSSSSSSSS.”
It was the soggy voice of one who’d spent decades gnawing on his tongue. Gunmar the Black, the Hungry One, saw me, smelled me, wished to eat me. From somewhere within the pupil’s void I could hear the splintering whack of what I knew was his wooden arm. He was aching to add another few slash marks of conquer, and as much as he’d prefer to do it in person, he wasn’t strong enough yet, so he’d just use this handy, four-ton puppet.
One of ARRRGH!!!’s clawed hands barreled at us, big as a school bus. The wind of it knocked us down before the paw itself arrived. Tub and I clung to each other in the grass, too scared to scream.
The paw never reached us. Gunmar bawled through ARRRGH!!!’s muzzle. Tub and I scrabbled away on all fours and saw Jack withdrawing his long-sword from ARRRGH!!!’s calf. Her hackles stiffened and she turned on my uncle, baring skewed teeth. But when she saw the boy bravely wielding his little blade, her shoulders fell. Both paws made fists and landed on the ground, and from there she eased her body to a seated position atop the broken tree branch. Tub and I were jostled by the impact.
The Eye of Malevolence fattened and wobbled like dough. Dozens of veins retracted from ARRRGH!!!’s skull, each one unchaining her from bondage. The Eye quavered upon her muzzle for a few seconds before falling, bouncing once on the ground, and rolling to a halt amid the manicured grass. ARRRGH!!! dropped her weary face into her massive paws. Jack sheathed his swords, put his hands to his friend’s neck, and whispered in her ear. The suburbs were quiet enough for me to hear.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t cut deep. Just a scrape.”
“Boy humans. Me want in belly. Ashamed.”
“Shhh,” Jack whispered. “I wouldn’t let that happen.”
Trollhunters Page 14
