“You’re mad. And drunk. He’s been here the whole time.”
“I’ve made stronger men talk in the past.”
“I can’t be part of this.” Hemming grabbed his sodden boots and furs from the floors. “This isn’t right.”
He stormed out of the hall and passed Magne and Sigurd prodding Elof down the corridor.
“Ho, good fellow,” said Elof, “what word from the keep?”
Hemming broke eye contact and hurried down the hall trying to get away from Arne and his drunken idiocy. But even in his room, with his door shut, he could not block out Elof’s sudden and violent screams.
6
Elof’s screams did more than thwart any attempt by Hemming to sleep. They brought back memories of the war. Back to the time when he was the one spilling Svergish blood with his blade.
A hatred for the Svergish nation had been a part of his childhood. Before the war, when Hemming was still a child, his nana would croon about how the Sverges snuck across the mountains and stuffed naughty boys like Hemming and his head-strong brothers into sacks, weighted them with cold heavy stones, and drowned them in the river. Every year, bards came to the village festivals and sung of ancient battles where hordes of savage Sverges were beaten back by Hemming’s brave people. And every song warned of the return of the red-haired devils. In times of famine, the men of the village whispered in the mead hall about the sudden onset of wasting disease in the goat herds and pulling up rotten fish in their nets, and how this was the work of the Sverges and their witches and warlocks.
So when the war came, Hemming was ready to fight for his nation.
He marched out of his village and streamed with the others heeding the call into the massive encampment of King Harald. The first skirmishes were exhilarating and it was then that Hemming proved himself braver and more able than the other men from his village, most of whom shied away to the rear or died at the first charge with a spear quivering in their chest. Hemming had no idea of what was expected, except what he had heard in song, so he had waded to the front of the line where he gave up his skinning knife and picked up the shield and sword from a fallen man and hacked his way through walls of men earning the quiet nods of the commanders who led the armies.
On those fields, he earned his axe, shiny and not stained with blood then. Eventually he rose in the ranks to lead a small group of hardened men who were sent under cover of night across enemy lines to murder and line the heads of their victims up on poles so that come dawn the Sverges would see their brothers and sons facing them in the dawn light, slack-jawed, eyes plucked out by ravens fat from the endless slaughter.
Hemming didn’t remember it being a single moment where everything changed. It was more of a gradual awakening, the realization that the war was never ending, and there was no turning back to a life in the village. With his axe and the bloodshed being how he defined himself, he believed he had cut himself off from any chance of returning to his home, his family, a life of living gently with the seasons.
He came to feel disgusted by his fellow soldiers. They smelled sour and persisted in their crude jokes. They slept too close to him, their snores and snorts keeping him awake at night. They were not content with a clean thrust into the heart of a Svergish man, but instead sought to hamstring him, bring him down like prey, and then keeping him alive and draining the life out of him with slow cuts and curses and spit.
Hemming remembered the day when he knew he would need to walk away. The war was as good as over. The Svergish army had been beaten back from the border and the previous three months of spring thaw had been spent with a punishing encroachment across the border, raiding small villages and pushing towards the capital to force a humiliating capitulation from their gap-toothed king.
Hemming led his troops far from the capital into a small village of mostly women, old men, and children in a wide, green valley bursting with white daisies. The villagers offered no resistance. The men were long gone, chewed up by the fighting and never to return. The village women had been preserved from the fighting but word had traveled and they knew the war was over. They greeted Hemming’s men with jars of mead and steaming plates of goat, greens, and small red potatoes. The women were ruddy cheeked and shy, a few even welcoming. The night was full of song and drink.
It should have ended there.
That night Hemming had retreated from the others, content to sleep on a bed of freshly cut hay in a barn at the edge of the village, chickens and a lumbering cow his sole companions.
But he had woken to screams in the gray light of dawn.
With axe in hand, he had raced down to the river, expecting a wall of Svergish soldiers.
But instead he found his men throwing hemp sacks deep into the river. The sacks sunk quickly, violent bubbles bursting on the surface. The women on the shore screamed, tore at their hair, plunged hopelessly into the frigid waters.
Hemming dropped his axe and stared at the women, women whose children had been tied into sacks with cold heavy stones and drowned in the river.
Something died in Hemming that day. His people were as evil as his worst nightmares of the Sverges. He wanted to go as far away as he could from the madness. He had no more use for people.
Soon after the war, he had come to the keep in the hope he would be far from the great mass of humanity.
But he was not sure he had escaped the cruelty he had been running from.
7
Hemming woke in his bed shivering. He stared through the visible mist of his breath at the dark-beamed ceiling. The room seemed smaller, confining, no longer offering the solace it once did. An icy cold enveloped him. It was as if the whole room was built of walls of ice.
During the long hours of the night, the flames from the small fire he had built in the hearth had died to glowing embers. This was usually enough to keep him warm. But this morning cold reached out to seize him.
He rose from his cot, wrapping the wool blanket around his shoulders, and added a small log to the fire. The flames reluctantly took hold, the wood crackling and shifting on the embers. Even then the heat from the fire did not erode the freezing temperature.
After a few minutes, he dressed himself in the furs he would normally wear outside, and headed to the great hall. He wondered if the cold from the journey to and from the Svergish keep had settled deep into his bones. Maybe later in the day he would have Helga draw him a hot bath. She would give him that twisted-lip look of annoyance whenever he asked for anything other than the meals she served, but eventually she would heat enough water for him.
Except for the two hostages, everyone else in the keep had already gathered in the great hall, and sat on benches at one end of the dining table, bent over steaming bowls of gruel. He sniffed the air. Dried fish again.
He was tired of dried fish every morning. They weren’t anywhere near the sea and it made no sense to eat fish on the top of a mountain.
He though about saying something but he knew that arguing about food first thing in the morning would result only in an angry scowl from Helga, and further put him in the bad graces of Arne.
Hemming had previously suggested that they kill a goat to get some fresh meat. Or maybe the rabbits Liv caught could be eaten for breakfast too. But Arne wanted to save the meat for later in the winter when the rations they had brought in from the coast began to dwindle.
Later he would mention something to Liv. Maybe he could join her on one of her hunts, and they could bring back something bigger, like a deer, though she had warned them that it would only be small game over the winter and even that would be scarce.
He went to the cauldron, filled his bowl with the watery porridge, and squeezed in between Runa and Magne. Everyone was dressed in their outdoor furs. He stared at the hearth.
“Can we put more logs in?” Sigurd asked. He sniffled and ran the back of his hand across his nose. He wore a thin moth-eaten vest, and visibly trembled as he sat there, flesh goose pimpled and teeth chattering.
“Won’t make a difference,” said Liv. Her dogs sat behind her, heads following the movement of her spoon from bowl to mouth. “Winter has come. You can burn all the logs we have at once and it still won’t make the cold flee. Fatten up. We have a long winter ahead.”
Hemming made it halfway through his gruel before he had to take a break. The dried fish chunks kept getting caught in his throat, and it was all he could do not to spit his food back up. He poked around the gruel, separating the fish bits off to one side.
He made eye contact with Arne. Chunks of gruel clung to his whiskers. “So what secrets did Elof spill?”
Arne looked up and smirked. “He had nothing to say.”
He turned back to his bowl.
Hemming clenched his teeth, biting back the words that gathered up behind his lips. But he had to say something. What Arne had done was wrong. Torturing a hostage was a gross violation of protocol and if word got back to the Sverges, hostilities could start again. Everything would get complicated again, and that’s exactly what Hemming was hoping to avoid.
Before he could speak, the dogs began growling, a chorus of rumbling from around the table. They rose to all four feet, shackled, heads low, teeth bared.
Hemming followed their gaze towards the hallway.
Brit stood at the edge of the room.
She held herself up with one hand against the cold stone wall and she looked bad. Blood stained the short cotton tunic she wore. The visible gashes and bites on her exposed legs and arms from the dog attack had been sewn up with thick black thread making her look like a child’s doll that had lived long past its usefulness. Some of the cuts looked to have reopened and glistening bloody flesh showed beneath.
Her head lolled almost drunkenly, and Hemming stood, suddenly afraid that she might pitch to the floor. When she looked up, he saw that something was off with her eyes. They were red and heavy lidded as if they had been distorted with a bloody mask.
Runa rose and tottered forward, hands extended. “Girl, you should be back in your bed, resting. It’s too early to be walking around. Let’s get you back to the room.”
“She’s probably hungry,” said Magne. “That long walk through the snow, and then those dogs. I’d be wanting food. You want food, girl?”
“Food,” she repeated back but in a voice that was more moan than words.
She shuffled forward another couple of steps, away from the support of the wall. “Food.”
“Something’s not right,” said Liv.
The dogs slinked along the bench, heads low to the ground, the fur on their backs bristling, unfurling low guttural growls. Liv snapped her fingers at them and they crouched further, bunching up closer to Liv, but they would not stop growling.
“Get those hounds out of here,” said Arne. “Now.”
Liv pushed away from the table, her gaze catching Hemming’s for a moment, and she shook her head slowly. She too saw that something was not right here. But Arne seemed blind to it.
Liv retreated with her dogs to the corridor that led to the kennels.
By this time, Brit had reached the end of the table. Hemming grimace. She smelled sour, as if her skin rotted around her. He coughed to mask the sudden urge to retch.
“She stinks,” said Sigurd. He shoved a fist under his nose. “Horrible.”
Helga returned from the cauldron and extended a bowl of gruel to Brit. She stiffly reached out and cupped it in her hands, bringing it close to her nose to sniff deeply. Then she pulled the bowl to her lips and began gulping the gruel down.
“Slow down, girl,” said Arne. “That’s piping hot. You’re going to burn yourself.”
“Food. Food. Food,” said Brit between gulps.
“I told you she was hungry,” said Magne banging one of his meaty fists on the table. “Listen to Magne. He knows best.”
Helga reached for the bowl. “Do you want more, girl? I can get you more.”
Suddenly Liv shouted. One of the dogs burst from the corridor and leapt at Brit dragging her to the ground in a tangle of limbs. She was caught in his jaws. The dog thrashed her wildly back and forth.
Hemming jumped to his feet, grabbed the dog by the scruff, and hurled him across the room.
The dog skittered across the floor, and in his mouth: Brit’s skin. Torn completely off.
Hemming stared at Brit’s blood- and gore-covered body. He remembered the skinned corpse in the Svergish keep. His breath caught hard in his chest.
“What the…” Arne bent towards the figure.
Brit suddenly unfolded from the ground, knees clicking and bending the wrong direction. She lashed out with talons, knocking Arne onto his back. His hands sucked in to his chest.
Hemming stepped back, his legs feeling like they would buckle. He could not understand what he was looking at. What had been Brit one moment before no longer was.
The bloody figure almost looked human, but its knees bent backwards, it arms hung too low, and those glistening talons extended from its fingers.
Sigurd screamed. Hemming also wanted to scream but he could not breathe. He could not move.
The thing swiveled its head, with its oversized jaw, in the direction of Sigurd. It opened its mouth, revealing rows of saliva-webbed, razor-sharp teeth and a black leathery tongue, and released an ear-piercing screech.
Then it sprinted down an empty corridor, a trail of blood marking its wake.
8
No one in the room moved.
Hemming slowly sucked air back into his lungs. He took a tentative step forward, and then another, his strength coming back into his legs. But still his heart pounded, shaking his whole body, and sweat soaked his back and chest.
“What was that?” screamed Magne. Sigurd cowered next to him, half tucked beneath the dining table.
Hemming edged close to Arne, all the while glancing at the corridor. He feared the thing would burst from the dark corridor. He shivered at the thought of those glistening teeth, the unnatural hinging of its jaw.
Hemming pulled Arne’s hands from his chest. The man blubbered. The monster had scoured deep gashes through the bronze breastplate and blood seeped red in the wool shirt beneath. He lifted Arne to sitting.
The commander stared at his blood-wet fingers. “It burns. Son of a bitch. Armor saved me.”
Liv crouched by her dog, arms wrapped tightly around his neck. She stared at the crumpled skin, like folded wet paper. “Hemming, do you remember the skinless corpse we found in the Svergish keep? What if that corpse was Brit’s?”
Hemming fixed on the bloody pile on the floor. “Something wearing her skin. This can’t be real.”
“A demon!” barked Runa. She drew symbols in the air with her arthritic fingers and mumbled beneath her breath. “Some demon released from the pits of hell.”
“It killed her and wore her skin,” cried Sigurd. He trembled uncontrollably. “It slaughtered everyone in the other keep. And we let it in here with us.”
“We need to get out of here,” said Hemming. “Back down to Riverton.”
“Yes!” said Sigurd. “Let’s go now. It’s stupid to stay here.”
“No,” said Magne. “It’s injured. Look at all the blood.” A long trail of ichor painted the floor. “We should track it down and kill it. We can’t just hide from it.”
“My dogs,” said Liv. “They’ve already got its scent.”
“Those other dogs were hunting it down,” said Arne. “They were trying to kill it and we saved that thing and brought it into our keep.”
“A foul creature from hell,” said Runa. “Its eyes, did you see its eyes?”
Hemming shook his head. “This is not what I signed up for. Arne, look at us. A handful of us, half of us not even soldiers. This is stupid. We need to leave right now and go back down to Riverton. We’ll bring a battalion of soldiers up here and they can hunt it down. We need to be smart about this. No need to go chasing after it.”
Arne got to his feet and seized a jug of mead from the table. He bit down
on the cork and pulled it free. Then he took a deep drink and then another. He looked up with watery eyes and held the jug out for the others. Only Sigurd took some hurried gulps.
“No debate. We hunt it down. We kill it.”
Hemming felt as if his feet had suddenly lost contact with the ground and that he was floating, no longer anchored to the earth. Thinking on that monstrous thing, his bowels clenched and a shiver of fear ran up his spine. He wanted to run. Did they even have enough time to get their weapons and hunt the monster down before it killed them like it did with the Sverges in the other keep?
He remembered the corpses that littered that place, the blood, the skin lying on the floor. He imagined himself on the floor, his skin torn from his body, the monster walking around in his skin. Hemming did not want to hunt it down. He did not want to chase after it. The only thing he wanted to do was to protect himself by escaping.
“Get back to your rooms, grab your weapons, and meet back here,” Arne said. “And, Liv bring the dogs. We’re going hunting.”
As Hemming turned towards the corridor and the bloody trail, his legs buckled slightly beneath him. What if the thing was lying in wait between him and his axe and armor?
Suddenly a silhouette wavered in the doorway.
Hemming’s breath caught.
Sigurd cursed and backpedalled until he fell off his feet.
Liv began urging her dog into frenzy.
Hemming balled his fists, ready to fight for his own life.
Elof stepped out of the shadows of the corridor, eyes weary, his skin bandaged and weeping after being tortured. “I heard the screaming,” he said. “Who was next, Arne? Was it not enough to torture me?”
9
Hemming peered into his room. The flames in the hearth had died down to pulsing embers and even though they cast a faint glow, the room was filled with shadows, blackness spreading to the edges. He imagined that creature crouched, waiting in the gloom. Hemming was a soldier, decorated and blooded, but this thing made him tremble. He stared at his axe. It leaned against the wall near his bed, on the opposite side of the room.
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