Alvin stabs an index finger at a rune carved near the bottom of one side of the miniature obelisk. “See, see,” he says in thickly accented English.
“He can read it, too?” Chase asks. He’s nearly shouting now to be heard over the wind. We need to take shelter, and soon.
“He can read some,” Jakob says, standing up. He walks to us, his limp barely detectable. “But some runes are more recognizable than others.” He pulls up his sleeve revealing a rune tattoo. It matches the one at the bottom of the stone. “Show them,” Jakob says to Willem.
With a sigh, Willem puts the stone down and rolls up his sleeve. He has the same tattoo.
“What does it mean?” I ask.
“It’s our surname,” Willem says. “Olavson. This warning was put here by Torstein, Son of Olav.” He looks me in the eyes. “Our ancestor. Perhaps the brother of a distant grandfather.”
A gust of wind whips snow into my face. The sting pulls me back to the life-threatening situation at hand. That Willem’s ancestor built this place and left a warning, and might very well be the body we found, is interesting. But if we don’t take shelter soon, we’re not going to survive long enough to appreciate this uncovered bit of history—or decipher the warning carved into the stone.
I shake the fresh snow off my cloak. “Everyone inside the tent. Leave nothing outside.”
As the sun is blotted out by the storm clouds, we quickly collect our gear and load it against the back wall of the tent. We then pile inside, sitting cross-legged around Peach’s unconscious body as if she’s some kind of coffee table. The space is less cramped without Jenny here, but it also seems colder, and less hopeful. I hadn’t realized she’d become some kind of anchor for me. Now that she’s gone, I feel a strange emptiness.
I watch Willem try to read the runes. He might have studied the language, but that doesn’t mean he’s an expert. I took three years of Latin in high school and the only things I remember are two fictional residents of Pompeii (before Vesuvius erupted) named Grumio and Metella, along with the phrase “Tuus ferox aper,” which loosely translates to, “You are a ferocious boar.” To make things worse, it looks like some of the runes are worn.
The small yellow tent is lit by a single LED light, and the whole thing shakes violently, beaten by the winds. The tent roof occasionally folds down on us until we all reach up and push the dome against the winds.
We sit like this for two hours, waiting for the storm to pass, or at least decrease in violence. No one sleeps. No one speaks. And the air smells strongly of Jenny’s drying blood. Willem is the only one with something to do besides wonder when a cyclone will snatch up the raft and toss the lot of us out to sea.
The cold starts to seep in. We’re packed in tight, but the wind is finding its way through the raft’s flimsy armor. I wrap my cloak around me more tightly and fight off a shiver. When I was thirteen and living in New Hampshire, I went snowboarding at a local golf course with some new friends. I’d just met most of them and wanted to impress them, so when the cold cut through my cheap combat books and single layer of socks, I didn’t complain. Twenty minutes later, my feet throbbed with pain and I admitted defeat. I sat crouched inside a concrete tube where some construction was being done and waited for someone’s mother to come pick us up. When I got home, my red feet burned. The pain was unbearable. I know now that I was close to having frostbite. And that’s how I’m starting to feel now. The cold has crept past my outer layers and it’s moving through my muscles and reaching for my bones. If the sun doesn’t come out soon, we’re going to be in trouble. I can handle a balmy forty degrees. But this below freezing shit, with wind thrown in, is killing me. Literally.
Chase is shivering, so I know I’m not alone. Alvin just sits still, his eyes closed, sleeping I think. Jakob has his head turned up. He watches the wind pulse through the tent in waves. But he seems unaffected by the cold so far. Willem, too. He looks nonplussed by the storm and cold, though a certain degree of fear is certainly visible in his eyes. But I think that has more to do with what he’s reading than the storm around us. I watch his brow furrow deeply and wonder what he’s learning. But I don’t ask. I don’t have the energy to speak right now.
Thirty more frigid minutes pass in slow motion. I’m thirteen again, scrunching my toes in my boots to make sure things still work. I rub my arms, and legs, trying to stay in motion while sitting. I close my eyes, trying to imagine fire. I’ve heard that imagining heat can help you feel warmer. I don’t think it actually makes you warmer. It’s more a mental coping mechanism. After ten more minutes of imagining a warm toasty fireplace, I determine the technique is useless. When I open my eyes, I’m greeted by a silver flask.
Alvin shakes the flask out to me. “Will help,” he says.
“Bless your soul,” I say, taking the flask and taking a swig without asking what kind of poison it contains. The minute it hits my throat, I realize I might have made a mistake. I cough and wheeze for a moment before collecting myself. The burn travels down my throat and enters my stomach before radiating out through my extremities. Like the warmth conjured by the imagination, this isn’t true heat, but it certainly feels real.
Alvin smiles at my distress. I nearly call him an old bastid, but I’m feeling pretty rosy now, so I ask, “What is this?”
Jakob answers. He’s smiling, too. “Alvin calls it firewater. Homemade whisky. That’s his twenty year batch.”
“Is it one hundred proof or something?” I ask. I was raised by the Colonel. I know my liquors.
“One twenty,” Jakob says with a chuckle.
I can tell the act of sharing the firewater was as much joke as effort to help me get warm. My defiant side flares up. I raise the flask up. “To Greenlander alcoholics!” I take a long pull on the whiskey, swallow it down and immediately start coughing. Jakob and Alvin laugh loudly, as I pass the bottle to Jakob. He raises the bottle to me and takes a drink, impervious to the alcohol’s burn. Alvin takes the bottle, repeats the gesture and takes a drink before putting the bottle away.
They haven’t shared the bottle with Chase and I can see the disappointment on his face. He’s still shivering and looks envious of our laughter. But I suspect that despite welcoming Chase into our group, they haven’t truly accepted him. I, on the other hand, have just scored mega brownie points with the old codgers.
“Hey,” Willem says over the laughter. When no one pays attention to him, he repeats himself more loudly, “Hey!”
We stop laughing. It’s hard to do. The alcohol is working wonders on my system. Death seems a distant thing now. But when I see the rune covered block and remember Willem’s mission, I sober a bit.
“Have you translated the runes?” I ask.
“Most,” he says. “I don’t recognize a few and a couple are illegible, but I think I can infer what was said.
“What does our forefather have to tell us?” Jakob asks.
Willem turns to his father. “That we need to get the hell off of this island.”
22
“Beware, all who tread on this cursed land. Only death awaits you here. Flee while you are still able.”
I shiver at the words Willem has just read. He’s only just begun reading his translation of the runes, and they’re already ominous. He looks up, sees his audience is listening with rapt attention, and continues.
Willem looks at us and says, “Keep in mind, I’m paraphrasing,” before continuing his narration. “Those now entombed on this peninsula are heroes. They bore burdens beyond imagining, and sacrificed greatly. Greenland is once again a land without men. We have slain all who lived here—friends, family, the old and newborn alike. We pursued the infection north as it changed every man, woman and child it touched into abominations…Draugar.”
A gasp makes me jump. Alvin looks horrified. Jakob does, too. Something about this word—Draugar—frightens them more than being stranded, more than the storm, or the blood-soaked woman lying unconscious at their feet. “What’s Draugar?” I ask.
To my surprise, it’s Chase who answers, and he looks more excited than afraid. “The Draugar are Norse warriors raised from the dead. Draugar is the plural, Draugr is singular. They’re strong, but slow. Basically Viking zombies, but there are several different classes—”
Classes? Chase’s role playing speak gives away the source of his knowledge. I hold up a hand, stopping his lecture. “Stop,” I say. “No offense, but I think I’d like the non-D&D version.” I turn to the three men with Viking blood and raise my eyebrows.
“Aptrgangr,” Alvin whispers in a language I can’t understand.
Jakob nods. “Again-walker.”
Again-walker.Great. “So Chase is right? He’s talking about zombies?”
“Not exactly,” Willem says. “The Draugar are the source of modern day zombie stories, but they’re also the basis of modern vampire stories.”
“Both are living dead,” Chase adds.
Willem continues. “But the Draugar weren’t interested in just blood, or brains, they were interested in both. The blood kept them…fresh. The brains, I have no idea. They’re described as incredibly strong, and bigger when freshly infected, though I think the suspected dead were really just bloating. And, obviously, they reeked of decay. They’re very hard to kill. Iron weapons supposedly injure them, but separating the head from the body did the trick. Though it’s believed the only true way to contain a Draugr is to entomb it. They would bury a Draugr in a stone tomb and seal it behind what they called a corpse door—basically a brick wall. They would sew the big toes together and fill the soles of the feet with pins or nails, which made walking tricky. They covered the body with hay, or twigs, and placed a pair of iron scissors on its chest; I have no idea why. At the time, the Norse were a mix of the old religion—Odin, Thor, Asgard—and Christianity, so there’s even a few stories of holy water being used to keep them away.”
“That must be why holy water works on vampires in modern fiction,” Chase says.
Willem shrugs. “Probably.”
“And that’s what Grandpappy Olavson is telling us? That we’ve come across a Draugar graveyard?”
“That’s just part of it,” Willem says, looking back down at his notes. “He’s also saying that the Draugr plague, which transferred from person to person the same way as with zombies and vampires—by a bite, spread across Greenland and that he, and his men, killed every infected person they came across, which happened to be everyone.”
“Wouldn’t that have been recorded somewhere?” I ask. “We’d be learning about that in high school history.”
Willem pats the stone lying next to him. “It is recorded. We just hadn’t found the evidence before now. All we knew is that sometime in the early 1400’s, the settlements disappeared and no one ever knew why. Only ruins remained.”
“So this story fits?” I ask.
Willem frowns. “I should probably finish reading it before we rush to believe the story or not.”
Makes sense, I think. “Go ahead.”
“We started as twenty men, all hunters,” Willem reads. “We are now six, all showing signs of Draugr infection, which begins with mild illness and descends into madness. The strong-willed change slowly; the weak, much faster. But what is most important is that we have pursued the source of the Draugar to this frigid, desolate place and entombed it as we will now entomb ourselves. Fear the Draugr, but beware the Muninn, the source, whose resting place is appropriately marked with my family’s seal, now a mark of the cursed. This message, carved in stone, is the only sentinel I can leave to stand guard. May my harsh words hasten your retreat. Torstein, Son of Olav.”
“Muninn?” I ask. “Didn’t you say that was one of Odin’s ravens? Means mind, or memory, or something.”
“Both,” Willem says. “Perhaps they discovered the plague was being spread by the birds? I don’t know.”
“Or Muninn was a person,” I say. “It only took a black cloak, and black hair, to make you all give me the Raven nickname.”
Willem twists his lips around, pondering the ancient mystery. He looks ready to offer up another idea, but Chase beats him to the punch.
“Um,” he says, sounding nervous. “Why did they pick a Raven? I mean, there are lots of black things they could have picked.”
The question is directed at me. “The Raven is their family crest,” I say.
Chase looks like he’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and a few months to live.
“And…just let me get this straight,” Chase says, raising a finger in the air. His hand shakes. “The Raven is the family crest of the, ahh, Olavson family. Yes? And Torstein, Son of Olav, was their ancestor? An Olavson?”
“Yes, that’s right,” Willem says. “Why are you—”
“So the crest carved onto the stone where this Muninn is entombed would be—”
He leaves the statement unfinished.
Willem takes the bait. “A raven.”
Chase looks like the doctor has just revealed his terminal cancer is actually going to kill him in a few hours. “What is it?” I ask him.
“The cave,” he says. “The cave where I hid with McAfee. And Mr. Jackson. And Eagon. It was sealed. Covered by a thick stone wall. We uhh, we tore it down to get inside.”
Willem starts rubbing his forehead. We all know how this is going to end, but let Chase get it out.
“The largest stone in the wall,” Chase says. “It was, ahh, it was marked. With a raven.”
No one says a word. Four sets of eyes watch Chase.
“I think…I think it was Muninn’s cave,” he says. “I think the Muninn killed Eagon. We set the Raven free.”
“It killed her.” The soft, feminine voice makes everyone jump back and scream.
As I catch my breath, I see that Peach is awake. She’s still flat on her back, but her eyes are open. The blank stare from before has dulled, but there are still traces of it hidden in her pupils.
“Killed who?” Chase asks after composing himself.
“Jenny,” Peach says. “The raven killed her. I saw it.”
23
If circumstances had been ideal, I would had have time to interview Peach, ask her to describe what she saw, how Jenny died, how she survived. Okay, ideal would actually be me on a beach, with none of these people around, sunning myself and reading a trashy novel that has nothing to do with whales, Vikings, ravens or any other avian species. But right now, in this moment, I could have really done without the howl that rips through the tent and erases the effects of the firewater.
My body shakes with a shiver.
“What was that?” Chase says, fear creeping back into his voice.
“Wind?” Willem asks.
We all sit silently, waiting for the howl to repeat so we can identify it as wind. But the sound doesn’t come. In fact, the tent has stopped shaking. Sometime in the last ten minutes while we listened to the tale of Torstein, the wind died down.
I unzip the hatch and poke my head outside. The sky is still full of gray clouds and snowflakes flutter through the sky, but the swirling black monster of a storm has moved north, out to sea. “It wasn’t the wind,” I say.
“It was the raven,” Peach says. She hasn’t sat up. Hasn’t moved. She’s an Egyptian mummy laying in a sarcophagus and communicating from the afterlife. According to the long deceased Olavson, that might actually be possible. A second shiver grips my body as a totally irrational fear tickles my mind. I look at Peach more closely. It’s cold—really cold—but her forehead is slick with sweat.
“Feeling okay, Peach?” I ask.
She glances at me with a squinty-eyed glare that most women perfect in middle-school.
“Never mind Peach,” Chase says, sliding to the open hatch. “We’re in a big yellow target.” He looks through the hatch and cranes his head around, looking at the stone walls around us. “The walls are taller than the tent, so we should be okay unless it walks past the front door.”
“It?” I say. “Think about
what you’re saying. There is no recently thawed giant raven wandering around the island killing people and playing hacky-sack with their heads. There are no zombies. No vampires. No Draugar.” I set my eyes on Peach. “And we’re going to find out who killed Jenny, with or without your help.”
“Hey!” Chase shouts, yanking my shoulder so I’m facing him again.
I nearly punch him in the gut, but manage to restrain myself.
“There might not be any of those things, but there is a polar bear.”
Willem sidles up next to us. He speaks more gently. “And your missing captain.”
Damnit. I hate being wrong. “And Mr. Jackson,” I admit. “You’re right. But we can’t go anywhere yet. The sea will be too rough still. Even with the engine, we’ll never make it across the channel.”
“This girl is ill,” Jakob says. He has his hand on Peach’s forehead. Her eyes are closed again and her body shivers.
What comes around goes around, I think, but I keep it to myself. Instead, I take charge. “I’m going out to look for Jenny—Jenny’s body. I want to know how she died.” I glance at Peach. “How she really died. Come with me or stay here, the choice is yours.”
I slide from the exit and climb to my feet, careful that I don’t stand taller than the wall. I don’t want to expose myself until I’m certain that howl didn’t come from something nearby. As I check my handgun, Chase, Willem, Jakob and Alvin all exit the tent.
“Alvin and I will remain here,” Jakob says. He points to a pile of stones that must have fallen from the upper portion of the walls long ago. We’ll fill in the doorway with those. You’ll have to climb over the wall to get back in.”
“Good idea,” I say.
“I’m Captain for a reason,” Jakob says and gives me a wink.
I head for the door. Willem and Chase follow me. Neither has said so, but it’s clear they’re both coming. My heroes, I think with more than a little bit of sarcasm. It occurs to me that it’s a good thing I have a filter between the things I think and the things I say or everyone would know I’m an asshole.
THE SENTINEL (A Jane Harper Horror Novel) Page 12