by Brian Hodge
I followed as he led me into his office, walking in that stiff-legged manner of his. The stone was standing on a table in a corner, a flat gray slab with characters etched in a quasi-circle around the edges. Some were still sharply defined, others less distinct. The writing was of the same type as on the battleaxe from the quad: the classic elder runes.
“Small, as runestones go,” he said. “But I suppose they could only work with what they could find.”
“What does it say?”
“Roughly translated, it says, ‘This stone is raised in memory of Olaf the Dark. He fared like a man from Iceland to Vínland and beyond. May Odin guide him to the Hall of the Slain, to reap a harvest of corpses.”‘
“It almost sounds like a prophecy.”
“Indeed it does, in light of what you’ve told me. And what happened years ago.” He cleared his throat, then waved me on to follow him back to the living room.
“What did happen then?” I asked.
He avoided eye contact this time, instead staring askance at the coffee table. “In the spring of 1940, my brother killed himself in a car wreck. He was drunk at the time, I make no secret of that. He left behind a wife and two daughters, who were five and six. They lived in a small house at what you now call Tri-Lakes. Later in the year, as I was attending Washington University in St. Louis, I began an independent study dissertation on the history of Williamson County. My sister-in-law offered to put me up; their home was a good deal closer to Bloody Williamson than St. Louis. And it worked out fine. I grew especially fond of my nieces.” His voice came close to cracking. “I found the stone one day while playing with them, and soon after that, Doris, my sister-in-law, went utterly berserk. She came after me with an axe. But before that, she murdered her own children. She’d taken two short lengths of rope and tied one around each of their necks, then pulled both ends tight so that they choked. This was one manner of execution, or sacrifice, in Viking culture.
“Doris knocked over a kerosene lantern while chasing me, and the house burned, Doris and the children with it. I suppose no real evidence was left to tell the true story. And I decided to lie, because immediately afterward, I had no idea how to explain it all. The fire was blamed on lightning, which was a lucky break for me, but it was a shame the fire couldn’t have spread further because of the rain.”
“And so why all the similarities in events over nine hundred and fifty years apart? You don’t think that…” I let my voice wander away from me.
Crighton sat still for a few moments. “Suppose there is a remnant still there, a piece of whatever hideous drive fueled Olaf the Dark. A piece that remains harbored in the grove where they practiced their rites. And when someone comes close enough, he’s able to use them to live again. Should a host body die, he can simply move on to another and live again. Taking what he pleases, plundering where he wills.”
He looked me straight in the eye again, his face as hard as the stone in his office.
“He’s found Valhöll,” he said.
Probably the only Viking who ever did. Or so I hoped. How I hoped.
“Just thinking off the top of my head, I’d guess that he is ultimately attracted to chaos. The Vikings, in actuality, were not the evil demons they were made out to be. They may more accurately be seen as agents of self-interested chaos. They were experts at sowing chaos and profiting handsomely from it. Perhaps this is what truly stirs Olaf into activity. He feeds on the chaos in peoples’ lives. Certainly there was enough in Doris’s life after my brother died.”
And now, in our own lives as well. We were at the most unstable time of our lives, fresh out of high school and heading for a larger world. Residing in each of us were fears and anxieties to last a lifetime. Especially Rick, after he’d mashed his fingers.
For different reasons, it was like that with Hurdles, too.
“I honestly believe that Sarah, my younger niece, tried to warn us in her own way. She insisted she’d seen a bearlike thing in the grove, and then in the house.” Crighton rubbed his eyes. “And while she saw Olaf growing stronger, we dismissed it as a typical figment of a child’s imagination.” He cleared his throat, a thick liquid sound. “I tried to escape the memories, and planned to drive to California. I didn’t know what I’d do after I got there, but it didn’t matter because I never made it anyway.” He rapped his knuckles on his left leg; it sounded hard, plastic. “I had my own car wreck in Colorado, and I still don’t know quite how it happened. I lay on the side of a mountain for a few days and lost a leg to gangrene. A present from Olaf. Or perhaps chastisement for trying to run. You can’t run away from some things.”
How well I knew that.
He sighed, spread his hands. “At any rate, those are my stories. I don’t believe in predestination, Chris, but I do believe that I was chosen by Olaf. In retrospect, I wonder if my brother’s death wasn’t just another part of this, somehow designed to get me out there more permanently. But yes, Olaf chose me to be his chronicler, the teller of his tale. When I tried to run, he yanked me back east, and I knew I had no choice but to go along with whatever force was out there. So that was my real purpose for living. To pass this on.”
More than any time since I’d arrived, I felt such pity for this man. To have just been starting out your life, and then to have been selected for purposes as foul as this…
But then, were Aaron and I and our friends that much different?
It made me wonder: Crighton’s purpose in this was already clear to him. Aaron and I were still struggling to make sense of our part in it. The what I now understood. But not the why. And I told Crighton as much.
“It’s not like we just blundered onto that site and now we’re paying for it. It’s not even like Olaf is doing this for sport. It’s like he’s chosen me and my brother to hammer on. I mean, everything that’s happened these past few months has clustered around us. It’s not random at all.” I lifted my hands in helpless consternation. “What the hell is it all about?”
Crighton pursed his lips in concentration, his forehead crinkling. At last he looked at me and smiled kindly. “For that, I have no answer. But you’re right, it does seem that he is attracted to you, but I can’t say why. You say you’re of Nordic descent, and I see it in your face. Perhaps that’s it. And perhaps that’s only a coincidence.”
Which puts us back to square one, I thought glumly.
“Maybe you can’t answer this, either,” I said, “but can I stop him?”
He leaned forward in his chair, elbows resting on the worn knees of his pants. He shook his head. “I just don’t know, Chris. I’ve looked for that answer in all the years I’ve spent studying Icelandic history and translating the literature. But I’ve never found a clue. I only wish I could help you there.”
I stared into the floor. “So do I.”
After a moment of awkward silence, he stood again. “But I do have something I want to give you. You see, the runes were used for magic and curses as well as memorial inscriptions.”
I looked at him, my eyes widening.
“I don’t know if you can even use it to your advantage, but I want you to take the stone. I’ve never felt that it was mine. I’ve only been holding onto it.”
I nodded, still wide-eyed. “I wouldn’t know what to do with it. I’d just have to go on instinct.”
“And that may be the smartest move you could make.”
I mulled it over in my mind for a moment, then another, then another. Hell, I couldn’t even read the damn thing. It was just another rock to me. I pushed the thought away. Let it simmer on the back burners awhile.
“Whatever happened to Olaf’s enemy, the guy that beat him down?” I asked. It’d be good to know there was at least one success story connected with this. “Thorfinn Snow-Beard?”
Crighton waved his hand idly in the air, a kind of dismissal. “Oh, the saga says he continued to walk the straight and narrow path. It wasn’t very interesting. The stories of the insufferably righteous rarely are. He wanted to change his ways and
steer clear of the heathen background he came from. But the man did break tradition and established his family name as one that he intended not to change, as a sign of their break with the past. You recall I mentioned earlier their method of forming patronymic surnames?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what Thorfinn did. His father’s name was Handorr, so the name became—”
Crighton stopped as abruptly as if he’d been shot, and a new light dawned in his eyes. I’m sure it mirrored my own, for all the tales my grandmother had told me as a kid came back like a tidal wave.
“—it became Handorrsson,” he whispered hoarsely. “Surely you don’t know if you were…”
I gripped the arm of the sofa and did the only thing I could manage at the moment.
I nodded.
Chapter 36
I barely made it back home in time for supper. I ate, then showered to wash away the road sweat that had built up since early morning. I was quiet as a tomb during supper that night. Everything I’d learned from Crighton needed more time to sink in and take root. A picture-perfect puzzle hung before my mind’s eye.
Revenge, I thought. The oldest motive in the world. Olaf must have been biding his time for centuries, waiting, watching, looking for the perfect set of circumstances to strike back at the descendants of the man who cast him from his home.
But one final piece of that puzzle was still missing. How do you fight something over 950 years old? And I’d thought finding Crighton was going to be the difficult task. Child’s play, by comparison. I’d put the runestone in my trunk, wrapped in an old blanket along with the axe. Magic, he’d said. Curses. Now, if only I could figure out a way to use it against Tri-Lakes.
Once I’d dried off from my shower and finally put on some fresh clothes, I saw light seeping from beneath Aaron’s bedroom door. I knocked once, lightly. ‘‘It’s me.”
“Come on in,” he said, and I did so. “You don’t have to knock. I’m not that paranoid.” He lay atop his bed with an afghan draped loosely over his waist and legs, thumbing through a new Rolling Stone. “Considering how long you were gone, I take it you found him?”
“Yup.”
He let the magazine fall to the floor. “What’d he have to say?”
“Plenty. But first, we need to talk more about Hurdles. Really, we have to do something. He’s got to be taken out of the picture. Even if we have to lie to get the police after him. But when I was in the shower I got to thinking that it might not hurt to have someone on our side when we go in. Someone that might add more credibility. Interested?”
One corner of Aaron’s mouth ticked. “Who do you have in mind?”
“Mr. Goddard. Talk to him first thing in the morning. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got a lot of respect for the guy. We could go in and see him together. What do you think?”
“Sure. What have we got to lose?”
“Classes start at eight-thirty,” I said. “Say we leave here at eight or so?”
“Sure.”
I shut his door then, because the things that were coming next lent themselves to it. Closed-door secrets, closed-door lives. I sat on the other end of the bed. Looked at him for a moment.
“Anyway. What I learned this afternoon,” I said. “You never got into the family heritage stuff the way I did, did you?”
He shook his head. “You were interested in it enough for the both of us.”
“Well, it’s time you got interested,” I said, and began that long, long story. The history. How it fit in with things I’d not yet told Aaron about, such as the visions, and the battleaxe.
And although I didn’t learn of it until after everything was all over, this must have been about the exact time that Hurdles went into motion again. Hurdles tracked down White Trash Joe to do a little birthday shopping. Or so he said.
It didn’t take long. When the cash got flashed up front, Joe’s transactions never took long. Joe pocketed the hundred-plus. And hoped the fat boy’s dad would like that crossbow.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve discovered that few matters really go according to plan. The best-laid schemes of mice and men, and all that.
Somehow my alarm failed to go off Wednesday morning, and on I slumbered. Aaron, who left Good Morning, America to check on me, woke me, so we were only five minutes behind schedule.
But there was more trouble lying in wait.
I had problems with the hot water once I’d gotten lathered up with soap and shampoo. In theory, cold showers should go quickly, but it doesn’t work that way when you can only stand to rinse yourself off a little bit at a time. The Titanic went down in warmer water than that shower.
My trusty Gillette blow-dryer blew its last gasp, shorting out with a stinking puff of smoke.
Dad had trouble starting his truck that morning, effectively blocking us in until he got it rolling.
While neither Aaron nor I said anything, I know the same thought had crossed our minds. It felt as if something out there was deliberately throwing roadblocks at us.
We finally pulled out at eight-fifteen. The drive to school tacked on another ten minutes. Mr. Goddard’s building was a clamor of noise when we stepped inside; students slammed lockers, yelled, leaned against walls, gave it their all to put off that inevitable first class of the day. We took a front staircase to the second floor.
Aaron and I made our way down the second floor corridor toward the rear of the building and Mr. Goddard’s classroom. When the bell rang, the hallway was nearly deserted save for a few stragglers, Aaron and me, and Mr. Goddard, drinking at the water fountain outside his door at the end of the hail.
“Looks like we got here in plenty of time,” Aaron said, heavy on the sarcasm.
Mr. Goddard straightened up from the fountain, saw us, and froze. Squinted. Waved when he decided we were friends and not foes. And waited for us. He wore jeans and a sweater with a leaping deer design. His beard had filled in considerably since the Homecoming game.
“Hi Chris. Bringing your truant brother back in person, huh?” He said it lightly. Mr. Goddard had never been especially hard-nosed about attendance. He kicked at a cigarette butt on the floor, sent it skittering across the tile and onto the rear stairway across the hall; the stairwell was a bent gray throat leading down, down…
“We need to talk to you,” I said.
His face clouded over when he saw how serious I was. He glanced into his room, front to back. A few kids were craning their necks for a better glimpse of us. “It’s that important?”
“Yeah. It is.”
Mr. Goddard rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “Give me a minute to talk these people into behaving themselves.” He took another step into his doorway.
Aaron was the first to see it coming. His eyes seemed to swell in their sockets. His mouth worked soundlessly, and he pointed at the deserted rear stairwell.
No, not quite deserted.
Hurdles.
A dull snapping sound cut through the air, like a quick pluck of a huge guitar string. Something zipped past me and punched into Mr. Goddard’s chest so fast it didn’t even stop there; a splurt of blood splashed the wall from his back. He went slamming into the wall a instant later, and slid slowly down with that same dazed expression on his face as he stared down at the drooling hole in his sweater. He left a wide red smear on the wall as he went down.
The screaming started then, and I heard somebody in the class hurl their breakfast into the floor with a thick splatter.
Something in me refused to budge, wouldn’t let me follow Aaron as he ducked into the classroom. I stood in the doorway and watched as Hurdles left the top stair, grimacing with a terrible resolve, an unwavering purpose. His eyes were fixed on me, unblinking. They weren’t his eyes. But I’d seen them before, oh yes.
Muscles cording in his arm, he drew back the bow and notched it behind the release, then loaded another arrow from the quiver dangling from his shoulder. He lifted the crossbow again.
“CHRIS!” Aaron’s voic
e, frantic, close.
I leaned forward and seized the knob of the classroom door and swung it in after me, the door thudding shut and latching. My fingers groped for a lock and I realized the only way it could be locked was with a janitor’s key. So I did the only thing I could: gripped the knob as tightly as I could and stepped aside, out of line with the doorway.
Hurdles let his second arrow fly, and it punched a neat round hole through the door, spraying tiny slivers of glass and shattering a window across the room. It brought a fresh wave of screaming.
The door — the bottom half was heavy wood, the top half thick translucent glass reinforced with wire mesh. Sturdy, but I had no idea how long it could thwart a determined Hurdles. So I hung on to the knob and felt it grow slippery as the chilly sweat poured.
Voices outside in the hallway, frightened, shouting at Hurdles. He shouted back, no, not shouted, roared, and then I heard that twunk sound again. There came a yelp of pain from up the hall, and someone began screaming over and over, as if dying an endless death, flayed alive and roasting over glowing coals.
I took the moment to glance at the class behind me. Some had had enough presence of mind to hit the floor, while others sat glassy-eyed and numb while staring at the door or at Mr. Goddard, leaking onto the floor as Aaron desperately tried pressing his palm over the chest wound. Another kid, bless him, joined Aaron and applied direct pressure over the exit wound in his back. A guy and girl in the far row opened a window and slipped out onto the fire escape, and a handful of others who saw them followed suit. Others looked too shell-shocked to even think of trying it themselves. I was just about to open my mouth and remind them when—
He was back. And all thought fled me in one giant brainlock.
The knob began to twist in my hand, slipping in the greasy film of sweat. I wedged my shoulder against the wall like Samson ready to bring down the temple, and pulled back as hard as I could.
Arrows started punching through the door again, one after another after another. I didn’t know a crossbow could be loaded time and again so quickly. I think I started screaming somewhere along in here.