The Otherlife

by Julia Gray

  Hati will eat the moon. Skǫll will devour the sun. All will fight, and all will fall, I think uneasily.

  Ragnarok is the end.

  But the end of what?

  Now I turn down a gravelled lane and walk past the church and the graveyard and all the way to the end of the road. Here, finally, I come to towering iron gates, built tall and impenetrable, but the wall is loaded with creepers, which make it easy for me to clamber over. A slither and a jump and I’m on the other side. It’s silent: the only sounds are the rain on the trees and my breathing. Still, I’m wary as I approach the house, keeping to the trees and avoiding the winding pebbled driveway. I don’t know who’s out there.

  Duvalle Hall rises out of the shadows. It’s larger than I remember, and more imposing. Ike and Elsie must have extended it. I don’t remember the extra wing on the left; I don’t remember the two towers that point like a mano cornuto from the roof. Surely it never had so many windows, so many rooms? But it’s definitely Duvalle Hall. I recognise the yew hedges, the outhouses. The converted stables appear as I get nearer, tucked away behind the house. There’s the croquet lawn, and over to my right I make out the glint of the lake and the ornamental bridge, and the maze beyond. No lights burn in the windows. Shivers eddy along my arms as I come to the front door. I put out my hand to push it, and it opens at once, swinging back with oiled grace. My heart is a kick drum.

  I step across the threshold. ‘Zara?’ I call out. ‘Rebecca? It’s Ben.’

  They did say, didn’t they, that they’d be here this weekend? Perhaps I’ve got that wrong. The marble floor is cold under my feet as I wander into the centre of the hall, my steps tentative. There’s nothing here, I think. There’s no one. Hati and Skǫll in the sky, the Late Greats – all just the chemical glitches in my brain. But if that’s so, then how did I get here? Because I sure as hell didn’t trek across the fields; I felt Bifrost quiver under my trainers. I saw Heimdallr raise the horn to his lips, so close I could have reached out to touch it – and I know it would have been smooth and slightly warm under my fingers.

  ‘Christ, it’s dark in here,’ comes a voice. ‘Why don’t you have the light on? Ah yes, the power’s out. Hold on.’

  Muscles drawn tight, I wait.

  Someone is shouldering the sitting-room door. Footsteps on stone. A match is struck, then another. A candle illuminates the hall.

  ‘Ben! Great to see you! How was your hike?’

  It’s Ike Duvalle, coming towards me, beaming with lordly confidence.

  ‘What do you think of our new bridge? Pretty handy, huh?’

  He claps me on the back; something feels odd about his arm.

  ‘You’d better head on upstairs. Careful on your way up. There’s a lot of work going on in this house. Ah, but that’s the way Elsie likes it. Now, I should see about brunch. You will be staying for brunch, right?’

  As he speaks he walks me towards the stairs, as though he’s in a hurry for me to go.

  ‘What kind of eggs do you like? Fried are the most greasily satisfying. Poached eggs look like boobs, or so I’ve always thought.’

  He doesn’t seem to notice that I haven’t said anything. I don’t know what to say; I’m too disorientated. He’s not how I remember him at all. He leans down to a row of bulbous glass-jar candles on the mantelpiece and there’s something strange about the way he strikes the matches – holding the box awkwardly, his left hand at an odd angle – that bothers me. He catches me looking, and holds his hand up.

  ‘Prosthetic. You like? Pretty cool.’

  Now that I’m looking at it properly, I can see that it’s artificial: jointed, flesh-coloured, the fingers opening and closing with mechanical stiffness.

  ‘Ike, what happened to your hand?’ I say.

  ‘Had an encounter with one of our resident beasts. Unpleasant-looking animal. One of our gamekeepers took a shot at him, but I’m not sure we nailed him.’

  He holds open the door to the stairs.

  ‘Thank you,’ I say. There seems to be no choice but to go through.

  Just as I pass him, Ike clutches my arm with his artificial hand and whispers, ‘I just wish I knew, Ben. I wish I knew where I went wrong.’

  This is a staircase I don’t remember from my time at Duvalle Hall. The stairs I remember were wide and mahogany; they split into two like the ones on the Titanic and had a river of rich dark carpeting running down the middle. The stairs I’m currently climbing are both shallow and steep at the same time; sometimes I take a step and am surprised by how high I have to lift my leg, and other times I stumble, misplacing my foot. It must be a hidden passage. It smells of mould, and something tangy and metallic, and expensive room freshener. The walls are rough-hewn stone, porous, the colour of the inside of a mouth. The stairs twist like DNA strands, so many times that I find I can’t figure out my orientation, or how far I’ve climbed.

  A small round window appears, like a porthole. I crouch down and peer through it, and then draw back in alarm.

  Through the porthole, Elsie Duvalle is standing in a bra and knickers, going through her wardrobe with quick, cross hands. Her clothes – silver and gold robes, jewel-coloured shawls – are flowing past her on some kind of invisible carousel. Boxes with expensive-looking logos and labels are piled up around her; ropes of fish-scale gems are slung over the free-standing mirror. Elsie pulls a kimono onto her shoulders. She calls to someone out of sight.

  ‘Clothilde! It is unbelievable. He has stolen some of my dresses. He is literally unbelievable. What are we going to do with him? Can you go and fetch him at once, please? And get the decorator to call me.’

  She looks up sharply; I pull back from the edge of the porthole. She has the same waxy appearance as Ike does, as though if I were to peel her skin away there’d be nothing underneath but air.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  She comes towards the porthole. Her hair billows out from her head in a cloud of woven gold. A lemony-green light flickers about her ears as she begins to cry.

  The stairs are steeper now. I notice that the walls are inlaid with a web-like substance, like electrical wire, that seems to connect one porthole to another. Some of them are blocked or bricked up, others have curtains or panes of glass. These I peer through, each time with a pulse of hesitation, a buckling in my gut.

  Through one porthole, a wolf sits in Pret a Manger with a Super Club sandwich.

  Through another, two wolves tear down Westbourne Grove with a chargrilled steak.

  Through a third, the boys from 8 Upper are auditioning for Lord of the Flies. Frodo stands on the stage, his fine voice echoing proudly as he delivers one of Jack’s speeches. He ducks as a pair of highlighter pens, bound with rubber bands, freewheels through the air towards his face.

  Some of these images are faint, others clear and sharp-edged. I pass a branch of Hamleys, overstuffed with toys. In the centre of a shelf sits a blonde doll dressed in a clown suit. Her hair has been jaggedly cut, and she is crying.

  I pass a factory floor where wolves in white aprons are icing hundreds of tiny cupcakes that are dancing quietly by on conveyor belts. Each cupcake has a pale-faced, dark-haired boy delicately painted on its surface.

  It’s me.

  Higher, higher I climb. I’m nearly beyond thinking; it’s as much as I can do to keep going. One thing I’m sure of: something is wrong here. Ike’s bitten-off hand, the lemony-green light in Elsie’s face … none of this is right. I don’t know what’s happening, but it is something very strange. It’s as though Ike and Tyr have become oddly melded into a single entity; meanwhile, Elsie is Frigg. But why?

  This is not my Otherlife. Parts of it are familiar, but parts of it are not. And this is not Duvalle Hall either. It’s somewhere, or something, else. Every few minutes the house shakes, as if a giant hand is clenching in its foundations. The smells are stronger the higher I climb: the copper of blood, fresh-baked chocolate croissants, new-mown grass. The web-like substance on the walls glistens with quick-travelling
sparks. Somewhere below, I can still hear Elsie screaming.

  And now the stairs are coming to an end. The door at the top of them is heavy and oak-solid and lined with red felt, and it takes all my strength to push it open. With the whole of my weight I lean against it, feeling the threat of cold air on the other side. Suddenly, without warning, the door gives way and I half fall out onto an immense stretch of rooftop covered entirely with grass.

  It’s a rugby pitch.

  I take a couple of steps out onto the pitch. The rain has died down. The twin fireballs of Hati and Skǫll – one over to the east, one over to the west – leer down from above, like giant floodlights. I squint upwards. Now, above me, a constellation of ice-blue points appears in the sky, and each point gets larger, larger, growing limbs and weapons until they stand, side by side, and ready.

  An army of frost giants.

  Unannounced, the wolf pounces, knocking me down. Iron-hard body, flailing legs, hot breath. Diamond eyes. Its jaws close on my upper arm. The scream, when it comes, doesn’t sound like mine. It’s the disembodied scream of computer games, heavy metal, air-raid sirens. My arm howls with pain.

  I lock eyes with the wolf, wishing I had more violence in me, and prepare to knee it in the throat. Its head comes closer, till its nose is nearly touching mine.

  And then, instead of ripping out my jugular with one swift-clawed slash, it licks my face, with a rough tongue that feels like it’s studded with salt crystals. It whines, softly, nudging my nose.

  ‘Skǫll?’ I whisper.

  ‘Wrong!’ it says triumphantly, rolling off me and doing a blurry, furred somersault. It scrambles to its feet, shaking its coat. Its four legs become two and it climbs to stand, dressed in white trousers and a red shirt. His curls gleam like butter. He gives me a rugby tackle of a hug.

  ‘It’s so good to see you,’ says my old friend Hobie Duvalle. ‘Sorry I bit you, dude.’

  HOBIE’S DIARY

  Freyr’s Day, 7th November 2008

  I am obviously in disgrace.

  I’ve never seen my parents so angry. The Tattoo Incident pales into insignificance. I mean, my mother isn’t Ben’s mother so she didn’t break anything, but she actually seized me by the wrist, sat me down in a chair like I was about to be tortured by the Secret Police and shouted in my face. The problem is, I guess, that apart from exercise and lunches my mother doesn’t do much stuff, so apparently the children’s charity thing is of, like, Huge Importance and therefore it was about the worst thing I could have done, ever. Much worse than if I’d just eaten all the salted caramels, which is what I’d planned to do initially.

  First of all it was the fact that people had paid £250 for tickets to this thing which had several celebrities and football players among the guests and some BBC man doing the auction, not to mention a famous old jazz singer performing after dinner. So, in Mum’s mind, sabotaging the goodie bags was a bit like scratching the bonnet of a Maserati. An act of great devaluation. Second of all it was the content of the magazine article. (Dad said: ‘It was so disgusting that it actually made me sick – not only that someone would do such a thing, but that people would publish and read it. I’m utterly ashamed of you, Hobie.’) Thirdly, everyone in the article, from the cannibal to the victim’s family, was a complete chav. And that of course made it worse. Not that Mum would have seen the joke if they’d been posh, but she might not have freaked out quite as badly as she did.

  I am now not allowed the following:

  Puddings

  Salty snacks

  Sugary snacks

  Xbox

  Heavy Metal

  Any TV apart from shitty documentaries about whales and plankton

  My iPhone.

  I demanded to be told the timeframe of this punishment and apparently it’s till the end of half term and that’s only three days away. So actually it’s nearly over. Normally I’d be desperate to get back to London, but I’ll be sad when Ben isn’t staying with us any more. Even if we’ve had to put up with his dreadful mother.

  I don’t care much about my phone because there’s not much signal here anyway, and I’d only have used it to text Frodes or Archie something belittling or designed to derail their day in some small way. The lack of Xbox hurts more, but we don’t really have time for it anyway, and I’d rather go to Yggdrasil with Ben. Same goes for TV. Plus the one down here isn’t nearly as large as all the London TVs. Once you’re used to a 42-inch screen, you can’t really adjust to anything smaller, I find.

  However, the sunflower and pumpkin seeds that Clothilde doles out to me in a little glass ramekin like I’m a pet budgerigar or something are really humiliating and totally inedible. Even though Rebecca says they’re really good for you and full of essential fats. I think I will die if I have to keep eating them. They taste like bits of cardboard.

  ‘Think about the Berserks,’ said Ben today when we took a break from Geography. ‘They fought on empty stomachs.’

  ‘Bullshit. Weren’t they stuffed full of hallucinogenic mushrooms or alcohol or something?’

  ‘Yeah, but no food. Probably.’

  ‘I’m sure they had a few carcasses to barbecue at the end of it.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Definitely not bloody goji berries.’ Morosely I helped myself to another handful.

  We were all in the kitchen. The tutors were making coffee and looking at each other’s notes, murmuring things about ‘timing’ and ‘showing your working’ etc. Me and Ben and Za were at the kitchen table, staring down at our ration bowls like prisoners who’ve been let into the courtyard for an hour’s forced exercise before going off to build railroads or whatever. Ben has nobly refused to eat any of the things I’m being denied. A bit like a protest hunger strike. Not that he ever really seems to care about food.

  I spat a pumpkin seed across the table, aiming for Zara’s Longines wristwatch that she got for her tenth birthday. She jerked her arm out of the way and I noticed how narrow her wrist looked, with the pink crocodile bracelet of the watch slithering over it. Her fingers were a bit like Twiglets (another snack I’m permitted to consume). Sort of snap-pable, with sticking-out knuckles.

  ‘Stop it, Hobes,’ she muttered.

  ‘Stop it, Hobes,’ I mimicked, with my mouth full of what felt like hamster bedding. ‘How’s the old verbal reasoning going? Learned how to spell your own name yet?’

  ‘Ho-bee,’ sang Rebecca above the roar of the Nespresso machine, ‘be kind.’

  Jason was looking out across the kitchen garden to where our head gardener was overseeing the building of the most ginormous bonfire you could ever dream of. Tomorrow is our Bonfire Night celebration. After dinner we’ll watch fireworks by the side of the lake and bedtime will be a whole two hours later than usual. I love bonfires. Ordinarily I’d be out there chucking deadwood onto it and then scrambling up the climbing frame and leaping off to land snap crunch on the top of the heap, but as you can imagine that wasn’t on the agenda for today. Too much like fun.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Jason. ‘That’ll be some bonfire.’

  He strode outside, knotting his scarf over his Adam’s apple. Rebecca went with him, closing the kitchen door carefully behind her. She kept pulling at her sleeves so that the cuffs of her sweater (which was the exact pink of summer pudding) covered her hands and she was leaning close to Jason for warmth. Their heads bobbed together. He lit one of his roll-ups, and they seemed deep in conversation. Sometimes Rebecca threw a kind of half-glance back through the window in our direction, and I wondered why. Sometimes she shook her head, as if something was quite sad.

  Zara slipped out of the room like a little ghost.

  ‘You shouldn’t be so mean to her,’ said Ben.

  ‘I’m not mean to her,’ I said. ‘She’s used to it anyway.’

  ‘What you did … I felt so sorry for her.’

  He was referring to the game of Lose Zara in the Maze that we played yesterday. Zara is just so amazingly trusting each time. That’s what makes
it so funny. You lead her into the maze, getting her to bring a couple of those awful dolls and say maybe they can do a fashion show or a concert or something, and then you blindfold her and run away. Then she has to find her way out – ideally while it gets dark – and you crouch outside making ghost noises. Anyway it was all going brilliantly yesterday and Zara was crying and screaming and then Ben, totally unbelievably, went back in to get her.

  ‘It was extremely lame of you to go in and fetch her,’ I said. ‘She’d have gotten out eventually.’

  Suddenly I saw that Zara had left her halloumi and red pepper wrap completely untouched. I seized it and crammed it, whole, into my mouth, feeling the glorious ooze of Hell-mann’s mayo onto my palms, only chewing as much as I needed to facilitate swallowing it as fast as was humanly possible.

  I couldn’t resist a victory cry.

  ‘Soooo good!’ I snarfed. ‘Want some?’

  Ben shook his head. ‘Won’t you be in trouble?’

  ‘S’not sugary, s’not salty,’ I said, or words to that effect. I needed to be economical with speech in order to eat faster. ‘Jesus, I was getting so hungry I almost—’

  And then Clothilde came in with a massive basket of ironing and saw me and went into a torrent of stressed-out French, and then, surprise! Mum came tap-tap-tapping in wearing her suede knee-high boots and, lo and behold, I was in trouble again. This time for eating a snack that was a) contraband and b) Zara’s. FOR GOD’S SAKE. DOESN’T MY MOTHER HAVE ANYTHING BETTER TO DO?

  ‘Mum, I need snacks in order to do the amount of work we’ve got to get through,’ I whined.

  ‘Yes, and you can have dried fruit, nuts and seeds.’

  ‘But they’re rank. They’re foul. I hate them.’

  ‘The point is not for you to like them,’ she said, wetting a piece of kitchen roll and dabbing my mayonnaise-anointed face in a way that I found ludicrously over the top and like she was just trying to embarrass me. ‘You have too much of what you like.’