The Ritual

FORTY-SIX

They were close.

Voices.

Footsteps.

People.

A muttering in Swedish or Norwegian outside the warm heavy darkness that engulfed him. A woman, youngish. And … two men, their tones deeper. He sensed their presence above him, over him. The voices of the people then came together, near his feet.

He was lying down; his limbs and back were stiff, but sunken into a soft surface. Under his shoulders and buttocks, his skin burned where it touched … bedding.

Something was wrapped around his head; he could feel its touch, its pressure, could sense its size, covering his eyes as well as his skull like a big ill-fitting hat.

When he tried to open his eyes there was resistance from his eyelids. They were gummed shut. One eyelid partially broke apart and a streak of white pain shot backwards through his pupil. He closed the eye again. If he moved his head at all it would hurt, perhaps terribly, and not stop hurting. He knew this without putting it to the test.

He gasped. Tried to speak. But there were no words inside the hot arid place that was his throat. A swishing rustle, as if from long heavy skirts sweeping a wooden floor, came out of the darkness and closed about him. And then a small dry hand touched his cheek, to calm him, to bid him be still. An elderly voice made shushing sounds.

Before he remembered anything from the time before his waking, his being there, he sank away, back into a healing darkness and its blessed warmth.

FORTY-SEVEN

He awoke so thirsty he could not swallow and his lips would tear like rice paper if he forced them to part. It was later than before, much later. A great period of sleep had left the back of his eyes feeling bruised.

This was the same place as before, he assumed with a vague recollection of being half aware of lying in this position, on this same surface, at some other time recently. Though something notable was missing now. But what was it? From inside him, there had been a removal or a raising of something, like a weight. A something that had driven him, wasted him, spent him, left him witless, big-eyed and alight with panic for so long.

Fear.

Fear. The choking of it. The flinching and the paralysis. The relentless expectation of its cold jolt. Fear had finally gone from him.

And the time before he slept came back to him then. Like a gush of darkness through his mouth and eyes and ears. It even felt wet and cold, the terrible rushing of recollection through him, and it filled his nose with the stink of mulch and dead wood.

Scratched and bleeding, he’d walked to the end of himself. Lungs had burned and legs had cramped, but were now only warm and tired; ghostly outlines of scolds and scars about his tortured body told him a story he did not want repeated.

Stricken faces were lit up in his mind. Hutch. Phil. Dom. Up in the trees he saw the rags again, the rags and bones. Then he recalled the thin silhouettes of gaunt trees standing before the fire of a red sky. As did something else. It was among the trees, it was of the trees, and it was apart from the trees. Something upright, and watching him before a backdrop of some strange planet ablaze. The electric memory of the smashing of his skull, like a china bowl under a hammer, jolted his whole body. And he was disorientated by the noise of his own shriek in the darkness.

But he was saved and was now lying in a bed. He had been found, attended to. His heart burst.

Wrenching his eyes fully open, he felt the sensation of ripping cloth inside his head. A thud of pain behind his eyes followed. Then there was another and another thump, but these were weaker survivable aftershocks, and were smothered deeper inside his skull.

In this place of his salvation, the air tasted unclean. He thought of used clothes in a charity shop. Thirst burned like salt from a swollen tongue down to his navel. He opened his wooden lips and exposed his gritty mouth to the taste of neglect: moisture in old timber, dust, bed linen so oily it smelled of a hot animal.

He looked into the pale blank space before his face. Eyes contracting, refocusing, he saw the stitches of a bandage. One layer of material, close enough to his eyelashes to hamper a blink. Faint light seeped through the fabric. He recalled a vague sensation of his head being rolled between quick gentle hands while he slept. Caring hands that nearly made him surface from the fathoms of damaged sleep. It had been a long time ago: weeks? Days?

Something heavy and thick was covering him from toes to chin. He was warm under its weight despite the stink. Things inside the coverings bit him repeatedly with pinprick teeth. The back of his thighs itched. New constellations of sharp bites spread around his ribs.

Between his thighs and under his buttocks the bedding was also wet. It alarmed him more than the lice.

Concentrating hard, he moved his hips, his legs, his feet, then bent his knees, then his elbows. His neck he kept still, and he merely looked up, straight ahead, into the grubby fabric hanging over his eyes while his body reacquainted itself with sensation, with definition and with its possibilities.

Slowly, he raised his swollen leaden head from the greasy pillow and the scent of dusty feathers rose with him. Tilting his head forward, he squinted under the bandage and down his body.

And saw rolling hills of ancient eiderdown, patch-worked with colours faded or dark with grime; squares of disparate fabrics reaching to the bumps of his concealed feet. The surface of the coverings were level with the sides of the wooden frame he lay inside. It was like he was inside an old wooden chest or coffin; he had been sunk deep within its inflexible confines and covered over with antique swaddling. It was some kind of bed, but a structure he was immediately afraid there might be a lid for.

Carefully, he twisted his head to the left and in the greyish light saw a cabinet made from dark timber beside the bed. A dark wooden jug stood beside a wooden cup. Without his consent his throat contracted but barely completed a painful swallow.

Carefully, he moved on to his left side then shuffled into a foetal position. Propping his upper body on one elbow, he reached for the mug. It was heavy. Full of dusty warmish water. All of which he swallowed, only tasting it afterwards when his mouth became tangy with rust and sparked steely with minerals. Wild water. Well water.

A bludgeoning ache behind his eyes rolled in waves and brought his eyelids down fast as storm shutters. His limbs turned to liquid with exhaustion after the simple exertions. Am I that broken? He eased back into the imprint that his long occupancy of the bed had shaped into the bedding. He seemed to sink deeper down than before, the odiferous cavern of unventilated quilt pressing behind his descent.

Now he was still, the pain inside his skull rang more softly, and the slosh of water in his gut lulled him back to restfulness.

He was saved. ‘Saved’. He was saved from the terrible forest and what walked through it. He was alive and saved. Saved. Alive. Saved. His face became wet with tears. He sniffed. And then dropped into sleep.

FORTY-EIGHT

There are people in the room.

Again?

Leaning towards you while you stand in the metal tub, they inspect your white body. They are old. So very old. Every inch of each face is furrowed and wrinkled into clumps of yellowish skin, like under the eyes, which are hard to make out beyond glints within the sunken sockets. But when one of them puts their head through a thin strand of light, you can see a milky-blue cornea surrounded by a discoloured iris.

One of them could be a woman, but there is so little hair on the patchy skull. Just a few white bits around the sides of the head; the skin traversed by blackish veins. The other could be a man, or maybe even the body of a bird without feathers, shrunken and starved into a shape of sticks.

Bent in their loose black garments, like robes hanging from bare bone, they squint and peer at your hips, ribs and shoulders.

Fingers with knuckles the size of peach stones, covered in skin as translucent as the flesh of cold chicken, prod at your freckled belly, as if you are a joint of meat. Dark teeth spike behind the tight grins of lipless mouths, grooved like muzzles.

You try and speak but you can’t get your breath. They mutter to each other in words you cannot understand. Lilting, musical voices, that rise up and down in strange cadences.

Tallow candles are lit and placed about the walls, making shadows flicker and rise up and down the dark wood, highlighting the horns and discoloured bones nailed to the planks.

Then from above you, through the ceiling, you hear the knocking. The banging of wood on wood. Mad tappings and rappings without rhythm, like a child with a stick and a saucepan. And maybe it is an animal, a dog or something up there, because something is whining. The sounds are dulled through the smoke-blackened ceiling; this whining and mewling amidst the banging.

You are grateful that this makes the old people in the dirty black wool move away from you. But you are only relieved for a moment, because the figures move towards the door where they seem to suddenly be in a hurry to get out. One of them fumbles with the door latch and the other peers up at the ceiling, with eyes full of glee, and more teeth showing than before, at the sound of hard feet resounding against the floor upstairs; unsteady at first, and then cantering.

You try to follow the old people out of the door, but it’s not possible for you to move and step over the edge of the black iron tub. Your ankles are tied together with something thin and painful where it squeezes your skin, and when you look up you can see your hands going purple from where they are bound together at the wrist with a leather strap that loops over a blackened iron hook in the ceiling.

Then the old people are gone and you are alone in the cold metal basin. But something is coming down from the room upstairs. You can hear its bone feet on the wooden steps of a staircase outside this room, and you can hear the sound of something squeezing its body down and through a narrow passage, accompanied by quick gusts of excited breath.

A thick shape fills the doorway of your room. You scream when you realize it is coming through on all fours, with the long horns out front.

Luke woke with a cry.

Panted hard like he had just smashed across the finishing line of a sprint down a running track. He called out for his mother.

The remnant of his waking was swift and the nightmare receded to a sepia blur, then vanished. He was awake and gasping into the old bandage tied about the front of his face, reaching down to the tip of his nose. He blinked rapidly. Moaned. Because for a few disorientating moments, he thought he was hanging from the ceiling, tied by his wrists. But it was nothing more than the gibberish of shock after waking in darkness.

Moist and warm, the moulding of the bedding clung about him and outlined his physical shape; prone, stretched out.

He peered beneath the bandages, his eyes slitted to restrict the scorching of the thin light. He saw the murky outline of the old eiderdown; the sides of the box bed; perhaps a dim dark wall beyond his feet.

Still safe. Still saved.

He’d had a bad dream. No problem there. No surprises. There would be others.

He thought of his open wound; the cracks in his skull. He touched the bandage.

Breathed out, slowly. Sit tight. He was safe and help was on its way.

He closed his eyes.

FORTY-NINE

So many violent sounds smashed him from sleep. For a few dazed seconds, he continued to mumble to the thin seated figures of whom he had been dreaming. Then he addressed the origin of the noise erupting from somewhere beneath his feet, ‘Please. Who?’

Something or someone was screaming. It was a high-pitched, inhuman cry. Beneath these relentless shrieks, a sound like the plates of the earth grinding together in an earthquake became an impossible rhythm. Drums.

The bed vibrated. He felt a thicker thrumming sensation in his hands and feet, and in the pit of his stomach. Bass.

Music.

He released his breath. The entire room was not filled with a million insects buzzing against each other, inside some giant smoking hive; these were guitar strings being shredded rapidly and amplified into distortion. Some type of extreme music was erupting from nearby. From out of speakers so worn, damaged, and too small for the task set them, they crackled and snapped like cooking fat.

Luke came up from the stinking eiderdown and slumped onto his elbows; his eyes behind the bandages were stuck between a squint and full closure. He clawed at his face. Shoved the bandage up his forehead. The entire loose arrangement of dressings dropped off his head, as if a cap had been tugged away by an unexpected hand from behind. Cold stale air fell fast and cooled against his scalp. He forced his eyelids wide apart. Focused on the room. And then whimpered.

Three figures stood at the foot of the bed, and the very sight of them made him quite sure that the hell of the Bible was real, and that he had awoken in one of its rooms.

Black horns jutted from the head of the goat-headed figure in the middle. Hard as oak, polished like stone, the horns rose from a bristly forehead; curving outwards along their length, before tilting vertically into sharp points at their conclusion.

The sight of them took his breath away and thrust a snapshot of another dark place that made no sense into his mind; a mind that was now opening and closing its doors and windows like a film speeded to a blur.

The goat’s coal-black ears stuck out at ninety degrees from the great motionless skull, as if the creature had just been surprised in a forest glade. The yellow eyes with their large oval pupils were curiously feminine, softened by light-brown eyebrows and long eyelashes. Black fur, as glossy as a horse’s tail, dropped from beneath the beast’s chin.

Alone, even without the support of its two ghastly companions, the goat seemed to rise and not only fill the dim room to the ceiling, but command the entire space. It was blasphemously majestic, and shocking, and maddening, all at once.

Luke expected its horns to drop, and for it to begin a terrible rooting through the eiderdown. He imagined himself retreating up the bed to the rear wall where he would be gored. Opened, ragged up the front and emptied steaming into the bedclothes. He thought of dear Hutch, of Phil, and his face screwed into an involuntary palsy.

But the goat just stood above him, motionless, almost solemn; towering right up to the brownish ceiling.

Was this their executioner? But if so then why was it wearing a dusty black suit and grubby collarless shirt? The fraying sleeves of the jacket were halfway up its front legs. Or were they forearms? The soiled jacket was so tight across the shoulders, the figure’s long front limbs were pinched against its torso. It looked like the creature had taken the suit from a much smaller dead man.

Luke looked at the other two figures.

Like the cast of some degenerate Victorian pantomime, they crowded the upright goat and issued across the bed a scent of disused props, of dusty backstage places, of old sweat.

The hare was too terrible to look upon for long. And the fact that it was diminutive, no taller than five feet, somehow made its visage even worse to behold than the goat with its appalling height.

Tatty brownish fur sprung in clumps from a long face. Mad eyes, fiery with amber but also black with rage at their heart, bulged from bony eye sockets. A pair of tall ears were cocked forward, almost twitching. More similar to tusks than teeth, two long pillars of discoloured bone dropped from its dirty black mouth, guaranteeing its prey a deep and fatal penetration.

With a gasp, Luke raised a hand feebly, as if to ward off the toothy menacing he anticipated, so busy and sharp, about his throat. Tufty, stained and stitched, its long neck bushed and bristled down to a pair of naked milky shoulders, and to a heavy bust, tipped with pink nipples, bright and puckered hard.

Aghast, Luke looked away from it. Demands for his attention were now being made by the lamb. It snorted. The first sound any of the figures had made. He stared into the lamb’s dead bluish eyes, fringed with pink rims and bleached eyelashes. It seemed to regard him with a great sadness, like a face from a freak-show daguerreotype. Fur stiff and yellowing with age was close-cropped about the head but still managed to curl like a human child’s. Atop its head, a garland of dried flowers had been entwined with a spray of heather. Beneath its little square teeth and small chin, a stiff circular collar of lace jutted out. Brittle with age and watermarked, the gown it wore brought to mind both a burial shroud and an old-fashioned christening dress made for a little girl. But the latter juvenile suggestions of its attire did not soften Luke’s shock at seeing the upright lamb at the foot of his bed. Did not soften it at all, but prolonged it.

Amidst the cacophony of the shrieking music, and as his mind struggled to comprehend the surreal horror of this welcoming party, he felt unable to move, or speak, or to even think clearly. And his visitors just stood there, still as mannequins, staring at him, their bright hideously animate eyes unmoving, as if they were waiting in expectation for something from him: a word, a scream, some feeble defence.

Suddenly, the great black head of the goat turned to the lamb and something passed between them. The lamb turned sideways, revealing its pink whisker-filled ear, and bent down towards the floor that Luke could not see. A white human arm shot out of the lace gown, the forearm girlishly pale and thin, but blackened with spiky tattoos above the wrist. The music abruptly ceased. Silence expanded.

Luke sat up fully, backed against the end of his little box and pulled his knees into his stomach. His shock lessened in the sudden quiet, but not by much. Beneath him, his quick movements disrupted the dirty sheepskins from a bed of old hay that filled the little box.

Why am I not in a hospital bed? And he also wondered whether this second unwelcome appearance of a black goat into his life had burned up another of the fuses inside him, and that without the fuse he would remain a very nervous man for the rest of his life.

The goat raised two long-fingered human hands. Which were the first things attached to the creature that Luke was pleased to see, as he had been expecting hooves.

Dirty fingernails atop the slender fingers gripped the furry cheeks of the goat head and pushed upwards, removing the mask, but revealing a face beneath it that Luke at once wished had remained covered.

The face was caked in some kind of white cosmetic. It bleached the skin of all colour save the black lines cutting grooves into the forehead and at each side of the downturned sullen mouth. The eyes had been made especially hollow-looking with solid patches of black make-up, caked inside the sockets. The lips had been painted black too, but inside the hot mask much of the cosmetics had sweated off the thick vulval mouth of the figure, which sneered at Luke and exposed teeth the yellow-brown of unboiled corn.

Long black hair, clotted with sweat, fell like oily string about the figure’s large mournful face. Dark lines, carved as much as painted from between the bridge of the nose and into the forehead, gave the pallid face a permanent frown. The eyes were a cold bright blue; their expression intense, contemptuous, self-serious. The man’s beard was long and matted. Streaks of white greasepaint had run into it, frosting the hair, making Luke think of the foliage of wintry trees glimpsed on the banks of model railways.

Taking in his new surroundings as quickly as possible, Luke looked for a door in the plain but stained walls. Between the hare and the goat he spied one where two of the unadorned walls joined; a narrow aperture. It was closed. And all about him, the ancient plaster bulged from between warped timber, giving the room a misshapen bulbous character that made him even more uneasy. If that were possible, and he found that it was. A small window covered in brownish net curtains emitted a smoky light into the room.

Inside the ancient bed, with the sheepskin so soiled it made his skin feel rubbery, he realized that his body was also still filthy from his ordeal in the forest. The fact that he had not been bathed concerned him so much, he felt that if he dwelled upon it, he would begin to cry with all of his heart.

‘Welcome,’ the white-faced man said. The voice was extremely deep, but affected. The sudden brief animation of his mouth and the timbre of his voice made the man appear younger than Luke had at first thought when the figure unmasked. He now put the figure in his early twenties, even his late teens.

Luke coughed, to clear his throat of what felt like splinters. Swallowed. ‘Where am I?’ His voice was a croak, dried out, insubstantial.

‘South of heaven,’ the unsmiling figure replied in the deep voice that sounded even more absurd on its second airing.

A thin delinquent hyena laugh erupted from inside the lamb’s head; the harshest edges of the sound muffled by the confines of the mask. The figure leaned forward to grasp its own woolly horror of a head under the tiny ears and removed it after a twisting struggle. Straightening his spine and snapping his head backwards, the youth whipped his own long black hair from his wet face. Several strands no thicker than shoe laces clung to his moist cheeks.

The lamb’s thin face, which struggled between being boyishly pretty and weasel-like, was also plastered with white make-up. But crimson streaks had been daubed down his cheeks as if made by tears of blood, and also crafted to run from each nostril and from the corners of his downturned black-lipped mouth, like newly shed red blood.

Luke swallowed. ‘Who are you?’

In response to the question, the lamb issued a horrible sound that was both a bark and a high-pitched screech. Then the youth giggled to himself. Within the black caves of eye make-up, his pale-blue eyes were bright with glee. It sounded as if he had screamed, ‘Oscar Ray.’

Luke frowned, swallowed again, and again. ‘Oscar Ray?’

‘Oskerai!’ the figure shrieked again, looking even more damaged as it extended two spindly white arms from the nightgown and thrust them into the air.

‘We are the wild hunt,’ the tall figure said, his tone pompous, the words heavily accented.

‘The final gathering,’ a petulant, excitable female voice cried from inside the terrible head of the hare. Despite knowing there was a human being inside the hare head-piece, Luke knew he would never feel comfortable within the presence of its mad eyes and dirty teeth.

‘I don’t understand,’ Luke said, and hoped they could not read the depth of his fear and alarm; he was old enough to know it was always a mistake to reveal such in the company of the unstable.

Off came the wretched head of the female hare, to reveal the plump head of a young woman in her late teens, possibly younger. She too had painted her face, but where the others had created grotesque expressions resembling imperious grimaces or bloodied scowls, the girl’s use of white face-paint and black kohl had been more artful. Her spherical head depicted a permanent expression of spiteful mirth, as if the bright red splashes about her lips and chin were evidence of a recent sadistic act performed with the use of her mouth.

To engage their sympathy, and to put an end to this unnerving game, Luke touched the hot part of his head that felt too big to be healthy. Crusted blood in a thick seam indented his probing fingertips. The wound was still wet and open in the middle. The dressing behind him on the greyish pillow was the same one Dom had clumsily wrapped about his skull when he was out cold on the high ground, on the last night they spent outdoors. The white-faced youths had not even attempted to dress his head with a new bandage, let alone bathe his tormented and filthy body.

Now he was sitting up, the pain deep inside his skull, and the constant swoop of nausea it transmitted, made him horribly aware of his desire for an X-ray. ‘Hospital. A doctor. My head.’ They continued to watch him without emotion. ‘I need help. Please.’

The youth who had been the goat defiantly raised the chin on his mournful grimacing face. ‘Soon.’ With that, he turned, ducked his head, and strode noisily at the tiny door. He must have been nearly seven feet tall; his height freakish within the dimensions of the room. Steel shin guards flashed upon the giant’s biker boots, where they shot out from the too-tight and short trouser legs. The thick heels of his boots were studded with either rivets or small nails.

The hare suddenly shrieked at Luke and stuck out a tongue so incongruously red between its liquorice-black lips, that Luke physically recoiled. On her fat dirty feet, she then skipped after the giant and squeezed herself through the doorway.

Luke looked to the remaining youth, who appeared even more idiotic when alone, dressed in his horrid nightgown, the narrow face daubed with clown paint.

‘My friends,’ Luke pleaded. ‘They were killed. Murdered. You have to call the police. Now. You hear me?’

Head tilted to one side, the youth screwed his face into a quizzical expression. Then, imitating the taller youth by adopting a deep voice and mocking tone, said, ‘You must understand, there is no police here. No doctors. You are many miles away from such things. But you are lucky to be alive. Very lucky, my friend. We have no phone. But someone has gone to fetch help for you. Soon it comes.’

Bewildered, Luke gaped from inside the reeking box bed. ‘I don’t—’

Within the nightgown, the figure puffed out its chest. ‘You are fine. Be cool.’ Then he turned, picked up the CD player, and followed his companions out the door.

The clunk of a heavy key inside an old iron lock preceded the heavy booming of three sets of feet through a hollow wooden space, or a corridor, beyond the walls of the room. And for a long time after they had left him alone, Luke stared in mute shock at the locked door.

FIFTY

The clunk of a big key in the old lock of the door roused Luke from where he sat in a daze, on the side of the box bed.

He stood up too quickly, and fell against the cabinet. The wooden mug clanged against the floor, the jug wobbled sideways and jetted its remaining contents across the cabinet surface. The unlocking and opening of the door became hurried.

Before Luke could fully right himself, he caught sight of a small elderly woman in a long dress, moving swiftly from the door towards him. Somewhere under the long black gown, which concealed her body right up to the furrowed chin, her little feet knocked loudly against the wooden floorboards. The sound hurt his head.

With the faintest touch of her small hands, she guided more than moved him back to the bed. Where he sat, squinting through the shuddering waves of pain that surged from the middle of his head before crashing behind his eyes. He thought he would be sick. His vision broke into silvery dots and the back of his neck froze. Then he was sick. A great squeezing inside his stomach forced a trickle of dirty liquid out of his mouth. The elderly woman muttered something in Swedish.

At the furthest reaches of his bilious senses, he detected the presence of another figure in the room. When it spoke, in what reminded Luke of Norwegian more than Swedish, he recognized the voice to be that of the youth who had worn the lamb mask.

The nausea drained from Luke and the walls of the room stilled. He looked again at the old woman. Her face was expressionless, but her small black eyes glimmered in sockets so old the skin around her eyes reminded him of walnut shells. What he could see of them was strange and intense. He could not look into them for long.

Her lips had sunk inside her mouth; the chin below was deeply grooved and whiskered. The bright white hair about the tiny head was very thick but short, and looked like she had cut it herself, with a knife and a fork.

He suddenly wanted to laugh madly at this apparition, but he found her weirdness also filled him with a muting unease. Her skin was grey and also yellowy in places, like the flesh of an ageing smoker. She could not have been an inch taller than four feet. From a distance she would resemble a child in a high-necked dress, which looked homespun. Another notion that contributed to his discomfort. About the front of her black gown was a floor-length apron, once white, but now soiled brown with old water marks.

‘I don’t come near you if you are going to puke,’ the grinning youth said from behind the elderly woman. The childlike lacy gown had gone from his skinny body. Instead he wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the name Gorgoroth and a photograph of a group of men, their faces horribly disfigured with white, black, and blood-red make-up. The cracked white paint on the youth’s face stopped under his chin, leaving his throat clean but still very pale. It was thin and made especially pointy with an Adam’s apple. Between his feminine hands he held a tray. ‘None of us can cook shit. We burn water! But she is OK. If you like fucking stew every day.’

Luke was not sure whether he should smile, or say thank you. He didn’t know why he was here, or who these people were. He said nothing.

On the wooden plate, dark floury vegetables were covered with a brown lumpy gravy.

‘We have drink. We make it ourselves, so it is very strong. Er … you call it … Moonshine. Moonshine! But maybe you puke very quickly if you drink it today, I think. So you get water.’

The tray was lowered and placed on the bed. Luke glanced at the youth’s tattooed arms; ink crawled in black vines around circular runes. On the inside of one forearm was a Thor’s hammer. A badly drawn inverted crucifix disfigured the back of a slender hand. Tucked inside his bullet belt was a long knife. The knife handle was made of dark bone. The blade was shiny against the dull leather of his trousers. The sight of it dried out Luke’s mouth.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘My name is Luke. I am hurt. I need … Please, I need for you to get help.’

The youth stood back. ‘Luke eh? I am Fenris.’ He smiled with pride. ‘You know what that means?’

Luke stared blankly at him.

‘It means Wolf.’ He pronounced it vulf. ‘Ha! Because I am very like the wolf, you know. As many have found out. And the other guy, his name is Loki. You know what it means?’

When no answer was coming from Luke’s stupefied face, he said, ‘Devil. Because, let me tell you, he is exactly that, my friend. And the girl with the great tits — though don’t tell her I say so — is called Surtr. A pretty name for a demon, eh? It means fire. Her name too, it is the same as she is. You understand me?’

‘Yes.’ Luke did not want to hear another word from the figure he found baffling, and utterly idiotic.

The old woman continued to stare at him, which unnerved him, even though he still avoided looking directly into her almost imperceptible eyes in that small collapsed face. She did not smile. He imagined she never had done.

‘So where you come from, Luke?’

‘London. England,’ he said automatically.

‘Ah, London,’ Fenris repeated, emphasizing the second syllable and pronouncing it ‘don’ not ‘dun’, like those with English as a second language often did. ‘One day, I think, we will play there. At the Camden Underworld maybe. I have never been, but Loki, he has been to London.’

Luke’s face felt heavy and almost ached from a lack of expression caused by his bemusement at the irrelevance of the youth’s chatter. He could think of nothing to say, and part of him resisted pleading for help; instinctively, he felt it would do him no good.

‘And how did you get from London to here, Luke?’

Luke looked at the floor, closed his eyes on the pain of recollection more than from the discomfort caused by the thin light. ‘A holiday.’

The youth remained quiet, thinking hard on what Luke had just said. Then suddenly laughed, and laughed, and could not seem to stop. Eventually, he wiped at his eyes, smudging black eye make-up into white face-paint. ‘Some fucking holiday, eh?’ Then he laughed some more.

If two of his friends had not been butchered so horribly, and the third gone missing, he might have seen the funny side of it too. Instead, the man’s giggling made him angry. But the sharpness of rage was welcome compared to the anxiety he could not swallow. And his irritation proved a refreshing respite from the sickish skittering of nerves in his gut, which seemed to have rendered him strengthless. ‘My friends died. Out there. In the forest. We got lost. We were attacked. By an …’

‘You took the wrong path, my friend. Let me tell you that.’

‘What do you mean?’

For the first time since they met, the youth stopped grinning, or pulling stupid facial expressions and fooling about. He was suddenly serious. He looked over his shoulder at the open door, then back at Luke. ‘What did you see?’

‘What do you mean?’

Fenris grinned, shrugged. ‘Your friends, how did they die?’

‘They were killed … by something. Out there. In the trees …’ Luke was confused; was lost for words. Did the right words even exist to explain what had happened to poor Hutch? And Phil? Dom too? Luke dipped his head, then looked up at Fenris. Why was he grinning?

‘What were their names?’ Fenris asked, but more to change the subject Luke suspected, than through any genuine interest in his friends.

‘Why?’

‘No reason.’ The youth straightened his face and pulled what he must have imagined was a fierce evil expression. Then seemed to grow bored of that pose, and grinned again instead. ‘So what do you do in London, Luke?’

Luke’s suspicion flexed. He’d been found with no ID; his passport and wallet were lost in one of the discarded rucksacks. He wondered what he should say, how he should answer the questions the youth had probably been sent to ask him. ‘I sell CDs.’ Say as little as possible, he decided.

‘You like music?’ The youth seemed excited by this possibility.

Luke stayed quiet. But looked at the man’s shirt.

‘You heard Gorgoroth?’ Fenris asked.

‘Of them.’

‘Uh?’

‘I have heard of them.’

‘You know true black metal?’

Luke shrugged.

‘Which bands?’

Luke became annoyed at himself for trying to think of the name of bands whose CDs they sold from the tiny black metal section of the shop. ‘What does it matter?’

‘It doesn’t. Which bands?’

Luke sighed. ‘Dimmu Borgir.’

The youth spat. ‘Poseurs!’

‘Cradle of Filth.’

The man shrugged, indifferent, yawned.

‘Venom?’

He smiled. ‘The masters! Now we are getting somewhere, Luke from London.’ Then he lowered his voice into a deep mocking tone and frowned. ‘But you clearly need to be educated, my friend. You need to hear Emperor. Dark Throne. Burzum. Satyricon. Bathory. And you will hear them all while you are our guest in this forest of eternal sorrow. And maybe, maybe, if you are a very good boy, we play you Blood Frenzy too.’ The youth feigned disappointment at Luke’s lack of recognition of the name, and at his continuing bewilderment. ‘Blood Frenzy! My band. You work in a CD store, and you have not heard of Blood Frenzy. Luke! Very stupid of you.’

‘Fenris.’

At the mention of his name, the youth stopped grinning. ‘That is my name.’

‘I need to take a piss.’

Fenris barked an order at the old woman, who had done nothing but stare at Luke since her arrival. Slowly, she moved across the room and vanished through the door, her little feet loud against the uneven floorboards.

Luke removed his eyes from the open door, trying to suppress the keen interest in it they had revealed. ‘And then I want my clothes, Fenris from Sweden.’

‘Norway! I am Norwegian. A Viking!’

‘OK, Fenris from Norway. I want to leave here. Thank you for taking me from the forest. I would have died otherwise. But my friends were murdered, and I need to report it. And now you and your friends are making me feel nervous.’

Fenris smiled. ‘Then you are a very wise man, Luke from London. Because wolves and devils and fire are to be feared when they are on the wild hunt.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Fenris grinned his yellow grin.

The elderly woman returned to the room, with a large wooden bucket she could barely carry. A very old one, a museum piece, the sides bound with circular iron bands. Fenris watched her struggle, but made no attempt to help her.

The voice of the second youth suddenly boomed from downstairs. He spoke in what Luke had correctly suspected was Norwegian. Fenris rolled his eyes. ‘I must go, Luke. But we will speak again.’ He nodded at the chamber pot the old woman had placed at Luke’s feet. ‘Please, feel free to piss.’ He turned and walked to the door. The old woman clip-clopped loudly after him.

Luke heard the key turn in the door lock. ‘Why? Why lock it? The door?’ he called out.

No one answered him.

FIFTY-ONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

No, it didn’t fit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But what to do? To do? To do?

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

FIFTY-TWO

Feet boomed up a staircase beyond the walls of his room; waking him. He sat up and made a feeble sound. The footsteps banged down the corridor outside.

Luke remained motionless on the bed, closed his eyes to a squint, hoping it might deter another visit.

It did not.

Fenris came in through the door, but left it wide open behind him; a long iron key dangled from the outside of the lock. Fenris was holding something in his hands. ‘Luke! Wake up! You have slept for long enough, my friend. You are missing the party! Look. Look here.’

The bedding dipped sharply near his feet. As Fenris landed on his backside, the impact rolled Luke into the side of the box. He clutched his head. ‘Careful!’ The force of his own voice surprised him.

‘Sorry,’ Fenris said, automatically. ‘I am sorry.’

‘I think my skull is fractured.’

‘Look here.’ Fenris thrust a hand out clutching black-and-white photographs. His breath smelled vile, like spoiled milk, and vomit. Luke winced, drew away from the weaving drunken figure with the painted sweating face.

‘The nausea. My headache. I think I have a fracture.’ He was wasting his breath.

Fenris’s eyes struggled to focus on him. ‘Blood Frenzy,’ he shrieked in an imitation of the screaming vocals on the recording still blasting outside the house. Luke winced; it hurt his ears, his head. He then tried to make himself seem oblivious to the open doorway behind Fenris, but it seemed to call to him. His thoughts fell over each other. Was there a town near the house? How far could he walk? Was that wise when so near the trees at night? Were these even the trees of the same forest they were lost inside, and had died inside?

‘Look!’ Fenris was getting annoyed at his failure to examine the photographs. Luke picked them up off the bedclothes.

Publicity shots of Fenris, Loki and one other man with incredibly long white-blond hair. Poses of shirtless figures holding swords, faces painted, grimacing at the camera. Some were taken of the three figures in the snow. Blackened wintry trees formed a skeletal backdrop to their posturing. In the winter shots they held their instruments. Loki played guitar; it looked like a banjo in his huge long-fingered hands. Fenris held drum sticks. This role seemed to make sense to Luke, as drumming would be the only thing to contain his fidgeting, his energy, and it also produced a lot of noise.

The third figure he had not seen at the house. He was slender, tall, and boyishly beautiful despite the white face-paint, in turn festooned with thin black cracks. His hair was lustrous, feminine, and his whole demeanour was somehow at odds with the other two musicians. He seemed to command a stillness about him the other two could only mimic. Was he the one who had gone for help?

They all wore leather trousers, big boots, studded belts. They liked bullets, tattoos, inverted crosses. There were over a dozen photographs, all featuring the same trio making themselves look as ominous, or evil, or hideous, or insane, or imperious as they could manage when shirtless with painted faces. Luke had seen similar before in Kerrang! Metal Hammer — the magazines they stocked in the shop. He always flicked through them, but it wasn’t his thing. He listened to and avidly collected classic rock, blues, outlaw country, folk, Americana. Always had done. Though he had not taken too much interest in the outré genre of heavy metal, he knew black metal was a Scandinavian thing. Didn’t they burn some churches in the nineties? They were Satanic. It was an underground anti-authoritarian thing. He knew little else, but was pretty sure his ignorance would soon be corrected by Fenris. The thought made him feel more tired than he had imagined it was possible to be. And why they produced such music in the social utopia of Scandinavia puzzled him. Perhaps it was a protest to being the most spoiled people in Europe; an act of rebellion against having everything.

At the bottom of each photo the logo of Blood Frenzy was printed, as was Nordland Panzergrenadier Records, and a P.O. Box address in Oslo.

Fenris dropped a CD into Luke’s lap. Then sat back, his arms crossed, his chin raised, his monstrous face grimacing. ‘You have that in your store?’

The cover artwork featured a wintry northern landscape so dark it was hard to determine much definition. Gassy whitish mist or light trailed from a patch of water in the bottom left-hand corner of the photograph. Or was it a painting? The band’s logo was red and inscribed like streak lightning at the top of the cover.

Luke turned the case over and saw one of the press shots on the rear, featuring the three figures in the snow, holding broadswords in warrior poses. A track listing was stamped in Germanic writing down the left-hand side. He lacked the energy, interest and inclination to read the song titles. Feeling irritable, sullen, exhausted, he just shrugged and tossed the case back towards Fenris.

‘You don’t know!’ Fenris lashed out and slapped Luke’s face.

Luke jolted back and against the end of the bed like he had been electrocuted. They stared at each other. Fenris’s blue eyes had narrowed, darkened. He looked psychotic. Luke swallowed. And then the figure was suddenly smiling again, as if pleased with Luke’s reaction.

A bully. A pissant little fuck. ‘Don’t fucking touch me again.’

Fenris made a big deal of looking afraid. ‘Or what will you do to me, Luke of London? Eh? Who work in the CD store, but do not know of the most evil band in the whole world! You must work in a faggot store. Sell music for pussies.’ He laughed loudly at his own wit.

Luke thought of kicking Fenris in the face, with the heel of his foot, right into his dirty teeth. The disorientating throb of pain between his ears told him that maybe it was not the right moment. But he welcomed again the heat of anger building inside him; he’d had enough of this. ‘We just don’t get much demand for devil-worshipping horse shit.’

Fenris stopped laughing. Sat bolt upright. The energy of his body changed. Slowly, he moved off the bed, not once breaking his glare from Luke. The youth’s addled face seemed to have reddened under the white paint. He had made Fenris so angry, the youth could barely breathe. When he managed to speak, his voice was low and mean. ‘Devil? The devil? That what you think? Eh? We worship the devil? You don’t know anything! We use the devil only because we hate the Christians. It is Odin who lives in us. It was Odin all along.’

He clenched both hands into fists. Closed his eyes. Gritted his teeth into a snarl. ‘See how Christians poison us! We can only call things by their names. It is Odin, great Wotan, who mutters in our blood. What Christians say is evil is our religion. We are warriors. Wild, you know! We are open to nature. We feel no pity!’

‘Sure. OK.’ Luke did not know what else to say. His entire body tensed. He looked about for the wooden spoon.

And then Fenris gave it to him, speaking so quickly that Luke only seemed to hear bits of what the drunken youth jabbered at him. It would have all sounded ridiculous, had three of his friends not been killed in the forest. ‘We have no pity for your friends. They were weak, they died. End of the story. Old Gods require blood sacrifice! They are, how you say?’ He paused, sneering, for a few seconds to choose the word. ‘Ruthless! Yes, they are ruthless!’

Luke slowly moved off the bed. Fenris was unstable, becoming hysterical, a maniac drunk; his whole body was trembling.

The youth turned his body and followed Luke with his cold blue eyes in that horribly painted face. ‘We ride with Odin. He our guide. He lead us. He lead us through our blood. You cannot believe what is here. What lives here. You cannot believe it.’

‘You’d be surprised what I now believe. But chill, yeah?’

Fenris was not to be calmed. ‘Our blood whispers to burn the church, we burn it. Our blood says kill a faggot … a, a, a immigrant … a drug dealer. We kill them! Our blood says, come home. You are ready for the old one of the forest. God of … of … of your people. You come home. You are ready, because you have proven yourself to be true Oskerai! Who ride wild ’til Ragnarok comes. It is not some fucking devil! Some Christian shit! It is older Gods who speak to us.’ Fenris clutched the knife handle at his belt.

Luke raised both hands, palm first. ‘Sure. I get it. But I’m tired. I hurt. Please. Just calm the fuck down. Please.’

But the youth continued to sway towards him, blue eyes bulging in the cracked white face. ‘We are Vikings. And now we rise. Through our blood, and through the soil of the forest, he speaks to us. Same with the Nazis. Wotan came back to them. Even Jung prove this.’ Wild of face, delirious with adolescent passion for his idiot theory, he drew the knife from his belt. Luke’s legs felt like they’d vanished. He shuffled his naked feet so he knew where they were.

‘We do something no one else has done. Ever in the history!’

With the curved blade steely black, brandished and held aloft, Fenris snarled and jabbed it in the direction of the small window of the room. ‘We shit on the Christian altars. No problem. Then we kill faggots like you! No problem. But it’s not new. It’s very much fun I can tell you, to be this evil. But it is not … not … Fuck it! The words, the words! Original! It is not original. But we will be the first leaders of black metal to summon a real God of old. Something you maybe have seen with your own eyes. And will see again, soon. We have prepared ourselves to meet a God. You better do the same, my friend.’

Luke edged away from the swaying figure, but the corner of the cabinet was soon pressing at his spine.

Fenris struggled to focus his eyes. ‘In these woods is a real God! Not some Christian shit. Or some fucking devil. This place is sacred. Here there is real resurrection. It is Blood Frenzy who make music of Gods.’

When the tip of the knife was within a foot of his eyes, Luke swung the jug from behind his head, in an arc, and so quickly he surprised himself. And delivered its heavy wooden base upon the side of Fenris’s skull.

There was a moment of surprise on the young man’s face. And a terrible hollow-coconut sound echoed inside the room. The figure dropped the knife, took two steps backwards. His eyes closed. He suddenly looked like a child about to cry.

Luke swung the jug against the side of the man’s head again. It did not break. But thudded, bounced off his skull. Fenris fell sideways, onto his knees. Luke raised the jug a third time.

But before he could strike again, something heavy and naked moved quickly into the room. He turned his head a fraction. Sucked in his breath.

The insane face of the mottled hare came at him so fast he gasped. Two chubby fists struck his face. At least three times, before he dropped the jug and managed to seize one of the girl’s wrists. It was doughy in the palm of his rough hand. The hare’s feet stamped and kicked at him. They whirled sideways, like a pair of drunks performing some ludicrous dance.

He shrieked as her nails raked down his cheek. He thought one of his eyes had been clawed out. Hot salty water blurred his entire vision. Or was it blood?

There was a long pause when nothing happened, and he was only able to detect a watery outline of the hare, swimming before his eyes. And then a small fist thumped down and into the open wound on his scalp.

FIFTY-THREE

Luke came to on a grubby floor, and wondered where he was. Looked up, at where the screaming voice so garbled with rage and grief was issuing from.

He saw tall Loki clutching the hare to his chest. Holding her back. Back from him.

Fenris was on his knees, moving groggily towards the door, moaning to himself.

The girl kept up her shrieking. It was like glass smashing inside his head. Luke tasted blood in his mouth. His head was cold, wet, opened. He touched his face. Then put his fingers in front of his squinting eyes. They were slick, bright red.

Nothing could stop the girl from screaming and kicking her small fat feet in his direction. Until Loki lifted her from the floor and heaved her away, towards the door. ‘Let me cut him!’ she screamed in English, directing her bristly face at Luke. ‘Let me cut him.’

Loki shouted at her in Norwegian. But the girl was inconsolable. The glassy eyes of the hare seemed to fix on Luke, where he lay with a face all shiny and hot and wet. ‘Let me cut him, Loki! Let me cut him up, Loki!’

‘No! Then there will be nothing left. Think. Think. Think,’ he repeated, though with his accent, it sounded like he was shouting, ‘Sink, sink, sink.’

Fenris fell to his elbows, placed his head face down on the floor, and started a rhythmic moaning that made him sound like a child. His black hair puddled around his head. Luke stared at the man’s ribs and the bony vertebrae under his blue-white skin. They were children, Luke thought. Kids. Damaged kids.

The kicking girl grew tired. She struggled less, then relaxed her body and started to sob. ‘I want to. I want to,’ she said.

‘Not yet,’ Loki said, and held her very tightly.

FIFTY-FOUR

If the hare had picked up Fenris’s knife, he would be dead. He would have bled out, brightly and hopelessly on the dirty floor of this room. An image flashed into his imagination, of his dirty skin parted into long red mouths. He shut down his eyes and his disordered thoughts upon such a vision.

The argument still raged below. On the ground floor. Sporadically, Loki’s voice rose out of necessity to force down the cries of the girl. For the first time in a while, Luke could not hear Fenris.

A chair scraped loudly across a floor, then toppled on to its side. Glass smashed. Upstairs in his little room, Luke flinched.

He used his forearm to dab at the blood trickling down his forehead. His head was hot and weightless, and there was a swelling behind his eyes. The actual gash didn’t hurt so much any more. But it would do again. Soon. Endorphins had merely surged. Their good work was temporary. It always was.

The fight made him feel better. Stupidly so, because he had made things much worse for himself. Security would be tightened, grudges had formed, faces would have to be saved, revenge needed to be taken. Inevitable, predictable, childish; the consequences of being human. It was the way of things. The ground rules were just being established between him and them. Every new grouping of people formed a hierarchy. And he was at the bottom of this one; a disempowered witness to their moronic sadism. That was his role.

‘How? How?’

Below, the girl made a chesty groaning sound, like she had screamed and sobbed herself dry. Loki’s voice rumbled. Still no sound from Fenris.

Luke sat down on the box bed and wished he had water to drink. Strangely, he also hoped he had not hurt Fenris badly. He took no pleasure in the look of animal pain he had caused.

At last his mind was really beginning to wake itself up. He welcomed this new urgency. Healing needed to be deferred, if that was at all possible. He needed to bite down on the pain and get the fuck out fast.

He had been taken from danger, from imminent mortal danger, but then enclosed in a stinking bed in an airless room in an old house, and left unaware of the location of the house. A person needs to know at least that to feel comfortable; needs to know where they are in the world. Ever since Hutch decided on taking the short cut, he was finished with not knowing precisely where he was. ‘Fuck you, H.’

But when you have taken a person into your care, and you feed them, shelter them, but do not attend to what could be a serious head injury, and Sweden is a modern country with emergency services, hospitals, even helicopters when required, then …

Luke pulled his dirty fingers down his wet face, utterly confounded by the absurdity and the impossibility of the situation.

They would tell him nothing. Fenris evaded his questions. No useful information would be forthcoming from his hosts; he sensed that much. He was being kept here against his will. So escape should be his only focus. Because the masks, the music, the screaming, the fire down there in the dark grass: it was all leading to a terrible conclusion.

He’d tried not to think about that thing in the woods, of what killed his friends. Until now he had been too ill and hurt and tired to do so. But his dealings with it were not over. Of that he was certain.

They were here for it too. Blood Frenzy. And they had revealed their identities through the silly demoniac names that could be easily traced through the P.O. Box in Oslo and the name of the record company. And if there was any truth to Fenris’s bragging, about what they had been up to, then his release from here was not imminent. They were on the run.

He thought of the freaky old woman. Wondered about her.

Slow heavy feet boomed up the stairs. Broke his thoughts apart and into a rout.

He tensed. Looked about for a weapon. The jug was still in the room, on its side, intact; incredibly intact. And the bucket. He went for the jug, gripped its worn handle. Images of Fenris’s curved knife came into his mind and he shivered. He could not stop the shivers, or the trembling that took hold of his jaw.

‘Luke? It is Loki.’ No attempt was made by Loki to enter the room.

They were wary of him now. That’s good. Wary is good. They are just kids anyway. Fenris is a bull-shitter, a big mouth. They haven’t killed anyone.

Luke stood a few feet from the door and gave himself enough room to swing the jug. ‘Yeah.’

‘Good, you are listening.’

‘All ears.’

‘Of this I am very pleased, Luke. Because you need to listen very good. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tonight, you make a big mistake.’

‘I do?’

‘Yes you do, my friend, you do.’

‘He came at me with a knife. What am I supposed to do?’

‘If he wanted to kill you Luke, you would already be dead. You understand?’

‘Not really.’

Loki sighed. ‘Fenris has killed before. To him, killing is nothing. You see?’

Luke felt his skin go cold. Heat seemed to be draining away from his body through his own feet.

By an act of will, he forced the implications of what Loki had just said from his mind, and in much the same way that he had censored the vision of his knife-ruined flesh before. He had to keep holding himself all together or it was over. ‘When it is me he threatens, it means something to me, Loki. You understand that?’

‘He was not going to hurt you. He like you. Is glad you are here with us. He gets bored with me and Surtr. You see, me and Surtr are together and Fenris is the one left out. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘But now you have no friends here, Luke. You messed it up.’

‘He was no friend, Loki. And I’m no fool.’

Loki guffawed. ‘I never said you were, Luke. You want to survive. You fight. You are not weak. And I respect that. You are special. Which is why you survive and your friends die. Yes? Fenris was foolish to take his eye off you, that is all. But he learn a valuable lesson. I would prefer him not to know this lesson again, because now I have work to do. To be the peacemaker, yes?’

Luke stayed quiet. He found himself desperately trying not to like Loki.

‘Are you still with me, Luke?’

‘Yes!’

‘Good. But please you are guest, so do not shout. OK?’

‘OK.’

‘Thank you.’

‘My friends, Loki. Did you kill my friends?’

‘No we did not, Luke. I cannot tell you precisely what happened to them, but soon I wish to find out—’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Luke! It is I who is speaking. So listen to me. Now you must be careful and … how they say? Sleep light. Because someone in this house, not far from your bed, they very much want to kill you.’

‘You tell Fenris that I am sorry. I hit him because I thought he was going to hurt me. And I am very tired of being hurt, Loki. Can you understand that? My friends have been murdered and I want … I just want all of this to end.’

‘I understand, Luke. And it will all end soon.’

This statement made him mad with hope until he realized that Loki was probably talking about a completely different ending to his story.

‘But Fenris is not your problem,’ the deep-voiced giant said into the door. ‘He is mad at you, yes. He hoped you would be good company for him while you wait.’

‘Wait for what?’

‘I have not finished, Luke—’

‘What, Loki? What am I waiting for? Eh? The police. Because that is who will be coming very soon.’

‘I do not think so, Luke. Do not give yourself false hopes, my friend. You are far too important for us to give away to the police. And they are the last people we want to see. But I am sure they would like to meet us.’ Loki laughed to himself. Disingenuous, but deep laughter. ‘I tell you very soon, my friend. All in good times. But tonight’s party was for a very good reason. As you will soon see. But you must be patient a little while longer, Luke. Until then, you must understand what it is I am saying about your behaviour as a guest in this house.’

‘I am trying, Loki. I am trying very hard to understand why I am being kept here against my will.’

‘Your will is strong, Luke. But please let me tell you the problem you have right now. Yes?’

‘Yes. Yes. Yes. Tell me, Loki.’

‘When I say you have a very big problem in this house, I do not lie, Luke. But it is not Fenris. He has a sore head, but he don’t kill you. Your problem is Surtr, Luke.’

‘You keep your mad bitch away from me. OK, Loki? How’s that, mate?’

‘I will try my best, Luke. But I must sleep also. And she is very absolutist.’

‘I don’t follow?’

‘She likes to stab, Luke. To cut. She is a little crazy in her ideas. One time we got this guy and she … Well, let me make you imagine a man who tries to run with no toes on his feet. It was a very funny thing to see, I can tell you. And she never stop with his toes. All of him fits inside this … this … baggage. You know, the airport baggage?’

Luke thought he might be sick again. He needed to sit down. Tried to bring the strength back into his arms.

‘I think you understand me, Luke. So I ask a favour from you. You do as we say. Which mean, no more fighting, my friend. I leave you to think on this.’ His footsteps began to retreat down the corridor outside.

Luke moved to the door. ‘I need water. Loki. Water.’

The loud footsteps returned to the other side of the door. ‘I bring it.’

‘Hot water. A bandage.’

‘Not possible.’

‘Some painkillers. Headache tablets.’

‘Not possible.’

‘Cigarettes, please.’

‘Not possible.’

‘Tell you what, call an ambulance. Right now.’

‘Not possible,’ Loki said, without a trace of humour.

Wincing, as even the minutiae of limited mobility seemed to make his swollen brain collide painfully against the insides of his skull, Luke moved his body across the bedding to the side of the bed. Slowly, he hooked his legs over and then stood upright. Even with his head supported by both hands, he felt unbalanced, seasick.

He gulped at more of the stale dusty water, straight from the jug. It trickled round each side of his mouth and spattered down his naked chest. Besides his damp underwear, they had removed all of his clothes. He felt too ill and anxious to explore the reasons why. But there were no medical supplies here, and they were not going to let him go. Those were the new facts. The new rules binding his life. What was left of it.

A terrible bolus of emotion suddenly came up from behind his sternum where it had been stored in his worn-out heart. It rushed, burning, through him. He knelt on the floor. Bent over, sobbed.

His throat was thick with an emotion that could have been loneliness, or sadness, or self-pity, or despair, or all of these things at once. He didn’t know, but he thought anything, even death, was better than feeling this way.

He was hurting. So much. His head. He wanted it to stop. Would offer anything for a painkiller. Up and down his back, and around his calf muscles where thorns had curled and torn, the scratches shrieked with their own tiny voices. Even between his fingers there were cuts he could not recall the cause of.

He looked at the dirty swollen skin of his hands and forearms. And to think, he’d believed himself saved. His chest tightened and his skin pinpricked cold; the sensation felt horribly familiar.

Lying on the wooden floor, he curled into himself, held his broken head, and quietly wept until he was exhausted by the effort of producing tears.

FIFTY-FIVE

After the sobbing of Surtr finally ceased downstairs, Luke rested on top of the musty eiderdown and listened to the night. Dry blood stiffened and cracked upon his face. There were no electric lights inside the room. No power sockets. No electricity. So when the world outside went dark, so did the room, and the house around it. The coastal sounds of the trees swished near the house, but rose in deeper longer waves further out, stirred by the first strong wind he could remember since he’d arrived in Sweden.

He listened to the wind until a new commotion of footsteps came up the stairs. He assumed it was the youths and the old woman, rising to murder him. Luke tensed, stopped breathing.

Someone banged about in a room further down the corridor outside of his room — maybe two sets of feet — and then a door closed on those sounds. Other sets of feet shuffled and bumped downstairs, on the ground floor, but to destinations in other parts of the building.

He sucked in his breath, relaxed back into the mattress. His captors must have been going to their beds to sleep; some of them had gone into a room on this storey of the house. He sensed that it was a large building; it creaked and yawned like an old sailing ship, and he could hear the adjustments of its timbers in the distance. Sometimes he thought he could feel the floor under the bed moving too. He doubted the building was structurally safe.

Eventually, despite the headache and nausea, he fell into a coma of exhaustion.

To wake from a disorientating dream that involved him turning round and round and looking at a moon-white sky. Something had broken him from sleep. Noises. Above his room.

It must have been well after midnight. It was pitch-black outside and the sky through his little window had not yet begun to lighten for dawn.

But floorboards of a room directly above the ceiling of his room were creaking. And there was a faint bumping up there too. No scratching like the activity of mice or birds, but the shifting sounds of motion from a more substantial presence. Or presences.

Yes, he became sure that something, bigger than a dog or cat, was on the move upstairs, fumbling about. The pattern of movement brought to his imagination the image of several small children, blind and stumbling round the walls of an enclosed space, looking for a way out. He pushed the image from his thoughts. It was not the kind of thing he wanted to think about on his own in the dark.

Gingerly, he edged himself off the bed. The floor emitted a loud and lasting crack. Up above him all fell silent. He paused, held his breath and strained his ears for a few seconds. Then trod carefully upon the floor again. The silence of night amplified his movements as if through loud speakers.

He swore silently. The house was listening. The darkness was following him.

Nothing was moving above him now, but its presence still conveyed the sense that whoever it was had begun to listen intently to his movements.

He started to panic. Whimpered. He needed to act. To do something. Now.

At the window, he quickly moved his hands around the frame, then the glass. Could see nothing through it. The stars and moon were blotted out by cloud. The window was definitely too small to crawl through if he punched the glass out. His shoulders would not fit. The drop would snap an ankle anyway, maybe two. He shuddered. No more pain. Please.

Testing sections of the floor before he gave them his full weight, he moved unevenly across the room to the door. Pressed himself against it, felt its contours with the palms of his hands, turned its handle uselessly, implored it to have a flaw that would allow him to leave. But the door was solid. An old thing, not a moulding, no hardboard involved in its construction. He scratched at the thick hinges. He’d need a crowbar to get this bastard out of the frame.

On his hands and knees, he moved about the floor. Using the tips of his fingers, he picked at the spaces between the gappy floorboards, wanting to break through them with his bare hands. Puffs of cold air and dust came up at him, silent exhalations from the building’s internal air currents. Beneath his hands, the floor was like the door: solid, ancient. He picked and pried, dirtied his already dirty knees. He gritted his teeth and silently called down curses upon the place.

Upright again, he then moved about the walls, shuffling his feet. The plaster was moist in places; powdery under the paintwork in other areas. He wondered if he might dig through the wall at one of these weak points with a shard of the broken jug or bucket. He was giving it serious thought when the activity above his head interrupted his considerations.

Voices.

Whispering voices.

Thump, bump, thump: the sounds of small bodies.

He moved into the middle of the room, at the foot of the bed, and something up there followed him. A pattering of babyish feet tracked across the ceiling to where he stood. Directly above him.

Luke moved towards the window. The little footsteps followed.

‘Hello,’ Luke said.

Silence.

Louder this time. ‘Hello.’

No reply.

‘Can you hear me?’

No one answered, but he was sure that a second tangible presence above him was attracted to the sound of his voice. Because another small form was now being dragged, or was dragging itself across the floor above. It could have been no bigger than a child, because the shuffling sound was so light, so delicate. It bore no weight, but merely scuffed at the old floorboards.

There was more whispering now too. Several papery voices were rustling up there. He could not make out a single word, but perhaps a note of optimism now defined their tone.

This summoned a third participant. Up there. From the far corner of his room, he heard another set of steps move across the ceiling, towards his position beside the window. But this figure was moving incredibly slowly, as if every step was a terrible effort. The sound of the footsteps was also hard, hollow and woody, as if this individual was wearing shoes with tipped heels, or was using crutches. It was more of a slow careful knocking than a skitter or dragging motion like the first two presences had made.

‘I can hear you. English? Do you speak English?’ he called out, softly.

The whispering intensified, then died away.

Silence.

This was going nowhere. Who did they have up there? Children? He thought of Fred and Rose West’s house in Gloucester, of the entombed captives suffocated in the walls. Recalled bits of what he knew about the degradation of the victims of degenerate killers. Dharma, Manson, the Green River Killer, Brady, Nielsen, the Night Prowler, and all of the stranglers and slashers with their hall of fame on cable television. He thought of their victims kept captive, toyed with, despatched, even fucked, often eaten. These thoughts made him feel so weak, he thought he should sit down.

Then he clenched his fists, ground his teeth. Wanted to bellow at the impossibility, the absurdity, the unfairness of it. There was simply no preparation in life for the determined madness of others.

Realizing he had either been holding his breath, or taking shallow breaths since hearing the movements above him, he greedily sucked the musty air of the room into his lungs. And shivered. It was so cold now. His feet were frozen; he wondered if they had gone blue. He became angry again because he had no clothes. Maybe his clothes were in a terrible state, or maybe his disrobement was a tactic.

He touched the tacky furrow that ran across the top of his skull. It feels worse than it is, he told himself, but wasn’t sure whether he believed this.

He made his way towards the vague outline of the box bed. A little rest and warm-up and he’d be in a better place to deal with this, with them. Tomorrow, he would have to make his play.

The thought made him sickly and strengthless again, and he vainly wished he had not struck Fenris. They’d be on their guard now. But he had to do something. Maybe dig at that plaster first. Yes, take a rest, then break that jug with the bucket, as quietly as possible inside the bedclothes. Start carving the plaster while Blood Frenzy slept off their moonshine and frolics. They were going to kill him anyway. Fucking up the wall was the least of his worries.

He sat down on the bed. Gaped into space. Kill him anyway. He wondered how it would feel to die. Maybe just darkness came after.

Up above his head all was quiet again, but he imagined that whoever was up there was now listening to his thoughts.

Luke lay back. The bed stank like a farm animal, but at least it was warm.

FIFTY-SIX

He stood at the window. The sky was white with moon. It filled the atmosphere like a planet about to bump into the earth. Stretching away forever before the house, the forest of so many tall black trees was still, but not silent. Strange cries issued in the distance, rising from down amongst the cold lightless spaces, beneath the canopy of great branches, that were like muscular arms raised to the luminous air in praise. Dark leaves upon the peaks of the tallest trees frosted in the falling brightness. Wondrous light, but not comforting light. Though he wished it were.

Behind him in the room, someone spoke to him in a tiny quick voice. A little person. What they said made sense to him, though he had never heard such things before in his life. He was not allowed to turn around.

And he felt an urge to go down there, to that whitish clearing beneath his window. Carved within the great ocean of never-ending trees, in this new world, was a circular flat space, carpeted with a soft pelt of shorn silvery grass. He felt euphoric before it, filled with a mad glee, but accepted it would be very hard to get out of the circle and the upright stones if he dared go down there. Down there to turn round and round, before the mouth of the dark stone chamber, while looking up at the white sky. He had done it before. Or had he? He wasn’t sure.

And in the treeline the figures cavorted. They were children. They were angels. Tears filled his eyes. They were dancing. Or they were stalking around the edge of the clearing. Or maybe their skipping movements, before they dropped to all fours, were a combination of dancing and stalking. Sometimes they rose up on two hind legs and waved, or clawed their thin white arms at the sky.

It was hard to see the little white people clearly, because of the sudden darting of their pale child bodies into the shadows of the forest. They never remained still for long, and flitted about constantly. But the longer he watched the more he glimpsed of their pinkish eyes and their whippy tails, blood-purple like earth worms, before they withdrew to the endless darkness beneath the treetops.

Through the glass of the window he strained his ears to hear their voices too, as they called up to him. They cried out for him to come down and do the turning before the black stones, under the white glare of sky. But then he thought the sound they made was more like barking, or coughing, and not voices calling at all. And he was uncertain whether children should have such square yellow teeth in their wide mouths. Clutched in their tiny white fists were bones. Long bones from legs and arms.

Then he understood that they put the bones inside the stone chamber. It was the chamber that he was to go inside, to wait for another to come. From out there. Deep and far out there, among the forever of black trees, something approached.

Behind him, the tiny voice and the skitter of tiny fast feet on the wooden floor stopped.

And, suddenly, he was inside the stone walls of the old chamber of upright stones and he could smell the earthy pungency of the dirt floor inside it. And in the thin light he saw the bones. All of the bones. The bones strewn about the dirt floor. Some still wet and dark. Bones gathered amongst the stones.

He pitched from sleep and cried, ‘Not in there. Not inside. Please.’

But the three figures about the bed all reached for him at the same time. Ashen faces cracked with black fissures, came in at him.

Fenris grinned. The whites of his eyes were incongruous and shocking within their black sockets. ‘We have found your friend. Come and see, Luke.’ His mouth was too red beyond the black lipstick, the tongue too visible, the teeth too yellow.

In his giant hands, Loki slapped Luke’s forearms together. Luke tried to pull his hands apart, but Surtr worked faster with the nylon hoop. It must have been circling his wrists before he awoke, and now a strap was tugged and the loop whizzed smaller. His flesh purpled under the binding. The skin immediately itched.

He was pulled into a sitting position. Fenris yanked the eiderdown off his legs. Cold air rushed in and his body seemed frail, ungainly. Shame warmed through Luke.

‘Up. Up,’ Loki said.

Fenris smiled at him. ‘Man, you stink.’

Luke rose to his knees. ‘No. You’re hurting … Stop.’ And then the pain in his wrists silenced him as Surtr pulled the strap even tighter. Tears melted the vision of her moon-face and her spiteful lipless smile.

Fenris gripped his hands while Loki shovelled a huge hand under his right arm. Together, they pulled him upright, then off the bed and on to his feet. Fenris smiled right into his face. ‘Big surprise for you today, Luke.’

Out of the room, then down a cramped wooden corridor they bumped and banged him. Surtr went first with wide bare feet padding across the wooden floors; her raised soles were as black as tar. Loki followed her, dipping his head to avoid smacking it against the ceiling and oil lantern; his bulk eclipsed the thin light in the narrow space. Close behind Luke, Fenris giggled. He felt the youth’s hot breath inside his ear.

All of them were excited, pushy, shoving, impatient. He wanted to scream at them to leave him alone, but the idea that Dom was here shocked him mute. He was alive then. Impossibly alive. He thought his heart was breaking. ‘Where did you find him? My friend?’

At the top of the stairs Loki turned his head, the long black hair swaying in an inky torrent. ‘He found us.’

Luke could barely breathe, let alone speak. ‘Is he all right?’

Fenris laughed and said, ‘Very well.’

Loki frowned at Fenris, then turned away.

‘Is my friend all right?’ Luke demanded, his disorientation lessening, the pain in his wrists turning to warmth.

‘These stairs are very old. They put you on your ass,’ Loki said.

Fenris pushed Luke from behind. He skittered down the first three steps. Fell against the old walls, righted himself. It was like standing on the deck of a small boat, or walking through a moving train. His balance was shot. Whether it was because he had just woken, or because his hands were tied, or because of his head injury, he didn’t know. And then he was at ground level, the floor solid beneath his naked soles. From the open front door, air fresh with damp and rain and earth engulfed him.

A cramped brownish hallway materialized. A murky kitchen led off it; inside he saw a black iron stove and chimney, an old wooden table with solid sides of plain board, chairs with rounded legs, peeling cabinets.

A bigger parlour, the walls dark with ancient timber and chaotic with antlers, skulls and blackened things, then came briefly into view through another doorway to his right. And then he was pushed from behind by Fenris again, and out through the open front door he went, and on to a sloping wooden porch.

The remains of the pyre from the night before blackened the grass. He could smell old smoke and wet ash.

To his left, the old woman stood on the porch. The sudden sight of her small body in the long dusty black dress, made him start. Tiny eyes glimmered in her collapsed expressionless face. The uneven ends of her short white hair were wispy in the day’s grim light. She merely watched him. The youths ignored her.

Luke jerked away from Fenris and stumbled after Loki.

Desperately, Luke cast his eyes about. ‘Dom. Mate. Dom!’ He desperately wanted to see his friend, and needed to get a sense of the house he was imprisoned within, and essay the grounds, but he only succeeded in a bewildered stumbling into the grass paddock before the porch. And then his eyes caught sight of something up high, straight ahead, caught in a tree like a hapless parachutist gone all limp. He looked away and gasped.

Then whipped his head back to see the tatty figure in the treeline, strung up directly before the front door; the spot below his little window. In his eyes, the reds and yellows of raw meat, and the sudden white of bone, clashed with the backdrop of dark wintry green.

‘We have summoned him wiv our music! See!’ It was Fenris shouting behind Luke.

Luke dropped to his knees. Looked at the grass and at his bound hands. Peered back up.

Mackerel light silted down and through the tree branches. Dappled with shadow, Dom’s face was perfectly still; white as candle wax across the unshaven cheeks either side of a thick bruised nose, but mired with dark blood around the mouth. His face seemed strangely expressionless, like he had been nonchalant about the circumstances of his final breath.

As if drunk and embracing the shoulders of friends on either side, Dom’s pallid arms were stretched out and hooked between two tree limbs about eight feet from the ground. His torso and legs drooped, appearing weightless now that everything had been looted from out of his rib cage. The glimmer of the vertebrae, still moist, was worse than the beard of blood around the gaping mouth. He had been peeled from the waist to his heavy thighs. A side of meat in a butcher’s window.

Luke’s vision went hazy, insubstantial, then whited out. He fell onto his side and looked back at the house. Saw it for the first time. It was made from wood, stained black by age. Had a pointy dark roof. Small windows.

Two sets of thick-soled boots, embedded with silver rivets from toe to heel, came and stood too close to his eyes.

‘Enough now. Just enough now,’ Luke said, though he wasn’t sure who he was talking to. ‘Not Dom. Not my friend. No more.’

‘We call to it, it come. Our music is raise magic,’ Fenris said, excitedly. When these words finally assembled into a sentence inside his mind, the information confused Luke. Then he realized he could feel nothing. Nothing at all, as if every nerve had been stripped from out of his body like wiring torn from a wall cavity. When he realized Fenris was not talking about Dom, but about the thing that had brought his remains here, he closed his eyes.

‘This is the most remote place in Scandinavia, Luke.’ It was Loki speaking to him now. ‘Where the oldest things can still be found, my friend. Here there are different rules. Different energies, you know.’ Luke continued to stare at the house.

Then Fenris was talking again, quickly, near where Luke lay in the grass in his dirty underwear, wrists bound with a plastic loop from a DIY store. ‘They kept it alive here. Kept it real.’

When he spoke next in his deep, softened voice, it was as if Loki was mollifying a confused child. ‘Something is pushing to the surface of the world, Luke. And in us too. Something terrible. Destructive. I sense it in you also. It pulled you in, eh? And all of your friends. Us too. But, I am sorry to say, that sometimes the innocent are sacrificed.’

Fenris was babbling, breathless with glee. ‘How do you think they have lived here? Lived for so long? No one fucks with them. They live as they please. It is the oldest forest in Europe. It is protected. That is why all this is still here.’

Loki’s voice remained passive, unshocked, unaffected by the ruin of a father, a husband, a friend, a man, up in that tree. ‘This is the land of our ancestors. Here Odin still rides. And you have to wake up and accept the wishes … the demands of something older and greater than you, Luke. That is all.’

He heard the voice of the old woman for the first time then. ‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas.’

Loki and Fenris stopped talking and turned to her. Luke looked at her wrinkled impassive face. Some thin grey teeth were visible inside her lipless mouth. ‘Det som en gang givits ar forsvunnet, det kommer att atertas,’ she said again, as if simply stating a fact. Her voice was cracked with age, but the intonation was strangely melodic.

Loki crouched down, swept a curtain of hair over one shoulder and tilted his crudely painted face towards Luke. ‘She says, what was once given, is missing. One will come to fetch it back.’

And then somehow Luke was on his feet, and the horizon of the forest was jumping in his eyes, and he was running on stiff awkward legs. Running away from it all.

Past the front of the house he went, then up the side of the building; a dark wooden wall rearing up on his right side, the forest blurring to his left. Behind the building a white pick-up truck with mud-plastered sides was parked before an overgrown orchard, the arrangement of the trees haphazard. Some of the tree branches hung heavy with dark-green fruit: cooking apples. A thin grassy track, grooved to clay in twin tyre tracks, travelled along the side of the sparse gathering of fruit trees, before vanishing round a bend.

Voices behind: Fenris whooped, then laughed like a jackal. Loki gave orders, his tone unhurried, methodical.

A glance over his shoulder. The girl ran after him. Ungainly, short legs pumping in tight black jeans; heavy bosom swinging in an oversized hooded top with something printed on the front. Her feet bare, white, thudding. Face round, excited.

Instinctively, Luke ran towards the clay track. It might lead somewhere. The ground would not be so uneven as the forest floor was bound to be. He could cut into the thick trees further down the track, drop and hide at ground level. The thought pushed him on, his exertions loud within his head. Every footfall jolted up his spine and seemed to widen the crack in his skull, which he would never believe was not there until he dared look into a mirror again. Not being able to pump his arms was slowing him down.

Eyes wild, teeth gritted, Fenris came at him from between the side of the truck and the shadowy rear of the house, looking to cut him off before he reached the track. A fat girl and a disturbed teenager with their faces painted like corpses, or demons, or whatever they thought they were, were coming for him.

Luke yanked at his wrist binding. Impotent fury welled up his throat. Even wearing big boots, Fenris was quick. Would have to be faced.

Luke stopped, turned. Thought of kicking him, heel first. The approach of the girl to his right, distracted him. Cheeks puffed, chest heaving, little hands balled into fists, her washed-out eyes widening: a high-pitched scream came out of her small mouth.

Fenris pulled up short. Grinned. Danced sideways. Backwards. Cried out something inarticulate, shrieky, triumphant.

A moment of indecision. Then Luke turned to the girl. She was almost upon him. He kicked everything he had into the gut of the rushing figure.

Her forward momentum knocked him off his back leg and he was falling. There was a look of surprise, then fear at being hurt, on her face, and she bowed away. The grassy turf came up too fast and slammed into Luke’s shoulders from behind.

Fenris laughed. Clapped his hands against his thighs.

The girl was bent double, silent, winded.

Luke sat up quickly, swivelled his weight onto one buttock. Bent his left leg at the knee to propel himself upwards.

The toe of Fenris’s boot struck him in the temple. Ice cracked inside his skull. Rivets opened his cheekbone. Red lights flared.

When his vision juddered back down and settled, he was looking at a dead grey sky and could not close his mouth or clench his jaw. His ear whistled and the side of his head thumped hot.

Again he tried to get up, but only succeeded in sitting before the girl’s snatching chubby fingers were in his hair. Something had come loose inside her, unhinged: he could see it in her eyes. A belligerent keening sound, like sobbing but harder, came out of her.

Whatever had dried shut along the top of his head, came apart under his hair with a sticky-tape sound and his scalp flooded hot. The pain made him go white all over; it enveloped him like an immersion in cold water would. He withered into a faint.

She pulled him back down to the earth, flattened his shoulders against the cold grass. He broke from the faint, but thought he would be sick. Couldn’t breathe. Thrust his hands upward, fingers locked like he was in prayer. His knuckles sank under her small flat chin. She made a sound like air escaping quickly from a cushion, until her mouth clamped shut on the sound.

Fenris stamped the corrugated sole of his big boot onto Luke’s face.

Gristle popped. A streak of nose pain took the last of the strength from his limbs. The rubber sole twisted, rearranging the skin, and his features with it.

Luke knew the fight was over. He was done. Spent.

Surtr crowded out the light, dropped her heavy round knees onto his shoulders. Straddled his face. Through the delirium of pain, he caught her scent. She was yoghurty, sour-creamy, sebaceous. He was smelling her cunt through a nose he knew to be smashed flat.

Holding his hair, making rippy sounds, she yanked his head off the ground, then smashed it back down. Up again, then down.

Then her weight was gone. Suddenly lifted clean off him. And Luke rolled onto his side and choked the rust rush of blood from out of his throat. Spat loops of bloody saliva from his mouth. The sight of it frightened him. In what little of his mind was still working at its frantic scattering of thoughts, he visualized his face disfigured, his skull open, the organ inside grey and shivering at the open sky. He prodded at his wet face with his fingertips. The skin was tight. An egg-shaped lump, hard as bone, had already risen where he had been kicked in the temple. Merely touching it made him feel sick, so he stopped.

Loki held on to his girlfriend, his acolyte, tightly. Spoke quickly and urgently into her disordered black hair. A smudge of her white face behind the fringe still peered intently at Luke, as if some urgent play had been disrupted by a parent.

Hung loosely over one of Loki’s shoulders was the dark wood of a stock and the dull gleam of gunmetal. A hunting rifle. If Loki’s white-faced devil hounds had not pulled him down, Loki would have shot him anyway. He was not leaving here. Luke lay back and closed his eyes on a grey world that did not seem to want him in it any more.

FIFTY-SEVEN

‘Luke. I am having the hard time keeping you alive right now.’ Loki’s eyes were bright and blue and smiling in the beam of dusty light that fell through the little window. Loki was in a playful mood, a good mood. Grinning, he tossed his mane of black hair over one shoulder. He didn’t seem so dour, so intensely serious now; it was as if the arrival of Luke’s butchered friend had relieved the tension in the air. And he was drunk. Beside the closed door he had propped the rifle against the wall.

Luke had been lying still for hours before Loki’s arrival. He could not breathe through his nose, which felt like it had swollen to four times its normal size, and his head was open like split fruit. Both of his eyes were swollen, one nearly shut. It felt puffy. He was covered in scores of hard red itching lumps from being bitten senseless by the bugs in the hideous bed. Scores of cuts and scratches covered his ankles and forearms, and he had not washed in a week. He stank. He was thirsty. He was hungry. He was broken. He realized he did not care about much any more.

And he hated himself for being relieved the giant was in a good mood. And he loathed himself for feeling some gratitude towards Loki too; since they dragged him out of the forest, Loki had now saved him from the other two twice.

But saved me for what?

He was tired of being helpless. Sick and tired of being sick and tired of this room, and of the stinking box bed in it, which would not dry and now reeked of his own ammonia. He had already been exhausted by his fear and pain and wretchedness before they even found him, and now the thin, indefatigable, but ultimately futile hope that had sustained him since he had awoken in this place was exhausting; the hope that somehow these young people would recognize some common humanity they shared with the dirty wounded man from the forest, and that upon recognizing that he was a good person, they would let him go. Its twin, the pathetic clawing infantile hope that help from the outside world would suddenly materialize way out here, was also exhausting. Hope was now more tiring than anything else. Its perpetual rise and fall through the terrible ache in his head, and its arrival and its disappearance while he passed in and out of consciousness, and while he moved from one strange world to awake in another crueller place, was more painful and more hateful to endure than the sadism of these adolescent bullies.

He supposed he was near the very end of himself.

At last. So at last he could stop caring. And before he could start dwelling on what he would miss in his life, and who might miss him back in the world, he now decided, quite calmly, that he just wanted it to end. And to end soon. Perhaps he could even hasten it. He smiled with broken lips.

‘Your tattoos are a fucking contradiction, Loki.’ His voice sounded thick, unrecognizable. Blood poured into his throat from the back of his nose and he coughed it onto his chest. Sat up. Spat his mouth empty. Looked at Loki and suddenly hated him so intensely and desperately, that when his loathing abated his mind was clear.

The giant paused in his expansive grinning. The morbid white face shook itself in mock surprise.

Luke continued. ‘You despise Christianity. Am I right? Your lot set fire to those old wooden Stave churches. Because you hate God. You have a pentagram on your chest, another one on your shoulder, and an upside-down crucifix on your stomach, should anyone need further proof that you are a devil-worshipping badass motherfucker.’

Loki laughed, slapped his thighs, then swigged from his drinking horn.

Luke would not be silenced. ‘Which all implies that you once believed in the devil. In Satan, Loki. But then you also have pagan tattoos. Heathen runes and shit like that. Old Norse runes all over your knuckles, Loki. A Thor’s hammer, I see. Pre-Christian. A different belief system. So I’m guessing that you and Fenris are all about Odin these days. Yeah? Which implies you do not believe in the Christian God, or the devil any more. So vandalizing those churches was a waste of time? Places raised by a depth of belief, centuries ago, that I doubt you can even begin to understand, Loki. I’ve seen them in Norway with my friend Hutch, who was murdered by that atrocity you worship. Those churches are beautiful. Symbols of a more lasting devotion than your fads and your fashions, mate. Because now you’re into something else. But these were places that once gave simple people comfort. It’s your country’s culture, it’s your own history. Sorry to sound like your fucking mom, Loki, but you’re a vandal. A wanker.’

‘Luke, I tell you now—’

‘So what do you believe in? What really is your fucking point? Why am I here? Because from where I am sitting, I have stopped trying to figure you out. I have no more interest in trying to understand anything about you stupid fucking morons. I don’t think you have a point, Loki. Any of you. You’re just a bunch of little shits that have crossed too many lines. And now you’re so damaged, you don’t even make sense to yourselves. So come on. Do it. Get it over with, you big bastard wanker.’

Loki raised his large face to look at the ceiling and smiled. Nodded. ‘Now this is just the attitude I am speaking with you about, Luke. That gets you in trouble here. But you know, I like your style. True, you are very er … misunderstanding my beliefs. Which is OK. As you are most probably the blind sheep, like everyone else. So I make allowances for you. Because you are asleep. But soon I think, you will be waking up.’

Loki rested his long back against the stained wall. He smiled, wistfully, which was immediately at odds with his painted-on grimace, then sighed. ‘You know, Luke. I miss fighting the church. The Christians. At least real Christians have the balls to judge me. You are with us, or you are damned. We learn that from them. It is true. To be absolutist. Fascistic. I like their style.’ He raised his two giant hands and shook his head, as if struck by a sudden revelation. ‘And you are not wrong about some things. To think we burned the oldest churches. I try not to have regrets, Luke, but that is one. I should have torched the new American shit, eh? Scientology or something. It’s even worse brainwashing for very unsophisticated people. But there are places where true and much older devotion exists, Luke. Like here.’

Loki eased his long body to the floor. Smiled wistfully. ‘I knew about it all my life, you know. I am from near this place. A bit south, in Norway. But close. This is still my true land. And I come back from the world to be here. To get away, you know? To come where there are no fucking Christians, no rules, no social democrats, or humanist bastards.’ He spat, then swigged from his horn. Despite the many competing odours about him in the room, and the state of his nose, Luke could taste the unpleasant yeasty miasma of Loki’s breath, even from where he was slumped inside the box bed.

‘We have awoken, Luke. And we want our fellow Vikings to awake too, you know. We show them how. Up here. And with our music. It will be special, Luke. We are working on something very intense, my friend. It will have the voice of the older Gods in it. Arise. Arise it will say.’

He pointed the horn at Luke. ‘Real magic, you know? That’s why I come. I decide to show the others what real magic is. I brought only the fittest with me, you know? Who have proven themselves to me. Proved they were evil enough. That they were … uncompromising. A word I like when I learn it. They prove they could kill and burn. They who are of blood and soil.’

Loki suddenly laughed. ‘Maybe too much, eh? Fenris! Not very smart, you think? He was already killing animals when I met him in Oslo, you know? No pets in his town, yeah. I say desecrate that grave, my friend. And he do it. So easy. Churches?’ Loki made a sound of something exploding and shaped the flames in the air with his big hands. ‘Kill a priest I once say when we are drunk.’ Loki nodded, grinning, as if merely recounting some absurd and trivial exploit of rebellion. ‘And he surely did.’

He straightened his face and adopted a more commanding posture. ‘To be a Viking, you must learn to be truly evil, Luke. Must be able to prove yourself in a blood frenzy. You know, you are very lucky. And I tell you this, because you are the first person to know this about us, who is still alive. Yes? OK, do not answer. But let me convince you.

‘We have killed nine people. Including two priests.’ Loki grinned, swigged again from his horn. ‘Not bad, eh? Worst mass murderers that Norway ever has, and they still don’t know it. That is the best part. They don’t expect it to happen in Norway, but we are some of the first ones to wake, you know? Varg and Bard Faust, they were black-metal killers. Revolutionaries. They light the path for us to follow. But we go much further than them.

‘And Odin is coming, my friend. Make no mistakes about this. There will be murder. There will be blood sacrifice. We will have our revenge. You will see. You will see.’ He drank some more.

Sometime during Loki’s confession, Luke lost what had been a sudden hot desire to goad the man. He didn’t really know what he believed about the youths, or even knew to be true any more, but he now doubted that Loki was lying about what the group had done before they arrived here.

Luke started to laugh. He had to do something; it helped with the fear. Being afraid wasn’t helping him. Hadn’t done so for a long while. There was no time for fear now. Fear was useless to him; a repetitive survival instinct when survival was no longer a possibility. It was time for something else altogether.

Loki glared at him. This was not a reaction he expected, or wanted; Luke could see that. They wanted to be feared, and revered, as all morbid adolescents do.

‘What happened, eh? Loki. What happened to that sweet little blond kid that you undoubtedly used to be? I bet you had one of those patterned jumpers too. With reindeers on the front.’

‘Better not to make too much of the piss, Luke. You are on the very thin ice already, my good friend.’

‘You were a healthy, educated, middle-class kid, Loki. Your country is the envy of the world. Because of your quality of life. What’s your excuse? You were spoilt and bored and angry. And you went too far. Look at you now. An arsonist. Vandal. Kidnapper. A killer. And fuck knows what else.’

‘Luke. Luke. Luke. Still you are the sheep. You are sleeping.’

‘And your girlfriend was fucked up by something before you met her. She needs medicating, Loki. She’s lost it, mate. I thought I’d been out with some high-maintenance nut jobs, but that fat bitch is in a different league. And maybe Fenris was too far gone too when you met him. Yeah, I think so. They were a couple of misfits who think you’re some kind of messiah. Hardly candidates of the highest calibre for the revolution. What a sad and pointless tale it ultimately is.’

Loki shook his head, disappointed. ‘Luke. You talk in your sleep.’

‘Because I can’t see the bigger picture, Loki. Because you, and Beavis and Buttmunch out there, have embraced sadism and the pitiless murder of innocent people. And I am a sleeping sheep because I fail to see the importance of it. I fail to understand the significance of your actions. Nor will I ever, Loki. When you finally kill me, I … Well, I will be dead and you will be a murderer. That’s all there is to it. It’s pointless. There is nothing magical or special about it. It’s just sordid and wrong and rotten and all fucked up, like you and those dickheads who follow you around with their faces painted like ghosts.’

‘Exactly! Now you have hit the nail with the hammer.’ Loki grinned, then stood up and approached the bed. Luke could not help flinching, but hated himself for doing so.

Loki tilted the horn and poured a long draft of a foul-smelling liquid onto Luke’s mouth. He tasted orange juice, and something like white spirit, or ethanol, and then he was choking.

Loki reclaimed his seat on the dusty floor. ‘Good, yeah? I think so. Now, you are close to understanding that it is all part of the same thing. It does not matter if we hate Christians, or immigrants, or faggots. That shows we are serious, yes. But you have to look deeper, my friend. Wotan woke in us. And we answered his call. But at the start we were like, er … yes, like the children who want to do something, but don’t know how they do it, so they do something else, yes?’

‘No.’

Loki raised his hands in frustration at the limits of his second language. ‘The devil is a good way to start, Luke. It is the start to be truly evil. To say fuck morals. I am evil. I am a Satanist. I desecrate. I burn. I kill. To separate us from the rest, the sheep. Then, we realize it was Odin who stirs in us. Great Wotan. Ancestral blood is boiling in us. We thought it was the devil, but it is not. It was Odin who wanted us to destroy the fucking Jewish religion and all the Christian bullshit that does not belong here. What has the Middle East got to do with Norway? Or Europe? So fuck it. Fuck the Muslims, fuck the Christians. We should have burned the mosques too. But that will come, I tell you this now. We are Vikings! We have been tricked to sleep in our own ancestral land. But now we are waking. We go on the wild ride for Odin. We burn, we kill, so that we can wake. You see, we wake. It makes a … er … opening. A way in, for older things buried. To begin the new order. To signal other wild rides. You see? Ragnarok is coming, Luke. Soon. So we must begin to desecrate the world.’

‘You’re full of shit, Loki.’

For a long unnerving moment, Loki said nothing, but stared at the window. When he spoke again, the drunken oaf had retreated. The more reflective Loki had returned. ‘I felt drawn out here, Luke. As you all did. For a very special reason. You cannot deny this. It was destiny.’

‘We were on holiday, Loki. It had fuck all to do with Wotan or Odin.’

‘No, you are wrong.’ He turned his face to Luke. ‘You were drawn into the forest at the same time as us. You came for the terrible ride. You just did not know it. But we are all here for the wild hunt. The true one. The oldest one of all. It needs witnesses. And sacrifice, Luke. So it pulls things in. As it once did. Of all the trails you could walk, you walk in this one. A big mistake, my friend.

‘The Christians once stop the sacrifice and the wild rides up here. Long time ago. But the rides never really stop. What was once given up here, a long time ago, just had to be taken instead, you see? And the hunt used to happen at Yuletide, but this year it come early. Which is very bad for you and your friends, I think.’

Loki slapped his own chest. ‘We come to this place where wild hunts have been seen. Real magic, you know. I know the stories from when I was a boy. Here they worship something that was in these woods before Christ.’ He turned again to glare at Luke. ‘We have nowhere else to go. We burn all our bridges, Luke. Some very angry people are looking for us. But that is destiny. Destiny brings us home. Destiny gave us no choice but to come here. To be true.’

Luke snorted, then winced because of the pain that dug behind his eyes. He prodded at the tears about his delicate, swollen eyes. ‘It’s not destiny. You’re on the run. And you will be caught. Eventually. And my friends were killed by … something unnatural, I’ll grant you that. But it’s no God.’

Loki pointed at the floor. ‘You are wrong, my friend. She knows. And she tells us that the old ride has started early. So we go out to see it. She lets us go to see something so old you cannot believe it. A God returning. That is when we find you. There is no one here to give sacrifice any more, Luke. So what is needed is taken now, you know? Just taken. Yeah? Like your friends. You and your friends started it early. But rites should be followed as they once were. She tells us. Something must be given, Luke. Again. To a true God of the North. That is how it once was. How it will be again now we are here. You see? She is too old, my friend. And that is where we come in. To give. Like others once gave. To be a part of something true. Old. Special. To give and be close to a God. The only one worthy of our loyalty. It is the … er … the gesture that counts. Like Christmas, it’s all about giving.’ Loki burst out laughing at his own joke. Luke said nothing.

‘Like you will be given. Maybe tonight. We hope anyway. We get much closer. We have contact now. And you are wrong, because our God knows we are here. To do things as they were once done. No one but us would do these things. No one is this uncompromising. And there is no one else up here to do it any more. It is all destiny, Luke. And what we needed to give, also came. You. You came and we came at the same time. A sign.’

Loki raised his hands to encompass the room, the house, the forest outside. ‘These are the original settlers. The first people. But there were other things here before them. And the settlers paid a tax to the original occupants to remain here. To hunt, trade skins, live in the forest. Long ago. Give the God food and drink and they prosper. Give it animals to rip apart and the forest grows and protects. It is the way of the Old Ones. They have been pushed to the little places, Luke. To the corners. By Christians, and immigrants and social democrats.’ Loki shakes his head, in bitter despair, then looks up. ‘They call it by many names out here. In my family when I was a boy, they call it the Black Yule Goat. But that is not such a good name, I think. But in these woods is a God. A very real God. You can be sure of that. Christians call it a demon. But it is a God. Just not their God.’ He shrugged. ‘This place is sacred. Here there is resurrection. We come to make music of resurrection. To give a sacrifice and to receive blessings. To spread the message. To be in the presence of a God. As our ancestors once were. You, my friend, are privileged. You will see.’

‘I’ve seen it.’

Loki nods his head. ‘I envy you that, my friend. And we will see it too when it come to accept you. Soon. Now we have you, Luke. We have something to give. You see? As it should be. As it was. As Odin wish it. And to us it will come. She promise, Luke. She save you for this. It is the only reason you live a little longer. So you can be our tribute. Our tithe, Luke. Our introduction to the old ways. You are our proof that we are true.’

‘It’s no God, Loki. You are wrong. The Christians were probably closer to the truth. Everything you have done has been for nothing. It’s been pointless. Senseless. I’ve seen the temple. It’s in ruins, mate. The old stones? Overgrown. No one to tend the cemetery. This is all forgotten, Loki. It’s over. Died out. There’s only that old woman left. And she can’t have long, mate. And you’re too bored and stupid to hang around here for long. So it’s over. No more worshipping of some old wild, mad beast, or whatever it is. No more sacrifice. No more murder. This thing you call a God has no future.’

Loki’s eyes were too wide, too bright for his big face. His lips were suddenly trembling with drunken emotion when confronted by Luke’s repeated failure to understand, to acknowledge, to believe.

‘And you’ll be in prison, mate,’ Luke continued. ‘At least you’ll be notorious. All that attention seeking will have paid off, eh? I only wish they had the death penalty here. I really do. Because all three of you, and that evil thing out there … you all need putting down. It’s what you deserve.’

‘You are wrong, Luke from London. I show you. I show you. So you know why it is that you must die here.’

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.

FIFTY-NINE

‘Now maybe you take us seriously, eh?’ Loki stood over Luke, shaking his head in grave disappointment.

Luke looked up from the box bed through the one eye that remained open. Inside his mouth he could feel bits of teeth, like sand, from where he’d fallen onto his face. But, strangely, there was no tooth pain.

Fenris had been sent outside by Loki, to calm down. When they came down from the attic, Loki had bellowed at Fenris. He’d even cuffed him hard, outside of Luke’s room, and then shoved him down the stairs. Surtr had meekly followed the petulant Fenris into the paddock outside. He could hear her now, outside his window, continuing Loki’s admonition of sulky disobedient Fenris.

Leaning over the box bed, which Luke had crawled back to after falling down the attic stairs, Loki rebound Luke’s ankles with a new nylon tie. And Luke did not resist, having had enough of fists and boots and shoving and yanking, but he had wondered if they found the little white loops here, in this place, or whether they had carried the ties with them, and had used them on other wrists and other ankles as they made their way north. The notion made him feel faint and nervous again. He thought he might hyperventilate.

A slight easing of the terrible nausea from his head wound was now the only positive thing that he could identify within his reduced and wretched state.

Loki sat down on the end of the bed. The giant was breathing hard. He spoke with difficulty, was wheezy; it sounded like he had asthma, like Phil. Poor Phil.

‘So now you know, Luke from London. Know that you are nothing. A worm compared to what is here.’ He pointed one long finger at the ceiling. Then he looked at the little window, before checking the watch face between the two studded wristbands on his forearm. He looked back at Luke, his cold blue eyes alight with excitement inside their black sockets. ‘She can call it, you know? We know she can. And she know we are fucking serious. She has promised to call it. For us. And for you, Luke. So tonight we try again.’

Loki screwed his face up into a demoniac scowl, and stuck his dark-red tongue out. Grinned. ‘You are the lucky man. Tonight you meet a God, and you know the true meaning of a blood frenzy, Luke. You have been a great deal of trouble for me. But later, I think we will all be much happier people. Make peace with your dead God. Maybe you see your friends again soon, yes?’

Loki left him alone.

Luke continued to stare into space for a long time, unable to focus his eyes on anything around him. Up above him, in the attic, he occasionally heard the little loud feet of the old woman moving about up there; she still had not come down since the confrontation. That place was beloved to her. But Luke knew he’d rather die than ever see it again.

After a while she began to weep. Through her little sobs, she spoke in her old lilting language to those around her in the dusty darkness. And Luke did not know why, but he felt a great sympathy for her. Soon, his own tears cut across his cheeks.

The wind buffeted his little window and the clouds stifled the weak white sunlight. As the air dimmed about him, his thoughts lowered their own lights. And he wept for himself, and for his friends, and his heart’s pouring seemed to flow into the great sadness that ran through the world and through all who were in it.

Maybe for short periods of time it seemed to him, inside that stinking bed, that some people were exempt from tragedy and pain, but these respites were short; in the scheme of things and in the length of eternity, respites were nothing but anomalies in a relentless flow of despair and pain and sadness and horror that surely would eventually sweep everyone away.

And for the first time since he had been at school, Luke prayed. The enormity of what existed in this place made him think in those terms. In the epic terms of gods and devils, and in the terms of magic and the great incomprehensible age that had swept through here and left such terrible things behind. It did him good to pray, and to cry and scour his damaged lumpy face with stinging brine; to dissolve some of the cold despair.

Outside, beneath his window, the music came roaring out of the old CD player and he could no longer hear the old woman above him. Intermittently, Fenris and Loki scraped their throats to reproduce black-metal vocals. They were drinking again; he could tell by the idiotic jackal giggle that Fenris produced when downing the moonshine. And so it all continued; it was dull in its predictability. Evil was, he decided, inevitable, relentless and predictable. Imaginative, he’d give it that much, but soulless.

He dabbed at his nostrils, carefully, with the back of one filthy hand. It was hopeless; he couldn’t even wipe his own nose. It was gushing with snot and blood. He dropped his head back onto the grey pillow and closed his one good eye; the other had shut itself down. He lay still, in silence, on the reeking sheepskins and waited for the light to completely fade out, for the sky to darken. To finally get this over with.

And in the long hours in which he waited alone with his thoughts, he tormented himself briefly by replaying his attempts at escape. In his memory, once he’d hit Fenris with the jug, he should have beaten Surtr off before she struck his head wound. He should have been quicker and harder with her. He imagined himself doing it all over again, but successfully this time, and then running downstairs and finding one of the knives, or the rifle.

Or he should have just run straight into the woods after they showed poor Dom to him; he should not have aimed for the track beside the orchard. What had he been thinking? If he had gone into the woods maybe he could have hidden, then crawled away later. And the opportunity to dig through that wall was gone now too; he had fallen asleep and dreamed of his own death instead, and now his wrists and his ankles were tied. It was like this entire situation was part of some terrible destiny; like fate had drawn him here to be sacrificed. Like Loki had said.

‘Piss off,’ he murmured to himself.

But even if he had escaped from the house, and made it out there — what then?

He swore at himself. Sniffed. Winced.

This is how things were now. The thought settled heavily upon him, but at least acceptance brought the relief that comes with the final acknowledgement of a painful, decisive truth. When aspirations and pretension and effort can finally be set aside as the wastes of mental effort they usually are. No more yearnings or cravings or anxieties. It would all be over soon enough.

He had just been caught up in the way of the world; on one of its lunatic fringes perhaps, but had still been swept away by the true and deeper undertow of tragedy nonetheless. What happened to you eventually was just more extreme out here; that was the only difference to being ground down by increments in the other world he had failed at and had now departed for good. The possibilities for destruction here were not so different in any other place; they just took different forms. Nor was the intent for violence any different here; that was everywhere he had ever lived. Or the self-absorption, the pathological ambition, the spite and delight in the downfall of others — all of that was back home too. It led here eventually. It was building everywhere. It was in the blood. A few natural disasters, or the wrong people take charge, or a war gets out of hand and changes the colour of the sky, or the earth becomes irreparably poisoned and water and food run short … and skulls would be smashed, again. Over and over again. Ragnarok. This was the chaos Loki wanted. And he wanted it sooner rather than later, even if it was only around him to begin with, in his dismal, misguided, obsessive existence.

To think he’d always championed the outcast too; been a friend of the misfit, the underdog. He was the last person they should have been snuffing out. But losers just wanted to swap places with anyone above them in the hierarchy. It made his life seem even more hopeless.

‘Fuck it.’

His own weaknesses and mistakes and defects seemed pitiful in comparison to Blood Frenzy. He couldn’t even be bad properly. At least these guys really went for it. He wanted to laugh, but also acknowledged that he had probably lost his mind. At last. About fucking time. What good had it been anyway?

Maybe a terrible Karma had indeed led him here. Just so he could realize all of this now, the hard way. He grinned, and showed his own bloodied teeth to the dirty ceiling.

‘I wanted it to stop out here. Just for a bit. To be with my friends for a few days. That was all,’ Luke said out loud to God, to the things in the attic, to anyone who might be listening. He’d just wanted a break from the world he didn’t get along with: his job, the dismal flat, the same nullifying disappointment every day, the getting older and the growing into it all. He had wanted a change and he had got one.

He smiled and then he sniggered. A bubble of blood popped on his lips. He suddenly felt mad, and wild, and free of the burden of himself.

The sound of big heavy feet outside. Loki. Thank fuck: Loki wouldn’t kill him yet. He’d have a little more time to sort his head out before the end. He was beginning to interest himself; was finally in agreement with himself.

The door opened. Loki came through. He was sweating heavily, his make-up was tainting his sweat and dripping onto his beard and Satyricon T-Shirt. His hands were red.

‘Loki. Your eyeliner’s running, mate.’

The old woman followed the giant youth into the room. She carried a tray. Upon it stood another wooden jug, and a wooden bowl still steaming. The scent of meat and gravy hit the back of Luke’s throat and made him gasp.

Loki grinned. ‘More than eyeliner will be running from you soon, my friend. I look forward to seeing it. It will be quite a show. Maybe we film it too.’

‘Bring on Ragnarok. Bring it! The things you can do with a life, Loki. And yet people like you can’t wait to turn back the clock. Fucking savages. Barbarians.’

‘Thank you, Luke. Now you begin to understand our Viking ways with foreigners who fuck with Odin.’

‘You know, lying here with my face hanging off, I’m beginning to think that the end of the nuclear family was not a good thing. Because people like you might not have happened. There would have been no Blood Frenzy then, eh? I reckon you took it in the ass from an early age, Loki.’

‘Mr psychologist, I think you are maybe full of shit.’

‘You’re nothing new, mate. Ragnarok, this time is it? Then a few hikers cop it. And some poor priest. You big shite, Loki.’

‘Luke, I remind you, you are guest here.’ Loki wagged a finger at Luke’s face. ‘I give you to an ancient one of the woods very soon. Maybe you tell it your theory. And it tear your fucking guts out while you do it. Throw you in a tree like an animal.’ Loki grinned.

Luke laughed, until it hurt his nose, his split lips, his bruised cheekbone, and whatever had gone wrong with the top of his head. ‘The most evil band in the world, eh? The serial murderers who summoned a demon. It’s pretty rock and roll, Loki. I’ll give you that. But it counts for shit. You are a fantasist. This is all a load of Dungeons and Dragons, mate. You’re a cliché.’

‘You are a dead man walking, Luke. Or one that is lying down.’

The old woman put the tray down beside the bed. Luke’s mouth filled with saliva.

‘Time for you to eat, Luke. And to stop talking.’ Loki peered on to the plate and wrinkled his nose. ‘I wish it was nicer for you, because it is your last meal, my friend.’

‘You can stop this now.’

‘Not possible.’

‘Loki. At least let me run. Give me a chance out there.’

He grinned. ‘Please eat. Do not make this hard for me. I am not a bastard like Fenris. I do not want to … erm … taunt you.’

‘My friends had families. I want to see my dog again. That’s it. I won’t beg.’

Loki smiled. ‘You eat. Then, we get you ready. I leave you alone now.’ He walked towards the door, then paused, turned around. ‘Hey Luke. If somehow you get off this bed, then crawl down the stairs, or something stupid like that, I let Surtr cut you like she want to. She is only a few seconds away from blood frenzy with you, Luke. So I make a deal with her. I tell her, if Luke run again before it is time for him, then, I tell her, you can cut off all his toes. You can totally fuck him up. And you know something, Luke? Luke?’

‘What?’

‘I am not joking.’

Loki left him alone with the old woman.

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.

SIXTY-TWO

When they took him from the room, he was entirely naked save for the bindings at his wrists and ankles. They were clumsy and drunk; they were stupefying.

He did not struggle as Loki and Fenris squeezed him through the narrow passageway and down the cramped and unstable staircase, because he did not want them to drop him. Being three feet from the hard ground with no arms and legs at his disposal, to stick out and break a fall upon all of the sharp wooden edges and corners, made him nervous.

It was only when they took him outside, into the cold damp air, and under that sky dimming from grey to black, that he fought. Inside the little clearing of grass and within the pointy shadow of the old black house, he pulled his legs back suddenly using his hips, and broke them from Fenris’s arms, which were supporting him like a heavy roll of carpet against his side. And then Luke twisted around within Loki’s long white arms, so he was suddenly facing the earth before he was dropped to the moist grass.

He broke his fall with his knees, then tried to stand and fell immediately over, onto his side. In the cold wet grass, he paused to consider his next move.

Fenris issued his long thin laugh into the darkening air.

‘Where will you go, Luke?’ Loki said, wheezing but wistful.

The great fire cracked and spat and leapt out its orange tongues so high at the sky. Showers of sparks and porous sheets of leaf drifted up in hot draughts, twisted, and extinguished themselves in glowing red sparks.

The violent music played. The sound was dulled through the earth, but still enough of the cacophony spluttered and crackled out there and into the cold sunless forest, so that whatever crawled this terrible black earth, would know it was dealing with Blood Frenzy this night.

The rifle leant against the porch railing, perhaps as insurance in case Odin failed to discriminate between sacrifice and chosen one. In the shadows of the porch, sat upon a little wooden chair, the old woman watched Luke, her black eyes glinting at the end of the firelight that beat gently against her expressionless face.

To get him on that cross they’d have to cut the nylon from his wrists; and that would be his last chance. He heaved as much air into his lungs as he could and shuddered right down to his joints. Tried not to let urine stream down his legs. And failed; it spouted warm, like life, out of him, over him.

The dark crucifix looked thin, insubstantial. He wondered if it could hold his weight, and imagined the farce and banality of his own death upon an upside-down crucifix that would not stay upright.

‘Oh God,’ he said, and could not prevent himself making this exclamation of alarm, when he thought of long nails and a mallet; of Fenris’s spindly tattooed arms swinging the hammer in the dying light.

But beside the crucifix, he saw coils of old fibrous rope, thin as a washing line, and prayed they were for his wrists and ankles.

Against the dimming trees, as the light drew back like a tide across the ancient roots and bracken of the forest, the sign of the inverted cross now looked too basic, and mock sinister; a prop in a bad horror film with no budget and a cast of overacting amateurs in face-paint. It was uninspiring and unimpressive, like a place or artefact that had acquired an undeserved cult status, and always disappointed whenever it was actually revealed. What a way to die. It should have been funny, but was just dismal and depressing instead.

‘Now, Luke. You can run nowhere,’ Loki said, his breathing returning to normal. ‘We keep your feet tied. So there is no way you get away from this. If you struggle too much, we have to … er …’

‘Knock you the fuck out!’ Fenris shrieked.

‘More or less,’ Loki said in agreement. ‘But what I can do for you is give you a last drink, my friend.’

The drinking horn was freed from behind Loki’s silver bullet belt and then upended over his face. Luke welcomed its sour chemical burn inside his mouth and throat and stomach. He moved his chin to guide that brackish stream into his gullet. Then it made him want to throw up, before spreading a generous warmth through his gut. It made him dizzy too; like it was the first strong drink he had ever swallowed. It was neat alcohol cut with sweetened orange juice, and brewed in buckets by the desperate. He rolled onto his side and coughed some of it back out of his throat and mouth.

Blood Frenzy had also made a special effort tonight for a special occasion; it was not often they made the acquaintance of an ancient deity of the woods. Loki and Fenris had adorned themselves with a plethora of chains about their waists, and thickened their pale arms with studded armbands to their shoulders; their biceps bristled with actual nails. Each of them wore the band’s own shirt, featuring the gloomy lake and spiky red writing. Their faces were freshly decorated and thickened with white paint. Eye sockets were blacked out and long imperious grimaces had been effected through their artificially downturned mouths. Only Surtr remained naked. She had no tattoos on her short plump body, but her labia were encrusted with silver piercings.

With the sole of his boot, Fenris rolled Luke onto his back. Loki grabbed Luke’s ankles and pulled him across the wet grass, to the foot of their crucifix.

It may have looked insubstantial, but it took the total strength of both young men to lever the wooden cross back out of the hole and to then begin lowering it earthward; at least they knew enough to sink deep foundations.

Fenris caught his eye as he watched them slowly work the crucifix back towards the ground. ‘Nice touch, eh? Old-school black metal!’

When the crucifix was no more than a few feet from the ground, they let it fall with a whump onto the grass beside him, ready for his binding to it. Then they used their hands to roll his body over and over, before Fenris seized his ankles and moved them to the foot of the long upright plank.

Loki called Surtr over. She padded across the grass to them. When she came closer Luke could see the white, red and black paint on her face had been perfected into a grin containing as much spite and cruelty as she had been able to fashion into her own features. Even without make-up, she didn’t need much help looking hateful. Is this how she feels inside? he wondered hopelessly, and recalled what he had seen in her eyes when she attacked him; her closeness to him made him shrink inside.

What was wrong with them? All of them?

His stomach fell away at this reminder of their utter unfamiliarity to him; it was profound.

He hated them.

His ankles were lashed to the wooden cross, which was hard and splintery and untreated and felt horrid against his calves and heels. Surtr sat on his chest, facing him, pinned his arms under her buttocks; Loki pressed a huge boot against his throat. And they were swift, they were methodical. They were killers. Killers: the word repeated itself once inside Luke’s mind and it made his whole body go cold.

And then a reel of all they were taking from him flashed up: he saw his mother’s smiling face, his little dog, Monty, with his white head cocked to one side just before a walk, his sister, his father, pretty Charlotte in the beer garden, wearing her knee boots, her overbite too sexy to prevent him making a pass, his CD collection, the Billy Bookcase from IKEA with all of his paperbacks inside, stacked double, real ale in the Fitzroy Tavern … He stopped the film with one tremendous sob. Screwed his eyes shut. Then growled in defiance.

Once his ankles were fastened tightly to the rough wooden plank with the washing line, he could not move his feet or lower legs at all.

He could barely breathe with Surtr’s weight upon his diaphragm either; the metal in her bare genitals was cold against his stomach. ‘Your band stinks!’ he shouted, when he realized that he would not be able to punch and thrash with his arms.

Surtr had pushed the heels of her little fat feet into his armpits, so when Loki reached behind Surtr’s lower back and finally cut the nylon cord from Luke’s wrists, it was easy for Fenris and Loki to take a wrist each and pull his arms apart and to drag the stinking smock over his head. Surtr removed her crushing weight from his chest and helped the boys bag him with the stinking gown; and they hooded him in the musty blood of the poor wretches who had died wrapped in that terrible cloth before him.

Loki and Fenris pulled each of his arms through the tight arm holes of the dress; stretched his arms wide apart and lifted his body onto the crucifix, with his hands pulled out to the ends of the cross beam. And when it came to tie his wrists off, the girl settled her considerable body weight through her knees, hard into his shoulders, which immediately flashed with pain at the point just prior to dislocation. Weak and dizzy and nauseous; he had no choice but to remain still for them.

He wanted to cry and beg and plead right then, but he screamed to control the pain and frustration instead.

Loki wrapped one of his wrists in rope. Fenris tied off the other wrist. Tight thin rope that burned and cut into his flesh, pinned him to that cross in the wet grass beneath a sky from which the last light was draining fast.

When Surtr clumsily removed her big knees off his shoulders, Luke understood there would be no last struggle; no final petulant fight to give them something to remember him by.

Fenris grinned, Loki frowned, and then they were straining with all their might and strength under the weight of the crucifix’s long beam with Luke tied fast upon it. He shook and he struggled against the rough wood as he was raised from the ground. His little stinking white gown dropped down at the front towards his face, and his cock and balls felt horribly exposed to the night air. He felt like a baby, infantilized. There would be no dignity at the end. He hated them with such a black intensity, he could only hope that he might suffer a stroke and deny them his final screams, his abject terror at the very end.

Then he was upside down. Down his body, he looked at where he was skirted in the blood-ruined linen. Saw the black sky beyond his grimy toes. Dropped his head back to the wood. Looked at the grass so close to his face. Studded boots gathered near his eyes. The pressure of blood rushing downwards came into his head quickly. And upon his head they jammed that scratchy spiky crown of flowers, by shoving it upwards. They martyred him with that halo of dead petals.

And then they all began shrieking. They sang out their incomprehensible screechy lyrics. They drank from bone horns. They threw their thin arms at the sky he could see below the soles of his feet.

‘You die on the cross of the false messiah, Luke! It is so exciting, you fucking Nazarene!’ Fenris shrieked into his face.

Luke’s face screwed up involuntarily. He thought he might break down. Then stopped himself. Then tried to get off. Stupidly, he just tried to get off the big upside-down crucifix. Then he sobbed. Then he shouted. Then lost his mind; saw it go, like a watery thing puffing into vapour, before there was just black and red colours and his own screams inside him. Good, because he did not want his mind. Did not want reason, or lucidity, or anything that would enable him to fully comprehend what soon would be coming for him from out of those dark trees, as he hung upside down upon that black cross.

‘Your band fucking sucks!’ he screamed at them again. And laughed like a maniac. ‘You talentless fuckwits!’ Some of the alcohol ran down from his gullet and into his mouth, stinging like battery acid. He spat it out, spat it at them.

The world of upside-down whirled about him; the fire dropped into the sky; the forever of trees clung to the soil with their roots to prevent themselves falling into that eternal canopy of cloudy darkness. He felt as if he were hanging over some great ocean, and could see no land in any direction, and was about to be dropped. If they cut him loose now he knew he would fall straight down and into the sky.

Fenris tried to out-scream him; he was getting to Fenris again. He knew it; skinny weasel-boy Fenris had unfinished business with him and didn’t like any defiance from his victims.

‘Hey Surtr,’ he called out to the excitable figure, thumping herself around the fire with her face all painted like that. ‘I’ll be dead, but you’ll still be fat and ugly. You look like a frog, you fat fuck! Your cunt is the worst thing I have ever smelled!’ he screamed his throat raw.

And then Loki was restraining Fenris, who looked like a Bonobo monkey with a white face, driven mad by some experiment.

Luke screamed into the sky, the earth, the endless trees. He wanted to be mad and screaming when it came, low down and fast and eager. He called out to it. ‘Come on you stinking fuck! Come on!’ He would bite its face with the last of his life.

Soon he was fading, he was feeling faint, his head was swollen and hot and prickly.

Loki was calling to the old woman. He was angry with her. She seemed unconcerned, and sat silently on her little chair. Loki released Fenris, who stomped across to the porch and pointed at the tiny woman in her little chair. He screamed at her too. Clenched his hard white fists and shook them at her. Loki implored her. Then shouted at Fenris, who turned on him. There was some shoving between them. Then Surtr plodded across to the confrontation and screamed at Fenris.

The old woman stood up, and left the porch. She went back inside the house. Closed the door. Left them all outside arguing, with Luke upside down upon the cross.

Eventually their voices petered out. Loki muttered something to Surtr, who walked solemnly to the CD player and killed the music. Not even the fire seemed so fierce now. They were all just outside, getting cold in the damp and dark air. And the woods remained silent too. Like the old woman. Silent and old and indifferent.

Though the woods were not completely vacant. Luke’s eyes bulged purple from the terrible pressure inside his head, and his vision darkened like the last of his sight was suddenly going out. But he saw their faces; the pale faces and pinkish eyes catching the flash of the fire as the little white people watched him. Watched him and then withdrew.

SIXTY-THREE

The moon is full and the forest outside his room has changed. It is larger than ever before; it covers the entire land to the cold seas on every shore. It is luminous. It is majestic. It is epochal. It is timeless. Before it, he feels smaller than he has ever felt.

The voices return from the space above him; whisperings he can understand.

‘Look. Look,’ they cry out to him. ‘Look down.’

On the grass beneath the great moon-filled sky, he sees a figure dressed in white, crowned with flowers and propped upright in a cart full of bloodied fowl. The passenger is thrown about in its seat like a doll, or maybe it struggles.

Behind the cart, a ragged procession follows; in the places where the silvery light turns back the darkness, he sees the hunched, the loping, and the skipping thin figures in rags older than the crusades. They prance and caper alongside the cart, out to a place so old even the chorus in the attic tell him they have forgotten its true age. Perhaps this is the last of all the old places.

When the time comes will he call with them into the sky? they ask. Will he say the old names with them? When he hears the name he is to speak with them, he cannot breathe.

And from that cart, the figure in the white robe, wearing a crown of dead spring flowers upon its head, is taken down. The figure that is so suddenly him, and now he is amongst the stones. And upon the largest stones around him, his dead friends grimace silently in death. Naked and devoured down to their blood-blackened bones, they are tied to stones carved with forgotten poems. And upon a stone he too is mounted, between his friends, and what was once given will be given again.

From the trees he is watched by small, indistinct figures. They talk and make sounds that remind him of laughter. Their whispering voices fill his eyes and ears like flies.

He sees another place. And in it he can smell tallow and smoke and the reek of soiled straw. He is inside a dark barn, or a simple church; a plain structure of old timber that flickers with the reddish light of a fire.

In here, somewhere in the darkness, a woman groans in the agonies of childbirth. And he cannot prevent his legs from rushing across to where she lies even though his mind is screaming at him to run away.

Her cries are soon accompanied by the sound of newborn livestock. And he is standing amongst a group of small figures, about the shadowy straw-filled manger. And here is a thing, wet and mewling, that he cannot quite see, both of man and of another place, drawn out by its rear hooves from between pale lifeless thighs. It is brought out of the steaming, devastated womb of the dead mother and is clutched by the long fingers of those who witness a miracle.

Luke comes out of the dream with a cry. And looks about the dark room to try and see the faces of the people who are muttering at him so quickly. But the voices fade, retreat above him, back into the attic.

He stands again before the glowing white window of his little room, shaking from the dream of the birthing, and he looks down at the forest bathed in phosphorescent light. At the edge of the trees, small white figures, lightly haired and thin, gather and frolic. He blinks and they are gone too.

He turns around and the old woman comes towards him. Her tiny feet are no longer loud because they are bound in cloth. She offers him a knife. The long thin black one he has seen before.

The point of the blade seems to open a place inside himself that will not allow him to ever feel anything again but rage, or to remember anything but those moments of choking hatred, and to only think instinctively as the creatures of the forest think in order to prolong their lives and to evade the skilful predators.

The chorus above knock their little feet upon the floor of the attic. They bang the old timbers for blood.

He looks down at the old woman, but she is no longer before him in the room. The house cracks about him like an old hand closing its fingers; he stands alone amongst the splinters and the dust, holding the knife.

When the sun broke through the thin cloud, Luke awoke.

Again.

And sat up, gasping. But this time the air was colder and sharper around his naked body and he knew that this time he was really awake.

Luke adjusted his position upon the bed to ease the aches in his ankles. He rubbed at his sore wrists. Widened his feet. The dreams let go of him.

His breath caught in his throat.

He was untied.

Startled mute and perfectly still by this realization, he stared at how the eiderdown had been turned down to the foot of the bed. Between his knees on the tatty sheepskins was a red Swiss Army knife; the main blade folded out. It was his knife.

Draped over the side of the bed was the blood-mired gown and the little crown of flowers.

SIXTY-FOUR

Naked, Luke squatted upon the floor of his room and watched the door. It was early. Outside his window the sun was bright and steely where it found fissures in the cloud cover. The rain had stopped.

He stilled the rushing of his thoughts; the chattery clutter that was eroding his advantage before he realized he had one. He tried instead to understand his new position in a world that was entirely a place of confusion, of terror, of the impossible and his bafflement before it.

The old woman; she came to him in a dream while he slept in the wretched bed, bound like a captive, like a sacrifice. But now he was free and within his hand was a knife. So she had really come in the night and cut his restraints and left him a weapon?

He gaped, he grinned.

They were so angry with the old lady last night, when she refused to call that thing out there, out from amongst the black trees. She disobeyed Loki; she refused to bring the demon, the God, to take him as he hung upon the cross. And now she wanted him to run, or to get rid of the youths from her home; he wasn’t sure which, but he had good cause to do both.

The impossible idea of him living again, for more than just a few hours, came back to him. It took his breath away, even his balance, and he had to steady himself by putting one hand against the dirty floorboards.

The awareness of his new circumstances shivered through him; it was a white electricity coursing under his skin. It made his eyelids jump and the nerves spark inside his muscles. He was as light as helium, as fast and jittery as a hare.

He could not remember ever feeling the same way before. There seemed to be no limit now to where his mind could reach or to where his limbs could carry him. He was strength. He was unbound.

And unsure he had ever been fully awake before right now, right here; naked and dirty and scarred and so reduced in this moment-by-moment existence. And he understood that he had given up long before this time. Had been drifting. Baffled. Inactive. Futile. His old self was flimsy, insubstantial. His old world grey. There had been hesitation at critical moments; so much self-doubt. He had languished, demoralized, for so long, forever. He understood this. The realizations came all at once and very quickly. His whole life until this moment was preposterous; and himself in that life absurd.

But now he wanted to live.

If he survived the next few minutes, every moment of his life would sing. Each word spoken would have meaning, every meal eaten and drink taken would be a gift: his salvation would be the living of life.

He smiled at himself. He was simply not about giving up. He received again a sense of what he loved, of who he no longer wanted to disappoint, of what he wanted to live for. It came back to him, but stronger, and clearer than ever. His memory rested on the image of his little dog, at home; the small trusting figure, blinking snowy eyelids up at him in the mouth of his tiny dismal kitchen. He smiled and he cried silently at the same time.

He mattered again to himself. Watching his own end come closer and closer, while in constant fear, was abhorrent to him. He had arms and legs he could still move; senses that received and experienced the utter wonder of existence, moment by moment. He laughed, quietly, through his tears.

They thought they could take life away from him.

There were three of them. He thought of the sheath knives, the rifle. They were teenagers. Children even. Probably too young to go to prison. Could he hurt them if it came to it? This sudden stab of his conscience made him groan. This was no time or place for a conscience.

He rose and walked to the window of his room, and looked out at the upside-down cross, felled and flat upon the grass.

It was simply a world where one will dominated another. It was an uncompromising era. Insistent wills eroded him, dominated him, they always had done. Some even greater will, guiding all of the others who had tormented him in his life, had led him here for the final reckoning of himself; in a part of the world made by the damaged for the damaged, in the great age of the pathological. If he survived the morning, he swore he would fight it, them, whatever, forever.

He could defer to no one and nothing but his own survival now. It was an every man for himself world. He did not make it so; he had resisted it but was tired of being the victim. ‘Victim,’ he whispered the word. ‘Victim.’ Saying it was like sucking a battery. He victimized himself. And he would not have it any more. He would die here unless he killed them all. He was in the now; he knew what that meant.

Could he kill? he asked himself. His stomach turned over. Would he recognize himself after he did this thing? This was not some horror film; he would actually have to smash a knife through human skin into the density of a body.

He began to shake. Maybe he should just run, hide, run, hide, hope.

No. They would come after him.

He looked at the ceiling. He had to sow with salt the place where such things could still exist. He would need to go to the red, hot, unthinking place inside himself: the place he inhabited when he attacked the passenger on the train, and punched poor Dom off his feet. He needed to find the place inside himself that led to the smashings, the snappings, the middle fingers at drivers who did not stop for pedestrians on crossings, the grindings of his teeth to sand when he could not sleep and thought of the sociopaths he had worked with. The pathetic rage that destroyed his possessions and furniture, that turned itself against the inconsiderate and the rude in public, was always simmering in him, ready to boil. The gas needed to be turned up a notch. Right now. His life depended upon it happening. And he would need to stay inside that hot red place of instinct and rage until they or he were dead.

It was unthinkable; it was mandatory.

But it wouldn’t come. In his thoughts and feelings he found it hard to change places with them. To suddenly be the one who was violent and determined.

He closed his eyes. Imagined their horrid painted faces; the triumphant smiles of these intense, committed, wilfully idiotic, cruel people. They were unfathomable. Why should they live, and he not? Why?

They deserved to die. He wanted them dead. He wanted their young but poisonous blood shed, and this wretched part of the world erased from the earth. Blood and soil. Yes, they were right. Ragnarok was coming down fast, but not in the way they anticipated. He’d give them their blood and soil.

He was naked so he put on the little stained gown. It smelled of rust. Then he crowned himself, as the old woman wished.

But if he overcame them … He remembered the terrible forest, and of what walked upon its floor. Luke shuddered. Closed his eyes against it all.

He crept towards the door. One thing at a time.

‘One thing at a time, my friend,’ said the part of him that had detached itself from all of the other voices inside him.

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.

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.

SIXTY-NINE

He never heard it cough again, or bark, or yip like a black-muzzled jackal. But he was not alone in those woods that arched over him, cut out the weak greyish sunlight, and dripped heavy fragrant raindrops onto him like the branches and limbs of the trees were the ceiling of a limestone cave, glittery, timeless, and dreadful.

No, he never heard it or saw it again. But other things kept pace with him.

He swallowed and swallowed to ease the terrible thirst in a throat scorched by cordite. He would be cold, then hot and sweaty; he saw things and heard the voices of people that were not there; he passed in and out of worlds. He walked. And he walked.

Out of sight, the white people scurried. They chattered like little monkeys. They leapt up at the corner of his heavy eyes; they were small and pale like naked children.

Twice in his delirium, he turned and knelt and fired the rifle into the trees at where he thought he had seen something small and pallid land on tiny feet and begin chittering. And then there would be silence. An awful silence loaded with anticipation and vague hopes. Before it began again: the prancing of little feet on the wet forest floor just out of sight, and the crying out of small mouths in the distant undergrowth.

She had quite a brood; so many young. Moder was hurt and her young were angry. If he fell and passed out with exhaustion, he knew they would take him from his own dreams and from the wet mud his feet slid about in. So he walked and he walked and he talked to himself to keep them from taking him.

It must have been early evening when he came to the end of the track and saw the sky in what felt like the first time in years. The track simply ended and when he turned and looked back at the great wall of trees, it was like he stood in a coastal cove, peninsulas on either side, and had passed out of a crack in the cliff face, or a well-hidden cave. He could no longer see the end of the track he had just walked for the best part of a day and evening, nor any break in the thickets of undergrowth, rising tangled to the height of a man.

He had come on to a rocky plane, windswept and misty with rain. Grey, moss green, and whitish stone, forever. Besides a scattering of small birch trees it was arid, desolate like the bottom of some great ocean that had been drained.

A great suffocating feeling of solitude came over him in the bleak stillness; he felt lonelier than he had ever been before in his memory, but also suffered a mad urge to wander farther, forever amongst the massive boulders. It looked uncannily familiar too, like he was back where he had started from, all that time ago. So long ago, with his three best friends all around him.

When he put some distance between himself and the edge of the forest, he sat down and rested, yanking his head up whenever it dropped and he fell into a dark red sleep for seconds, or minutes, or even hours; he couldn’t be sure. Eventually his shivering became too intense, so he staggered back onto his feet, shouldered the rifle and started walking even further away from the trees.

Beyond one of the great reaching crests of the forest, where the mighty trees thrust out together like a sweeping arm, he found another track: narrow, stony, overgrown, but offering the suggestion that someone with purpose had worn this thin line into the landscape of stone and grey reindeer moss. Someone that had also once walked away from the dreadful forest.

He didn’t know which way was north or south, or where the track went, but the very sight of it made him weep and shudder down to his toes.

So into the darkness he shivered violently and he walked on legs like stumps and on feet he could not feel. Thin traces of moon and luminous cloud lit themselves up. He often stared at his hand before his eyes but could see nothing. The oblivion didn’t last for long and the sky faded indigo, then dark blue, then pink, then white-grey.

For brief moments, his mind went clear and he felt warm. And he recalled things with so great a clarity, it took a conscious force of will to assure himself that he was not back at work, or in London, or talking to Hutch in a bar in Stockholm about books.

But in the repetitive, tedious delirium, in the tramp tramp tramping of his numb feet, in some incongruous moment of clarity, he decided that earning £863 a month after tax at the age of thirty-six did not matter any more. Nor did owing NatWest Bank twenty-five grand in a loan for a business that had failed so long ago. It was irrelevant. The fact he disliked his job, and hated two of his colleagues, and was as poor as the poorest migrants around him at home in Finsbury Park, and that he dreaded Christmas because there were fewer and fewer places for him to go, and that he only owned three pairs of shoes, did not matter. And all of this fell from him. His eyes now looked at something that was beyond the horizon and so deeply inside himself at the same time. And he knew that what he now felt could never be truly revisited again. But that also did not matter. Enough of it would survive inside him, and live. And he knew the things that held him in place, and reflected an image of who he had once been back to himself, and that marshalled everyone else around him, and that those things a man should strive for and achieve in the old world were all now unimportant.

Even though he was crippled and caked in dross and stained with blood and his head was still crowned by the dead flowers, like they were holding irreparably damaged parts of his skull together, he felt light and giddy and unburdened. He was naked, and his head was bright with a whitish light even though the sky was grey and the rain fell upon him.

Nothing mattered at all but being here. Himself. There was still some life in him. His heart beat. Air passed in and out of his lungs. One foot followed another. Knowing how quickly and suddenly and unexpectedly life could end, how irrelevant life was anyway to this universe of earth and sky and age, how indifferent it was to all of the people still in it, those who would come to it and those who had already left it, he felt freed. Alone, but free. Freed of it all. Free of them, free of everything. At least for a while. And that’s all anyone really had, he decided, a little while.