Chapter 3. The Discovery of the New World
The trolls made their way to the lake.
This requires a bit of explanation. Though the trolls were known, fully, as The Rabid Band of Lake Borack, and were colloquially thought to live underneath that lake, in fact they lived under the hills that bordered the lake on the north side. The only entrance to their caverns, however, was at the bottom of the lake itself.
Lake Borack was a deep lake, and since the days of the dinosaurs, it had been a cold one. In order to reach the caverns of the Rabid Band, one had to swim deep in that cold water and into a small underwater cavern. If one swam into that cavern a few hundred yards (where it was totally dark even in the strongest noon sunlight) it eventually widened and broadened. A hundred yards or so further, the rock ceiling of the cavern rose above the water's surface. Only here was there any air for whatever creature had swum so far.
Further in, the ground rose up above the level of the water, a beach rising up from an underground lake.
While technically this underground lake was a part of Lake Borack, the trolls had a different name for it. They called it “Dark Water.” Above Dark Water was no endless sky, but a dome of granite that has never seen the sun.
Still, one could dimly see. The walls of the cavern were laced with phosphorescent minerals that faintly glowed, revealing this lower world of the trolls. But it was no picnic down there. There wasn't enough light to read by, and the cave was a constant 56 degrees Fahrenheit: not warm enough to be comfortable unless one was a cold-blooded cave fish, or a troll with layers and layers of insulating blubber.
The trolls didn't like this cavern; it held a cool dampness that tended to encourage the growth of mold upon their most tender parts. They preferred the dryer caverns under the hills, where there was no water, and where cracks in the earth vented the smoke from their fires.
Or, at least that's what they'd tell you. The truth was darker: the trolls were afraid of a giant creature supposed to inhabit that underground lake. No one had ever seen this creature, or at least seen the whole of it. At most, a lone troll has on occasion reported seeing a hump of its back curl along the surface of the water.
This creature had had a name once, though it had been lost generations before. None of the trolls living through the last centuries had been brave enough to speak its name, and so it had been lost. Now, they just called it the Dark Water Horror. And it was horrible. There were tales of smaller trolls being eaten whole. That was of no assurance to the larger trolls, because there were also tales of trolls being ripped apart and eaten, delicately, one limb at a time.
The fattest of the trolls, Obeast, had once found a long, cylindrical object a few feet from shore that he supposed might be a tooth of the creature. While no one could prove that it had come from the Dark Water Horror, still, it gave them pause. It hung on a wall in the main troll cavern. Brumvack had placed it there as a warning to the younger trolls: the world is a dangerous place. Be careful. You're safer here with us. The legend was clear: if any troll went alone to the underwater lake, he was likely to be eaten. Better to remain with one’s cave mates. There was safety in numbers.
Brumvack himself assumed that if there ever had been a Dark Water Horror, it had gone the way of the dinosaurs. Probably, in fact, it had been a dinosaur, whose bones were now at the bottom of the lake somewhere. Surely, no trolls had mysteriously disappeared for a long while. But he didn't tell the others of these thoughts. It was helpful as a leader to keep his subjects in fear. It was a way to control them.
In any case, on that day the trolls were too angry to be scared, or perhaps too hungry to care. They roared from the caves where they lived downward toward Dark Water. They waded into that water with none of the toe-testing and gingerly steps that usually accompanied the task. They were driven. Brumvack, to keep them in their state of frenzy, emitted a foodwhoop, a high yell of the hunt that shook the stone walls and echoed eerily around the cavern.
The thirteen trolls of the Rabid Band swam out into the water, splashing and grunting and taking the deep breaths necessary to swimming the length of the underwater cavern that would give them entrance to the lake itself.
It was a sight to see, that baker's dozen of bulging bodies cutting through the water, even though those bodies bulged less belligerently than they had before the Big Sleep.
Their excitement, however, was short lived. Even before they reached the surface of the lake, they could see that their world had changed. The lake wasn’t covered in great sheets of ice any more, thankfully, but there were other problems. The biggest problem was that the water was clean. No longer was it green with the slime of the bone-headed dinosaur fish, or brown with the silt of the mudfish. It was clean and crystal clear and it tasted terrible. The trolls shrank at the first sight of it. But they steeled themselves and swam to the surface.
One at a time, first Brumvack and then Schmoozeglutton and then all the rest, poked their noses above the surface of the water. As soon as they did so, all the energy of revenge and hunger—and even the energy of proud troll honor—left them. Twenty six troll eyes scanned the horizon, and for a moment they couldn’t even breathe.
The world, like the water, had changed.
Long ago, of course, the land had been lush with a dinosaurstudded jungle. They had survived the change of climate to a frozen wasteland that only the occasional woolly mammoth inhabited. That had been bad, but this was worse. Instead of the great icy plains stretching into the distance, they saw nothing but houses and buildings.
Of course, trolls didn't know they were houses and buildings; all they could see were boxy structures that grew everywhere, like giant square toadstools. They looked unnatural. Brumvack had no doubt that they would turn out to be poisonous.
Still, though the other trolls shrank back in horror from what they saw, he urged them forward. “Let’s (wheeze) see what else is here,” he said, and motioned them to swim a little closer to shore.
The next things they saw were more horrible than the cubical mushrooms: giant beetles with round feet, which raced along in search of food. Those beetles looked menacing. They were too small as individuals to eat trolls, but the trolls knew how insects worked: a whole group of them would work together to chase a troll, to surround it, to take it down. The trolls had seen the giant insects of the Pleistocene, but these were huge. They whined and thrummed as they ran.
And closer, there right on the lakefront, was a final horror too terrible to contemplate: two-legged creatures, like trolls, though these were much different than any troll they had ever seen. They were smaller, wimpier, and much, much uglier.
As the trolls took in this view of their new world, they each felt a lurch in their stomachs. Where they had hoped that their hibernation would deliver them to a world more like the dinosaur age, instead it had given them this: a world too radically different from the one they thought they knew. And those two-legged creatures: what was that about? Were they the new breed of trolls, living on top of the earth, instead of underneath it? If so, something had gone badly wrong in their breeding. They were short, skinny, and terribly small-brained creatures. If this is what the grand race of trolls had become, they wanted no part of it.
Brumvack, treading water for one last look, got the attention of the others with a small burp. He signaled them to return to the cave. There, they would regroup. The world had changed. Brumvack sensed that they had no business up on the land until they had completed further investigation.
“No stopping along the way,” he said. “It might (snort) be dangerous.”