Read Online Trollhunters by Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Kraus - Free Book Online
Authors: Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Kraus
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still wore my bedtime sweatpants and T-shirt. A pile of dirty straw, though, had replaced my bed, and a cave had replaced my room.
On unsteady legs I rose, brushing off the straw. The room looked to be carved from rock, though what I could see of the ceiling was threaded with the bottommost layer of the real world:
gurgling, ancient water pipes; openings of moss-coated sewer canals; and scorched electrical grids covered with soot. Orange rust water dripped steadily from a dozen outmoded joints. A single
passageway led out of the room into a hallway. A claustrophobic instinct told me to take it.
My sight adjusted as I walked, and I began to make out piles of junk all around me. Had it been random trash, I would have been less frightened. Instead, it was painstakingly organized. To my
left was a hill of typewriters, old-timey ones with manual return carriages as well as models from the 1980s featuring miniature display screens. The whole pile reeked of ink. To my right was a
wall of microwave ovens stacked like brickwork—black ones, white ones, brown ones, red ones—some of them old and dusty, others newer and still spattered with the remains of their last
meals. All of them were unmistakably broken.
I moved into the hall. To my surprise it was illuminated by oil sconces hung higher than I could reach. Lamps didn’t light themselves—I reminded myself to walk softly, though it
didn’t much matter. The place was loud with the hissing of the lamps, the babbling of water through the overhead pipes, and a subterranean rumble that must have been the foul-smelling air
churning through the underground passages. This was worse than any Trophy Cave I’d ever imagined.
The hall branched off into several rooms, each stocked with other detritus of human life. One room contained a quicksand of watches: digital, analogue, calculator; men’s, women’s,
kids’; and so many of them that you’d have to wade waist-deep through the glittering moat. Another room was filled with fans: dust-coated ceiling fans, plastic desk fans, big industrial
fans that stood on thick metal poles. Cords from a few wreathed up into the tracery of pipes and wires, and those fans were on, the blades clanging and the gears grinding with every oscillation.
The last room I dared look inside was the worst: refrigerators, maybe fifty of them in every condition, standing like headstones in a grassless graveyard.
The end of the hall opened into a spacious cavern lit by a bright fire, though I struggled to make out any details through the rain of fetid water dripping from the towering entryway—a
stone arch that looked as if it had been grafted from a sixteenth-century church. I began to pass through but paused in astonishment, the oily water weighing down my hair.
It was a cathedral of junk. Everywhere I looked, piles were gathered against grimy brick walls, these artifacts even more frightening because they were the stuff of kids. There was a mountain of
cheap toy weapons. Jumbled in a corner were a thousand mismatched roller skates, one or two of which were squeaking as they rolled across the uneven floor. There were two dueling towers of
lunchboxes emblazoned with happy cartoon faces. Most disturbing of all was the gigantic pyramid that dominated the room: bicycles, hundreds of them dissolving into rust, tangled together and
reaching twenty feet into the air.
Clusters of flickering fluorescent lights were bundled together with wire and rigged into some source of stolen power. But their sick blue glow paled next to the hot white fire that burned from
an oven at the far side of the room, crackling as if recently fed. I could not resist walking toward it as humans had done since the dawn of time.
A butte of discarded dolls blocked my view of the oven’s mouth. I began to circle my way around the dolls when the flames revealed a large stone mural carved into the wall. It was
rough-hewn but of jagged complexity. On the right it seemed to
On unsteady legs I rose, brushing off the straw. The room looked to be carved from rock, though what I could see of the ceiling was threaded with the bottommost layer of the real world:
gurgling, ancient water pipes; openings of moss-coated sewer canals; and scorched electrical grids covered with soot. Orange rust water dripped steadily from a dozen outmoded joints. A single
passageway led out of the room into a hallway. A claustrophobic instinct told me to take it.
My sight adjusted as I walked, and I began to make out piles of junk all around me. Had it been random trash, I would have been less frightened. Instead, it was painstakingly organized. To my
left was a hill of typewriters, old-timey ones with manual return carriages as well as models from the 1980s featuring miniature display screens. The whole pile reeked of ink. To my right was a
wall of microwave ovens stacked like brickwork—black ones, white ones, brown ones, red ones—some of them old and dusty, others newer and still spattered with the remains of their last
meals. All of them were unmistakably broken.
I moved into the hall. To my surprise it was illuminated by oil sconces hung higher than I could reach. Lamps didn’t light themselves—I reminded myself to walk softly, though it
didn’t much matter. The place was loud with the hissing of the lamps, the babbling of water through the overhead pipes, and a subterranean rumble that must have been the foul-smelling air
churning through the underground passages. This was worse than any Trophy Cave I’d ever imagined.
The hall branched off into several rooms, each stocked with other detritus of human life. One room contained a quicksand of watches: digital, analogue, calculator; men’s, women’s,
kids’; and so many of them that you’d have to wade waist-deep through the glittering moat. Another room was filled with fans: dust-coated ceiling fans, plastic desk fans, big industrial
fans that stood on thick metal poles. Cords from a few wreathed up into the tracery of pipes and wires, and those fans were on, the blades clanging and the gears grinding with every oscillation.
The last room I dared look inside was the worst: refrigerators, maybe fifty of them in every condition, standing like headstones in a grassless graveyard.
The end of the hall opened into a spacious cavern lit by a bright fire, though I struggled to make out any details through the rain of fetid water dripping from the towering entryway—a
stone arch that looked as if it had been grafted from a sixteenth-century church. I began to pass through but paused in astonishment, the oily water weighing down my hair.
It was a cathedral of junk. Everywhere I looked, piles were gathered against grimy brick walls, these artifacts even more frightening because they were the stuff of kids. There was a mountain of
cheap toy weapons. Jumbled in a corner were a thousand mismatched roller skates, one or two of which were squeaking as they rolled across the uneven floor. There were two dueling towers of
lunchboxes emblazoned with happy cartoon faces. Most disturbing of all was the gigantic pyramid that dominated the room: bicycles, hundreds of them dissolving into rust, tangled together and
reaching twenty feet into the air.
Clusters of flickering fluorescent lights were bundled together with wire and rigged into some source of stolen power. But their sick blue glow paled next to the hot white fire that burned from
an oven at the far side of the room, crackling as if recently fed. I could not resist walking toward it as humans had done since the dawn of time.
A butte of discarded dolls blocked my view of the oven’s mouth. I began to circle my way around the dolls when the flames revealed a large stone mural carved into the wall. It was
rough-hewn but of jagged complexity. On the right it seemed to
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