C12 Chapter 12

Soldiers were lined up at short intervals outside a high fence. Behind it, four tall buildings rose to the sky. A large crowd of people stood at a suitable distance, staring.

Now they protested loudly because the guard at the gate had let a man slip into the area. Why was he allowed in and not they? Was he a journalist? If so, the other journalists would report the guard at the gate for being biased.

No, he wasn’t a journalist, said someone. But they needed somebody who could go up inside the building and check what was going on. Anyway, this man only had a few months left to live. This was why they had agreed to his wish. He was a foreigner. And ... if he wanted to sacrifice himself, well then it was his own business.

Some of those in the crowd got the impression that it was the bit about being a foreigner that had weighed heaviest in making up their minds.

They saw Ian Morahan walk into the “Kornblomsten” tower. The door slammed behind him. They shuddered joyfully.

Late in the morning, the five were rested and ready to travel. The bread had dwindled and to be on the safe side, they took some bars of chocolate with them. They found them in a cardboard box in the kiosk. They paid well for them and then they were on their way.

“This time they didn’t find us,” said Ellen triumphantly. “I felt sure we would be locked up and burnt inside the huts.”

“So did I,” Gabriel admitted. “Or that they would come rushing in and shoot us. We overslept, didn’t we?”

After half an hour, they came to a small town and stopped to top up the oil in the car, which was showing a warning light.

“Thank goodness we didn’t go farther into the wilderness,” Nataniel said. “But I must say that farmer lied to us! There’s a hotel over there and it’s open. What a cheat!”

“I think fate wanted us to stay where we were,” said Tova. “Otherwise, ‘they’ might have found us here.”

“Probably.” The others nodded.

Gabriel was trampling on a newspaper that somebody had thrown away.

Suddenly, he started. “Nataniel! Look! Your name is mentioned here!”

Gabriel stepped off the newspaper and picked it up. It was covered with footprints, but still completely readable.

Nataniel was shocked. “Well, look at that. Rikard is searching for me!”

“When is the newspaper from?”

“Yesterday. Then we’ve lost a whole day.”

“Lost? How come?”

Nataniel read the newspaper aloud and they listened with mounting horror.

Finally, Nataniel asked: “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Yes,” replied Marco. “I don’t think there’s any doubt who this is about.”

“I must go back,” said Nataniel feverishly. “Can I take the motorbike, Marco?”

“Of course, but don’t take the bottle with you!”

“No, that’s true. Will you take it?”

Marco looked hesitant and Nataniel understood.

“If they capture you, they’ll get two bottles at the same time. That won’t do. I’ll hide it over there in that little grove. I’ll bury it and put a mark over it. You must witness it so that you also know about it.”

Ellen was shuffling her feet impatiently. There was something she wanted to say. “I want to be with you, Nataniel.”

“No, you can’t! You have a bottle of your own, which needs to be taken to the Valley of the Ice People.”

“But you can’t go on your own. You’ll need me!”

“Ellen! No protests now! I’ll do the journey in one go, Marco. Give me a bar of chocolate, then I’ll manage for a while.”

They shared the chocolate from the previous night. But Ellen’s nerves were on edge so she didn’t want any. She had already made up her mind to follow Nataniel; she didn’t dare to let him travel on his own. But how was she to do it?

“There’s a telephone box,” said Nataniel. “I’ll go over and give Rikard a call.”

He came back quickly. “Yes,” he said sternly. “Rikard is convinced that it’s Tengel the Evil in that block of flats! Especially because the creature seems to hate him in particular. You know: the blood of the Ice People! Rikard is at home right now, he’s been very busy ever since we left. He immediately announced in the newspapers that the authorities wanted me. That went into yesterday’s evening papers. All this has been going on for a few days without us knowing anything about it. This shows that it’s wrong to focus on the problems of the Ice People so much that you forget the outside world – where our problem has materialized ... Anyway, Rikard isn’t there now, so that’s all he knows. Now, let’s bury my bottle! In this little grove. This will be fine, won’t it?”

When they had buried the little bottle and covered it with earth, Nataniel arranged some stones as a marker. Then he got to his feet. He called quietly: “Tengel the Good: will you please guard this place?”

They waited without moving. Then they heard a whistling sound in the grove and something they couldn’t see was among them. They heard Tengel the Good’s deep, familiar voice: “One of the abandoned ones has now settled by the place. If necessary, he will summon several of his friends. The bottle is safe here.”

“Thank you,” said Nataniel, and they left the grove. Then he was off on the motorbike and Marco took over the wheel of the car. Ellen was distraught. She wouldn’t get into the car, but Marco and Tova persuaded her.

She sat there stiff as a board, with an utterly empty expression on her face. She had failed. She wouldn’t be by Nataniel’s side when he needed her the very most.

She woke up all of a sudden. “Marco, look! A small airstrip! Oh, what a shame Nataniel didn’t see it. And there are planes in there. One of them seems to be about to take off.”

“Yes, so what?”

“Drop me off, I want to get on that plane!”

“No, Ellen ...”

But when Marco saw the determined resoluteness in Ellen’s eyes, he understood how much it meant for her to be with Nataniel. He sighed deeply with tight lips.

“Oh, well. You can always ask. If they’re off to Northern Norway ...”

They weren’t. They would be flying to Oslo and there was room for Ellen. If she paid, of course.

Actually, she couldn’t afford it. She had spent her savings for the journey, but Ellen didn’t hesitate for a second. The flight wouldn’t depart until three quarters of an hour later, but this meant very little. Nataniel would be travelling by a much slower route.

So they parted company when they had found a suitable place to bury Ellen’s bottle and put a mark over the spot. They repeated the process of calling upon Tengel the Good and having the abandoned demons guard the place. This time, Tengel the Good warned them. He appreciated Ellen’s loyalty towards Nataniel but the entire picture was now different. They had to be vigilant every single moment. Their ancestors had felt great activity in all layers of the earth and air.

Tengel the Evil had mobilized his army ...

Now there were only three in the car.

Gabriel said that he was sleepy and tried to fall asleep. Tova, who had been promoted to the front seat, was chirping away happily but was beginning to yawn alarmingly.

“Why on earth are we so sleepy?” asked Marco. “After all, we slept well last night. But I can hardly see clearly any longer.”

Tova stirred slightly at the sound of his voice. She had almost fallen asleep. She shouted: “Look where you’re going, Marco!”

It was a very narrow escape. Marco managed to bring the car back to an even keel, then he drove onto a side road and stopped the car.

“The chocolate,” Marco said with clenched teeth. “So they found us after all. This time as well!”

Tova was struggling to stay awake: the need to sleep was irresistible. “What are we to do?” she whispered weakly.

All the trees were in a haze. Marco’s voice came from afar: “I’ll drive a bit farther along here so that we can’t be seen from the main road. Then we’ll just have to lock the doors of the car and try to sleep. There’s nothing else we can do.”

“What if there was something other than just sleeping medicine in the chocolate? Something stronger?”

“We must just hope for the best,” Marco muttered as he manoeuvred the car in between the tree trunks. Before she slept, Tova hurriedly locked the back doors where Gabriel was lying.

“Ellen didn’t take any chocolate,” she said unintelligibly.

Farther down the Gudbrandsdalen, Nataniel woke up for a moment. He had actually landed in the ditch! How on earth had that happened?

Then he remembered. The inertia that had gripped him. The irresistible fatigue. And then, nothing. And now stinging scrapes all over his body.

He also understood that he had been poisoned. Mustering all his energy, he managed to get the bike up out of the ditch and rolled it behind a derelict smithy at the roadside. There he leant against the wall and slept. He had no choice.

A fair-haired young man came and sat next to him. Linde-Lou was going to do everything he could to protect him!

Ellen didn’t reach Vestsund until dusk. Rikard drove her there. She wanted to wait for him to make sure that she would be allowed through the cordoned-off area.

“Nataniel is bound to be there by now,” she said confidently. “He can drive fast when he wants to.”

In the car, Rikard had given Ellen a full report of what he knew. Actually, it wasn’t very much because nobody had managed to get sufficiently close without losing their lives ...

“That’s encouraging,” she muttered.

The spectators were still there. Some had probably left, but others had arrived. The four high-rise buildings rose against the dark night sky. There was light in one of them, in a few scattered windows. But since the entire area had been evacuated, people had probably forgotten to switch off the lights when they left.

“Kornblomsten” lay in complete darkness.

“You mentioned something about a journalist?”

“Yes. He was foolhardy. He went too close. A few of the residents were also in the way of ... oh, God! This is awful!”

The wrought-iron gate creaked as it opened and the guard let them in. The crowd stared and mumbled.

Rikard asked whether Nataniel Gard had come. The guard had just replaced the daytime guard; he knew that a man had been let in quite recently, so perhaps that was him.

“Probably,” said Rikard. “It’s bound to be Nataniel because I’ve given orders for him to be let in.”

He led Ellen up the tarmacked road towards the block. The gate closed behind them. They were now locked in together with what the newspapers were describing as “it”.

Rikard opened the door, switched on the light and showed her into the hall.

The glare was treacherous. Ellen stepped back in horror.

“Phew, what a stench!” she exclaimed. “What an abominable stench! How on earth can Nataniel take it?”

“You may well ask!” Rikard pulled a face and coughed.

“Where ... is it ... you know?”

He pointed upwards. “Prowls about. As a rule, two floors up, in the hall up there. Ellen: Do you know what you’ve let yourself in for?”

“I’ll be all right as long as Nataniel’s here.”

Rikard thought for a moment. “He has great confidence in you, you know that. So have our ancestors, since they chose you as one of the five. I was told why. Because you have something in you that appeals to unhappy souls and spirits. Isn’t that true?”

“Thank you very much,” Ellen said tartly. “This isn’t always a nice quality to have.” She coughed and almost threw up because of the stench.

“I see.”

All of a sudden, they stiffened. They heard footsteps coming down from the second floor.

“Nataniel?” Ellen shouted in a lowered voice.

But there was no answer. The steps merely stopped for a moment and then continued. Ellen moved a bit closer to Rikard.

A man came down the stairs. A dark-haired man with deep-set eyes and sharp, downward-turning lines in his face: an indicator of advanced cancer.

“Who are you?” asked Rikard sharply. “What are you doing here?”

“My name’s Morahan,” said the man in very poor Norwegian. “I asked for permission to come inside and look around and got it because I’ll be dead soon anyway. I’m terminally ill. I promised to report on what I saw.”

“So have you seen anything?”

“Yes.”

“And you survived?”

“It seems to have accepted me. But I’m very careful and keep myself at a good distance. Perhaps it needs me? It almost seems so.”

“Please describe what you saw.”

Morahan shuddered violently. “It ... it’s something unfathomable, beyond comprehension. At first, I thought it was something from another planet, but ... No. It seems very earthly. Very earthly! That dust ... as if it’s of the earth. And old!”

Rikard cleared his throat. “We had hoped to meet Nataniel Gard here. Have you seen him by any chance?”

The dark eyes gazed at him in surprise. “No. There’s nobody else here.”

Ellen said quickly: “If ... Morahan can get fairly close to him, I might be able to do so as well.”

Rikard admonished Ellen. “No, I won’t allow it.”

The Irishman said: “I’ve found an absolutely safe vantage point up there where it’s possible to retreat down a back stair and you can lock the door after you. Besides, he’s not particularly aggressive.”

“He can’t tolerate me,” said Rikard. “He made such violent attacks against me that I can’t possibly go up there anymore. There are special reasons why this is impossible. I fear he’ll attack Ellen in the same way. She and I happen to be relatives.”

Morahan gave him an inquisitive look.

“We think we know who this grotesque creature is. That Nataniel Gard I mentioned also belongs to the same family. But also that abominable dust he appears to excrete seems to be toxic. So I think you should be more cautious, Mr Morahan!”

“Why?”

Rikard and Ellen couldn’t answer that question.

Ellen’s heart contracted. The man who stood there, holding onto the banister, was very fascinating. She liked what she saw. Although the illness had ravaged him, there was something strong and robust about him even if he wasn’t very tall. She didn’t want this man to die so early because he hadn’t deserved it. Somehow, he seemed so dynamic.

But everything in his appearance, his pallor, his thinness, the deep-set eyes and the lines in his face, not to mention his horribly superficial breathing, told them that his days were numbered.

There was a strange, tense atmosphere in the big hall, which wasn’t exactly pleasant. It was almost unbearably eerie. Worst of all, of course, was the smell, but there was also a dull undertone of evil in the building. The sensitive Ellen could feel it very clearly.

Suddenly, she broke the silence.

“I want to see the creature now.”

Rikard hesitated for a long time, his face showing fear, despondency and several hours of unease.

“If I’m doing something wrong, I’ll never forgive myself. But Nataniel has told me a lot about you, Ellen. So I feel very strongly that you, with your special abilities, can achieve some sort of contact. Your previous experiences of this kind were in places where shocking things had taken place. This is something totally different. This isn’t a mood that has lingered after a pleading spirit. Ellen, I don’t know ... I can’t.”

“Well, Rikard, I’m not scared.”

He gritted his teeth. “I’m so unsure. Shouldn’t we wait for Nataniel? But, then, we ought to make sure. Find out whether it really is the one we have in mind. Well, off you go then! But please don’t be rash!”

“I promise to be very careful. Morahan knows how far we can go.”

“And don’t expect anything beautiful or touching!”

“Have we ever believed we would?”

When she went up the stairs and the horrible stench grew twice as sharp and enveloped her, she was just about to give up. Morahan stretched out his hand towards her because he could feel that her steps were becoming more hesitant. He has no more to live for, Ellen thought, but I do!

Still, he survived meeting the monster, and so can I. But then he’s not one of the Ice People.

“Rikard,” she said, turning around. “I don’t suppose you have a revolver that I can borrow?”

“What use would a revolver be here?”

That answer shocked Ellen more than anything else she had heard.

Tengel the Evil – the immortal ...

They worked their way slowly up the first flight. It had to be done slowly for other reasons as well. Morahan had to rest at the top of every stairway. His hand was clammy to hold. They suspected that using the lift would seem too disruptive for “it”, so they struggled as well as they could.

Ellen gathered that Morahan preferred to speak Norwegian even if she would have understood his English much better. She herself addressed him in Norwegian. He found this a pleasant surprise.

“How did you end up here?” she whispered.

“Curiosity,” he admitted.

“But in Norway?”

“I wanted to see where my mother came from before ...” Morahan didn’t finish the sentence. “She was from Nordland.”

“We’re also travelling in that direction – afterwards,” she said, quite matter-of-fact. He didn’t reply.

The first corridor was empty, as Ellen had expected. Morahan held her hand in a hard grip, no doubt to make her feel secure, but he didn’t feel safe himself right now so ...

A terminally ill man who is insecure?

This was probably the most frightening thing.

When the stairs turned up to the next landing, Morahan hesitated for a moment. Ellen could feel that despite his seeming calm, he trembled at the thought of continuing.

“You don’t seem to have gotten used to it,” she said with gentle understanding.

“No, I can’t take it. That monster is something you never get used to. No, I can’t let you see ... this! Can’t draw a young girl into something so horrible!”

“Believe me, my family are hardened.” They had stopped. “Where do you think it comes from?”

The air was thick like syrup and stank like dead animals or other unappetizing things.

“I’ve no idea,” he replied. “It’s like something out of a nightmare – with the only difference that even in my worst dreams, I don’t have such a macabre imagination. And then here! In a sterile high-rise on the outskirts of Oslo! It’s simply unfathomable!”

Ellen said pensively: “If it is who we think it is, then he’s from the Balkans – after a short stay of eighteen years in the Harz.”

“The Balkans?” said Morahan quickly. “Transylvania?”

Ellen turned and looked at him with a slow smile. “Are you thinking of vampires? No, he’s not a vampire.”

“You say ‘he’?”

“Yes, I think it’s a better designation than ‘it’. Besides, it is a he. If it’s who we think it is. That’s what I want to find out now.”

Then they said no more. They walked hesitantly up the last steps to the third floor.

Then they were in the corridor.

They didn’t dare to switch on the light because they wanted to avoid anything that could irritate him, but the evening light was too dim now to illuminate the long corridor properly. Ellen strained her eyes in the dusk. The stench was now so thick that you could have cut it with a knife.

She whispered: “I can’t see anything.” She had to suppress a cough. “Is he here?”

Morahan didn’t answer her. He merely held her hand so hard that it hurt.

Dark shadows twisted the perspective for Ellen. It wasn’t just the intense smell up here – it was also something else. Something vibrating, oppressive, hanging in the air itself.

Is it possible to see it at all? Ellen wondered. Perhaps it’s just a sensation, an invisible subterranean creature?

Then she started. At the far end of the corridor some cupboards stood along the wall. On top of one of them there was something that wasn’t supposed to be there ...

Ellen took a firmer grip of Morahan’s hand. Very gently, he signalled that they could move a bit closer. Over to a door that seemed to lead to the fire escape.

Ellen’s steps became increasingly hesitant. She felt a creeping feeling in her neck, an irresistible urge to rush senselessly back and out into the fresh air. There was a strange glow over the corridor and she gathered that it was the reflection of the setting sun, which had hidden itself behind one of the other high-rise buildings.

Ellen’s trembling breathing and Morahan’s strained drawing in of air were all that could be heard.

His grasp around her shoulders stopped her. Now they ought not to go any further.

She stood stock-still while the disbelief grew in her, a wild revolt against understanding what could slowly be detected in the shadows. In a lightning vision, she understood what the inhabitants of the building must have felt when they opened their doors and stood face-to-face with this! She knew that one had died from a heart attack, another one – the person who had involuntarily let this creature into the building – lay in the half-open door, his body serving as a doorstop. It was unclear how he had died. Others had had a terrible shock.

After all, she who had been prepared for this was nevertheless shaken.

Then, like a whim of fate, a final strip of sunlight appeared from behind the neighbouring building and shone onto the opposite wall. And Ellen saw shockingly clearly what was over there.

“It’s him,” she whispered with frozen lips.

The long corridor began to sway before her eyes like the deck on a ship in a storm and she had to reach out for Morahan in order not to fall.