Then the crowd surged forward and grabbed them both. Men pulled sealskin sacks over their heads so that the couple could not cast spells. Agdis was hauled away to one side, while some men wound a rope around Ogmund’s neck and strung it over the doorframe of his burning house. They pulled the rope tight and Ogmund hung in the doorway, hands clawing at his throat, feet kicking at the ground only a few inches below. Soon enough the old man strangled.
Now everyone’s attention turned to Agdis. They dragged her into the open and snatched the sack from her head. The old woman knelt on the ground, eyes darting about, mumbling. “She is cursing us!” Gerda yelled. “Stone her!” The women shouted and gathered up rocks. Agdis grimaced with her toothless mouth. The first stone hit her and she raised her arms before her face. The women pelted her and she collapsed in a heap, blood running from her forehead. The women closed in and crushed her skull with stones.
For a while people milled about, examining the corpses and discussing each other’s role in the deaths of the old people.
“Now things will go better for us,” said Ketil.
“Oh yes,” said Thorolf, “your herds will increase and the hay grow tall and rich. Fish will run so thick that you can cross the streams on their backs. All the girls will be pretty and the weather will be fine.”
“You mock me.”
“Not at all. I am agreeing with you.”
Bjorn was worried now, his excitement turned into anxiety. “Suppose she cursed us there while she died? Or he cast a spell while he hanged?”
“They died wordless,” said Thorolf. “Only screams.”
Bjorn said, “What of their farm?”
Thorolf said, “It is mine now. I will send my farmhand Adals to run it. He is newly married to the widow Braga and is very capable of making this farm produce well. We will help him build a new house. In time, he will buy this farm from me.” Thorolf looked around at them. “We shall all enjoy our prosperity. All of us together, here in our community.”
Copyright © 2011 Mike Culpepper
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FICTION
LOST IN A STRANGE NEIGHBORHOOD
ELAINE MENGE
Travis pumped the pedals like a wild man. A fever powered him. The fever of triumph. Today he’d kept up with the younger guys for the first time, even in this cold. During cooldown, his breaths condensed so visibly in the evening air, he felt himself going gleefully cross-eyed at the sight.
Since early September he’d joined the throng of bicyclists—Wednesday and Friday afternoons, sometimes Saturday mornings—on their training route along the curving, five-mile stretch of the lake road. Back and forth they’d go, until five became twenty, thirty.
He’d start with the lead group, but soon fall back, keeping company with the weaker sisters—the forty and over crowd, a few nicely toned women in the mix.
Forty-two isn’t twenty-something, he’d tell himself. Instead of giving him license to coast, the words egged him on. And today he’d made it, kept up with the young lions. He was on his way, would never be left behind again—at least, not for a long long time. He knew his place in the lineup now. In many other ways, he knew his place in the world.
He gave the handlebars a happy slap and sat erect, no hands, legs pumping, homeward bound. In his head he could hear the background music he deserved—an Olympic fanfare.
The first time he ever saw the other riders, he was astride his new titanium racer on a levee overlooking the roadway. There had to be at least fifty guys down there. They reminded him of a school of fish—sleek, silvered minnows, fanning out on the curves, then contracting, some at the end trailing off, those at the head, pressing forward, none wanting to be last, left behind, gasping for air.
Never lag or veer too far to one side: That’s where sharks pick you off, his first boss always warned, regarding investment strategy. Travis knew he’d be able to stay at mid-field from now on, behind the leaders and safely ahead of the losers.
He slowed, glided into a right turn onto a newly resurfaced avenue. What a smooth ride. He loved it. For today, his training run was over. When he reached home, dinner would be waiting. They ate early ever since he’d altered his work schedule, going in earlier so he could get home in time for training before sunset. He pictured Travis Jr. snugged up against the table in his highchair, the pressure cooker lid rattling, the kitchen warm and steamy. Daylight savings time ended the previous weekend, and now, not much past five, the sun was staging a bravura light show against the dim sky, granting a few wispy clouds a border of pinkish gold. Half an hour and the evening’s Prussian blue would bowl over, deepen, backdrop the stars.
He had to admit he was winded. What a workout, what a pace. He couldn’t wait to tell Jill, though he’d take care choosing his words. She liked his getting the exercise, but thought him obsessive about both work and play. “Remember, you’re not Lance Armstrong,” she’d say. “And get back before dark. I don’t like that route you take. The traffic. You never know who’s been drinking. I wish you’d—”
Her favorite phrase. What was it in this case? She wished he’d take his bike to the lake in the SUV instead of riding it there and back in rush-hour traffic along Wiser Boulevard.
He’d done that a few times to placate her. But putting the bike in the SUV, then taking it out at the lake, and hauling it back again was a waste of time, especially since the lake was only four miles away. Sure, he had to skirt a certain questionable neighborhood, taking busy Wiser to get there. So what? Though he had to admit, the thought of one of those cars running up his ass did make his calf muscles tense.
Now and then he considered not taking the roundabout way home, the route that avoided Azalea Gardens—that problem neighborhood. Maybe today he should give the shortcut a try. He’d studied a map, thought he’d located a slim connection—hell, maybe it was only an old cow lane—joining up that bad neighborhood to an artery near his own. If he could work up the nerve to enter Azalea Gardens, do a couple of doglegs in that helter-skelter maze of streets, he should reach a lane that would let him out the other side, and over what he imagined was an old wooden bridge—something like that—spanning the drainage canal that separated Azalea Gardens from the Sheridan Estates side. He’d chop a mile off the trip, and nearly all but a stumpy finger of traffic-packed Wiser Boulevard. Be home in less than ten minutes.
Was Azalea Gardens really such a treacherous place? he asked himself, his breaths now coming shallow and quick. He was on Wiser, hounded by pickups and SUVs more monstrous than his own. The turn-off street, if he decided to take it, was coming up fast.
Every few weeks you heard of a shooting in there, mostly drug-related. Or it was a domestic dispute, some genius of the male sex shooting, stabbing, or strangling his wife or girlfriend. His “whatever.” That’s the word his mother used to describe those relationships. Less often, a teenager or some kid not even into double digits would shoot another kid over an issue so incredibly stupid, no one could ever quite define it.
He’d driven through the area a year ago when he and Jill first put in the offer on the Sheridan Estates house, just to make sure that the less-than-savory neighborhood they’d heard about was effectively cordoned off from their own.
Azalea Gardens hadn’t looked terribly threatening that day. Of course, scores of basketball hoops with missing nets lined the streets. Several pick-up games were going on. He’d received dark looks from the long-boned kids who’d been genetically engineered, it seemed, to excel at that sport. He experienced a moment’s fear that his Land Rover would be blocked by their bodies, that despite its Fort Knox–like locks, he’d be pulled from his seat and forced through the hoop himself.
That day, he hadn’t been looking for a road that provided exit from Azalea Gardens and entry into Sheridan across the canal, but he was sure he remembered a rickety bridge over a canal. Some canal, somewhere. Pretty sure. That’s all he’d need to get through.
What bot
hered him most about the neighborhood was that it reminded him of the one he’d grown up in. Not the people in it, but the houses. That other neighborhood existed in another time, another town, two states over. White-painted clapboard, two-bedroom houses. Railroad tracks a block away looming over a drainage canal. It couldn’t exactly be said that his parents’ house was on the wrong side of the tracks, but he quickly understood that being that close to the wrong side wasn’t the right side either.
His mother was dissatisfied. “We don’t even have a foyer,” she’d fuss. From her he learned that no respectable home lacked a foyer. More important, no self-respecting husband and father would park his family in a tract house the likes of which, when you took two steps inside, you were already smack dab in the middle of the living room!
Though Travis had fun playing with the other kids in the neighborhood, he always felt that more than a whiff of shame clung to him simply because he lived there. It didn’t help that one of his most revered high-school friends once remarked, “You sure do live in the Styx.” Travis didn’t know then the Styx was a river in Greek Hell. A few weeks later he ran across the word in English class. He’d heard “sticks,” and wondered if the reference had something to do with poor building materials. Though he didn’t like his mom’s attitude toward their house, and didn’t like a quality in her that his father called snobbiness, he was determined that once he was a man, he would not bring up a family in the Styx, much less in a house built of sticks. He well knew what the Big Bad Wolf had done to that place.
Two sadly leaning blond brick pillars were coming up on his left, announcing Azalea Gardens. No way would he pass up the shortcut tonight. Travis Jr. was waiting. What could be so bad in there, anyway? A few restless teenagers shooting balls at a mangled hoop? A few mongrel dogs? He could outrace a dog. If a more vicious breed needed further instruction, he’d grab the pump attached to the bike’s frame.
He’d simply avoid any two-legged trouble—knife by so fast, no spur-of-the-moment bad guys would have time to think.
He sat upright, hands dangling as he pumped his legs down the subdivision’s main street, Azalea Avenue. Yards were seedy, unkempt. Mowing in general looked to be a semiannual event. The gardens touted on the entrance posts were nonexistent. Other than that, and the garish trim colors of pink and aquamarine—hues that had been florescent in intensity before wind and rain dulled them—the place looked innocent, bereft of inhabitants.
Piece of cake. What had he been afraid of all these months? He guessed he’d regarded Azalea Gardens as mapmakers of old did uncharted seas, full of bloody-toothed monsters, sea serpents showing off shiny green scales, and freakish island peoples with odd, threatening customs.
The creatures on those old maps were pure decoration. He’d read that recently. They signified the unknown. The mapmakers themselves, modern historians said, didn’t believe such creatures existed. Their maps were works of art, not seriously designed to orient you to the real known world.
In any case, Travis didn’t need a map.
He hit an intersection. Primrose Lane. Gliding on instinct, he hooked a left. Then, not too far down he’d take a right. Right? The streets were curvy, not gridded, he knew, since the neighborhood had been laid out along the contours of a snaking bayou. The bayou was gone, drained thirty years ago, so now the warren of streets—all named after flowers—looked eccentric for no good reason.
When time came to take a second right, Travis strained to read the street sign. Daisy Lane, it looked like. The letters were fuzzed with graffiti. No problem. He didn’t have to know street names; he just needed to keep moving in a northwest direction, find the drainage canal and the wooden bridge that would return him to civilization.
On the sidewalk ahead, a figure approached. A woman, he saw with relief. She was enveloped in long dark cloths. In a flash, he had her pegged: brought up in a black Baptist singing/swaying tradition, now faking this severe Muslim thing, getting revenge on Mama and/or Grandma, married to and at the mercy of some drug-dealing thug who never left the house without wearing his funny, spangled round hat and big sunglasses.
Travis slowed. Passing the woman, he waved to show that he was a good guy, not above saying hello. She returned a suspicious frown. Yeah, well, in these cyclist duds, he probably did resemble an eel on wheels. No guys around here would wear a helmet to ride a bike, either. His silver helmet wasn’t exactly a low-profile article, but taking it off presented problems too. His thick blond hair would immediately peg him as an outsider.
In the near distance he heard an unchained melody of teeth-gnashing, throat-ripping growls topped by crescendoing barks and high-pitched yelps of pain. Some group of warring dogs were having at it. Travis fingered his bicycle pump, clamped onto the bike’s framework. It could double as a club, if need be.
Still there, he confirmed.
The bike wobbled.
He’d caused the wobble. A chill, like a low-numbered, baby earthquake, traversed his body right down to the fingers on the curving handlebars. Now that he’d slowed his pace, the cold was creeping in. When he reached home, instead of sitting at the dinner table in the biker togs that always sent little Travis into hysterics, he’d opt for a hot shower first. Their showerhead was a miracle of hydrotherapy. He had stereo sound in there too. He’d push a button and hear his own top-ten favorite songs.
The wobble brought up another consideration. What if he got a flat? What if he went into a skid, fell, broke his chain?
His sweat was cooling him down too much. He felt on the verge of chattering teeth.
Pick up pace, he told himself. Instead, he slowed. Another odd-angled intersection was coming up. Though the desire defied good sense, he wanted to see the street’s name. The sign was just a pole—a skinny, headless creature—nothing on top.
Veer left, he told himself, slowing to check his intuition, spinning pedals backwards just to keep his blood circulating. He was almost sure this was the way. But he could see kids farther down the street he wanted to take, jumping in the air, hooting, basketball thrumming off the backboard. Riding past them felt risky. He continued straight ahead instead.
Without warning, two teens on skateboards darted at him, coming from the opposite direction. One flung out an arm as if to snag his handlebars. Travis swerved, maintained balance. The kid shrieked—a god-awful, piercing sound. Travis clenched his teeth.
“Let me out of here,” he muttered. In his tiny rearview mirror, he spied a new threat.
A hulking gray bomb of a car, some ancient, aggrieved Oldsmobile, was chewing up the asphalt behind him, its stereo mouthing off full blast. The bass beat pummeled the air like a monster jackhammer. The words were a chaos of foul clichés, but the strong monotonous beat, never wavering, was a study in sobriety.
Travis pulled over into the right gutter. He didn’t even want to know what kind of debris his tires were crushing. The car drew even. A guy in the passenger seat hung his head out the window. “Hey, pretty boy!” he chirped, his accent some variety from south of the border. “Hey, sweet biker babe—you lookin’ sweet enough to . . .”
Travis threw down his feet and turned the bike around beneath him with as much speed and aplomb as a cartoon character, then started grinding the wheels in the opposite direction. One backward glance let him know that the car was still sitting where he’d left it, thinking things over like an angry, stood-up date, its deranged muffler emitting ear-rupturing noises that would put the hounds of hell to shame.
Clammy all over, heart thudding, his deepest wish was no longer to seek a northwest passage, but to get back to Wiser Boulevard and its blessedly vicious traffic. The headless pole should be coming up on his left. That would orient him. Instead, the pole at the next intersection held an ordinary, graffiti-free sign: Pansy Lane.
His back arched as if to say “Huh?” “If only I had a map,” he said aloud. Talking aloud was reassuring. “As if I’d carry a map of Azalea Gardens on this bike. But you wish you had it, don’t you, Trav? Th
en maybe we’d find our way out of this godforsaken hell-hole.” He liked saying we, as if he wasn’t the only doomed sailor on this expedition.
Just ahead on his right, a yellow porch light flicked on. A large dark figure stood beneath it. The shape plopped down on the porch swing and began moving back and forth. Probably an old guy. At least this dude didn’t look threatening. Travis considered stopping and asking the man if he could tell him how to get out of Azalea Gardens; but nearing, he saw that the guy couldn’t be more than twenty. The young black man nodded his head in an exaggerated fashion, said, “G’mornin’.” The way he pushed his legs against the floor to make the swing go was weird, jerky. He might be on something, or maybe he was spastic, slow, or pretending to be.
Travis sped past without answering. He began to fear that his energy would flag. After all, he’d kept up with those younger bikers for over sixty minutes, then suffered a jolt of adrenaline thanks to the skateboarders and the kooky Hispanic joyriders. Now that the adrenaline was easing off, he felt shaky. He hadn’t eaten since noon. What if his legs gave out? What then?
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 04/01/11 Page 13