The Fountain of Youth

Chapter 20

Heri was the last one to step out of the car when they reached the cursed place where, in 1969, his uncles had shared their last night together before one was taken from this earth by the cruel greed of occult-obsessed SS officers. Sam and Johild walked together a few feet behind old Gunnar to allow him some privacy during such an emotional moment. They walked slowly and Heri caught up with them.

“Sam, you’re not going to tell anyone about this, right? I’m just making sure, because I don’t want my cousin here to tell me she told me so after you betray my trust,” he asked Sam sincerely.

“On my mother’s life, Heri,” was all Sam replied and that was all he had. Fortunately, Heri accepted that out of hand.

“So you’re really going to keep all this to yourself?” Johild asked skeptically.

“Aye, but I will show my two friends I told you about,” Sam reminded her.

She looked at Heri. “I don’t like it.”

“Look, Sam, if this gets out, those bastards who murdered my uncle right in front of his brother will return. And who knows which of us will end up being their victims this time, you know? I can’t let that happen, as you must understand,” Heri told the journalist.

“I understand. Would you feel better about it if I left the cameras in your car?” Sam asked.

The two cousins exchanged glances, considering the offer. Heri moved closer to Sam and gently put his hand on the camera, pressing it downward. “As a matter of fact, that’s probably the only way you will leave these islands, my friend.”

“Really?” Sam gasped. “You would kill me for this secret?”

“Or keep you here forever,” Johild said, only realizing how affectionately promising it sounded after Sam raised an eyebrow and nodded in acceptance.

“Put it away, Sam. You can know the secret, but you can’t have evidence,” Heri said, making sure the Scotsman heard his ultimatum. “Look at him over there. Look at him.”

Sam looked at Gunnar’s large frame, wilting and slow in his sorrow where he stood. He was waiting for the young ones, but he didn’t turn to see how close they were. He just wanted to stand up there in the icy gusts of Grímsfjall, alone with the spirit of his brother who was thrown from these very cliffs. Gunnar was quiet, but his heart had much to say. When the others joined him he sniffed and said, “There, about fifty meters off, is where we found the Empty Hourglass.”

“Is that the name you gave it?” Johild asked her father. He nodded and even smiled a little.

“That’s what it looked like to us when we stood up on the edge of the cliff and looked down toward it. Little did I know at the time that it didn’t resemble an hourglass, yet served a similar purpose. The fact that it was empty was like a poem, you know, a poem about a magical timekeeper without sand. Where time did not pass, no matter on what side of it you were,” he mused with a smile. “The glorious glow of the narrow part was really the portal between the time we have and the time we lose, just as it’s a passage for the sand to fall through to measure time,” he philosophized.

Gunnar took a deep breath, as if he wished to breathe in his brother’s ever-present essence. “They left the next afternoon, not having found anything. Those Nazi pigs! When the commando men and the police came up here they played the same game of deceit, saying they were just tourists, journalists who wanted to see the historical sites. By that time my brother was only missing and all I had was my word, see?”

“Aye, they’d have no reason to detain them and the sons of bitches knew it. You didn’t come back with the police?” Sam asked.

“No. I was advised to keep away until they had proof that these people were involved, but of course, the rock they had killed Jon with was lying at the bottom of the currents long before the sun even came up that day,” Gunnar said as Sam shook his head in disbelief. Gunnar looked him up and down. “Where is your camera, Scotsman?”

Heri stood up proudly. “I forbade him to bring it up here. Whatever you want to show us tonight, you can show us, but there will be no proof of its existence.”

“That takes a lot of pressure off my heart, I must say. Sam, thank you for that,” the old man said.

Heri and Johild looked at Sam with reprimanding looks of victory. They had defeated the will of the snooping Scotsman, welcome as he was, for challenging the discretion of the matter.

“You’re welcome, Gunnar.” Sam smiled and gave the two cousins a mocking look. “I told you that you could trust me.”

“Come, I’ll show you the place where the two circular ruins meet. But you know, I haven’t been here in many, many years. I have no idea if the glowing pool is still here.”

“So it’s a pool?” Johild asked.

“Yes, the mine shaft the British erected here apparently filled up with underground water from the mountain, forming a subterranean pool. The shaft previously connected the two structures.”

“And the colors on Sam’s picture?” Heri asked.

“Those were present in the water when I returned a week after my brother was killed. My brother’s best friend’s father was what would today be called the local police chief. When he went out to question the SS officers, he told them that I’d fallen from the cliff while running away in the night and that my body was found in the bay. Smart man. He knew they’d kill me if they knew I was still alive.” He smiled.

“And they bought it,” Sam said, smiling. “Lucky for you.”

“Imagine how strange it was for me to run into that same woman in 1985 when she returned with a new pack of dogs? She was older then, but not nearly looking her age. I think she recognized me from back then, but said nothing,” Gunnar recalled. “But that time she said she was a dance teacher from England named…um, let me think, she called herself uh, Cotswald. Yes! Now I remember. She was Mrs. Cotswald. Maybe she got sick of the Himmler hound beating her up and married a Brit.”

“Well, seeing what she was involved in, I would wish that hound had rather beaten her to death, actually,” Johild grunted. “She could have helped you and Uncle Jon, Papa.”

“But she did,” Sam interjected. “She warned them, didn’t she? And why wouldn’t she acknowledge recognizing your father when she saw him again, if she were so evil?”

“You’re protecting a Nazi bitch whose pals killed my family, Sam,” she retorted. “Don’t protect someone’s reputation against my ill wishes until you think about who she really was.”

Heri could feel the tension mount between the journalist and his cousin again. Gunnar agreed with Sam to an extent, but he wasn’t about to inflame his daughter’s wrath again, not here where his brother’s memory was sacred.

“So, Uncle, do you think that glowing pool will still be here?” Heri asked out of curiosity and for the sake of peace between Johild and Sam.

Gunnar shrugged positively. “I don’t know, but Sam took that picture less than a week ago.”

“Remember, that was just a light anomaly above the spot. It wasn’t a pool — just a bunch of rocks when I investigated,” Sam explained about the night he took the picture above the Empty Hourglass.

“It’s almost dark,” Heri reported, his clear gray eyes surveying the skies and the dying light. “We’ll know soon enough.”

While they sat vigil at the virtually invisible ruin, waiting for the lights to appear, Sam took advantage of the time to find out a bit more about the anomaly he’d snapped with his Canon a few nights before.

“Heri, I saw your books on science and physics at home. You must have some theory on what this is?” Sam asked.

“Astrophysics is my thing, yes,” Heri attested. “But this might be celestial, or at least atmospheric in nature. What would baffle me, though, was if these lights were under the water. So first we have to see if that shaft is still filled with water. If those lights ascend from it, I’ll be thoroughly perplexed.”

Gunnar laughed. It was a dissociative chuckle that sounded like the mocking of someone who knew when others did not. But he hadn’t intended it that way. He was just letting out the juvenile excitement of a boy about to show his friends something awe-inspiring.

“Why can’t you young people just enjoy it for what it is?” he asked with a smile. “Why do you have to analyze and study everything to debunk the magic of the beauty we live in?”

Johild smiled, hooking her arm into her father’s. “I agree with you, Papa.”

“There’s no such thing as magic, Uncle Gunnar. We don’t take things at face value in the name of God anymore,” Heri explained passionately. “The world has evolved into thinking individuals who study and examine things within the scientific spectrum to prove that all things deemed miracles are justified by science. No more do we allow emotion and miracles to steer us and influence our decisions.”

“No,” Gunnar replied indifferently, “your generation is so engrossed by your scientific theories, to claim knowledge previously privy only to gods, that you neglect to understand that miracles and magic are but the manifestation of wondrous scientific principles. We all know that our world is governed by science, Heri, but to be so rigid in proving magical things a farce is in direct contradiction of living — truly living and enjoying the strangeness, instead of trying to debunk everything that is still wonderful in nature.”

Heri sank his head. Of course he disagreed, even just for the use of the words ‘miracle’ and ‘magic.’ But he partly fathomed what his uncle meant. He was perceptive enough to see that Gunnar knew the reality of the anomaly, but chose to see its existence as magical. The forty-three-year-old nephew of old Gunnar elected to accept his uncle’s need to dream and to believe that such things, such as color phenomena under water, were possible.

“Look!” Johild exclaimed. “Is this just psychosomatic of me that I just want to see what my dad is talking about?”

They all got to their feet. Gunnar and Heri looked around them to make sure that there were no other witnesses around them.

“Clear,” Heri said.

“As if anybody could come for a walk on a hilltop in this bloody cold!” Sam shivered.

“Scotland is colder, isn’t it?” Johild asked mockingly.

Sam leered at her over the collar he’d pulled up to cover his mouth and nose. “Usually, but with the wind chill of your heart, Jo, these islands can grow colder than the Arctic.”

“Oh darling, I only make it cold to give you an excuse for the obvious lack of endowment you no doubt sport under those layers of clothing,” she hit back.

“Whoa!” Sam gasped, stunned. “That was a really good one!”

Heri followed his uncle, who had started toward the higher slope of the mountainside. In passing he sighed at Sam and Johild. “Get a room already, you two. I can smell the sex from a mile away.”