by B. C. James
At that point Thor stopped talking and just slouched in front of the bottle of Vodka. If she were not in Hel or Valhalla, the only other options for her were Múspellsheimr, Niflheim, or that she experienced final death. Surt was just the sort of unfeeling savage who would get a kick out of a putting a goddess down forever. Any possibility he could think of for her final destination put Sif well out of his reach, which would not have been so were it not for his own father, Odin, and his unhealthy fixation on Ragnarok.
It was Odin who had sent Sif as an emissary to Surt in an attempt to secure the demon’s favor. He believed this would change the balance of power if and when Ragnarok happened. Surt apparently wasn’t open to an alliance and Sif never returned. No God or Goddess had ever seen her again, alive or dead.
Thor was less than an open book at this point; Baldr could see the topic of his wife disturbed him.
“I don’t know what to say Thor. If there is anything you think I might be able to do…”
“I don’t want to talk about it. Now, let’s get back to watching the little drama you have going in the bottle. Do me a favor and fast-forward through all the parts where you are just walking aimlessly. If I want to be bored, I’ll go home and watch reruns of Caprica.”
They went back to gazing into the vodka bottle. The long walk had taken him beyond the parade of lost souls and to what looked to be an extremely bleak seashore. To Thor’s eyes, the beach looked sort of like the photos of Mars sent back to Earth by the NASA probe, Spirit. The soil was of salmon color, and the sharp, jagged rocks were a deep burnt umber. In contrast to this was the vegetation that clung to the rocks. The plants were a brilliant green. In all his travels through Hel, this was the first time that Baldr had encountered any sort of vegetation or life beyond the souls who now called the realm home.
Baldr was staring across the sea. The water was an ugly, brackish green; it looked oily. If he was to continue toward Hel’s sun, he was going to have to cross this travesty of a sea.
Baldr had started looking around for anything that could be used as a boat. Tucked behind some large boulders, he came across an extremely curious site. It was a body. Seeing dead people in Hel was not an unusual occurrence, but most of the time the dead were walking around and complaining. In this case, it was a proper dead body. Had Baldr actually had old coins in his pocket, he would have put them on the eye sockets of the mummified face. What was more curious was the thing resting next to the corpse.
It was an ornate machine that resembled a weird sort of sleigh. It had no runners or wheels, but there was a large disk at the back of it and a bit of a saddle where the dead man had obviously sat. Strange glowing crystals were scattered around it as well, adding to its mystery. Baldr could feel power emanating from the crystals but he was clueless about the nature or capabilities of the energy that seemed inherent to them. The device as a whole was obviously built for a purpose. Who would randomly throw something like this together and then add a seat so that they could ride it? For what purpose, the God of Light could only guess.
Baldr noticed Thor staring at this particular scene in abject bewilderment.
“Um…yeah, Thor, about that bit. It took me a while to understand what the hell that was all about. None of it made sense until I got back to Earth and caught up on a few centuries of reading. All I will say is that some of H.G. Wells’ stories should be moved out of the fiction section and on to the non-fiction shelf, in this case, probably into biographies.”
Baldr chuckled, and they went back to watching the little holographic drama. They had become as engrossed in this as some people are with their daily soap operas.
They watched as Baldr checked out the machine. His examination didn’t take much time. He quickly decided that the machine was well beyond his intellect or experience. While he inspected the corpse, he also noticed that the entrails were gone. The mummified state of the body betrayed the fact that it had been here for a very long time. He picked at the open cavity that used to be the abdomen. He could see the unmistakable signs of gnawing on the skin that was left around the gaping wound. There was no other evidence of injury, except a deep stab wound in the right shoulder, like he had been pinned to the ground with a tent spike. Stretch marks around the shoulder wound suggested that the man struggled mightily against whatever held him down. All the signs worked together to paint a gruesome picture of a man spiked into the dirt and sand while an unknown something disemboweled him. The spilling of intestines did not bring instant death. The unnamed victim would have lived long enough to watch and feel another creature feasting upon his viscera.
Baldr was both fascinated and horrified at the implications of what he was seeing. So lost was he in the body that he barely noticed as something tickled his cheek. It was as if someone was brushing a feather across the side of his face.
Baldr spun away from the tickling feather and saw that he was being felt up by the antennae of a crab. In this case, the crab was the size of a small convenience store. Usually something as big as a neighborhood 7-11 is not the sort of creature that should be able to sneak up on, well…anything. The fact was that this animal so perfectly blended with the rocks raised the disturbing possibility that it may have been there the whole time. The only thing that made it stand out from the boulders around it was the fact that it had a glossy sheen to it.
The eyestalks focused on Baldr, its huge claw snapping in anticipation. It scuttled toward Baldr on six legs. Its massive claw was complemented by a stabbing weapon on the other side. It was an odd combination of appendages: a pincher and something that looked like a twenty-foot long hat pin. It gave the appearance that the arthropod was threatening Baldr from behind a sword and shield. The god didn’t have time to be awed by the monster; he could see the greedy mouth parts moving in expectation of their Asgardian meal.
The movement of the creature made a liar out of Baldr’s assumptions about the animal’s quickness. He assumed that this would be like hand-to-hand combat with a walrus, but the beast struck out with amazing speed and stabbed at him with its lance. Baldr managed to sidestep the attack but quickly found that the crab’s speed was not the only thing he was wrong about. The lance had grazed his flank and dark red blood started to flow from a deep gash in his side. He just assumed that being in the afterlife meant that he was safe from further harm. This was not so. A big, angry, red existential paradigm shift was driving this point home as it repeatedly tried to gut him.
Baldr looked away from the bottle and turned to his brother, “Even after finding a corpse, it had never really sunk in that I could be in any real danger. I was already in Hel, what else could happen to me?” Baldr asked. “The death of the soul itself, and the final end of your existence was the type of fate for those in Múspellsheimr or the poor souls who were eaten by Nidhogg, the dragon. This could not be a fate for one of the gods, could it? I was not keen on the idea of finding out.”
The brothers watched as Baldr spent the next several moments dodging attacks, all the while trying to figure out how someone without weapons was going to get out of this. The odds did not appear in his favor. This monstrous crustacean would have sent a T-Rex fleeing in terror with its tail between its legs and little, stubby arms waving in panic.
The beast nearly skewered the god and then pressed its attack by unexpectedly striking out with its pincher. Baldr ducked the initial swipe but wasn’t prepared for a backswing by the huge claw. The crab had knocked him about twenty yards away and into some boulders. The God of Light was bloody, bruised, and stunned. Through his blurred vision he could see the animal scuttling sideways toward him. He was unarmed against a monster with a thick exoskeleton, a one-track mind, and a curiosity about the taste of godly flesh.
Baldr narrated this part of the action. “I did the only thing I could think of, I ran. There was no rhyme, reason, or destination in mind. I just ran. I thought of a number of potential plans, all of them brilliant of course, but I simply didn’t have the time or materials to make any of them
work.”
He ran in circles, the crab hot on his heels, until he was back to where the ordeal started, with the poor fellow whom Baldr was now certain met his end at the mandibles of this animal.
As Baldr got to the scene of that traveler’s last stand with his strange machine, he twisted his ankle on one of the discarded crystals. Down he went. The crab moved in on him with its sideways gate. As it got above Baldr, ready to deliver the final blow, the God grabbed the only weapon at hand, a fistful of the strange crystals. Baldr felt a surge of their power as his hand closed around them. At this point he did the only thing that seemed reasonable, he threw them into the crab’s mouth. As the monster’s mandibles closed on the strange gemstones, there was a release of peculiar energy, and the massive crab disappeared into thin air.
Chapter 7
Baldr sat in the red sand for a long time, trying to process what just happened and how he had won almost completely by accident. After a bit of a rest, he rummaged through the dead traveler’s meager possessions, trying to find anything useful. After a frustrating search, it was clear that there wasn’t a thing that once belonged to this person that would help Baldr get across that sea.
Thor watched as the tiny version of Baldr raised its eyebrows and smiled.
“What you’re seeing is me have a particularly brilliant idea,” Baldr said with not a little pride in his voice.
“Hmmmm,” mused Thor, “your epiphany face looks a whole lot like an ‘o’ face. You should do something about that before people start slapping you with sexual harassment suits every time you have an idea.”
“What’s an ‘o’ face?”
“I’m not explaining that without an anatomically correct doll, a copy of the Office Space DVD, and a lawyer present. So, you had a brilliant idea?” Thor asked.
He wanted to get things back on track. He mentally noted that there were a lot of cultural references that his long, lost brother was simply not going to understand.
“Yup, it was a stroke of pure, inspired genius! When a crab grows, the shell doesn’t grow with it. It needs to shed that old, confining shell if it’s going to get any bigger. A crab that size has done a lot of growing so there must be pieces of the molted shell lying around. I also noticed that the crab was very shiny. That meant that it had only recently gone through the molting process. So there had to be something I could use somewhere near. Pure genius, wasn’t it?” Baldr was never one to deprive himself of credit.
Thor couldn’t argue. He probably wouldn’t have thought of it. He may have stumbled across the answer while searching the area and finding large, hollow bits of crab shell. But he wouldn’t have looked at a shiny, man-eating crab and reasoned that something about it was his ticket out.
They watched the bottle as Baldr scrambled to the top of a pile of boulders. He surveyed the area around him until he caught a glimpse of what he was looking for. A couple hundred yards away from him, by another outcropping of rocks, was what looked like a pale version of the crab he had fought. Baldr approached with caution, wary of the possibility of an attack from another meat-eating crustacean.
He got to his goal unscathed to find that it was exactly what he thought it was, the molted shell of his adversary. The pieces were thick and strong despite being slightly transparent. It took some time, godly strength, an impressive amount of profanity, and a number of improvised rock tools to break off a piece big enough to use as a raft.
Thor watched as Baldr stood in his makeshift boat and surveyed the strange sea. He shoved off into the water in his improvised vessel. Crab shell fragments lashed to the traveler’s femur served as a makeshift oar. There was an irreverence to the act of using bits of the crab’s unfortunate victim in such a manner. It was a small desecration that put a wry smile on Baldr’s face as he paddled toward the far end of the sea and the ball of light in the sky.
“It wasn’t long after shoving off before this sea made my skin start to crawl,” Baldr said. Thor looked closer into the bottle. He gazed down into the dark liquid and saw thousands of macabre, tortured souls, each with a horrified expression on their face. They passed through the water below Baldr’s feet. Some swam together like schools of ghoulish fish, shimmering in the blackness. More than once one of these creatures would turn its dead eyes towards his brother. At one point a particularly ghastly body floated by and locked eyes with Baldr. Breaking away from the souls it was swimming with, it reached a sickly pale, green arm from the water and latched on to the fragment of shell that separated Baldr from this sea of lost souls. The tortured thing may have been trying to pull itself onto the boat in a vain attempt to escape whatever torment it was experiencing below the still surface. A more disturbing possibility was that it was trying to drag Baldr down into the depths with it. Regardless of the intent, the effort nearly capsized the boat. Baldr righted his crude vessel and smacked at the creature’s fingers with his oar. The hand released its grip on the boat and sank back below the dark water.
For a moment, all was quiet. Then hundreds of dead hands broke the surface of the water and were grabbing at the edge of the boat. Baldr kept smacking their hands away, but it couldn’t go on forever. Every moment more undead hands were rising from the sea and he could see thousands upon thousands of souls swimming off in the distance, porpoising to get a look at him. It was almost as if, even though Baldr was technically dead, he radiated a sort of energy that they found irresistible. Could they sense his divinity? Was their death so different than his that, to them, he seemed to radiate life? It was impossible to say what was drawing them to Baldr. All he knew was that nothing good waited for him in those shadowy depths.
Thor watched the scene continue for a while, until the moment that pure white light began to radiate from Baldr. The bright halo extended for several yards past the edges of his boat. Radiating from the God of Light, this new, intense luminosity immediately repulsed these wretches like morning sunlight warding off vampires.
Thor raised an eyebrow and looked at Baldr. This conveyed an unspoken question to his half-brother.
“They live in darkness,” Baldr said, “so I figured that light may be uncomfortable to them. Hey, I took a shot and it worked out. While I was happy that I found a way to deal with these things, I didn’t know if I had enough stamina to keep glowing until I reached my destination. But as I floated along, it began to dawn on me how odd a concern this was. During my entire time in the underworld, stamina was never an issue, but motivation was. A heavy sense of depression made me want to lie down and never get up, but I never actually felt tired. The closer I got to the glowing ball in Hel’s sky, the more things seem to be reversed. I felt more driven than I had been in centuries, but my body was beginning to suffer the sort of weariness that happens to the living when they are physically tested to their limits.”
Baldr rowed and glowed for what seemed like, and what could actually have been, weeks or months until he reached the far shore of the sea. In truth, it wasn’t so much a shore as it was an abrupt end to the water. Instead of a sandy beach, there was simply a vertical wall of rock that seemed to stretch upward for eternity.
“I once again was victimized by a crushing sort of despair.” The hopelessness that Baldr felt in that moment leaked into his voice as he narrated, “This time, it had nothing to do with being in Hel and everything to do with the fact that I knew the next leg of this journey was straight up the face of this red stone behemoth. The task was so daunting that for a moment I felt nostalgic for the crab.”
The God of Light found dubious hand and footholds in the ancient stone and slowly made his way up the sheer rock face. As he got about a dozen feet above the water, and the light from his body shined less on his improvised raft, he looked down at the splashing below him. He turned his head and watched as dozens of sickly, pale green arms rose up from the black water and violently pulled his crab shell boat below. After those few, brutal moments, the sea beneath him became, once again, a motionless pane of black glass. After a few heartbeats of sil
ence, a hideous high-pitched wail broke through the surface of the water. The sounds made the vodka bottle shake, freezing the blood in Thor’s veins. It sounded like storm winds blowing through the trees combined with the angry screams of a desperate child. The water’s inhabitants were extremely unhappy that Baldr was not on the boat when they pulled it under, that much was clear. Thor observed Baldr’s knuckles going white from the death grip he had on the rock’s handholds. With the raft now gone, there was truly no going back.
The slow climb took him miles above the water.
“Fatigue and fear were constant, annoying companions,” Baldr said, “while aching muscles and the desire to sleep were both heavy sensations, ones I hadn’t felt since the days when I was among the living. Giving in to either at the wrong time meant a long free-fall into hostile waters.”
The images in the bottle showed Thor scenes of his brother occasionally finding a ledge that allowed him to rest and nap.
“Sleeping felt extremely good and I began to realize how many simple pleasures I took for granted when I was alive,” Baldr stated, adding context to the images.
He found one of the rare outcrops of rock that was big enough to rest on and pulled himself on to it. He flopped down on the rock and allowed himself the luxury of a breather. He could feel that he was close. On one side was the cliff face. On the other side was a huge amber globe that looked like shimmering liquid.
“It radiated light, warmth, and, strangely enough, life,” Baldr recounted. “I was so focused on my climb that I didn’t even notice where I was. I had climbed several miles since the last piece of rock that I used as a bed. Even at that point I knew I was close. The “sun” dominated everything around me. When I looked backwards, away from the rock, all I saw was the massive amber orb hanging in the sky behind me, blocking out everything else. But when I pulled myself up on to that last rock ledge, I had no idea that I had virtually arrived at my destination, but there it was.”
