The Quest for Valhalla

Chapter 29

It was evening in Thurso. The picturesque steeples disappeared in the soft thickness that slowly descended upon the coastal town as night enfolded its merry streets and frigid beaches. Close to the western head of the grand landscape, Sam, Nina, and their friends moved into a smallholding owned by a friend of Alex’s. It consisted of a circle of small structures, built around a huge fire pit near one of the small inlets where the ocean could secretly impose and spread its beautiful saline fragrance late at night when the tide exhaled a crisp breeze onto the land.

While Erika prepared The Brotherhood and the riders of Sleipnir for their mission, Gunnar had a look at Nina’s wound. Every time his eyes caught the Tiwaz rune his wife’s arm used to bear, his heart would ache just a little, urging him more to take action and fuelling the vengeful flame he kept burning like a pilot light.

He sat her down at the dining room table and she placed her arm on the embroidered table cloth. In the background bustle of the club members outside, roaring, toasting, and eating around the bonfire, Nina embraced the odd feeling of freedom, entwined with a persisting nudge of terror for what her life had evolved to in the past few weeks. It felt as if she was living another life altogether. Looking at the giant calloused hands of Gunnar Joutsen, who had decided against the advice of his brethren to accompany Sam and Nina alone to Valhalla, she realized that she would never be as safe as she was right now.

From nowhere, Sam sank down beside her and she could not help but smile. The two men flanked her with care and friendship, an emotional warmth she never got from Purdue — not even in most intense throes of passion. She regretted nothing, as her relationship with the billionaire was a means to an end, but she did lament the lack of closeness. It was something which had always eluded her, no matter how deeply in love she was. But Sam, her trusty old friend and confidant, object of her affection of late, was the only man who ever exuded that protective favor she craved and made no secret that it was intended specifically for her.

“How are you holding up, Dr. Gould?” he teased.

“I’m doing great, thank you, Mr. Cleave. Manage to stay upright for a whole two hours, I see,” she snapped playfully, referring to the two fainting spells Sam suffered during his tattooing session. He had neglected as a show of pride to share his terrible fear of needles with them and subsequently passed out when he dared look in the wall mirror. Seeing Eldard pressing the pulsing needle into his back unnerved him and reminded him of the aversion he had for silver hole-makers. The only productive thing he could boast was his visions.

Sam shook his head and wiped back his black tresses, a look of willing defeat gracing his countenance. Then he whispered, “I’ll never live it down, will I?”

Gunnar smiled at the jest as he carefully removed the bandage to see what kind of wound the historian had hidden under the light brown stains on the bloody wrapping. As he peeled it away, she winced from the pain where the fabric had settled into the coagulated blood of the wound and hitched on the stitches.

“Sorry, love,” Gunnar apologized without ceasing his tugging, but Nina felt Sam’s hand wrap around her other hand, comforting her.

“Good god, it hurts like fuck!” she moaned through her teeth with her eyes pinched tightly.

“Almost done,” the big biker soothed in deliberately subdued tone. “Sam, I hate to say this, but you have to see if you can produce more revelations tonight. Regensburg is full of historical landmarks. I need you to see if you can find something in your visions to narrow down what we are looking for, you see?”

Sam nodded, “I reckon if I pick a fight with Jimmy or Rolar, I’d get us to Valhalla in one go, hey?” Nina and Gunnar laughed at his masochistic enthusiasm. The two members he referred to dwarfed most specimens short of WWE heavyweight wrestlers. They would certainly deal him a pummeling he would not survive.

“No, one of the ladies from The Brotherhood should do the trick,” Nina remarked as she sucked in air through her clenched jaws when the last part of the bandage tore free from the wound.

“On that note,” Sam’s boyish interest came to the fore again, “will pleasure perhaps give me the same effect as pain?” Nina looked at him in amusement and shook her head. “You know, just in case I feel the need to get some… extra information…”

Gunnar chuckled heartily, “I don’t know, brother, you could give it a try. Right now we’ll take any help we can get. But the ladies will not be here much longer, so you had better get to it.”

Nina’s eyes pierced Sam’s. She did not have to voice her envious protest for him to know she secretly agreed to be his guinea pig, should he decide to test the theory. He knew this and reveled in it.

“It’s uncanny. Look at this,” Gunnar noted as he turned the inside of Nina’s forearm upwards. Lita’s medical fiends had carved perfect circle on the arm of their limp patient, just deep enough to reach the threshold between tissue and dermis. It appeared that the disc of skin was removed and later placed back like the lid of a jar. What lay beneath was unknown, but from what Gunnar managed to ascertain by some painful scrutiny, it was not anything solid, not any kind of implant that he could detect.

“It looks like their fucking symbol. How sick are these bastards?” Sam cringed from the clearly reminiscent carving of the Black Sun sigil in Nina’s skin. A distraught Nina wailed in agony as Gunnar pressed down upon the tender flesh not yet mended underneath. Sam had to turn his eyes away from the grotesque sight of the fleshy lid shifting ever so lightly over the tissue below as Gunnar’s finger tested its elasticity. Nina caught her breath with great effort, folding her small body in Sam’s embrace as she grew faint from the painful experiment. She panted heavily, her eyes closed to focus on composure, but it was clear that she was losing the battle against the pressing darkness of the pain-induced disorientation.

“I cannot find anything that implies a tracking device or any hardware under this,” Gunnar revealed evenly as if he was conducting an autopsy. He looked at the waning consciousness of Sam’s friend, pale-faced and whimpering in the journalist’s embrace and he realized that he was causing Nina a thorough torturing. “I’m sorry, love. I don’t think we’ll pry any further, okay?” he nodded to Sam who was running his hand sympathetically over Nina’s hair.

“Tomi! Can you get us a metal detector type device? Like soon. Hopefully within the next two hours?” Gunnar asked the techno wizard of Sleipnir who was nursing a bottle of beer and a turkey leg on the porch of the cottage.

“On it, brother!” came the answer through a mouth stuffed with food.

“Right, Sam, get Nina to get some rest while I meet with my family outside to make sure everything is a go. Then see if you can induce more visions,” Gunnar ordered as he raised his powerful frame from the chair and tossed Sam a bankie filled with green.

“Smoke up, brother! If that don’t work, Gunnar will be beating the shit out of you to get that dream center working, aye?” one of the passing Sleipnir boys laughed, slapping Sam hard on the back.

As Sam laid Nina down on the bed in the dimly lit bedroom, something was amiss. How could there be nothing under that patch of skin? Why would they go through such a procedure if there was nothing to plant? Then again, with their reputation for unorthodox practices far beyond the reach of logic, he would not be surprised at anything they came up with. He looked at Nina lying on the bed. Her body was rigid in its position where she lay on her back, hands folded over her stomach. He could hardly hear her breathe, and only the heaving of her chest and stomach eased his concern.

In the gaining darkness of the evening, he fixed his eyes on her in the bright firelight from the column of flames the bonfire outside yielded. Even in the warm yellow glow, the skin of her face was frightfully wan, and it was not from her fainting spell alone. His instincts told him that there was more to her condition than the dizziness of raw pain. Shaking his head, Sam sighed and took a ceremonial athame from one of the small tables in the corner, hidden by the shadows of night. He turned to face the petite woman on the bed and whispered, “Don’t worry, Nina, I will make sure we get there as soon as possible. You don’t know it, and I am only guessing, but they did something sinister to you. I don’t know what it is, but your pretty little face is a testament to some or other deadly fate and I don’t like it one bit.”

With those words Sam pressed the bent silver blade down on the skin of his chest. It hurt, but it was bearable. Sam had never been one for self-mutilation, but he could see his beloved Nina’s condition deteriorate by the hour and although he kept it to himself, the grim truth was waving at her from her face every time he looked at her. He pressed the point deeper, but the skin did not even break yet before he could take no more agony.

“Jesus, you’re a sissy,” he said to himself. “Just go and start a fight with the boys outside.”

Sam scoffed as he threw the knife back on the pile of steel and silver where it landed with a clang to rejoin the mangled orgy of war razors. “But first, some stress relief,” he sniffed and pulled an abused pack of Marlboro’s from his pocket, flicking a fag in between his pursed lips in one skilled motion. He sat down carefully on the bed corner, minding his weight and movement so that he would not disturb Nina.

The ascending billows of blue smoke curled and shape shifted as Sam breathed into the ambience of the beautiful, shimmering light that pulsed lazily upon the frosted window of the room. Deep thoughts came with the smoke, its shamanist thrall invoking Sam’s dormant spirit, the thing he buried most when he had to reason or present facts. This time he allowed it to rise and speak. After all, nobody was here. No-one needed him to be level-headed and logical here and now. It would be his little secret that he nurtured his scorned side for once. He thought of the connotations between history and myth. Between his own research, Nina’s eagerly related historical accounts, and what he had experienced since joining the company of The Brotherhood, he had to admit that there was more to Norse mythology than just old bearded gods with horned helmets.

With all his quite recent adventures involving the Nazi organizations and their nefarious pursuits, Sam had learned to dig deeper into the origins of matters he used to brush off as plain racism or cultural genocide. All those symbols the Nazis enjoyed to flaunt so much, and all free cultures learned to fear and hate, originated from a far more honorable heritage and those true Germanic peoples who wished to honor their old heathen gods in the modern age, were thus constantly harassed as Nazis. Sam used to be one of those ignorant rat’s asses who, without proper investigation, cried ‘racist’ or ‘Nazi’ whenever anyone wore a Swastika or the equally infamous SS-lightning symbols, once borne upon the uniforms of coldblooded killers.

Now he had discovered that these sigils were only adopted by Hitler and his animals to promote their Aryan heritage, of all things, claiming to be direct descendants of the mighty Norse god Odin. This was where the corruption cracked through a valorous and proud culture and reduced its renowned signs to repulsive marks of tyranny and hatred. Through his scrutiny of its origins, Sam learned that the Swastika, also called gammadion, was one of Thor’s representations of thunder, that the ‘SS’ depicted lightning. Further research even showed him that the Swastika was used in Buddhist and Hindu scriptures as a sacred symbol denoting luck or wellness, long before the infamous Austrian defiled it with his regime of terror and prejudice. It was a new age for Sam Cleave. His once rigid trademarks had been shattered by an uninvited awakening, not only in his appearance, but in his approach to information, his perception of things. What the old Sam may have seen as a square line drawing, the new Sam would endeavor to give a walk around to discover that it was a cube, multi-dimensional with depth.

Immersed in thought, Sam’s hand dropped inadvertently and the blazing ash of the cigarette singed the soft hair on his arm before kissing the vulnerable skin underneath.

“FUCK!” he screamed and jumped up at the blistering sensation that spread casually through his nerve endings like a good bourbon. An agonizing, excruciating, good bourbon, that is. He stepped madly on the demon butt to extinguish its audacity and its heat before the room faded suddenly. At first, Sam thought it was the shadows; that perhaps the bonfire outside the window had been doused, but he saw Nina sit up just before she too, vanished into a white haze of oblivion.

Before him, he saw the vision reveal its details to him, like a picture embraced by snow white smoke and white noise. It was a massive building with arches and columns made from marble. A low, wide triangle sat atop the linear family of grooved pillars, sculpted within the pediment borders were human figures, but Sam could not see what they were depicted doing. At the base of the white building there were what he thought were overlapping stairways or folding walls.

As he called out what he was seeing, he vaguely sensed more people around his corporal self and Nina’s voice echoed somewhere among them, far off in the real world. He could hear male voices repeating what he was reporting, as if they needed him to venture further into the waking walk of his mind. They reminded him of a band of college guys chanting for him to down an insurmountable amount of alcohol in a ridiculously tall glass.

“Okay, okay,” he said, his eyes stiff in their sockets and staring ahead, blind to the world he was standing in, but guide in another. “It looks like the Parthenon… in Athens,” Sam exclaimed with his arms outstretched before him, his fingers fanning to pry and probe the unseen world before him. He frowned, waited. Then he stepped backward, but Alex and Gunnar simultaneously grabbed him before he could stub his heels and fall through the obscured old glass of the window.

“What is it, Sam?” Nina asked curiously, but her voice was void of its usual beaming zest.

“H-h… horses?” Sam stuttered and blinked hard a few times as if to clarify what he thought he beheld. But there they were, clear as the building they were galloping through. White, brown, and black horses, perhaps a hundred of them, were storming through the seemingly endless hallways which ran stretched with wall to one side and a uniform row of gigantic marble-like columns to the other. Then the horses, like the endless and identical pillars of the temple, formed a single file and became only two. One horse bore a crown on its head, the other not. As the entranced journalist described the vision, while Alex, Nina, and Gunnar took note of where this place could be — where horses crossed majestic white halls unperturbed, where their chaotic clapping of hooves could unite into a steady gallop of only eight legs reverberating through the enormous galleries of busts and plaques.

“Busts and plaques?” Nina gasped laboriously, her face pallid and moist, fringed by wet curls. Her eyes were blacker than usual now, encircled by darkened skin. She looked drained and ill, but her spirit was strong. She looked frail but smiled like a ninth grader know-it-all when she informed them, “It’s the Walhalla Memorial near Regensburg! A memorial site in Bavaria!” With great effort, her dainty hands pressed on the bed to help her rise to her feet and after she composed her stature upon weakened legs Nina announced, “Gentlemen, we are going to Germany.”