Troll

The Troll is a supernatural creature whose presence in Queens is sustained by a bargain between the Knudsen family and the creature’s caretaker. The bargain demands a child, and the portraits of infants kept in its hidden lair make the pact’s consequences visible across generations. The Troll is not simply described as a threat: its keepers claim that it tries to raise the children entrusted to it, making failed parenthood, inherited obligation, and the limits of protection central to its role. When it finally emerges, Emma Valentine and Apollo Kagwa rescue Brian Kagwa, and daylight turns the creature to stone.

Names and Arrival in Queens

Jorgen Knudsen identifies the creature by several names: Jotunn, Trolde, and Troll. He presents the first two as Norwegian terms, linking it to the homeland from which Nils Knudsen brought it. Jorgen’s account places the creature within a natural landscape of forests, mountains, and hidden lairs rather than treating its presence as an isolated occurrence. That account supplies the history through which the family’s later actions become intelligible, though not excusable.

Nils had to leave Norway with his wife, Anna Sofie. According to Jorgen, the small sloop planned by the Sloopers seemed an unsafe means of passage, and Nils brought the creature as insurance. The arrangement came at a price: while the Sloopers continued upstate after reaching New York City, Nils, Anna Sofie, and Petra Mikkelsdatter stayed in Queens borough. Jorgen describes the area at that time as farmland, with extensive forest. The later development of parkland did not erase the landscape’s secluded pockets: the hills and caves offered places where the creature could hide.

The Pact and Its Children

Nils’s part of the agreement was to serve as the creature’s caretaker and ensure that it was appeased. The stipulated payment was a child. When Nils could no longer postpone fulfilling the bargain, he took his daughter Agnes into the woods and delivered her to the creature’s cave. Jorgen’s explanation makes the arrangement a family obligation passed through action: the creature’s presence demands a human cost, and a caretaker is responsible for meeting that demand.

In the windowless den, Apollo sees a wall of framed images arranged in rows like a timeline. The images move from sketches and charcoal renderings through daguerreotypes and black-and-white photographs to early color pictures. They are all portraits of children, none older than a year. Their ordering gives the history a material record: the pact is not represented as one terrible decision alone, but as a repeated pattern visible across successive images. Apollo’s question about whether the children were fed to the creature meets a distinction from Jorgen. He insists that this description is not accurate: the Troll tries to raise them, he says, and feeds only when that effort fails. The distinction does not undo the children’s fate. Instead, it exposes how the family’s language of care coexists with the pact’s repeated harm.

Inherited Belief and the Creature’s Appearance

Kinder Garten later tells Emma that the Troll cannot be killed. His explanation is framed through inheritance: the past cannot be changed, he argues, so people can only make the best of what they have inherited. That belief helps explain the endurance of the family’s arrangement, but the story does not confirm it as an unbreakable fact. The creature’s eventual destruction by daylight directly contradicts the assertion that it cannot be killed.

The revelation of the Troll’s physical presence is delayed until Apollo and Emma are beside Brian in the cave. A sound they had taken for an echo proves to be a breathing pattern in sync with the child. Then the wall they had mistaken for part of the amphitheater moves, and a large eye opens in the darkness. The names Jotunn, Trolde, and Troll mark the moment when the creature Apollo has heard about is no longer only a family history or a set of portraits. The hidden chamber becomes an actual threshold between the visible human world and the creature concealed within it.

Destruction and Narrative Significance

The Troll emerges while Emma holds Brian. She keeps her grip on him as they retreat, refusing to let him go again. This immediate protective action contrasts with the generations of caretaking organized around appeasing the creature, in which children were delivered to it under the terms of the pact. Apollo and Emma’s objective is to get Brian out; the creature’s claimed parental role offers no protection against that need.

After they find Brian alive and pull him from the Troll, Apollo and Emma crawl away with him. As the sun rises, daylight reaches the creature: its color drains, it stiffens, and it becomes stone before breaking apart. The remains resemble a mound of boulders, and the place could pass for a small hill to someone who did not know what had been there. The daylight provides a decisive supernatural resolution, not an explanation that returns the creature to the ordinary world. The inherited conviction that it was beyond killing has failed.

Emma carries Brian toward the woods, while Apollo stays behind. He approaches the largest stone, which had been the creature’s head, and touches the depressions that had been its eyes before pressing his forehead to the stone. He understands this gesture as a burial not of his father but of his fatherlessness. The Troll’s death therefore ends more than the immediate danger in the cave: it gives Apollo a way to mark the childhood absence that has haunted him. Brian, whom the story calls the only child ever born twice, survives the creature that had been hidden behind generations of family history.