ARRRGH!!!, crooked, crud-covered teeth and all, was quickly leaving us behind. We exited the velvet darkness of the bridge and entered the menacing coolness of an autumn evening. ARRRGH!!! avoided streetlights by adopting a low, four-legged trot and keeping beneath an overhang of trees alongside the road. I was the last to pass Jack, who was sheathing his swords, waiting to bring up the rear.

His gloved hand shot out and nabbed my arm.

“Don’t be nervous.” His voice was a low rasp. “You’ll love it.”

It did not sound like a promise. More like a curse.

22.

Suburbia looked vulnerable to me now. The houses were built of flimsy walls instead of solid stone; the picket fences were laughable in their meager attempts at claiming a piece of land; the ornamental mailboxes and flower lattices cried out for indifferent destruction. Each identical row of houses looked like a line of eggs waiting to be stomped on.

We rested on our elbows among the bushes in a backyard. ARRRGH!!! concealed herself in the opposite fashion, standing straight enough to be mistaken for another tree. Fifty feet away was a house painted a pale pink, and I strained for signs of trolls in the flower bed, the scatterings of garden tools, the swinging porch bench, the coils of water hose.

“There,” Jack said. “There. There. There. There.”

It took me several minutes before I could see the Nullhullers. Concealed in shadow by scruffy gray coats, they were the size of monkeys and had noodly arms and legs unequal to the task of carting around their obese bodies. Their eyes were large and completely black and their noses dark and runny. Most notable were mouths so wide that the corners almost met at the back of the head. As they crawled, the top halves of their heads popped up and down like garbage can lids.

“Dammit,” Jack whispered. “There’s number six.”

“Why, is that one worse?” I asked.

“Nullhullers, the odious cretins,” Blinky replied. “They travel in packs of five.”

Indeed, four more fat, long-limbed creatures wobbled onto the scene, and then there were ten giggling and snorting Nullhullers. Eight of them were gesturing at a second-floor window, though I could not imagine how creatures so fat would scale the wall. Meanwhile, the remaining two began scribbling across the side of the house with what looked like red chalk. They made a circle, then within that circle drew an upside-down star. I recognized it as the sign of Satan cherished by all the heavy-metal kids at school.

“Nullhullers are Satanists?!” I hissed.