ON SKUA ISLAND 



Contents
II 



John Langan lives in upstate New York, where he is currently working on a Ph.D. at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His fiction has appeared previously in The Shawangunk Review and The Tinker. His F&SF debut might make you think that his doctoral dissertation concerns Henry lames or early twentieth-century ghost stories. It also might make you leave the lights on when you go to sleep. 

THE STORY HAD HELD US, round the dinner table, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was weird, as, on a February night in an old house with a strong storm howling off the ocean, a story should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till the eight of us adjourned to the living room with our drinks. There Fiona, my fiancee, noted it as the first time she had heard anyone number a tale that could be classified under the rubric of the zombie story among his own experiences. Whereupon Griffin, the story's narrator, hastened to repeat, for the third or possibly the fourth time, that much of the substance of what he had related was as it had been related to him on the beach by old Anthony, the fisherman, when everything was over, and although he, Griffin, indeed had seen what he was sure was DeBoer's white body through the green trees, the local doctor had been unable or unwilling to fix DeBoer's time of death with any certainty, so that the glimpse of him might have been a last look at a doomed, but still living, man. 

"But do you believe that?" Kappa, our hostess, asked Griffin, who shrugged and looked sheepishly at his port. 

Jennifer, curled on one of the large wicker chairs, said, "You have to admit, most of the stories you hear in a setting like this --" she waved her hand for emphasis and, as if in response, the wind gusted to a shriek, rattling the windows and provoking a round of laughter from the rest of us. "Very nice," she said, "you see: I told you I had powers. You have to admit, the kind of story you tend to hear, which I guess means the kind of story people tend to know, is the ghost story. Isn't that true? Get my mother started, and she'll tell you about her Uncle Richard, who saw the woman next door two days after she died, when he was out behind the house chopping wood. She was floating three feet off the ground; his hair turned completely white on the spot." 

"What happened to her?" Fiona asked. 

"The woman? Who knows? She floated away. The point is, it's a ghost story." She turned to me. "Come on, Mr. Horror-story-writer, back me up on this." 

"Ghost stories are popular," I said. "It does seem as if everyone knows one. Certainly you find more so-called serious writers trying their hands at ghost stories than you do stories about vampires, or mummies, or," with a nod to Griffin, who returned it, "zombies." 

"I don't know," Fiona said. "I just spent the past semester teaching Henry James -- a lot of Henry James -- and let me tell you, there's a pretty fair amount of vampiric activity going on in old Henry's works, especially a book like The Sacred Fount." 

"Granted," I said, "but he never wrote about mummies." 

Bob, our host, said, "I wonder why that was," looking at Fiona, who answered, "It wasn't flexible enough: he couldn't adapt the idea of the mummy (mummyism? I to his type of story the way he could adapt the idea of the vampire, vampirism." 

"Can anyone?" Jennifer asked. "I mean, how many big mummy novels have there been? It's not like the vampire: For a while there, it seemed like every other book, movie, and TV show was about vampires, for crying out loud." 

"And frequently from the vampire's point of view," Bob added. 

"I know, really, like I'm going to identify with this walking corpse who spends his nights sucking people's blood out of little holes in their necks. Hello! Whose brainstorm was this? Anyway, regardless of what I may have thought, they were very popular. And you've had God only knows how many of those zombie movies, those Dead movies, Night of the Living Evil Dead from Hell Part III or whatever, not to mention movies about the devil and possession and witches and toxic monsters--but we were talking about books, weren't we? Well, I'm sure you've had books about all those things, too, haven't you?" She looked at me. 

"More or less," I said. 

"And werewolves: This one," she gestured at me with her wineglass, "is working on a werewolf thing. It's very good. Are you done with it yet?" 

"Not yet," I said. 

"He's been very busy with the semester," Fiona said. 

"We've got the great werewolf novel-- sorry, I know I'm not supposed to call it that -- we've got the great werewolf story coming, too, but what about the mummy?" 

"The mummy is different," I replied. "It's a relic from a different time, the imperial age, from when the sun never set on the British Empire. Has anyone read any of the original mummy stories, the ones Arthur Conan Doyle wrote?" Only Bob nodded. "I shouldn't call them the original stories; I don't know for sure whether they are or not. I assume they were among the first. Anyway, Conan Doyle's mummy is very different from what we're accustomed to when we hear that name; at least, from what I think of. His mummy is a weapon. There's an obnoxious student of obscure foreign languages at Oxford who buys one that he keeps in his apartment for use against his enemies. He can read the spell that animates the mummy and sends it to do your bidding, which in his case usually involves disposing of the latest person who's annoyed him." 

"Talk about revenge of the nerds," Jennifer said. 

"What happens to him?" Fiona asked. 

"Fortunately, a fellow student figures out what's going on and forces him to destroy the mummy, cut it up with dissecting knives and bum it together with the papers that brought it to life." 

"How does he manage that?" Jennifer asked. "You would think the guy would just sic the mummy on him." 

"He goes armed, with a gun." 

"Oh. I guess that would do the trick." 

"Indeed. I haven't made any kind of exhaustive survey, but that seems to be how the mummy first enters English literature. I wonder if it doesn't express some kind of anxiety, or even guilt, about the whole imperial enterprise, particularly with regard to the museums. The mummy seems so much a creature of the museum, doesn't it? You imagine it shuffling through the museum after dark, one loose bandage trailing along the floor behind it. Where does that image come from? It must be a scene in a film, I suppose. But it's as if the mummy embodies a kind of doubt the British had about removing all those antiquities from their rightful locations and shipping them to London for display, as if they suspected the morality of their actions --" 

"Or as if they were afraid of contamination,' Fiona said. 

"Mmm," Bob said. "Who knows what you're going to bring into the country?' 

"Right, you have to be careful," I said. "That could be it, too, like Dracula. Watch out what you unload from the boats." "Dracula?' Jennifer asked. 

"There are those who see Dracula as sublimating a fear of rabies," Bob answered, "a fear of England becoming diseased through its contact with other, particularly very distant and very foreign, places." 

"I see," Jennifer said. "Thank you, Bob. You're right about the mummy: We don't think about it in terms of the story you described. We think of it as a love story, am I right ? It starts in ancient Egypt, with a priest who's in love with the wrong person: the Pharaoh's wife, or his sister or weren't their sisters their wives? Anyway, he's in love with someone he's not supposed to be, so as a punishment for his hubris --see, I do remember something from Bob's class -- he's mummified. Could you say he's mummified alive?" 

"Well, technically, mummification was something that was done to you after you were dead," Bob said. "But hey -- why not?" 

"All right then: Bob has given me permission to use the phrase 'mummified alive.' So the priest is buried in the desert, where he's forgotten about for the next four to five thousand years, until a bunch of clueless archaeologists, or I guess they'd be Egyptologists, find him, bring him to the museum, and turn him loose." 

"Which usually involves his trying to find the reincarnation of his lost love," I added. 

"Yes, who just happens to be the woman the hero's in love with, too. Convenient, that. The mummy kidnaps her and carries her to the Egypt room at the museum, which he has set up for the ceremony that will return his lost love's soul to the heroine's body. Luckily, the hero has figured all this out, and he shows up at the museum just in time to foil the mummy's plans. And get the girl. The mummy winds up incinerated." 

"That's Hollywood," Fiona said, shaking her head, "everything becomes a romance." 

"What's wrong with romance?" I asked, receiving in reply a sour expression. "Well," I said, "certainly the film versions of the mummy story tend to rob it of the deeper implications you find in the earlier written stories. The mummy becomes another monster, his Egyptian origins so much window-dressing." 

Bob said, "The Egyptian associations had no resonance for Americans." 

"Not the same resonance," Fiona said. "For America, Egypt was just another exotic location." 

"So that's it?" Jennifer asked. "The mummy is dead? There's nothing anyone can do with it? Him? It?" 

"This is all very nice," Kappa said, "and very educational, I can assure you. But isn't it a bit off track? We were talking about things that actually had happened to people, not movies and books." 

Bob nodded, and Jennifer said, "You're absolutely right, Kappa, we were talking about actual events." 

"So," I said, glancing round the company gathered there in the living room, my eyebrows raised for effect, "does anyone have a mummy story they'd care to share?" 

There was a pause during which the wind fell off, and then a voice said, "I do." 

We looked about to see who had spoken, and our eyes settled on Nicholas, who had been introduced at the commence of our stay at the Cape house as an old friend of Bob's from Harvard and who had maintained an almost unbroken silence in the five days since, departing the house for hours at a time on walks whose destination he shared with no one, but which appeared to take him inland, away from the beach and the winter angry ocean. His face was buried under twin avalanches of white hair, one descending from the tangled mass crowning his head, the other rising from the tangled mass hugging his jaw, but his hooded eyes were a pale bright blue that I should have described as arctic. For dress, he favored a pair of worn jeans and a yellowed cable-knit sweater, which he supplemented with a long gray wool coat and boots that laced up just short of his knees for his jaunts outside. In reply to a question Jennifer had posed our first morning there, while Nicholas was out, Kappa had informed us that Nicholas was an archaeologist whose particular interest was the study of the Vikings, which was the basis upon which his friendship with Bob had been founded when they met at Harvard. Although they had maintained contact over the years, it was not uncommon for Nicholas to disappear on some expedition or another for months at a time, and occasionally longer, which was part of the reason Kappa assumed he had never married. He did not speak much: this we had witnessed ourselves as Jennifer, who prides herself on being able to have a conversation with any living human being, availed herself of every opportunity to ask Nicholas questions, about himself, his career, what he was engaged in currently, that he answered in monosyllables when possible, clipped phrases when not, his voice when he spoke the sandpapery rasp of one unaccustomed to frequent speech. Now he was sitting on a dining room chair he had positioned at the group's perimeter, between the dining room and the living room, a long-necked bottle of beer cradled in his hands. We shifted in our respective seats to face him, and he repeated, "I do; I have a mummy story." "You do?" Bob asked. 

"Well," Jennifer said, "I'm sure we'd all love to hear your story, Nicholas." 

"Why don't you come a bit closer?" Kappa offered, but Nicholas made no effort to move. 

"You have a mummy story?" Fiona asked, to which Nicholas nodded vigorously in reply. 

"Yes," he said, "yes, I think you'd have to call it that." 

Possessed by a sudden impulse, I asked, "Would you tell us your story, Nicholas?" which appeared to be the cue for which he had been waiting: He began to speak, his voice scraping like a machine that had been but seldom-used for an exceedingly long time. It strengthened, his voice, as he continued speaking; at the end of the hour and a half, or perhaps it was two hours, his story took, it sounded almost pleasant, the kind of voice that would have been at home delivering lectures to large groups of students at a university. The story he told would not have found a home at a university, however: it was the kind of story that is suited to a February night in an old house with a strong storm howling off the ocean. When his tale was completed, we retired to bed without much comment. I do not think any of us slept soundly that night; I know I did not. In the dark, I lay beside my fiancee listening to the wind moaning at our window, to the ocean smashing itself onto the beach, and when at last I slept I dreamed of a dark island, and gnarled hands reaching up, out of the water, to choke me. 
II 

THIS HAPPENED twenty-five years ago (Nicholas said). Immediately after, and for years, I thought the memory of it would never fade. I was sure the memory would never fade: It was burned into my brain. But the surface onto which it was burned has worn away over the last quarter-century, and now the memory doesn't seem as deeply engraved. 

I was at the University of Aberdeen on a faculty exchange program. I was supposed to be delivering weekly lectures and meeting with students for tutorial sessions, but I was able to pass the bulk of those duties off on a bright young assistant someone at the University, probably the department chair, had decided to assign me. His name was Bruce; as I recall, he was from Greenock, a town on the west coast. Bruce delivered my lectures, which was to say he gave lectures he had researched and written and I told him I had read and approved, and Bruce took care of my tutorials. He was very eager. I was, too: I was using the free time Bruce allowed me to make trips all over the country to do research for a book I was writing on the Viking presence in Scotland, a subject I considered, and still do, vastly understudied. I would leave the University for anywhere from a day to a week at a time -- well, I was away for a week only once, and that was to take part in a dig on Skye that an old friend of mine from undergrad was running. Nothing disastrous ever happened while I was gone, and I thought Bruce would benefit from all the experience. 

When I returned from a trip, I spent a day organizing my notes, then another couple of days writing. I wrote from eight in the morning till four in the afternoon, stopping for a half-hour lunch sometime between eleven and one, depending on how the writing was proceeding. At four, I pushed my chair away from the typewriter and left my cold flat for a warm pub, usually one just down the street called The Tappit Hen. Most days, Bruce would join me to fill me in on how the latest lecture or tutorial had gone. I would nod at whatever he told me, not really listening to him, and say, "Sounds like you're doing fine." This pleased him what seemed to me an inordinate amount. I was flattered, yes, but I was also annoyed, maybe more annoyed than flattered. A number of significant discoveries concerning the Viking role in British history had broken in the last couple of years, and I had not been involved, not even remotely, in any of them. I had only been aware one of them was in progress. The picture of myself I saw in Bruce's broad freckled face reminded me acutely how far my reality was from his ideal. 

Bruce was with me when the man from MI-5 pulled up a stool at the table. I assume he was from MI-5; I didn't ask and he didn't volunteer the information. He was affiliated with some type of intelligence operation, of that much I was sure. His skin was bad, his teeth were bad, and he wore his hair in a crewcut. He was carrying an old briefcase that he swung up onto the table and unsnapped, but did not open. He verified my identity, did not bother with Bruce's, and gave his name as Green. There were no handshakes. He had sought me out, Green said, because he thought I might be able to help him. He propped open his briefcase and withdrew from it a large envelope which he slid across the table to me, asking me to have a look at its contents and tell him what I thought. 

The envelope held a dozen or so large black-and-white photographs. The first few were of an island, not a very large one from the look of it, a rocky beach and a couple of hills. There was a shape on top of one of the hills, the one to the right in the picture: what looked like a stone column. My guess was correct: The next photos showed a tall, narrow column that was covered from top to bottom in runes. A couple of the pictures were clear and close enough for me to have a good look at some of the runes, and when I did my heart started to knock in my chest. I had not seen runes like these before: There were certain family resemblances to runes I knew from parts of Eastern Norway, enough for me to be able to read a couple of words and phrases here and there, but there were also striking variations, and more than a few characters that were completely new, unprecedented. You may be surprised to hear that not once did I doubt these pictures' authenticity, but that was the case. I looked at Green and asked him where this was. 

"So you're interested?" he asked. I said I was, and he told me that the island in these photographs was located north-northwest of the Shetlands, an hour and a hall's boat ride from the nearest human habitation. The place was called Skua Island, and if I thought that artifact of any archaeological significance, he and his employers -- his term -- were prepared to send me there to study it within two weeks, as soon as school let out for Christmas holiday. 

Of course I was suspicious. People don't just approach you in a pub and offer to pay your way to unearthing a potentially historic find. Did I say unearthing? Yes: That was what one of the segments of writing I could read said, that there was something buried underneath this column, something I immediately thought might be the remains of a nobleman or hero. Even if what lay below the column wasn't that exciting, the column itself was: Among the runes were characters that I thought I recognized as ancient Greek, and a couple that resembled pictographs I had seen on scrolls on display at the Met, in New York, in the Egyptian wing. I saw myself invited to lecture at Oxford, at the Sorbonne, on my earth-shaking discovery. And if that discovery had been arranged and financed by an intelligence organization, what difference did that make? I had heard of such partnerships in the past; it was impossible to go very far in the field in any direction without encountering them: A team was provided generous funding to go to Peru, or Morocco, or Indonesia, and in exchange all they had to do was answer a few questions on their return, plot out the route they had taken through the mountains on a map, share their photographs of the capital, the airport. It's been the way of the archaeological world since at least the Victorians, probably longer. Undoubtedly, I was needed on the island as a cover, a front for whatever operation required its use. Perhaps they wanted to monitor the movements of Soviet submarines in the North Atlantic. If we could help each other, I saw no harm in it. 

So I agreed, and even engaged to have Bruce accompany me as a reward for his slave labor. The morning after the last day of classes, the two of us were flown in a small plane from Aberdeen to the Shetlands, where we were introduced to the rest of our crew, eleven men whose posture and crewcuts bespoke their military associations as well as any uniform would have. I don't remember most of their names, only the leader's, Collins, whom I later heard the men address as "Major," and another, Joseph -- I'm not sure if that was his first or last name -- and a third, Ryan. Collins was older, by ten years at least, than his men, in his early to mid-thirties. He was short and stocky, and his eyes were green and sharp. All the gear I had requested he had procured and had stored on board the fishing ship that had been hired to ferry us to the island. One thing I will say for the military: They are efficient. We ate lunch on the ship as it rode out of port. 

By then it was one o'clock, and already the sky was darkening. I don't know if any of you have been that far north in the winter (Bob, I know you've been to Iceland, but wasn't that in the summer?), but the sun only puts in an appearance for a few hours a day, fewer the closer to the Arctic Circle you venture. It goes without saying that the sea was rough. Rough! It was a heap of gray slabs heaving around us. Despite the pills we had swallowed with our lunches, Bruce and I were soon hanging over the ship's side, our lunches offerings to the sea. None of our companions seemed much affected. I remember that trip as a succession of flights and drops, the deck seesawing beneath our feet, the ship's engine throbbing as it scaled one gray hill then slid down another, the waves striking the bow with a great hollow boom. We made better time than the season should have allowed, and it was just over an hour after we left port that Skua Island rose to our left. Ryan pointed it out to me, but my eyes already had found it. It wasn't more than a couple of hills that seemed barely taller than the waves swelling around us. Even given the hour and the failing light, the place seemed unusually dark. I searched the hill crests and located the column on the hill to the left, which meant that the photograph Green had shown me had been shot from the other side of the island. It was to there that we made our way. Seen from above, the island resembled a horseshoe, the opening facing north and forming a bay that was only a little less choppy than the sea. The ship dropped anchor in the bay, and Bruce and I and the eleven soldiers packed our gear into bright yellow inflatable rafts that we rowed to shore. As we approached the beach, a great cloud of black-backed gulls, really, a surprising number for so small an island, rose into the wind, shrieking furiously. It's an enormous bird, the black-backed gull; as we pulled up on the beach, the flock hung there overhead screaming at us for what seemed a long time, before veering away. 

The ship waited for us to land, then raised anchor and headed for home. In a week, it would be back to collect us. I had wanted longer, two weeks minimum with the possibility of a third should the need arise, but seven days was the best offer Green claimed to be empowered to make. So once we had carried our rafts across the beach, up and over a rise, up to the relative shelter of one of the hills, while Bruce and the men struck camp, I dug a flashlight out from a bag and set off for the column. I wanted to see it. The ground was soft, spongy: peat bog, covered with moss. The hill wasn't especially steep, but there was what felt like a hurricane strength arctic wind blowing against me as I climbed, and by the time I reached the summit, such as it was, and the column, my face felt as if it had been peeled off. 

The column was as tall as I was, a foot or so wide, struck from what appeared to be gray granite. I traced the flashlight beam up and down it, over the tightly bunched runes descending from its rounded top to a point beneath the ground's surface. I circled it, slowly, not caring that my face was not even numb anymore, thinking about the men who had raised and carved it, about whatever they had buried underneath it. I knew little of them: I could venture a few educated guesses but I would remain largely in the dark until I had deciphered these runes and seen what the column covered; even then, there would be much I would not know. But standing there in front of their handiwork, the stars already glittering in the sky, I felt close to those strange men to an extent I had not experienced before, so much so that I would not have been surprised to have turned around and found one of them standing behind me, wrapped in a great fur cape. The secrets I was poised to uncover filled my head, as did the lectures waiting for me to deliver them at Cambridge, Berkeley. The wind was finally too much for such revelry, however, so I quickly made my way back down to camp. 

As I did, I thought of my father. I don't know if I ever told you about him, Bob; I don't think so. He had owned a hardware store in Ann Arbor when I was a child. Never terribly successful, he had slid into bankruptcy not too long after my mother died, my first year at Harvard. He had held a series of low-paying, low-skills jobs over the next couple of years, then wandered in front of the minister's Chrysler one unlucky Saturday afternoon. He had lingered in the hospital long enough for me to make the trip out to Michigan to sit by his bedside as he died. My older sister -- her husband, actually -- had to pay for the funeral and the tombstone. At some point in the next two days of standing around the funeral home, shaking the hands of people I hadn't seen in ten years or didn't remember, I had promised myself, pledged myself, that my life was not going to follow the same trajectory as his. I was not going to struggle at society's margins until the designated car arrived to strike me down. At other people's funerals, especially the funerals of those who are close to us, it's natural to think of our own funerals, our deaths, and I vowed that mine would be different from this drab, sparsely attended affair with which my father was sent to his eternal reward. When I died, people would sit up and take notice at my passing. I would be remembered. Sliding into my sleeping bag that first night on the island, on the brink of discovery, I thought I was at last on my way to realizing that pledge. 

We were up and at the site early the next morning, while it still was dark. The wind had abated from the night before, but only somewhat; we stood with our backs to it as much as we could. Green had told me I could have seven men at my disposal, and seven men I had. I didn't see where the others went, nor did I care. I had decided to push ahead and excavate the column and whatever lay beneath it, a move I described to myself as bold but that was really premature if not foolish before I had deciphered the runes. But it was a move I felt Green's time constraints compelled me to. The men worked swiftly and well, including Collins, mostly under Bruce's supervision, as I copied down the column's inscriptions into a notebook that I pored over in our tent later that night, surrounded by all the dictionaries of ancient languages I owned or had been able to procure in the time before our trip. The first order of business was to remove the column, which the men accomplished with what seemed remarkable ease within a day and a half. Among their other skills, they appeared to have had some training as engineers; perhaps that was why they had been selected for this trip. Perhaps it was part of the reason, anyway. The column descended another two feet into the ground; when it was out and lying on a blue tarpaulin, I spent the end of that afternoon and the beginning of the following morning inspecting the cavity that had held it before giving the go-ahead to start digging. Within five minutes of that command, none other than Bruce himself made our first discovery. 

It was a sword, wrapped in the remnants of a cloth that melted when the air struck it. It was unlike any Viking weapon with which I was familiar, and I knew them all. Its rusted blade was easily a yard long. The hilt had been struck in the shape of a bird, its opened beak holding the blade, its outspread wings forming the exaggeratedly wide guard, its body the grip, and its talons the pommel. Through the peat clotted around the pommel, I saw bright green: Scraping it clean with my fingers revealed an enormous emerald clutched in the bird's claws. The style of the metalwork was completely foreign to me, as was the bird it was supposed to represent. It was no bird of prey, which is what you would expect for a sword. Joseph recognized it, however; it was a bonxie, a skua, the seagull-like bird from which this island had taken its name. Dreadful fierce birds, he said, especially when they were nesting. They would fly straight for you if you wandered in among their nests, peck your eyes out. 

You can imagine my excitement, which, to be fair, seemed to be shared by all the men, and not just Bruce. Each of them wanted to see the sword, to hold it. Here was history come up from out of the ground, and they had been present for it. Although the sky was clouding over with the advance forces of a storm that had been approaching steadily from the south since sunrise, we continued the dig. Down a foot and a half from our first find, our second took almost another hour to come to light; once again, it was Bruce whose shovel uncovered it. His work had revealed part of a human body, a shoulder, the skin dark, shrunken, and leathery from having been held for who knew how long in the peat bog. The rest of us converged on Bruce's find, and I began directing the excavation. In a short time, the shoulder was revealed to be connected to an arm and a torso, and that torso to a head and another arm and to two legs. We did our best not to handle the body, clearing out space on either side of it so that we could stoop to examine it. By now, the sky was completely dark, and our flashlights out and on. The rain was spattering, and threatening to do worse imminently. The men shining their flashlights down into the hole, I knelt to see what we had, Bruce to my left. 

It was a woman, her skin dark oak in color and pulled tight around her bones by the relentless action of the bog. Her throat had been cut, that was the first thing I noticed; you could see the ragged space where a knife had been dragged across it. Neither very tall nor very big, she was wearing a short, plain, coarsely woven tunic. Her arms were bound together behind her back, and her feet were bound as well, both with leather straps that had worn well. Her face -- there was something wrong with her face; even allowing for the effects of the peat bog on it, her face appeared to have been disfigured, particularly around the cheeks and eyes, where dull bone shone through, as if she had been struck by a knife, or a club or axe. Her nose was largely gone, apparently torn off. Her jaws were slightly parted; her eyesockets filled with brackish water, her braided hair woven with peat fibers. 

Years after this, Bob, you sent me a collection of Seamus Heaney's poems, North. Your inscription said that I would enjoy the poems because Heaney, too, was doing archaeology. I didn't know he had written about the Irish bog mummies, so until I read the book, which wasn't for months, I resented what I thought was a too-glib comparison on your part. Once I opened the collection, however, and started reading, I found I couldn't stop. I read and re-read those poems. There was one in particular I kept returning to, called "Strange Fruit"; I read it until I had memorized it, and then I mumbled the words in my sleep. It was a description of a girl's decapitated head, which it compared to "an exhumed gourd." Heaney wrote of the head's "leathery beauty," its "eyeholes black as pools," and his words returned me to that hole in the peat, to that woman's body lying slightly curled, seven flashlight beams wavering on it. I wasn't sure what she was doing there: She might have been a sacrifice sent to accompany an important personage on his journey into the afterlife, but in that case she should have been both better dressed and closer to the man she was to join. Her garb, her bound hands and feet, the damage to her face, strongly hinted that she had been executed, punished for one crime or another, possibly adultery, possibly witchcraft, possibly murder. Yet if that was the case, then why had she been buried under this monument and strange sword? You wouldn't mark a criminal's grave in such a way. 

Before we could investigate any further, the hole we had dug and cleared began to fill with water. It welled up quickly; from where I was crouched, I could have sworn it started from the gash in the woman's neck, pouring out of it in a thick stream. Bruce and I scrambled to escape the hole, the soldiers catching our arms and hauling us up and out. In a matter of seconds, our find was submerged in water so brackish our flashlights could distinguish nothing beneath its swirling surface. At almost the same moment, the clouds assembled overhead unleashed a deluge so fierce it left very little beyond Bruce, who was standing next to me, visible. There was no recourse: We would have to retreat to camp and wait till tomorrow to continue our work. At least, I reflected as we trudged down the hill, heads down against the rain, the water would preserve the body for us. 

That night, I worked at further decoding the column's text, but found it difficult not to become distracted speculating on the sword lying on a towel beside my sleeping bag, or the woman lying underwater at the top of the hill. Bruce and I spent quite a bit longer than we should have trading suppositions, imagining explanations, and when I closed my notebook and sank down to sleep, I had accomplished much less than I had intended. With the possibility of more awaiting our discovery, however, I was less distressed over my lack of progress than I otherwise might have been. As long as the site continued to yield results, the translation could wait; if it came to that, there was no reason for me not to work on it when I returned to Aberdeen. It was a history, dating from when I was not sure, but guesstimated some time before the first millennium. It recounted a terrible plague that had afflicted the communities of all the islands, a geographic vagary that seemed to encompass at least the Shetlands, the Orkneys, the Outer Hebrides, and possibly the Inner Hebrides and parts of mainland Scotland itself. This plague was no mere ordinary sickness, but had especially malevolent associations: It had either escaped or been set loose or been sent from a place deep under Middle Earth, a place connected to a god or person, perhaps a sorcerer, with whom I was unfamiliar, but who was or was associated with the worm. His name was represented by a pictograph of a circle broken at about two o'clock, for which I could find no reference, however tentative. The plague's effects were reported as horrible, but left unspecified. 

The next morning, the rain had passed and everything changed. Bruce shook me awake to tell me that something terrible had occurred during the night and the storm, and Collins wanted to see me. In reply to my questions, he answered that he didn't know what was the matter, but the Major seemed agitated, quite agitated. I dressed hurriedly, and found Collins standing beyond our cluster of tents, on the other side of the rise separating us from the beach, beside a pair of blue tarpaulins like the one on which we had laid the column two days before. The tarps had been weighted down at their corners with large rocks to prevent them from fluttering away from the shapes they stretched over. There were a pair of large brownish birds standing beyond the tarps that I thought I recognized as skuas. Greeting Collins, I asked him what the problem was. "There are two of my men under there," he said, jerking his thumb at the tarps. "They're dead." He made no move to pull back the tarps, nor did I request him to. 

I was shocked, and said so. Aside from the fact that both men's necks had been broken, their heads wrenched almost backward, and their eyes gouged out (although that was probably the birds, the skuas, which had found the bodies before he did), Collins didn't know what had happened. He assumed that the aggressor, his word, had ambushed the first man while he had been standing guard, then waited by his body for the second man to come to relieve him. He himself had not heard a thing, although given the storm blowing that would have been more difficult. Of course I hadn't heard anything, and told him so, which didn't seem to surprise him. Who could have done this ? I asked him, and despite his reply that he hadn't the faintest idea, something in his answer, the way he gave it as ii it were a scripted line he had been forced to deliver without having had sufficient time to rehearse it, made me think that he had a very good idea who was behind this. Perhaps the specifics were a little dim, but I realized that he thought we had been discovered, or I should say that he had been discovered, he and his men, by whomever they had come up here to observe. If that were the case, then whoever had assassinated these two men was most likely still on the island, waiting for night's early fall to finish his -- or their -- work. When Collins told me that he was going to have to ask me to remain by my tent for a little while this morning, until his men had had a chance to scour the island, I did not protest but said of course, I understood. If this man and his orders were all that was going to be standing between me and a team of Soviet commandoes, I thought it wisest not to antagonize him. 

Thus, I was back at my translation much sooner than I had anticipated, while Collins sent out two two-man patrols to sweep the island, one heading east, the other west, from our camp to meet on the opposite side of the island, where they would advance together to sweep the hills before returning to camp. Throughout, they would maintain radio silence. Collins, the men, were not dressed any differently than they had been the day before; they had not changed into camouflage and berets at the first sign of trouble; but there was something different about them, and it was only after I had been seeing the hands held in the large jacket pockets, or inside the jackets to one side or the other, that I realized they were all armed, with pistols and submachine guns, and were keeping those arms close at hand, ready for use. They were more tense, but I could hardly fault them for that: I was more tense. 

Bruce kept with the men, watching for the patrols' return, while I did my best to apply myself to the column's strange characters. When the patrols were not back within a couple of hours, I was not worried: Even islands as small as this one could contain hidden caves, gullies, chasms, that might lengthen a search of it considerably. When the patrols had not shown by lunch, Bruce was noticeably anxious; I told him to relax, it might be hours yet. The translation was no less difficult, but I began to find the rhythm of it, so that even though large patches of it remained unclear, the broad outlines were beginning to swim into view. During this terrible plague, the peoples of the islands had sought high and low, near and far, for relief and found none. There was a considerable list of all the important people who had gone to their graves with the thing, denied the glory of a warrior's death in battle through the machinations of the one who had unleashed it. At last, the leaders of -- I thought it was the Shetlands, but it could have been the Orkneys -- had decided to seek the aid of a wizard whose name I couldn't quite fix; the characters appeared to be Greek but weren't yielding any intelligible sound; who lived in the Faroe islands and who was something of a dubious character, having dealings with all sorts of creatures, human, divine, and in-between, to whom it was best to give a wide berth. Driven by their desperation, the leaders dispatched an envoy imploring his aid. Twice he refused them, but on the third request his heart softened and he agreed to assist them. He journeyed to the islands on a boat that did not touch the water, or that moved as swiftly as a bird across the water, and when he arrived he wasted no time: Disclosing the supernatural origin of the plague, he told the leaders that strong measures would be needed to defeat it. He, the wizard, could summon all the sickness to himself, but he could not purge it from the Earth. In order for that to be accomplished, he would require a vessel, by which, as the leaders quickly saw, he meant a human being. 

By now, the sun had set, and neither patrol had appeared. I was uneasy; Bruce appeared to be barely containing a full-fledged panic attack: He ducked in and out of the tent half a dozen times in fifteen minutes, until I closed my notebook and went with him to join Collins and the others. Collins and two of the men, Joseph and Ryan, were crouched outside his tent; I presumed the other two were standing guard somewhere off in the gathering darkness. The weapons were out and on display now: Each man carried a black submachine gun slung over his shoulder. They were engaged in a quiet conversation that ceased as I drew near. Squatting beside them, I asked if there had been any sign of either patrol, and was not surprised when Collins shook his head from side to side. Were we going to continue to wait for them? As of now, that was our plan. Should we perhaps think about radioing for reinforcements, that kind of thing? Collins fixed me with his sharp green eyes. "Reinforcements?" he repeated. "Why, Doctor, you make it sound as if this were some kind of military operation. My men and I are out here to assist you in your excavation and analysis of objects of priceless value to our national heritage." 

"Then why those?" I asked, pointing to the guns. 

"No harm in being prudent," Collins replied. 

"Ah, yes, prudent," I said. Well, if we weren't going to call for reinforcements, since, I hastened to add, we were only an archaeological expedition and, as he had said, what possible need could archaeologists have for reinforcements? perhaps we could shorten the length of our expedition? 

That was a decision Collins would leave for the morning. 

In that case, I said, would he be so kind as to provide Bruce and me with samples of the prudence -- I gestured at the guns -- he and his men had seen fit to exercise? Things being what they were, it seemed prudent for all of us to be prudent. 

He did not think that was prudent, Collins said immediately. If Bruce and I were discovered, he did not say by whom, with any kind of weapon it would go much worse for us than if we were unarmed. 

"You forget," I said, "I have the sword." 

Collins laughed, and said if any Vikings landed on the beach he would call on me to lead the charge against them. In the meantime, he would post Ryan outside our tent, to ease our minds. Never let it be said that the British did not value their scholars, even if those scholars were American. 

And then a sudden smell flooded my nostrils, a thick stench full of bog rot and rancid flesh. I coughed, fighting down the bile rushing up my throat, and Collins, Joseph, and Ryan gagged. I opened my mouth to ask what it was, and for a second the smell was in my mouth, a vile taste coating my teeth, my tongue, my throat. I thought I was going to vomit, and then, as quickly as it came, the smell was gone. I breathed deeply, and looked at Collins. I could not think what to say, and neither, apparently, could he. We stared at each other for what felt like minutes. "Well," I said at length, "I guess I'll turn in." 

"Good," he said. "Do that." 

I left Collins with a request that should the patrols return I would be notified, regardless of the hour, to which he agreed. Neither my work nor my sleep were interrupted that night. Sitting cross-legged in my tent, the notebook open on my lap, reaching for this dictionary, then that dictionary, moving ahead a line only to have to move back two to reconsider the way I had rendered this word, or that, making brilliant leaps and worse than obvious blunders, I tried not to think about whoever was waiting out there in the dark, whoever had seized those men's heads in his hands and twisted, swift and hard, so that their necks had snapped audibly and they had fallen down dead, their eyes food for the skuas. I tried not to wonder what he or they had done to the patrols, whether they were lying scattered over the island with their heads wrenched almost backward, their arms and legs splayed; or had they been knifed? gloved hands clamped over their mouths, the blade drawn across their throats in a single burning stroke; or shot? a bullet spat out of a silencer into an eye, an ear. I tried not to think about any of these deaths being visited on me. I tried to decode more about the island leaders' response to the wizard's demand for a human being to serve as vessel to contain the plague. It appeared they had consented to his request with minimal debate: One man, Gunnar, a landowner of some repute, had refused to have anything to do with such dealings, but that same night the plague fell on him and by morning he was dead; his brains, the history detailed, burst and ran out his ears. After Gunnar, no one else contested the leaders' decision, and Frigga, Gunnar's eldest daughter, was selected by the leaders for the wizard's use. Elaborate preparations were made, several lengthy prayers were addressed to various gods, Odin, Loki, and Hel, goddess of death, among them, and then the wizard called all of the plague to himself, from all the islands he summoned it. It came as, or as if, a cloud of insects so vast it filled the sky, blotting out the sun. Men and women covered their heads in fear; an old woman fell dead from terror of it. The wizard commanded the plague into Frigga, who was lying bound at his feet. At first, it did not obey, nor did it heed the wizard's second command, but on his third attempt his power proved greater and the plague descended into Frigga, streaming into her mouth, her nose, her ears, the huge black cloud lodging itself within her, until the sky was once again clear, the sun shining. 

This, however, was not the end. Frigga remained alive; she had become as fierce as an animal, straining against her bonds, gnashing her teeth and growling at the wizard and at the islands' leaders, threatening bloody vengeance. Nonplussed, the wizard had her rowed to the island of the --to Skua Island, where she was put ashore, her feet loosed but her hands still bound. The island was full of the skuas; there to nest, I supposed; and when Frigga, or what had been Frigga, set foot among them, they flew at her fiercely, attacking her unprotected face and eyes with no mercy. Her screams were terrible, heard by all the peoples of all the islands. At last, the birds left her with no face and no eyes, which the wizard said was necessary so that she should go unrecognized among the dead, so that she should be unable to find her way out of the place to which he was going to dispatch her. Half a dozen strong men seized her, for even so injured she was fearfully powerful, and bore her up to the summit of one of the island's hills, where the wizard once more bound her feet and slew her by cutting her throat. The blood that spilled out was black, and one of the men it splashed died on the spot. When all the blood had left her, the wizard ordered her body buried at the summit of the opposite hill, and a stone placed over it as a reminder to all the people of all the islands of what he (once more that name I couldn't decipher) had done for them, and as a warning not to disturb this spot, for now that the girl's body had been used as a vessel for returning (that symbol, the broken circle) evil to him, it would be a simple matter for him to return Frigga to her body full of his power, and if he did, she would be awful. He, the wizard, would place a sword between the stone and the girl that would keep her in her place, and he would write the warning on the stone himself, so that all could read it. Woe be to he who disturbed the sword: Not only would the wrath of the one who had sent the plague fall on him, but the wrath of the wizard as well, and he would lose to the reborn girl that which she herself had lost, by which I assumed was meant his face. 

It was late when I completed the preliminary translation; Bruce had long since retired to sleep. You might think I would have experienced some trepidation, some anxiety, over what I had brought to light, but you would be mistaken. Despite the hour, I was exhilarated: In a matter of days, I had rendered into reasonably intelligible English a text written in a language whose idiosyncracies would have cost many another scholar weeks if not months of effort to overcome. Yes, there was a curse, a pair of curses, threatened against whoever disturbed the site, but such curses were commonplace; indeed, I would have been more surprised had there been no curse, no warning of dire consequences. Melodramatic films aside, when all was said and done, King Tut's curse had been nothing more than a self-fulfilling prophecy. If I was worried about anything, it was the team of Soviet commandoes creeping ever closer to us, knives clenched between their teeth, waiting for the precise moment to take revenge on us for whatever operations Collins and his men had been performing. The text on the column I judged an elaborately coded narrative, possibly intended to justify an actual event, the killing of the girl we had discovered, through recourse to supernatural explanations. 

I was not particularly moved by the story I had translated. I don't think it will surprise you to hear that; you're academics: You understand the idea of professional distance. You might be interested to learn the number of people unable to maintain a similar distance. I have encountered them in my classrooms, generally in my introductory courses, and at the public lectures I have delivered, usually at the request of a museum. Perhaps you have dealt with them, too. These people find the notion of the kind of thing that happened to Frigga having occurred in their country unduly upsetting. That such actions are performed in other places, by other people, they readily accept; as long as it's foreigners, they are not troubled. Suggest, however, that, as it were, someone's hundred-times-great-grandfather was a participant at a human sacrifice, and it's an affront, as if you had accused the person her or himself of having held the knife and made the cut. Some try to suggest that the people who performed these acts were foreigners; in this case, Vikings as opposed to true Scots; until I remind them that those foreigners are their ancestors, that the Vikings became Scots. By the time Frigga was slain, the two cultures were already fairly integrated. I imagine it's shame that's at the root of the sometimes surprisingly intense denials I have met with. There is no need for it: There is no culture that is innocent. In most cases, you don't have to dig particularly long or hard to unearth similar events. We are never as far from such things as we would like to think. 

I unzipped the tent's flap and stepped out into the night air to stretch legs long past cramped and unbend a back in danger of remaining permanently crooked. To my relief, Ryan was still on watch. There had been, he informed me, still no sign of either patrol; come morning, he thought the Major was going to call for someone to come fetch us. He, Ryan, was sorry that I would have to abandon the dig, which I assured him he needn't be. Even the little we had accomplished was something, and there was always the possibility of returning at a later date, during the summer, maybe, when it was warmer, and light for most of the day. If he wanted to join us, I said, I would be happy to hold a place for him. He thanked me but thought he had best decline, since come summer there was a good chance he would be quite a distance from here. And good riddance at that, he added. I laughed and said I completely understood. Stretching myself a final time, I told Ryan I would see him in the morning. 

"Let's hope so, sir," he said. 

Before I fell asleep, I thought again about my father, about his death. I remembered the suit we had buried him in, a cheap, worn and faded brown polyester suit that was at least ten years out of fashion; I remembered the tie we had given the funeral home for him, a red, white, and blue adaptation of the stars and stripes I had given him when I was twelve for Father's Day and that he had continued to claim was his favorite tie; I remembered the small group of mourners at the funeral service, barely sufficient to fill the first three pews of the church. At the time, I had found all of it maddeningly pathetic; now I thought that at least my father had had a funeral. It seemed likely I was going to die out here alone and who knew what was going to be done with my body? Stripped and set out for the birds, perhaps, or my pockets stuffed with rocks and submerged, an unexpected bounty for the crabs and fish. At least there was a place with my father's name on it and the dates of his birth and death, a place to which you could drive on a Sunday with your children, as my sister sometimes did. My monument would be an island few knew and even fewer had visited. 

I slept unexpectedly late, waking with the sunrise. I suppose I expected the morning to bring, if not my own death, or Bruce's, news of the deaths of others, of one or several or even all of the men during the night. That was not the case: Although the four men who had left camp yesterday morning had not yet returned, and did not seem likely to, the seven of us had survived, and the chill, bright air was warm with the relief bubbling up out of us. Overhead, a skua cried out, and I took the sound for a good omen. Collins was no less relieved than the rest of us, but had decided to take no chances, radioing for the boat to return for us. We had two hours, and then we would be leaving Skua Island. No one, least of all me, was upset by this. Maybe, I thought as I hurried to my tent and stuffed my notebook, pen, and assorted dictionaries into my duffel bag, the Soviets had not intended to liquidate the lot of us, only enough to disrupt the mission, cause Collins to pull up stakes and leave sooner than he had intended to; if that was the case, they had succeeded. Or maybe one or both of the patrols had managed to wound their assailants mortally even as they themselves were killed. A day raid was not impossible, but unlikely: obviously, whatever force had been deployed on the island was too small to storm the camp, or it would have done so already, and attacking during daylight would not improve its chances in a firelight. It did occur to me that the Soviets might be waiting for all of us to board the ship to torpedo it, but I thought that scenario unlikely: To destroy a civilian vessel in its territorial waters was to risk consequences far in excess of whatever small benefit or satisfaction our deaths might bring. Having come through the night, I felt strangely invincible, the way, I imagine, one of Beowulf's men must have felt after having lived through that awful night in Heorot. 

Fueled by that sensation of invincibility, I decided I must return to the hilltop to take photographs of the column and the mummy. I had copied down the runes but I had no evidence of the object they had covered, as I had no evidence of what that object had covered. All I had was the sword, which, while intriguing, required the column and the mummy to establish its full significance. The risk of this past day, I thought, the lying in my tent waiting to die, would have been for nothing, if I couldn't bring back sufficient proof of the island's archaeological significance to ensure funding to mount a return come summer. Of course it was irrational, contradictory, but in a remarkably short space of time -- the time it took to shove two pairs of socks and an extra pair of jeans into a duffelbag -- I had convinced myself that if we had survived the night then we were free and clear of danger, and if we were free and clear of danger, then there was no reason not to go to the site. When I broached the subject to him, Bruce was game for running up the hill, snapping a dozen quick photographs, and running back down; as for Collins, he said that while he advised against our leaving the camp, he would not stop us from doing so. He also would not give us any of his men to accompany us, and he would not hold the ship for us if we were not back when it sailed into the bay. He appeared neither surprised nor concerned; his mind, I assume, occupied by other things. I thanked him and returned to the tent, which Bruce, ever-efficient, was in the process of flattening and rolling up. I was searching through my bag when Ryan walked up beside me and, before I realized what he was doing, slid an automatic pistol into the right pocket of my coat. "If anything happens," he said, smiling as if he were sharing a joke or a pleasant observation, "you switch off the safety, hold it in one hand and steady with the other, and line up the front sights with the back. It's got quite a kick to it, so be ready. If me and the lads hear anything, we'll try to do what we can." I nodded, and he strolled away to join the rest of his colleagues as they continued packing up the camp and loading it into the yellow inflatable rafts. 

Bruce and I made the top of the hill without incident. There were a trio of skuas roosting on the column, but they flapped off as we approached. The hole was still full of black water, I saw, but once more thought it would be good for preserving our find. Bruce snapped pictures of the column lying on its blue tarp while I eased myself down into the pool beneath whose surface our mummy, our Frigga, as I had started to think of her, lay. We would raise her, which I thought could be accomplished with minimal damage, set her on the ground, photograph her, and return her to the water. The water was almost to the tops of my boots, but only almost, for which I was grateful. Balancing on my left foot, I brought the right forward, feeling for the body. I touched nothing. Apparently, she was further away from this side of the hole than I had remembered. I advanced a step, repeated the procedure, and again felt nothing. Confused, I tried a third time, and a fourth, and then I was at the other side of the hole. I turned around and ran through the process again, with no more success. The hole was empty: Someone had removed Frigga. I looked up at Bruce to speak, but was stopped by a sound: the popping of firecrackers, gunfire, and brief, high cries that sounded like those of birds but were not. His face paled, and I felt the blood drain from mine. Struggling up the side of the hole, I felt in my coat pocket for the pistol and, my fingers closing around it, withdrew it as Bruce caught the top of my coat and helped me the rest of the way up. The sight of the gun startled him; he had not seen Ryan slip it to me nor had I told him. For another five, maybe ten, seconds, the distant gunfire continued, two or three submachine guns stuttering at the same time, and the cries, too, before all of it ceased. It did not start again. 

Although, for reasons more of irrational panic than any real knowledge, I did not believe what I said, I told Bruce that undoubtedly we had heard Collins and the men dealing with whoever had been plaguing us. All the same, there was no harm in being careful: Thus, attempting to conceal ourselves behind the scant cover afforded by slight rises of ground and solitary boulders, we descended the hill back to camp, myself in the lead with the pistol held out in front of me, Bruce following. I was filled with an almost overwhelming sense of dread, an emotion that partook equally of hanging over the toilet knowing you were going to vomit and in so doing plunge yourself into stomach-twisting illness, and of watching your father's chest sink for the final time, standing on the brink of a plunge of a very different, but no less real, kind. The camp was quiet as we sighted it, and as we drew nearer, I saw why: Everyone was dead, Collins, Ryan, Joseph, the two others. Ryan was collapsed on a yellow raft, and I could not understand what was wrong with his body until I realized that his head was turned around backward, his eye-sockets empty and bloody, blood trailing from his nose, his open mouth. Collins was on the ground next to him, facedown in a wide pool of blood still spreading from where his left arm had been torn from his body and tossed aside, where it lay with a pistol still clenched in hand. I did my best not to look directly at either of them, because I was afraid that if I did I would join Bruce, who was sobbing behind me. The remaining three men lay with one of the other rafts: A glance that lasted too long showed me another of them with his neck broken, one, I think it was Joseph, with both his arms tom off, the third with a gaping red hole punched into his chest. All their eyes appeared to have been gouged out. There was blood everywhere, flecks, streaks, puddles of red splashed across the scene. From where we were standing on the hill, I could see over the rise beyond the camp to the bay and sea, both of which were empty. 

"What happened?" Bruce said. "What happened to them?" 

I told him I didn't know and I didn't: No team of Soviet commandoes, however brutal, however ruthless, would have done this. Overhead, a small flock of skuas, a half-dozen or so, circled, crying. This, this was gratuitous, this was -- I didn't know how to describe it to myself; it was outside my vocabulary. As was what I saw next. 

There, running toward us from over the rise beyond the camp, was Frigga. For a moment that stretched on elastically, I was sure my mind had broken, that the superabundant carnage spread out in front of me had snapped it with the ease with which you snap a match between your fingers. So, I thought, this is insanity, as I watched her race closer, her back hunched, her braid flapping from side to side like the tail of an animal, her sightless eyes pointed at me, her mouth open wide, her arms stretched out to either side of her, her fingers hooked. Amazing, I thought, what detail. Then Bruce saw her too and started screaming, which was all it took for me to know I was not insane, and even as I knew this I felt a tremendous regret, because I was not sure my mind could support Frigga running across the ground and everything that implied, and I felt a tremendous fear, my gut squeezing. I leveled the pistol, aligning the sights on Frigga's chest, and squeezed the trigger. The gun roared, almost kicking itself from my hands, but I held onto it and fired again, and again, and again. I could see the fabric of her tunic pucker where the bullets struck with what at this distance should have been sufficient force to knock a big man sprawling with several large holes in him. I fired again before she was on me, striking me on the side of the head with a kindling-thin arm that connected like a heavy club in the hands of a weightlifter, sweeping me from my feet and sending me rolling down the hill. Everything spun around, and around, and around, then I hit the bundle that was my duffel bag. 

On the hillside above, Bruce was screaming. Pushing myself up on my hands, I saw him on his back, Frigga straddling him, one hand at his throat, the other approaching his jaw. My God, I thought, the warning was true: She's going to take his face. She did not care that Bruce had had nothing to do with what had happened to her so long ago: She had suffered, and now someone else could suffer. The pistol had fallen from my grip, but was close; I picked it up, aimed it, and emptied the rest of the clip into Frigga's back. It did not affect her in the least. As Bruce struggled to free her hand from his throat, she dug the thumb of her other hand into his skin and began drawing it along his jaw, blood squirting out as she split his flesh. His screams increased. Enraged, I threw the useless pistol at her. It struck her head and fell to the side, without her noticing. Frantically, I looked about for a weapon, for something that might be of use against her, as her thumb continued its circuit of Bruce's face and his screams continued. Guns were useless, and I doubted explosives -- the sword! It had kept her in place for a thousand years: It might be effective. Bruce had rolled it up inside the tent to protect it. The tent was behind my duffel bag; I dropped to my knees and began furiously untying the tent's straps. Bruce's screams continued. I fought with a knot, tore the strap off. I undid the remaining strap, unrolled the tent, shouting for Bruce to hold on. His screams continued. I did not look up. Two pairs of socks, a sweater, where was the sword? there! swaddled in a blanket I yanked away. There was a tearing sound, like a shirt caught on a nail, and Bruce's screams became a wet, choked gurgle. I looked up, the sword in my hand, and saw that I was too late: Frigga had taken Bruce's face, peeled it off him the way you might peel an orange, and draped it over her own ruined face. His face gone, his throat split open by her thumb, Bruce was dead. Through the ragged holes in Bruce's face, Frigga's empty sockets gazed at me, and my mind trembled at the sight. In a bound, she had leapt off him, and was running toward me. 

I fled. Sword in hand, I ran as fast as I could for the beach, praying that the boat would have made its appearance, that it would be sitting there in the bay and I would be able to swim out to it, leave Frigga behind. Even as the beach came into view, though, and I ran down onto it, slipping and almost falling on a loose rock, and I saw the bay, the sea beyond, and, yes, the ship approaching in the not-too-distant distance, I could hear Frigga's feet clattering across the rocks behind me, feel her hand reaching out to catch my jacket. She was too fast; she was on me: I was going to die here, on the beach, in sight of the ship and salvation; if I were lucky, she would break my neck and be done with me quickly. A tidal wave of rage swelled in my chest, rushing up into my brain, swamping my fear. I was going to die here, on this Godforsaken island, at the hands of a monster I had brought up out of the ground, and no one would know, no one would know any of this, anything. I caught the sword in both hands, stopped, pivoted, and swung it as hard as I could, screaming my throat raw with fury and frustration. 

Frigga could not stop in time to avoid me. The blade caught her on the side of the head, cracking it, sending poor Bruce's empty face flying off her. She staggered, and I struck again, bringing the sword down on her right collar bone, breaking it and three of the ribs beneath it, ripping open her leathery skin. She swept at me with her left hand, catching me a glancing blow on the right shoulder that spun me half around; I struck her right arm and heard a bone snap. We were at the water; a wave swept around my boots. I backed into it, Frigga following, her dark face streaked with Bruce's blood. The freezing water rising to my knees, my thighs, I continued back, holding the sword before me. Frigga feinted to the right, then lunged at me, and with a scream I drove the sword straight through her, just under the breastbone, all the way in and out the other side, to the hilt. It pushed through her with the sound of leather tearing. I kept screaming as she stumbled and fell in the water with a splash; I kept screaming as she tried to stand and could not, flailing at the sword impaling her; I kept screaming as I pulled off my coat, tugged off my boots, and swam for the boat. I screamed as if screaming would defeat her. I did not see Frigga sink under the water, a crowd of skuas descending onto it as she did, flapping and crying: that was what the ship captain claimed to have seen. I was still screaming when they pulled me out of the water onto the ship, and when at last I stopped screaming, all I would say, for a week, in reply to whatever question was posed to me, was, "They're dead. They're all dead. She got them. Frigga got them." 

Of course, that isn't enough for you. Of course, you want to hear more; you want to know what happened next. It's all right: I would, too. I was put in a hospital, in Edinburgh, in a private room. I saw various doctors, took various medications, and had many interviews with many men, some of them in uniform, some in suits. I told them all the same story I told you. I presume there was an investigation, even several, although apparently Frigga was not found; that was what I was told, at least. No charges of any kind were brought against me; why they would have been, I'm not sure, except that when things go wrong to this magnitude and this many people die, a scapegoat is usually required. I have no idea what explanation was provided Bruce's family, whether his body was returned to them and if so in what state. In the hospital, I tried to compose a letter expressing my sympathy at their loss, but I could not write anything that did not sound too much like a lie, so in the end I sent a generic card that a nurse bought for me. I presume the deaths of Collins, Ryan, Joseph, and the others were assigned an unrelated tragic cause: lost at sea during training maneuvers; killed when their helicopter went down. Eventually, I was released from the hospital, with a generous supply of pills to keep me from waking in the night, screaming. I taught at Aberdeen the following semester, actually delivering my own lectures and running my own tutorials, but I returned home before the last semester, leaving the department in the lurch and not caring that I did. They have not invited me back; I've had no desire to return. My career since then-- has been less than it could have been. I -- I think I've psychoanalyzed myself sufficiently for one night. I'll leave the reasons for my failure to achieve, whether they be guilt, fear, heredity, a combination of the lot, or none of the above, to your discussion. 

I tend to avoid the sea. Had I realized how close this house is to the Atlantic, I most likely would not have come. You told me, Bob, I simply wasn't paying attention. Beside the sound and smell of the ocean, I try to stay busy; when my mind is free, I wonder: Was that final blow sufficient to kill Frigga? Can you even speak of such a thing, is it possible? The birds, the skuas, what were they doing there? Did the deaths of Collins and the men, Bruce's death, satisfy her, or even now, as we sit here talking, is she making her way toward me? Nights like this, if I'm unwise or unlucky enough to find myself by the sea, I imagine -- well, I'm sure you can guess. 
--For Fiona, and for Bob & Kappa Waugh


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