FIFTY-EIGHT

They were coming for him again. All of them.

Outside his room, Fenris chattered, Surtr’s bare feet scuffed the dusty floor, Loki’s great boots boomed in all of the hollow places, and the tiny loud feet of the old woman led the strange procession of Blood Frenzy through the dark house.

Beside her proclamation outside the house that morning, Luke had not heard the old woman speak. But something had upset her now. For so mute a creature, she had certainly wanted to be heard downstairs in the confrontation preceding this noisy progress of his hosts towards his room.

She had admonished the youths, raised her aged voice and its peculiar singsong dialect to the dim rafters. He guessed, and he could not stop himself hoping, she was imploring them not to do something; like maybe kill him in what must be, he had come to believe, her home. But then he thought of her implacable little face and doubted his life was of any consequence to the diminutive creature. So, maybe she was in dispute with Loki about something else entirely. And whatever it was, it terrified Luke.

Her relationship to the youths was a curiosity. She was neither kin nor friend; but she may not have been in league with them either. During the confrontation he overheard downstairs, he was beginning to intuit, or even hope – though hope was a dangerous thing and he distrusted it greatly – that her role was that of a reluctant host, a compromised confederate at best. And maybe whatever Loki wanted to show Luke, and had threatened to share with him right now, their aged host was dead against him seeing it.

Since his attempt to escape that morning, his wrists, and now his ankles too, were bound with nylon zip-lock ties, so there would be no struggle this time. When he ran for the trees they took his final privilege of capacity from him.

The door of his room opened.

Luke kept his face blank, but watched the eyes of the old woman. She returned his stare. Her little mouth was tight, grim.

There were sheathed knifes at the waists of Loki and Fenris, but they came to him without the rifle. The plastic tie around his ankles was severed by Fenris so that he could walk.

He was pulled off the bed by his bound wrists and tugged from the room. Outside, they hauled him down the passageway to the right of his room, to lead him upwards and into the dark house, and not down and out of it.

At the end of the cramped passage, the old woman stood and blocked the bottom of a staircase that was so small and narrow, Luke imagined it had been built solely for the passage of children. In the amber light of the lamp that Loki carried, her embedded eyes glinted black with fury, and also with fear, like those of a mother afraid for her young.

Then the little old woman and her loud feet suddenly turned and clumped ahead of Loki, like she was suddenly eager to get up those stairs first. And now that she knew she could not stop the eager chattering mischief and insolent will of the youths, she seemed to move too swiftly for her years on those little loud feet. To Luke, the hidden haste of her limbs inside that old dress, its hem sweeping the stairs, and the sight of her little body topped by the tatty white head, scuttling upwards into shadow, was a vision as unwelcome and disconcerting as that of an unpleasant doll, suddenly come to life.

But up and into the smell of age Luke was pushed. Forced from behind by Fenris, he was squeezed into Loki’s ungainly wake through the narrow dark staircase, its confines as hot as an unclean mouth. The attic had its own breath that came down dusty and tangy with roof spaces where old air collected under warped timbers, and was further thickened with a taint of petrified flesh. Luke recognized a smell sharpened by the long-ago desiccation of small bodies, of birds and rodents; their ruin now a lingering residue. It was the same odour he had discovered in the loft of a flat full of dead rats he once rented in West Hampstead.

His heart jumped inside his chest when he caught the scent, and his eyes burned from his inability to blink as he was pushed closer to the top of the staircase. Something was living up there; he had heard it in the night. And the fact that it was living up there in that terrible reek of dried-out decay, made him absolutely certain that he did not want to see it.

Loki struggled before him, his progress slowed to a squeezing and scraping of his length against the ancient timbers and the wooden planks and dry plaster that buckled between the uprights. Amber light, from the swaying oil lantern in Loki’s hand, threw a warm glow downwards, between Loki’s legs, and for moments Luke was able to see his feet on the little stairs that were so worn down and scuffed at their middle.

The girl stayed downstairs; her plump face unsmiling with alarm, or even fright; the washed-out blue eyes were magnified with awe at what Luke was being pushed towards by her collaborators. Up here was something she had clearly seen before, but did not want to witness again.

But up he went, reluctant, stumbling; pushed by Fenris and pulled by Loki to the threshold of the black space.

Inside, there was no light beyond the halo of Loki’s lantern, which the giant suddenly shielded with one large hand. And then dimmed the flame inside the glass shade as though to protect sensitive eyes.

Not so much as a thin streak of murky daylight cut through a loose tile in the low roof above them. This was the peak of the house; the summit of all its mystery and horror. Walls and stairs and beams below in the old structure crookedly supported it, but also concealed what was up there; insulated it, preserved it and its continuing purpose. And Luke could now literally taste the impending revelation that he would rather be without. His terror was such that he could not even swallow. He tried and failed to rid his mind of the memories of what could still be found in these old places, out here among the oldest trees of Europe.

Loki and Fenris fell into a hushed reverence once they were inside the attic space.

A stinking hand curled around Luke’s face and covered his mouth from behind to make sure he also observed a respectful quiet. Fenris. The slender dirty hand remained there, tight across his lips. A bony shoulder and chest pushed against his back and shunted him further into the darkness. He peered down to see his naked feet, and at what they were scuffling across.

From somewhere to his left, amber light shone. Loki’s old oil lantern had been placed on the floor. Loki crouched beside it, his shoulder hunched against the slope of the roof. Briefly, he looked into Luke’s wild eyes and then turned his head, and raised the lantern to cast its meagre glow out there. So he could see. See it all.

The grubby light opened the space to Luke’s eyes, which he wanted to shut and keep shut: the lamp illuminated a long rectangular loft with sloping sides that ran the length of the upper storey of the building. The ceiling was low as it sloped down from beneath a central beam that Luke could barely stand upright beneath; the furthest edge of the attic space remained in shadow. But to his left and right he could see plenty.

The terrible monument in the forest, the church, was not good enough for them. For some reason these dead had to be brought home and displayed here.

Small, thin bodies stood against the two side walls, or sat with their ankles crossed, their bony knees gleaming smooth. Hairless heads were bowed. Mouths hung open, giving their parchment faces the vacancy of the sleeping.

They were little people and their clothes had either blackened and adhered to their meagre frames, or their raiment was bleached of all but the dimmest colours and was now loose and dusty about the insubstantial shapes inside.

Some of the figures were belted together with rags, to keep their arms held at their sides. But then over there, were crude wooden boxes full of bones, the skulls bulbous upon the dusty sticks of collapsed limbs. Other occupants of the reliquary were reduced to mere cairns of bone and dust and dross upon the wooden floor. And there were other figures cramped into little chests, their remains mostly whole, their skin dark and leathery, their hairless heads propped upon the carved wooden sides of the ancient caskets. Another mottled figure had been crudely sown into what looked like silver birch bark, in which it sat and grinned at eternity over the rim.

Further in, as Luke was pushed forward by insistent Fenris, the heads of another half a dozen of the interned upright figures were yellowish. Lipless grimaces seemed poised to speak. Papery eyes were sightless, but seemingly raised in the murk as if anticipating the return of light. Their raiment was dark, their flesh tight on the bones beneath the petrified cloth, but not hardened, not fossilized yet. The lustre of their skins suggested a suppleness that Luke would rather not have noted.

At the end of the attic, he could see the old woman, but her face was inscrutable. She stood in partial shadow beside two small and huddled figures, draped in some kind of dusty black vestment or robe. They sat upon small wooden chairs. Ancient chairs. Children’s chairs. Side by side, like a little king and queen interned in some airless tomb to honour their afterlife.

Luke recalled fragments of a recent dream. He thought of the sounds that came down to him through the ceiling in the night. The disintegration of even more of his sanity felt tangible. It slid with his reason into a rout of silent panic.

And then the whispering began. Behind him. Around him. Lilting up and down, up and down. No louder than the scratch of a rat’s claws, but the faintest of choirs from the driest of mouths was still determined to be heard. Impossible.

‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas,’ said Loki from the corner.

‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas,’ repeated Fenris into his ear.

Luke thought, or he imagined because nothing that old can live, that he then saw movement upon those little chairs.

He strained his eyes in the dim light. There it was again. A twitch of one dry head. The gentle elevation of a pointed chin. A rustle of old paper. A sigh.

Fenris pushed him closer on legs he could barely feel.

The grubby silhouettes of a gaunt and wasted ancestry watched him from both sides. Like leaves disturbed by a barely perceptible draught, he then detected other suggestions of movement about him. In order to subdue a scream, he told himself the ghastly animation was merely caused by the surge and retraction of amber light from the moving lantern. But he could not turn his head and confirm this desperate hope that the subtle restlessness of the parched and the mummified upright figures, was nothing more than a trick of light, or a gust of air rising through the ancient timbers of the house. And soon such conjectures ceased, because the seated figures on their little thrones suddenly commanded all of his attention.

A small mouth opened to reveal toothless gums, thin as cartilage. After a flicker, an eyelid parted in its deep socket. A faint glimmer of a black eye shone in the lamplight.

The hand of the second little figure dropped from its armrest and into its dry lap; the fingers clattered as if they were holding dice. The head of the figure dipped, then rose, suggesting the figure was emerging from, or trying to keep itself from, a deep sleep. One of its thin feet moved, the bony foot clad in a pointed shoe, the leather creased and blackened by centuries.

They lived.

‘These are the ancient ones,’ Loki muttered.

Momentarily Luke’s thoughts moved from rout to clarity. Their own dead and slowly dying were precious. The lives of strangers were meaningless; they were to be hunted and slaughtered like deer in the forest, then dumped in a rubbish-filled crypt of an abandoned church, while these brittle remains were stored here with reverence.

‘The past and the present are the same thing here,’ Loki whispered.

Fenris removed his hand from Luke’s mouth. Luke shuddered, and made a sound like he was stepping into cold water. And suddenly he grasped that the old woman of the woods was defined by this closeness to her dead. They existed continuously. She lived with the dead. Kept alive a bond with the dreadful things of another time. The church and cemetery was a place of sacrifice, while the old servants of an old religion reposed here. It was despicable.

Luke groaned again as the impossible registered as reality. There was more shock than awe. As the air left his lungs, it sounded as if his life was leaving him too.

Such a reaction of despair seemed provocative in this place. He caught a suggestion of a dry mouth within a dry head, that had been pressed to the wall at his left, but was now gaping, or gulping towards, his presence. And then the body below the head, and the other two bodies flanking it, twitched ever so gently in their moorings, as if keen to be much closer to him in the musty darkness.

Luke dropped his eyes to the floor, to evade the signs of their restlessness. But in the thin brownish light he saw that the legs of the upright figures resting against the walls ended in bone. In hooves. And that their murky lower limbs bent the wrong way at the knee. It was as if animal limbs had been stitched into their groins. Luke thought of the thin forelegs of another thing they had discovered in another blasphemous attic, and of the tiny black mummified hands fixed upon its bony wrists.

He whimpered. He mewled.

Luke pushed backwards against Fenris’s pressing shoulder; he felt like he was being manoeuvred too close to the edge of a cliff, or within reach of a dangerous and cornered animal. Fenris dug his heels in, tried again to move Luke closer.

‘Nay,’ said the old woman.

‘Nay, nay,’ said Loki.

But Fenris would not be told and he pushed harder until Luke nearly toppled forward and fell. He thrust out one leg to keep his footing. His face skimmed closer to the seated figures on the little chairs.

Before him, a gasp. A sudden intake of breath inside a bone-dry chest. An audible creak, as the jaw widened in a little mottled face.

The second figure’s head seemed to shake in a slight palsy, as if it were confused. Then an eye opened in what was mostly a skull papered with brown skin. The eye was bluish at its centre, milky at the edges. And wet.

Luke sucked in his breath.

The figure’s mouth dropped open. A hint of tongue whisked inside; no bigger than the flick of a small fish’s tail.

Both figures shifted on their chairs. More animate, their tiny movements progressed from vibrations to a sudden confused animation. He heard the scrape of old cloth, the click of bone in socket. They were afraid. Or was it excitement that made them move like that upon those small wooden chairs?

And then the old woman was standing before the two little seated figures; shielding them, and pushing Luke and Fenris backwards with her small hard brownish hands. Her black eyes were fixed on Fenris’s face, over Luke’s shoulder, and her eyes were filled with so much loathing it was hard to look too long into them.

One of her small arms then withdrew from Luke’s belly that she pushed at; and suddenly that little hand moved behind her grubby apron, before returning with something extending from her tiny hand. Something thin and sharp and glinting within the tiny liver-spotted fist. Luke looked down and focused on the blackened steel of an old blade, an inch from his naked gut: narrow as a pencil, a museum piece, a relic whipped from a still life painted by a Dutch master. It prodded at him again.

There was commotion of heavy boots from somewhere behind him in the attic. And Loki’s voice was suddenly loud all about them. Fenris began wheedling with Loki in Norwegian. Then he talked quickly and angrily at the elderly woman, who in turn bared her blackish gums and dark teeth and growled at Fenris like a small bear.

Luke was suddenly pulled away, backwards, to the entrance, his feet kicking and scuffling for balance on the old dusty floorboards. The lantern light leapt and retracted from behind him; it surged up and dropped down the underside of the ancient roof. And the amber light gave the impression that a row of the thin figures against the right wall, were all leaning forward at the same time as if eager for him to remain in there with them.

Then Luke was spun around above the opening to the attic staircase, and pushed at it by Loki; one huge hand cupping the back of his head. But Luke needed little encouragement and leapt down the stairs, skittering, stumbling, missing his footing, and crashing to his knees at the bottom.

He was talking, quickly, to himself; had not realized he was doing so.

Surtr stood before him, looking as frightened as he felt.

He tried to get up, but in his jittery panic fell forward onto his face. His forehead hit the floor, caught the tip of his swollen nose. Tiny broken bones moved within the inflamed tissue. His eyes turned over, white, and his stomach flopped inside out. He bleached into a faint for a few seconds, banged his mouth against wood, then woke and clasped his face with the imploring fingers of his bound and useless hands.

In the distance, up above him, there was shouting: Loki and Fenris. And another sound. One far more disconcerting. A deep, throaty growling that evolved into bleating. It didn’t sound like a person. Didn’t sound like it had come out of a human mouth at all. And it was then combined with a stream of words twisted enough in their anguish to inform the listener that hysteria was building within the speaker. It must have been the voice of the old woman.