At full volume Blinky’s scornful tone was plenty intimidating.

“My emotional state is not to be trifled with!”

“The Killaheed Bridge, Gunmar the Black,” I said. “We can’t protect ourselves from that psycho up there if we don’t know what you’re even talking about.”

Tub held onto my waist like a drowning man.

“Our Father,” he mumbled, “who harks from heaven…shank us this day…some daily bread…”

“Tub!” I hissed. “You’re Jewish!”

“I know,” he hissed back, “that’s why I don’t know the damn words!”

ARRRGH!!! growled from behind us. Her hot breath dampened our necks.

“Explain!” I said, bracing myself against an outcropping of brick.

“And forgive us our bread,” Tub continued, “as we forgive those who bread against us…”

Blinky recoiled his tentacles. With dry rustles, they twisted, untwisted, and laced into patterns the meaning of which I couldn’t begin to guess. Ooze hung from his pores in beads; the effect was like that of a great inhale.

“Very well. You do, after all, have standing before you the foremost living authority on troll movement in America. But hark, young scamps! My explanations come with two conditions. Condition one! That I might save time by quoting liberally from my unfinished eleven-thousand-page, thirty-eight-volume dissertation, Troll Migration from the Old World and Suggestions for Future Growth and Sustainable Materials; Featuring an Account of the Great Gumm-Gumm War in America and Appendices on Euro-American Troll Type, Size, Smell, and Hue. Condition two! That we keep locomoting in this direction during the education. The night is not infinite in length. All agreed?”

“Sure. Fine. Start talking.” I nudged Tub. “He’s going to tell us stuff.”

Tub sniffled from where he nuzzled my armpit.

“Amen,” he concluded.

20.

Trolls have existed on this planet for as long as humans. This is what I was told and what I translated to Tub. The first mention of them in recorded history is from ninth-century Norway, when the nefarious creatures began showing up in song, verse, and bedtime stories to keep misbehaving children in line. According to Norse folklore, trolls are one of the Dark Beings, the purest embodiments of evil, and they scurried from between the toes of Ymir, the mythic six-headed Frost Giant whose murdered body became the universe in which we live: his bones became the mountains, his teeth boulders, and so forth.