The Artifact Hunters

by Janet Fox

  The wind made a low moan as it rounded the crumbling barn, and the sound sent a chill up his spine. It was time to move.

  Isaac Wolf made for the village as fast as his long legs could carry him.

  CHAPTER 8

  Isaac

  1942

  Having legs that were long for his age meant that Isaac was a walker. He could walk a good distance and faster than any of his friends. He was pretty sure he’d make that village before nightfall.

  Even so, as night came on, so did his fear, and he sped up to a jog. Whoever they were, if they were anything like the monster at the hut, he didn’t want to meet them.

  The sun skimmed the horizon as he reached the narrow lane leading into the village that was tucked right at the edge of the moors. A dozen or so houses, a stone kirk, and a pub.

  Above the pub’s door a sign creaked on rusty hinges: The Witch’s Broom. Below the name was an image of a tangle of tree branches that stuck out like spider legs in all directions.

  No other symbols, as far as he could see. Although there were plenty of knots in the branches of the witch’s broom, none of them were eternity knots. But maybe someone here would have seen that symbol. Maybe someone here could point the way to Craig Village and Rookskill Castle.

  He opened the door to a smoky room filled with mostly men, who stopped as one to stare as he entered.

  “Ach, come on, lad, it be dreich,” snapped a portly woman who, walking by, managed to yank his arm and pull him inside and shut the door behind him despite the fact that she was carrying a whiskey bottle and glasses.

  Isaac swallowed. “Hello,” he said, nodding to the crowd.

  Silence filled the room. Many eyes on him, a stranger. Isaac felt too small inside and too tall outside. He felt different from these dour, ruddy Scotsmen, and he figured they knew he was different, too, and maybe they wouldn’t like someone different. He cleared his throat, mustering his best English. “I am refugee. Escaping the Nazis.”

  A low murmur around the room. Some faces softened, some grew hard.

  “I am looking for a, um, circle of rings,” he said, not knowing how else to describe the eternity knot, so he made a gesture in the air. He’d lost the paper in the hut and didn’t want to pull the pendant from underneath his shirt. And as the fire popped and the light inside glowed and the sky outside darkened, he added, “And a place to stay the night.”

  At that, the woman said to him, “Sit ye doon, lad. Ye can rest here, in the room above.”

  The rest of the company went back to their business, talking of weather and winter and war, though some cast him low, wary glances. The pub smelled of roasted vegetables and the sharp tang of alcohol, the fire crackled, and he was warmed by the closeness despite the cool looks.

  Isaac found a small table and set his pack between his legs. He’d been given enough money to more than pay for his food and lodging, for at least tonight. The woman brought him a hunk of bread and a bowl of soup and he wolfed it down, starving after so many days without much to eat. Though once he was settled, his mind returned to his parents and the monster and the casket.

  Just what had he stepped into when he’d stepped off that boat?

  “Laddie, if ye be looking for rings, there be one na far.”

  The man leaned over from the adjacent table, catching Isaac’s eye.

  “One?” Isaac echoed, hope rising.

  “Aye. A great ring of stone.”

  “Ah,” Isaac said, disappointed, as he was sure that was not what he sought. “Do you know of a Rookskill? A castle? A village called Craig?”

  More wary glances shot his way. His accent betrayed him. It didn’t matter how young he was. Boys only a couple of years older were fighting on both sides in this ugly war. And even here, he might not be accepted for who and what he was.

  “Nay,” said the man. “There be castles on the islands but na Rookskill. Na Craig.” He turned back to his companions.

  “Thank you,” Isaac said. His spirits sank to a new low.

  As he got up to leave his table, he felt eyes following him, and he wished he could shrink, or, like his parents had, up and disappear.

  * * *

  * * *

  Isaac was given a small room—the only room—in the pub.

  Before sleep he read a bit of Frankenstein, the part set in Orkney, as if that might give Isaac some clue about where he was. Hardly more than a rock, Isaac read, whose high sides were continually beaten upon by the waves. But when Victor began the detestable occupation of making a companion for his monster, Isaac closed the book and leaned back with a sigh into his first real bed in almost a month.

  His mind drifted, and then he snapped awake.

  The eternity knot.

  Why hadn’t he seen it? Maybe because he’d been too distracted by the coming of night.

  His mind’s eye went to the tall standing stone in the courtyard of the croft. He’d traced it with his finger—now he retraced it in his memory. A long, thin, incised line leading down, down, and at the bottom a depression, an etching covered by lichen, a symbol he’d seen but hadn’t registered.

  He concentrated, eyes closed. It wasn’t exactly like the rings, but a bit more abstract like a twining vine, a winding loop that had no beginning and no end. He closed his eyes tight. There. He could picture it. It was the eternity knot. Yes!

  He touched the pendant that hung around his neck, his heart pounding like a drum.

  The symbol was carved into the standing stone that stood in the courtyard of the croft.

  Isaac jumped out of bed, pulled the casket from his pack, and sat it on the bed. That hum he’d heard in the hut filled his head again.

  The casket held answers. He wanted answers so badly. Since he’d left Prague, he hadn’t known what his parents had meant by all their strange references, and now the puzzle had grown. Yes, he knew he wasn’t supposed to open it.

  They may sense it.

  He fingered the seal. It was old and the lead seal was worn thin. He could likely break it with his fingers.

  Which is what he did.

  Wait. How did that happen?

  Do not open it.

  But he had. And now, okay, maybe, just a peek? Would just a tiny peek be a problem?

  He lifted the lid half an inch, then he reached his fingers inside, touching something icy cold, a strange roundish object that popped open like a locket, his thumb slipping inside the locket and over a tiny wheel that turned, and then the object began to tick and whirr, and the locket snapped shut again as his fingers closed around it, round and solid, and what in the world?

  The hum grew, became a painful throb, and then Isaac, clutching the cold orb tight in his fist, was thrust into a void.

  CHAPTER 9

  Isaac in the Ring of Brodgar

  Circa 2800 BC

  Isaac still clutches the orb, pulling it tight to his chest, as he tumbles and rolls. He sees pictures passing as if he’s watching (no, as if he’s inside) the frames of a film, images of his trip across the North Sea and then across Europe, backward in time.

  Then Prague.

  The arrival of the Nazis in his country.

  His schoolmates, teasing him for reading so much.

  The leaning houses with their red geraniums on the streets of Josefov.

  His parents, reading and talking softly by the fire.

  His grandfather (gone this last year), laughing, sharing a joke with him and the baker.

  His grandfather next to him in the Old-New Synagogue.

  His grandfather’s cottage high in the cool mountains.

  The old bay horse as Isaac fed it apples across the fence, a stack of books, a chessboard with his grandfather’s king in check, a green-stained truck carved from wood with wheels that rolled, a blue ball, stars in the night sky.

  Isaac tumbles through
darkness and light, the images muddled and confused.

  When he finally lands—as if he’s been propelled through a long cannon—he’s stumbling across a spongy-wet landscape in deepest night, the rank smell of the sea and swampy wetlands rising around him. He’s suffering from some kind of delusion or trapped in a vivid nightmare.

  The object he still clutches tight in his fist vibrates and hums as it digs into his palm, an orb but with sharp protrusions, and he doesn’t know why but he won’t open his hand and look at it.

  Now in the distance are spots of fire—flames and sudden gashes of fire shooting skyward—the cries of men and women and the screams of children. It’s a battle, with figures leaping and falling, shadows against the flames of burning huts. It reminds him of a cave painting, and he believes he’s watching the ruin of a place that died in a war that took place thousands of years before he was born.

  Then the same terrifying scream Isaac had heard in the streets of Prague and at the door of the hut. It’s the scream of a monster that drops from the night sky on great wings, with eyes like burning coals.

  Isaac backs away and thumps against solid rock. He’s inside a ring of tall standing stones that tower above his head. He braces his hand against the stone and his fingers find carvings, and some sort of niche or recess but he doesn’t reach inside. The cries and screams from the burning settlement grow, and suddenly animals—sheep, cows—stream past him, running random, wild-eyed and bawling, splashing into the muck of swamp and the night beyond.

  The monsters—there are many—circle. They look like humans but fly on leathery wings. Their faces are exquisite, almost too beautiful, but also dreadful, for their teeth are sharp points and their eyes burn red. They bear down on the settlement, and it’s no longer a battle of human against human as they raise their axes and pikes in defense against this terror from above. But the monsters pluck away the weapons and carry the people off into the night sky, into the stars.

  Isaac clutches the icy orb in his fist, and horror fills him as he watches one after another, men, women, and children, taken away into the night. He’s a witness to their end.

  One of the monsters turns and looks in his direction, red eyes glaring, searching, and Isaac must close his own.

  The hum begins again and a faint chime—like a bell—rings in his brain. He sinks to his knees and clutches his arms to his chest and without warning falls back into oblivion.

  CHAPTER 10

  Moloch’s Sluagh Hunter

  The standing stones of the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkney Islands are twice as tall as the tallest man. Thin and chiseled by millennia of rough weather, on a heathery piece of land surrounded by the sea, they point like accusing fingers, or the jutting teeth of a recumbent giant, to the sky. They are the remnants of worship—or perhaps they were put there to ward off evil (at which they failed)—by the ancient civilization whose homely ruins lie nearby, a complex society lost in the mists of deep time, whose collapse was sudden and complete.

  Whose collapse has been witnessed by one boy in an awful time travel.

  Now, in Isaac’s time, eons after those people vanished from the earth, on this night when a sliver of moon illuminates the stones, a creature glides overhead on black angel-wide wings. It lands atop the tallest of the stones like a bird of prey. But it is not a bird. It has eyes that can devour a soul. Eyes as red as blood.

  This is Isaac’s nightmarish monster. And it is Moloch’s sluagh hunter, searching for the Guardian.

  It has perched on the tower of the Charles Bridge.

  It has been across Europe.

  It has hovered over Orkney.

  It has followed the Guardian through time and space—to a stone hut and to an ancient settlement, among others—but it can’t quite put its talons on what it seeks.

  The sluagh turns its head this way and that, and senses . . . Ach! Some magic nearby? It can’t quite grasp where or what. But it’s not far away, and the sluagh will return to Moloch with even this small scrap of news.

  But before it does, it will feed its own hunger for a human soul. The sluagh turns its head and opens its mouth and screams.

  The Scots who live nearby shift in their beds and moan and dream of slavering wolves, of the haunted howes, of a ruined ness, of thin places. The boy who has fallen into and out of a strange, frightening time-travel vision in a small pub shudders and shakes.

  The dread sluagh turns its head and its eyes burn like coals. It can’t put its claws on the magic, but it will find food. It screams again, hungry, angry.

  CHAPTER 11

  Isaac

  1942

  Boom! Boom! Boom!

  Isaac sat straight up, sucking in a deep breath. He was in a bed in a dark room in an inn in the Orkney Islands, gripping the coverlet tight in his fist. Next to him on the bed lay the casket. Its contents—that cold orb he’d clutched in his fist that had transported him to a terrible place in the past, or was it a nightmare?—were once more concealed inside, thank all the prophets.

  Then, another loud boom, and “Laddie,” came a voice from the other side of his door. The landlady of this hostelry. “If ye want to make the mainland, ye’d best be doon in ten minutes.”

  Isaac, fully awake now, scrambled out of bed. He dressed as fast as he could, pausing before he shoved the casket inside his pack, as the vision began to fade.

  Isaac shouldered his pack and stumbled down the stairs.

  “I am to make the mainland?” he asked the landlady.

  She eyed him, sharp. “Rookskill, aye? Near to Craig? Me cousin lives in Craig. Ye take the number six bus south from Scrabster.”

  A farmer who spoke in an unfamiliar language—Gaelic, maybe? thought Isaac—stood in the shadowy pub, turning his hat in his hand. He was driving a lorry to the ferry in Stromness. The landlady had arranged for him to take Isaac to the ferry landing, and she’d packed a bit of food for Isaac’s journey and would accept no payment.

  Isaac was so grateful he couldn’t stop thanking her, but she brushed him away.

  Dawn was a thin band of orange in the east. The kindness of strangers and the morning light helped lessen the fear left from his vision. Isaac and the farmer rode in silence, the lorry bouncing down the road guided by two dim headlights.

  Isaac saw, to his right, a series of mounds that he took to be ruins because they rose from the landscape in an unnatural way. Then, not much farther down the road, solid objects pushed into the sky from the flat marshes and moors, monoliths silhouetted against the growing light, sharp and tall, about a half mile off toward the sea.

  Isaac’s heart began to pound. The ring of stones. He pointed.

  The farmer spoke rapidly, waving his hand. Isaac clutched his pack to his chest, feeling the solid casket through the canvas.

  A creature was perched on the tallest stone.

  Isaac leaned his face against the cold glass window. There was barely enough light to make it out. But as they passed, the creature spread great wide wings and lifted into the sky, and as it did, it turned its head.

  Eyes as red as burning coals. Isaac’s monster.

  It swooped and turned and sped westward across the land, straight toward the moving lorry. Straight for Isaac, those eyes seeming to pierce the lorry and look right at him.

  Icy terror spread through Isaac. Then a hum sang into his brain, a low and painful hum, and he threw his hands over his ears.

  The monster passed overhead with a deep whoosh, and the farmer spoke again, craning his neck to look up through the front window of the cab.

  “What is that?” Isaac whispered.

  The farmer gestured, making the sign to ward off evil, and said words—repeated words over and over, his voice louder and louder—then clutched the steering wheel with white knuckles and pressed flat down on the gas, and the lorry jerked forward.

  Isaac gripped the edge of his seat
and tried to breathe. But that hum, that painful hum. And the nightmare—no, it was too real to be only a dream—of fire and fight he’d had as he held that cold orb clutched in his fist, the orb now inside the casket in his pack.

  Just then the sun slipped above the horizon, bathing the entire landscape in rosy pink. The monster disappeared as if it couldn’t abide the light, and the deep throbbing hum was replaced by silence.

  When they reached the ferry landing, Isaac shook sweaty hands with the farmer, who gave him a narrow-eyed look and scuttled away.

  Isaac shared the ferry across the Firth with a large number of servicemen. They lined the rails, watchful, searching the waters for U-boats.

  But Isaac had his own worries, as he kept an eye on the islands growing smaller behind, searching the skies hoping not to see that flying monster chasing the waves.

  Chasing him.

  * * *

  * * *

  In Scrabster, Isaac found the bus to the village of Craig, a couple of hours south, paying his fare with almost his last bit of coin. Isaac sat on the jostling bus, clutching his pack, the hard lump of the casket pushing the pendant into his skin.

  The bus turned into a narrow lane by a train station and Isaac craned his neck to see the sign. CRAIG STATION. Half a dozen British soldiers disembarked with him, their rowdy banter fading into the distance as they made for Craig Village, leaving Isaac on his own.

  He turned in a full circle. Craig Station sat at the edge of the village. It was late, and mist hovered above the trees, and the damp air smelled earthy. There was no castle to be seen. He wondered what to do next, so he climbed the steps and went inside the empty station.

  A man lifted his eyes from his paperwork and peered at Isaac through the bars of the ticket window.

  “Another bairn,” he said with a grim look.

  “Rookskill?” Isaac asked. He didn’t want to say more lest his accent betray him.