SIXTY-SIX

Luke rested on his shins, the rifle across his naked thighs, and closed his eyes. He knelt in the grass between Fenris and the old lady.

Could he get up again? He would have to; he needed clothes, more water. A bandage too, or anything soft and clean to wrap around his hip and plug his chest. He was sure the cuts were widening as he moved and breathed. His left arm was going stiff and he could barely raise it above his waist. He was slowing down, he was coming to a stop. He blew his lungs empty. A cigarette would probably kill him, but he would kill for one right now.

He turned his head and looked back at the house, at the peaked pointy roof. He wasn’t finished here. He stood up, wincing. The giving and the taking had to stop. The door had to be closed. Loki had known about this place; others might do too. The barrier between the world and another much older place was much thinner here than elsewhere; things came and went. He understood that.

His friends had been slaughtered like game in season, like livestock. They had been hunted, swiftly despatched, field-dressed, and then displayed in the trees. An account had to be settled. For them. He’d do anything for them now.

Why had the old woman not called it home to clean out her trespassers? Luke closed his eyes. His skin shivered. His head hurt as it wondered. There was no one to tell him anything. Not out here. He just guessed and flinched like a small animal.

Because of the rifle. And sheath knives. Because it could be hurt. She was protecting it. Her mother. And protecting the old family upstairs. It required an inside job and he was the man on the inside. Maybe.

But he did know that some species should become extinct. Luke opened his eyes.

Moder’s rule and her pitiful congregation had to end. She was an isolated God; the last black goat of the woods. What he guessed was her youngest and most presentable daughter did her best to keep it all going up here. Maybe she was the girl left behind to look after mother. He did not know; he was guessing again. But it just all needed to stop. No more sons and fathers and friends should hang from trees. Not that, ever.

Luke walked back to the house; every muscle and sinew ached from a bruising so deep he doubted he could ever be fixed. The horizon of treetops juddered in his vision. Somehow the sky was all white now too, but he was grateful for the rain. It came down cold and hard. Was never far away up here. Just changed places with the snow. Over and over, forever.

He looked at Fenris. Reached down, gripped the sticky handle of the Swiss Army knife and yanked it out. Fenris sat up, head lolling, like Luke was leading him by a hand, then dropped back down to the blood and the soil. Luke stabbed the blade into the turf twice to clean it.

On the porch, he put down the rifle and the knife and took off the little white dress. Dropped it over Loki’s terrible face. But left the crown of dead flowers on his head; it seemed to be holding his thoughts together. And then he looked down the hallway to the staircase.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Through the door at the end of the corridor on the first storey, and up into the attic he went on feet so slow and clumsy they must have all heard him coming. Up there, in the warm dusty timeless darkness, they knew he was coming for them.

And into the lightless place at the top of the house, he crept and fumbled about, naked and bloodied as a newborn. He had no light; couldn’t get it together enough downstairs to find an oil lantern and matches. But he went on memory to the places where he remembered the little figures to be sitting. And now he was up there, he found they were all too old and too weak to do anything but mutter.

The rain struck the roof and was amplified inside the attic space. Still, he could hear them all about him. Their voices were rustles, sometimes scratchy like the voices in old radios dimmed to a murmur. And they were not laughing now. They sounded confused, like elderly people who had awoken in beds and forgotten where they were.

He went in low, head down, ears cocked to their sounds. At the far end of the room, he knelt down. Laid the rifle upon the floor. Then fumbled his hands around the two little chairs, patting his shaking hands over their robes, dry as old bread, then over brittle limbs no thicker than woodwind instruments, until he found the first small head.

‘You killed them amongst the stones,’ he whispered. ‘Yes, you showed me. Carried them out in wagons to die.’

He placed his finger atop the slowly moving skull, raised the knife up high, and then brought the blade down.

Through it went, through skin no stiffer than yellowing paper, and through an avian skull thin as eggshell, and into what remained of a living organ. Old magic may have kept it living, but new steel ended its long and miserable existence; a life that may well have begun when those great trees out there were mere saplings.

The other seated figure rustled in the darkness and tried to bite his fingers. He heard its dry jaw clacking.

‘I saw your old house. I was there. You used to string them up over a basin. You showed me. Did you suckle your God on blood?’

The second figure was a woman, he sensed, though it was pitch-black in the attic, and they were so old when he had first seen them he could not really be sure. But he found himself amazed at just how accurate his instincts could be when he had nothing else to go on.

When his fingers found her in the dark, he heard her cartilage beak creak open again, then felt the snap of dry gums upon a finger joint. It did not hurt, but he had to stifle a scream all the same. She resisted to the last, like a dying insect with its stinger raised at a bird’s sharp face.

He despatched the second fossil swiftly, struck it hard with the knife held like a dagger, and caved in half of its skull while throttling its wizened neck at the same time. He felt the head collapse to dust. Breathed some of it in, coughed, spat.

He stood up, and where they rattled and muttered against the walls, on either side of the little throne room, he felt for their sharp-featured faces, their old dry heads, their desiccated grinning, and he punched the knife through them. Through them all. One by one. Broke every head to dust. Until nothing whispered or shook within its mooring any longer.

Once he had finished with them, he bent over and retrieved the rifle. And while turning his thoughts to finding clothes, far out in the woods he heard a sound so terrible, he lost his balance and sat his bare buttocks down in the hot darkness of the attic.

The dreadful bullock bark. The devil-dog yipping.

The wet sky, the aged trunks of sleeping trees, the cold unfeeling earth, functioned as an acoustic chamber, and within that space the oldest and most poignant sound of anguish pierced him, and every living thing within earshot, to the marrow. A mother’s cry.

Moments later, he heard Surtr too. She unleashed a scream and he knew she had met a sudden and painful end in the claws or teeth of something much greater than herself. Moder was coming home now. Drawn by the loss of her own.

Luke scrabbled and half fell down the attic stairs. He ran into Loki and Surtr’s old room and peered out at the trees. Little of the sun was showing itself, and seemed to grow afraid and moved back behind the low grey clouds.

Again, the bullock cough. He could not see her, but knew she was much closer now. Somewhere nearby, Moder’s black flanks were shuddering with emotion, and the yipping that came out of her trembled. She was crazed with rage. Blind. Intent.

Truck. Truck. Fucking truck.

Knife in one hand, rifle in the other, naked and begrimed, he ran down the stairs on skittish feet and staggered into the kitchen. Peered out through the window.

The tiny body of the old woman was gone from the grass.

He briefly thought of putting the rifle barrel inside his mouth and then a big toe inside the trigger guard.

The old black presence was invisible but immense; it reared up and covered the house, inflicted so much pressure upon his thoughts they hardened into diamonds of a terror that was total, mindless, pure and complete. He gaped, he pissed down his dirty legs. One arm started to shake so badly, the other had to come around and hold it steady. He made a groaning noise that just did not sound like anything that had ever come out of his mouth before.

Truck.

He shuddered across to the table, hyperventilating, shaking to the black soles of his Neanderthal feet.

Too many things; not enough hands. Rifle. Knife. Keys.

He put the keys into his mouth, bit down on all the screams that wanted to come out. His teeth oozed around the metal keyring like butter.

Rifle out before him, the stock banged hard into his shoulder, his saliva dripping all over the keyring, the knife in the palm of the hand that held the rifle barrel steady, he walked back into the silvery morning of the old world, naked.

SIXTY-EIGHT

It could move fast, he knew that. Though the last time it had cried out, the sound had been bellowed skyward from the other side of the building; what he thought of as the front. So he tried to reassure himself he could sneak away through the kitchen door in the rear; get to the truck, and go, while it still shrieked and paced about out front.

But he had taken no more than five steps through the grass, away from the back door, when he heard it again: to his front, to the right, where the forest resumed its oceanic immensity on the right-hand side of the orchard. It was as if it too was rushing for the truck now, keeping pace with his intentions. And it must have covered fifty yards in a mere matter of moments.

Down on one knee, Luke swung the sights of the rifle across the base of the treeline, anticipating the emergence of a long black shape pressed to the ground.

Nothing came; the trees remained still and dark in the falling rain. Would the weather mask his scent? he wondered, uselessly, because it had always known exactly where they were at any time. And it could see him now, he knew it.

Up on the balls of his feet, his breath too loud and unable to stop it wheezing in and out of his mouth like he was a tired old dog, he moved across to the truck. He could only see the white shape of the vehicle in his peripheral vision because not for a second did he take his eyes from the trees.

The haphazard and sparse plantation of fruit trees in the orchard, and the open gulley of the dirt track, would allow him to sight the rifle through their exposure, but he dearly wished the rear of the truck had not been so close to the treeline.

He decided to go inside the truck cabin through the driver-side door, with the rifle pointed at the forest until the last moment. There would be one shot, if that, if it chose to come at him from the trees as he entered the vehicle. Twenty feet, one bound.

Driver-side door open. Unwilling to even blink, he eased himself up and onto the broad bench before the steering wheel. Wound the passenger-side window right down, pulled his door closed and then rested the underside of the rifle barrel on the bottom of the passenger-side window frame. If the truck still functioned and moved him down the track, he’d be able to shoot from that side.

He placed the knife on the top of the plastic dashboard, took the keys from his mouth and tried to slip the ignition key into the slot on the steering column. His hands were shaking too much. One hand was dark black with his own blood from where it had clutched at his hip; the sight of it made him feel faint, sick again. On the third attempt he got the key into the slot.

Turned it. There was a click. Green lights glowed to indicate oil, temperature. Amber low-lights circled the speedometer clock and fuel gauge. He depressed the clutch with the sole of a dirty bare foot. The pedal was stiff. He turned the ignition key over again.

The cabin shook. The engine started immediately, impossibly. But there should be no fuel. Something should be wrong with the engine. Nothing should go right for him. That was the way of things.

He shut down the train of thought.

And the engine cut out. Cold. He turned the key again. The engine rocked into life. Sputtered out again. Luke checked the fuel gauge; about one tenth of a tank. They’d drained it for their stupid pyres. How far would that much petrol get him? Far enough.

Turning the key a third time, he worried about flooding the motor. The engine roared, then chugged into a shaky life. He depressed the accelerator pedal, kept the engine ticking over, idling with a bad cough. The truck was old, had been in the rain; how long would it take to warm up? Was there time for all that?

He looked back at the treeline, cursing himself for becoming distracted; it only took a moment to die out here. Phil had learned that the hard way.

Nothing moved.

The windshield was too blurry to see through. He found the switch for the wipers on the indicator column. Turned the wipers on, and the fog lights, and the hazard lights. ‘Shit.’ No, leave them on.

Handbrake off. Clutch down, into first gear. Right hand on the wheel. Left hand back to holding the rifle stock steady, the end of the barrel aimed through the passenger-side window, finger on the goddamn trigger.

The truck moved, under him, along the grass towards the mouth of the thin track. He was revving too high. Eased back on the accelerator. It was disorientating; operating a vehicle, moving it with these tiny pressures of feet and legs. The last time he had driven had been a van five years before when he moved flat, from one dark corner of London to another.

The truck left the paddock and bumped along the track, the tyres seeming to find the grooves they had made coming in. This was too easy.

Eyes everywhere: to the treeline at the left side of the track, back across the bonnet, through the spindly trees of the orchard, then back again to the forest on his left. Nothing moving out there. Hope surged fiery through his chest. Stupidly, he burped. He needed air; opened the driver-side window.

He looked into the rear-view mirror for the first time. His vision swam. His face was smeared with blood from where he had wiped red sticky hands at sweat and tears; a dirty beard made him look Neolithic; his red-rimmed eyes were those of the witless; something like a crust on a Cornish pasty ran down his hairline, under the tiara of dead flowers, and ended within his left eyebrow; deep pale worry lines cracked the filth beside his eyes and mouth.

Past the orchard, the dark house almost vanishing from out of the rear-view mirror, and he realized he was chanting, ‘Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.’

He stopped speaking and cooled with dread at the sight of how the trees then leant in and curved over the muddy track up ahead. And once he was passed the orchard, the world went dark and he was in a natural tunnel; a funnel of dense foliage. It whipped, it scraped the sides of the truck. It came in through the open driver-side window and tried to slap an eye stinging shut. He drew the barrel of the gun back inside. Started winding up the windows. Was doing too much for his fragile coordination to cope with. With a jolt, the vehicle stalled.

‘Shit fucker!’ Getting angry now. The rifle butt was stuck on something, would not allow itself to be pulled into the truck cabin any further, which prevented him from winding the passenger-side window all the way shut. He had become a quivering thing of rushing thoughts in a thick heavy head, and was all big elbows and jerky feet; he hated himself, hated the trees, this land, everything. He believed in malign divine presences, supernatural forces of fate that kept him here, off balance and absurd in his mismanagement of everything. He was a bleeding farce.

‘Stop! Stop it!’ he told the dominant voice inside his mind. You got this far. You did what you had to do to get this far.

Took a breath. Looked down to his right. Slowly raised the rifle butt from out of a tear in the vinyl seat cushion. Wound the passenger-side window all the way up to shut and seal himself from the cold wet breath of the forest and the trees that were too unnervingly close. Took another big deep steadying lungful.

Restarted the engine. Out of instinct, he checked the rear-view mirror. Squinted. Had a long dark branch fallen across the back of the truck’s flatbed? Yes, and now it felt like the rear wheels had lowered slightly, or sunk into the clay.

He caught his breath.

Yanked his head around.

Looked through the glass panel behind his head.

And saw the end of a black shape step off the rear of the vehicle.

And vanish into the trees.

But it had left something behind.

Luke looked into the flatbed. Surtr stared back at him. Pale-blue eyes wide in surprise, lipless mouth open, as if to say, Remember me?

Beneath her breasts, her rib cage had been torn asunder like a cardboard box. She had red-whitish flesh wings attached to an all too visible spinal column. She was all gone, down to her dark, sopping abdomen, but sat upright, her inert body resting against the tail gate of the truck. An inconceivable strength had done that to sinew, muscle and bone; literally torn her body wide open.

I’m still here, it was telling him. Still with you, every inch of the way.

Clumsily, he snatched up the rifle, but the dimensions of the cabin prevented him from moving the long firearm around. The engine cut out.

‘Stop!’ he cried at himself. What did it matter, which way the gun was pointing? The rifle was next to useless inside the cabin; could not be manoeuvred at all. What he needed was speed.

He turned the key over hard, so the starter motor squealed. The cabin shook as the engine came back to reluctant life again. He went from first to third gear in seconds and threw his feet from accelerator to brake, accelerator to brake, while tossing the steering wheel and the truck from side to side, down the track. Beneath the metal floor he felt the tyres grip and slip and fight to stay aiming straight ahead and away from this place.

He flushed hot and cold, twice nearly crashing the vehicle off the road and into the trees. No seatbelt. ‘Stupid bastard!’ In his rear-view mirror, Surtr lolled and shook, bumped and banged, but would not take her eyes from him.

And then, suddenly, something moved behind her.

Only sporadically did the white-grey light break through the canopy of foliage over the rutted road, and shine steely through the tree branches that desired, and were designed, to smother the track into oblivion. But over the lolling pale head of his passenger in the rear, he saw something running quickly on all fours, behind the truck. But only briefly, for no more than a moment; no longer than it took him to say, ‘Oh God.’

He checked the road in front of the bonnet, then looked into the mirror again. Behind the vehicle, a lanky darkness rose to full height and stepped away into the jumping shadows at the side of the track in the time it took to blink an eye. The figure had been at least twenty yards behind his rear bumper, but tall on those black legs, thin as stilts, that bent the wrong way at the knee joint.

He hurriedly turned the headlights on, then switched them to full beam; the sudden strobe of white light was an instant comfort inside the cocoon of rain-heavy leaves that now draped themselves across the windscreen like the flabby hands of protesters, attempting to slow down a diplomat’s car driving through a crowd.

It had been running down the road behind him, was keeping up. A thing dark. Thin rear legs. No tail. A brief ripple of light across a flank tooled with muscle. ‘Jesus fucking Christ!’

He was doing thirty miles an hour when he smacked his head against the steel underside of the cabin roof and was forced to brake, to slow down. One eye shut from the pain; an old wound up there had reopened or just set fire to itself again.

Crawling, skidding; he spent more time looking into the rear-view mirror, than he did over the wet white bonnet.

Which is why he did an emergency stop when something darted across the front of the vehicle. His breastbone hit the steering wheel and set the horn blasting; his forehead banged, slapped, then pressed flat, against the cold inside of the windscreen.

For a while he did not know which way he was facing, until his senses landed safely and reorientated his spatial awareness. He pulled himself back hard into his seat.

As he lowered his eyes, he caught the last of something moving; close to the ground, slipping into the trees. It was a thing both lean and brawny.

Had he not stopped he would have hit it. ‘Fuck!’

The engine had stalled again, and if it stalled once more he swore he would get out of the cabin and put a bullet through the bonnet of the spluttering shuddering mess of a truck.

He got it started again as the panic made his jaw shake as if he were suddenly freezing.

Were the rear wheels now stuck in a rut though? The truck would only now move in increments, as if the handbrake was still on. The engine whined and steamed. Then the whole vehicle jolted forward, almost pitching him off the road.

Something had been holding the truck again, from behind.

Luke glanced at the rear-view mirror. A black shape suddenly flared up, and reared away as if on long quivering stilts.

And then it was on the roof. Clambering and all about the windows on every side. He heard himself scream. The dim light dimmed.

The banging of hammers upon the roof; the ricochets of bone feet on metal smarted inside his tender ears. A pink-teated underside of a great belly across the windscreen, black-haired and doggish. Hint of an amber eye the size of an apple to his right.

He looked at the eye.

Saw a great mouth opening instead. Black gums, and yellow canines the length of middle fingers. Breath condensed on the glass, then it was gone.

And so was he, with the accelerator plugged to the metal floor, and his thoughts reeling round and round in a terrible whirlpooling skull-wind, and the branches of trees grooved the side panels, and twigs scratched at the glass like they had claws of their own and wanted to shell him like an oyster.

Bang! Bang! Bang! The hooves of horses across a metal sheet, as something stamped upon the cabin roof again, then ran across the flatbed and vanished, taking poor Surtr with it, like her remains were the remnants of a disembowelled doll, held by one ankle.

Luke was still screaming when the truck veered from one side of the road to the other, entering the forest a few feet on either side of the track. A headlamp went smash. The bumper tore off, and the wheels went over it with a crumple he felt more than heard.

He stamped on the brake to regain control of the vehicle. The truck slid. Came to a jolting stop that put his forehead into the windscreen again.

He sat back, gaping. He’d got the vehicle wedged at an angle, diagonally across the track. Up ahead, the tunnel of overhanging forest narrowed, and completely shut off the light.

Reverse. First gear. Reverse. First gear … A ten-point turn before he stopped counting and began whimpering.

He thought of getting out and using the rifle. Then was certain, again, that he should just put the end of the barrel inside his mouth and end the delay of his demise. It was inevitable.

Fear and big white eyes inside a suit of dirty skin: that’s all he was now.

His arms and legs were shaking. He watched his knee for no longer than a second but its palsy alarmed him. His hands and feet were all pins and needles, until he made his limbs work again by scrabbling for the knife between his legs where it had jumped from the dash. He gripped the knife handle between the palm of his right hand and the outside of the steering wheel. The blade was dull, thick with blood at its base. Its presence inside the cabin made him feel strength in the form of a thin wire of tension within the bones of his forearms.

Slowly, in first gear, he nudged the truck back onto the track and further into the shadows, into the greater darkness where daylight had no place and never had done. Driving fast was out of the question; this was second-gear driving all the way through. But it had not broken inside the vehicle. Could not. Maybe. He told himself he could tentatively wheel his way out of here, like a nervous motorist with a flat tyre in a safari park.

Minutes passed. How many he could not possibly know. But as each wheel turned one full rotation and he rolled forward and further along this hairline crack in the surface of the greatest forest of Europe, he promised himself that he would get out, and that this terrible black tunnel would end and that what stalked him through it could not possibly break into his shell of metal and …

He eased around a tight curve in first gear, and his one working headlight showed him a long stretch of narrow and straight track ahead. And the light also flashed upon what coiled and tensed down there on such long limbs.

Something tall and lean but shaggy about its haunches, was risen and poised; with bony arms, long as a stallion’s forelegs, hanging before it. And the great shape of its head was raised as if to catch a scent or sound on the breeze. It was waiting. Waiting for him.

The terrible head-shape was so long, ragged. It pulled itself back into a centre of gravity, anchored in thighs springloaded to strike. A glimmer of headlight flashed across corneas amber-red.

He thought it was an impossibly tall man. For a moment. Or an ape, a large scrawny one, poised to pounce like a great cat. But then of it, and about it, as it lowered down upon great muscled haunches, and before it fled right at him, were the briefest features of other things that made Luke suffocate on a tongue he was sure he had swallowed in his terror.

A thick-haired face, black, with a wet bovine muzzle, made itself temporarily available for scrutiny. The almost human eyes filled his mind. Eyes curiously sentient. Eyes revealing a hideous intent. To merely see them made him whimper. But in the visible moments of its swift charge it seemed mostly goatish, that shape of a head upon the bullock neck; though the yellow teeth should have been in the mouth of something else, long extinct. And extending from all of this, were the greatest of horns, from another place altogether. And it was coming at him. And he was going at it.

The engine screamed at the end of first gear, for he had no presence of mind to go up to second. And he screamed over the engine, so loudly, until blood came up and into his mouth, and his vision blurred.

Then it was through the windscreen.

Poles of aged bone ploughed into the webbing glass. The steering wheel snapped in half. The top of a skull, broad as a small table, followed through. Glass cubes covered Luke like sugar crystals. He heard a sound like the puncturing of some giant ball, and on either side of his neck the horns kept on going and going through the rear of the seat and the sheet metal of the cabin behind his shoulders. Until his nostrils and teeth and eyes were pressed into oily bristles that tasted like old meat and shat-upon straw. Something snapped like plastic between his eyes. His already broken nose.

Billows of steamed-out breath, cankerous with dead shoals of fish and sulphurous with a pig’s dung, infused the cabin, the world. And he was sick into it, onto it, that great matted skull. Just before it began the terrible thrashing of its head.

Luke was stuck fast into his seat. But the vehicle rocked like it had been T-boned at a junction by a speeding bus. Then two wheels were off the ground at the front. The rear wall of the cabin caved in and there was the grinding of great stones as those horns moved deeper into the steel of the cabin. The roof suddenly groaned like an old floor and then buckled like a paper bag. It was stuck; it was tearing the world apart to get out.

Against his stomach and groin, he felt a nose; as wet as seafood and contracting like a baby’s heart in his navel. It was the worst sensation of all, in there, in the darkness, while smashed into his seat. Below the nose its mouth worried and busied and dripped. It was seeking something to pinch and tear like tracing paper between quick fingers.

A last moment of himself, an instinct, or maybe it was a spasm, a twitch, sent from the origins of his own species when they coughed out their last under rutting horns and snatching jaws, came to his right hand. The hand that held the Swiss Army knife.

His right arm had been hammered against a horn as the thing smashed itself through the windscreen. But he could bend that arm at the elbow, and he could grit his teeth, then part his jaws, and scream too. And he screamed out his last as he pressed his tiny blade into that great black throat.

A bellow from a mouth filling with liquid deafened him. He fell forward in his seat to the sound of two sword blades clashing.

And it was gone from his face, his chest, the cabin, from the bonnet. Wet damp air came in through the shattered windscreen to temper the abattoir stink all about him.

Silence.

And then coughing, out there, in the dark wet forever of trees. Coughing as if to clear a throat of a fine bone. Luke looked at his right hand; it was empty.

The engine had stalled. There was no steering wheel.

He closed his eyes. Then opened them. His mouth was wet. Blood. His nose was smashed.

He pushed the rifle out and onto the bonnet. Then followed it with his own naked body.