The Fountain of Youth

Chapter 17

Johild’s thoughts were racing as she listened to the men talking in the car. Once she’d heard the shocking news that her father had, in fact, been born in 1930, her next question was one for the grand prize. But for now, she waited to hear how her uncle had really died. It might explain her father’s hatred of outsiders.

“Jon found the circles first. To this day I’ll never understand why nobody ever realized that this mountain was one of the main vantage points from where the Brits dispatched their navy vessels. They used the radio towers similar to the Loran-C’s elsewhere in the island.” Gunnar frowned.

“So, nobody noticed the circles until 1969?” Heri asked him.

“No. At the time, the land belonged to a British colonel who’d married one of the Egholm girls,” he answered, referring to a local girl who’d been in school with them, Elsa Egholm. “The colonel had settled here in Hvalba with his Faroese wife. He tried to make it as a blacksmith or something, as far as I can recall. But then…then they came.”

Gunnar removed his beanie to wipe the ensuing tears that refused to be denied. For the first time since her previous outburst, Johild felt sorry for her dad. He caught his breath as the vivid memories badgered him. “You know,” he sniffed, “the biggest curse of not aging properly is the rampant regrets of bygone times pelting your heart. Make no mistake, I do understand how terrible illnesses like Alzheimer’s and dementia must be. But to be young for unnaturally long only means that you have a stronger memory to remind you of a longer timeframe of sorrow. More years of misery…to add to a mind that never forgets.”

“Fuckin’ hell,” Sam said. “That makes so much sense. Really, it makes me think twice about my desire to be young.”

“See? What did I tell you?” Heri gloated.

“Aye, you made your point. Gunnar just proved it irrefutable,” Sam replied back.

“Uncle, were they the people who killed Uncle Jon?” Heri asked Gunnar.

The old man nodded. “When the Scotsman told of them, when you mentioned those accursed words at the party — The Order of the Black Sun — I felt sick. I swore I’d never speak of them again and that if anyone else ever did, I would cut out their tongue.”

Sam swallowed hard. “Um, so, tell us what they came here for, Gunnar.”

“What do you think they came for, Sam? They were looking for the Fountain of Youth, for immortality. That fucking swine Himmler — it was another one of those twisted projects that he subjected civilians to. You see, when the Brits were stationed on the Faroe Islands during Operation Valentine, some of the soldiers married into the cultures here, just like this colonel who owned the patch of land later. Some of them wrote home about how beautiful it was here and how some parts of the islands have water that preserved the youth of those who drank it,” he recounted.

“So this is how you managed to stay young?” Johild finally spoke.

Her father shook his head and corrected her, “Not staying young. We didn’t defeat age, my sweetheart. We simply impeded it. How else would I pass for sixty-three when I bathed in the spring at forty years of age? I’ve aged, but at a delayed rate.”

“God, this stuff is riveting!” Sam raved softly. “Absolutely fascinating!”

“And it will stay riveting in secret, right Sam?” Heri put him on the spot.

“Aye,” Sam sighed.

“You would make journalistic history if you reported on something equivalent to the existence of God, wouldn’t you?” Johild jousted again.

“I would. In fact, it would be the biggest revelation in history. But I’m not stupid enough to share such a thing. Although my closest friends, much like me, would be overcome with awe at knowing that there was a way to deter aging, we are people who know that the human race should not be allowed to harness such a power. Ever. You can rest assured, pretty lassie, that I will never let the sick world out there abuse and exploit something so powerful.” Sam hoped that with this speech all of the distrusting ideas in their heads would be put to death once and for all.

“Pretty lassie,” Johild whispered condescendingly and rolled her eyes. Sam only smiled.

“As you were, Uncle Gunnar,” Heri urged. The vehicle was roaring up the slight slant of the road through the deserted waist of Suðuroy, making good time toward Grímsfjall’s hair-raising cliffs.

“Yes, so, the outside world unfortunately learned about the water the British soldiers found to be literally the water of life. Their longevity increased as their health held up. They knew it was no coincidence. As expected of normal, logical people, most Europeans who heard about the miraculous water treated it as a metaphor, you know? They thought it was just a way to say the cleaner air and fresh water was better than the sewers in Europe, right?”

“Yep, I’d have to agree. Something that perfect has to be impossible to most people,” Heri remarked as his pristine gray eyes followed the lines of the main road that ran through the island.

“But of course, with the million-and-one level of insanity Himmler and his SS imps possessed, they didn’t flinch at the idea at all. Instead, they sent their supernaturally minded ghost hunters to come here and investigate the claims. They sent a team of scientists from the Order of the Black Sun to harvest whatever was in the water the Brits had drilled for up on that mountain back in 1942.” Gunnar’s eyes held an empty stare while he relived that day. “And they came with a fishing trawler they’d hired, posing as journalists. Who do you think snapped that black and white picture that was used for the article, Sam? It was just our bad luck, me and Jon’s, to be there when those parasites showed up.”

The old man took a deep breath and carried on, hoping that the trauma would subside a little once he’d passed on the tale. “They asked us about all the British stations, pillboxes, even the monuments like Minnisvarðin, for God’s sake! Why would they think that magic water would flow out of a stone-carved, commemorative monument?”

“Need I remind you of the ludicrous madness they indulged in, Gunnar?” Sam asked.

Gunnar scoffed and looked amused. “You’re right, Scotsman. There was nothing they would not investigate, fucking Kraut demons. I remember Jon being completely engrossed with a woman who was with them, but her husband was with her and they couldn’t entertain their attraction.”

“Ooh, and was she worth the trouble?” Heri asked, lifting his chin to better see his uncle in the mirror.

“She would’ve been if she were alone. Beautiful, but sad. You could see by the way her husband treated her that she was probably his victim more than his lover. Poor woman. A Polish national, had a slight limp, but stunning to the eye she was. Her husband, Raymond, turned out to be one of the late Himmler’s golden boys, I found out later. You see, my brother and I didn’t know at the time that these people had actually been active during the Second World War! They looked our age, but they were a generation above us. Some even older!”

“Wait a minute,” Sam stopped him. “Are you telling me that they’d already used this water back in the War?”

Gunnar nodded. “They knew about this life force long before we ever did. I always figured that this was why they didn’t think it crazy to look for something like that here too. The Polish woman told Jon that they were on holiday from England, where they lived. She said she’d heard of historical sites where the fountain of youth ran from the stones. Naturally my brother had never heard of anything like that, so we laughed it off.”

“That sounds like a mistake,” Heri said.

“It was. It was a fatal mistake. After we took them up there they kept us there to camp with them, offering to let us use their trawler when we got down to Hvalba. That’s when we knew we were in trouble. That was the night Jon and I moved the rock for our tent and saw the glowing ground, but we just replaced it because it frightened us, you know?” Gunnar explained, sounding like a juvenile talking about a prom date. “When the brutes finally went to sleep the pretty woman snuck out to warn us that her organization would never leave us alive, whether they found the fountain or not. You see, their henchmen had unsuccessfully dug all day to find the spring, but the stones of the ruins were bone dry. No spring of life poured from a wet rock or whatever they’d imagined.”

“So the spring they were looking for was, in fact, the glowing ground you and your brother found?” Sam asked. Gunnar affirmed with a single nod. “But the Nazi blokes couldn’t see it in the daylight, I suppose.”

“Plus, it was hidden under a stone, so they wouldn’t have seen it anyway,” Johild chipped in. The others agreed with her. “Why didn’t you just flee, Papa?”

Gunnar’s eyes were heavily laden with emotion. “We tried. Once it was dark we ran away from the camp. But Jon went back to try and save the woman he’d fallen for, to bring her with us.” His words broke as his voice failed him. “Hiding a good distance away while I waited for Jon and the girl, I knew something was wrong when she screamed in the quiet tent. I listened to how my brother screamed during the first few blows, cussing and crying out in pain.”

The vehicle buzzed as the broken man recalled the moment of his brother’s death. There was not a word, nor a whimper, from any of the others listening to his dirge. Gunnar tried to be strong, but his nose was red as his eyes. Sobbing, he finished what he needed to tell them. He made up his mind to tell them everything, and from then on he would never speak a word about it again as long as he lived.

“I ran toward the tent, but it was far and I…I took t-too long to save him. The woman crawled from the tent, her face a bloody mess and through broken teeth sh-she mouthed at me the words… ‘he is dead,’” Gunnar forced. His body shook under the strain of his sorrow, but he spoke slowly in order to breathe in between words. “She waved wildly to tell me to run for my life. Th-they…they had beaten my brother to death with a stone…a s-stone…from that very site, and then those godless motherfuckers threw his body over the cliffs where fishermen found his shattered corpse four days later, floating in a churning rock pool at the base of the cliff.”

“Christ, Gunnar! I’m so sorry,” Sam said softly.

“I’m glad that I told you all the truth after all these years.” Gunnar sniffed and wiped his face with his beanie. Johild gave him a few tissues from her bag.

“Now I know why you hate journalists more than I do,” she concluded, just as Heri’s car slowed down, approaching the last few hundred meters to the rising crest of the very site where Gunnar’s tale was set.