Read Online Trollhunters by Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Kraus - Free Book Online Page A

depict a series of beasts exiting from beneath a series of bridges to board a large sailing ship. This same ship was present on the
left of the mural, with more beasts departing and ducking beneath new bridges.
    Spanning across the entire ocean was a rendering of what seemed to be the most important bridge of all. Carvings of grasping hands, paws, tentacles, and claws all reached up toward the central
stone, which depicted a horrid lording figure with six arms. Its eyes were uneven: one was a sparkling ruby embedded in the stone, the other a gaping abscess.
    Those details were lurid, but what was carved beneath them was worse. It seemed to suggest a war between beasts and humans so tumultuous that you could not tell where one raised club melded into
another firing gun, or where one biting mouth blended into another swinging axe. I averted my gaze to the border of the mural, which was made up of portraits of individuals I could only assume were
important figures. All of them were hideous. One had a dog’s snout and fangs. The next had practically no head at all, its beady eyes centered upon its smooth chest. The third had scarlet
eyes, eight of them on long stems.
    The eyes swayed.
    They were not part of the mural.
    The thing from my house glided toward me with surprising grace for something with an indeterminate number of legs, all of which were hidden behind a patchwork kilt scaled with layers of medals,
prizes, trophies, and award ribbons. An incalculable tangle of tentacles twined around one another as if dying to squeeze something to death. As it passed the oven, the firelight revealed the
thing’s olive-green coloring, reptilian texture, and lacquer of slime lubricating its undulating appendages. Its mouth, a horizontal gash, opened and released a strangled bleat:
    “Grrruuuuglemmmurrrrrph.”
    My feet caught in a knot of doll hair and I fell.
    The thing came faster, nattering with nonsensical grunts. I was on my back and covered with grinning, poseable plastic. I could feel the heat of the stove and wondered if it might house a poker
or some other sort of weapon. But there was no time. The thing was stomping dolls flat and leaning right over me. Tentacles threaded the air. Eight eyes hovered over my field of vision. I braced
for destruction.
    But a few of the eyes behaved as if uncertain that I was there. Like an idiot, I passed a hand back and forth in front of one of them. It did not react. I considered running. Was I fast enough
to bolt before feeling one of those tentacles tighten around my neck?
    “He can’t see you,” a voice said. “He’s nearly blind.”
    The horrid thing straightened up and turned toward the oven. It gibbered a few more indescribable syllables. I looked in that direction, too, and saw, rising from a squatting position by the
mouth of the oven, a man made of metal. Rising with him were two long, glimmering swords. The blades of both were stained with blood. He flicked them to expel the excess carnage and then, in a
single expert movement, sheathed the weapons in twin scabbards bolted to his back.
    “His name’s Blinky,” he said. “Trolls have a sense of humor about their names.”
    He paused.
    “Not about much else, though.”
    The man’s voice squawked with feedback, as if forced through a ramshackle stereo speaker. In fact, that looked to be the case: covering his mouth was the metal grill of an antiquated boom
box. He was not, I saw, a robot, but rather a human-sized being equipped in specialized gear. Like everything down here, the suit was constructed of junk. The mask was dominated by an oversize pair
of aviator goggles, but also featured part of an old football helmet, ear protectors made out of industrial headphones, and a chinstrap fashioned from a child’s slingshot.
    All of the junk had once belonged to children.
    The missing children.
    The Milk Carton Epidemic.
    I found that I couldn’t move.
    His armor, if that’s what it was, was just as incredible.