Thor's Haven

by Richard S Young

  Markus searched the internet to remind himself of just who this Eostre was in the pantheon of pagan culture and read up on the fact that she was regarded as a Proto-Indo-European goddess of the dawn whose mythic representation was celebrated as the ‘reluctant’ bringer of the light after the long darkness of winter. Within this primitive structure of Indo-European paganism, she was venerated as the ‘goddess of the dawn’ and a ‘daughter of heaven’ who brought the world upspringing light, a spectacle of joy and blessing whose meaning had been easily assimilated and adapted to reflect the resurrection-day reverence of the Christian God. The reading of that final description of this goddess convinced Markus that the sudden appearance of this white stone was a heresy that had to be stopped from gathering any form of attention. He sent a simple text message to Henrique.

  ‘Recover this white stone by any means, return it to me but destroy all and any proof of its very existence.’

  Markus’s concern was because at the end of time, Jesus Christ gave the worthy a white stone with their name on it. These stones were their passports to Heaven, so what could be the connection with a pagan rune?

  17.03pm – 10th April, present day.

  Rama Shresth’s house, Kongamdara Road, Pathanpora, Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, India

  Rama, Rifat and Daniel had returned to sitting at the dining table as they continued trying to piece together everything that Jnyandeep Medansh had told them earlier in the day. Daniel took the laptop out of its sleep mode and immediately noticed on the lit screen that the internet searches for information about Pergamon, Montségur, Otto Rahn and the phrase ‘under the tree’ had completed. Daniel proceeded to click on a Wikipedia page about Otto Rahn and began to read the article. As he did so, he took notes and then exclaimed over to his two companions “Take a look at this!”

  Rama and Rifat crowded around Daniel and the laptop at the table as Daniel started to point out pieces from the article.

  “It says here that this man Otto Rahn was some type of academic historian who was working for the German SS before World War 2. He seems to have been searching for the location of the Holy Grail and was looking for clues to its whereabouts at some medieval fortress in France called Montségur.” Daniel clicked on a link to Montségur and the three men read the article on display.

  Rifat stubbed his finger into the screen “Read that.” The lines on the screen that he was pointing at read:

  ‘Some documents have been found in Montségur that are, to say the least, curious and which people have linked with Catharism and the era of their demise. For example, a text was discovered in a small cave near the castle. This remarkable document, however, is the so-called “wooden book”, in truth not made out of wood, nor a book but is a set of six – and in origin 18 – thin palm leaves, upon which is depicted a non-European or Arabic type of writing, as well as some depictions of animals and geometric shapes. The pages are part of a system of astrology known as Nadi astrology (or naadi jothidam); a form of astrology mostly practiced in India, and the only enigma is therefore how these pages ended up in Montségur, and why.

  Nadi astrology is based on the belief that the past, present and future lives of all humans were written down by the Seven Sages of the Hindu tradition in ancient times, and recorded on these small palm leaves, called Nadis. These Nadis link a series of incarnations together, from one’s ‘Poorva Janma’ (previous birth), and they promise to help you in the present life, but people will be involuntarily attracted to the leaves of their destiny only. The very word Nadi in Tamil means “(destined) to come on own accord”.’

  Rifat then pointed at some images of the text of the wooden book. “There’s your Norse rune ‘Perth’ that’s on the stone. What did we find out earlier about its meaning? Something about destiny?”

  Daniel scrolled the flashing cursor on the screen over to another highlighted link and clicked on ‘Pergamon’ which then brought up considerable information about a historical ruined city in Turkey close to modern day Bergama. The Library of Pergamon was considered to be the second largest library in the ancient world and was said to contain over 200,000 documents and scrolls. Regarded as an important city in the New Testament, it was explicitly mentioned by St. John as being one of the Seven Churches of Revelation as detailed in the Book of Revelation (2:12-17) and where Jesus Christ addresses the congregation of Pergamon:

  “He that hath an ear, let him hear what the Spirit saith; To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.”

  Daniel stopped reading the screen and turned around to face Rifat and Rama. He initially thought about what he was going to say to them and then just blurted it out.

  “According to Ynyandeep and then from what we’ve been able to find out on the internet so far, this stone has something to do with links to Jesus Christ and the Book of Revelations in the Holy Bible. I really don’t know what to believe anymore and we’re probably reading far more into this than it deserves, but basically, a white stone is supposed to be given out by Jesus Christ at the end of time with the names of the deserved recipient written upon it. It seems to be a symbol of special blessing and denoting that privilege that will be given to believers. I’ve no idea what the Norse symbol has to do with it but I fear that we now may be spending far too much time looking for answers for something that has nothing to with us. We have spent all our adult lives dealing with bare facts in front of us and then processing them professionally when confronting them. This stone, and what Jnyandeep has told us, seems to be more to do about having some sort of faith and believing in the various religious practices that goes along with it. I’m not knocking these practices and I am not deriding what others may have as privately-held beliefs of a particular religion, but I am afraid I seem to have got you involved in looking for something that I wasn’t really looking for in the first place. Sorry.”

  Rama just placed a hand on his shoulder and told him not to worry about it and that Daniel was to look on the positives of the last few days. He had travelled to India, met new people, experienced different outlooks and got an education about religions and spirituality and now he had a permanent memento to remember his trip to Pakistan and India, the white stone.

  Rifat placed a hand on Daniel’s other shoulder and said “It was your destiny!”

  The three men all laughed at Rifat’s utterance. Daniel powered down the laptop and snapped the screen shut.

  02.31am – 11th April, present day.

  The Excelsior Hotel, Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)

  Daniel waved goodbye to Rifat and entered into the foyer of his hotel. He collected his room key from reception and waited patiently for the elevator to arrive. As he got in and pressed the button for his floor, he reflected upon the fact that it had been a long couple of days for him and Daniel was really looking forward to just lying in his bed and letting the world go by.

  As the elevator doors opened at his floor, the sweet-sickly scent of the bael trees outside the hotel wafted down the corridor towards him. A warmish breeze blew the aroma along the corridor and Daniel noticed that the windows at the far end were swaying gently open. He walked towards them with the intention of latching them over, and as he passed his room, he spotted the flicker of torchlight beams shining under the door. His senses went on full alert and he crouched down just past the door frame and listened intently to the quiet movements coming from within the room. The torchlight flickers were still flashing and Daniel could hear drawers being opened and closed, the rustle of paperwork being sifted and the drag of the zippers on his bags being drawn. The scratch marks around the lock of the door confirmed that the room had been broken into and he peered through the keyhole to see if he could determine how many people were in the room. The keyhole viewpoint gave him no ind
ication, but as he went to stand up, he noticed the footprints on the carpet closest to the wall skirting. The carpeting at the edges of corridors and rooms very rarely sees foot traffic and this hotel corridor was no exception. Whoever had broken into his room had stood close to the walls of the hallway as they made their entrance within. The fact that they had stood still for a couple of minutes had been sufficient time for the soles of their footwear to leave indentations on the carpet closest to the skirting board.

  Daniel gently brushed his palm over the impressions and determined that there were two people inside his room. Their unique treads, temporarily imprinted on the carpet, indicated that these two men were wearing military type footwear, and he remembered Rifat’s words from the day before at the Rozabal Tomb – “You don’t see many people in the Kashmir wearing Scorpion or Viper tactical boots”. Whoever was currently inside his room just now was probably not going to play nicely once they were disturbed, and reporting the matter to reception to call for some sort of police assistance was simply going to be a waste of time and then followed by an awful lot of unnecessary discussion and paperwork.

  Daniel made the snap decision that he would just have to find out for himself who these people were and what they were looking for inside his room.

  He looked around the corridor for a fixture or a fitting that he could use to improvise as a makeshift weapon but nothing seemed suitable. He tiptoed down the corridor and shut fast the windows and closed over the curtains at the far end, picked up a chair and used it as a foot-stool as he unscrewed the light bulbs from the wall fittings along the length of the corridor. The only light bulb left on was the one nearest his door. Daniel laid all the light bulbs down on the carpet in front of the door and gently tried the door handle of the room. It was unlocked. He unscrewed the remaining light bulb from its socket and the corridor fell into complete darkness. Daniel reckoned that his sole advantage upon tackling the men inside the room would be his entering from darkness and surprising them unexpectedly.

  He slowly opened the door and gathered up the light bulbs in either hand. As Daniel entered the room, he threw the light bulbs in his left hand against a far wall. Pop. Pop. Pop. He spotted movement to his right and he smashed the light bulbs in his right hand into the face of one of the intruders. The intruder fell to the ground and screamed in pain as Daniel then turned his attention to the other intruder whose whereabouts were determined by the torch that he held in his left hand. A metallic glint cut through the air and Daniel felt a stinging pain in his chest. He realised that he had just been slashed with the sharp point of a knife and that the intruder was wildly swinging the blade about in front of him in the darkness. He threw himself down on the floor and with both legs, kicked the intruder hard in the knees. The intruder fell to the ground, grunted, groaned and lay motionless and Daniel turned his attention to the other intruder in the room. Having switched on the lights, he found him lying face down over by the bed. The smeared blood on the carpet had been the giveaway and Daniel turned him over. The man’s face was just a mess of blood and broken glass and Daniel appreciated that when he had smashed the light bulbs into this man’s face, it had taken him by surprise. The man had screamed and then fallen to the ground, and as an automatic reaction to being attacked, he had put his hands up to his face to assess what the damage was upon his person. In the darkness of the room, the man had pushed some broken shards of glass and then the filament of a light bulb even deeper through his left eye socket and into his brain. He had died a very slow and painful death.

  Daniel crossed over the room to the other man who was lying face down with both hands underneath him clutching at his chest. The man’s breath was ragged and short and his body twitched with every gasp. Daniel turned him over and discovered that the man had impaled himself with his own knife, right up to the hilt of the blade. When Daniel had kicked his legs away at the knees, the momentum of the action had caused the man to pitch forward and he had landed, chest first, upon his own knife. The immediate and frantic movements of this unfortunate man were his futile attempts to remove the blade from his own chest. His rasping breath indicated that he was aspirating upon his own blood and death was directly imminent. There was nothing Daniel could do to help the man and as blood began to froth and bubble in the man’s mouth, Daniel heard his last utterance, “Belibasta” as he finally choked upon his own bodily fluid.

  Daniel quickly searched the two men’s bodies for identification and information but to no avail but the only thing of interest was a tattoo of a strange cross on the right inside forearm of the man that had stabbed himself to death. The cross had numbers written around it ’1244.03.16 – 63’ and nothing else. Daniel took out his mobile phone and photographed the tattoo and then the faces of his now-dead assailants. He would use the images to try and identify who they were and why they had been searching his room but time was of the essence as Police sirens sounded in the distance and Daniel presumed they were coming to the hotel. As he pocketed his phone, it rang. He answered the call and before he could say anything, he could hear the voice of Rifat Khan.

  “Get your gear together and wait for me in the car park outside the hotel right this minute. You’ve got problems mate. We’ve got problems. You need to get out of Pakistan as fast as you can. Jnyandeep Medhansh and his grand-daughter have been found murdered in Srinagar and you are the number one suspect for their deaths. There is an international incident breaking and a red notice has been issued for your arrest - you have to go now, otherwise you will never see daylight again.”

  03.01am – 11th April, present day.

  The Excelsior Hotel, Mirpur - Pakistani administered Kashmir (Azad Kashmir)

  After taping the skin-deep slash mark across his chest with elastoplast from the first aid kit in the room, Daniel had quickly gathered all of his essentials together and hurriedly packed them into a back-pack. Passport, identification papers, currency, wallet, laptop, charger cables, a change of clothes, notes and the white stone. As he zipped the back-pack closed and took a final look around the room, he studied the two dead bodies and began to wonder what the hell was going on. Rifat had called him to give him a heads-up that he needed to get out of Pakistan and that the police authorities in India were looking for him in connection with the apparent murder of Jnyandeep Medhansh and his grand-daughter.

  He had to take Rifat at his word and follow his advice as Daniel fully understood that he had next to no chance of getting remotely anywhere near the Consulate-General of Denmark’s office in Karachi, let alone the Danish Embassy in Islamabad without his new friend’s help and assistance. He couldn’t just simply jump on the first plane flight out of Pakistan as he had become the main suspect in a double murder investigation. The body count of that murder investigation would increase when the two fresh corpses currently lying beside him were eventually found by the Pakistani police forces. Their discovery would then lead to the police authorities of two sovereign nation states demanding his immediate apprehension, and the prospect of what that would then entail was not the most appealing of thoughts.

  If Daniel was to try and get out of Pakistan by sea, the nearest port was by the Indian Ocean and that was a journey of nearly 900 miles overland just to get to the city of Karachi. If he ever got to Karachi, he could try and seek shelter or sanctuary within the Consulate-General of Denmark’s office that was located at 14 Clifton Street. From there, he would have to make an unassisted escape out of Pakistan into international waters but Daniel knew that it would be impossible for him to get there un-noticed. Another option was to try and get to the Danish Embassy in Islamabad, 160 miles away to the north and a trip of about 6 hour’s worth of continuous driving. If he left now, he would have the cover of darkness for about 4 hours and the knowledge that the Pakistani police authorities would get initially bogged down with investigating the discovery of the two dead bodies currently lying on the floor of his hotel room. But even if he did manage to get to the relative safety of
the Danish Embassy, he still had the problem of getting out of the country, and that was something that was never going to happen.

  He would become trapped, like the Swedish national, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, had been - stuck forever inside the Equadorian Embassy in London as an asylum-seeker hiding under the umbrella of diplomatic immunity while the agents of various foreign countries waited patiently outside to extradite him back to their respective sovereign territories for prosecution. He took out his mobile phone and began a quick internet search of the nearest Danish embassies and consulates in the neighbouring countries that he could possibly use as an initial sanctuary to effect his next moves.

  Kabul in Afghanistan was 10 hours away and 430 miles travelling overland and Dhaka in Bangladesh was over 1500 miles away. The Indian options were also unfeasible – Mumbai was 1300 miles, Kolkata was 1400 miles, Chennai was 1800 miles and New Delhi was nearly 500 miles. He would never get near them if he was a wanted man. The other nearest consulate was in Kathmandhu in Nepal and that was over 1100 miles away overland. He switched off his connection to the internet, pulled the back-pack over his shoulders and closed his hotel room door behind him. Rifat must have a plan, he mused, as he walked down the darkened corridor towards the window curtains he had shut over earlier.

  He gently pulled the curtain open and peered carefully out of the window to the ill-lit and darkened car park below. Daniel knew from experience that the two dead men would likely have had an accomplice nearby and probably waiting inside a motor vehicle ready to make a fast escape. He scanned the car park for a waiting vehicle but there were no engines running. As he was drawing the curtain back over shut, a cloud of smoke caught his eye away to his far right. The smoke swirled as a light breeze dispersed the plume in the warm night air. A red dot grew brighter from inside the driving compartment of a parked van and then another cloud of smoke billowed upwards. Daniel concentrated on watching this red dot and comprehended that there was an occupant sitting in the driving seat of the van smoking a cigarette. As his vision accustomised to the murkiness of the environs below, he could see that when the driver took a long drag of his cigarette and drew the smoke down into his lungs, the ember on the tip of the cigarette glowed red in the darkness. The driver would then exhale the smoke out of an open window in a sinuous cloud above the van. Daniel had a sudden memory flash back to his military service days and the many superstitions about smoking in the dark and an origin theory dating back to the First World War. If three soldiers decided to smoke after dark in their trenches and lit their cigarettes from the same match, there was a superstition that at least one of them would end up dead. The initial illumination of the strike of a match would alert an enemy sniper to the presence of these soldiers close by. As the match burned to light the second cigarette, the sniper would have the time to aim his rifle towards the flame. Finally, as the third cigarette was lit up, the sniper now had a viable target and would shoot the third smoker. Daniel smiled to himself as he watched the ember of a cigarette burn bright for a third time in the dark. The superstition of the third light was indeed true. He pushed open the fire escape door to his right and ran down the four flights of stairs to the ground level. Cautiously, he pushed the exit door open and slowly crept along the outside wall of the hotel while watching the van, the glowing ember and subsequent plume of smoke above it.