The Web of Loki

by Carla Reighard

  “No. I was just going to ask you the same question.”

  Harlee pounded on Ingrid’s other portal, so Ingrid went over to open that glass also.

  “What in the world is going on?” Harlee asked.

  “I don’t know. Stein just asked the same question.”

  Harlee eyed him skeptically. “Are you sure that’s Stein and not Loki?”

  “I’m not, but he seems like it.”

  “What was the first thing I said to you on Earth when we were alone?” Harlee asked.

  “You better be good to my friend or I’ll break your nose; I’m taking self-defense classes so I know how to do it,” Stein said in the same tone Ingrid imagined Harlee would have used.

  Ingrid looked over at Harlee to see if that was correct; she also was shocked by her friend’s protectiveness. She didn’t know Harlee was as violent as Hilde, the Viking warrior, was.

  “I suppose you’re Stein, but you could have told Loki about my threats.”

  “Trust me, I wouldn’t have done that. Loki would have teased me for letting a girl talk to me that way. He doesn’t have respect for females. They are more for entertainment to him than anything else.”

  “Well, until we can get to the truth, I’ll just be careful of what I say around you. Anyway, what is happening?” Harlee asked.

  “I don’t know. The alarms will sound when there is a breach in security.” Stein moved away from the glass, and then came back with a pale face. “The cell next to me is empty. Somehow Loki has escaped!”

  Ingrid gasped, “What does that mean?”

  “Well, he can be anyone now since he’s probably already changed his appearance.”

  “Are we in danger?” Harlee asked.

  “I don’t see any reason for Loki to harm us, but until they can find him or prove we’re not him, we could be in prison for a while.”

  A slight knocking sound was heard from the other side of Harlee’s apartment. She moved away from Ingrid and opened up the side to Brian’s room. Ingrid heard them talking, but they were quiet enough so that she couldn’t understand what was being said.

  Before Ingrid asked them what they were discussing, Freya appeared in front of their cells. “Young people, you probably noticed by now that one of you is missing. I suspect that it is Loki and the rest of you aren’t that fiend in disguise. I won’t be able to confirm that until he’s captured, but we have another problem we need to deal with first. The black web that was seeping out of Zoey’s virtual reality chair has broken the hatch’s seal to my ship. It is beginning to invade my vessel!”

  “How can that be possible and what does that mean?” Ingrid asked as bile rose in her throat.

  “That means we need you to get back to your own body and fix whatever is going haywire with your true self. Our experts told me that you can reverse everything, but you have to go backward in your thoughts and undo the things you created.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “First, we need to get you unconscious and back into the virtual world.” Freya nodded towards the guards and they disengaged Ingrid’s electric barrier. “Please follow me.”

  Ingrid felt a different kind of terror than what she felt when they entered the Beyond and faced the horrible monsters; a pit in her stomach formed as she thought about failing not just herself but a whole ship full of people that included her friends and the boy she thought she may love. As she walked away from Stein, he gave her an encouraging smile.

  Harlee called out, “You have this Zoe – I mean Ingrid. You can do this.”

  Brian also smiled and gave her the thumbs up signal. Ingrid realized this was the first time she felt like her friends were cheering for her. She hid how she felt most of the time, so maybe they didn’t realize that disappointment hit her hard, but they had never given her words of consolation or encouragement when she had been Zoey.

  Freya led Ingrid back to the hatch that went to the room where they had found Loki and her body at the top of the World Tree. Black threads had forced the door open, and from what she could see, it appeared the room had been darkened by the threatening web.

  Freya spoke solemnly to Ingrid. “We need to get that door shut because it is causing my ship to be unstable, but what would be even better is to have it disappear for good. The only way we can do that is to either strand you in Tuntre forever or get you to reverse everything. Think of it like rewinding a movie and watching everything move backward. Only you can figure out what to reverse, and only you know what is causing this. Tuntre isn’t where the problem originated. It started in your mind, so whatever fears or disappointments Zoey had before Loki hooked her up to the story transporter made this an uncontrollable nightmare.”

  “How can I reverse things that are out of my control? Sure, I’ve had disappointments, but they weren’t my fault.”

  Freya rested her hand on Ingrid’s shoulder and spoke tenderly. “No, you can’t reverse the things that didn’t go your way, but you can change how you dealt with them. You must rewire how you think about life, but only you can do it. No one can do it for you.”

  Ingrid sighed and tried to understand what Freya was explaining. Until she faced whatever it was her mind had trouble facing, she wouldn’t know if Freya was right.

  “You need to be put to sleep, but only when you’re back in that room. Here’s an axe to cut away that nasty stuff. I don’t think it will hurt you to do that.”

  “No, it’s only poisonous for the skin to touch.” Ingrid pointed to her scar. “We whacked away at a lot of this stuff in the Beyond without any issues.”

  Freya didn’t know what the Beyond was, but she didn’t waste time asking; instead, she only gave Ingrid a perplexed look. “Here’s a pill to take that will put you into a coma-like state. It is the only way to reunite you with Zoey. I can’t follow you into that room so you will be in charge of closing the door before you go down the ladder.”

  Ingrid took the pill and put it in the pocket of her pants. Then she grabbed the axe and started chopping away at the Web as Bjørn and Stein had done in the forest. Hilde had helped a lot as well; Ingrid had probably done the least amount because of her weakness and fear. Now she was on her own, as she had originally planned. Maybe she was going to be the heroine after all.

  Chapter 22

  Ingrid managed to get the blackened threads cut away enough to get through the opening and shut the door tightly above her head. The room had electric lighting, but all the fixtures had started to get covered so the darkened room reminded Ingrid of a basement in a creepy movie.

  “Thank you, Harlee, for putting more scary images into my head with all your comments about movies. My mind is already full of that stuff without her stupid comments,” Ingrid said out loud as she tried to calm her racing heart.

  The smell of something rotting just added to the ambience. She knew when she was Zoey she didn’t watch the types of movies Harlee kept referring to, but if she had, the room would have been the place where the spooky clown or chainsaw murderer jumped out. For not being a fan of the horror genre, she sure had a lot of bloodcurdling images floating around inside her imagination. Ever since her friends’ memories had returned, Harlee mentioned that media multiple times.

  The coal-colored tentacles climbed the ladder, and Ingrid tried to hold on to the rungs without getting poisoned. A few times, her hand couldn’t avoid contact; the Web stung and left a black mark that she assumed would eventually fade to brown like the one on her face.

  Ingrid scolded herself, “You don’t have to worry about scars. This body isn’t real. Get your butt down the ladder and fix this!’”

  She stopped cutting away at the web and went down the steps as fast as she could. She felt the burn wherever her skin touched the nasty stuff, but the pain didn’t linger. Once she was at the bottom, she slowly cut away a spot on the ground where she could lie down; she didn’t want to collapse into the web after she took the pill. The chair that Zoey sat unconsciously on was totally encased. It
made her look like a spider’s prey – all wrapped up in a pod and ready to eat.

  “I won’t think about that. I need to think about reversing the curse. Reverse the curse, reverse the curse, reverse the curse.”

  While flat on the ground, she took the pill and continued to whisper her rhyme. In a minute, she was in a coma-like state – and rewinding through all her experiences in Tuntre, the Beyond, and Zoey’s life on Earth.

  She woke up in full Viking warrior gear next to the World Tree. Based on what she recalled, she was back in the fake Asgard because of the warm sun and clean air.

  “So I start here and work my way backward to Tuntre. It makes sense, but it seems like this journey is going to take me forever!”

  Ingrid knew she couldn’t return to Tuntre via the Bifrost Bridge; she had to use the exact passage backward that her friends took and face the monsters they fought. She headed toward the hedge maze and found the hole they had gone through. Ingrid stepped gingerly onto the organic ladder and began the descent to the cave, hoping that going down would be easier than going up. She was thankful she didn’t have to start inside the tree tower and go past the room with all the blood or the spider; she knew that was all Loki’s creation to open up the portal to Valhalla, and this trip was about her reversing her own mental demons – not his.

  As she carefully climbed downward, she thought of both her life and Zoey’s life. It seemed they were both full of expectations not met which led to a warped perspective. For some reason, her memories of her life as Zoey were returning a little bit at a time, and she remembered certain instances that bruised her ego. There was the time Zoey tried for the cheerleading squad with Harlee and didn’t make it. Harlee was so excited about her own acceptance on the team that she didn’t realize how devastating it was for Zoey. Instead of moping, Zoey tried to show excitement for Harlee, and that only managed to make her friend think she was fine with the outcome.

  Then she tried to do something her friend never considered doing – Zoey auditioned for the main part in the school play. She ended up with a less significant part, and she knew that was because only a few people tried out and the director needed someone for the role. Ingrid remembered the isolated feelings that had invaded her. While Harlee was finding her own path in high school with Brian and her new circle of friends, Zoey became more of a loner. Harlee had always invited her to the cheerleaders’ social outings, but none of them wanted her there, so Zoey spent a lot of time by herself.

  Her biggest heartbreak was her secret crush on Brian before he had asked Harlee out. She never had the chance to tell her best friend about her infatuation. Harlee was always too busy with cheerleading practice, going to the games, and making posters for the sports teams. Yet when Brian, the hunky football player, asked Harlee out for the first time, Zoey was the first person Harlee told. By then, it was best for Zoey to keep her crush a secret, as the couple seemed totally enamored with each other. Of course, Harlee invited her along on some of their dates, but unlike the outings with the other cheerleaders, Zoey agreed to tag along to be near Brian. She was a sucker for agony, she had guessed, but at least Brian was kind to her and didn’t treat her like the obvious third wheel that she was.

  The list of her own inadequacies piled high in front of her as she lumbered down the rungs of the ladder. As a result of what she deemed her unforgivable failures, many of the things she told herself were negative in nature. She realized these were the things that had created the monsters in Tuntre and the Beyond.

  Through Ingrid’s labored breathing she told herself, “Somehow, I’m going to need to figure out how to change my perspective and turn my negatives into rainbows and unicorns.”

  She laughed and said, “Wouldn’t Stein love to hear me say that?”

  The laughter made her steps feel a little bit lighter, but as soon as she thought about Stein and her friends, she got gloomy again. It seemed to be natural to fall into that hopeless feeling. It took way more energy to be happy, but she was determined to not give up. Just as she thought the phrase, “I will not give up,” the ladder finally ended, and she had to jump slightly down to the cave’s floor.

  A slight twinge of pain jolted through her ankles from the landing, but it wasn’t enough to hinder her ability to walk. She tried to recall which direction her and her friends had come from, but in the end, she had to guess.

  It wasn’t long before Ingrid heard a hissing sound. It was louder than a regular garden snake, which she could barely hear back in her home when they appeared in the grass. The volume alerted her that it was a large reptile and probably the one she had turned into a stick the first time she was in the cave with her friends. She turned around to see the scary creature approach.

  “Ugh, not you again! I can’t imagine you into a stick this time. So why did my mind dream you up? Do you represent my failures, self-loathing, or desire to quit before I even try? Maybe you are that part of me that can’t get over betrayal.”

  The beast wasn’t slithering flat on the ground, but rather it was propped up like a cobra ready to attack. Ingrid grabbed the sword at her side and proceeded to swipe at the thing. She was glad the weapon was light in weight and seemed to be designed for her lack of muscles.

  “Maybe you represent a person in my life who really hurt me.” She kept slashing the air, trying to make contact with the thing. “Are you like Loki, the sneaky trickster who wound his way into my life and made me believe my writing was brilliant? Are you that one person who made me think that I might have some talent with my writing? Are you a symbol of the jerk that used and betrayed me?”

  Ingrid never managed to cut the snake before it changed into Loki right before her eyes. She gawped for a second, out of pure shock, then she asked, “What are you doing here?”

  Loki looked over his body and the surroundings, and then glared at Ingrid. “What am I doing here? I was having a grand old time pretending to be someone non-important on Freya’s vessel and then I found myself sucked into this virtual world of yours. Get me out of here!”

  Ingrid went up to Loki and punched him in the nose. He stumbled a little but managed to stay on his feet while blood dripped from his nose. “Ow, that hurt, you bi-”

  “Watch what you call me or I’ll do it again! That felt really good,” Ingrid said smugly. Then she got up into Loki’s face. “How dare you use me, you piece of garbage!”

  “I think you broke my nose.”

  “Good, you deserve it! Besides, can’t you just repair it with your ability to morph?” she asked snarkily, but then she noticed other bruises on his face and realized that they were from his fight with Stein. He also looked older, much closer to thirty, than when he pretended to be her friend.

  “No, I can’t! For some reason, you put me in this hideous place without any of my abilities. You need to undo this, and fast!”

  “I don’t need to do anything for you. I need to overcome my fears that created all of this in the first place so Freya’s ship doesn’t crash and I can return to being Zoey.”

  “What do I have to do with any of your warped thoughts?”

  “Besides the fact that you used them to create this place, I don’t know, but I’ve been going backwards on the journey I took with my friends to figure out how to undo all of this. I was thinking that I needed to understand what created the nightmares in the first place when the ginormous snake my friends and I had fought appeared. That caused me to wonder which one of my fears created the beast, and then I remembered your betrayal. You were like a sneaky snake telling me I was a good writer, and I believed you until I discovered that you only needed me to create your passage home. That caused me to feel worse about myself. Anyway, how did you manage to escape your cell on Freya’s ship?”

  Loki wiped the blood from his nose onto his sleeve. “My wife, Sigyn, bless her soul, came to our prison and figured out which Stein was her husband. You see, I have some tells that give away my identity if you know me well enough, and she has been my closest ally besides
Stein. She freed me, only for me to change into a bug and disappear from her. I didn’t want her to get into trouble for helping me escape, and I really don’t want to be married anymore.”

  “Why are you so horrible? Sigyn and Stein obviously love you – although that makes it clear that they are a little crazy.”

  “Yep, and I intend to make sure they realize that and leave me alone. I’m tired of them forgiving me and trying to keep me safe. I am a horrible person, and I should be left to my own destruction.”

  Ingrid sighed, “Stein alluded to something you did, but frankly, I’m too tired to care at the time. Your emotional dysfunctions are going to give me a headache.”

  “Well, it’s your fault I’m here.”

  “Freya said I had to reverse the web and that it was created from my own fears. You weren’t as much of a fear as a disappointment.”

  “If it makes you feel any better, it was never personal. I just found you an easy target to use since you didn’t have a lot of friends.”

  “No, that doesn’t make me feel any better. I think I have already had victory over one of my insecurities. Maybe when I’m less tired, I’ll resort back to my old self, but currently, I realize that I am worthy. I do have the ability to write, and if I ever get out of this nightmare, I’m going to compose a story on a regular computer that will help people safely escape in their minds – not in this dangerous virtual nightmare. The fact that the snake turned into you makes me think I already defeated my first demon.”

  “Great, now I’m a demon! Okay, so how do we get out of here?”

  “I don’t exactly recall the way out, but I figured I’ll just wing it. This is all my imagination anyway so we should be able to eventually find the exit to the Beyond.”

  “Oh no, I’m not going into the Beyond. That place will kill me.”

  “You don’t have to, but then you’ll be stuck in this cave.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense how I got forced into here. I’m not hooked up to any virtual reality machine.”