Order of the Black Sun Box Set 5

by Preston William Child

  “Where did you take this?” Gunnar asked Sam without looking up.

  “Hov,” Sam replied without thinking, picking the first town that came to mind.

  Gunnar stung Sam with a dirty look. “Don’t insult our intelligence, Mr. Cleave. This stone circle is not in Hov. It is at Hvalba.”

  That was just what Sam wanted to hear. Gunnar realized only afterwards that Sam was testing him, but it was too late to deny its existence. “So you do know about this place? What do you make of the colors hovering over it?”

  “I’m not some fancy scientist, Scotsman. How should I know?” Gunnar asked.

  “Because you were there before,” Sam reminded him. “Move on to the next image on the phone.”

  Johild took the liberty of helping her father by swiping to the next picture. It was a black and white image, a newspaper cutout from 1969 reporting on a fishing expedition Gunnar and his brother had been on when they’d uncovered the ruin, since then affectionately called the ‘Empty Hourglass’.

  “What’s this?” Johild scowled as she scanned through the article and checked the publication date at the bottom of the article. Astonished, she looked up at her father. He had no words, no explanations. All he did was shake his head, hoping that she’d abandon any enquiry. “What is this, Papa?” Johild insisted with a hoarse panic in her voice. What frightened her, what she was demanding an explanation for was the fact that her father still looked exactly the same.

  “What’s going on?” Heri asked, not having seen either of the images.

  “A photograph from 1969 proves that old Gunnar here has not aged a day since he discovered the Empty Hourglass along with his brother,” Sam disclosed. Heri scoffed and snickered at the obvious ridiculousness, but at the looks on his family members’ faces he ceased his laughing.

  “Wait. Really?” Heri asked Sam, who nodded affirmatively. “How is that possible?”

  “Is this what those so-called tourists came after in 1985, Papa?” Johild asked firmly. “Because I remember them asking about the circles when I was twelve years old.”

  “They were just tourists,” he told his daughter.

  “Is that why their people killed my uncle in 1969? Because he was a bad tour guide?” she shouted, furious that she’d been deceived all this time.

  “Watch your tone, Jo,” her father warned, but he knew that she had every right to act this way. Furious at being busted, Gunnar raged at Sam. “Are you happy now, Scotsman? You’ve been aware of this all this time. Is this why you came here? To break up my family!”

  “I’m not the one who lied to my daughter, Gunnar. Your family had nothing to do with my trip here or with the pictures I took. That picture of you and Jon? I discovered it last night while I was doing background research on Johild here,” Sam admitted, regardless of the possibility that he could ignite her hate for him again.

  “What?” she frowned, now directing her exasperation at Sam.

  “I thought you were…interesting. I wanted to know more about you.” Sam ignored Heri’s smirk and retrieved his phone from Johild. At first she was hesitant to return it to him for his insolence, but eventually let him take the phone back.

  “Don’t worry. There are no pictures of your secrets on my cell,” Sam reassured her.

  “I know,” she snapped. “I have nothing to hide. Not from you,” she glared at her father, “or from you.”

  “Maybe it’s better if we go there then, hey Sam? To that circle of stones that I’ve never heard of either.” Heri was hoping his uncle would catch his drift. “It’s less than an hour’s drive.”

  Gunnar sank his head.

  For many years that made up diminutive lifetimes, he had kept the true reason for his brother’s death a secret. He’d bottled up the gruesome incident, not to mention the arcane powers of the two circles that formed the shape of an hourglass, overlapping briefly at a small, singular point from where the alien light source would emerge in exquisite colors.

  Johild was in a state of disbelief. She wanted to give Gunnar the silent treatment that worked so well for her mother, but she was not like her mother. She was not as docile as her mother. No, she wanted answers, and she was not afraid to address issues that scratched at her feelings. She looked at Gunnar.

  “Papa, I want to know who those people were and why they killed Uncle Jon over a bloody Second World War station!” she said sharply, but without rudeness in her tone.

  His weary eyes refused to look at her, but he lowered his voice, recoiling from the fight he’d started earlier in the day. Gunnar was outnumbered by three younger, inquisitive, and fiery personalities and perhaps it was time to come clean to the next generation. It would be better that way. He was tired of remembering and if he told the story he might finally be unburdened from it.

  “In 1969 Jon and I went fishing, looking more variety of marine breeding grounds at Hvalba than we could find near our home at Sandvik. I mean, we had children and wives to take care of and wanted to expand our sea haunts,” Gunnar told his eager audience. “We took the tunnel that was made that year and packed all the gear we might need for a few days out in the elements. It was summer, so there were no real serious exposure issues to worry about.”

  “You took a tunnel?” Sam asked. He was thoroughly confused, but Heri explained nonchalantly that there were two tunnels on the island. One reached from Sandvik, which was primarily a coal mining town, to Hvalba.

  “Then there was another one built in ’62 that leads south toward Trongisvágur from Hvalba. Those are the tunnels my uncle is referring to,” he told Sam proudly. The journalist was impressed. “I thought you meant like an underground tunnel or shaft structure,” he smiled sheepishly.

  “No, pal, those are the two we have. Official tunnels. Nothing as primitive as you’re imagining.” Heri chuckled as the vehicle sped up under them. He wanted to see the Empty Hourglass for himself, whether old Gunnar’s story made sense or not.

  Gunnar shifted uncomfortably in his seat and cleared his throat. “Heri, there are actually three tunnels on the islands.”

  “I don’t think so, Uncle!” Heri argued. “I know my homeland better than the rivers that run across it. I’ve never heard of a third. Sorry.”

  Calmly Gunnar replied, “Until a moment ago you also did not know about the stone circles either. The people who know about this place you can count on your ten fingers, my boy.”

  Johild looked at her father. Her face displayed something halfway past anger and heading toward fascination. “How old are you, Papa?”

  “I was thirty-nine in that picture,” he revealed reluctantly.

  The three young people around the troubled old man silently competed to work out his current age first. Heri won.

  “Eighty-five?” he gasped. “You mean to tell me my uncle Gunnar is not sixty-three years old, but eighty…five?”

  “Jesus Christ!” Sam exclaimed involuntarily. “I’m going to have to get a lot more video on you, Gunnar.”

  “You will do no such thing, Scotsman!” Gunnar roared. “What did I say about exploiting our special places? Our secrets belong to our children. Don’t make me drown you in Eldvatn and throw your snooping Scottish ass from a cliff on Hvalbiareidi, because I swear to God I will!”

  “Alright, alright!” Sam retreated. “Sorry. Just a reflex. It comes with the job. I’ll keep my lens cap on! Relax. You have to understand that this is unbelievable. I thought Heri looked young, but you,” Sam chuckled in awe, “you take the cake!”

  Johild had never been this quiet for this long since her adolescence had hit.

  “Can we get back to what happened on Hvalba? I’d like to know before we actually reach the spot. I’d really like to know about the third tunnel that I have no knowledge of too!” Heri pushed his uncle and gestured for Sam to shut up.

  “The Scotsman would guess right about the third tunnel, a shaft that ran deep under the mountain. Jon and I, we found it by accident when we needed a rock to hold down our tent that night. We
moved the rock and pissed our pants at the glowing ground underneath it,” he reminisced humorously, but tears formed in his eyes. “I never imagined that it was the last night I would spend with my brother.”

  17

  Johild’s thoughts were racing as she listened to the men talking in the car. Once she’d heard the shocking news that her father had, in fact, been born in 1930, her next question was one for the grand prize. But for now, she waited to hear how her uncle had really died. It might explain her father’s hatred of outsiders.

  “Jon found the circles first. To this day I’ll never understand why nobody ever realized that this mountain was one of the main vantage points from where the Brits dispatched their navy vessels. They used the radio towers similar to the Loran-C’s elsewhere in the island.” Gunnar frowned.

  “So, nobody noticed the circles until 1969?” Heri asked him.

  “No. At the time, the land belonged to a British colonel who’d married one of the Egholm girls,” he answered, referring to a local girl who’d been in school with them, Elsa Egholm. “The colonel had settled here in Hvalba with his Faroese wife. He tried to make it as a blacksmith or something, as far as I can recall. But then…then they came.”

  Gunnar removed his beanie to wipe the ensuing tears that refused to be denied. For the first time since her previous outburst, Johild felt sorry for her dad. He caught his breath as the vivid memories badgered him. “You know,” he sniffed, “the biggest curse of not aging properly is the rampant regrets of bygone times pelting your heart. Make no mistake, I do understand how terrible illnesses like Alzheimer’s and dementia must be. But to be young for unnaturally long only means that you have a stronger memory to remind you of a longer timeframe of sorrow. More years of misery…to add to a mind that never forgets.”

  “Fuckin’ hell,” Sam said. “That makes so much sense. Really, it makes me think twice about my desire to be young.”

  “See? What did I tell you?” Heri gloated.

  “Aye, you made your point. Gunnar just proved it irrefutable,” Sam replied back.

  “Uncle, were they the people who killed Uncle Jon?” Heri asked Gunnar.

  The old man nodded. “When the Scotsman told of them, when you mentioned those accursed words at the party – The Order of the Black Sun – I felt sick. I swore I’d never speak of them again and that if anyone else ever did, I would cut out their tongue.”

  Sam swallowed hard. “Um, so, tell us what they came here for, Gunnar.”

  “What do you think they came for, Sam? They were looking for the Fountain of Youth, for immortality. That fucking swine Himmler – it was another one of those twisted projects that he subjected civilians to. You see, when the Brits were stationed on the Faroe Islands during Operation Valentine, some of the soldiers married into the cultures here, just like this colonel who owned the patch of land later. Some of them wrote home about how beautiful it was here and how some parts of the islands have water that preserved the youth of those who drank it,” he recounted.

  “So this is how you managed to stay young?” Johild finally spoke.

  Her father shook his head and corrected her, “Not staying young. We didn’t defeat age, my sweetheart. We simply impeded it. How else would I pass for sixty-three when I bathed in the spring at forty years of age? I’ve aged, but at a delayed rate.”

  “God, this stuff is riveting!” Sam raved softly. “Absolutely fascinating!”

  “And it will stay riveting in secret, right Sam?” Heri put him on the spot.

  “Aye,” Sam sighed.

  “You would make journalistic history if you reported on something equivalent to the existence of God, wouldn’t you?” Johild jousted again.

  “I would. In fact, it would be the biggest revelation in history. But I’m not stupid enough to share such a thing. Although my closest friends, much like me, would be overcome with awe at knowing that there was a way to deter aging, we are people who know that the human race should not be allowed to harness such a power. Ever. You can rest assured, pretty lassie, that I will never let the sick world out there abuse and exploit something so powerful.” Sam hoped that with this speech all of the distrusting ideas in their heads would be put to death once and for all.

  “Pretty lassie,” Johild whispered condescendingly and rolled her eyes. Sam only smiled.

  “As you were, Uncle Gunnar,” Heri urged. The vehicle was roaring up the slight slant of the road through the deserted waist of Suðuroy, making good time toward Grímsfjall’s hair-raising cliffs.

  “Yes, so, the outside world unfortunately learned about the water the British soldiers found to be literally the water of life. Their longevity increased as their health held up. They knew it was no coincidence. As expected of normal, logical people, most Europeans who heard about the miraculous water treated it as a metaphor, you know? They thought it was just a way to say the cleaner air and fresh water was better than the sewers in Europe, right?”

  “Yep, I’d have to agree. Something that perfect has to be impossible to most people,” Heri remarked as his pristine gray eyes followed the lines of the main road that ran through the island.

  “But of course, with the million-and-one level of insanity Himmler and his SS imps possessed, they didn’t flinch at the idea at all. Instead, they sent their supernaturally minded ghost hunters to come here and investigate the claims. They sent a team of scientists from the Order of the Black Sun to harvest whatever was in the water the Brits had drilled for up on that mountain back in 1942.” Gunnar’s eyes held an empty stare while he relived that day. “And they came with a fishing trawler they’d hired, posing as journalists. Who do you think snapped that black and white picture that was used for the article, Sam? It was just our bad luck, me and Jon’s, to be there when those parasites showed up.”

  The old man took a deep breath and carried on, hoping that the trauma would subside a little once he’d passed on the tale. “They asked us about all the British stations, pillboxes, even the monuments like Minnisvarðin, for God’s sake! Why would they think that magic water would flow out of a stone-carved, commemorative monument?”

  “Need I remind you of the ludicrous madness they indulged in, Gunnar?” Sam asked.

  Gunnar scoffed and looked amused. “You’re right, Scotsman. There was nothing they would not investigate, fucking Kraut demons. I remember Jon being completely engrossed with a woman who was with them, but her husband was with her and they couldn’t entertain their attraction.”

  “Ooh, and was she worth the trouble?” Heri asked, lifting his chin to better see his uncle in the mirror.

  “She would’ve been if she were alone. Beautiful, but sad. You could see by the way her husband treated her that she was probably his victim more than his lover. Poor woman. A Polish national, had a slight limp, but stunning to the eye she was. Her husband, Raymond, turned out to be one of the late Himmler’s golden boys, I found out later. You see, my brother and I didn’t know at the time that these people had actually been active during the Second World War! They looked our age, but they were a generation above us. Some even older!”

  “Wait a minute,” Sam stopped him. “Are you telling me that they’d already used this water back in the War?”

  Gunnar nodded. “They knew about this life force long before we ever did. I always figured that this was why they didn’t think it crazy to look for something like that here too. The Polish woman told Jon that they were on holiday from England, where they lived. She said she’d heard of historical sites where the fountain of youth ran from the stones. Naturally my brother had never heard of anything like that, so we laughed it off.”

  “That sounds like a mistake,” Heri said.

  “It was. It was a fatal mistake. After we took them up there they kept us there to camp with them, offering to let us use their trawler when we got down to Hvalba. That’s when we knew we were in trouble. That was the night Jon and I moved the rock for our tent and saw the glowing ground, but we just replaced it because it fr
ightened us, you know?” Gunnar explained, sounding like a juvenile talking about a prom date. “When the brutes finally went to sleep the pretty woman snuck out to warn us that her organization would never leave us alive, whether they found the fountain or not. You see, their henchmen had unsuccessfully dug all day to find the spring, but the stones of the ruins were bone dry. No spring of life poured from a wet rock or whatever they’d imagined.”

  “So the spring they were looking for was, in fact, the glowing ground you and your brother found?” Sam asked. Gunnar affirmed with a single nod. “But the Nazi blokes couldn’t see it in the daylight, I suppose.”

  “Plus, it was hidden under a stone, so they wouldn’t have seen it anyway,” Johild chipped in. The others agreed with her. “Why didn’t you just flee, Papa?”

  Gunnar’s eyes were heavily laden with emotion. “We tried. Once it was dark we ran away from the camp. But Jon went back to try and save the woman he’d fallen for, to bring her with us.” His words broke as his voice failed him. “Hiding a good distance away while I waited for Jon and the girl, I knew something was wrong when she screamed in the quiet tent. I listened to how my brother screamed during the first few blows, cussing and crying out in pain.”

  The vehicle buzzed as the broken man recalled the moment of his brother’s death. There was not a word, nor a whimper, from any of the others listening to his dirge. Gunnar tried to be strong, but his nose was red as his eyes. Sobbing, he finished what he needed to tell them. He made up his mind to tell them everything, and from then on he would never speak a word about it again as long as he lived.

  “I ran toward the tent, but it was far and I…I took t-too long to save him. The woman crawled from the tent, her face a bloody mess and through broken teeth sh-she mouthed at me the words… ‘he is dead,’” Gunnar forced. His body shook under the strain of his sorrow, but he spoke slowly in order to breathe in between words. “She waved wildly to tell me to run for my life. Th-they…they had beaten my brother to death with a stone…a s-stone…from that very site, and then those godless motherfuckers threw his body over the cliffs where fishermen found his shattered corpse four days later, floating in a churning rock pool at the base of the cliff.”