The Peculiar Exploits of Brigadier Ffellowes (8 page)

             
" 'What he said amounted to this. We, that is my people, had settled on the land made sacred in the remote past to Jormungandir. Now Jormungandir in the standard Norse sagas and myths is the great, world-circling sea serpent, the son of the renegade Aesir Loki and a giantess. He is a monster who on the day of Ragnarok will arise to assault Asgard. But actually, these myths are based on something quite, quite different. The ancient Jormungandir was a god of the sea all right, but he was here before any Norsemen, and he had children, who were semi-mortal and very, very dangerous. All the Asgard business was invented later, by people who did not remember the reality, which was both unpleasant and a literal, living menace to ancient men.

             
" 'My ancestor, the first of our race to rule here, asked what he could do to abate the menace. Nothing, said the shaman, except go away. Unless, if the chief were brave enough, he, the shaman, could summon the Children of the God, and the chief could ask
them
how
they
felt!

             
" 'Well, my people were anything but Christians in those days, and they had some rather nasty gods of their own. Also, the old chief, my ancestor, was on his mettle, and he liked the land he and his tribe had settled. So—he agreed, and although his counselors tried to prevent him, he went alone at night to the shore with the old shaman of the shore people. And what is more, he returned.

             
" 'From that day to this we have always lived here on this stretch of shore. There is a vault below the deepest cellar where certain things are kept and a ceremony through which the eldest son of the house of Nyderstrom must pass. I will not tell you more about it save to say that it involves an oath, one we have never broken, and that the other parties to the oath would not be good for men to see. You should know, for you have seen one!'

             
"I had sat spellbound while this rigmarole went on, and some of the disbelief must have shown in my eyes, because he spoke rather sharply all at once.

             
" 'What do you think the Watcher in the Sea was, the "animal" that seized you? If it had been anyone else in that car but myself—!'

             
"I nodded, because after recalling my experience on my swim, I was less ready to dismiss his story, and I had been in danger of forgetting my adventure. I apologized and he went on talking.

             
" 'The woman you spoke to was my father's much younger sister, a vain and arrogant woman of no brainpower at all. She lived a life in what is now thought of as society, in Stockholm, on a generous allowance from me, and I have never liked her. Somewhere, perhaps as a child, she learned more than she should about the family secret, which is ordinarily never revealed to our women.

             
" 'She wished me to marry and tried ceaselessly to entrap me with female idiots of good family whom she had selected.

             
" 'It is true that I must someday marry, but my aunt irritated me beyond measure, and I finally ordered her out of the house and told her that her allowance would cease if she did not stop troubling me. She was always using the place for house parties for her vapid friends, until I put a stop to it.

             
" 'I knew when I saw her body what she had done. She must have found out that the servants were away and that I would be gone for the day. She sent men from Stockholm. The local folk would not obey such an order from her, in my absence. She must have had duplicate keys, and she went in and down and had moved what she should never have seen, let alone touched. It was sacrilege, no less, and of a very real and dangerous kind. The fool thought the things she took held me to the house, I imagine.

             
" 'You see,' he went on, with more passion in his voice than I had previously heard.
'They
are not responsible. They do not see things as we do. They regarded the moving of those things as the breaking of a trust, and they struck back. You appeared, because of the time element, to have some connection, and they struck at you. You do see what I mean, don't you?'

             
"His green eyes fixed themselves on me in an open appeal. He actually wanted sympathy for what, if his words were true, must be the damnedest set of beings this side of madness. And even odder, you know, he had got it. I had begun to make a twisted sense of what he said, and on that quiet evening in the big shadowed room, I seemed to feel an ancient and undying wrong, moreover one which badly needed putting right.

             
"He seemed to sense this and went on, more quietly.

             
" 'You know, I still need your help. Your silence later, but more immediate help now. Soon that lorry will be here and the things it took must be restored.

             
" 'I am not now sure if I can heal the breach. It will depend on the Others. If they believe me, all will go as before. If not—well, it was my family who kept the trust, but also who broke it. I will be in great danger, not only to my body but also to my soul. Their power is not all of the body.

             
" 'We have never known,' he went on softly, 'why they love this strip of coast. It is not used so far as we know, for any of their purposes, and they are subject to our emotions or desires in any case. But they do, and so the trust is honored.'

             
"He looked at his watch and murmured 'six o'clock.' He got up and went to the telephone, but as his hand met the receiver, we both heard something.

             
"It was a distant noise, a curious sound, as if, far away somewhere, a wet piece of cloth were being dragged over stone. In the great silent house, the sound could not be localized, but it seemed to me to come from deep below us, perhaps in a cellar. It made my hair stiffen.

             
" 'Hah,' he muttered. 'They are stirring. I wonder—'

             
"As he spoke, we both became conscious of another noise, one which had been growing
upon us for some moments unaware, that of a powerful motor engine. Our minds must have worked together for as the engine noise grew, our eyes met and we both burst into simultaneous gasps of relief. It could only be the furniture van, returning at last.

             
"We both ran to the entrance. The hush of evening lay over the estate, and shadows were long and dark, but the twin lights turning into the drive cast a welcome luminance over the entrance.

             
"The big lorry parked again in front of the main entrance, and the two workmen I had seen earlier got out. I could not really understand the rapid gunfire Swedish, but I gathered the baron was explaining that his aunt had made a mistake. At one point both men looked appalled, and I gathered that Nyderstrom had told them of his aunt's death. (He told me later that he had conveyed the impression that she was unsound mentally: it would help quiet gossip when they saw a report of the death.)

             
"All four of us went around to the rear of the van, and the two men opened the doors. Under the baron's direction they carried out and deposited on the gravel the two pieces of furniture I had seen earlier. One was the curious chair. It did not look terribly heavy, but it had a box bottom, solid sides instead of legs and no arm rests. Carved on the oval-topped head was a hand grasping a sort of trident, and when I looked closely, I got a real jolt. The hand had only two fingers and a thumb, all without nails, and I suddenly felt in my bones the reality of my host's story.

             
"The other piece was the small, plain, rectangular chest, a bit like a large toy chest, with short legs ending in feet like a duck's. I mean three-toed and
webbed,
not the conventional 'duck foot' of the antique dealers.

             
"Both the chair and the chest were made of a dark wood, so dark it looked oily, and they had certainly not been made yesterday.

             
"Nyderstrom had the two men put the two pieces in the front hall and then paid them. They climbed back into their cab, so far as I could make out, apologizing continuously for any trouble they might have caused. We waved from the porch and then watched the lights sweep down the drive and fade into the night. It was fully dark now, and I suddenly felt a sense of plain old-fashioned fright as we stood in silence on the dark porch.

             
" 'Come,' said the baron, suddenly breaking the silence, 'we must hurry. I assume you will help?'

             
" 'Certainly,' I said. I felt I had to, you see, and had no lingering doubts at all. I'm afraid that if he'd suggested murdering someone, by this time I'd have agreed cheerfully. There was a compelling, hypnotic power about him. Rasputin was supposed to have had it and Hitler also, although I saw
him
plenty, and never felt it. At any rate, I just couldn't feel that anything this man wanted was wrong.

             
"We manhandled the chair and the chest into the back of the house, stopping at last in a back hall in front of a huge oaken door, which appeared to be set in a stone wall. Since the house
was made of wood, this stone must have been part of the original building, the ancient fort, I guess, that he'd mentioned earlier.

             
"There were three locks on the door, a giant old padlock, a smaller newer one and a very modern-looking combination. Nyderstrom fished out two keys, one of them huge, and turned them. Then, with his back to me, he worked the combination. The old house was utterly silent, and there was almost an atmospheric hush, the kind you get when a bad thunderstorm is going to break. Everything seemed to be waiting, waiting for something to happen.

             
"There was a click and Nyderstrom flung the great door open. The first thing I noticed was that it was lined with steel on the other, inner side, and the second, that it opened on a broad flight of shallow steps leading down on a curve out of sight into darkness. The third impression was not visual at all. A wave of odor, strong but not unpleasant, of tide pools, seaweed and salt air poured out of the opening. And there were several large patches of water on the highest steps, large enough to reflect the light.

             
"Nyderstrom closed the door again gently, not securing it, and turned to me. He pointed, and I now saw on one wall of the corridor to the left of the door, about head height, a steel box, also with a combination lock. A heavy cable led from it down to the floor. Still in silence, he adjusted the combination and opened the box. Inside was a knife switch with a red handle. He left the box open and spoke, solemnly and slowly.

             
" 'I am going down to a confrontation. You must stay right here, with the door open a little, watching the steps. I may be half an hour, but at most three quarters. If I come up
alone,
let me out. If I come up
not
alone, slam the door, turn the lock and throw that switch. Also if anything
else
comes up, do so. This whole house, under my direction, and at my coming of age, was extensively mined and you will have exactly two and a half minutes to get as far as possible from it. Remember, at
most,
three quarters of an hour. At the end of that time, even if nothing has happened, you will throw that switch and run ...!'

             
"I could only nod. There seemed to be nothing to say, really.

             
"He seemed to relax a little, patted me on the shoulders, and turned to unlock the strange chest. Over his shoulder he talked to me as he took things out. 'You are going to see one thing at any rate, a true Sea King in full regalia. Something, my friend, no one has seen who is not a member of my family since the late Bronze Age.'

             
"He stood up and began to undress quickly, until he stood absolutely naked. I have never seen a more wonderful figure of a man, pallid as an ivory statue, but huge and splendidly formed. On his head, from out of the stuff in the chest, he had set a narrow coronet, only a band in the back, but rising to a flanged peak in front. Mounted in the front peak was a plaque on which the three-fingered hand and trident were outlined in purple gems. The thing was solid gold. Nyderstrom then stooped and pulled on a curious, short kilt, made of some scaly hide like a lizard's and colored an odd green-gold. Finally, he took in his right hand a short, curved, gold rod, ending in a blunt, stylized trident.