difficult in recent weeks, as Queen Anne residents had been keeping closer track of their pets, blaming coyotes for the recent disappearances). Considering what to say to Aussie in the morning was paramount. But eventually he could not bear to sit still and found his legs carrying him to Fremont after all. Something special was clearly called for, a little libation to luck, so at the PCC he bought more of the Eel River beef for the Troll, and for himself and Cut’n-Shoot a half gallon of a unique coconut-and-molasses ice cream he had found nowhere else.
He left the grocery grinning, turned left — and saw, a block up 34th Street, walking away, Dr. Philip Austin Watkins IV.
The Scotch proved stronger than good judgment. “Aussie!” he shouted. Then louder: “Aussie!” Bag swinging wildly, he began to run.
The department head had dined out late with friends, imbibing one too many himself as the evening wore on. “You’ve never been screwed until you’ve been screwed by the British,” he’d said, and meant it. Thank heavens he’d had foresight enough to lay contingency plans.
It took him a moment to realize that his name was being called, and a troubling moment more when he turned around to recognize who it was. His apprehension should perhaps have lasted longer: Instead of a simple greeting, followed by meaningless chat, Richardson slammed full tilt into the issue of the job opening. “Aussie, I heard about Brubaker. And you promised. You did promise.”
“I promised to do everything I could to help you,” Aussie countered. “And I did, but obviously it wasn’t enough. I’m sorry.”
“You can’t leave the slot open, and it’s too late—”
“Mr. Richardson. You knew you were a fill-in, just as I knew from the beginning that the Aiken grant was a recruiting hook in disguise. If the fish had bitten later I might have had to keep you on. As it happens, he did it while my own preferred replacement was still sitting by the phone at Kansas State, waiting for my call, exactly where he’s been since I first talked to him last April. The slot, as you call it, is already filled.”
“Oh.” Without thought, Richardson removed the frozen half gallon of coconut-molasses ice cream from his grocery bag and smashed Aussie in the head with it just as hard as he could. The man was insensible when he hit the ground, but not dead. Richardson was particularly glad of that.
“That was satisfactory,” Richardson said aloud, as though he were judging a presentation in class. He heard his voice echoing in his head, which interested him. Looking around quickly and seeing no one close enough to notice what he was doing, or to interfere with it, Richardson got Aussie — who was not a small person — on his feet, hooked an arm around his waist, and draped one of the chairman’s arms around his own neck, saying loudly and frequently, “Told you, Aussie; you can’t say I didn’t tell you. Sip the Calvados, I said, don’t guzzle it. Ah, come on, Aussie, help me a little bit here.”
Ordinarily, the walk to the Aurora Bridge would have taken Richardson a few minutes at most; dragging the unconscious Aussie, it took months, and by the time he came near the Troll’s overpass he was panting and sweating heavily. “The last lively!” he called out in a louder, different voice. “Here you go! Compliments of the chef.”
A hoarse, frantic voice behind him demanded, “What you doing? What the hell you doing?” Richardson let go of Aussie and turned to see Cut’n-Shoot gaping at him, his bleared eyes as wild as those of a horse in a burning barn. “What the hell you think you doing?”
“Tidying up,” Richardson said. His voice sounded as far away as the old man’s, and the echoes in his head were growing louder.
“You dumb shit,” Cut’n-Shoot whispered. He was plainly sober, if he hadn’t been a moment before, and wishing he weren’t. “You crazy dumb shit, you fucking killed him.”
Richardson looked briefly down, shaking his head. “Oh, let’s hope not. He’s twitched a couple of times.”
Cut’n-Shoot was neither listening to him nor looking directly at him. “I’m out of here; I ain’t in this mess. I’m calling the cops.”
Richardson did not take the statement seriously. “Oh, please. Can you stand there and tell me our friend’s always lived on warm puppies? Nothing like this has ever, ever happened before?”
“Not like this, not never like this.” Cut’n-Shoot was beginning to back away, looking small and cold, hugging himself. “I got to call the cops. See if he got a cell phone or something.”
“Ah, no cops,” Richardson said. He was fascinated by his own detachment; by his strange lightheartedness in the midst of what he knew ought to be a nightmare. He took hold of Cut’n-Shoot’s black slicker, which felt like slimy tissue paper in his hand. “You have got to get yourself a new raincoat,” he told the old man sternly. “Promise me you’ll get a new coat this winter.” Cut’n-Shoot stared blankly at him, and Richardson shook him hard. “Promise, damn it!”
Richardson heard the long scraping rumble before he could turn, still keeping his grip on the struggling, babbling Cut’n-Shoot. The Troll was moving, emerging from its lair under the bridge, the disproportionate length of its body giving the effect of a great worm, even a dragon. In the open, it braced itself on its knuckles for some moments, like a gorilla, before rising to its full height. The hubcap eye was alight as Richardson had never seen it — a whipping-forest-fire red-orange that had nothing to do with the thin, wan crescent on the horizon. He thought, madly and absurdly, not of Grendel, but of the Cyclops Polyphemus.
The Troll crouched hugely over Aussie, prodding him experimentally with the same hand that perpetually crushed the Volkswagen. The man moaned softly, and Richardson said as the Troll looked up, “See? Lively.”
For the first time in Richardson’s memory the Troll made a sound. It was neither a growl nor a snarl, nor were there any more words in it than there were words in Richardson to describe it. Long ago he had spent three- quarters of a year teaching at a branch of the University of Alaska, and what he most remembered about that strange land was the sense of the pack ice breaking up in the spring, much too distant for him to have heard it or even felt the vibration in his bones; but like everyone else, he, foreigner or not, knew absolutely that it was happening. So it was with the sound that reached him now — not from the Troll’s mouth or throat or monstrous body, but from its entire preposterous existence.
“Saying grace?” Richardson asked. The Troll made the sound again, and his head descended, jaws opening wider than Richardson had ever seen. Cut’n-Shoot screamed, and kept on screaming. Richardson kept a tight grip on him, but the old man’s utter panic set the echoes roaring in Richardson’s head. He said, “Quit it — come on, relax, enjoy a little dinner theater,” but one of Cut’n-Shoot’s flailing arms caught him hard enough on a cheekbone that his eyes watered and went out of focus for a moment. “Ow,” he said; and then, “Okay, then. Okay.”
Very little of Aussie was still visible. Richardson took a firmer hold of Cut’n-Shoot, lifted him partly off the ground, and half-hurled, half-shoved him at the Troll. The old man actually tripped over a concrete forearm; he fell directly against the Troll’s chest, snuggling grotesquely. He opened his mouth to scream again, but nothing came out.
“How about a taste of the guardian?” Richardson demanded. He hardly recognized his own voice: It was loud and frayed and hurt him coming out. “How about a piece of the one who’s always there to make sure you behave? Wouldn’t that be nice, after all this time?”
When the Troll’s mouth opened over Cut’n-Shoot, Richardson began to laugh in delighted hysteria. Not only did the great gray jaws seem to hinge at the back, exactly like a waffle iron, but they matched perfectly, hammer and anvil, when the mouth slammed shut.
After the jaws finally stopped moving, the Troll stretched toward the sky again, and Richardson realized that it was somehow different now — taller and straighter, its rough edges softening, sinking into themselves, becoming more fluid. Becoming more real. It stared down at Richardson and made a different sound this time.
Like a troll cares what it’s made of, starting out, he thought, and somehow the echoes in his head and Cut’n-Shoot’s crazy laughter were one and the same.
“Well, shit,” he said. “That meal sure agreed with you.”
He was just turning to run when the thing’s hand, no longer concrete but just as hard, just as vast and heavy, fell on his shoulder, breaking it. Richardson was shrieking as the Troll lifted him into the air, tucked him clumsily under one arm, and began squeezing back into the lair under the Aurora Bridge. Crumpled against the monster’s side — clothing shredded, skin lacerated, his ribs going — Richardson heard the tolling of an impossible heart.
