“Aesir”
By T.A. Wardrope
Copyright 2011 T.A. Wardrope
Smashwords Edition
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***
The saying goes that every adventure begins with a single step, but in my case, the adventure began with a single meeting. I had been writing freelance for the rock and roll magazine RAWK, but just recently transitioned from the freelance ranks on the virtue of a story I had written about the buzz-generating Atlanta band Orlock. As a result, I also had a few nervous interviews on MTV and some local shows about the time I spent with the band. I was the little guy with the cracking voice and the mop top.
Marcus, my editor, summoned me in to his office and laid it all out before me.
“Lewis, I’d like you to go to Oslo and spend some time with this band…Fimbultver.”
“Fimbultver.” The correct pronunciation.
“Yeah. Things are getting pretty crazy over there; figure we should get on it before the Stone or Shred. This is more our territory, anyway.”
“Uhhh…they’re pretty intense. I don’t want my head on a pike at one of their shows.”
“That’s not true…that’s like the Ozzy bat story.”
“The bat story is true.”
“Do you want the gig? I figured you’d appreciate the lead, and I think you need something you can really sink your teeth into.”
“How long will I be gone?”
“Long enough to get the story, a couple of weeks at the most. I really want you to get inside of the scene. Deep insider stuff. Give me a good solid tent pole piece. Something sensational, I know you can do it. This could be just what the magazine needs – a rising tide lifts all boats!”
“When would I leave?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
I arranged to meet Fimbultver backstage at the Loki club after they were done with their set. Although I was told exactly where to meet them in the club, I had not been told that I would be blindfolded, led into the basement, and subjected to a ritual showering of ice-cold goat’s blood by an eager member of their entourage. I met the Norse rock god Ansger shivering and shuddering.
He was draped imperially over a ragged red chair in a dark corner of the basement. His silver ringed, black tattooed fingers flowed over the contours of the cushions as if they were his favorite pet or lover, or both. Droplets of lingering sweat and booze shimmered in the scarlet ambience of the lounge. The impression was that he was drenched in blood, and wore it much better than I. A thick hand twisted a rain of amber-blonde locks away from his face and exposed both deep eyes and his heavy brow.
He grumbled through an accent as old the land itself.
“I am Ansgar.”
He sat there and interrogated me about my right to be there, about my rock cred, as the blood dripped into a pool on the cold cement floor. Only after Ansgar, and Ansgar alone, was convinced I wasn’t a cop or some other stooge did someone hand me a ragged, stale beer smelling, black towel to wipe the blood and sweat away.
Having passed the initiation, I was allowed to follow with the Fimbultver entourage and spend a few days in the Fimbultver practice studio with the five members of the band, Ansgar’s girlfriend Freya and other assorted members of their morbid pack. During one of these sessions, as the band was deep into pounding out the thundering music itself, no one paid me much notice except for Freya.
She set herself down in a sticker-covered folding chair next to mine. I smelled the tobacco and vodka floating off of her. She crossed her leather pants with a swish and leaned her twin diamond steel eyes towards me with a flip of the hair for emphasis.
“What other bands have you written about?”
“American bands. Local folks around Atlanta…some bigger names…I did an Orlock piece a few months ago.”
She sneered.
“Have you written about real black metal?”
“Uhhh…nothing over here before.”
“Ah. So what do you know?”
“I’ve listened to Fimbultver, of course, heard some of Chton, Klompfut, Hanes, Midgard…Fenrir.”
“Who do you like the most?”
Her face was taut, predatory. She pressed her black nails into each other as she looked me over. I didn’t get the idea she really cared one way or the other which band I enjoyed the most. She wanted to know if I enjoyed them at all.
“It’s a toss-up between Fimbultver and Midgard.”
“Isn’t it?”
She flicked a piece of dead skin off her fingertip and stood as noiselessly as she arrived. I watched her sway back over to the doorway near the area where the band was playing, she leaned into it, measured the men in the room, touched her teeth with her tongue absently as if she were licking her lips before a meal. She felt my stare and matched it with her own. I had to look away. I didn’t want to meet the challenge, didn’t want to cross the line from spectator to player, wanted them to take me into the depths of the scene as willing guides.
The craggy fjords and ice blue water shined in the unclouded sunlight, offering me a vista on the breadth of the Western coast. I was unprepared for the ascent into the Jotunheim, I’d dressed much warmer than I should have, so I was amazed at how comfortable I could be standing still on the mountain, exposed to all the churning winds of the world. A wisp of sweet smoke invaded the high air and I looked over to the source of the smoke, my black leather clad guides, Ansgar and Freya. They were smoking; I looked back at the coastline.
Ansgar and Freya mumbled unintelligibly behind me as I took in the natural beauty of their homeland. I suspected they had marked me as a fool from the start, so I hadn’t paid much attention to their hyenaesque snickering since I wiped the drying blood off of me that first night.
“Such a beautiful view?” Ansgar asked.
“Inspiring,” I offered with some honesty.
Ansgar stepped closer, his worn leather boots crisped through the snow, the chains of his leather jacket clinked in the sharp air as he swept his tattooed hand across the view of the coastline in front of me.
“These are like the teeth on the Dreki, the Viking ships, as they reach out, bite into whatever they catch, eating to live. -- sweeping into the frozen ocean and driving even the blood-hungry sharks before them in fear.” he clenched his fist with a wheezing chuckle.
“I can see that.” I said it because I could see it.
Ansgar put his broad arm around my shoulders and embraced me with curious force.
“Let’s go meet the mighty god Odin, shall we?”
I turned with him, not having much choice, just as Freya tossed her butt over the edge of the mountain. She tightened the blonde ponytail behind her head and tromped up and ahead of Ansgar and I. The growling, drooling, wolf’s head on the back panel of her jacket looked vibrant in the white light. The jaws appeared to open and shut as she moved up the powdered grey incline.
“How many times have you been up here?” I asked.
“Many, many times -- though not many lately. This is where the kids go. I am too famous to come here, anymore. Too powerful to be with them, but today, we should be alone.” a final squeeze for emphasis and he released me from his embrace.
The rocky path narrowed and branched alongside of the eastern face of the mountain. Narrow enough to make me clutch the rock, yet not treacherous enough to slow Freya as she leapt over the rocks and dirt. Here and there were patches of graffiti somehow etched into or onto the stone. Mostly Norwegian rock sigils, I recognized names of bands, a few satanic pentagrams, several enochian demon names, all crafted with elegance by an expert hand. As we climbed the designs became more intricate, merged into wolfish knot work designs and Old Norse words I did not recognize. I remember chuckling as I pictured the n’er do wells from my neighborhood street in rural Georgia scribbling their illiterate heavy metal tags on this Norwegian mountainside.
Freya stepped quickly to the left, and vanished from sight. I stopped.
Ansgar stopped only when he noticed I was not moving.
“This way to Odin’s Cave.” He pointed to where Freya had disappeared from sight. Then, with a wide stride ahead and to the left he vanished just as Freya had.
I followed slowly. I imagined them waiting behind this almost impossibly sharp turn on the cliff, plotting to jump out and surprise me, succeeding, only to have me leap from shock and fall to a tragic death. That would have been an amusing story for Marcus. I poked my head around the corner while I clung to the face with fingers that felt as frail as springtime ice.
I saw a man-sized sliver that had been ripped out of the side of the mountain by natural forces, and now decorated by eons of faithful Norsemen. Smoke drifted out of the hole, and the fresh crimson cherries of two burning cigarettes waited in the dark.
I hugged my body around the sharp edge and pushed myself in the crevice with one breathless motion. I let my eyes adjust to the dark before going further, and then could see some of Odin’s Cave.
The cave was large, with what looked like a low ceiling; several stalagmites and stalactites jabbed up and down here and there. The floor was sooty and charred, no doubt burned by thousands of sacred or profane bonfires. I stepped closer to the walls, wasn’t too surprised to see more ornate, runic graffiti flowing over every rocky inch. I wondered, was this just a mural by and for socially damned and self-loathing teens or something more sincere? How many had added their touch to this completely anonymous work?
“This is Odin’s Cave?” I asked for confirmation.
Freya spoke before Ansgar finished opening his mouth; “Yes!”
Ansgar closed his mouth, looked slightly askance at Freya while I stood in hesitant silence.
“You don’t feel the power of Odin around you?” Ansgar accused.
“No.” I squeaked the word out.
Ansgar let one of his signature growls rumble into the cave and gestured broadly as if he were on stage.
“This isn’t just a cave -- this is Odin’s Cave! Before they went out across the seas, this is where the Vikings themselves came to see.”
“See what?”
Freya’s chains jangled as she sat on a nearby rock. She folded her fingers as her subzero blue eyes bit at me, her nostrils flared like a stalking dog’s, and her small frame poised to spring at my throat. I felt I was being circled prior to the kill.
“What do you imagine they would come here to see?”
Given what I knew of the occult theatrics of this small and warped community, I had a vivid short list of potential sights, which included, but were not limited to, psychedelic visions of Valhalla, gory and orgiastic nightmares of eternal punishment at the mercy of the Midgard serpent, and/or pornographic visions of fertility rites that would make Caligula blush. I streamlined my response.
“The great god Odin?”
More jangles as Freya slunk away to a dark corner of the cave. She slipped out of sight, whispered something only the walls could hear. The cave was bigger than it had appeared at first.
Ansgar scraped at his emerging blonde stubble.
“What do you think of us, man? I mean, really? What really brings you all the way over here? I know you have black metal in the states.”
“Your anger is…your art is pure. Beyond that…I can’t say …something is different…more sincere?”
“Can you feel how sincere we are?”
There in that cave, outnumbered and feeling like a dork at the mercy of the class gang of bullies, I could feel my objectivity zip away with all the speed of an arriving Viking arrow. Freya was still not visible.
“Did Freya go somewhere?”
“She has gone on, lower, into the older Odin’s Cave.”
“Where?” This was out quicker than I wanted it to be, and probably laden with a bit more fear than I wanted too.
A slight smile, fading into the shadows oh his beard, mysterious as it drifted across his face.
“Don’t you wonder about me? You have all these questions about the scene, about the bands, the parties, yet you haven’t asked me anything about me.”
He had a good 70 pounds on me, and every ounce of it was rock-hardened sinew. I didn’t feel outnumbered, anymore, just outgunned. Had I offended him in my desire to be respectful? I remembered the long knives both of them kept with them at all times.
“I haven’t written the story yet, I don’t know what to say about you, or the band.”
“You haven’t asked.”
“I observe.”
His lips cracked just enough to see his left incisor, which was sharpened beyond what nature intended. His nodding head shook his mane back and forth.
“You need to decide why it is we are the way we are?”
“That’s not what I am writing about, but, sure, people are curious why your scene is so…intense.”
“We have no school shootings here is Oslo. No gangs. No rash of suicides, not that this matters to me, but that is what you Americans care about isn’t it? Safety?”
“Every society has their own subcultures, their own groups with their own problems.”
“We are not a problem.”
Check. My move.
“There is more to the Cave?”
The smile widened, I could see he had sharpened the incisor.
“Would you like to see for yourself?”
He turned dramatically and leapt into the shadows that had swallowed Freya minutes before. The echoes of his clomping boots resounded for longer than it should have by my estimation of the size of the cave. I cautiously followed this noise on quivering legs as I slid my fingers over the frozen stone. I felt the walls around me narrow and it occurred to me that I was most likely in a hidden passageway of some kind, behind the antechamber that the uninitiated thought to be Odin’s Cave.
Ansgar’s breath was much louder in the tunnel and filled it with the scents of pot, burnt lamb, and warm ale. In the deepening darkness he appeared to merge into the thickening swatches of shadow, somehow growing gigantic.
A cool sweep of incoming air blasted the odors away as I felt my way around a downward curve in the tunnel. Freya and Ansgar could then be seen ahead, lit by the flashlights in each of their hands. Past them, the narrow illuminated tunnel sloped into a steeper descent and out of sight again. As I stepped into the lit area, they turned the lights away and continued their way down. They had the only light, so I trailed them as fast as I could, but I was always too far behind.
The slope evolved into a flight of rough stone stairs that felt worn from erosion or use. My guides made their way sure-footedly down them, as I took each step as if it were on the edge of the world.
They didn’t bother to look back to see if I was keeping up, and I wasn’t. Their lights grew fainter; they weren’t waiting for me. I remembered that mercy was not a trait valued by these kinds of people. I felt the inkling of earnest danger, as I was no longer safe and protected by my hosts. I also recalled that I was the only unarmed member of the group, and for the first time, I was desperate to have some sort of weapon on my person. Something sharp, or heavy, to defend myself against whatever threat emerged onto the unlit path ahead of me.
Atlanta, the states, Oslo, even the recent cool breezes of the Jotunheim felt as hopeless memories of the past. The twin twinkles of bobbing flashlights reminded me I was deeply inside the scene yet still completely alien and untested at the same time. Vertigo rose from nowhere, as if I were about to fall through an unseen crack in the rock floor, maybe, or into the gaping maw of some primordial Norse being. Hysterics, fevered imagination, no doubt. As if I needed something else to fear.
Then, the bobbing lights were sucked completely into the void. I doubled my stumbling to catch up to my delinquent guides.
I stopped mid-step, retreated into the stone. The boots, the jangling chains and the varied stenches were no more. I felt my own cloud of breath float past my nose and frosting eyelashes. I knew the way back. I could walk all the way back down to Oslo if I really had to. I would walk all the way back to Oslo if I really had to.
I broke down, yelled like a lost child into the subterranean night.
“Ansgar! Freya!”
I imagined them hunched over and snickering in the dark, biting back their laughter with their filed fangs.
“Ansgar!”
I took the next step down. Then the next. After a few more it was easier and I was drifting, step-by-step, into the blank, and progressively colder, depths. Whoever told me that caves were warm was obviously wrong. There was a frigid nip of cold spreading on my nose and ears when I finally heard a sound that wasn’t my own churning breath.
The ground felt level. I crouched to rest and decide on the next step; whether I should go forward or back up to the entrance. On my haunches, I slowed back my breath to listen to the waves of air around me.
A growl. Panting. A new stench; wet fur and warm animal breath.
A clattering of claws on stone. A second set, I wondered. A swallowed growl followed by a snort.
There is a kind of darkness your eyes cannot adjust to. Even so, I strained to see something through the black curtain around me, but all was just a blind soundscape of dripping rocks, brutish breath, and the foulest odors of furry nature.
Slobber. Breath rich with odors of blood and decay swept into my numbed nostrils. I clenched my own meager jaws even as the blood pounded into my every waiting muscle. Flight or fight.
Strangely welcome heat drifted off of a heaving body that was what felt like inches from my own. Were there two other animals, after all? A fresher, shallower breath mingled with the wretched fumes from the first creature in front of me. They were creatures to me; an unknown species with an unknown diet.
A growl like rumbling thunder shook the rock under my hands and feet. Claws clicked on stone as the source of the growl, the first one, the one that sounded larger, set a paw down somewhere to my left, circling to flank. The sound grew into a bone-shaking staccato.
Stereo growls then, as the dog-thing, (I assumed then it had to be a wolf), to my right answered the bellowing challenge. Muddy wet fur brushed past my shoulder as the creature stalked forward, circling to maintain its advantage on the first beast. Mold and fungus lingered in the air. A snarl creaked out, terribly close, like a drunken whisper.
A solid wall of wet fur slammed me over and down into the ground, as the two creatures collided in a gnashing frenzy above my prone body. Warm spit and salty blood sprayed down on me even as all four of one set of angry claws dug into my down jacket for purchase. I reached a trembling hand up into the maelstrom of fur, clutched the first chunk of wet coat I could get at and pushed it away till my thin muscles threatened to snap.
A whistling snap of damp air blew into me as a set of fangs clamped down into my gloved right hand. I felt something slam hard into the creature that had dug its fangs into my maimed hand.
The bones of the jaw unlocked, to turn on the real threat, and I took this moment to squirm out from under both of them as they fought, wincing and tearing up from each new pain that was born as I did. Knocked back into the wall, again, as I tried to push up off of the moist ground. A fresh slick of blood soaked into my jacket as another set of hind claws ripped through the threads of my jeans, with that the creature launched itself with a gurgling roar at the other. I couldn’t tell which was which anymore. I didn’t know which way was out.
I leapt into the fray, the only way forward and out of Odin’s Cave was through these beasts. My right boot slammed into the side of one, I heard it lash to bite; a wisp of fur followed by the solid noise of tooth in skin as it tore into a chunk of the other creature instead. A freshly airborne mist graced me as I slid across the wet ground, scrambling for purchase, willing myself along.
Aching, grinding, I brought one wounded leg ahead of the other as if going further into the tunnel was all survival required of me. The yelps and growls of the animals faded behind me into a distant din. The fight sounded ceaseless, as if there would never be a killer or a killed.
An unknowable amount of time was spent in the frozen dark. I know I crawled, thought that would save me some pain. On was my hands and knees when I first caught a glimpse of a narrow shard of light. I got to my two legs, stumbled forward, and then I plummeted as if I had finally fallen through a crack in the mountain.
Snow blind; I eventually squinted up at the grey rocks reaching over me. Wisps of silent slow blew over. Some flakes landed and turned to pink in the shreds of my clothing and skin. I ached to fall into a deep-cradled sleep as I looked back at the ruddy trail I left as I rolled down from the crack in the rock.
Snow, sky, and mountain defined themselves further; an animal figure stood vanguard just outside of the thin crack that had expelled me. The stone face of the far side of the mountain was recognizable; I had somehow made it out the other end of the tunnel, past the animals. Furry and bloodied, I could see that it was a hulking grey wolf that looked out over flaring nostrils at me. My eyes strained against the luminent snow as I tried to find a weapon to defend myself with. Nothing as kind as a rock was in sight. I pushed myself off of the snow and faced the wolf, even as my body vibrated and threatened to collapse from a murder of throbs and stings.
I stared into the wolf’s ice-cold eyes. Mountain wind blew into my exposed wounds. I sighted the spot on its red neck I was going to sink my own nails into as soon as I could. I was hungry for it to lunge. I wanted to sink my ripped hand into its own torn throat as we tumbled down the mountain in a spiral of blood, down and fur.
A distant rumble from within the cave. The wolf lowered its straightened tail and turned with a short snarl to the shadows of the crevice, and the certain violence behind it. Shortly after, a scream, which pierced through ascending octaves and left a trail of unplacable echoes that alternated between bestial trauma and cherubic hallelujah.
I found a faltering way home through undisturbed snowdrifts and empty tree lines. A road, a passing truck, and a hospital with a language I barely understood. The Norsemen poked, prodded, sutured and stitched, repaired, and I still felt like I should go retire to a cage.
I don’t think my assignment is over. I know that the article isn’t written; it took too much willpower to just type this through the pain. Fimbultver is now on tour in the United States, Ansgar is leading the band, and Freya can’t be too far behind. I should catch up with them, inquire as to how it is they got out of the cave ahead of me and yet left no footprints, how it is they decided to leave me behind and how it is they got past the wolves unscathed.
One way or the other, I don’t know if the exact explanation of the events really matters all that much to me. I can still taste the mingled salty plasma in my mouth, weigh the imaginary grey stone in my hand and recall at will the urgent impulse to fight with breathless fire. My wounds speak to me daily.
I now have chronic, vivid daydreams of chasing elk, caribou, or men across an endless frozen sea, feeling the ice beneath me as I surge forward, smelling their blood and moving carcasses ahead of me. I have to overtake them, drag them down, rip open their skins and get to the real animal inside. I must smell the steam as it rises into the drifting artic air.
I must overcome and conquer.
So, imagine me on my hands and knees, with a fresh kill at my waiting, blood running over the ice and snow, red streaks from my mouth and up my forearms. Have someone draw this for you if you need the help, look it over, and you will start to see how I have come to see. Put on a Fimbultver record to enhance the effect, and wonder how it is that some music does such strange things to people.