SIXTY

She prepared him with her small gentle hands. Luke watched those doll fingers cut the soiled disgrace of his underwear from his waist and legs, to reveal the tidemark of grime that rose to his hips. She cooed to him to reassure him when he flinched as the steel of the big old scissors was close to his genitals. The pads of her fingers were coarse and leathery, same as her face, but her touch was soft when she bathed his face and his swollen nose, and when she patted his crusting scalp.

She fed him with care and with precision, tucking the warm brown stew inside his swollen lips with the old wooden spoon. Then she held the back of his head, and let him gobble and snuffle at the stewed beets she held out to him. All about the cuts on his face and scalp, she dabbed a black mixture that smelled of rain and moss.

Her eyes were little obsidian flints set so deeply in that impossibly wrinkled hide of a face, and they were smiling all the time she worked about his body, trussed upon that reeking bed. But there was warmth inside her eyes too. It was genuine, he felt. But perhaps no more lasting than the affection shown to a favourite hen, or lamb, or piglet. He mattered as much as livestock. He was important, he was valued, but only for the sustenance of other older appetites.

Good times, old times she remembered. She was washing a corpse. Perhaps her own family had once been bathed and dressed too, but in readiness for the eternity of that loft, by other old women with gentle hands. She lived with the dead. Perhaps she had learned this ritual from those still-twitching ancestors upstairs, made from parchment and dust. And maybe she had prepared other poor wretches too, for that mighty and unnatural presence that governed these black woods. To be given. Given.

He began to breathe too quickly. Into his mind came the other attic he had seen out here, and with it the memory of a black face, long, and wet about the great pink bullock nostrils; he thought of worn but strong horns the length of swords. How long did it keep you alive out there in the wet darkness? ‘Jesus. Jesus, Christ. Please.’ He said, and tried to sit up.

She came closer, held him, gently touched his forehead, like he was a child having a nightmare.

He swallowed the panic. He welcomed her arms, and her quiet words that he could not understand. Her little body was so hard under that dusty black dress that stretched up to her wizened throat. But he welcomed her bosom and he sobbed into it.

The bones of men and beasts, the skeletons of forsaken homes, the forgotten places of worship, now bound them each to the other. He had come here living and warm but now must become of it. There was no other place for him in this world. Not any more.

Close to the upright stones, whose meanings and messages were mostly lost, and in the very soil of this lightless place, something was pursuing a purpose older than any living memory. He had sensed it, had tried to run from it, but was now overcome by it. The very idea of it caught the breath in his throat and slowed the blood cold in his veins.

‘Oh God. Oh God.’

She smiled; she seemed to know and to acknowledge this great epiphany he was experiencing, that wracked his dismal little body and his frail mind upon that wretched bed of old skins and soiled hay.

The terrible will of this place demanded the renewal of old rites. Such things still existed up here. Here. Called by the oldest names, they came back to life. Tonight, for him. His life in the distant world, and even the distant world, meant nothing here. Nothing at all. This is how things were for him now.

A quiet voice came into his head and told him that thinking of what had been taken away from him would only make things worse.

This was a true wilderness and people went missing in it all the time. They died to celebrate what long lay hidden here, in its eternal retreat. It had come to the surface of the world early this year; broken its ancient slumber for the monotony of ritual and blood. They had woken it. It had slaughtered his friends, and enjoyed the hunt, the wild ride, but now it just wanted a gift; the provision of something wriggling, tied down. As it had once been surfeited by that ramshackle community above his head, it wanted to be remembered, and honoured. As all Gods do.

Luke gasped at the air. The panic covered him in a cold sweat. He shivered. The old woman cooed, she hugged him close, her little lamb.

‘It’s a secret,’ he whispered to her.

She smiled. He smiled at her, his eyes begging; even this greasy old pillow over his face would be a mercy compared to what would soon come to him from out of those prehistoric trees. ‘Please. End it.’

The old woman kept things going; she was part of a long line. She was in place, always; for the things that must be given, and taken away out there, into the eternal forest, into the darkness.

‘God no. God no.’

He thought of all those brown bones in the crypt of that broken church: there was no escape. There were no deals to be made. And the very sense of the age of the place, and its size and its indifference to him, nearly extinguished him right there and then in that little bed. He wished it would, rather than making him just comprehend it.

‘Please. I want to die now.’

It was like the rare flora and fauna, exempt from scrutiny and trespass, and nurtured by only those who understood.

‘They don’t care about you. They are using you.’ He looked into her tiny black eyes. ‘They’ll destroy you too. You know it, don’t you?’

Blood Frenzy were vandals; impatient, delinquent, angry. Misfits wanting to spit into the face of God, government, society, decency, and anything else that excluded them, or simply bored them. They were as unwelcome here as he was. The old woman was not afraid of them. She was merely tolerating them; he was sure of it. He entertained a lunatic hope that he and the old woman together could help the youths find their natural self-destructive conclusion. ‘Let’s get rid of them. You and me. I swear. I promise. I will not tell a soul about you … and your family.’ He looked at her, then looked up at the ceiling.

She shushed him, she stroked his clammy forehead.

No matter the senseless age of what clung on, up here in the boreal wilderness, lit only by moon and sun and seen by so few, the last thing their startled eyes ever saw, Luke whispered to her that it would not begin the end of days that Loki craved. If they must see it as a God, then it was not a God with that kind of weight. He told her that his death was pointless.

But then maybe his life was anyway; it seemed oddly fitting that a damaged teenager’s gruesome fantasy world should be the end of his floundering in this life.

And then he was staring at the ceiling and all of him felt as though it were rising from his very body. And in his awe and steadily growing comprehension at what existed out here, at this miraculous and dreadful thing, he suspected it was not long for this world either. What was extraordinary was how it had survived for so long. But its rule was over; it was endangered. An isolated God; all but forgotten and long demented. Branded a false God by the sign of the cross, its idolatry rotted in forgotten attics now, and about it false prophets and ragged messiahs gathered.

Eventually, and as the light dimmed, the waves of fear-induced madness exhausted themselves inside Luke, and slowly subsided from his tormented mind. He felt almost at peace. Not long now.

The old woman climbed off the bed. Her little feet knocked loudly against the old floor. She picked up what he thought had been a towel that she had laid upon the side table with the tray. But it was a smock. An old white gown, embroidered intricately with silvery thread around the high neckline; though stained horribly from the waistline to the hem. It had been laundered many times. Was washed out. But there were some stains that could not be removed, like where the aged fabric was black and stiff with old blood. She laid it with reverence across the foot of the bed.

Hearts torn out for the sun God in Mexico. Wretches ritually strangled and buried with their masters in ancient Britain. Simple people accused of witchcraft, pressed under stones and set alight in pyres of dry kindling. Commuters gassed in the Tokyo subway. Passengers flown through the side of buildings in jets full of fuel. If only we could all stand up. All of us who have died unjustly for the Gods of the insane. There would be so many of us.

Next, with a little sigh of love, from the bedside table she raised a garland of dry flowers that he was to wear like a crown when he died.

What had once been given, would soon be given again. One was coming to fetch it.

Outside his window, Fenris and Loki shouted to each other; their voices were tight, as if they were straining their bodies with some mighty exertion. And then the music started again and he could not hear the sound of their voices any more.

The old woman collected the gown and the crown of dead flowers. She leaned over him and, inexplicably, raised one gnarled and crooked finger to her lips, to bid him be silent even though he already was.

SIXTY-ONE

When she was gone, taking with her the tray and the plate and jug, the gown and the crown, Luke swung his legs over the side of the bed. Planted his bare feet on the floor, stood up, keeping his calves tight against the frame of the bed until he could establish whether it was possible to balance while moving with his ankles bound together.

It wasn’t. When he tried to hop, he crashed to the floor, onto his shoulder. He spat and cursed into the wooden floorboards. Then waited for the sweats to stop and for the footsteps to bang up those old stairs and to rush to his room.

No one came. He wriggled his toes. They weren’t coming off just yet. He grinned into the dust.

On his side, entirely naked, he shuffled across to the window. Then raised himself, by pushing the back of his shoulders up and against the wall. Eventually upright, and dirtied again, he turned himself about and peered out of the window.

Blood Frenzy had been busy. Another great pyre had been assembled about twenty feet from the treeline, and positioned much further away from the house than before. Surtr shoved smaller branches of kindling into the base of the structure. The red plastic can of fuel stood at her feet. And a hole had been dug a short distance from the pyre. Foundations, for the large cross that had been roughly cobbled together from two thick planks of aged wood.

Fenris and Loki began positioning the top of the cross inside this hole that had been cut into the turf. They were inserting the crucifix upside down.

Fenris called out to Surtr, who smiled back at him with her hideously painted face. She had added more blood around the nose and mouth than usual. She was also naked again, and her long black hair was lank about her creamy shoulders. She picked up a little silver digital camera from the grass and came across to take photos of Loki and Fenris, as they posed beside the inverted crucifix. It was all still a bit of a game to them. A lack of solemnity at his demise made Luke suddenly and briefly and absurdly angry.

And then he felt so weakened by the sight of that forlorn black cross, standing at a slight tilt under the low dark sky, that he sank to the floor and began to rock himself from side to side.