Trollhunters by Guillermo del Toro, Daniel Kraus Page A

Achieved. Safety Mode 3-A Initiated
. He flicked a switch and nighttime floodlights bathed
the front and back yards. Neighbor dogs to both sides of our house howled their nightly disapproval.



Dad moved down the hall in his slippers, not making a sound. He entered his bedroom, closed the door, and after thirty seconds I heard the soft sounds of a familiar song playing from his old
speakers, a syrupy tune I’d been hearing all of my life, some song by an oldies group called Don and Juan.
    “I stood on this corner, / Waiting for you to come along, / So my heart could feel satisfi-i-i-ied
.…
”

When midnight came, I learned it from pop-up warnings on my phone and laptop. I had set the alarms to make sure I got some sleep after the long day, but I dismissed both of
them in disgust. All the lights in my room were off and my eyes were straining at the screen, yet sleep wasn’t going to happen, not anytime soon.
    I wasn’t making it any easier on myself with the subject of my surfing. Instead of studying math, I’d been scouring the most popular video sites, and some lesser-known ones, too, on
a hunt for anyone else who’d seen what I’d seen. My initial searches, limited to subjects like “sewer drains” and “locker rooms,” came up empty, but after ninety
minutes of tweaking I’d found a second layer of content, videos so unpopular and poorly indexed that you had to learn a new language of misspelling to have a shot at uncovering them. Most of
these were blurred snippets of absolutely nothing, while drunken voices hollered off-camera, “Look at that! Look at that right there!”
    It was when I began noticing location tags that I started to sweat. I found no less than six videos posted within the past six years uploaded from right here in Saint B. To call these videos
amateur would be putting it nicely, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t something moving through those dimly lit alleys and behind those distant dumpsters. The videos were marked with
only one or two “likes” and underscored with comments along the lines of
omg so fake
. But to someone who’d seen hands and feet and shoulders of unimaginable dimension,
the shapes looked eerily familiar.
    It got so I couldn’t take any more. I tore out my earbuds. Right away I wished I hadn’t done it. The stillness in the house was unnatural. I can’t put it better than that. It
was as if there were new mouths in the house sucking up our supply of air. I could hear things I normally couldn’t: the buzzing from the front porch security camera, Dad’s breathing
from his bedroom.
    The idea that someone could be inside, though, was insane. The place was a fortress. You couldn’t get through our doors without a chainsaw and blowtorch, not to mention the screaming of
multiple alarms and the arrival of three different security company vans. Through the crack in my door, I could see the proof on the other side of the living room: two red lights signifying that
the various security systems were armed. I had been watching those two lights from bed all my life. So why did they seem wrong to me?
    The two lights blinked.
    Yes, that’s what was bothering me.
    They weren’t console lights at all. They were eyes.
    I lay there, unable to breathe, as the red eyes shifted about. Floorboards moaned beneath a great weight. I heard an exhale like the nickering snort of a horse. And then the red eyes moved from
the far edge of the living room, revealing the much smaller security console bulbs behind it. Whatever it was, it was coming toward the bedrooms. It was about the worst thing I could possibly
imagine. Until the next thing happened.
    More eyes opened: three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Each of them swam in the same space of air as if connected to the same head, though each operated independently, some snaking to the left,
some to the right, some glancing backward, and the rest straining right at me. Whatever this thing—or things—was, it filled