Shadows of the Short Days

by Alexander Dan Vilhjálmsson

  She felt the surge before she saw it. An unnatural wound in reality. A forceful unmaking about to be unleashed. She turned and ran. Behind her, a wild torrent of sorcerous energy was unleashed as a náskári tearing into the soldiers burst in a blinding flash. The air smelled of static electricity and fresh blood. She sprinted as hard as she could, her feet steady now from fear, helping Diljá to carry the injured man. She risked a look behind her.

  The air crackled around the seiðskratti in spasms. Around it was a wasteland of death, a crater of deformed bodies. It turned its white-beaked mask towards her and watched as she ran.

  Ellefu

  Sæmundur flung open the apartment door and slammed it shut behind him. His heart was pounding in his chest as if it wanted to burst out. He felt the inside pocket of his coat again and was relieved when he felt the thick skin page was still there. It hadn’t been a hallucination.

  He looked out of the window to see if anyone was outside, if he had been followed. The bare trees shivered in the autumn wind. He pulled down the curtains. He was drenched in cold sweat and shivering uncontrollably. The mushroom high was still potent, turning his mind sluggish and murky.

  When Sæmundur had made Edda return to the library’s lobby he found Almía where he had left her, hidden underneath the librarian’s desk. The fungus had spread out of her throat, all over her face and down the neckline. Her head had been transformed into a colony of mushrooms. The air around them was visibly thick with spores already.

  This wasn’t supposed to happen. The infection wasn’t supposed to take hold so quickly. It had become too powerful for him to be able to put a stop to it. The fungus had slipped his control and would now work to spread its deathly spores to as many people as it could. He had lost control somewhere, without realising it. The galdur had perhaps been incomplete. It had buried itself deep inside them. They were worse than dead now and soon others would share their fate.

  He left Almía there and made Edda stumble back to him, as fast as she could. His control over her walking corpse had dwindled rapidly. He felt how she could no longer breathe because of the growth spreading in her lungs.

  Fortunately she was not spotted shambling from the library like a rigid corpse. Eventually Sæmundur lost control and Edda collapsed outside Almía’s office. He had dragged her in, tearing the page from her stiff, gnarled hand, and run away, delirious with fear. The hallucinations had become intensely disturbing and all illusion of control had evaporated. It was only a matter of time before the galdur would completely fade away and the fungus would bring Almía and Edda back to life, under its own power and unchained will. He shuddered with the thought. The fungus-infested corpses would shamble around and spew spore-clouds, attacking every living creature that came into range.

  He’d thrown up, somewhere out in the marshland surrounding Svartiskóli. He wanted to scream, to cry. None of this was supposed to have happened. This was not what he had intended.

  He told himself, over and over again: this was the only way forward. He had been cornered, forced into this position. There was always a sacrifice. He knew this. That was the essence of studying and practising galdur. What was the price you were willing to pay? That was the only real question a galdramaður faced.

  But he had been unaware of the true cost he had just paid. They were dead. Other people could be killed. The infestation could spread out into the city. Hundreds of people might die.

  Sæmundur fished the patch of skin out of his pocket as delicately as he could, his hands shaking uncontrollably. He collapsed down from weak legs on the mattress in the middle of the floor and spread out the manuscript page.

  The skin was ancient and the blood-brown writing faint. A circular symbol occupied most of the page, a spiral swallowing itself. A black hole. A vortex. Oddly shaped galdrastafir and words were located around and inside the symbol. Between them were drawn straight lines, forming a weird symbol over the spiral itself. It was a circle of invocation. Cramped handwriting filled the rest of the page – instructions for the use and purpose of the galdur, alongside incantations. Fresher handwriting was in the margin, written in different hands throughout the ages. He’d tried to take a copy of the manuscript but Edda’s hands were too stiff for such a delicate task at that point.

  Sæmundur devoured the text in the weak lamplight. He inspected the circle of invocation thoroughly and identified a few symbols of galdur, but he didn’t recognise most of them.

  Suddenly he sat up and folded the page hurriedly. The spiral had started to turn, without his noticing it, and he could hear a low scratching in the back of his head. As soon as he looked up from the symbol and folded the page the scratching stopped.

  He didn’t fully comprehend the ritual. Some of the words of power were like nothing he’d seen before, although he understood enough to recognise that he stood on the deranged precipice of galdur and pure insanity. Any serious ritual of galdur was time-consuming, but this one demanded only a handful of raw materials, all of which he had ready. The actual invocation, the central nervous system of the ritual, was esoteric and complex, but not impossible for him to manage. Sæmundur contemplated the folded skin and considered if he’d torn the wrong page from Rauðskinna. Whether this was a trap set by Gottskálkur the Cruel.

  Sæmundur sighed and lay back on the mattress. There was no guarantee that this ritual would help him understand the nature of galdur, but he needed assistance. Blindly researching the causality of galdur would be as reasonable as sending a man into a darkened dynamite factory with a box of matches. He needed outside assistance.

  Mæja started mewing at her bowl for food. He didn’t have anything for the cat, so he ignored her. She purred and butted her head against his feet, occasionally giving an inquisitive mew if he stirred, but eventually she gave up and started to groom herself. He reached for the pipe on the floor. Found the pouch that the cloth-golem had fetched for him earlier that day and stuffed the pipe with moss. Sæmundur gave it a good whiff, taking a moment to enjoy the fragrance. Real stuff, probably from Snæfellsjökull glacier. Nothing like the crap they picked from the lava fields just out of Huldufjörður. He sat up, lit the long pipe, and smoked.

  The smoke moved around him like an eel in the depths. He had burned every bridge behind him. Kári would wake up soon. He’d spoken a galdur of forgetfulness and amnesia over him, but who knew how much he retained? There was no way but forward. What was done was done. He could ponder the consequences later, sober. When he had fully grasped what this ritual offered. Only then could he weigh up the cost of it.

  He’d fucked up so many things. First his relationship with Garún. Then the expulsion from Svartiskóli. He’d lost control over the moss smoking a long time ago. Probably that had been the first thing to go. His debt with Rotsvelgur was spiralling out of control. He’d be lucky to get out of that with only a limb or so missing. He suddenly remembered that he had a concert coming up soon. He had completely forgotten. He doubted he would live or evade arrest for that long. He laughed weakly to himself. Why, of all things, was he feeling anxious about the concert now? The most insignificant problem facing him.

  He finished the pipe and dropped it on the floor. It was getting dark outside, the season making darkness reach further and further into the day. The only light came from his oil lamp. The shadows were like ink around the lamplight when the moss hit him hard, like a blast of sound crashing over him. The high merged oddly with the dregs of the mushroom trip. He could hear the scratching again, but now it was as if something was trying to claw its way inside, break through the floor, walls, roof. He knew he was hallucinating, but not in the sense that he was imagining it. He was sensing things too clearly.

  There was no sense in procrastinating. It could possibly be his only chance. He was ready.

  The page was next to him, folded. It looked as if it was absorbing the darkness around it, swallowing it hungrily and growing fatter, more bloated. He picked up the page, saturated with darkness, and felt how his fingers
went numb – as if it was leeching the life out of him. Carefully he unfolded the page and spread it out on the floor. He pored over the page thoroughly. Again and again he traced the spiral in his mind, etching its form into his memory. It wasn’t enough that the invocation circle was made perfectly; it also had to exist within Sæmundur in the same perfect form, creating an unbreakable barrier both within and without. When he felt it was complete he had the feeling that he had sometimes been unconsciously closing his eyes, while still seeing the symbols and letters in front of him, floating in the dark. But he was so stoned that he couldn’t be sure.

  He wandered around the dim apartment until he finally found the antique jewellery box, and fetched a stick of chalk from it. Underneath dirty trousers and socks he found an old dagger that was starting to rust. He kicked the clothes and the junk cluttering his room into the corner and made enough floor space free for the ceremony.

  The spiral was simple enough, although it was elliptical in shape, which was unusual. Despite that, he didn’t find it hard to draw it with the chalk. It was as if his hands already knew what they were doing. As if he’d done this before, in another time, another place. Over the spiral Sæmundur drew perfectly straight lines that intersected in key locations, the sharp corners located inside or outside the spiral. The lines made up a chaotic-looking star, which at a glance looked like a toddler’s drawing, but a closer look showed that it was made with a certain elusive order in mind. An alien purpose. Sæmundur drew with extreme precision the galdrastafir on their designated spots within the spiral. The ritual circle was complete. It just had to be sealed off and the ritual could commence.

  He compared the circle with the drawing on the page. Everything matched, it seemed like. Blissful waves of pleasure buzzed through his body and he rocked slightly on his feet. The moss was preparing him. Syncing him to the rhythm, the beat of the incantation to come. He read Gottskálk’s instructions again:

  Rísta skal þennan karakter og skal hann eigi sólu líta. Vek blóð úr vinstri hönd og dreif um stafinn frá ystu mörkum að innstu með offrið í miðju. Gakk þrisvar rangsælis og les þessa særingu. Consummatum est.

  Carve this character and shall it not see the sun. Draw blood from the left hand and spread from the outer limits to the innermost with the offering centred. Walk three times widdershins and read this invocation. Consummatum est.

  Flesh. Bones would not suffice for this galdur. No, it had to be flesh as well. But Sæmundur didn’t know if it should be dead or alive, or if that even mattered. If the demon possessed dead flesh, could it spark back to life? Or was the entity more like a parasite that needed a healthy host to live? His thoughts zeroed back in to Edda and Almía in Svartiskóli. It felt as if a claw was squeezing his heart, robbing him of his breath. Murderer. He was a murderer.

  No, no. Not this, not now.

  Sæmundur rummaged through the piles of manuscripts while trying to recall everything he knew about transmundane beings, especially those that were called demons. The first one he had trapped was in a skull for Garún. As soon as the entity was bound to the skull the bone had taken on a blueish hue. At the time, he had been trying to trace the source of the power that fed galdur and made it manifest. Why did it alone attract transmundanes, and not seiður? It was dangerous to open yourself to other realities. Something else might bleed through with whatever you were calling. Every single galdramaður was always at risk of becoming prey to unseen forces. Sæmundur wondered if his bones had started to turn a faint blue without him knowing. If he was unknowingly infected with them already.

  There was no time to go to a butcher’s and get a piece of meat or a carcass. Everything could fall apart around him at any moment. Anything should suffice – a half-butchered ram or the head off an old workhorse. He could go out and look for a stray animal. Sæmundur looked at his own hands and considered whether the being could manifest in one of them should he chop it off. Unlikely.

  Why was he considering this? Bad vibes, bad vibes. The scratching intensified. He sat on the mattress, rubbed his temples. The moss was leading him down a dark path.

  He could let the entity manifest in his own body. It wasn’t so hard to believe that Gottskálk had done exactly that, back when he lived. Invited the devil into his own head, offered him his own bones, his own flesh. Gottskálk was an inhuman bastard, by all accounts, and likely to match the devil in feats of ill temper and evil. If anyone could contain a demon in his own bones – tame the beast and use it for his own desires – then it was the Reverend Gottskálk “the Cruel’ Nikulásson. But not Sæmundur. He knew himself too well. Too capricious, too weak. One day, perhaps. But not now. He had to find something else.

  Mæja pranced back to him and gave him a miserable mew. She looked as if she had lost weight. Sæmundur petted her and tufts of fur came loose with each stroke. Poor Mæja. This wasn’t a cat’s life. She didn’t ask for much. Water, perhaps the occasional drop of milk, and something to eat. Almost anything. And a warm place to snuggle. But she hardly got even that. He was pathetic. Not being able to care for a single, tiny cat.

  An idea struck Sæmundur’s mind and he stopped petting the cat. In the thick, drugged fog of his mind he felt as if a black candle had been lit, a black conflagration, a black sun. He became distant. Cold. Frozen. Mæja kept butting her head against him and purring.

  He couldn’t. What would Garún say?

  Nothing.

  She would never find out. He looked at the cat and the elliptical chalk circle.

  “Kitty-cat. Are you hungry, Mæja, dear? Come, let’s eat. Come.”

  * * *

  He cleared the junk off the amplifier and lined up the tallow candles on top of it. The only light came from their weak flames, yet it appeared vigorous in the oppressive darkness. The spiral seemed to move in the flickering light. Sæmundur had tied Mæja’s limbs together with string and the cat lay mewing in the centre of the circle. She cried out ceaselessly and her hoarse cries merged with the scratching in the wall. He felt nauseous. The slow realisation of what he had done and was about to do threatened to overwhelm him. Make him freeze. He shut himself off from the horror of it.

  The candle lights were many and spread out, multiplying Sæmundur’s shadow. The flames gleamed and the shadows danced on the walls. He began the ritual.

  First he closed the circle. He put down branches of birch at the edge of the spiral while mumbling an incantation. The birch branches slid from his hand, falling to the floor like heavy iron rods. When the circle of invocation had been sealed he started walking widdershins around it while chanting thrice the eleven forbidden names, summoning the forces that were simultaneously the bridge and the barrier between worlds.

  It was as if the room was in free fall into the depths of the earth. Gravity felt vague, fleeting. The walls seemed to slide past at extreme speed, as if in an elevator, but still they were not moving. The scratching intensified and the floorboards groaned. The moss sent electric waves through his body. Sæmundur heard a murmur rise within his head and beyond the wall simultaneously, but he paid it no heed. The gates were open.

  Mæja had stopped mewing. She was stiff, the hairs on her back standing up. She didn’t fight, didn’t try to escape. The cat just stared at Sæmundur. Stared and kept quiet. He looked away.

  He took his place in the same spot where he’d started, the candles at his back. The shadows danced over the invocation circle in front of him, playing in the dizzying spiral, which was now turning lethargically, but turning nonetheless.

  Fear paralysed Sæmundur when he realised that he couldn’t recall the key incantation, the summoning itself. He completely froze. Yet, before he knew it he was spouting the incantation without hesitation, even though he could never recall the next word before he spoke it out loud.

  He felt the sound of the world surrounding him. He drew it in, closer, weaving it around him. Noise from factories, vehicles, animals and people. People talking, laughing, walking, singing, fucking, screaming, whisperi
ng. Sound from dust settling, wood rotting, water running, flames that burn. Sound from worms crawling, flowers dying, trees growing, mountains being weathered down, grain by grain. He heard the deafening rumble of clouds moving across the sky, the crackle from the embers of the sun, the clamour of the stars and the overwhelming, never-ending tone of everything that is.

  The pressure built up and everything trembled. Cracks splintered across the walls until the darkness surrounding him grew so deep and thick that he could no longer see them. The pitch darkness smothered the candlelight, and his shadows grew darker and stronger. Intense, incomprehensible words of longing came from beyond the walls. Sæmundur had to summon every ounce of strength he had not to run away and tear away the boards, letting in that which was knocking on the window of his soul, begging to be let in.

  Mæja screeched loud and long. A primal, panicked scream. Sæmundur had finished the invocation without realising it. The cat convulsed in agony, twisting and fighting in its desperation to escape, but the knots were too strong and the twine cut deep into her. She hissed uncontrollably and suddenly Sæmundur understood why. The shadows slid together, flooding into Mæja like oil down a drain.

  Something cracked within the cat. Mæja screeched even louder. The candles flickered. Sæmundur’s hair and beard moved in a wind from nowhere, even though he felt no breeze on his face. His shadow had vanished. It was if he wasn’t standing there in the light at all. The cat twitched and squirmed involuntarily. Sæmundur heard her bones break and saw them moving underneath the fur, as if something was trying to hatch. Her back arched, swelling, and a spatter of blood erupted over the floor when the stretched-out skin finally gave. Mæja had stopped screeching. Instead only deep, dying gurgles came from her.

  Pitch-black chitin, shining with blood and ichor, pushed itself out of the cat’s carcass. Steam rose from the slimy body. The creature straightened itself and the corpse cracked open, like a hatchling breaking through a shell. A small, horned head appeared and the creature opened its eyes for the first time. They were a silver void. A long and hairless tail appeared, its end shaped like an arrowhead. The earthly remains of Mæja were nothing but skin and a few bones at the creature’s feet. It was as if she had been skinned.