by P. W. Child
However, by the looks of it they were not due soon, at least not before he was forced to drink whatever devilish elixir was distilled for his forced clairvoyance. He had pondered upon the subject when he was called to dinner.
“Dinner,” he scoffed to himself as he bore up with his hands on his knees for support. “The Last Supper it is. And you my Judas, for I Nina’s Judas played,” Lockhart summoned his own poetic lament at his fate for what he provoked in Karmic reaction. In the very same dining hall where the Black Sun symbol hovered over Nina’s dwindling sight before she went under, they all gathered for dinner. Slokin, Lita, Lockhart, and a few of the medical and scientific staff sat around the table as the plates were loaded with grilled meat and fresh vegetables, exotic spices, and delicacies. From goblets, they party drank everything from red wine to lime water, whatever their tastes demanded. Slokin raised his glass in a toast and all around the table responded in kind.
“To Valhalla!” he smiled. In unison, they all cried the name most holy to the Viking nations and Lockhart’s heart jumped at the mention of the name he so revered, and feared, as the events of that fateful day when he found himself in the very presence of the Holy Hall of the Slain sped through his reminiscence like a bad acid trip.
“To Valhalla,” he stuttered, choking on the mighty word as his emotions overwhelmed him and he swallowed hard to rebuke the furious urge to burst into tears. He gulped hard on the Scotch he had requested, wishing it was poison. Soon enough, he would get his poison, he knew, and it came with a shot of betrayal that was so cold that he did not need it on the rocks.
“Master Lockhart,” came the sudden death rattle from the powerful red Goddess at the head of the table. Her voice was hoarse and loud, echoing throughout the domed hall like the clap of thunder. Lockhart’s body froze, but he maintained his composure.
“Miss Røderic,” he smiled dryly, determined not to show his terror or contempt. The old man rose to his feet, standing proudly as a member of the Order present there, his true name and origins hidden to all but Lita Røderic. His eyes gleamed with the threat of tears. She nodded to all at the great long table under the black sun painted on the ceiling and stood up. Lofty in her stature, her hair fell forward over her shoulders, making her eyes all the more starkly striking as she pinned each member with her gaze. In her hands she held the antique silver vial, playing over its beautiful design with her fingertips.
“Would you do us the honor of consuming the vial in the name of the Order of the Black Sun? It is a privilege to be chosen for this task, as you are all aware. I have bestowed the honor upon one of my most trusted and oldest associates, Professor Herman Lockhart, who had, through many years, any trials and tribulations, remained loyal to the Order and assisted me, personally, in many a successful ventures.”
She rested her deceitful eyes on him, her smile revolting him.
‘Privilege? The only privilege you afforded me was the location of your doomed hive, you bitch,’ Lockhart thought as he nodded in agreement and mock-respect. ‘I hope The Brotherhood hangs you with your own goddamned tail, demoness.’
When Lockhart opened the vial a strong and putrid stench escaped the mouth of the container, so powerful that the few men flanking him recoiled.
“Keep it down, Professor!” Slokin jested. “Hope you can hold your liquor.”
Without a much desired retort the old man swallowed the elixir. The party present all winced at the sight and moans of disgust emanated around the room. His face pulled in repulsion, but he quickly realized that it was nothing more than well rigged Absinthe, cleverly used along with a collection of extracts to mimic the true tincture brewed by whatever ancient seiðkona Odin trusted to concoct it.
His heart smiled at the deception Lita was unaware of and he intended to keep her in the dark about it. Now Lockhart knew the liquid could not harm him apart from a bit of a headache and maybe a case of the runs in the morning, but he decided to wear his mask well. Drinking every drop, he fell slightly against the table in a feigned dizzy spell and quickly the people around him helped him to his seat.
A mild cheer came from the party at the emptying of the flask, satisfied that soon the old scholar would show them the way to Valhalla to bring to fruition their age-long goal, the very goal of the Führer himself. Through his dramatic rendition as the oracle of the Order, Professor Lockhart’s heart cheered at the thought that he was unperturbed by any drug or nefarious concoction. It afforded him the insidious privilege of being the cancer of the Order, the resident virus inside the body that would be their undoing. He smiled.
How sweet his demise was going to be, knowing that he was the architect of the Black Sun’s destruction.
Chapter 29
It was evening in Thurso. The picturesque steeples disappeared in the soft thickness that slowly descended upon the coastal town as night enfolded its merry streets and frigid beaches. Close to the western head of the grand landscape, Sam, Nina, and their friends moved into a smallholding owned by a friend of Alex’s. It consisted of a circle of small structures, built around a huge fire pit near one of the small inlets where the ocean could secretly impose and spread its beautiful saline fragrance late at night when the tide exhaled a crisp breeze onto the land.
While Erika prepared The Brotherhood and the riders of Sleipnir for their mission, Gunnar had a look at Nina’s wound. Every time his eyes caught the Tiwaz rune his wife’s arm used to bear, his heart would ache just a little, urging him more to take action and fuelling the vengeful flame he kept burning like a pilot light.
He sat her down at the dining room table and she placed her arm on the embroidered table cloth. In the background bustle of the club members outside, roaring, toasting, and eating around the bonfire, Nina embraced the odd feeling of freedom, entwined with a persisting nudge of terror for what her life had evolved to in the past few weeks. It felt as if she was living another life altogether. Looking at the giant calloused hands of Gunnar Joutsen, who had decided against the advice of his brethren to accompany Sam and Nina alone to Valhalla, she realized that she would never be as safe as she was right now.
From nowhere, Sam sank down beside her and she could not help but smile. The two men flanked her with care and friendship, an emotional warmth she never got from Purdue – not even in most intense throes of passion. She regretted nothing, as her relationship with the billionaire was a means to an end, but she did lament the lack of closeness. It was something which had always eluded her, no matter how deeply in love she was. But Sam, her trusty old friend and confidant, object of her affection of late, was the only man who ever exuded that protective favor she craved and made no secret that it was intended specifically for her.
“How are you holding up, Dr. Gould?” he teased.
“I’m doing great, thank you, Mr. Cleave. Manage to stay upright for a whole two hours, I see,” she snapped playfully, referring to the two fainting spells Sam suffered during his tattooing session. He had neglected as a show of pride to share his terrible fear of needles with them and subsequently passed out when he dared look in the wall mirror. Seeing Eldard pressing the pulsing needle into his back unnerved him and reminded him of the aversion he had for silver hole-makers. The only productive thing he could boast was his visions.
Sam shook his head and wiped back his black tresses, a look of willing defeat gracing his countenance. Then he whispered, “I’ll never live it down, will I?”
Gunnar smiled at the jest as he carefully removed the bandage to see what kind of wound the historian had hidden under the light brown stains on the bloody wrapping. As he peeled it away, she winced from the pain where the fabric had settled into the coagulated blood of the wound and hitched on the stitches.
“Sorry, love,” Gunnar apologized without ceasing his tugging, but Nina felt Sam’s hand wrap around her other hand, comforting her.
“Good god, it hurts like fuck!” she moaned through her teeth with her eyes pinched tightly.
“Almost done,” the big bik
er soothed in deliberately subdued tone. “Sam, I hate to say this, but you have to see if you can produce more revelations tonight. Regensburg is full of historical landmarks. I need you to see if you can find something in your visions to narrow down what we are looking for, you see?”
Sam nodded, “I reckon if I pick a fight with Jimmy or Rolar, I’d get us to Valhalla in one go, hey?” Nina and Gunnar laughed at his masochistic enthusiasm. The two members he referred to dwarfed most specimens short of WWE heavyweight wrestlers. They would certainly deal him a pummeling he would not survive.
“No, one of the ladies from The Brotherhood should do the trick,” Nina remarked as she sucked in air through her clenched jaws when the last part of the bandage tore free from the wound.
“On that note,” Sam’s boyish interest came to the fore again, “will pleasure perhaps give me the same effect as pain?” Nina looked at him in amusement and shook her head. “You know, just in case I feel the need to get some…extra information…”
Gunnar chuckled heartily, “I don’t know, brother, you could give it a try. Right now we’ll take any help we can get. But the ladies will not be here much longer, so you had better get to it.”
Nina’s eyes pierced Sam’s. She did not have to voice her envious protest for him to know she secretly agreed to be his guinea pig, should he decide to test the theory. He knew this and reveled in it.
“It’s uncanny. Look at this,” Gunnar noted as he turned the inside of Nina’s forearm upwards. Lita’s medical fiends had carved perfect circle on the arm of their limp patient, just deep enough to reach the threshold between tissue and dermis. It appeared that the disc of skin was removed and later placed back like the lid of a jar. What lay beneath was unknown, but from what Gunnar managed to ascertain by some painful scrutiny, it was not anything solid, not any kind of implant that he could detect.
“It looks like their fucking symbol. How sick are these bastards?” Sam cringed from the clearly reminiscent carving of the Black Sun sigil in Nina’s skin. A distraught Nina wailed in agony as Gunnar pressed down upon the tender flesh not yet mended underneath. Sam had to turn his eyes away from the grotesque sight of the fleshy lid shifting ever so lightly over the tissue below as Gunnar’s finger tested its elasticity. Nina caught her breath with great effort, folding her small body in Sam’s embrace as she grew faint from the painful experiment. She panted heavily, her eyes closed to focus on composure, but it was clear that she was losing the battle against the pressing darkness of the pain-induced disorientation.
“I cannot find anything that implies a tracking device or any hardware under this,” Gunnar revealed evenly as if he was conducting an autopsy. He looked at the waning consciousness of Sam’s friend, pale-faced and whimpering in the journalist’s embrace and he realized that he was causing Nina a thorough torturing. “I’m sorry, love. I don’t think we’ll pry any further, okay?” he nodded to Sam who was running his hand sympathetically over Nina’s hair.
“Tomi! Can you get us a metal detector type device? Like soon. Hopefully within the next two hours?” Gunnar asked the techno wizard of Sleipnir who was nursing a bottle of beer and a turkey leg on the porch of the cottage.
“On it, brother!” came the answer through a mouth stuffed with food.
“Right, Sam, get Nina to get some rest while I meet with my family outside to make sure everything is a go. Then see if you can induce more visions,” Gunnar ordered as he raised his powerful frame from the chair and tossed Sam a bankie filled with green.
“Smoke up, brother! If that don’t work, Gunnar will be beating the shit out of you to get that dream center working, aye?” one of the passing Sleipnir boys laughed, slapping Sam hard on the back.
As Sam laid Nina down on the bed in the dimly lit bedroom, something was amiss. How could there be nothing under that patch of skin? Why would they go through such a procedure if there was nothing to plant? Then again, with their reputation for unorthodox practices far beyond the reach of logic, he would not be surprised at anything they came up with. He looked at Nina lying on the bed. Her body was rigid in its position where she lay on her back, hands folded over her stomach. He could hardly hear her breathe, and only the heaving of her chest and stomach eased his concern.
In the gaining darkness of the evening, he fixed his eyes on her in the bright firelight from the column of flames the bonfire outside yielded. Even in the warm yellow glow, the skin of her face was frightfully wan, and it was not from her fainting spell alone. His instincts told him that there was more to her condition than the dizziness of raw pain. Shaking his head, Sam sighed and took a ceremonial athame from one of the small tables in the corner, hidden by the shadows of night. He turned to face the petite woman on the bed and whispered, “Don’t worry, Nina, I will make sure we get there as soon as possible. You don’t know it, and I am only guessing, but they did something sinister to you. I don’t know what it is, but your pretty little face is a testament to some or other deadly fate and I don’t like it one bit.”
With those words Sam pressed the bent silver blade down on the skin of his chest. It hurt, but it was bearable. Sam had never been one for self-mutilation, but he could see his beloved Nina’s condition deteriorate by the hour and although he kept it to himself, the grim truth was waving at her from her face every time he looked at her. He pressed the point deeper, but the skin did not even break yet before he could take no more agony.
“Jesus, you’re a sissy,” he said to himself. “Just go and start a fight with the boys outside.”
Sam scoffed as he threw the knife back on the pile of steel and silver where it landed with a clang to rejoin the mangled orgy of war razors. “But first, some stress relief,” he sniffed and pulled an abused pack of Marlboro’s from his pocket, flicking a fag in between his pursed lips in one skilled motion. He sat down carefully on the bed corner, minding his weight and movement so that he would not disturb Nina.
The ascending billows of blue smoke curled and shape shifted as Sam breathed into the ambience of the beautiful, shimmering light that pulsed lazily upon the frosted window of the room. Deep thoughts came with the smoke, its shamanist thrall invoking Sam’s dormant spirit, the thing he buried most when he had to reason or present facts. This time he allowed it to rise and speak. After all, nobody was here. No-one needed him to be level-headed and logical here and now. It would be his little secret that he nurtured his scorned side for once. He thought of the connotations between history and myth. Between his own research, Nina’s eagerly related historical accounts, and what he had experienced since joining the company of The Brotherhood, he had to admit that there was more to Norse mythology than just old bearded gods with horned helmets.
With all his quite recent adventures involving the Nazi organizations and their nefarious pursuits, Sam had learned to dig deeper into the origins of matters he used to brush off as plain racism or cultural genocide. All those symbols the Nazis enjoyed to flaunt so much, and all free cultures learned to fear and hate, originated from a far more honorable heritage and those true Germanic peoples who wished to honor their old heathen gods in the modern age, were thus constantly harassed as Nazis. Sam used to be one of those ignorant rat’s asses who, without proper investigation, cried ‘racist’ or ‘Nazi’ whenever anyone wore a Swastika or the equally infamous SS-lightning symbols, once borne upon the uniforms of coldblooded killers.
Now he had discovered that these sigils were only adopted by Hitler and his animals to promote their Aryan heritage, of all things, claiming to be direct descendants of the mighty Norse god Odin. This was where the corruption cracked through a valorous and proud culture and reduced its renowned signs to repulsive marks of tyranny and hatred. Through his scrutiny of its origins, Sam learned that the Swastika, also called gammadion, was one of Thor’s representations of thunder, that the ‘SS’ depicted lightning. Further research even showed him that the Swastika was used in Buddhist and Hindu scriptures as a sacred symbol denoting luck or wellness, long before the i
nfamous Austrian defiled it with his regime of terror and prejudice. It was a new age for Sam Cleave. His once rigid trademarks had been shattered by an uninvited awakening, not only in his appearance, but in his approach to information, his perception of things. What the old Sam may have seen as a square line drawing, the new Sam would endeavor to give a walk around to discover that it was a cube, multi-dimensional with depth.
Immersed in thought, Sam’s hand dropped inadvertently and the blazing ash of the cigarette singed the soft hair on his arm before kissing the vulnerable skin underneath.
“FUCK!” he screamed and jumped up at the blistering sensation that spread casually through his nerve endings like a good bourbon. An agonizing, excruciating, good bourbon, that is. He stepped madly on the demon butt to extinguish its audacity and its heat before the room faded suddenly. At first, Sam thought it was the shadows; that perhaps the bonfire outside the window had been doused, but he saw Nina sit up just before she too, vanished into a white haze of oblivion.
Before him, he saw the vision reveal its details to him, like a picture embraced by snow white smoke and white noise. It was a massive building with arches and columns made from marble. A low, wide triangle sat atop the linear family of grooved pillars, sculpted within the pediment borders were human figures, but Sam could not see what they were depicted doing. At the base of the white building there were what he thought were overlapping stairways or folding walls.
As he called out what he was seeing, he vaguely sensed more people around his corporal self and Nina’s voice echoed somewhere among them, far off in the real world. He could hear male voices repeating what he was reporting, as if they needed him to venture further into the waking walk of his mind. They reminded him of a band of college guys chanting for him to down an insurmountable amount of alcohol in a ridiculously tall glass.
