FIFTY-ONE

The cutlery was made from either bone or wood; Luke didn’t know, nor did he want to touch it. The wooden plate was balanced on the foot of the bed and half filled with stew and boiled root vegetable. He dithered, standing over it, his hands wavering uselessly as the smell tormented him. Hunger burned his stomach right back to his spine and made him dizzy. When was the last time he’d eaten? He didn’t know because he did not know how long he had been in the room, in the bed, pissing himself.

The food was lukewarm, had cooled while Fenris chattered. At least it was soft. Luke knelt before it. Lowered his face to the plate.

By the time he had licked every dreg of the bitter salty gravy to the side of the plate, he heard a growing tumult of voices and the banging of busy feet beneath his room, one floor down.

Excitable voices. Shrieking, screaming voices, imitating the vocals in black metal music; growling and gargling, before breaking into cracked falsettos. He wondered if they were communicating with each other in this way, or just trying to outdo each other like children. Fenris was the loudest. Luke doubted the youth’s mouth ever stayed closed for long. His oafish noises were being underwritten by Loki’s booming baritone. Maybe the girl was doing all the jackal noises, in competition with Fenris. He doubted it was the old woman making such a garbled sound. And why did they wear their shoes inside the house? he thought, then felt foolish for the irrelevance of such a query. But the sound of the continual hollow banging of their feet against the wooden floors was maddening, deafening. It made him flinch, set his nerves on edge. It intimidated him; he was afraid it would rise up the stairs to his room at any moment.

The youths could not use furniture quietly either. Wooden legs of what he guessed were chairs were constantly scraped angrily across the floors. It sounded as if the entire ground floor of the building was being rearranged, or vandalized and things were toppling over and smashing down there. He wondered who the old woman was. Was she related to the band, to this Blood Frenzy? He wanted to know why she allowed them to be so aggressive.

He was suddenly annoyed at himself for not asking why he was here, or who the old woman was, or about so many other things he desperately needed the answers to. His temperature suddenly plummeted. Were these youths their killers? Had these adolescents hunted them? Murdered his friends? This wolf and devil and fire?

No, it didn’t fit.

Luke had not seen their pursuer, their killer, but what he knew and sensed of it was too swift, too silent, for human endeavour. He could not imagine these painted youths capable of such bestial cunning. Nor did they exude its unnatural presence that infiltrated dreams. It. Luke clutched at his face, and started to pant to ease another panic attack.

The noises of the group banged and screeched outside the house, then lessened as their boots trod upon grass. Save for the idiotic screams, which continued unabated.

Luke moved across the room to the tiny window. He noted black nails, or tacks, poking from the wall to the right side of the window. Over the bed, sections of the plaster featured rectangles of lighter paint. Pictures and ornaments had been taken down. Not a good sign, though he could not define why. He moved the rag of discoloured netting aside and looked down from the window.

It was getting dark outside, but there was still some bruised light in the sky. He guessed it was around eight. A dim orangey glow was being emitted from an open door, or from the windows directly beneath his feet that he could not see.

Outside his little window, the youths were going to light a pyre.

Dark wooden logs were stacked into a triangular shape, about twenty feet from the house in a wide grassy area that extended to the black trees bordering the property. Coils of briar and dead branches formed another messy layer of kindling around the logs. A red plastic petrol can was visible in the dark grass. Grass that had not been cut for a long time but had been flattened by feet around the pyre in a messy circular patch.

A few small fruit trees grew in the flat grassy area. Across from the house was a smaller building. It looked like an elaborate Wendy house, or a shed with a solitary door and a porch. A black miniature house that made him afraid; it looked like the disused buildings they had found in the forest. This one was also very old. As was the room, and no doubt the house. Everything around here was morbidly aged and neglected. The very smells of the place were alien to him. The house smelled of the forest. Of the dark dripping heart of the terrible wood, that reared up black and still and impenetrable around the grassy paddock.

He was suddenly gripped with a terror that the pyre was for him. That the youths were going to burn him alive.

He forced himself to deny the possibility, to stem the spurt of panic that came into his mouth. They were just young and drunk. They had saved him. They took nothing seriously; they were teenagers. Excitable. That’s all. Someone had gone to fetch a doctor.

Then why lock the door? Luke turned his head slowly and looked at the little door. To … to keep him safe. But from what?

Luke shuffled as fast as he dared across the room to the door, the floor gritty under the soles of his feet. Supposing a time came, when the pain in his head lessened and more mobility returned to his body, he wondered if he would need to free himself from the room, silently. The tiny window was too small to climb through, so he was only left with the door as a method of escape.

He turned the black iron door handle. Locked. He knew it was, but maybe it could be forced open. The house was old, the door narrow, it looked flimsy. But when he shook the handle and pressed his naked shoulder into the wood, the door proved to be more solid and heavy than it appeared, and was also swollen slightly crooked in the doorway. There was little movement of it inside the frame. His brief hope of an easy escape died.

He bent over and waited for the quakes inside his skull to subside to ripples. Returned to the window.

Down below, Fenris and Loki had stripped off their T-shirts and revealed their upper bodies to the cold evening air: pale as grubs around the tattoos, chests smooth, upper arms long and thin and festooned with more of the black spiky tattoos. Swathes of matted black hair formed drapes around their freshly whitened faces. He had not realized how long Loki’s hair was until now; it fell past his waist in a tatty curtain. The man’s limbs were spindly, but he was a giant. He had some sort of bandolier that crossed his chest; it was made from black leather and studded. Both men’s forearms bristled with long silver nails, protruding from leather bands that stretched from wrist to elbow.

Grimaces had been newly depicted on to the young but knowing faces of the two men. They widened their eyes at the dark sky and did more of the idiotic shrieking, with their arms held out from their bodies. Luke could not see the girl.

Black metal music suddenly exploded from the old CD player. The machine was out of sight, and must have been operated by the girl, who suddenly ran into view, naked. Her buttocks and heavy breasts shook as she ran. There were no tattoos visible on her skin and she had small feet. Absurd feet. Her skin was so pale too, almost luminescent. Upon her head she wore the mask; had become the hare again. Her head looked oversized, shaggy, and the vague shadow her head cast before the orangey glow of the house was not pleasant.

Messily, Fenris upended the petrol can over the wood. It splashed silvery. Loki produced a Zippo lighter and Luke suddenly identified one major cause of the unrelenting irritation that had refused to subside inside him since he had eaten. He was in withdrawal. And desperately wanted to smoke. Wondered how long it had been since his last cigarette. He’d rather have tobacco than clothes or fucking steel cutlery. ‘Please, please let them have cigarettes,’ he whispered.

The Zippo took its time igniting the pyre. And the pyre had to be relit four times, despite the leaping of the fat hare and Fenris’s excitable shrieking to urge the flames into existence. They were all drunk.

He watched more of the youths’ drunken dancing. The two men were gulping something from horns fashioned into cups. Moonshine. The ungainly hare fell to its knees twice. Against the windowpane the light and heat from the fire seemed to beat, and push him further back inside the room.

Tiredness from his exertions made his body suddenly feel old and wretched. He felt faint and nauseous. This was no time to try anything clever.

He made his way back to the bed. Lay upon the eiderdown, unable to face the urine-damp sheepskins and soiled hay beneath. Closed his eyes, shivered. Tried to make sense of what was happening to him. He found it hard to think clearly now. The gargling vocals and machine-gun drumming beneath his window interfered with his thoughts, and even his breathing. He wanted the silence and darkness of sleep again; felt its presence swaying at the back of his mind.

The situation was preposterous. But his acceptance of it seemed too easy. Because he was in shock. Maybe still in shock from what had happened to Dom and Phil and Hutch, out there in the forest he could see from his window.

He wasn’t safe at all, and was still within reach of whatever it was, out there. There had not been enough time to process his predicament, because he had been running for his life, for days, and was broken by it. Then he was here, in this madness. He struggled to connect the two situations.

He desperately wanted the noise of the youths to cease. He wanted total silence around him. Because noise would carry for miles and miles. It might attract something else to the house.

But the music played and the drunken youths screamed at the sky. Nothing seemed to tire them. He wondered if they could keep it up all night.

It. Did they know of it? Had Fenris been making inquiries? But quietly, as if hoping Loki would not overhear? Loki led them. He seemed more intelligent, perhaps benign, though immediately ridiculous. Fenris was an oaf, a noisy adolescent. There was something infuriatingly immature about both of them. Geeky. They were dorks. Compared to what he had encountered out there, he was not afraid of them physically. He analysed this instinct. Yes, he was more wary of their intentions, their motives for keeping him locked inside this room, than afraid of what they could do to him. He guessed, more than decided, that they were exuberant, delinquent, irresponsible, but harmless. And the old woman was an adult, responsible; she had fed him, retied the bandage, stroked his cheek. He remembered the sensation and shivered. Bad things didn’t happen around grandmothers. He just had to relax and wait. The masks had given him a fright, that was all. But then, his well-being did not appear to be their priority. They were oblivious to the state of his broken head. They were having a fucking party. Had they really sent for help? He increasingly felt as if he were the victim of some elaborate practical joke. They were toying with him; they liked to know things that he did not. Pathetic.

But what to do? To do? To do?

The maelstrom of noise outside the house continued for so long, his exhaustion and fragility began to put him to sleep in spite of it.