SIXTY-FIVE

The door to his room was unlocked. When he opened it, he expected someone with a painted face to suddenly come through it, grinning; or, at the very least, to be outside waiting for him in the shadows. But there was no one in the corridor.

He went out and into the dark house on careful feet. Pulled the door closed behind him, but paused when the old hinges began to groan. He left it ajar.

Listened as he had never listened before. Somewhere, something was dripping: a monotonous sound, ambient. There was a far-off creak in the roof, then a wooden floorboard moaned under his dirty feet. The old house was always shifting; the old spine trying to support the weight of its years.

At one end of the thin passage was the little door to the attic; to his left, at the other end, was the staircase they had been dragging him up and down for two days now. One other wooden door stood between him and the staircase leading to the ground floor. He remembered the pattern of footsteps at night: someone would be sleeping in that room, two of them.

Keeping his feet at the sides of the warped floor and his head low, he walked towards the top of the staircase. It was like moving below deck on an old ship. He was careful, but the floor creaked. Once, under the oil lantern, he nearly lost his balance.

Across from the bedroom door, he paused and listened so intensely it was like he was sending his consciousness inside that room to pad and paw about like a blind man.

Silence. Stillness.

At the top of the stairs he allowed himself to swallow, and to breathe again. His head began to hurt; a dull ache pushed behind his eyes.

Down he went, his skin goosing, like he was stepping into cold seawater. And the further he moved from his room, the more he fought the urge to speed up, to just flee. Inexplicably, his ankles hurt and quivered the tendons and muscles in his lower legs, threatening to pitch him over. He clenched his teeth. Why was his body trying to betray him?

Bottom of the staircase. Eyes and ears everywhere, seeking them out.

The old woman with the loud feet wouldn’t let him run. She wanted a job done. And if he went straight for the trees, where would he then go? It would come; she could call it.

The truck. Keys. The truck.

Had she wanted him to get away, there would have been car keys along with the knife in his little bed that morning. But he could not just go into a bedroom and stab a sleeping body; the thought made him feel sick and faint. He leant against the wall of the little hall. Peered at the plain wood, either blemished with wood smoke or just blackened with a terrible age.

On the balls of his feet he slipped around another dusty oil lantern and passed into the parlour, into another era. There were walls of dark wood, cloudy with ancient mould and damp near the bulgy ceiling. A gassy yellowish light came in through two small grimy windows facing the paddock. He smelled wet wood, dead smoke lingering.

Most of the walls were obscured by the dusty artefacts. Horse shoes. Animal bones. Another charnel house. Bones and remains from the forest. Skulls of martens or squirrels, antlers from red deer, the dinosaur face of a bear skull, the nightmare grimace of an elk; all sightless, desiccated.

The furniture was homemade, simple. Hunting materials lined the shelves in the heavy cabinet. The blackened head of a broad axe. A shield boss. Points of spears, arrow heads, knife blades. Other things of corroded iron that could have been hooks, or blades. He saw an oval brooch decorated with a leaping animal. And the sudden colour of glass beads; blue glass patterned with an undulating mosaic of red, white, yellow in a little brass dish. A rubble of round flat stones, worn like flints, maybe whetstones. Other implements, their purpose a mystery to him, all made from bone or stone and so old and bleached they resembled driftwood on a sea shore. His eyes scoured the floor, the walls, and the little table for the rifle.

Under his feet worn and mouldering pelts of deer covered dirty straw scattered about the dusty floorboards; the tattered remnants of the pelts were an unwelcome reminder of the trees and what hung from them.

Nothing of any use to him in the parlour; no clothes, no rifle. He turned on his heel, stepped across the hallway. Suddenly afraid of the darkness at the top of the staircase, he looked to his left as he crossed the passage. And came into the kitchen quickly.

And then there was Fenris. Inside the kitchen with him. A room bigger than Luke thought it could be. Long: the floor hard and cold with uneven tiles of slate. And upon the dark table Fenris lay inside a red sleeping bag, within the plain boards of a box bed. Beside the wooden box was a long wooden sheet, or lid; the tabletop for when the furniture wasn’t being used as a bed. The pointy smeared face of Fenris peeked out of the covers; the blue eyes were wide open.

They looked down, took in the knife in Luke’s hand, flicked back up to his face. Stared at him, almost doleful, in anticipation. Of what?

Fenris’s studded boots stood empty, beside a wooden bench, along one side of the big box bed. Luke looked about the room again quickly: an iron range with black chimney, a dark-brown cabinet, some pots and wooden plates, a back door. And a tiny crib, hand carved, in which the old woman sat; in her dusty black dress beside the hearth, like a cat. She stared at him too, waiting. What did they want from him, these people?

And then he saw it; the rifle leaning against the wall beside the door he had come through. And Fenris saw him see it. The world then became a blur with a judder going through it as time passed too quickly.

Fenris swung his legs, then his whole body off the table, and stood up still inside his sleeping bag; it dropped in a scarlet ruffle about his knees. ‘Good morning, Luke. Maybe you go back to London now, eh? Wearing your faggot dress. It look good on you.’

He slept in leather jeans and a T-shirt that advertised Bathory. In his hand was the sheath knife. It came into that slender feminine hand and the room and Luke’s life so quickly he knew in a heartbeat that the youth could use it. Had used it. Relied upon it and slept with it like a lover.

Luke’s heart dropped like a stone into a stomach that shimmered, then vanished. Only this far; only to get this far and they were there again, in his way.

He ran at Fenris, his own knife at his side. Then hesitated, one step away from Fenris, for a time shorter than a wristwatch could measure. He asked himself how it was done, the entering of a sharp point into a living human being. Even after all he had been through, it was simply not in him. But he had paused in that room long enough for Fenris to grin and thrust up a skinny white arm.

Luke flinched. Jerked to the side. Then his breath seized up inside him when he felt the opening of himself like wet pastry across his hip bone. A long sting followed the parting of his flesh under the gown. There was a hot flash down one thigh, and when he looked he was all red and drippy to the knee. He gouted, he gushed.

Fenris grinned, swivelled the knife about in his hand so it daggered down from his fist. Luke looked into the boy’s hard blue eyes and felt too angry to breathe. He had not wanted this and because of his decency he would have to die in a dirty kitchen. ‘Cunt,’ he said, and spit came out of his mouth. It made Fenris blink. Then the boy’s skinny tattooed arm was up in the air and coming down at him fast.

Luke walked under his elbow. Caught the girlish wrist in one hand, like he’d plucked a cricket ball whizzing through the air at second slip, and he had the ball in his hand before anyone had seen the actual catch. He punched his other hand up and into the skinny boy, blade out. His fist came to a stop as his thumb and knuckle indented the boy’s flat stomach, and then he stepped away.

Fenris gasped. Looked down himself in surprise. Then screwed up his smeared face like he was going to cry, like he was so disappointed who something was over, or that he had been cheated.

Luke went for the gun. Around him all he could hear was Fenris’s cries and his own breath, which was loud and hot and wet all over his own face. He was dizzy at the sight of the blood. It was all over his own leg, and coming out slippery between Fenris’s long scarlet fingers where he clutched them at his soggy side.

The gun was heavy. Ungainly. Luke heaved it up and into his arms and nearly dropped it. His hands were shaking too much to hold it steady, or to get his finger inside the trigger guard.

Fenris howled. His face was fury and grief and panic now. The old woman looked on from her little wooden box, impassive, as if strangely bored with their behaviour.

Fenris stepped out of the sleeping bag and came at him. Luke forced a jittery finger inside the trigger guard. Put the end of the barrel in Fenris’s direction.

Fenris did not stop.

Luke pulled the trigger. The trigger was unmovable. He tried to turn the rifle around to use the butt to strike Fenris, but the long barrel struck the wall behind his head. His own clumsiness and lack of coordination infuriated him; his arms felt like they were full of warm water.

He quickly swept the rifle to the side and parried Fenris’s bony hand that came slashing at him with his hunting knife still gripped in it. The point of the knife whisked a slot across Luke’s bicep, then cut his chest above the nipple. It felt deep; seemed to wake him up. He kicked the heel of his right foot into Fenris’s side, where it was wet.

The kid fell back, holding himself around the middle with both wet red hands. Luke ran sideways to the cabinets beside the window, to make room for himself, to get some air so that he could breathe. He looked down at the rifle; he had once fired a.22 rifle in the sea cadets; it had been a bolt action. He slid the bolt back and forth, hoping he was chambering a round. Pointed it at Fenris again, pulled the trigger. No movement from the trigger. ‘Shit.’

He leaned the rifle against the wall. It immediately slid down the patchy plaster and clattered noisily against the floor.

Fenris was now leaning on the plain wooden box that he had been sleeping inside. He had dropped his knife so he could hold his wet side with both hands. He was crying now. Looking at the ceiling, he called out for Loki twice. Then moaned in anguish and horror at the sight of his own blood coming over his hands and around the handle of the Swiss Army knife that was still stuck inside him; the knife Luke had just kicked deeper.

Upstairs: footsteps. Loud, skittering, scuffing, hurried: coming through the ceiling.

Luke went to Fenris. Picked up the sheath knife from before the youth’s skinny bare feet.

‘Please Luke,’ Fenris said.

Luke smashed it into the boy’s throat. All the way through, until the finger guard of the handle stopped against the lump of his Adam’s apple.

Luke stepped away, panting. ‘I’m sorry. Shit. Shit.’ He wanted this to stop now.

The old woman spoke in Swedish. She nodded her little white head in approval and her eyes smiled at him, over Fenris’s shoulder.

There was a terrible wet choking sound coming from Fenris, and he could not keep still. He staggered about the kitchen, dripping, then tottered out of the room, as if there were someone who could help him outside.

Heavy boots banged through a tight corridor upstairs, then boomed on to the stairs. Loki.

Fenris turned left in the dim hallway and ran for the front door like he was sick and wanted air.

Luke picked up the rifle, stared at it. Saw the little steel lever above the trigger guard. Put the end of the barrel against the floor, reached down with a hand and slipped the steel lever away from the SAFETY position.

Big boots boomed against the bottom two steps of the staircase and then came banging down the cramped hall on the ground floor. Loki was trying to be calm, but was worried; Luke could hear it in his voice, as he called out in Norwegian to Fenris; who he must have been able to see out on the porch or in the grass paddock. Luke shouldered the weapon and pointed the barrel into the middle of the doorframe. The rifle was so heavy, so long; it was hard to keep it aloft and steady. It made his arms feel frail.

But as soon as he had the rifle’s sights aimed at the doorway, Loki ducked into the kitchen, stooping at the waist so his head would miss the top of the frame. He did not see Luke until it was too late. Their eyes locked for a moment. Loki’s were puffy with sleep, running with mascara, and twitchy with shock. Just as he frowned in confusion, Luke shot him.

The rifle bucked; not too hard. But the sound deafened him. It seemed to crack the slate floor, smash all the windows and roar like a jet too low to the earth. Loki disappeared from the door. Luke’s ears whistled. The old lady cried out, afraid. Her little rough hands clouted her own ears. All was jittery around Luke; the world leapt in and out and nothing made sense in the ringing of his ears, in the impact of sending that bullet through a man.

Luke punched the bolt up, forward, back, and down. A brass shell dropped and bounced on to the slate stones; some smoke drifted from the end of the shell case. He was getting better. Not so clumsy. He could smell fireworks.

Loki was on all fours in the grubby hallway. Head down, hair covering his gasping face, his great back shuddering. Strangely, he too crawled at the front door which was wide open now.

Luke slipped on the floor. Looked down. His foot was wet with his own blood. He had slipped in the blood that was running down his leg from his hip. There was very little pain in his hip, but the sight of the blood made his vision go white. He stopped to be sick in the hallway, but nothing came out beside some phlegm. Mostly, it was just a big gassy burp. He looked over his shoulder at the stairs. But Surtr was not coming down yet. Up there it was silent.

Loki had reached the doorway and rolled onto his back, half on the porch, half in the hallway. They looked into each other’s eyes. They were both panting, exhausted, and unable to speak for a while. He had not realized the barrel of the gun had been directed so low when he shot Loki, but he had gunned him somewhere through the pelvis, where Loki’s big hands were now pressing into a dark wetness.

‘Luke. Stop!’ he commanded in his deep voice. Even covered in cracked white face-paint, Loki had never looked so pale.

Luke shook his head. Swallowed, but could not find his voice.

‘Luke, no. I ask this of you.’

Then words rushed out of him. ‘Where are the keys to the truck?’

Loki stayed quiet, but winced, screwed up his eyes against the pain.

‘Keys, Loki?’ He looked over his shoulder. Still no Surtr.

‘Upstairs. In my jacket.’

‘Where your fat bitch is? Nice try.’

Loki looked at him again; he was terrified, he had been telling Luke the truth about the whereabouts of the keys. Luke stared at the long figure down there, shivering in agony. The man couldn’t have been older than twenty. Loki started to cry. Luke could not look him in the eye for long. He started to cry too; couldn’t help himself. He felt a terrible grinding remorse for what he had just done to Fenris and Loki; he was about to shut down at any moment.

Luke stopped crying. Was suddenly angry with himself. Swallowed hard. ‘My friends wanted to live, Loki. To see their children.’ He cleared his throat; spat phlegm onto the floor. ‘Mercy is a privilege out here. Not a right. You made it that way. You can die by your own rules.’ Luke cleared his throat again and said, ‘Fuck it.’ He aimed the end of the rifle barrel at Loki’s big face. ‘Consequences, Loki.’

‘No, Luke,’ Loki said in a voice that was not so deep now. He raised a big hand and stretched it towards Luke, palm first. The palm was bright red and wet.

Luke shot him through his fingers. Banged Loki’s big head down against the wooden deck of the porch. Behind his head was an instant wide swirl of murky liquid peppered with hard bits that Luke could not bring himself to look into. The sound of it coming out of Loki’s head was the worst thing he had ever heard.

Luke punched the bolt up, forward, back, and down. Stepped over Loki, who still twitched and shivered down the length of his legs. Luke was not worried about him getting up again.

Luke sniffed; there was mucus all over his mouth and chin. With one forearm he wiped at his eyes, then at his mouth.

Fenris was lying on his side, still moving, about twenty feet from the house. Pulling himself along the ground with one arm, towards the trees. Just to get away. Luke followed him. There was a lot of blood in the grass.

Then Luke paused and turned around to look up at the windows of the house. The whitish balloon of Surtr’s face peered down at him from the little window of the room where they had kept him captive. Her face was full of shock. They stared at each other and then she retreated away from the glass.

‘Hey,’ he said to Fenris. ‘Hey.’

Fenris looked up at him, his eyes bulged from his smeared face. A horrible speckling of blood dotted his chin and the forearm beneath the hand that clutched at the handle of the hunting knife moving up and down in his throat.

Luke looked away, at the trees. He felt dizzy and sick and he just wanted to sit down on the grass, but could not bring himself to get any closer to the sounds Fenris was making.

‘I could get the truck running. Put you in the back. Drive like a bastard to … Where, I don’t fucking know, but that road must go somewhere, Fenris.’

Fenris propped himself up on one elbow. He gasped, he choked, his throat produced a horrible aerosol of blood, a mist as he pulled air in and out of himself from mouth, nose and throat.

Luke looked back at the house, wondering if there was a second gun. Nothing moved in the old black building, but Surtr would have to come down soon. From where he stood in the paddock, he could see through the open front door, and along the hallway to the far rear wall of the building. But still, nothing moved.

He looked down at Fenris again. He wanted, he needed, to speak. To make some sense of this to himself. It was like he was just doing things without thinking any of it through. He was operating on instinct now. But where did these instincts come from?

‘It’s too late for all that,’ Luke said, surprising himself with his own voice that possessed an inappropriate strength. ‘I don’t think the world has enough time left for all that, Fenris. It’s too late to understand, you know. Everything has just gone too far. You can’t persuade any more, or re-educate. You think this, I think that.’

Fenris might not have been listening; he clawed towards Luke’s leg.

‘You kidnap, you murder. Can you expect any mercy? There are consequences. I told Loki the same thing. You never thought about them. Did you? Even if you were caught, you would still expect special treatment. That’s what gets me the most. And you would get it. Fuck that shit, Fenris. Just fuck it.’

Fenris gobbled with his mouth at the air; he reached for Luke’s leg again and convulsed. Luke shot him through his right eye from close range.

Luke turned and walked back to the house, paused on the porch. Stood beside Loki, to the left of the doorframe, and peered into the brownish hallway. Loki had stopped moving now, but was leaking all over the uneven planking. Luke regretted not asking Loki or Fenris where they had put his tobacco. He was light in the head, soul-buoyant. Wanted this finished, quick now.

‘Surtr!’

No sound from upstairs in the dark house.

What to do. What to do. What to do.

Bullets. How many? There was a magazine before the trigger guard. But he wasn’t sure how to detach it to check the ammunition, and if he did, he worried he would not be able to get the magazine back inside the rifle. These things were never simple. He would need a knife, a backup.

‘Surtr! Loki’s gone. Your friends. Gone. You hear me?’

Silence.

He hiked up the dress and looked at his hip; it was open like a mouth with no lips, and had soaked the hem of the dress with blood; new blood on old blood. He couldn’t bear to look into it. The knife had gone down to muscle on his chest too, and peering below the neckline of the gown and seeing the wound so close made him faint and cold and nauseous. He bent double and dared to close his eyes. Breathed deep. Then straightened, stepped over Loki, and went back inside the kitchen.

He looked at the old woman; she looked at him. She had not moved from her little cradle beside the stove. And seemed expectant, dissatisfied with him; he had work to do, was not finished. But how? he wanted to ask her, though she spoke no English and could not answer him. He did not want to walk up that narrow staircase and go into the tiny rooms with their low ceilings; it was no place for a man with no blood left inside him and a rifle in his shaky white fingers. The girl could be up there waiting, moon-faced in the dark, with a knife in her pudgy little fist. Bitch.

And what was he to do with these wounds. He was about to point at his hip and show the old woman the new mouth, when she looked at the wall. The wall opposite the stove. And nodded her shrunken leathery head. Luke frowned. She nodded again, raised her top lip to flash her discoloured teeth in a little snarl.

Luke looked at the wall, and the moment he did he heard the door give a tiny moan from across the hallway. He shouldered the rifle. Surtr had come down the stairs silently on her flat round feet and was waiting inside the parlour. And she would have seen Loki too.

He swallowed. And moved slowly back to the entrance of the kitchen. Hesitated. Wondered if he should go into the parlour. Sutr could be just inside the doorway. Yes, the door had moved. He was sure he had not left it like that, pushed halfway back to the frame. Or maybe it had swung back of its own accord and she was still upstairs, hiding, waiting.

Holding his breath, he crouched and moved sideways down the hallway to the front door, stepped over Loki and sank himself down to the grass. Then stood up straight and peered at the little grimy windows of the parlour from the outside. Too dim.

Moving closer to the old brown glass, he placed one foot on the sagging deck of the porch and Surtr came into focus so quickly he sucked in his breath and nearly yanked at the trigger.

Bent forward, she faced the floor of the parlour, which is why she could not see him at the window. She wore jeans and a black T-shirt. She was listening intently, pressed against the inside of the old parlour door; clinging and ready to swing around and into him had he walked back inside the room. Or she was poised to smash the door closed on the rifle as he went inside. Or maybe she would creep out and take him by surprise from behind as he passed that room to search for her. Clever. She wanted him. Always had done. No woman had desired him so much – desired him dead.

He boiled, sweated cold over his face. Gritted his teeth until they hurt and he raised the rifle at the window.

Fired.

In went the entire glass pane and up and onto her toes went Surtr, like she’d been electrocuted. For a split second she was all shaky black hair and big white eyes. Something smashed inside. She cried out.

Was she hit?

Up, forward, back, down with the bolt in the breech. When Luke looked up she had gone from the parlour, the door closed behind her.

Luke hobbled sideways across the paddock and looked down and into the hallway of the house from outside. Heard the bump bump bump of her feet, somewhere inside, in the dark, out of sight. But she could not have reached the stairs, so she must have run inside the kitchen. Luke continued to walk sideways, outside, across the face of the house, with the rifle raised. He’d shoot the bitch through the glass of the kitchen windows. An eagerness, verging on excitement, made him tingle all over and sweat heavy.

There she was, going out the tiny back door of the kitchen; he saw her through the dirty windows as he squinted along the gun barrel.

Luke ran, ungainly, sloppily, with his breath hoarse and infuriating in his ears, down the side of the house, the rifle raised. He was desperate to fire it again. But he made sure to come round the corner of the house carefully, and into the rear paddock before the orchard, looking everywhere and ready to go.

No one on the grass.

Movement out there: in the orchard, on the other side of the truck. Off she went, fast for a big girl, between the trees planted along the side of the rutted track.

The rifle sights swam, then moved before his eyes. His hands were overeager, shaky. He blinked sweat out of his eyes. Refocused. Had her sighted. Then she was gone from the sights again, changing her direction, dodging, her big thighs pumping.

When he finally had her shape in front of the rifle sights, as she moved between two black-limbed trees, he fired.

Too high. Or had he hit her? She had vanished.

Cordite seared his face, his eyes, throat and nose. His ears rang out their resistance like a drill.

But no, he had not hit her, because there she was, still on her feet and running across the track at the side of the orchard. By the time he had the rifle cocked again, she was gone, into the trees where the forest began, on the other side of the track.

Disappointed, he looked at the white truck. Went to it. Through the passenger window, he saw sweet wrappers in the foot wells, a discarded book of maps written in Swedish. A right-hand drive. Opened the door. The smell of rubber, oil, wet metal, old cigarette smoke hit him. Scents of the old world; the world this vehicle could take him back to. It was filthy inside. Dirt was compacted into the mats and the seats; the floor of the cabin was bare metal. The rubber pads were gone from the pedals; upholstery was split on the long bench seat. A bright turquoise fishing lure hung from the rear-view mirror. In the flatbed an open bag of tools, empty red plastic fuel containers, a dozen crushed beer cans. It was not their vehicle. It had brought them here, but they had taken it from someone, somewhere else.

Luke put the gun down. Then leant inside the truck cabin and touched the steering column, put his finger tips on to the slot for the ignition key, hoping. Empty.

Keys, keys, fucking keys.

He decided there and then to just get the hell out, and fast. He turned and walked gingerly back towards the house, one hand clamped upon the movements of the new mouth in his hip.

Stopped. Turned around and went back for the gun that he had left on the grass. ‘Fuck.’ He wasn’t thinking straight. Was dizzy with hunger and burning with thirst; faint from the excitement that kept draining out of him, before being suddenly invigorated back through him from his exhausted glands, over and over and over again. His thighs felt so heavy. Shadows flickered at the sides of his vision. He spat, carried on.

The old woman was gone when he arrived back inside the kitchen. He called out. ‘Hello. Hello.’ But no one answered or came.

There were no taps, no sink; the house had never been plumbed. But he found six one-litre water bottles that had been reused to bring water to the house from the well he still had not seen. He uncapped one bottle; belted the warmish water inside him until a crippling stitch made him stop, bend over and gasp.

There was a pantry. Dark and brown and cool inside. A chunk of black bread he snapped from the hard loaf and crammed it to his mouth. Sucked it more than chewed it. Coarse against his tongue, it tasted of blood. There was a salted joint of meat in there; two sacks of beets; jars full of pickles and preserves lined four long shelves; dusty cooking apples; salt. Turnips, carrots, ancient coffee. But nothing to go. Blood Frenzy must have arrived empty-handed; these were her meagre provisions. They’d come to the end of the earth for this. Later, he could eat later. When he was gone.

Keys, keys, fucking keys.

He went up the stairs slowly, backwards, trying to keep the chewing mouth in his hip closed. He needed to wash it, bind it. At the top of the staircase, he turned himself around. Sent the barrel of the gun into the murk first and followed it with his body. He wondered if Surtr could have come back inside the house and crept up here. He dismissed the idea, but felt tense and brittle, like he would shatter at the first sound of her still being around.

Down the corridor. A peek into the first room. Two sleeping bags on the floor. One blue, one yellow. Loki and Surtr’s room. Clothes strewn everywhere. Untidy, dirty, angry people. He went inside, looking for Loki’s jacket. Then turned and gasped. Nearly shot from the hip, when he saw the three animal masks they had worn that first day. All three were lined up and staring from a wooden sawbuck table that looked as if the Vikings had made it. Did they bring the animal heads here, or had they come with the room?

A miasma of sweat and hair grease wafted off their clothing. In the mess on the floor he found a leather biker jacket. It was riddled with spikes around the shoulders; riveted with steel at the waistline and elbows. Celtic Frost, Satyricon, Gorgoroth, Behemoth, Ov Hell, Mayhem, Blood Frenzy, painted carefully in white paint on the back panel. Inside a pocket, a jingle-jangle. Six keys, attached to an inverted steel crucifix: what else?

For some reason Luke zipped the pocket closed after extracting the keys, then asked himself, ‘Why?’ Shook his head. It was like walking through treacle now. Was the house so hot? He could only remember being cold in here before. The building listed like a boat in a squall. The rifle was so heavy; the barrel banged against things. He swore at it. His face was burning, wet.

Back outside in the corridor, he glanced past his old room and at the little door that led to the attic staircase. Listened. A voice. He frowned. Moved down to the door, but it grew faint. He looked at the ceiling. Realized the voice was not coming from up there, but from outside. Someone was singing.

He went back into Loki and Surtr’s room and peered down through the dirty glass of the window. Nothing out back in the orchard. He paused, listened again. It was coming from the other side of the house. Unable to bear going back inside the room they had kept him locked inside, he descended the stairs, breathless, dazed, his wounds burning but wet.

In the hallway, he raised the rifle butt to his shoulder and walked at the front door. The parlour door was still closed; the kitchen, he saw after a quick sweep with his jerky eyes, was empty. Back door was still open.

He stepped over Loki, looked outside.

The little old woman stood by the site of the second fire, just beyond the radius of scorched grass. A tiny figure dressed in black to her neck, facing the trees, indifferent to the motionless body of Fenris on her lawn. For such a small person, her voice carried. The wailing that came out of her was almost Arabic in intonation, but then Luke thought of North American Indians too. And whatever she sang lilted up and down in the singsong cadences of Swedish. She clapped out a beat with her little hands. What she sang was simple, repetitive, like a nursery rhyme. The same few lines, going up and down, over and over. He began to recognize one word. ‘Moder.’

She called it out again, and again, at the end of the third line of the three-line verse: ‘Moder.’

Mother.

‘No,’ he said to himself. ‘Please no.’

The realization came quick and cold like the contents of a pail of freezing water thrown straight into his face. He swung his head like a tired horse, and knew that no man should be made to witness such things. Was he in hell? Had he died in that forest with his friends, and now this was an endless narrative of atrocity in an afterlife he stumbled about in?

He looped the keyring around his little finger, took aim with the rifle. ‘Ma’am! I said no!’

She sang like a child, like a little girl, and raised her thin dusty arms into the air. She looked at the sky and called the old name.

When the time comes, will you sing with us?

He had suspected once or twice that she had been using him, but he had not dared acknowledge it. It seemed too improbable, too incongruous for such a small freakish lady who made stew and clomped about the hovel in her homespun gown. But she had used him. Yes, to get the unwanted guests out of her house, to have her uninvited visitors bleed out on the lawn. They came and they invited themselves inside and made demands and would not leave. She was old and she wanted help ridding her home of the rodents. Fenris was a weasel and she wanted his neck wrung like a dish cloth; he had seen it in her black eyes. So she let him remain alive for a while, so Blood Frenzy thought they were in charge and that she was working for them, serving their purpose up here; but then she let the sacrifice be free to accomplish some chores for her. He’d survived the forest and Blood Frenzy because he had work to do for her; he was the angry one, the violent one. In the party of four that came through here to die, he was the man not so different to the youths with the painted faces, the man who could be useful, for a while. He had always felt his fate out here was predetermined. That he had a purpose. And this was it.

She’d played him from day one, but he was still to be given, and taken away out there, to the rocks and boughs and waters and the ways of prehistory. Now his job was done, the little old child was calling mother home. Because he was still a sacrifice. And he was even dressed for it. She had laid out the robe and crown for him to wear.

‘God no.’

He aimed the shaky rifle sight between the shoulder blades of that tiny figure. And let the sights twitch and hover about the target.

All of these things should not be. He thought of Hutch, pale and bedraggled and naked and hanging between spruce branches. He remembered Dom’s arms about his own shoulders not long before he too was opened and emptied like a rabbit by a hunter. He thought of poor Phil, all tatty and looted, the hood of his waterproof still up and keeping his pale face dry in death. And he remembered the sound of thin brown bodies, twitching in the darkness of an attic that should not exist. He bit down on horror. Clenched his jaw against the horror of it all. And squeezed the trigger.

Like a hand shoving her in the back, the little old lady made a surprised sound like all the air had been pushed out of her in one go. And up she went, off her feet, then came immediately straight down, onto her face. She never moved again. He’d shot out her tiny heart.

The world went silent and still. The whole forest held its breath. The sky paused in its gaseous swirling. The birds closed their beaks and the animals lay down their heads.

Luke walked across to her and looked down.

The hem of her dusty dress was hiked up to her bony knees. Unclothed, her legs were thin and covered in coarse white hair. The skin through the hair was pinkish. Her legs bent the wrong way at the knee joints. At the end of her goatish legs were little white hooves. Her tiny loud feet.