Chapter 4
Arthur had booked them rooms at a public house that had been serving pints since the American colonies had broken away from
the empire: a sprawling, timber-framed place with gables and a slate roof. The front door was flanked by stone corbels, a
glowering face carved into each—a lumpish nose and eyes staring out from beneath a jutting brow, a couple of monstrous hooked
teeth—they were almost tusks—protruding from beneath their lower lips. Colin did a double take at the sight, then looked meaningfully
at Arthur, who nodded slightly.
“That’s our boy,” Arthur said. “He’s been operating in these parts for eight, nine hundred years at least.”
“How could anyone carve an image of him? I thought men can’t see him for what he is.”
Arthur tipped his head to one side, thinking this over. At last, he said, “I’ll explain tomorrow. Let’s get out of the rain
and get some shut-eye.”
Colin’s room was the best in the house. Two rooms, really, a study connected to a bedroom.
An uneven floor, doorways he had to duck under, a clutter of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century furniture.
None of it was really to Colin’s taste. He preferred Pacific coast modern, clean lines, big windows, minimalist décor.
It was as cold inside as it was out, despite the blazing radiator tucked into one corner of his rooms. He slept three hours, then got up just before dawn to go for his run.
He took the Castle Road through town, past bakeries and tourist shops, past an ancient post office with a swaybacked and mossy roof.
He plunged down a steep and narrow road while the sun set fire to the world behind him, lighting the tops of the trees.
At the bottom of the lane, he took a sharp left and drove himself up the steep coastal path, no more than a ribbon of dirt winding through knee-high straw.
He found himself atop a monumental cliff.
The wind blasted across the ledge, a cold and briny gust that stung his cheeks.
Below, where cliffs met the blue crash of the Atlantic, the rock faces were pitted with vast yawning caverns.
Arthur had told him the whole coast was Swiss-cheesed with such caverns.
A tower of rock rose on the far side of a dizzying chasm, and the ruins of Tintagel were scattered across the top of it. It
looked like a green chessboard for giants, with great crude blocks of stone for pieces. There was no way to get over there,
to reach those barbaric ruins, except by descending to the beach below and then climbing a jagged and precarious staircase
cut into the side of the granite. One half expected to see a band of shivering, desperate hobbits making their way up those
steps.
The serfs had broken their backs building Tintagel for some unwashed, flea-bitten lord, and now it was just a dramatic pile
of rock, something to show the kids before you bought them wooden swords in the gift shop. The thought amused Colin—all that
labor, and it was ultimately so pointless. The Romans had deployed their efforts more productively, creating a modern system
of currency, knowing full well that finance was more effective than the sword when it came to subjugating a people. And of
course, when it came to one’s own defense, a castle was nothing next to money.
He was back in the pub, working on his second coffee, and had just finished reading yesterday’s Wall Street Journal when Arthur joined him. In his burly fisherman’s sweater and baggy khakis, he looked thoroughly English, all the American
rubbed right off him by fifteen years in Oxford. Arthur settled at the corner table with him and ordered himself the sort
of breakfast Colin associated with heart disease. Colin himself had worked out a diet optimized for performance, most of which
he could consume either as a shake or in tablet form. It always pleased him when he could make it through the day without
touching a fork.
“You were going to tell me about the troll,” Colin said.
Arthur was distracted, didn’t seem to hear him right away. He kept looking out toward the little reception area.
“You know some of it already,” Arthur said.
“You told me grown-ups can’t see Svangur for what he is, and yet he’s carved into the posts to either side of the front door
of this very inn. I assume those carvings weren’t made by children.”
Arthur peered into the lobby for a moment longer, then swiveled his head around to take Colin in. “You can’t consciously see
him if he doesn’t want you to. But the unconscious mind registers a lot that we miss in the everyday rush of our lives. It’s
a little like when one’s wife is having an affair . . . you don’t know for the longest time and then one day all is revealed.
And yet later, it seems to you, some part of you did know, all along.”
“As Rummy says,” Colin told him, “there’s what you know you know, there’s what you know you don’t know, and then there’s what you don’t know you don’t know . . . the unknown unknowns.”
“Rummy?”
“Rumsfeld. Donald.” Colin and Rummy spoke on the phone a few times a year and had dinner now and then, when Colin was in Washington.
Arthur winced slightly, as if his back was stiff.
“Yes, well—this really belongs to a fourth category, one that . . . Rummy . . . missed: what you don’t know you already know.
The unknown knowns. Artists may be particularly in touch with that.
Sometimes I think the whole act of painting or writing a poem is to try
and access that reservoir of things that are known unconsciously. Children, of course, always see a troll for what he is. You can’t get anything by them. Adults, on the other hand, are mostly hopeless. They live too
much in the world to see beyond it.”
“But we’ll be able to see him as he is. Svangur. The troll.”
Arthur put his hand in the pocket of his trousers. “Yes.” And he set a monocle on the table between them, a thin, scratched
lens set in a dull silver hoop.
“The Surrealist’s Glass,” Colin said. “May I?”
“Yes. I only ask that you don’t look at me through it.”
Colin cocked his head at that. “No?”
“I don’t want to be seen through the glass, and I wouldn’t look at a friend through it either. I don’t even look at myself. Not anymore. I did once, and it made me sick.”
The idea fascinated Colin. “What did you see?”
“My own true face. No one should have to see that.”
Colin lifted the lens and scanned the room. At first he saw only the room, through a foggy haze of scratches. The barkeep
had his back turned to them and was indolently cleaning a glass with a rag while he watched football highlights on a muted
TV. A cat slept under a table. Colin was about to put the lens down . . . when he saw a dark eyeball in the lintel of the
back door. It looked as if it was carved there, until it blinked. Colin cried out.
He lowered the Surrealist’s Glass and pushed it back to Arthur. “There’s an eyeball in that door.”
Arthur nodded. “Dryad. A lot of these old buildings have butchered dryads in the beams. Tree spirits.”
“I love that,” Colin said.
“You wouldn’t if you saw a gaping mouth, open in a scream,” Arthur said. “It can take a dryad that’s been hacked into pieces
a few hundred years to die.”
Colin thought he would still love it even then.
“Remind me: How many bridges have you searched under for this troll?” Colin asked.
“Three or four hundred. And I might’ve looked under three or four hundred more without your clever little—what did you call
it? Algorithm?”
“Well. You told me the troll needed to eat. You said he likes lamb and fat children. You said he’d have a crypt—a cave system—to keep his hoard and that he’d stay there come hell or high water .
. . not that high water would bother him since he has a certain amphibian quality.
And you said it would be a place where blood had been spilled .
. . that your troll—Svangur—would like the smell of it.
Once you’ve outlined the parameters of the search, it’s just a matter of pouring the information in and letting the software connect the dots.
The UK has several impressive national organizations that do work to find missing children, and almost all of them use our software.
Some of them have already uploaded a truly stupendous quantity of data about lost kids.
Knowing Svangur likes ’em buttery and fat was the key.
Five of the fattest kids to go missing in England in the last hundred and fifty years disappeared in the area around Slaughterbridge.
To be honest, the name of the bridge itself was sort of a red flag, don’t you think? ”
“You would. Only ‘slaughter’ is an Old English word for a swamp, not a battle.”
“In other linguistic trivia, you can’t spell ‘slaughter’ without ‘laughter.’”
“Only five children,” Arthur said. “Somehow I thought he’d take more than that. But of course, I was thinking on a human time
scale. After making a meal of someone’s chubby daughter he probably needs to sleep it off for a while. And he can make do
with goat, sheep. Fish. Children are a pleasure, not a necessity. Some of the reading suggests trolls may even be a bit like
cicadas, emerging cyclically, every nine years or so. He shows up, munches on some livestock, goes back to bed. Maybe every
second or third time he’s awake, he’ll devour a boy or a girl as a special treat.”
“I was perplexed by the lack of any evidence for a historical massacre at Slaughterbridge, though. Nothing in World War II.
Nothing in World War I. No great bloody labor clash. I went back hundreds of years. Nothing.”
“Hundreds of years wasn’t far enough. Geoffrey of Monmouth named it as the location of Arthur’s final battle, where he slew
his son, Mordred, and was mortally wounded himself. That may have been the massacre we were looking for.”
“As I said, I’m surprised you didn’t already check Slaughterbridge out.”
“This country is full of rivers, and every one of them has been choked with corpses at one time or another—verifiably, not
just mythically. Every bridge in this country has seen tragedy—a battle, a suicide, a collapse, a flash flood. And Cornwall
is chock to the brim—the absolute brim—with gift shops selling King Arthur T-shirts just because some old book mentioned that
Lancelot shagged a barmaid behind a nearby haystack.”
“Arthur, I have been meaning to ask. The trolls I remember in the stories, they seem to be disagreeable sorts. Tell me again why you think
this one is going to cooperate? I mean, are we sure he won’t just tear off my arm and beat you to death with it?”
“I’m not sure about that at all. I told you I have one . . . well, call it a talisman . . . that might protect us, but I can’t
be positive it will work without trying it.” Even as he spoke, he was rising from his chair and raising an arm. “Robin!”
Which was when Colin Wren got his first surprise of the day. A woman in jeans and a moss-colored corded sweater was swaggering
across the lobby and into the bar, a wool cap pulled over her blond hair. Colin had first met Robin Fellows at Van and Allie’s
wedding; he had last seen her at Van’s funeral. In between those two events, she had published the book that had led to Van’s
death in a cement stairwell. It had been brainlessly reckless to write the book in the first place; she had aided and abetted
Donovan in his criminal stupidity. Aiding the Get-Even Gang in acts of criminal stupidity seemed to be something of a habit
with her. How else to explain her presence this morning?
He put on a smile that he didn’t feel. Out of the corner of his mouth, he said, “What do you call this, Arthur?”
“I call it backup,” Arthur said.