Ragnarok

by Michael Smorenburg

  “Tree ring dating. They dated it out to 995 CE.”

  “See-ee?”

  “Current Era, Mum. It used to be called AD, anno Domini.”

  “Then say A D, luv,” Gaby countered Tegan, their arms interlinked, a teasing glint in her eye.

  “It’s not technically correct,” Tegan retorted. “Come on Mum. Can you never be serious?”

  “I know… I know. This is serious… to you.”

  “It could be just serious.”

  They walked a few more paces.

  “Now where was I?”

  “Tree rings.”

  “Yes. They got the age of nearly a thousand years old. They confirmed it with radio carbon dating.”

  “Not very accurate, that carbon dating,” Gaby scoffed.

  “Well, it is,” Tegan corrected her. “Out to thirty-five or so thousand years, carbon dating is very accurate, especially calibrated and in agreement with the ring dendrochronology.”

  “And the point is?”

  “Well… the point is that it is a thousand years old and as good as new. Little strange that, no?”

  “Strange… yes. Okay. Y’a have my attention.”

  “Evidently, the axe head is of iron construction. I can’t repeat the intricate metallurgic details, but the isotopes and carbon content, shape and everything else about it indicate it’s of Scandinavian design—Viking design—and in fact, Viking, well… from precisely the same territories and via the same methods as authentic Viking.”

  “Preposterous!” Gaby assured Tegan. “What y’a seem t’ be suggestin’… Whatever it t’is.”

  “I'm not proposing anything. I don’t know what to think, Mum. I’m floundering too, trying to figure it out… as confused as you or anyone.”

  “But tis strange,” Gaby conceded. “Odd.”

  They walked on a while, locked in their own thoughts and then chatted more mild pleasantries with one another and the occasional local.

  The chowder was as good as advertised.

  When the waitress stood a while making small talk, Tegan nudged the conversation toward the boating tragedy.

  “Shame, it is,” the lady agreed. “Two of them were brothers, you know. Their cousin lives in the town. Such a tragedy.”

  “Gee,” Tegan felt her heart flutter. “I would really like to pay my condolences. Do you perhaps know where the cousin lives?”

  “To be sure. He’s just two streets down toward the harbor.” She shared the address.

  “We can’t be just knocking on his door, Teegs,” Gaby admonished her daughter.

  “Well, I can hardly make an appointment without doing so,” Tegan pointed out.

  “But what good will it do?”

  “I don’t know Mum. That’s the thing about investigative journalism—the whole point is that you don’t know until you go find out.”

  Gaby couldn’t dispute it, but she tried several techniques to divert Tegan as her daughter led her gently but firmly in the direction of the home in mourning.

  “Well, I’m not coming in there. I’ll walk on down to the harbor and you can fetch me,” Gaby insisted.

  The door opened and the icy chill of tragedy immediately leaked out around the aura of the man in the doorway.

  “Hello sir,” Tegan stammered, finding confronting the topic much harder in person. “I… I… Well, I’m up on vacation and my dad’s out on the Bank. Milly up at the restaurant, at Harbor View, gave me your details and told me it was your cousin in… in the…” and her voice failed her.

  The man had kind eyes and a broken look about him.

  “Yes…” he nodded. “Do you want to come in?”

  “Thank you.”

  Very gently, Tegan explained that she was on a family vacation for her father to take advantage of the ocean’s sudden bounty, and then she segued into the gist of her objective.

  “He… uhhmm, Victor, is it?”

  The man nodded, “Yes, Victor.”

  “Well… I don’t want to be pushy, but I have the strangest feeling that I need to speak with him if he, uhhmm… when he wakes.”

  “I can arrange it,” the man assured, clinging to optimism.

  “You see?” Tegan said in triumph.

  “I still t’ink it’s a bit of an intrusion,” Gaby was unyielding.

  “He was happy for the diversion,” Tegan assured her. “Happy for the company.”

  “Well, a beautiful girl like you, a’knocking at his door… No doubt,” Gaby jostled her as they ambled arm-in-arm back home.

  “I have his number and gave him mine, so we’ll see if he calls. He told me something very interesting, which I must check out. Rumor—‘on good authority’, he insisted—has it that the axe from the first attacks around here had blood on it from three different people.”

  “Aye, yes. A terrible incident t’be sure. The family were butchered with it.”

  “Only the husband and wife. But blood from three means someone else, and it could only be one of the killers. My new friend tells me the DNA confirms the couple, and the DNA from the third is Northern European… specifically, from Iceland.”

  “Well, not surprising, dear. Probably we have that same DNA, y’know. Ireland was founded by the Norse, and many of the Irish moved here a century and more ago. Y’e can’t avoid it.”

  The fact of it dulled the wild romanticized notions cartwheeling through Tegan’s mind.

  “But still…” she said, not really making a point at all.

  They walked in silent contemplation a ways, when Gaby’s mobile rang. It was John from out on the Grand Banks, and it made Tegan take out her encrypted phone to see if she’d missed anything from Pete, her stomach doing that twisting thing again at the cold emptiness of her message screen. Just another message from Daxton still apologizing for his sudden withdrawal at lunch and a promise that he would soon have some more feedback for her.

  “I want to talk,” Tegan spoke over her mom, gesturing for her mom’s attention.

  “In a minute…! No John… it’s this daughter o’ yours interrupting. She’s a proper bully.”

  She handed the phone over to Tegan.

  “Dad! How are you doing?”

  John related a freezer room full of butchery to her.

  “Come on now. Surely that’s enough?”

  He said no amount could approach too much.

  “So you guys will just fish it till there’s no more… again!”

  No, he insisted, a new fishing ban was coming into effect at midnight for the authorities to study the anomaly, so they needed to take what they could before the deadline.

  The attitude angered Tegan.

  When the call was over, she turned her disquiet on her mother, a sympathizer and accessory to the crime of exploitation of the environment in this regard.

  A heated debate ensued down the predictable lines that God was providing a bounty and would keep an eye on things.

  “Like he did before?” Tegan shot back.

  And that brought the diversion to an end.

  “Anyway… Y’r father’ll be home by noon tomorrow with a bounty for us.”

  It was aimed at Tegan’s knees, to make her feel admonished for being so ungrateful.

  “And y’r man is not a fisherman or hunter?” Gaby tried another tack, betting on the cliché that a red-blooded Australian male was most likely a crocodile hunter of sorts, as well.

  “Doubt he’d have the time,” Tegan hedged, pondering briefly the new deadline she’d set for the crypto phone, before she’d break silence and try the open line.

  “Well then,” Gaby said, as if it was settled in her favor.

  They were almost back at the door of their east-facing cottage overlooking the ocean. John was somewhere out there just beyond the horizon, and their eyes went to that spot where they estimated his trajectory home would cut the skyline when he came.

  TV news delivered a new bag full of puzzle pieces.

  Yet another raid and massacre had been perpetrate
d on a family a dozen miles down the coast from the first. This time though, grainy CCTV footage had been recorded. The report was vague as to whether more than one camera angle was available, but the footage shown was shot in poor light with old and cheap analogue equipment.

  Half a dozen great hairy blobs carrying shafts was the best one could make out. The resolution was so poor that it might well have been a troop of big-foots.

  But the evidence they left was all too clearly gang related, the anchor insisted.

  Again, those carried shafts turned out to be axes with small heads.

  The CCTV footage re-ran and the axe heads were circled with the frames on pause for the benefit of viewers. The lack of definition showed only the smallest hint of something more than the pole at its end.

  A sword was also shown on pause. Again, no definition and only visible as an outline from a certain angle, shoved into a belt or scabbard as it must have been… footage that would have been missed if it wasn’t for the evidence of sword trauma to the victims that sent the investigators back to the monitors for verification.

  The perpetrators had got clean away again.

  Roadblocks and aerial surveillance had delivered nothing and no biker activity on the island’s roads could be confirmed; yet the authorities were convinced that the gangs were still their best lead.

  It did not escape Tegan that this was yet another home adjacent to a beach… a home next to a beach just like the one she and Gaby were staying in.

  The paranoia of that thought caused a fleck of terror to rise within her. She quelled irrational thought with the fact that the two attacks were on the other side of the peninsula fifty and more miles to the north.

  But… the thought persisted, if the authorities were right and it was a biker turf war? Fifty miles wasn’t a lot of buffer.

  The thought of it plagued her to the point that she found herself scouting and assessing the best escape routes she could lead her mom along if things turned bad.

  After her brief scouting foray, she returned to see a TV debate raging. The thrust of it had returned the conversation to the racial elements of the first attack.

  In a world of upheaval with mass population shifts, and Canada viewed as a safe haven, xenophobic fears in the Northeast were on the rise. The population had polarized; those who sympathized with Neo-Nazi and Aryan Brotherhood sentiments, and those who were terrified by this shift.

  The most aggressive of the right-wing movements had, according to the expert on TV, been steadily morphing to adopt the bizarre Norse paganism that the original Nazis were said to have pursued.

  The weaponry and style of the killings, he argued, seemed to carry those dreadful ritualistic hallmarks….

  She listened to the madness of it for a while, but it really seemed too far-fetched and deranged to be taken seriously.

  Could all this rationally be connected to The Incident? she pondered.

  Doubtful, her rational mind assured her, really doubtful.

  But then there was all the confusing stuff that Professor Daxton had shared with her over lunch before he became spooked.

  She’d made a recording on her mobile but it was very difficult to hear because of the ambient noise of the restaurant, so while it was fresh in her mind, she’d listened to it and made notes. She went to fetch her notes.

  Multiplee-connected topologies, she’d written, not quite sure how to spell multiplee. The dictionary suggested ‘multiply’, but that didn’t fit the definition, so she concluded it was an obscure word and spelled it phonetically.

  She’d asterisked *alternative routes through space, and added a notation with a question mark, or through time…? intending to ask the Prof if she met him again.

  She skimmed over the notes about time being a river with a trajectory and whirlpools and came across the other words that had confounded her—catastrophic regions of space…???!!! and geodesic??—to which she’d added in pencil the dictionary definition she’d looked up: relating to or denoting the shortest possible line between two points on a sphere or other curved surface.

  She was way out of her depth with these concepts, but instinctively, it felt like going over it again would trigger something.

  It didn’t.

  Worse yet, it had all seemed a whole lot clearer when the good Prof had explained it.

  The only lay-concept that leaped out of her notes was, (when an) obstruction is introduced (energy) time can flow backward!!!

  “It can flow backward,” she said out aloud.

  “Can what?” Gaby had come into the study where Tegan was pouring over her computer.

  “Oh, sorry Mum. Time. The professor I met with said time could move backward. I’m just thinking aloud.”

  “Science fiction,” Gaby scoffed.

  “Well, maybe not. The Prof said it’s possible.”

  “Oh, b’Jesus, they’re crazy, a new theory every other day…”

  Tegan let the tired old explanation about the difference between hypothesis and theory, and layman’s theory and scientific theory go for once. She’d explained it too many times and knew her mom’s Irish humor loved to wind her up about the distinction.

  “So what’s that t’do with your investigation? Time?”

  “The missing planes and boats went somewhere… The Professor hinted that maybe sometime is possible.”

  “But I t’ought you were all riled up ‘bout the attacks around here? Or the shenanigans near your new man?”

  “He doesn’t live in Australia anymore. But, yes, I sense they’re all connected; what was going on near Australia and what’s happening here. The Incident. I think it’s one event.”

  “Well, t’be sure, I can’t fathom it none,” and she pottered off.

  In Tegan’s email, were all manner of administration; mounting workloads for Sony, booking requests for her Malibu home, the usual clutter of spam… and nothing at all from Pete.

  She checked her phones, both of them. No sign of the man.

  According to the log on his instant messaging app, his last login was the day after she’d last seen him. A week and more ago, and she tried to remind herself that they’d shared something that was almost nothing. They really didn’t know one another.

  He owed her nothing.

  Then again, he’d bought her a snazzy phone and loaded his number—presumably to stay in touch. It was very confusing and increasingly worrying.

  And then there was a message with Info for you in the subject line.

  Thinking it spam, she deleted it and was already skimming the next message when she second-guessed herself and undid the delete.

  Just two hours ago she’d left a card at the restaurant, writing on its back, Anything unusual? Give me a shout. Handing it over, she’d explained that she was hoping to make a documentary about the unusual flow of occurrences—from weather anomalies to missing planes, boats and of course attacks—and that she’d love to talk to anyone who had seen or experienced anything out of the ordinary.

  The email message read, Chris at Harbor View Restaurant gave my dad your details. Probably it’s nothing, he says he saw a party-boat full of what he said looked like Hells Angels a few weeks back just before the attacks. Local cops not interested.

  “Jesus Christ on a stick,” Tegan flopped back heavily in her seat and her mother, pottering nearby, admonished her for the blasphemy. She ignored it and re-read the message.

  Her fingers were a blur. Fantastic – When can we meet?

  Chapter 16

  St. John’s Harbor

  Spirit (trawler)

  Latitude: 47°33'36"N

  Longitude: 52°42'33"W

  “I’m intrigued as to why you call it a party boat?”

  “Way it looked… how they were dressed,” the crusty old captain rumbled through bad teeth. “Like they’re outa the Bible or somethin’. Thought maybe a kiddie’s party, but no. All adults. Probably drunk.”

  “And you didn’t take a closer look?”

  “For what? We
were dragging nets on a grid pattern. Couldn’t make the turn. We see the strangest things out there, lassie,” he hesitated just a moment. “But this one was most strange, that I’ll grant y’a. Men at the oars… don’t see that too often these days.”

  “And the authorities?”

  “Authorities? Bahhh!” He scoffed. “They’ll think I was all drunk, like.”

  Tegan nodded in agreement, not just for encouragement but at the story his bulbous red nose told, cratered and blue veined.

  The authorities probably would have a point.

  “But your daughter said the cops ignored you?”

  “Then she must’a gone to them, the fool.”

  “Ahh… okay.” He hadn’t called his daughter a fool with malice, so it didn’t feel like she’d violated any confidentiality.

  “And radar? Your radar or the Harbormaster’s? Do they maybe keep records? Could we not get some kind of a track on where they came from or went?”

  “Wood,” he said and left it there as if Tegan should understand.

  “Wood? Sorry, I’m not following you.”

  “Wooden boat. It was fifty feet and our radar showed it as a three-man dinghy…”

  “Why would it do that?”

  The old man rolled his eyes like a moron was interviewing him, “Radar passes through wood.”

  “Oh… okay. Makes sense,” Tegan felt chastised and stupid. “So, where’d they go? Any ideas?”

  “Hugging the coast—we was south of Pouch Cove. They was inside of us ‘n went up round the point. Dunno,” he shrugged with indifference; then added emphatically, “Assholes.”

  “Really?”

  “At sea we greet. They didn’t acknowledge on radio, ignored our horn. Bitter and twisted. Buncha thugs.”

  “Anyone else see it?”

  “You think I was drunk?” the captain challenged, squinting in accusation, a brittle edge to his voice.

  Clearly the charge of being a drunk was always foremost on his mind.

  “My men all saw them.”

  He was an alcoholic, of that Tegan was sure.

  “Sorry, sir. No. I’m not suggesting you or your men didn’t see them. I’m wondering if you perhaps have anyone else I could talk to? Other trawlers in the area? Other authorities?”