by Sam Subity
My heart stuttered as my nightmares threatened to merge with my waking life. Had the dreams been some sort of warning? Aesir were supposed to have a sixth sense about danger that others didn’t have. This felt like that. Sort of. But sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference between actually feeling something and wanting to feel it so badly that I made it up myself. Whatever this was, my alarm bells were sure going off now.
Almost in a trance, I took a single step toward the window. Then another. Now I could feel a definite heat coming from that direction. The temperature increased as I approached, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. Like I was pulled toward it. A moth drawn to a flame.
Sweat beaded on my skin as I inched nearer. My brain screamed at me to stop. I reached out to raise the shade. My fingertips touched the pull cord. All I had to do was tug and I’d come face-to-face with … what?
Knock! Knock! Knock!
My tensed muscles reacted instantaneously, jerking down on the cord so hard I ripped the blinds right off the window. Even as they crashed to the floor, I realized the noise had come from behind me. I spun and saw a figure silhouetted in the doorway of the hospital room, its features obscured in the backlight from the hallway. My hand grabbed the closest thing I could find and flung it over my shoulder like a weapon. In the same motion, I leapt across the room, sliding to a stop with my outstretched fingertips mere inches from the intruder’s face.
“Wha … ? Ow!” the person said as he jerked backward and smacked the back of his head into the doorframe.
We stood with our eyes locked for a tense moment. My breath heaved through clenched teeth.
Then he gulped. “Uh, is that sphygmomanometer loaded?”
What? My eyes darted to the blood pressure cuff that hung limply over my shoulder.
“Sorry … heh … medical humor,” said the intruder. “My, um, mom’s a doctor.”
I blinked. For the first time it registered that standing there rubbing the back of his head was nothing more menacing than a boy about my age. So much for my special sixth sense.
“Who are you?” I said more angrily than I meant to, frustrated and embarrassed by my overreaction. I lowered my raised hand and willed my muscles to relax. “Sorry. It’s been a rough last couple of days.”
He nodded. “I figured. Are you Abby? Abby Beckett?”
“Yeah. How do you know my name?”
He held out his hand tentatively. “I’m Jacob Grimsby. But everyone just calls me Grimsby. I was assigned to be your tour guide.” When I looked at him blankly, he added, “For Vale? I’m supposed to show you around. You know, take you to class? That kind of thing.” He let his hand fall to his side.
We were interrupted by the sound of someone humming loudly in the hallway. The smell of fresh bread made my famished stomach do flip-flops.
“I have croissants!” Dad’s nurse, Bryn, sang as she appeared behind Grimsby. She was about twenty-ish, I guessed, with a long blond braid that trailed halfway down her back.
“Oh, hey, Jakey,” she said. “Whatcha doing?”
Jakey?
Grimsby blushed and quickly stuffed his hands into his pockets, trying to look casual. “Rolling out the welcome wagon, apparently.”
“Wait,” I said, “you guys know each other?”
“Oh, sure,” said Bryn. She stepped past us into the room, stopping to check Dad’s vitals before turning back to us. “His mom works here at the hospital too. I used to babysit him when he was just a little guy.”
I turned to Grimsby. “So if Bryn was getting breakfast, how did you know where to find us?” I felt a little bad grilling the guy, but my paranoia meter was on high alert after our recent experiences.
He averted his eyes. “I just sort of followed the noise. I take it you’re not a light sleeper?”
Bryn snorted. “Light sleeper? Ha! You should hear it when she starts snoring.”
Grimsby grinned. “So that’s what that was. I thought someone was murdering a duck with a chain saw. Slowly.”
I could feel my cheeks flush a little at the turn this conversation had taken. “Okay, is everyone done discussing my sleeping habits now?”
Grimsby shook his sleeve vigorously to expose his wristwatch and then checked the time. “Yeah, we should probably be getting to class.”
I stared. Class? “There’s no way I’m—”
Bryn cut me off with a wave of her hand. “I think that’s a fabulous idea. What were you planning to do? Sit around here growing roots until your dad wakes up?” She laid a hand on my shoulder and gently guided me toward the door of Dad’s room while she kept up her lecture. “What good does that do either of you? I like you, kid, but honestly, you need to get some fresh air. Go to class. Be a kid, for Pete’s sake.”
I opened my mouth to protest, but she wasn’t done. Her voice softening, she said, “Look, your dad knows you’re here for him. He really does. But he wouldn’t want you to stop living while he’s getting better.”
Glancing toward Grimsby, she smiled sweetly, then nudged the door closed right in his face.
“Hey!” he protested.
“Just a sec!” she called to him, then lowered her voice. “Besides, your dad is in good hands.” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers as if proving her point. Which was when I noticed for the first time the silver braided knot encircling her thumb. A Viking knot.
My eyes widened. “You’re a …” My eyes shot toward the closed door as I whispered, “Viking too?”
The hint of a smile played across her face. My surprise probably seemed a little silly to her, but she was the first Viking I’d met in, well, at least four years.
Bryn winked at me. “Like I said. In good hands.”
I stared into her eyes, my heart beating a little faster at the secret connection. Then I looked back at Dad. His heart monitor chirped out its steady rhythm. It seemed like he was okay, but what if he needed me?
Bryn pulled the door open and gently guided me into the hall. Grimsby looked up from where he leaned against the wall next to the door.
“You, um, didn’t hear any of that, did you?” I asked.
He cocked his head. “Hear what?”
“Oh, nothing. Just some girl stuff.”
“She’ll be ready in five,” Bryn said, and pushed the door closed behind me. Then the door reopened and she poked her head out, adding, “One last thing?”
“Yeah?” I said hopefully.
She pointed her finger at my head and twirled it in exaggerated circles. “You might want to find a hairbrush.” With that she shoved the bag of still-warm croissants into my hand and shut the door again.
I turned toward my reflection in the dark glass panel beside my dad’s door. My hair was plastered against my head in a sort of lopsided rooster tail on one side like my pillow had exploded. I shifted my eyes back to the closed door. “Okay, I guess I’m going to school,” I mumbled to myself.
“Good girl!” Bryn chimed from behind the door.
But as I stepped into the room next to Dad’s, where my things waited, I suddenly remembered the feeling of the strange presence at the window. I stepped toward my own window, where the rising sun now winked through the trees, casting long, dark shadows like ghostly fingers reaching across the snowy lawn. The bare branches of a nearby maple tree nearly touched the glass as they stirred in the wind. Had the sunrise and swaying branches created the effect of dancing red flames I’d seen earlier?
I was reminded of the old rhyme: Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
“Why?” I’d once asked my mom another lifetime ago. “What’s so bad about a red sky in the morning?”
“That’s how sailors predicted the weather back before modern technology,” she’d told me. “A red sky in the morning meant a storm was coming.”
As I gazed out the window, my face reflected back to me in the glass. The words echoed in my mind: A storm. A storm is coming. A storm is coming.
A chilly gust slipped under the slightly open wi
ndow, making me shiver. I slammed it shut to block out the cold. And locked it.
All the moving boxes containing my stuff were stacked neatly in one corner of the hospital room. I found the one with “Clothes—Abby” scrawled on the side in black Sharpie. Of course everything was properly packed and labeled, because Dad was insistent that even fleeing for our lives be done in a neat, orderly fashion.
I dug out a pair of jeans and another of my mom’s old red flannel shirts. The cloth’s age-worn softness seemed to embrace me like a warm hug as I slid it on. I turned toward the full-length mirror that hung on the back of the door and studied my reflection. People said I had my mom’s nose. Her eyes. But did I have her heart? Her courage to face our enemies no matter the cost?
I still remembered her funeral like it was yesterday. Me biting my lower lip resolutely to keep it from trembling as her coffin was slowly lowered into the ground. The fire—a cruel, random accident that had destroyed the cottage where we’d been vacationing—had stolen even the chance for me to see her face one final time. Not even the memory of the last thing she’d said to me remained. It was almost like the events of that horrific day had been burned from my mind, leaving me with only fiery nightmares. Dad said he’d been out for a late-afternoon jog on the beach and returned to find our cottage an inferno, fearing he’d lost both of us until he found me curled up in a whimpering ball in the woods behind the house.
And later, as I stood beside her grave, I silently made a vow that even though the memories of our final hours together were gone, I’d keep her memory alive by continuing the work she’d started. The words of a kid who didn’t know what she was promising. To hunt and eradicate the ancient enemy of the Aesir. A line from the Beowulf epic sprang to my mind: Those dark shadows of death, lurking, lying in wait, in long night keeping the misty moors.
Grendels.
A tremor racked my body as another dark shadow loomed into my thoughts. One that had lurked fewer than ten feet away across my kitchen floor. Almost close enough to touch. Suddenly I felt chilled to the core. Even though I’d never seen a Grendel in person, I was somehow certain that’s what it had been. Had it specifically sought me out? And if so, why was I still alive? Would it follow me here? I squeezed my hands into fists in frustration. Of the two people in the world I might talk with about all this, one was lying in a coma, and the other—Aunt Jess—had seemingly dropped off the face of the earth. Bryn? No, she’d probably just think it was silly—a little kid afraid of shadows.
The clatter of a cart going by in the hallway snapped me back to the present. Grimsby was waiting for me. I rubbed my hands against the chill that still lingered, then grabbed a second flannel. Then a scarf and a wool cap with a pom-pom on top and snugged everything on.
As I was about to leave, I noticed a maroon blazer draped neatly across the bed with the Vale Hall logo on the left front pocket. When I inspected it more closely, the tag on the inside collar had “Abby Beckett” stitched on it. Was I supposed to wear it? I managed to yank and tug it on over the flannels, then turned to inspect myself in the mirror. I looked like the marshmallow man stuffed into a three-sizes-too-small coat. Great.
In the mirror, my eyes fell across one of our boxes labeled “Household Items” and an idea hit me. The box’s contents were a jumbled mess from the run-in with the biker, but I found what I was looking for. Dad’s old cassette player.
Bryn looked up from where she sat reading a nursing textbook by the bedside when I came into Dad’s room.
“This’ll just take a second,” I said. She smiled when she saw the player and nodded.
There was an empty plug behind Dad’s bedside table, so I set up the machine and jammed a worn, old cassette into the slot, then clicked it closed. When I hit Play, the opening chords of the Beatles’ “Good Day Sunshine” filled the room. A little something to keep him company while I was away.
“Be back soon, Daddy,” I said quietly, and gently kissed him on the forehead.
My little mission accomplished, I headed downstairs toward the main entrance of the hospital. I paused for a second by the front doors and steeled myself against the cold, then stepped in front of the motion detector. The doors slid open, and I felt the North Carolina in me wither in the blast of the polar vortex that greeted me. If we were going to be in Minnesota for a while, I was going to have to get used to this.
I stepped out onto the sidewalk and surveyed the frozen gray wasteland beyond the doors like a visitor to some dystopian landscape. Also known as suburban Minneapolis.
If this was what the weather was like in October, then I was in trouble.
“You’re not from around here, are you?” someone said.
My head was basically fixed in place beneath layers of flannel and wool, so I pivoted my whole body in the direction of the voice. Grimsby crunched across the snow-packed lawn toward me. In the light of the morning sun, he looked way less spooky than when I’d first seen him. Black backpack straps pinched the shoulders of his maroon blazer, which was a match to mine, except the “a” in Vale on his breast pocket was scratched out with black pen and an “i” was scrawled over it. Despite the cold, he was wearing khaki shorts and brown loafers with no socks. He studied my clothes curiously as he approached.
I glanced down self-consciously. “Whff?” The word came out muffled behind my scarf.
“Did you come from a lumberjack convention?” he said.
I yanked down the scarf so he could hear me. “It’s like zero degrees out here.”
His eyes slid toward a digital marquee on a bank across the street: 34°F. He looked back at me with one raised eyebrow.
“We, uh, use Celsius where I’m from?” I said weakly.
“Well, welcome to Minnesota. And the United States, apparently. Up here we only have two seasons: July and winter. As you may have noticed, it’s not July. So you’re probably gonna need a heavier coat.”
“Well, I haven’t had time to, you know, go shopping yet.”
“Don’t worry,” he said, noticing the threadbare condition of my flannels. “There’s a Salvation Army downtown.”
He didn’t know how close he was to the truth. If you ever wondered who ends up with the old clothes your parents drop off at the thrift store, it’s probably yours truly. Unfortunately, one time that was literally the case, when I came to school wearing a striped polo shirt with a hole in the armpit that some girl’s mom had only dropped off the previous week. She said to me, “Hey, lift up your arm for a sec.” The next thing I knew, she was poking me in the armpit and calling me a dumpster diver. We didn’t exactly have a lot of money on a single teacher’s salary.
But all that aside, this guy was starting to annoy me. Here I was, my dad lying in a coma, me ripped from my home and deposited in this frozen wasteland, and I had to deal with him giving me a hard time about my fashion choices? I was seconds from wrapping my blood pressure cuff around his neck, but then I noticed his earnest expression. Was he actually for real?
As if sensing my confusion, he said, “No, seriously. I’ll show you the Salvation Army sometime. I once got these sweet grandpa pants there. They smelled like mothballs, but they were as comfortable as silk pajamas.” He nodded his head wistfully at the memory.
“So, school …” I said to remind him.
“Oh, right. I almost forgot. So I’m your fabulous welcoming committee of one. Jacob Grimsby, Esquire, at your service.” He spread his arms and bowed comically, his black curls flopping forward. “But as I mentioned earlier, everyone just calls me Grimsby.”
“Cool,” I said. “I’m Abby Beckett. But I guess you knew that already.” I pointed at the defaced logo on his blazer. “Vile Hall? Something I should know about?”
“Oh, it’ll be more fun for you to find out for yourself. Come on, we’re in the same class for first period. I’ll show you around a little before that.”
As we turned down the sidewalk, he asked, “So for real, where you from? Somewhere exotic?”
“Not ex
actly. North Carolina.”
“Ah, just sick of all the sun and sea air, then?” He extracted a plastic cup from the side pouch of his backpack and sipped a bright orange liquid through a plastic straw. Whatever it was had a faintly sweet smell.
“Well, I …” I started.
He saw me eyeing the cup. “Oh! Sorry. I almost forgot. I brought you one too.” He pulled a matching cup from the other side of his backpack and handed it to me. “Anyway, you were saying?”
I looked down skeptically at the cup, then shrugged and took a sip. As the syrupy liquid hit my tongue, my senses lit up like a pinball machine that had just gone full tilt.
I swallowed and coughed in surprise. “What is this stuff?”
Grimsby smiled proudly. “Really jolts you awake, doesn’t it? I’m into that whole juicing thing.” He took another long sip from his straw, then lifted his cup into the sunlight to study it.
“So, like … beets? Kale?”
“This one’s my vitamin C booster. I start with a base of orange Tang, then add a garnish of lemon and lime Skittles, and finish off with a shot of banana Runts. Because my doctor says I need more potassium.”
“You realize none of those are real fruits, right?”
Ignoring this, he said, “So why are you just starting school now? In the middle of October, I mean?”
“Oh, well …” I stalled as my brain struggled to put together a story on the fly. “My dad … he got a job here. He’s an expert in Old English literature—Beowulf, Chaucer—that kind of stuff. So I think he’s going to be teaching British literature. I’m sort of along for the ride, I guess you could say.”
“Rumor is you got a scholarship to play knattleikr. That’s hardly what I’d call only ‘along for the ride.’ ”