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.