Mark Chadbourn - The Burning Man

‘You can be quiet now.’

‘And you can take that gun you’ve got tucked away and shove it up your-’

Hunter pushed open the door to the back rooms to reveal the barman lying butchered in one corner. It looked as if he’d been attacked with an axe.

Laura glanced away. ‘Well, Shavi is going to be pissed off.’

‘Nice show of compassion. Very endearing.’

Hunter noted there was only one door leading down to what he presumed was the cellar.

Laura followed his gaze. ‘Why would you want to go down there?’

‘The other one might still be alive.’

‘I thought Church was the one who did the right thing.’

‘You really don’t know me. I’m a sensitive soul underneath this sexy and charismatic exterior.’

A flight of wooden steps led down into the dark cellar. The only sound was a distant creaking. Hunter flicked the light switch and a single bare bulb came on somewhere out of sight. It was barely enough to hold back the shadows. The creaking grew louder when they reached the foot of the stairs.

Rounding into the main area of the cellar, they saw the bearded drinker hanging by his neck from an oily rope attached to a hook in a beam. He was naked. His body was covered with runes cut into the skin with a sharp knife. Laura pressed a hand over her nose and mouth to keep out the salty butcher’s shop smell. Hunter first made sure the rest of the cellar was empty, then examined the body.

‘Ritual marks,’ he said. ‘Don’t know how they could have been carved so quickly.’

‘Because time doesn’t mean anything here. It’s like a bit of the Other-world has crossed over. Those runes — they look Viking.’

‘You’ve seen them before?’

‘I belong to an environmental group — Earth First. A couple of blokes in my chapter are Odinists. They’ve got those runes tattooed on their chests.’

Hunter tried to make sense of the markings. ‘Patterns,’ he mused.

‘What?’

‘Everywhere. Patterns. Numbers — five. Names. Symbols. Systems. All of them repeating.’ He paused thoughtfully. ‘Almost as if they were programmed in.’

‘When you’ve got your head out of your arse, can we actually turn our attention to who did this?’

The eyes of the hanged man snapped open, the whites crimson with broken blood vessels. Laura leaped back with a curse.

‘You woke them,’ the corpse said in heavily accented English. ‘You crossed into their Great Dominion. You woke them!’ It thrashed its legs around in fury, the ligature biting into its neck, the eyes bulging.

Hunter unconsciously stepped in front of Laura to protect her. ‘All right — slightly weird, but here we go. Who did this to you?’

A sickening laugh rattled in the hanging man’s constricted throat. ‘He will get you next. They all will!’

The eyes snapped shut and the animation left the body. The creaking rope gradually stilled.

‘I hate this life,’ Laura said.

Hunter grabbed her hand and hauled her towards the stairs. ‘We have to find the others. ‘“They all will”,’ he said. ‘How many of them are here?’

As Shavi and Tom entered the lounge, they realised Hunter and Laura were no longer where they had been. The haunting atmosphere grated on senses attuned to the Otherworldly.

‘What do you see?’ Shavi asked.

‘Nothing. I can’t move beyond this moment. You?’

Shavi felt the alien eye squirming in his head with a life of its own, but no images flashed into his mind. ‘This does not feel like the Army of the Ten Billion Spiders.’

Cautiously, they moved from the frosted lounge up the wide pine stairs to the first floor. Their rooms were on the second, but they were stopped in their tracks by thick greenery. Along the walls of the corridor stretched branches of fir and juniper, their resinous aroma heavy in the air. Ivy hung from the ceiling and dense moss obscured the floor.

‘Laura?’ Shavi said.

Tom snorted. ‘She barely knows what she’s capable of doing.’

‘I think whatever did this expects us to venture in there. That would be a mistake.’

‘For once one of you lot speaks some sense.’ Tom moved towards the next flight of stairs.

Before Shavi could follow he was gripped by a honeyed feeling rising from his groin. A night with his boyfriend Lee, shortly before Lee’s death, eased from his memory. Sensual, warm, gentle touches growing harder. Then a shiver of remembrance from a time before, an older woman kissing him deeply, embracing him between her thighs. And then he was enveloped in sex with Laura beneath the summery stars of a Glastonbury sky. He loved her. He loved them all.

His erection was hard, his heart pounding. Desire flooded through him, swamping all other thoughts. He walked into the corridor where alien, powerfully scented blooms were now sprouting. The moss was soft and soothing beneath his feet.

‘Where are you going, you bloody idiot?’ Tom called.

The distant voice was a distraction that Shavi ignored. Amongst the vegetation, his arousal became even more intense. He was vaguely aware of Tom grabbing his arm and trying to drag him back, until the grip was relinquished as Tom also fell under the spell. Side by side, they progressed along the corridor until they were deep in the scent of pine and flowers, and there was no sign of the hotel.

Rounding a corner, they came upon a cool grove in which a woman stood. Her features swam, but long before they settled into an image of ravishing beauty, both Shavi and Tom knew she was the most sexually attractive woman they had ever seen. Long, golden hair cascaded past her shoulders. Her lips were full and parted in a teasing smile. She wore a semi-transparent white dress, belted at the hips, that revealed and then hid the figure beneath.

‘I see the blue light in you.’ Her voice was low and warm. ‘Strange trespassers, indeed.’

‘Who are you?’ Shavi asked.

‘I live in the ice and the fire, in the roar of battle and the silence of the bedroom, in the pulse of the blood, in forests, in passion.’ She looked from Shavi to Tom, pleased with her control over them. ‘Those of your kind called me Freyja, once of the Vanir, now of the Aesir.’

‘Freyja,’ Tom repeated. Shavi felt his companion struggling. Why fight? Tom thought. Why not give in to the sensual delight?

‘For so long we have slept in the Halls of the Dead,’ she said. ‘But now you have woken us. What made you think you could enter our Great Dominion unbidden?’

‘They are Brothers and Sisters of Dragons.’ Tom’s voice was small, wavering. ‘Champions of Existence. They go where they please.’

Shavi found her laughter even more arousing. But Tom’s resistance had cast a shadow upon the golden world that now existed inside him. ‘If … if we should have asked your permission to come here, then I apologise,’ Shavi said hesitantly. ‘But our safe passage is imperative. We are on a mission of the greatest importance.’

Freyja came closer, and closer still, moving her lips to within a fraction of an inch from Shavi’s cheek, smelling his musk. It was all he could do to contain the heat rising in him.

‘A Brother of Dragons,’ she mused. ‘So you fight for the World Serpent, which is curled around Midgard with its tail in its mouth?’

‘Yes,’ Shavi breathed.

‘It is said that the World Serpent will burst forth at Ragnarok,’ she whispered. ‘Are these the End-Times? Is that why we have been woken?’

‘It is.’ The flint in Tom’s voice shocked Shavi. ‘Loki has already joined the Enemy.’

Freyja recoiled. ‘That sly, malignant trickster? Are you lying, old man?’

‘It is true,’ Shavi said.

Freyja considered the information. ‘This deserves our attention. But that does not alter the severity of your transgression.’ Her smile grew darker.