Tomb of Odin

Chapter 11

When Nina, Sam, and Purdue arrived at Wrichtishousis they had to cower under the tarp Purdue kept in the back of his 4x4 for little unforeseen moments just like this. They raced toward the side door because Purdue’s remote control for the garage door had no effect.

“Maintenance lagging because of your priorities, Purdue?” Sam teased.

But Purdue wasn’t paying attention to Sam’s remark. He was genuinely perplexed with the failing device and spent a good thirty seconds scrutinizing the thing.

“It shouldn’t be doing this,” he told Sam and Nina. The mechanics of the garage door were fine when we left here.”

“Oh, shit, I hope it is not doing this because of tampering, if you know what I mean,” Nina said, looking out both windows to see if she could see anything out of the ordinary.

“I don’t think so,” Purdue replied. “I haven’t pissed anyone off in the past few months.”

“There is an expiry time on grudges?” Sam asked, looking jokingly impressed. “Good to know. Very good to know.”

The men still had not told Nina why they needed her advice and her knowledge as a historian. However, she was still experiencing traumatic visions and nightmares, which she elected to keep to herself for fear of being regarded as paranoid or worse, being committed for some schizophrenic or delusional disorder. There simply was not time for psychoanalytic bullshit and she chalked it up to shock.

Purdue had a quick chat with his security people while Sam and Nina went into the house. They dropped their luggage in the living room to the left where the empty hearth was a picture of depressing desolation. Without waiting for an invitation, Sam gathered some logs from the iron basket contraption Purdue had designed. It served as a heavy duty Pez dispenser for wood and Sam opened the small bottom gate of the storage unit to get more after he stacked the first lot in the fireplace.

“Bloody inept lot, this,” Purdue grunted as he came in, shaking the rain from his stringy fair hair.

“Who?” Nina asked, as she passed Sam another log while he tried to get the little tongues of fire under the wood to consume the twigs he used for fuel.

“My security. Can you believe that when they parked their vehicle in the third garage, they left the keys in the car? So the bloke’s house keys were in the cubby. Now he needed the car keys, which had the garage door remote attached to get to the house keys, etc., etc. And these are the people I pay to watch over a mansion full of… well, all kinds of expensive things.”

“Things like the thing you discovered in the head of your brand new ornament,” Sam mentioned between puffs on the fire to urge it over the crackling sticks.

“Aye, I want to know what you dragged me here for,” Nina said enthusiastically. “I’m curious. You haven’t told me anything yet!”

“Let me show you,” Purdue smiled warmly, holding out his hand to her. With Sam in tow, the two of them walked along the side corridor Purdue used to get to the basement, an offshoot from the actual hallway that split from this one in the doorway of the kitchen. It was a gradual descent laid in concrete and grit that had good grip for shoes, but was smooth enough to use as a ramp for heavier objects to be wheeled.

“Why did you need me for this?” she asked again. Nina stopped in her tracks and with a weary expression and a lower tone she sighed, “Is it Nazi memorabilia?”

The two men just looked at her, waiting for her to start walking again.

“Oh, God, you two are going to be the death of me still,” she moaned as she continued down the well-lit corridor. For a brief moment Nina could see the similarities between this place and the dreaded tunnel where she first encountered the yeti men, but she was not going to let Sam and Purdue know that.

“I found this inside the head of the crucifix monument I bought,” Purdue told her as he punched in the code of the vault, before drawing his freehand recognition symbol on the silver square of the massive door.

“Where is the crucifix then?” she asked.

“Thor broke it,” Sam answered sincerely. Nina gave him that look of amusement he always got when he was taking the piss out of something, but he looked down at her and nodded seriously.

“Do explain,” she smiled.

“It was struck by lightning, Nina. And it was obliterated halfway through, unfortunately,” Purdue explained.

“What did you expect? A heathen god will not tolerate a Christian symbol in a Scottish garden. Are you daft?” she chuckled, and Sam joined in.

“You do know that Scotland was invaded by Thor’s worshippers long before the advent of Christianity around Britain, right? What was the appeal of the cross?” she asked.

“It is a replica of a famed monument in Estonia, apart from the materials it was fashioned from. So we think it was deliberately made to look like the War of Independence Victory Column, to serve as a clue to the location of what we found inside,” Sam enlightened Nina in an extended sentence fraught with information, as only an investigative journalist could.

“Estonia’s War of Independence?” Nina asked, giving it some thought. She took a moment to recall what she knew about it, but then she shook her head slowly, “That war was during the First World War, boys. It wouldn’t have anything to do with German history as far as I know.”

She pondered it while watching Purdue unlock another silver-colored box the size of a catering fridge. Again the images of the cryogenic containers and freezers from the Himalayan dig site darted into her mind. Her memory yielded the underground vacant room from which she had to purloin the generator for the yeti men. Nina inhaled deeply while Purdue opened the lid with Sam’s assistance. She could once again smell the machine room, the mountain water odor mingled with the decay of the tunnels.

“There it is,” Purdue said proudly.

Inside the box there was a crumpled heap of tarp just like that of Purdue’s truck, cradling the eleven-link golden chain. Nina gasped, her big, dark eyes widening at the awesome piece before her. Her mouth hung open as she bent over the box to touch it lightly.

“It was inside the cross you bought from…?” she asked.

“A relic dealer,” Sam said.

Nina looked up at Purdue and Sam with a surprised leer, “And? A relic dealer from where? How old is he? Where did he procure this piece? Need I ask more obvious questions?”

“I bought it from one Jari Koivusaari, whom I was referred to by Professor McClaine at the British Museum. He inherited it from the artist, whose name he did not share with me. Then I had it shipped from Finland,” Purdue explained. “Why? Can you make any sense of it all?”

Nina was quiet, almost pressing her face against the chain as she examined the gilded surface that was roughly cast. The thunder clapped in the skies over Wrichtishousis, prompting Sam and Nina to jerk slightly.

“That was a big one,” Purdue remarked, as the heavens rumbled.

“If Thor ever had a necklace, I imagine this would be the approximate size of it, eh?” Sam marveled. Purdue nodded in agreement. “If one was so inclined, one could very well measure the size of the thunder god by the size of this artifact.”

“Not Thor,” Nina noted, while unshakably engrossed in her scrutiny.

“I was being facetious,” Sam told her.

“Odin.”

The two men glared at each other with inquisitive fascination. Nina uttered the word with sincere certainty. Sam shrugged.

“Why Odin?” Purdue asked.

Nina stood up and sighed, “Did you even take a good look at the inscriptions on the chain?”

“I thought those were just scratches of a careless goldsmith,” Purdue admitted. “You mean to say those are letters?”

“Aye, they are in a language I don’t know, but there are two symbols on here, the Triple Horn of Odin and his associative rune,” she deduced, “so I reckon the chain has some significance to him. From what I see there are no other runes or insignias representing any other deities whatsoever, just Odin.”

Sam smiled. Purdue smiled and clapped his palms together in glee. Nina dared not even ask what they were thinking.

“Can I see the rest of the cross?” she asked.

“In the rain?” Sam winced. “What if lightning strikes twice in one place?”

“That’s a myth, Sam,” she replied.

“So is Odin,” he retorted, adamant not to go out in the pouring rain again.

“Come now. You were with me in Russia when we helped The Brotherhood a few years back, Sam. You know that he…” she tried to remind him, but Sam would have none of it.

“I was tired. That old man probably just died in the skirmish at Valhalla and I thought, mistakenly, that he was Wotan, the chieftain,” he protested, referring to the time they discovered Odin’s earthly abode after helping the Knights of the Hammer — known as The Brotherhood — protect it from a fierce daughter of the Black Sun.

“I’ll have Franz and his boys pitch us a gazebo of sorts over it, so that you can go have a look and see if there is anything else you pick up. Looks like I missed some things,” Purdue offered.

“Oh, he will not be pleased,” Sam remarked. “That man must be livid for what your monument did to his garden work.”

Purdue agreed. “I will just fuel his fee a little, just over the benchmark where ‘wavering’ becomes ‘willing.’ That or I’ll give him the cottage in the back.”

After an examination of the heavy granite chunks and the head of the fallen cross, Nina was able to ascertain that the copper inlays and symbols were of a Nazi nature. More obscure than the obvious Swastika and the SS lightning insignias, the copper-inlay symbols covered the symbolism of the Vril Society, founded shortly before the Nazis emerged into power.

“I believe we are once more dealing with Nazi legacy,” Purdue announced, after Nina had presented her assessment of the origin of the cross.

“So what you want to do is find out where the rest of the chain is,” Nina speculated.

Sam nodded, “Probably.”

Purdue was taken aback by their apparent reluctance to find the rest of the golden chain and even maybe discovering what it was from, originally.

“Listen, if we could find out where the rest is, we will know what it was for. Don’t you think that would be historically momentous?” he argued. They could see he was his old self again — the flamboyant explorer who had a lust for knowledge and adventure. Sam stepped forward, “I must admit, investigating a criminal organization was a bit monotonous.”

“Thank you, Sam!” Purdue grinned.

“Sam! I thought you were tired of running for your life. Some support you are,” Nina chastised him.

“Choice words coming from a woman we had to drag from a snowcapped burrow in the Himalayan mountains… on a dangerous expedition,” Purdue issued his challenge categorically at Nina, to Sam’s amusement.

“You have no riposte, my girl,” Sam grinned. “You have nothing to worry about. We are not dealing with any cults or people with twisted ideologies this time.”

“Correct,” Purdue affirmed. “Nobody even has to know what we are doing.”

“That’s right. We’ll go look for this Jari person first, to find out who the artist was, and from there we just figure out where he kept the rest of the chain. Quick and simple,” Sam coaxed, appealing to Nina’s need to keep things simple of late.

She had no choice. They were right. She missed the adventure and the travel. Foremost, she always wanted to see Finland.

“When do we go?”