By the time I stubbed the cigarette out the brothers were moving tables from the center of the floor. They raised a trapdoor so big it took two of them to lift it. The big man motioned me towards it, the gun never wavering from its aim at a spot over my heart. When I stood over the opened space I was looking down a long flight of wooden steps. The tang of the sea wafted up towards me, and somehow I didn’t think I was looking down into their beer cellar. The gun prodded me in the back, and I started down the steps.
I was on a steep stairway, hemmed in on either side by damp rock, which opened out after twelve steps into a wide area. Sputtering oil braziers lit a long hall. The roof and walls were an extravaganza of wood and bone, fishing nets and harpoons. The bones were the ribcage of what must have been an impressive whale, while all the woodwork was intricately carved with scrollwork and sea-faring scenes. The whole thing felt like a stage-set, but enough of Doug’s enthusiasm had rubbed off for me to realize that this room was old...far older that the bar above.
“One of life’s little coincidences,” the big man said. “Irene found it, two years ago.”
And something tickled at the back of my mind, as if clarity wasn’t far away. But I wasn’t given time to think about it. I was pushed further into the chamber.
At the far end, the woodwork and bone gave way to bare rock. Irene and John Mason stood over a pool that lapped gently at their feet. Behind them, seemingly carved straight into the rock wall, was a massive plinth, on which lay an effigy of a bound man, mouth wide open, screaming for eternity.
The three Mason brothers bowed low.
“Sea Father, protect us,” they chanted in unison.
John Mason still had that dreamy, far away look on his face while Irene held tightly to his arm. She smiled at me, but didn’t move to help when the brothers wrapped me in a fishing net, so tight that my arms were pinned to my side. They lifted me onto the plinth, and I noticed it had two parallel grooves cut on top...channels that let to the screaming statue. They laid me down on my side, facing out into the room, and the three of them walked off to my right and out of my sight.
Now was the time for a witty remark, a laugh in the face of danger...but I couldn’t manage one. My mouth dried up and my heart pounded all the way up to my ears.
“For Christ’s sake, Irene. Get me out of here. They’re going to kill me.”
“Oh no,” she said. “The boys must have their mummery. It’s their time.”
She went back to holding tight to John Mason, and didn’t acknowledge me further, even when I cursed and screamed. I shouted until I was hoarse, my throat feeling like barbed wire had ripped through it, but one last scream died in my throat as a figure stepped in front of me.
At first I thought it was John, changed again, then I realized it was one of the shorter brothers, dressed in a long hooded cloak. The cloak was of thick scales, and the hood fell over his face, the scales over his brow cunningly formed to look like two large, reptilian, eyes.
“I am a Son of Loki,” he said.
“I am Jormungand.”
“Gluttony is my table, whale meat my knife. The rocks of the earth my woman, strength my companion. Black depths are my bed and the sea itself forms the walls of my home.
“I am Jormungand, and Midgard is mine.”
He moved aside and the second smaller brother stepped forward. He wore a cloak of wolf fur, and his hood was shaped into the head of a great wolf.
“I am a Son of Loki.
“I am Fenrir.
“Gluttony is my table, red meat my knife. The moon is my woman, rage my companion. The forest is my bed and the mountains form the walls of my home.
“I am Fenrir, and Jotunheim is mine.”
He moved aside, and the big man stepped in front of me. He wore a cloak that was wolf fur down one side, and skin, probably human, down the other. Half of his hood was wolf, the other man.
“I am a Son of Loki,” he said.
“I am Vali.
“Gluttony is my table, sons of men my knife. All women are my women, fury my companion. The halls of men are my bed, and their cities form the walls of my home.
“I am Vali, and all of creation is mine.”
He moved to join his brothers.
If I hadn’t been bound and trussed I might have laughed, so serious yet so nonsensical were they. But any urge to laugh was quenched when the big man went to the wall and took down a harpoon that was as tall as he was.
His brothers began to stamp their feet, clap their hands, and chant, a deep, almost growling, rhythm that seemed to take on depth and resonance as it echoed around the chamber. The big man started to prowl the room, stabbing the point of the harpoon at walls, into corners, in a dance that was formalized and synchronized in time with the chants. And every time he circled the room and came to face me he stabbed the harpoon at my chest, getting closer each time, the chanting, foot stomping and clapping rising, louder and louder.
And slowly, above the noise being made by the brothers, I heard the tune I’d been listening to all night, but this time it came from far away, and sung by a single, mournful voice. John Mason started to move towards the rock pool, but Irene held him in a tight embrace. He made a token attempt at resistance, then seemed to slump in her arms.
The Mason brothers upped their tempo, and soon the big man was whirling and spinning around the room. And still, on each turn, the point of the harpoon came ever closer to my chest.
The noise the brothers made drowned out the sea wives for a few seconds, but it came back again, closer now, more forceful.
The brothers began to stomp and chant themselves into a frenzy, and sweat poured down the big man’s brow as he came round again.
The water in the pool surged and boiled, and the head of a seal broke water, just as the big man came round to face me.
“I am Vali, Son of Loki. By the right of blood I call for an end.”
He raised the harpoon.
“We will serve no more.”
He pulled the weapon back, and my whole life focused on the torchlight gleaming off the barbed point. I closed my eyes and tensed my muscles.
But the blow never came. A voice rang out in the chamber.
“I am a Daughter of Loki.”
I opened my eyes to see Irene fighting the big man for the harpoon. He seemed to be tugging as hard as he was able, but she took it way from him like taking a toy from a child.
“I am Hel,” she said, and changed, her skin mottling, turning grey, like wet clay. Lank grey hair hung in front of her face, and her eyes gleamed in the torchlight.
And I remembered.
It was Irene who’d brought Mason to me in the first place...it was she who had ‘found’ him...it was she who had ‘found’ this chamber. Even as pieces were falling into place in my head, the big man moved to take the harpoon from her. She backhanded him, seemingly putting no effort into it, but the big man flew a full five yards across the floor.
The other brothers fell silent, shock on their faces. The sound of the sea wife singing suddenly filled the room, and John Mason made a move towards the seal.
Irene—or, more correctly—Hel, swiveled and threw the harpoon like a javelin. It took John full in the back and a welter of blood come out just above his navel. He fell forward, face down in the edge of the pool.
The seal mewled piteously, but Hel paid it no attention.
She came forward to the plinth and lifted me bodily from it, dropping me down beside Mason’s body, then forgetting about me just as quickly as she turned to the two smaller brothers.
They turned to run, but she was on them like a cat after a mouse and she brought their heads together with a crack that echoed in the suddenly silent room. She slung their bodies onto the plinth. With hands that had grown thick, yellow talons, she tore the bodies, coolly methodically, disemboweling them. Blood splattered on and around me...but most was running down the runnels towards the screaming statue. And where the blood hit it, the stone began to change, ligh
tening in color, softening, as it took on the texture of skin, soaking up the blood, drinking it in.
“I am Hel,” the creature said. “Hunger is my table, the Sons of Loki my knife. Awaken, Father. I give you back your blood that long ago was taken.”
The statue no longer looked like stone. It was a tall, dark, man, bound in black cords...cords that were starting to soften as more blood ran.
I felt movement behind me, and heard Mason whisper, “Don’t move. I can loosen the net.”
Hel stood over us, eyes blazing, arms raised to the roof as she chanted. “Awaken, Father. Ragnarok is at hand. It is the twilight of the old gods. Tonight we will take their place in Asgard. Awaken, Father.”
On the plinth the man emerging from the stone began to struggle against the red bonds.
On the floor of the chamber, the last of the Mason brothers pushed himself to his feet. At first he didn’t seem to know where he was, then his eyes widened in horror as he saw the broken, mangled bodies of his brothers on the plinth. He roared like an animal in pain, and threw himself at Hel’s back.
She screamed, and tried to tear him off, but he had his legs locked at her waist, and was trying to force her head back, threatening to break her neck.
“You’re free,” I heard Mason say behind me. And I was able to move my arms.
The creature was still trying to move the brother from her back, so I took the chance to roll away. The net fell off me in one large sheet. Cramp hit me hard as I tried to get to my feet, and I staggered...almost fell.
Hel chose that moment to hurl herself backwards. Blood blew out from the man’s lips as she crushed him, once, twice, against the unforgiving stone. He fell off her, and she yelled in triumph.
She bent and lifted him. His eyes caught mine, pleading, just before she tossed him on the plinth among the wreckage that was all that remained of his brothers.
“Adams. Help me!” Mason shouted, but even if I’d been capable, I’d never have reached him in time. Hel went to work with a vengeance.
The figure that had so recently been a statue, a lump of inanimate rock, was pushing itself out of its bonds, slowly, as if coming out of a long-sleep. But there was a deep hunger in its eyes as Hel continued her bloody work.
Something pulled at my leg. John Mason lay there, the bloody end of the harpoon protruding from his belly...but he didn’t look like a man on the verge of death.
“Pull it out,” he said. “Quick. Before she notices us.”
I had to put a foot on his back, and I had to put my weight on it, but he didn’t flinch, even when the barbed end tore out of him, taking a fist-sized lump of flesh with it. His body flowed and melted, the wound closing, leaving no sign it had ever been there.
“We have to stop her,” he said, pushing himself to his feet.
Hel was still tearing the big man’s body to pieces. Over on the far side of the plinth, Loki had pushed his bonds aside and was crawling across the bloody runnels, his mouth smeared with gore, his eyes blazing with green fire.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said. I offered him my hand to help him up, and he took it, changing even as he pulled himself upright.
By the time he stood beside me, it wasn’t a hand I was holding, but a paw, a wolf’s paw, with thick hard claws that left indentations in my palm as he squeezed, once, then threw himself at Hel.
He hit her side-on, and the pair of them fell to the floor where they rolled, a rolling mass of flesh that changed and reformed faster then I could make sense of it.
Up on the plinth, Loki reached the remains of the brothers and started to eat. I heard bone crunch between his teeth as he lay, face down in the gore, among a pile of legs, arms, ribs...the three brothers united as one in death.
I felt bile rise in my throat, and I lifted the harpoon. I stepped forward, aware that Hel and John Mason, a pair of snarling, ape-like monstrosities, were tearing pieces out of each other at the far end of the room. I stepped up to the plinth and raised the harpoon above my head, bringing it down, hard, on Loki’s back, spearing him through. He lay in a pile of intestines, rolling and screaming.
“No!” I heard Hel shout behind me, but it didn’t stop me. I took the remaining tranquilizer darts from my pocket, and slammed them down, hard, into Loki’s back, beside the shaft of the harpoon. The figure went limp, face down in a bloody spread-eagled ribcage.
“No!” Hel screamed again.
I was pushed aside as a figure jumped to the plinth.
“Father!” she shouted, and bent over the prone body...at the same moment as John Mason, with a taloned hand, ripped her belly open from groin to sternum, her guts spilling over Loki.
“Quick,” Mason said. “Bind him.”
I watched in amazement as he pulled yard after yard of bloody intestines from Hel’s body, while she screamed and drummed her fists in the gore, sending splatters of blood everywhere. He started winding the ropy mess over Loki’s body, and where they touched the flesh, they turned to hard stone, black rock that began to spread across the skin, reversing the recent transformation.
I didn’t need to be told twice. I reached into her belly and began to pull. The guts felt like warm sausages in my hands as I coiled and knotted them over Loki until the stone had nearly taken him...then we started on Hel, binding her to her father with her own innards, all the while with her screaming and roaring till my ears rang.
My life was narrowed to gore and screams, and I was in a frenzy as I pulled and knotted, hands a mass of gore, nostrils filled with the stench of death, mouth full of the taste of corruption.
And still she screamed, even when her torso was fused tight to her father, even when her hair fell forward and solidified across her bloody chest. John Mason looped one last coil around her head, and it gripped her like a vise. Her eyes flared red one last time, and a scream died in her throat as the stone engulfed her.
Finally I stood back, panting heavily, noticing that the last remains of the Mason brothers were even now being engulfed in tendrils of black lacy rock. The harpoon stood out proud from the solidifying mess of limbs and torso, like a sword in the stone, and when I tried to move it, it was locked solid.
“How did you know?” I asked. “About the binding?”
But John Mason was no longer present. I turned, just in time to see him slip into the water beside the seal, his skin already changing to a dull grey, his feet, as he dived beside her, already showing signs of fusing together in a rudimentary tail. The water rippled twice, and I was left alone in a too quiet room. I had one last look at the grotesque rockery that was left, then dragged my tired body out of there, to the real world, where some sanity might be waiting.
Six hours later I walked wearily into the office and threw the Mason brother’s notebook on the desk in front of Doug.
“A wee souvenir for you,” I said “The case is closed, and we’ve earned our money.”
He looked as if he was full of questions, but I beat him to it.
“So. Did you get lucky?”
He blushed, all the way from collar to brow,
“No,” he said. “But we got paid again.”
“Tell me later,” I said. “In about a week, after I wake up.”
I took myself off to bed and slept like two separate logs.
It was daylight when I woke, and Doug was still in the office.
“When you said you were tired, I didn’t realize you’d sleep the clock around,” he said.
I grunted. I wasn’t quite ready for talk, but a coffee and a cigarette cured that. Slowly, I caught up with proceedings. Doug had made three grand and a new friend in the American lady. Betty Mulholland had called twice. And nothing more had been heard from ‘The Southside Slasher’.
I called Betty.
“You can start fitting somebody up,” I said. “He’s not coming back.”
“Is that a promise?”
“I’ll seal it with a kiss if you come over.”
She laughed and I wanted to hear her do it m
ore often.
“You can buy me a beer after work,” she said. “I’ll come round about six.”
“Wear your uniform,” I said. “And don’t forget the handcuffs.”
“Too fast again, Derek,” she said. “Maybe next week.”
Just as I put the phone down there was a knock on the door, and Jessie Malcolm walked in. She had a smile on her face.
“You got him back,” she said.
“How did you know?”
“I told her,” someone said behind her. The old, one-eyed janitor stepped in beside her and put a hand on her shoulder.
“We’ve become good friends,” the auld lady said, suddenly looking twenty years younger. “And we’re off on holiday, so I thought I’d better give you this.”
She handed me a check for twice what I was owed.
“There’s a wee bit extra for you. I just found out that I’m now the owner of a pub in Skye. This auld bugger here says he knows it, and apart from some work in the cellar, he says it’s a going concern.”
The old man smiled at me.
“We’re grateful for what you did for the boy,” he said. “That took guts.”
He led the old lady to the door. He looked back and tapped his glass eye, twice.
“I’ll be seeing you.”
And that’s where I thought the case ended...and it’s where it did end, for most of the people involved. But it really ended for me two weeks later.
I was out for a walk along the river. I was between cases, and I was just walking, scarcely a thought in my head. Sometime later I might go for a beer, or I might call my new friend on the police force and see if she fancied a curry and a cuddle.
Somebody called my name.
I turned towards the sound. Two seals bobbed, just yards off-shore. They both barked, once...and a third, smaller, head bobbed up to join them. All three looked straight at me, then, as one, bowed their heads. And as quickly as they’d come, they were gone.
The End
The Skin Game
Book Three of the Midnight Eye Files
One
WHAT’S THAT STAR ON THE WALL FOR?
The Midnight Eye Files Collection Page 40