Afterwalkers

by Tom Becker

  “What are you looking at, you big blue idiot?”

  Jamie’s heart nearly exploded with joy at the sound of Liam’s voice. Greg took a step forward, a low growl in his throat, then hesitated. Jamie couldn’t see from the bottom of the grave, but something about Liam was making the draugr uneasy.

  “What’s the matter, Gregory?” Liam called out mockingly. “Scared of a little flame? Or do you fight as bad as you drive?”

  Greg changed his grip on the shovel deliberately and sloped away from the grave in the direction of Liam’s voice. How long could Liam hope to keep him occupied? Jamie had to get free. Wiping the tears from his eyes on his sleeve, he stood up in the mire and reexamined his surroundings. The only way out was up. In the distance he heard shouts, and a loud clang – Greg’s shovel connecting with a headstone? Urgent adrenaline pumping through his veins, Jamie leapt into the air, reaching up for the sides of the grave. His fingers brushed tantalizingly against the edge of the surface, and then he tumbled back to the bottom. Jamie kicked the earth in frustration.

  “Jamie?” a voice whispered. “Are you OK?”

  Keeley’s pale face appeared through the bars of the mortsafe. She glanced around warily, her voice low.

  Jamie swallowed a sob of relief. “Get me out of here, please!”

  “Yeah.” Keeley examined the lock at the top of the mortsafe. “I’ll get right on that.”

  “You have to tell Liam … they’re all in it together. Lawrence is working for Mr Redgrave, and he’s a draugr too!”

  “I think Liam’s pretty busy right now,” Keeley told him, “but when he’s got a moment I’ll let him know.”

  “What’s happening up there? Where’s Greg?”

  “Trying to avoid getting fried. Liam’s got a flaming torch and he’s not very happy.”

  “How did you know I was here?”

  “My mum saw them bring you here from your bedroom window. Liam got tooled up straight away. There was no way him or Mum were going to let me help, but I knew Liam couldn’t get you out on his own. So I did what I always do: pretend to go off in a huff, slam a door, and then sneak out of the window when no one was looking.”

  “That’s great, Keeley,” Jamie whispered. “What now?”

  Keeley dangled a set of keys from her finger, grinning wickedly. “Your brother kept going on about lockpicks but I figured it was easier to take the spare set of mortsafe keys the vicar hides in a pot behind the watch house. No one knows this graveyard better than me.”

  Examining the lock around the top of the cage, Keeley frowned and selected a key. The sounds of battle were growing louder – Jamie heard the draugr roar with rage, and his breath caught in his throat as he heard Liam cry out.

  “Hurry up!”

  “Don’t rush me!” she told him crossly. “I’m going as quick as I can!”

  Her eyes lit up as the lock opened with a dull clink. Taking hold of the bars, she tried to lift up the mortsafe. From across the cemetery came a soft, deadly whooshing sound, and a strangled howl – a horrible, inhuman sound that made Jamie want to press his hands over his ears to block it out. Keeley redoubled her efforts, straining at the iron cage, but it refused to budge.

  “It’s too heavy!” she gasped. “I can’t lift it.”

  Then suddenly Liam was standing next to her, gritting his teeth as he lifted the mortsafe up in the air and pushed it to one side, allowing just enough room for Jamie to climb clear. His brother reached down a hand and pulled him up out of the grave. Jamie’s feet had barely touched the ground before Liam had wrapped him in a giant bear hug, and suddenly Jamie had to fight very hard to stop himself from crying.

  “What happened to Greg?” he asked.

  “I took care of him,” Liam replied softly. He winced, adjusting the rucksack on his back. “Though if my arm wasn’t broken before, I’m pretty sure it is now. Are you OK?”

  Jamie nodded.

  “Good lad. Listen, about earlier … I don’t know what I was thinking. This place has been getting to me, and with Sarge the way he is … but I should never have pushed you around. I’m sorry, OK? You were right – let’s just try and get out of here alive, yeah?”

  “Easier said then done,” a gravelly voice replied.

  Jamie whirled round to see Mr Redgrave shuffle out of the shadows behind a large gravestone. Lawrence was at his shoulder, a nasty smile on his face. At the sight of the rotting draugr Keeley blanched, and Liam’s eyes widened.

  “What the hell is that?” he asked Jamie.

  Jamie swallowed nervously. “Meet Mr Redgrave.”

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “It’s no joke, Liam my boy,” rasped Mr Redgrave. “No one’s laughing, no one’s smiling. Did you really think I was just going to leave Jamie here? I wanted you to come charging to the rescue. I wanted you all together.” Mr Redgrave leaned forward. “I want Aldus’s hoard.”

  Liam stepped forward, took his rucksack from his shoulders and dropped it on the ground in front of him.

  “There you go,” he said. “Job done.”

  “No!” Jamie gasped. “You can’t just give it to him! Why did you bring it with you?”

  “Why do you think I brought it with me?” Liam retorted. “You were in trouble, dummy! If I have to fight, I will. If I have to give them the hoard, I will. The only thing that matters is getting you back.”

  “Very touching,” said Lawrence, with a sneer.

  “What was that, Withershins?” Liam shot back. “Got something to say there?”

  “Nothing simple enough for you to understand.”

  “That a fact? Why don’t you stop hiding behind your pal, egghead, and we’ll see who’s laughing then.”

  “Enough!” barked Mr Redgrave. “Lawrence, take the bag.”

  As the bookshop owner darted forward Liam looped his foot through the rucksack strap, dragging it back towards him.

  “Not so fast,” he said to Mr Redgrave. “You get the hoard – what do we get?”

  “What do you want?”

  Liam looked the draugr straight in the eye. “This ends now,” he said. “The three of us get to walk out of here and leave this town without any more ghouls or zombies or Viking nutcases attacking us. Nothing happens to us or Sarge or Keeley’s mum. We’re free.”

  “Free?” Mr Redgrave raised a craggy eyebrow. “Free to tell whoever you like about Alderston? About me?”

  Liam let out a bitter laugh. “You think anyone’s going to believe us if we start talking?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I haven’t survived for two hundred years by taking chances. Or leaving loose ends.”

  Jamie shivered. Liam might not have looked scared of Mr Redgrave, but Jamie knew what the draugr was capable of. He was no lumbering corpse – he had killed Mathers.

  “Fair enough,” said Liam, with a shrug. “If you don’t want to do business, we can always sort this out another way. Ask Greg. He’s the pile of ashes behind that grave over there.”

  “You’re your father’s son, all right,” rasped Mr Redgrave. “All hot air and threats, raging and fighting to the bitter end. Losing Greg was … regrettable, but the young are so much harder to control, I find. They get impatient, hotheaded. Try living for a couple of centuries. You’ll learn how to wait.”

  As Liam and Mr Redgrave stared at each other there was a loud rustle in the bushes behind the watch house. Keeley turned and peered over towards it.

  “There’s someone there,” she told Liam.

  He frowned. “Who?”

  Jamie knew. It had killed Mathers… “We forgot something,” he said quietly. The trees quivered as a deafening bellow rent the night in two. “There’s more than one draugr left in Alderston.”

  Mathers came stalking through the graveyard, a nightmare of charred flesh with ugly scars running down the left-hand s
ide of his face, along his neck, and disappearing into the blackened remnants of his overalls. The smell of damp earth and decay that hung off the draugr had been sharpened by the acrid tang of burnt flesh. One eye was shut, lost in the fire-damaged half of his face where the lantern oil had gone up in the flames. The other eye was bulging with nameless, unquenchable rage.

  At the sight of the group facing off around the grave, the draugr came to a halt. He saw enemies everywhere he looked. Mindful of their previous meeting, Liam and Keeley both slowly backed away, while Lawrence shifted nervously. Mr Redgrave alone seemed unperturbed by Mathers’s entrance, the faintest trace of a smile crackling across his swollen lips.

  “Welcome,” said Mr Redgrave. “I wondered if we would be seeing you again tonight.”

  Mathers forced open half of his mouth, and a low, mangled noise came forth. The fire that had ravaged the creature’s face had also burned his vocal cords, and Jamie struggled to decipher his meaning. The draugr clenched his fist with frustration and repeated the word. With a chill Jamie realized what he was trying to say.

  “Smiler,” Mathers said again, and took a lurching step towards Liam.

  “Wait!” cried Jamie, waving his arms in the air. “You’ve got it wrong. Sarge didn’t kill Smiler – he did!” He pointed a trembling finger straight at Mr Redgrave. “He killed Smiler and buried him in our back garden as a warning to Sarge, then he told you it was us who did it. But it was Mr Redgrave!”

  “Don’t listen to the boy, Mathers,” Mr Redgrave warned. “He’s flesh and blood, not like you or I.”

  Mathers stopped, his deadened brain struggling to unpick the tangled lies and truths laid out before him. Jamie watched, his heart in his mouth, as the draugr took one ragged breath after another. Then he pointed a long finger at Lawrence. The bookshop owner paled, and took a pace back.

  “You,” Mathers growled, in a low voice. His hand reached up slowly to touch the charred flesh on the side of his head, remembering the battle in the field behind the Lodge, the moment when Lawrence’s hurled lighter had engulfed him in flames. Lawrence glanced at Mr Redgrave, pushing his glasses nervously up his nose as Mathers took a crunching step towards him.

  “Stop him!” he quailed.

  Mr Redgrave looked down at his feet.

  “What are you waiting for? We had a deal!” cried Lawrence, his voice almost hysterical with indignation.

  “The deal was that you’d help me find Aldus’s hoard,” Mr Redgrave said calmly. He nodded towards the rucksack lying in the snow. “And there it is. Thank you.”

  Mathers continued to advance on Lawrence, his remaining eye consumed with hatred.

  “Please,” Lawrence said weakly, holding up his hands. “I was only following orders! He told me to make sure the boy was all right. If I had the choice, I would never have hurt you.”

  He turned to run away, only to catch his foot in a tree root and go sprawling across the ground. Lawrence looked up and gave Jamie a pleading look, his face drenched in sheer panic. Mathers reached him before he could stand up, the draugr swatting him back down into the snow with a shuddering fist. Knocked half senseless, Lawrence lay supine and helpless as Mathers placed a giant knee on his ribcage and began to press down.

  “Jamie! Don’t look!” Jamie heard Liam’s command, but it was somehow impossible to look away, or to block out the sound of bones snapping like so many dead twigs. Mathers seemed to be barely making any effort at all, pressing his knee down with a merciless gentleness. Lawrence’s scream died in his throat, and with a cough of red blood he felt abruptly silent.

  All the while Mr Redgrave had been silent and still, an impassive onlooker. But as Mathers begin to straighten up, the elder draugr reached into his waistcoat. Jamie caught a silver glint in the moonlight, and saw Mr Redgrave pull forth the small dagger he had taken from him back at Withershins. With two or three smart steps he closed the gap to the scrap dealer, raised the dagger high into the sky and drove it between Mathers’s shoulder blades.

  The bellow of pain was loud enough to stir the dead in their graves, for the ancient remains of decaying bones to shiver and shake. Mr Redgrave made no attempt to follow up his attack, to pull out the knife and drive it again and again into the scrap dealer’s back. Jamie had witnessed Mathers shrug off Liam’s shovel as though it were straw, yet this slender blade seemed to have pierced the giant’s black heart. Mathers clutched futilely at the knife handle but it was just out of reach. With a low, keening groan, Mathers tumbled to the ground beside the corpse of the man he had just killed, joining him in eternal stillness.

  A shocked silence fell over the graveyard like fine snow.

  “You killed him!” gasped Jamie. “But … how? Lawrence said only fire or beheading can kill a draugr – all you did was stab him with a dagger!”

  “You stupid boy,” chuckled Mr Redgrave. “Don’t you realize what you brought me? It’s not a dagger, it’s a spearhead. The spearhead Aldus used to cut off the head of the draugr he battled in the chieftain’s barrow, at the very moment the creature cursed him and all his treasures. This blade has been bestowed with the darkest Viking magic, and even the draugr have learned to fear its touch.”

  He walked over to the fallen oak tree that was Mathers’s prone body and pulled the spearhead from his back, wiping the sickly dark blood from the blade with a handkerchief.

  “Wouldn’t want this falling into the wrong hands, would we?” Mr Redgrave rasped.

  The carnage of the last few minutes had left Jamie reeling. With every fallen body – first Greg, then Lawrence and Mathers – the odds should have shifted in their favour, but as the draugr walked slowly towards them Jamie realized that they were in greater peril than ever. With all the loose ends tied up, they were the only thing left standing between Redgrave and Aldus’s hoard.

  “Do something!” Jamie urged Liam.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know! Use the lighter!”

  “And what, singe his eyebrows?” Liam snapped back. “I used up my last torch getting rid of Greg. Unless you’ve got a oilcan in your pocket we’re in trouble.”

  The wind had dropped, leaving the graveyard utterly still. Then Keeley darted in front of Liam, grabbed the rucksack off the ground and started running. Before Jamie could call her back, she was flying away through the graves, her ponytail bobbing against her back.

  “You want this?” she called out to Mr Redgrave over her shoulder. “Come and get it, then!”

  “What is she doing?” Jamie asked Liam.

  “Thinking on her feet,” he replied. “The Lodge, little bro – now!”

  Jamie turned and ran through the graveyard, his feet slipping and sliding in the treacherous snow. The one advantage he had over the draugr was speed – Mr Redgrave could only follow after them in halting, lumbering steps. Liam quickly closed the distance to Keeley, who had already dropped down through the gap in the railings and was running towards the Lodge. If they could lock themselves inside the house, perhaps they could keep Mr Redgrave at bay until dawn. Maybe daylight would force him back into hiding. Anything had to be better than this graveyard. Jamie could feel the dead watching him as he stumbled past their resting places. At any moment he expected pale hands to come scrabbling out of the soil, reaching out hungrily towards him.

  At the bottom of the hill, the cemetery railings rose up to greet him. Liam was already crossing Church Lane, his athlete’s stride having outstripped his brother’s. Jamie plunged through the gap after him, only for his foot to go out from under him. Then he was falling.

  He hit the pavement hard, the landing punching the air from his lungs. For several seconds it was all he could do to lie there, despite the shrill voice in his head urging him to get up. Winded, he rolled on to his front and tried to crawl away on his hands and knees. There was a loud thump in the snow behind him as Mr Redgrave dropped down on to the lane from the gr
aveyard, followed by the slow, deliberate crunch of footsteps, until Jamie found himself staring at a pair of gleaming black shoes. From back near the Lodge he heard Keeley scream, and then a hand fastened itself around his throat and hoisted him into the air.

  “Enough running,” Mr Redgrave hissed.

  The draugr slammed Jamie into the graveyard wall so hard he felt his teeth rattle. The rotting stench made his eyes water, and he flinched at the peeling flesh on the creature’s fingertips.

  “How long will it take you to learn?” snarled Mr Redgrave. “You can’t escape from me!”

  Jamie shook his head. Through blurring eyes he saw a shadow flit across the driveway of the Lodge, climbing up into the removal van.

  “Please—” he croaked. “Can’t … breathe…”

  “There’s nothing to fear, Jamie my lad,” Mr Redgrave told him. “Death won’t be the end for you, it will be the beginning. You’ll live for centuries, be the master of all you survey. No one will ever dare to push you round again. Isn’t that what you want, deep down? After all these years of trailing around after Sarge, sleeping in the van, being ignored, dancing to whatever tune he plays?”

  The pressure on Jamie’s windpipe was unrelenting. From the Lodge driveway came the sound of an engine’s hacking cough as Liam tried to start the van. Mr Redgrave didn’t seem to notice, so intent was his dead glare on Jamie. The van had been sitting dormant in the driveway for over a week now and the engine was refusing to start. Another victim of the cold, Jamie thought.

  “Admit it,” Mr Redgrave hissed, his breath like a grave. “I’m doing you a favour.”

  Jamie was too dizzy to reply. He felt himself teetering on the edge of a very dark, very deep hole. His limbs were going limp, his eyes drooping shut.

  The roar of an engine brought him back from the brink; then there was a squeal of tyres as Liam stamped down on the accelerator. The removal van came bumping out of the driveway, its headlights flicking into glorious life. At last Mr Redgrave turned round, only to find himself bathed in a white glow as the van came barrelling towards him. The draugr’s grip went slack with surprise. Tearing himself free, Jamie threw himself to one side. The van hit seconds later, burying Mr Redgrave into the cemetery wall.