Sean Cullen - The Prince of Neither Here Nor There

The yellow eyes narrowed to slits and the huge nostrils sniffed wetly. “Hmmmmmmm.” The voice was deep and rumbling like rocks dropping into an empty oil drum. “Hello. Are you lost or what?”

Brendan was at the end of his endurance. He’d been attacked, chased, and nearly run over by a train. He’d heard squirrels talk and narrowly avoided being struck by lightning. Now a huge blue man was holding him helpless above the subway tracks. His mind decided that if this huge monster were going to eat him, it would be better if he weren’t awake for it. Brendan passed out.

When he came to, he was immediately aware of two things. One: he hadn’t been eaten, a positive development. He wanted to check his hands and feet to see if they were all present and accounted for but it was too dark to see. Two: he was moving. Well, he wasn’t moving himself, he was being carried. Something large and thick was clamped around him. It smelled powerfully. Not a bad smell but weird, like a very stinky armpit full of cinnamon. As his eyes began to adjust to the light, he was able to pick out more detail. He was being held in place by a large arm, thick as a young tree and just as solid. The arm was attached to a body of suitably large proportions. The body was draped in a thick woollen fabric, scratchy in the extreme. At the moment, they were shambling along a rough stone corridor.

As they swayed along, the giant thing hummed softly to itself. “Bum ba bum ba bum! bum ba bum ba bum! bum ba bum ba bum bum!” Brendan recognized the tune: it was the old Hockey Night in Canada theme.

Brendan felt panic begin to well up. He started struggling against the iron grip of the creature holding him. “Let go of me!”

“Na! Don’t whiggle. No whiggling, please.” The low rumbling voice echoed off the stone. “Borje don’t appreciate the whiggling.”

Brendan stopped wiggling. “Where are you taking me… Borje?”

“Patience, little master. ‘S not so far.”

Even as the creature spoke, the light was growing stronger. Brendan craned his head to look ahead and saw a bluish glow outlining what looked like a door.

Borje walked straight up to the door, a thick, heavy portal, and took out a steel key. Spraypainted slogans in a language Brendan couldn’t read covered the door, and a few crudely drawn rude pictures adorned it as well. The huge blue man named Borje tapped the key against the door, which glowed with a faint silver light for an instant before swinging open with the squeal of rusty hinges.

“Home, swheet home,” the creature Borje called as he carried Brendan over the threshold.

They were in a rough cavern cut out of the native stone. In one corner sat an overly large table with two oversized wooden chairs beside it. On the table were stacks of hockey pucks in tottering piles that covered most of the tabletop. In the far wall, a fireplace held pride of place, a merry fire crackling in the hearth. A huge overstuffed armchair sat directly in front of the flames. A smaller end table sat nearby and a large remote control lay atop it. On the wall over the mantelpiece was the largest flat-screen TV Brendan had ever seen. The place seemed quite cozy in a stone-caverny kind of way.

The door clanged shut. Borje placed Brendan on his feet. Brendan turned to look at the door, an impenetrable slab. He was trapped with the thing called Borje.

In his precarious and exhausted state of mind, he thought that the objects hanging on the wall were skulls. He blinked, rubbed his eyes, and looked again.

“Hockey helmets?”

The wall was covered in ice hockey helmets, row upon row, lovingly arranged and polished. Each had a tiny plaque that told which professional player had once worn the headgear. There were also shelves full of gloves from the ultra-modern to the ancient and decaying leather gauntlets that players had worn a century or more ago. Brendan looked around the room and saw that it was a hockey shrine, a museum to the sport. Rows of hockey sticks ranging from gnarled wooden clubs to plywood laminate to aluminum to one-piece composite leaned in cleverly designed wall racks. The rafters and roof beams were hung with hundreds of hockey jerseys. Most of them were from the Toronto Maple Leafs 57 but there were other teams as well.

Looking up into the curved recesses of the ceiling, Brendan could see more odds and ends of hockey history dangling from the rafters: shoulder pads, elbow pads, hockey pants, more sticks and helmets from every era of the sport. He gasped when he looked into one stone alcove and saw a squat silver cup lit from above by a single spotlight. The cup was so shiny it was clear it had been lovingly polished. Brendan looked more closely, and his eyes bugged out as he read some of the inscriptions on the base.

“Is that what I think it is?” he breathed.

“Yo. The original Stanley’s Cup.” Borje beamed. Then his huge face became slightly sheepish. “The one they have is a replica. I couldn’t resist! They never announced that the original whent missing.” He winked and grinned. “But she ain’t missing, nah? She’s right here!” 58

Brendan traced his fingers over the engraved lines on the trophy. “This is unbelievable,” Brendan said in awe. If his father had seen this collection he would have wet himself, wept for joy, and then died. His father was a huge hockey fan and played on a team called the Jokers, made up of comedians and artists who played charity games in Toronto. Brendan sometimes joined them. The awe in seeing such a collection pushed aside his terror for a moment. “Where did you get all this amazing stuff?”

“You like my hockey memorabiliums?” The heavy voice took on a childlike quality. “Many years, I’ve been collecting.”

Brendan moved closer to peer at a white helmet with a scrawled signature and the number 21 on the side. “Borje Salming?” 59

“Yo! My favouritest of players. A good Swhede, like me. I am Borje, too. Same name!” He giggled like a child. “I, Borje, left Swheden many years ago. Centuries in the fact. I come aboard a ship whith Lucky Leif himself.”

“Leif Eriksson?” Brendan whispered. “The Viking?” 60

“That’s the one! I were in the crew.” Borje thumped his chest with one massive fist. “They leave Borje behind. Hey, think I, bad luck! Not me, Leif bad luck. I stay. Whander here and there. End up here. Toronto built up around me.”

Brendan turned to look at Borje and was amazed that he wasn’t afraid of the hulking creature. Borje stood close to eight feet tall, with massive shoulders and arms that hung at his sides like thick tree branches. His head was as big as a large pumpkin and sprouted with greasy blond hair. He was wearing a blue and white woollen hockey jersey (one he’d made himself by the look of it) with a lopsided white maple leaf on the front.

“Uh… this is really cool and everything, but I really need to find Kim. You know Kim?” With some difficulty, Brendan decided he had to return to his current situation.

“Of course.” Borje smiled and slapped his chest. “Ki-Mata good friend of Borje!”

“Yeah, nice,” Brendan said. “Well, she said I have to get to the Swan so maybe I should be going.”

“You can’t go.” Borje frowned, his brows beetling together over his bulbous nose. “There are Dwharfs about in these tunnels.”

“Dwarfs?”

Borje shook his shaggy head. “Bad persons. Scavengers and whaylayers of folk. When they move in, there go the neighbourhood. They travel in gangs in the under tunnels and prey on the wheak. I stops them when I can.”

“Which leads to my next question,” Brendan said, trying to be delicate. “What exactly… are you?”

Borje laughed like a boulder falling down a well. “Oh. I am Borje and I am a Troll.” 61