The Troll People

  A forty-year-old man with a blonde mustache and a farmer’s shirt took a seat in the psychology office after shaking the psychologist’s hand across the desk. Also present was a man who claimed to be a sasquatch researcher, although he didn’t show any credentials.

“May we begin?” the psychologist turned on a recording device. “You were saying that during your regression therapy you came across something very startling from your past that you had forgotten. Can you tell me what that is?”

“Yes, in 1973 when I was ten years old I started playing with what I thought were a family of creatures living in the woods on my family’s land.” the man answered. “I thought they had escaped from a zoo, I had never heard the term ‘bigfoot’ before. In the time I spent with them they were very different from what people say they are.”

“How so?” the researcher interjected.

“Well they lived in a house that was made of bulrushes.” he continued. “And by house I mean it was literally a thatched house. There’s a shallow mound of earth in the woods where it stood; that’s because after the adults burned it they piled rocks on it. And it’s where they buried them.”

They both stopped writing and looked up as if they had each stepped outside of their area of expertise.

“Are you saying they were able to speak?” the researcher spoke first. “It’s thought that they nest on the ground like gorillas do. And the adults killed them?”

“They were as intelligent as we are.” the man said nervously. “They had the ability to change form, a kind of magic I suppose that’s passed on from parent to child. I don’t know what they were exactly. The one that was my age started following me home and sleeping in my room. He tried to take the place of a boy I knew… Oh my, I had forgotten this all happened before that.””

“Before you say anything else how did these memories first come back to you?” the psychologist asked.

“Bits and pieces just starting coming to me, the most random things would set it off. And then it was so astonishing it was like reading a fairy tale.”

“So what did you remember from your childhood before all this?”

“I remember the seventh grade when my parents separated and being transferred to military school.” he shrugged. “Come to think of it the property changed hands too. The whole neighborhood must have been a different place before that.”

“That’s common after a traumatic experience.” the psychologist explained. “Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

In 1973 young boys like Timothy were expected to disappear for hours at a time. There were several families with boys his own age on the same country road; the wooded oxbows of the Nebraska River were called the Alleys although he wasn’t sure what exactly the arrangement was between the property owner and the farmers. It was a normal childhood the adult Tim would come to realize which meant the years that followed were not normal. The sale of the farm, his parents’ separation while he was away at school, the pause whenever any family subject was raised suggested some ominous secret he never knew.

A year earlier when he was nine, Tim and four other boys went camping by themselves. Living on a farm he was used to seeing animals die and being processed; there was something called PDB which if a horse died from they were supposed to leave the carcass in a ditch beside the road to be collected and sprinkle it with lime. There were a lot of them that Summer which apparently was what attracted the problem. Something like a coyote was scavenging the ones that were too rotten for the neighborhood dogs.

He and the other boys always wore extremely short shorts and very tall socks, and usually swam in the river naked. After attempting to cook crawdads in a plastic bottle some of the boys went their separate ways and by nightfall two of them hadn’t returned. Travis was an older child but Mike was a lot like Tim’s little brother who wasn’t allowed to come along. What happened when Travis returned alone was a jumble of dimly-remembered events.

“Mike was never found.” Tim said in front of the desk. “The boy who went with him was hysterical, he looked like a ghost. There was a police search, I don’t know if the story he told them is what I heard or if I pieced it together later.”

“And that is what?”

“Mike was grabbed by a pair of ‘trolls’.” Tim swallowed. “That’s the word he used. I can’t imagine how horrifying it must have been. The young ones are just playing and don’t know their own strength; they’ll pull a person by the wrist up a tree or down a hole without thinking. Of course they must have… killed him.”

The other two stared at him. The boys were all sent home as the police formed a search party; he remembered them calling Mike’s name well-into the night over several days. He knew the other boy was punished severely as that was the last he saw of him that summer. And there was one other thing that stuck in his memory, adults talking about Mike in the past tense. Something like ‘it just figures considering the kind of family he came from’.”

“And why does that stick out in your mind?” the psychologist asked curiously. “Do you know what they meant by it?”

“No it’s just a startling thing to say.” he answered.

Tim’s discovery of the creatures began with the discovery of their lair not far from the house. At the ditch where dead livestock were discarded something was getting down on all fours and eviscerating them; it had left a coil of rotten intestines hanging fifteen feet up in a tree. He wasn’t sure what kind of animal would do that, but the broken pieces gave him a trail to follow into what was then an overgrown swamp where a tornado had passed through.

The path through the reeds became a tunnel that led directly to an opening that turned out to be the front door of a structure invisible to most people, much like a beaver lodge is. It seemed to be deserted so Tim went right on in. The floor was sand, and the dwelling was divided into rooms like an ordinary house. In the main room there were old cloths on the floor for sleeping, but the strangest thing was the framed portraits on the wall, like a pack rat that collects shiny objects that are useless to it.

“Are you sure you didn’t imagine any of this?” the psychologist was skeptical. “How do you explain how the search parties didn’t find a place as big as this? Farm boys that age are pretty resourceful, but you went inside considering what you had just seen and you didn’t tell your parents?”

“I don’t know.” Tim answered frankly. “The memory is just watching myself doing it, like Alice going down a rabbit hole. I couldn’t tell you if the owner was a person, an animal or something like Rumpelstiltskin.”

“This contradicts everything we think we know about them.” the researcher added. “Why would something that’s existed in the wild for thousands of years aspire to live like humans?”

“Maybe there’s no difference.” Tim suggested. “Maybe in their shoes we’d be eating carrion too.”

Some months after the neighborhood boy had disappeared, Tim’s little brother Benjamin came running into the house to tell him he was outside playing with “Mike”. Now too much time had passed for it to be the same Mike, but Tim followed him curiously to the back of the property. There Ben stood talking to someone behind the reeds that were as thick as a corn field.

As Tim grew closer, there was indeed a pair of eyes his own height peering back at them. Ben asked it to say its name. To Tim’s astonishment a deep rumbling sound rose from its stomach and “Mike” came out like a chimpanzee struggling to speak its first word. Tim could only figure it must have heard the searchers saying his name so many times he picked it up.

Over the next few days the two boys were able to coax “Mike” out into the open, but he was so ugly Ben was afraid and ran off, leaving it to focus on Tim only. Tim would throw a ball into the woods and Mike would roll it back in an effort to lure him closer to the house. This led to Tim showing him “magic tricks” with the ball, to which Mike gave a toothy grin that made him seem more human. Then he responded with some magic of his own.

He would disappear behind a tree, beckoning Tim with his long fingers and then Tim would walk completely around it and Mike would step out again. When he reappeared he seemed much less like an animal and more like a filthy, destitute boy. (But then he laughed so hard his eyes glowed red and his fangs came out, causing a frightened Tim to run back to the house.)

Mike’s getting closer to the house each time became a problem, waiting just outside the door to surprise Tim or watching him sleep through the bedroom window. After Tim showed him inside Mike starting letting himself in and was discovered putting on Tim’s clothes. He was getting so much better at speaking and acting like a human it was easy to pretend he was the real Mike, until the day Tim’s sister came running down the hall screaming for someone to “get that thing out of our house!”.

“I remember the farm being surrounded by rural police vehicles.” Tim swallowed, his story becoming difficult to tell. “Mike ran out the back door wearing my jeans and I heard the report of the sheriff’s shotgun. The land overseer showed up, a man with sunglasses and a safari shirt. They laid Mike on a picnic table and… dissected him.”

The other two stared at him as Tim took a drink of water.

“We could save the rest for our next session if you’d like.” the psychologist offered.

“There isn’t much else.” he cleared his throat. “The whole community converged on our land, a ‘posse’ although I wasn’t a witness to what they did. There was a disagreement between some Native Americans and a government man over who had custody of the body. My parents must have been threatened, I could hear them arguing at all hours and they never did that before. I was punished as if I’d done something terrible, locked in a room where a country doctor gave me injections. That’s where my childhood memory stops, like turning the page of a book.”

2

Thirty years after the events Tim described, he had a very normal life and a family of his own including an 8-year-old son Benjamin named after his brother. The world made sense; he was a computer repairman after leaving the army, military school having made a man out of a boy from a broken household. But then he returned to his childhood area to settle down as a tenant farmer himself, inspired by his revelations. It took months of research just to find out where the place used to be, since no extended relatives would speak of it. (As he told the psychologist a tornado can clear out a woodland and make it a swamp only to grow back into a woodland and it was the same with neighborhoods.) Now older, he had another strange observation of human nature.

His little son Ben knew nothing of Tim’s childhood stories, he only knew they moved there because his father was obsessed with something, pouring over land records and interviewing with anyone who would listen to him. He found what he believed was a shallow mound out in the woods which to Ben looked like nothing at all, and spent long hours there turning over rocks. There was talk of hiring an anthropologist (whatever that was).

It all seemed very scientific until a heated argument with the neighbors over property lines brought in the overseer, and his father’s plans seemed to be put on hold. Being a local his father believed an exchange of favors would take care of everything (if not the survey he paid for put facts on his side), but it was explained to him he didn’t have the plantation owner’s blessing. Then he lost his job, a setback he assured them would change nothing since he could always get a new one and they were still a family.

Over the next few months Ben noticed they were beginning to eat their own crops at dinner instead of selling them. Ben’s mother took up darning his clothes rather than buying new ones. His father had started drinking to cope with some unknown matter. Ben himself was no longer allowed to play with other neighborhood kids, although he didn’t know why. One day he passed by a group of them on the road and they all just stopped and stared as if there was some secret about him that was going around. Soon Ben was pulled out of school, then he heard someone say “it was bound to happen sooner or later” which made his bearded father turn around as if it struck some distant recollection.

The family sold all of their furniture and took to dining on the floor, which even Ben couldn’t understand for why didn’t they just pack up and move into an apartment? It must have been that his father was unwanted because of his meddling wherever he went, even trying to help the other farmers shovel manure led to him being chased off like a madman. One day they sat down to eat and it was organ meat salvaged from someone’s cow.

His father increasingly moved anything of value down to his research area at the edge of the woods (such as their household generator after the power was turned off) as if it was a more secure location. Every part of the house was stripped bare of anything that could be bartered from lumber to window panes. The family took to living in a single room where, having nothing else to occupy himself with, Ben’s father showed him a magic trick with his fingernails. Some men with rifles started snooping around as if the place was deserted, and that day Ben was told they were moving into the swamp.