I had no other choice. I wiggled myself forward. For a terrible second I thought I was stuck and entertained a fantasy of being drowned in sewage over a period of weeks, but then I pushed off with my feet and shot out the end of the pipe.

For two seconds I was airborne. Then I landed in a soft pile that, given its placement beneath a sewer pipe, I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn was not, in fact, mud. I sat up and glopped the muck from my face in handfuls. Finally I gave up and sat there, panting and reeking. It took a minute for me to appreciate that I could see quite well by the torchlight. It took even longer to appreciate the sound of a bustling marketplace. I had not looked up from my lap yet. I wondered if I should. The lights and the sounds seemed so familiar, so ordinary, until I remembered that I was somewhere deep underground and nothing down here was ordinary.

I looked.

It was an entire city of trolls. The landscape of narrow pathways and askew structures stretched for a good mile before dropping into darkness. Sloppy, mud-packed dwellings were everywhere but largely empty, having voided their troll contents so that they might take part in the clamorous bazaar. Smoke rose from food stands, where small skinned corpses of what I hoped were squirrel and rabbit roasted on spits. Other lean-tos offered up strange works of art: foreboding crests printed on rawhide, stones polished so that they glowed as if lit from within, bizarre periscopes and outlandish metronomes and other devices. Steam billowed from shop fronts where glowing metal rods were hammered into shape. Cauldrons of mysterious goo were stirred and poured into crude wooden bowls. And everywhere there was bartering: misshapen coins going from tentacle to paw, satchels of croaking frogs traded for jars of lightning bugs, and seemingly indistinguishable rocks scrutinized through a magnifying glass and set upon scales before their cautious exchange.

Crawling, stomping, and slinking through this demented metropolis was a pageant of beasts of indescribable variety. The first to notice me was a trio of ten-foot behemoths pulling behind them the remains of a car frame with every square inch wrapped in Christmas lights. The three trolls were of alarming complexion, sported gray beards down to their knees, and were identical aside from the pattern of their scars. Actually, there was one more difference: only one of them had an eye, a bulging sphere that flicked around with birdlike sensitivity. The cyclops saw me and held up an arm to halt his companions, each of whom had a single empty eye socket. When the eyeless ones began to yammer unhappily, he removed the eye, which looked wrinkled and dry, and handed it to the left one, who stuffed it into his own socket. In this slow fashion, they each took a turn staring.

I stood up, dripping sewage. I could dash past them, but was I safer right here?