Dead of Winter Collection

by Benjamin Knox

  “Sweetie, it's not safe here, okay? We're going to take you somewhere safe...”

  The woman gets ever so slightly closer. She speaks funny, has a strange accent.

  A crash from the other room and a voice, “Holy Fuck! We gotta get out of here.”

  There is a gurgling shriek – Mama – and the winds rises blasting in from the open cabin door.

  “Help me,” the woman says, and the large man descends on Silje who curls up into a ball, willing herself to vanish. Together the woman and the man scoop Silje out of the tub. The man is holding her much the way she is holding Rin.

  “Okay, sweetie, we're going to run now but you have to do something for me okay? You mustn't look. I want you to close your eyes really tight until we're outside.”

  Silje is silent.

  “Brennen, keep it down while we get to the door,” the woman calls out.

  Then they are moving, fast and jerky, through the main room of the cabin. Something bad is happening; someone is trying to keep mama trapped under the bed while she screams and rails against them. Each time she wails the storm-winds roar, bringing a sinister chill and biting ice with it.

  Then all of a sudden, for the first time in days – weeks? – Silje is outside the cabin. Now she does shut her eyes though, as the fierce angry writhing in the sky paints the snowfields a grotesque and wane emerald.

  Silje doesn't want to look. Doesn't want the green inside her the way it got inside papa and mama.

  All she hears is the heavy breathing of the man holding her and the steady crunch-crunch of his steps in the snow, and the rending of frozen flesh from bone.

  – III –

  REVENANTS

  The storm is rising around us, as if that hag in the cabin summoned it. I glance over my shoulder to see Lars still has the girl in his arms. Brennen trails behind us, making sure the hag doesn’t give chase. I squint into the biting gale and check my rifle; not many rounds left. I need to ration them. A bullet to the head might not put the dead down like I originally thought, but it slows them for a moment or two. Enough time to get away. Besides crippling limbs seems more effective. It doesn't kill them but does immobilise them.

  I can see the main building through the swirling snow, we're close; but the deep snow makes moving quickly difficult and the dead are tireless. They appear in the periphery, grey silhouettes shuffling towards us. They are spread out, no large clusters of them.

  Thank God.

  A few you can keep at bay, but as soon as they mass you're in trouble. In the five days I've been awake at the lodge we've had increasing attacks. Somehow the dead are finding us up here in this remote mountainous region. The survivors are worried. Divided on how to proceed with so little information from the outside world.

  None of that matters at the moment.

  Focus Kerry.

  Got to get back to the lodge.

  I try to not think about what I saw in that room, in the cabin. The father raving, insane. The mother...

  Those poor children, stuck in there so long with those monsters. The father might not have been dead but he wasn't himself. Something I didn't know could happen, but something the lodge survivors know about all too well; the Aurora, it can mesmerise those whose gaze lingers too long. It gets in your head, messes with you. I can't help but think of the strange dreams I've been having about Mark and the field of bones. Have I been affected? Will these dreams drive me insane like this little girl's father?

  Herryk doesn't think so.

  He believes it takes continual exposure. But that's just an educated guess. No one really knows what is going on, what the rules are. We're fighting blind.

  The crowded statue-like figures surrounding the main entrance to the lodge swirl into view through the biting, rising, winds. Brennen’s macabre solution to unkillable monsters. Frozen stiff under layers of ice. It freaked me out when I first saw them, never mind moving between the desiccated corpses glistening with ice and encrusted in snow. I vaguely recall fleeing the burning cabin, before I lost consciousness, of seeing them clustered together like this. At the time I'd thought they were my doom.

  It is no easier now to pass through the still figures than it had been the while heading out. I keep expecting them to break free – claws tearing at me in a cloud of glassy shards. They don't, can't in fact; Brennen has carefully covered these corpses in layer after layer of water, letting each freeze and then applying more from his vantage point atop the roof. That plus the frequent storms have encased them completely.

  I hear Brennen call out behind us.

  The young man had accompanied Lars and myself to check on Bjornnir and his family. What is left of that family Lars now holds in his arms.

  I turn to look back, Brennen has fallen, no not fallen – twisted frost encrusted limbs break from the deep snow to snag him, and drag him down. He is already prone, failing wildly at the clutching fingers, as weather blasted faces peer through the broken snow. No eyes, and the wind and cold have stripped flesh from the skull. Cheeks hang open. The nose sunken and in some cases gone completely. Frost and ice cake the ghoulish forms as they pull themselves up out of the blanket of snow we've been walking over.

  They've been laying in wait.

  They've set a trap for us!

  Brennen is screaming now as the icy claws tear at his parka and thermals to find the hot juicy meat beneath. The scarlet vivid against the white. I turn and raise my weapon, ready to run back and to help, but Lars ushers me onwards.

  “There's nothing you can do,” he yells over the rising gale.

  Brennen's screams, muffled now by the winds, are accompanied by cracking wet sounds; the crawling dead have him, talons digging troughs through his warm skin, teeth gnawing and peeling away the meat from his face. I can't count how many have a hold of him, it is a tangle of withered nightmarish limbs and faces. They've opened up his torso, ripping free the ropey innards, spreading them out like some sort of insane art piece. Painting wings in blood and guts. Several arms grip his exposed pelvis, another set already have a firm grip using his ribs as handholds.

  I can't take it.

  I turn, rifle up – hold my breath to steady my aim – and fire. A tiny red dot appears on Brennen's forehead and he stops screaming. My stomach lurches at having to put the young man out of his misery; then lurches again as they fierce limbs pull him apart wrenching him in half in a weak spray of blood. Final pulses of an organic machine.

  One less bullet, but worth it to spare Brennen those final agonising moments.

  Lars's hand on my shoulder, dragging me back, away. We're almost there. I can't feel my face any more it's so cold.

  The others in the Lodge see us coming and open the door. Calling and waving us in. We move between the warped and twisted ice statues – the dead frozen solid. Another shriek, high and hateful. No doubt from that hag from the cabin. A final blast of ice and wind tears at us, a parting gift, a warning.

  We tumble indoors, collapsing in a breathless heap.

  The doors slam shut behind us. Bolted. Heavy furniture shifted to further block the entrance.

  We're safe.

  For now.

  *

  Brigid took the little girl so that Herryk could look her over, make sure she was uninjured. The poor thing was filthy; no doubt Brigid would make sure she got some new clothes from the gift shop after she got cleaned up. The same treatment as I got.

  The rest of the group were distraught at the loss of Brennen. The young man had often been the only positive presence in an increasingly grim situation. Somehow Brennen would always find something silly to say. Give him a few minutes and he'd have a smile on your face.

  It occurs to me that Brennen is the first person I've killed. Sure I've hacked apart, burned and otherwise sundered the undead, but I haven't had to point a weapon at the living...until that moment.

  A tiny red hole appearing to silence his screams.

  Another nightmare to add to my growing collection.

 
I know what I did was a mercy but it doesn't change the fact the I killed him, me, not some desiccated corpse. Logically I know it was the right thing to do – I don't know if it will stop the light from reanimating his body – but the emotional weight lays heavy on me.

  Lars however is his grim unreadable self. He makes a move for the kitchens no doubt on a quest for some aquavit to scrub away the images we witnessed in that room. I could do with some myself. Instead I catch my breath and shake off the caked snow from my boots. The wind is battering at the lodge now causing the entire structure to reverberate with that incessant howling.

  Usually the storms come during the day when the aurora is at its weakest. If I didn't know any better I'd say that ghoul in the room summoned it – that poor boy woven into her rent belly, returned forcibly to a dead womb.

  I shake the image from my mind.

  Looks like I will need some aquavit, my hands are trembling as I pull off my gloves.

  I don't have much time for introspection though, people are crowding me, asking questions; about Brennen, about the cabin, the girl, what we should do. They're near panic.

  Our excursion was supposed to be a perimeter check, but with a vote looming whether we should leave, we’d needed to check on the cabin. Bjornnir and his family were the only ones remaining outside the safety of the main building.

  No one had seen Bjornnir or any of his family in days.

  By the time I came to the lodge they'd already locked themselves inside.

  So we checked even though the Aurora was out, we couldn't just leave them behind. It wasn't far and we hadn't seen any of the dead in a few days.

  After what we’d seen the theory that we were too remote to have much of a problem was shot.

  The people at the lodge thought they'd dealt with those that had succumbed to the Aurora, been driven mad and finally freezing to death outside, only to rise up again to seek out the living.

  I worried about Brigid’s reaction to the news about Brennen. She had worked closely with Brennen. In truth I think there might have been something between them, but now...

  I raise my hand to silence the buzzing questions.

  “It hasn't changed anything,” I say knowing it sounds callous. “We still need to decide if we stay or if we go.”

  A new wave of protest and indignation assaults me until Lars re-enters the room. My Norwegian is rusty, but I know enough to follow what's being said.

  “She's right,” he says above the furore. “Brennen will be sorely missed, but we still need to decide. The dead are increasing in numbers and we don't know where they are coming from.”

  “The cities!” cries one of the others.

  “We'll starve if we stay here,” a woman, Kristen, shouts.

  They start up again, arguing among themselves.

  “Quiet!” Lars shouts, his deep voice powerful, shocking the small group into silence. “No point arguing. We stay or we go. Those are our choices.” He takes a swig directly from the bottle then turns and leaves the main area.

  I follow him, trying to catch up.

  I find him near the gift shop staring at an old map mounted on the wall beside a set of mounted weapons. Replicas of a Viking sword and axe set atop an iron banded shield. This small area is the lodge's tribute to Norway's Viking past; drawings of long-ships and raiders. The map itself is hand made and shows this narrow region of the country, a strip of mountainous land along the North Sea coastline.

  There is something grim yet brittle in his eyes. Lars takes another swig and searches the map.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” I ask. It's lame and I know it but I don't know what else to say.

  “That room,” he begins, still not looking at me, “those words written on the walls...I...I know them.”

  I'm not sure what I should say to him. I've never been good at comforting people and social cues sometimes elude me, one of the many reasons Mark and I were having problems in our relationship.

  “Are they Norwegian?”

  “No,” he says, “Sami. Quite different, Uralic based...my mother spoke it.”

  I can see something building up inside him, emotionally, trying to find it's way out. He's looking at where we are on the map, nestled in the mountains.

  “My mother left Sami life, wanting more than isolation and reindeer farming for herself, so she left – well, ran away – to what she thought was a city but was in actual fact just a seaside fishing town. I don't think she hated the life offered her by her people, I think she craved adventure. It was just a deeper yearning than in most. Anyway, she ended up in Langsom Vann, the town where she met my father. It was supposed to be the first stop on a long journey but she never left. She fell in love with a fisherman, my father, and though she never went back to her folk she taught me a little of Sami life.”

  Lars pauses to collect his thoughts.

  This is the most I've heard him say at one time. I'm not going to make this any more difficult for him than I already know it must be.

  “The Sami way is closer to nature. I must've gotten a good dose of that because even the fishing town of my birth was too big for me. Well...too small and too big. Too many people. So I found work where I could, ended up here. Been working as custodian and handyman at the lodge for fifteen years. It suites me. Not many can handle the isolation during the off-season but that's my favourite time. It's good to get some human contact, but the few who work here are enough for me and I don't have to interact with the public.

  “But even after all this time I remember the stories my mother told me. Old stories passed down through the generations. Tales of giants and strange spirits both benign and malevolent.

  “I think the hot springs and the carvings are why I stayed. People assume they're Sami, though their culture isn't known for pictographs, so there has always been conjecture, but I think it is. I can feel it. I know that sounds crazy but I can, deep in my bones.

  “This place was holy to them in an ancient past, but now I'm beginning to think it was more a warning.

  Stello, it was written on the walls in...that room...it's an old word for giants that ate the flesh of men.”

  I want to tell Lars that these undead monsters aren't giants and that while they tear and rend people open we've not seen them consume any flesh. Their only motivation seems to to be to kill. To increase their numbers.

  “Bieggagallis is the name given to the Man of Storms, a malevolent god-spirit that used the winter storms to disorientate travellers, to batter at the homes and structures of men. And I think of the rising storms we've been getting almost everyday now; with the wind howling and screaming. It's not just my imagination, is it?”

  I swallow not sure how to take all of this. My first instinct is that Lars is losing it. Too much stress and isolation. Yet deep down, deep in my gut it feels like he's right. I recall my strange dream – a vision? – of the hooked mountain, ethereal reindeer and the dead.

  “No, it's not just your imagination,” I tell him.

  He seems relieved, like he'd been holding his breath.

  “There's more...” Lars continues, looking at me know, and I can see the growing dread in him. “Another name, a story from my childhood, one that gave me nightmares. Jabme-Akka, the Old Woman of the Dead.”

  I am beginning to see where Lars is going with this.

  “An ancient and hateful crone. A god-spirit like Bieggagallis. Cursed to be forever childless she courts the spirits of the dead and plagues the living. Taking those who pass in her presence to her bosom.”

  Chills run along my spine.

  “You think Bjornnir...was...” I don't know if I can say it, “worshipping her. This Jabme-Akka?”

  “It looks like it.” Lars turns again to look at the map.

  “It could be the Aurora drove him mad like the others and he fixated on those old stories,” I suggest.

  “Possible,” Lars agrees. “But it seems too much of a coincidence that there’s a connection to these old myths whi
le a scientific team is investigating Sami culture nearby.”

  I'd heard the group mention a science team stopping by for supplies and to rent a snowcat and some snowmobiles for the winter, before all this started happening a month ago.

  “That is strange,” I concede, “where were they heading?”

  “Here,” Lars stabs a finger at the map. A mountain nearby. “Jager's Topp. Hunter's Peak.”

  The little mark on the hand-drawn map shows a mountain not too far away. I catch my breath; the illustration shows the peak to be hooked.

  *

  My head still spinning with revelations. I leave Lars to his brooding, making my way to the large lodge kitchen to check on the girl.

  Brigid is sitting with her while Herryk finishes up.

  He speaks to them in Norwegian, telling them that the girl while in shock is physically fine apart from a few scrapes and bruises. Brigid spots me and unconsciously switches to English, “Good, I'll get her all cleaned up in the springs then.”

  Herryk nods. For once the thin man isn't drinking from the bottle of alcohol he has been using to disinfect the girl's scratches.

  Brigid takes the girl by the hand. “The poor thing won't speak,” she tells me. The girl holding her hand and staying close to Brigid's side, eyes wide and nervous.

  I crouch down so I'm eye level with the girl.

  “Give her time,” I say in awkward Norwegian while looking at the girl and smiling. “Hi, I'm Kerry and this,” I point, “is Brigid. We're not going to let anything bad happen to you anymore, okay?”

  The girl continues to hide behind Brigid, but seems to understand what I'm saying.

  “Who's this?” I say pointing to the bear in her grip, even though the bear's name is stitched on its tummy: Rin.

  The girl doesn't answer this time either, but relaxes slightly.

  Brigid urges the girl to follow, “Kom, så vi kan renser deg.”

  They leave towards the hot spring cave, the girl moving with Brigid but fixing me with her gaze until they pass from the room.

  I stand and turn to Herryk, “She okay?”