Horns & Wrinkles by Joseph Helgerson

Author:Joseph Helgerson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Thirty-two

Three Bags & A Gnome

We spent the day at the wet bottom of a twenty-foot mineshaft. Sunlight may not turn a river troll to stone, but it does make them all cross and itchy. To block out the sun, they unrolled the orange shag carpet across the mouth of the shaft, then sprinkled sand over it for camouflage. The last troll down stuck his hand out from beneath the carpet and tossed sand over the remaining corner.

The trolls tied their alligator bags to the ladder maybe halfway down the shaft. Stump left his bag unzipped, allowing a faint green glow to seep out.

"Helps me sleep," Stump mumbled without being asked.

We lay nestled like spoons, Duke at one end of the line, me the other, our hands and feet still tied. If they could have tied my nose, I wouldn't have minded.

"So who's going to talk to Bodacious?" Biz grumble-squeaked in the greenish dark.

"I could," Duke volunteered.

Nobody paid him any mind except to laugh, but at least his offer broke the tension.

"Now, Biz," Jim Dandy reasoned, "if you talk royalty to royalty with old Bo, we should be fine. All you have to do is tell her it's a package deal. Two stars and one meal for three crickets. No, better not call it a meal, better call it a banquet. Now, that's a steal."

"Oh no," Biz protested. "You tell her. I might forget something."

"She'll take it better from an equal," Jim Dandy predicted.

Name-calling followed until Stump played peacemaker, saying, "How about a taste of those willow cats?"

That at least was something they could agree about, so they chowed down without offering us anything to eat, then dropped off to sleep, one by one. Determined to show he was one of the gang, Duke conked out with them.

They snored worse than broken trombones, but even if Jim Dandy, Biz, Stump, and Duke had been quiet sleepers, I still wouldn't have been able to nod off. Not with everything I had swirling around inside my head.

After a while, all my tossing and turning woke Stump, who was right behind me. "If I untie you," he whispered in my ear, "will you stop thrashing?"

"I'll try."

As soon as Stump undid the knots holding my wrists and ankles together, I got busy pretending to snore. In no time at all the troll's paw slipped off my shoulder and he was back to talking in his sleep. "Not me! Duckwad." I crept up the ladder, wanting a peek in the trolls' alligator bags. It seemed a likely place to stash a stone feather and glove.

Inside Stump's bag there wasn't much of anything but his toy poodle (asleep in his cage), a sack of doggie treats, and a snapshot of a chunky troll wearing a stick hat with a water lily on top. His wife, I assumed. There was also a family picture that showed Stump, a motherly troll in a patched apron, and another troll who must have been the missing brother, the one turned into a human.

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