Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  The gates opened as he approached.

  Like the rest of the house, they were integrated with a security system that essentially turned it into a defensible fortress.

  Thorssen roared up the approach, tires spitting gravel as he slewed to a halt in the shadow of the house, and clambered out of the car. He carried the wooden case up to his den. The house was far too big for the two people who lived in it, but he’d always promised his mother a large family, and the house was a relic of that promise. Sometimes the dreams of youth were hard to grow out of. He could hear her puttering around in the kitchen as he went upstairs to the den. He closed the door behind him, knowing it wouldn’t open again unless he opened it. His mother knew better than to interrupt him when he was in the room. It was his sanctuary.

  After his father’s death he’d taken her in. He had the room, after all. She didn’t intrude, but she was always there, in the background, looking over him. The den was a real “boys’ room” with leather couches around a low oak table, a pool table, big-screen television hooked up into satellite relays, posters from old black-and-white movies of Garbo, Bergman and other golden-age sirens. There was a wet bar at the far side of the room, with double-headed axes crossed on the wall behind it.

  He set the wooden box down on the table and went to the bar to pour himself a Scotch.

  This room was his haven. It offered a barrier between work and home life.

  He opened the case and carefully unwrapped the silk covering. He stared down at the pieces of sword, imagining them whole, imagining them in the hero’s hand, imagining them slipping between the plates of the dragon’s scales to slay the mighty winged serpent. He even imagined the dragon’s blood spilling back along the blade as Beowulf raised it aloft.

  Is that what the rust is, dragon’s blood? Thorssen thought, finally daring to touch the crust again.

  He lost all track of time, minutes slipping into hours as time stopped making sense, and was only brought out of his reverie by the groan of floorboards outside the den’s door. He realized it was his mother, and could imagine her pacing up and down, wondering if it was safe to knock without incurring his wrath.

  “What is it, Mother?” he called out finally, putting her out of her misery.

  She coughed slightly, then asked, “Is everything all right, dear? You’ve been in there an awfully long time.” She didn’t open the door.

  “Yes, Mother. I am fine.”

  “Dinner has been ready for an hour,” she said. “It’s spoiling.”

  “I’ll be out shortly.”

  He could have said that he was busy. He could have told her he really didn’t care that dinner was going to waste. He wasn’t hungry. He wanted to spend every minute of every day with the greatest treasure imaginable. She would have understood. She would have understood if he’d told her he wanted to watch a documentary or batter around some pool balls to work off his frustration. She would have understood no matter what he told her, without question. That was the nature of their relationship. He thought. He created. He drove them. She understood.

  There had been a time when he’d lied to himself and pretended that everything he did, he did for her, to make her proud.

  He didn’t lie to himself anymore. Everything he did, he did for his own benefit. Just like this.

  Thorssen dusted aside the crumbs of rust he’d picked off the two parts of the sword and put them with the other fragments he had collected in small plastic bags. He had no way of knowing if they were worth keeping or not, but wasn’t about to discard them just in case.

  He ran his fingertips over the sword once more, but this time stopped to take ahold of both pieces of the broken blade and pushed them together, once more imagining what they might have been like in all their majesty.

  He covered them once more, left them on the coffee table and went down to join his mother over a meal of Wallenburgers and new potatoes.

  He listened as she told him about her day—about the friends she had seen and how busy the shops in the village had been, and how hard the housework was becoming as her old bones began to fail her. More than once he’d offered to employ a housekeeper, but every time he raised the subject she batted the offer away. She didn’t want help, she wanted to complain. The conversation died out a few mouthfuls into the meal. They ate the rest of it in near-silence.

  He nodded in the right places when she did offer something, but it was obvious he was distracted, so she let him pick at his food and mostly ignore her, but didn’t hide her disappointment when he set aside his plate, the meal half-eaten at best.

  “Is there something on your mind, dear?” she asked.

  “Nothing for you to worry about, Mother.”

  “But I do worry. I am your mother. It’s in the job description.”

  He smiled at that. “I suppose it is.”

  “I thought it might have been the terrible news about the car accident.”

  “And what accident would that be, Mother?” He kept his tone light. Ignorance, when it came to the murder of troublesome little thieves, was bliss. He had deliberately avoided asking how Tostig intended to remedy the problem of the archaeologist, so he wouldn’t slip up and give anything away. It was enough that the job was done, and the proof of that was on the table in his den.

  “The poor archaeologist from your dig at Skalunda.”

  “It’s not exactly my dig, Mother,” he interrupted with a self-deprecating smile. “There are dozens of people involved.”

  “It is yours,” she teased. “We both know that. Don’t put yourself down. It wouldn’t be happening without you. Anyway, I saw on the news today, the man who was running your excavation died in a car accident this morning. I thought someone would have told you?”

  “Mortensen died? That’s...” he muttered, and shook his head, feigning shock. “We should send flowers. Something.”

  “That would be the right thing to do, dear. You’re such a good boy, always thinking about others. You’re lucky I’m here to think about you.”

  “That I am,” he said.

  He hated lying to her, and knew in his heart that even if she discovered he was behind the man’s accident, even remotely, she would never betray him, never judge him. She trusted him. She believed in the greater good of what he was doing and that there would be casualties along the way. He simply chose not to upset her, and what she didn’t know couldn’t do that.

  She said no more about it as they finished their meal, and kissed him on the forehead as he made his excuses to retreat back to his den to make some calls.

  His heart leaped when he saw the sword again.

  He closed the door softly behind him and leaned back against it, needing the reassuring solidity of the wood at his back.

  “I’m here,” he whispered, words he might have offered to an expectant lover reclined on his bed. And that, in a strange way, was how he felt.

  There was a comfort in the sword’s nearness, a warmth that spread through him.

  He crossed the room to the table and reached down to take hold of the hilt where the long rotten bindings had fallen away. He slid his fingers under the blade where the two halves had been separated in battle, and lifted it. The broken halves seemed to stay joined—as though glue had been applied to try to repair the ancient sword—before slowly separating in his hands.

  It must have been a trick of the light, an optical illusion, that somehow combined to make him see what he wanted to see. Didn’t it?

  He placed the two halves down once more and examined the exposed edges, feeling them for some trace of solvent or anything to explain how they had seemed to hold together for that impossible second. There was no obvious change in the surfaces. Nothing apart from the crust of corrosion that had always been there. He started to think about it as dragon’s blood again, pushing the pieces together, willing Nægling to be whole again.

  But nothing happened.

  As his mother liked to say, if wishes were fishes he could have fed an army of loyal
supporters for free.

  Karl Thorssen turned on the television in the hope of getting some news about the car accident. It wasn’t grim fascination; it was purely practical. It would have been equally weird if a friend or coworker died and he didn’t know the most rudimentary details. Five minutes into the endless twenty-four-hour news cycle, up came the stark image of a burned-out car, which was replaced by Lars Mortensen’s face a few seconds later.

  It wasn’t as if they were anything more than acquaintances; Thorssen had only met the man on a couple of occasions, and those two times had been more than enough to convince him Mortensen’s support couldn’t be wholly relied upon. The man was an academic and, with that head full of nonsense, lived in a version of the world with high ideals about the truth, integrity and the relentless pursuit of knowledge for the sake of mankind. It wasn’t the real world. And that had made Mortensen the kind of man that needed to be watched. Closely.

  It was only a pity that Tostig had to resort to such extreme measures, but the sword couldn’t be taken out of the country. It belonged to the people. It was their heritage. It belonged to Sweden.

  It belonged to him.

  His cell phone rang. He glanced at the display. The name on it was enough to have him mute the television.

  “Is it done?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you calling?”

  “There have been complications.”

  “Do I want to know?”

  “You need to know.”

  “Tell me.”

  “The Serb is dead.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then why are you calling?”

  “To let you know that the Creed woman is more than she seems.”

  “More than she seems? Very cryptic. In what way is she different?”

  “For one, she killed the Serb, but it is the how, that’s what makes her different.”

  “I’m growing tired of all this dancing around the subject, Tostig. Spit it out.”

  “Very well. I don’t know how she did it, how it is even possible, but as we moved to finish her, she drew a sword from thin air.”

  “A sword?” Thorssen didn’t laugh. As preposterous as it sounded, Tostig wasn’t given to lies or embellishments. If he said that’s what happened, then that was what happened no matter how much it defied the laws of physics. He would not have dared mention it if he hadn’t been sure of what he had seen. “If she is becoming a problem—and I think she is—she needs to be taken care of. That hasn’t changed no matter what peculiar talents she has. I don’t care how you do it. I don’t care how many people get hurt, Tostig. The only thing I care about is that come dawn Annja Creed has lost more than just the will to live. I will not tolerate failure.”

  He didn’t wait for a response. He ended the call.

  Creed was an annoyance, but she didn’t possess the sword and, as far as he was aware, had no real understanding of what Mortensen had found, so her death was merely a precaution. But that was the difference between Karl Thorssen and other men of his ilk; he was a cautious man. He planned things out methodically. He controlled the flow of information. He knew what his enemies were thinking before they did. There was little Annja Creed could do to jeopardize his plans. She was like a fly buzzing around his head. He would swat her.

  Thorssen closed his eyes and sank back into his leather chair, savoring the feeling of contentment that came with knowing he had factored in every eventuality. He was in control. Even if she somehow discovered Mortensen’s secret, even if she worked out what he wanted her to do, even if she managed to piece the puzzle together and make sense of it, she could not touch him, because there was nothing to link Karl Thorssen to the twisted wreckage of the archaeologist’s car.

  He opened his eyes again.

  A yellow ribbon scrolled across the bottom of the silent screen announcing that they were entering the final days before the polls opened and promising exclusive coverage of the candidates’ debate.

  He hadn’t been invited to participate, but Thorssen didn’t mind. His exclusion guaranteed him more sympathy than his inclusion ever would have. Sometimes the petty bureaucrats played right into his hands. Besides, he had other things on his mind. Things that would make Lars Mortensen old news.

  14

  It wasn’t so much plan B as plan H, but it was a plan. Of sorts.

  Annja sent a text to Roux, and with one hundred and forty-four characters to play with she kept it nice and to the point: Things have gotten weird here. No matter how good you think your hand is, fold. Come down and join in the fun. I could do with a friend. Annja.

  Then she’d sent Johan away.

  He’d objected, saying she shouldn’t be alone, but she’d assured him she wouldn’t be. Instead, she’d told him she needed him to interview Elinor Johnsson from the museum of antiquities about Beowulf’s swords. The museum was up in Stockholm, about as far away as she could send him. Six hours on the train there, six back, which meant an overnight stay. She took the liberty of booking him into a hotel and, thanks to Micke Rehnfeldt, managed to snag him tickets to see a jazz singer she’d heard him mention, who just so happened to be playing in a small club down by the waterfront.

  He saw straight through Annja, but didn’t fight her over it.

  “I’ll be fine,” she assured him. “I’ve got dinner with Micke to talk about what happens next with his film and our segment, and after that a good friend should be coming into town.”

  “How good a friend?”

  “I trust him with my life,” she assured him.

  “You’d better...because if that guy comes back that’s exactly what you’re doing.”

  It was enough to get him on the train.

  The news of Lars’s accident had been unfolding all afternoon. The confirmation that it was his car came in first, and within the hour the police had announced that there had been one fatality. Though they had yet to release the victim’s name, given it was Mortensen’s car, the logical progression to it being Lars’s body in the wreckage didn’t seem like a big leap, but they needed to get dental records before they could say for sure who the dead man was.

  Certain elements in the media were already speculating about what would happen now at the dig, and what it meant for Karl Thorssen, the dig’s champion, with an eye on the upcoming election. After all, the timing of the ground breaking, a week before the people went to the polls, seemed to suggest he hoped for some incredible discovery as the votes were cast, surely? And so the talking heads went, opining about the motivations of the right-wing politico, giving vent to their spleens when the word immigration came up, and lamenting the use of a legend to feed Thorssen’s greedy ambition.

  One particularly vile specimen even went so far as to blame Mortensen, pointing out that the volunteers had been drinking the night before, celebrating the ground breaking and wetting the site, the implication being that Lars’s judgment was somehow diminished, his reflexes slowed, because he had still been drunk when he got into the car that morning. They edited out the fact that the drinking had been limited to passing around a ceremonial horn, Viking style, and that Mortensen had drunk no more than a mouthful of beer before passing the horn on to the volunteer beside him. But that was tabloid journalism for you.

  Micke was already in the restaurant when Annja arrived.

  She would have been happy enough to have just met up for a drink in the hotel bar, but when they’d been making the date she’d realized just how hungry she actually was, and when she admitted she’d only had a slice of carrot cake and a couple of coffees since breakfast he’d absolutely insisted they make an evening of it.

  “I’m glad you called,” he said, rising slightly as she approached the table. “How’s Johan working out for you?”

  There was already a glass of white wine in front of her empty seat.

  “I sent him to Stockholm to get rid of him,” Annja joked.

  “That well, then.”

  She smil
ed. “He’s got lousy taste in music, and not much can be said for his personal hygiene when it comes to hotel rooms, but other than that, honestly, I love the guy.”

  “So to what do I owe the pleasure?”

  “Work as always,” Annja replied.

  He looked down at his watch, like he was about to find an excuse to be anywhere else, then smirked.

  “You’ll want to hear this, I think.”

  “Why is it good-looking women always say that and I fall for it every time?” He smiled. It was an easy smile that looked like it belonged there, as if he should not have any other expression.

  “Because you’re a sucker for a pretty face?”

  “That’d be it.”

  It was only gentle flirtation, but knowing what she wanted to talk about, and with the memory of Lars Mortensen’s body in the burning car still painfully fresh, it was difficult to enjoy the moment. She took a deep breath, steeling herself for what she needed to say.

  “That sigh sounds serious,” Micke said before she could say anything. “Let’s order first, then we can devote the attention it obviously deserves. Besides, I know you, if you start talking about something you’re passionate about, you’ll not stop to eat and I really don’t want Doug giving me crap over you starving to death in Sweden. So, tonight we eat like kings, deal?”

  She waited until the waitress had taken their order before she shared her reason for wanting to see him.

  “Lars Mortensen,” Annja said, tackling it head-on. “Do you know if they are going to replace him?”

  “I spoke to Thorssen this afternoon—” he began.

  “Thorssen?”

  “Yep, our little fascist is pulling the purse strings. Straightforward economics—what Karl Thorssen wants Karl Thorssen gets.”

  “And what does he want?”

  “That’s the million-kroner question. What does Karl Thorssen want? Do you have any idea how many times there have been applications to excavate Skalunda?”