Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  “I am sure some of you recognize this place.” There was a murmur through the hall. Things were about to get interesting. “And even if you don’t, you’ll know the name. This is the Skalunda Barrow, believed to be the final resting place of our greatest hero, the old war wolf himself, Beowulf.” The screen shifted to show twin swords in place of the burial mound: Hrunting, given to Beowulf by Unferth for the fight with Grendel, and Nægling, the magical blade he claimed from Grendel’s cave, having defeated Grendel and Grendel’s mother. “He is a true symbol of our heritage. A warrior. A dragon slayer. He killed the enemies who threatened our land...just as the foreigners threaten it now.” Annja couldn’t quite believe what she’d just heard. Surely it had to be a language thing? A misinterpretation? But the level of sophistication in the rest of Thorssen’s language suggested not. “Now is the time for a new Beowulf to arise! Now is the time for someone to drive the dragons from our land!”

  Some of Thorssen’s acolytes seemed to be on the verge of losing themselves in rapture. They were rocking back and forth on their heels, murmuring, “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Only the front few rows seemed to be immune to the craziness. Karl Thorssen was none-to-subtly calling for the people to rise up against immigrants and drive them out of the country.

  “Surely this has to be against the law? This is nothing short of inciting racial hated,” Annja said, shaking her head. Her companion didn’t hear her. He was engrossed by the reaction of the crowd, and pointing his cameraman to where he should direct his focus.

  Thorssen had adopted the pose again, clearly enjoying the adoration.

  She noticed one of the securing men sprang into action, making his way down the side of the stage into the crowd. He’d obviously seen something he didn’t like. Maybe one of the great unwashed wasn’t towing the company line? She scanned the crowd looking for signs of dissent, but everyone seemed to be equally enthralled, waiting for the mothership to beam them up to a racially pure nirvana in the stars.

  He pushed his way through the faithful, moving his way toward the back doors.

  Curiosity might have killed the cat, but it still hadn’t managed to kill Annja Creed, though not for want of trying. She gave Micke a nod indicating where she was going, but his attention was already elsewhere. He was wrapped up in his own work, making sure the whole thing was captured on camera for his documentary. There was no denying that it would be good television.

  Without another word Annja worked her way through the crowd, until she reached the door, and followed the guard out.

  The tattooed man didn’t even notice that she was following him.

  Once the doors closed behind her Annja should have been isolated from the noise of the auditorium, but she wasn’t. It was replicated by a large flat-screen television and sophisticated sound system broadcasting what was going on inside the theater.

  Halfway down the red carpet, the bodyguard caught up with the man he’d spotted in the crowd. Annja was too far away to hear the exchange, but it was obvious from their body language that it was hostile in the extreme. His fingers dug into the guy’s arm as he twisted him around. He said something—the vehemence behind his words translated even if the words didn’t. The man didn’t back down. Far from it, he pushed himself up into the guard’s face and snarled back, feral, spitting full in the middle of his face and cursing him. Annja saw the scar on his cheek. The guard shoved him away and he went stumbling back two steps, reaching out for a handrail to catch his balance before he fell.

  The guard grabbed him again.

  “Everything all right here?” Annja asked, walking up behind them.

  “Keep out of this,” the bodyguard growled. Charming soul. “This has got nothing to do with you.”

  Annja wasn’t big on talking with bullyboys, but wasn’t about to leave the man to his not-so-tender mercies. “Look, this doesn’t have to be nasty.”

  The man took her intervention as his cue and pulled free of the guard’s grasp, running for the door. The guard didn’t stop him. He was looking at the screen over Annja’s shoulder as the backdrop behind Thorssen changed. The image of the two blades had been replaced by one of a painted Beowulf standing over what was obviously supposed to be Grendel’s mother, the hero holding his sword aloft in victory. It wasn’t subtle. But nothing about Karl Thorssen was.

  The camera shifted focus, settling on Thorssen. The politician raised his arm, echoing the image on the screen. It was a carefully choreographed move. He was fully in control, playing the crowd until a sudden explosion of noise erupted—through the doors, from the sound system, from the walls around her. The entire framework of the theater trembled, and then the stones themselves seemed to cry out as the building twisted and buckled.

  The cheers mutated into screams.

  Suddenly people charged through the doors, desperate to get out of the auditorium. Smoke and rubble filled the air. Nowhere was safe. Not in there. Not out here in the vestibule. She looked for the scar-faced man—the bomber? Was that what had happened here?—but he was gone, swept up with the tide of people and carried away with the stampede as they surged toward the street. Smoke. Sprinklers. Sirens. Chaos. Annja pressed herself against the wall to let the flood of people past; she couldn’t swim against it. Panic drove people from the theater, but not everyone was so lucky. She could see the screen behind the stage with the image of Beowulf battered and bloody in his chain-mail armor, sword aloft, but beneath it, where Grendel’s mother had been, there was only rubble and bodies.

  “Micke!” she cried. There was no way he could have heard her but that didn’t stop her calling out his name. She scanned the faces desperately, looking for her friend, not wanting to look toward the bodies for fear of seeing him there.

  And then she saw him giving instruction to his cameraman. He was pointing at the stage where Karl Thorssen lay. That was the money shot. In all this devastation, the man who would be one of those angry Norse gods of old lay battered and bleeding as two plainclothed SAPO operatives climbed onto the stage, trying to find a path through the rubble to get to the politician. It was an iconic moment. It would be shown on every television set in the world. It would be talked about for weeks. Thorssen rose from the ashes shakily, bruised and bloodied, like the heroic figure on the screen behind him. He breathed in deeply, savoring life amid all of this destruction, and turned to look directly at the camera.

  “I am Beowulf,” he declared.

  2

  It was a long night and a longer morning.

  She stayed with the rescuers, helping the weak and wounded. Annja pulled at the broken stones, heaving them aside. She heard cries all around her. She couldn’t stop. She couldn’t allow the horror of the moment to really take root in her mind. Right now people needed her.

  Chaos quickly gave way to at least the semblance of order as the paramedics and firemen worked, directing the rescue efforts. To her left three men labored hard, lifting a huge slab of masonry off the legs of a man who wouldn’t be walking again for a very long time, if ever. Shock rendered him silent. The rescue workers talked to him constantly, telling him how well he was doing, telling him to hang in there, telling him to be strong, that he was almost out, but not once telling him that everything would be all right. There was a reason for that. The woman beside him was beyond help. He clung to her hand. He must have known.

  Annja moved on to where she could be of more use.

  A medic crouched over a man who’s silver hammer on a chain had torn open his throat, giving him a crude tracheotomy.

  She recognized Micke’s cameraman. He stood aloof from the destruction, taking it all in with his lens as though the camera gave him the right to separate himself from the dead and the dying, to simply watch and record the tragedy rather than be a part of it. She wondered how he could stand there and do nothing, but she didn’t wonder for very long. He was coping with it the only way he knew how: documenting it. There was no telling what his camera might pick up that they would miss because they were too wrapped up
in the immediacy of the moment, unable and unwilling to just take a step back and look.

  The worst of it, though, was the smell—that slaughterhouse mix of burned meat and fecal matter that came with death.

  So she lost herself in the simple act of trying to help.

  Annja was among the last to leave the theater, covered in plaster dust and blood. She must have looked like a ghost emerging from the darkness into the bright sunlight. It could just as easily have been midafternoon as dawn; the sky was blue, without a cloud, the air so fresh in her lungs it stung. They were supposed to be breaking ground in Skalunda in a few hours. There’d be no beauty sleep today.

  A stone-jawed policeman came across and started talking to her in rapid-fire Swedish. She didn’t understand a word and just shrugged. “I’m sorry. American?”

  He switched to flawless English. “Before you go, we need your contact details so we can be in touch to take a statement.”

  “Of course,” Annja said. “I’m staying in a hotel downtown.” She pointed toward the hulking shape of her hotel towering over the skyline. It was impossible to miss.

  “If you could give your details to the officer.” He nodded toward an intimidatingly blonde Amazon of a woman with a pistol strapped on her hip and a peaked cap. She was busy taking details from a line of shell-shocked people. Surreally a radio played in the background, a pop song she didn’t know taunting the world to come on and do its worst. She couldn’t help but think it had.

  Annja joined the line to give her contact info, and then wandered the empty streets toward her hotel, a lost girl in a strange town. She felt her cell phone vibrate in her jeans pocket. When she took it out she saw she had seventeen missed calls, all of them from the same New York number: Doug Morrell, her producer on Chasing History’s Monsters. Seventeen calls meant he’d obviously seen the news about the explosion at Thorssen’s rally and put two and two together. She answered with a not-quite-breezy, “Doug!”

  “Annja! I thought you were dead. Answer your damned phone next time, would you? I’ve been calling and calling. We saw footage of the explosion. Tell me you weren’t there.”

  Doug was a decent guy, if young, blunt and not all that interested in life outside of ratings. She liked him as much as it was possible to like a self-obsessed Ivy League charmer like Doug, which in truth was often just enough to get her to agree to things against her better judgment. He knew it and she knew it. And he liked her just enough in return to at least make the lies and manipulations sound plausible. It wasn’t quite a meeting of minds, but in TV terms it was positively synergism.

  “Right in the middle of it,” she replied, just how lucky she’d been registering as she said it.

  “Are you okay? I mean...stupid question...but you know? Two arms, two legs, no bonus bits or bits missing? Every bad word I’ve ever said, every time I’ve conned you into doing something you didn’t want to do—”

  “Don’t go saying anything you’ll regret, Doug. You know, the kind of stuff that can be used in a court of law.” Annja laughed. It was a slightly frazzled laugh. “Because, believe me, I’ll certainly hold it against you.”

  “Okay, good point. You sure you’re in one piece?”

  “All fingers and all toes in place.”

  “You sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Okay, I believe you. So, now we’ve got the mild hysteria out of the way—see what happens when you don’t answer your phone?—time for the million-dollar question. Micke had someone in there filming the rally, right?” He paused for a beat, judging her reaction, then added, “Don’t get me wrong. It’s a tragedy.”

  “It is.”

  “But you have to admit it’d make great television. An episode on the greatest Norse hero of all, a myth that has continued to fascinate us over the centuries, tied in with the assassination attempt on one of the most charismatic politicians of recent times?” She could hear him marveling at the serendipity that had dropped this in his favorite reporter’s lap. “It’s pure television gold. I can see it already, can’t you?”

  Ratings.

  It was always about ratings with Doug when it came right down to it.

  That wasn’t fair, and she knew it. The man who had been terrified when she didn’t answer, that had been the real Doug Morrell; the man who wanted the gory details caught on film, that was the TV producer and they were different beasts. It was only now that Doug was sure she was safe that he let that beast out. It was only natural that he did. “Gold,” she agreed, halfheartedly.

  “Anyway, kiddo, you sound bushed. What is it, one, two in the morning?”

  She looked at her watch. It was closer to 5:00 a.m. and she could smell the hit of cinnamon in the air from a nearby bakery. The Swedes loved their cinnamon buns; it was as close as they came to a societal addiction.

  “Five.”

  “You should be in bed. You’re breaking ground tomorrow, right? Don’t want you looking like you’ve gone ten rounds with...well, I was going to try and be clever and name some female boxer, but you get the idea. Beauty sleep. That’s an order.”

  “You ever notice you only tell me what to do when there’s an ocean between us, Doug?” Annja laughed. “But just this once I’ll be good. I’m too tired to argue.”

  His voice changed. “I’m glad you’re okay, Annja. When you weren’t picking up...”

  “I know,” she finished for him. She couldn’t deal with mawkishness at 5:00 a.m., not that she was a big fan of it at any other time of day. She walked the rest of the way to the hotel, noting that it was still bright out, and had been for hours. This whole land of the midnight sun thing was a bit unnerving. In the height of the summer it was dark for no more than three hours a night, and if you went far enough north, to the Kebnekaise massif, you could watch the sun approach the horizon, then just rise again without ever disappearing from sight. As it was, the distinct lack of darkness as far south as Gothenburg was enough to turn a light sleeper into an insomniac and have them climbing up the hotel wall.

  An early-morning tram drove by on its way to one of the suburbs. The only passenger had her head resting on the window, still half-asleep. Annja waited for it to rumble off down the street before she crossed the road to the hotel.

  The night porter smiled at her as she crossed the marbled foyer and made for the bank of elevators, and her waiting bed. She saw herself in the mirrored elevator doors. It was a wonder he wasn’t reaching for the phone to call for the cops.

  * * *

  TWO HOURS OF restless sleep later, breakfast skipped, Annja was on-site waiting for Karl Thorssen to grace them with his presence.

  There was always something special about that first day on a dig—a sense of anticipation and hope that was almost palpable. Right up until they broke ground, anything was possible.

  This was no different.

  Beowulf’s barrow.

  Was the Geatish king interred here?

  What, if anything, would they find down there?

  Annja grinned despite herself. She wouldn’t have traded this part of her life for anything.

  Usually the locals were fairly dour and uninterested, but this time it was different. This wasn’t just some plot of land where a Roman villa had supposedly stood. This was part of legend. Their legend. Beowulf was more than Gustavus Adolphus, the father of modern warfare; he was their King Arthur. Slayer of dragons.

  She couldn’t help but think that whatever they found in the barrow had the power to make or break a part of the nation’s psyche. What if the bones were deformed or stunted? What if they extracted DNA that proved that he wasn’t Swedish at all? She thought of Thorssen driven to apoplexy by the imagined discovery his racially pure hero was nothing of the sort, and smiled. There would be a beautiful irony in that.

  Annja shielded her eyes against the sun.

  The site was already a hive of activity.

  Given the attempt on Karl Thorssen’s life last night, it was hardly surprising the press had turned o
ut in force to cover the ritual breaking of the ground. There were local dignitaries, too, businesspeople who provided financial muscle to Thorssen’s campaign and, giving their teachers the runaround, a group of schoolchildren who seemed to be everywhere at once, grinning and giggling and pretending to be ancient heroes with invisible swords fighting equally invisible dragons. There were half a dozen television presenters speaking to cameras, each offering a version of the same report. How Thorssen had survived the attempt on his life, how the crowd had gathered for this historic event, how Thorssen was writing his own legend and how the upcoming election promised to be a closely contested thing with a groundswell of support for the right-wing politician in the wake of last night’s tragedy.

  “Quite a turnout,” Johan Cheander said, his camera on his shoulder and scanning the crowd of faces. She couldn’t see Micke. Johan was good. He didn’t need telling what might make useful footage. Just like the night before, his camera was documenting it all down to the last detail. They’d work out what they needed later.

  “You’re not wrong,” Annja agreed, pointing to the black Mercedes coming across the grass toward them. It wasn’t designed for off-road. She’d half expected Karl Thorssen to arrive by helicopter. That seemed like the kind of over-the-top entrance he’d have enjoyed. No doubt he’d discharged himself from the hospital, telling the nurses he couldn’t miss this moment for the world. It was the kind of thing that would make good press whether it was true or not.

  The sight of the man getting out of the car with one arm in a sling, his rock-star face battered and bruised with any number of minor cuts and abrasions, left him looking like the wounded warrior he wanted to be. The cuts stood out against his pale gray skin. He saw someone he recognized in the crowd and raised a hand in greeting. It took him a second to muster his strength and don the mask of charming affability he’d need to get through the morning, but Annja noticed the occasional wince as he moved, and that he bit on his bottom lip every time the pain threatened to get too much.