Part 3: Chapter 4: Biding Some Time w/Mild Scares

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Chapter 4: Here Be Jotuns

Three nights later, when Tony Blanding picked up Fiona Cray to take her to a Spanish horror film in the city, he paused on his way through the dining-room and said, “Someone’s vandalized your mirror again.”

“Yes,” said Fiona. She was busy twisting a fuchsia scarf around her neck. “I made them get rid of the Sharpie’d one, and believe me, that was a production. So what does my sister do next? She picks up an X-Acto and ruins an antique, and I seem to be the only one who can be bothered to care. I think it has to do with the Halloween party.”

“Halloween party?” said Mr. Blanding. He stroked one of the fat white candles that stood in iron sconces affixed to either side of the mirror. “With costumes?”

“Of course. It was Imogen’s idea. We’re supposed to throw the whole house open to a town that can’t stand us and thinks we’re a house full of witches at the best of times. And my Aunt Valerie is aiding and abetting this. She’s practically orchestrating the thing.”

“Well, it sounds like fun to me,” said Mr. Blanding in his absent way. “You’ve got the perfect house for Halloween. Fiona, do you have a light?”

“For smoking?” asked Fiona - then saw his forefinger still caressing the buffet candle. “You want to light those? But we’re about to go.”

“Only for a moment,” said Mr. Blanding soothingly. “I’m enamored of your local superstition, Fiona. I want to try one more time and see if I can see a ghost.”

“You’re serious? But it’s not even dark.” She glanced at the tall, skinny windows, which began at about shin height and ended above her head. Three were curtained and sashed. The other two showed blue, cloudy-day twilight, the kind that is so deep and dispiriting it seems to confuse the contours of things.

“Do me a favor and pull the curtains.”

Fiona did, making one of her most offensive, eye-rolling faces while she was turned away from him. (She knew perfectly well how offensive her eye-rolls were, and she had tried to stop making them to no avail. She could not be blamed for a streak of brutal sarcasm, she believed, given her upbringing in this house of runaway female whimsy.)

She fumbled in the buffet’s top drawer and found a box of matches. “Seriously, Tony? I only made you do it the other time because we were tipsy, and it seemed like a fun thing to do.”

“And I was frustrated by my inability to glimpse the World Beyond,” said Mr. Blanding. He struck a match and lit the first candle. Its ruddy light danced on his face while he lit the second, throwing his cheekbones into relief and giving his skin a rich, golden cast. The mirror’s opaque surface looked pale and liquid now, like a still puddle under the full moon.

“There,” he said, and stepped back to examine his reflection.

Fiona stepped back, too. And back again. Her spine had gone rigid. She pressed both hands over her mouth and whipped around, as if she expected to see a man with a bloody hatchet standing between her and the door.

Nothing but darkness. Fiona Cray made a grunt of protest in her throat and turned back to where Mr. Blanding stood admiring himself in the mirror. “You see?” she said in a husky voice.

“See what?” said Tony Blanding.

Imogen woke in darkness to find her sister standing beside her bed, repeating in a strange, plaintive voice, “Please wake up. Please wake up. I know it’s late.”

Imogen sat up. Her mouth felt stale and woolly and so did her mind, in the way it only can when you’ve been woken just a few hours after falling asleep. She peered at her little fluorescent clock: twelve-fifteen.

“What the wha?” she managed.

“I just got back from the city,” said Fiona. In the light from the stairwell, Imogen could see she was still wearing her date clothes, some kind of foofy flowered skirt and a black sweater. Her shoulders were hunched, and she hugged herself as if she were cold.

“I know it should wait till morning, but I absolutely can’t stand it,” she said. “You have to tell me how you made it happen. I refuse to believe this house is haunted. I can’t sleep. I tried to watch a little TV, but I thought I heard someone walking in the dining-room, and when I came up from the basement no one was there. It’s playing havoc with my rational mind, Imogen.”

“Rational mind, you?” said Imogen, still groggy.

All the same, she wrapped herself in one of their great-grandmother’s crazy quilts and followed Fiona down three flights of stairs - clutching the banister, because her sister refused to switch on the second- and third-floor lights for fear of waking someone.

It was dark in the dining-room, though light blazed in the foyer. Fiona bent over the buffet, her thin shoulders looking tenser than ever, and scratched a match against the box. “You do it, please,” she said, holding the match to one of the white candles. “You’re the one who put that Wiccan sign on the mirror. So I think you’re the one who should look in.”

Imogen thought she understood now. Was Fiona the one who had looked at herself and seen something wrong? “As if you can’t tell, it’s a rune,” she said as disdainfully as she could, trying to ignore the strange churning in her chest.

“It doesn’t spell any word I know.”

Imogen took the guttering match from Fiona and lit the other candle. “Were you the one who saw your reflection?”

“It was Tony,” said Fiona, skittering to the side. “He saw your so-called rune, and he thought it would be funny to pretend he was superstitious. As far as I know, he didn’t see anything weird.”

“But you did,” said Imogen. She took a deep breath and opened her eyes. “Close that door, Fiona. Stand where you’re not reflected.”

Fiona hurried around the long table and pulled the door shut. Both sisters stood silent in the dark room, so seldom used these days, with its faint smells of cloves and cumin and orange peel from a jar of homemade potpourri Granny had stuck in the buffet to keep the napkins fresh. Imogen looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was a thicket, and the flames bleached her face to a tallow color, making her eyes more Cerberus-like than usual. They looked pupilless, like the cavities in a Jack o’ Lantern, but that was to be expected. “I am … a hideous ghoul come to haunt this cursed abode,” she said in a cavernous voice.

“Stop it.”

“Well, what do you want? What am I supposed to see?”

Fiona bobbed from one side of the door to the other, peering as if she were trying to see Imogen from a new angle. “I don’t see anything, not yet. Oh, Imo. What if I imagined them?”

“Imagined what?” She left the mirror and walked around the head of the table. “It’s your turn now. Come and look at yourself.”

“What if I see something?” said Fiona. Her voice rose in a way that sounded like a bad actress’s attempt to convey hysteria - though, knowing Fiona, it was probably only half acting. “If I see them,” she went on, “that could be solid proof I’m demented. Nuts. Screw loose. Have been ever since I ran away from the city. You’ll have to wake up Granny and have me committed, Imogen.”

Imogen snorted. “Open your eyes and look.”

She had managed to steer Fiona to the mirror, and now she stepped aside and watched as her sister gazed in. The flickering light made Fiona look even more like a Victorian invalid, and there was certainly something creepy about a candle-lit reflection in a dark room. But Imogen saw nothing spectral.

Neither did Fiona, apparently. She breathed a long sigh, blew out both candles, and ran around the table to open the door again. Then she sank into a side chair and drew her knees up to her chest. “Imogen, I must have imagined it. I’m sure I imagined it. It feels so far away now. Maybe it was the headlights of a car passing that I saw. Maybe Tony scares me a little. Maybe I’m crazy.”

Imogen made a noise in her throat that was disturbingly like a growl. She placed one hand on each of Fiona’s knees and asked, “What did you see, exactly?”

“Eyes,” said Imogen the next day. School was over, and the three of them were climbing the mountain, dressed in their burliest sweaters and jackets and mud boots. They hadn’t stopped at the Cray house for tea, because it got dark by six-thirty now, pushing everything earlier. Before she could go out, Aslaug needed to make her little brother a snack and watch him while her stepdad milked the cows and her mother delivered Meals on Wheels. After that, she’d had some difficulty excusing herself from the family dinner at six sharp.

“Eyes of what?” asked Stephen, kicking a molehill. It was cold on the slope; the sky stretched already gray-brown above them, full of crinkly purple clouds.

“Eyes of Jotun.”

Over her jeans and flannels, Aslaug wore a man’s tweed jacket; she hugged it around herself. Stephen had offered her the new sword to carry, but she shook her head and let him do it. “How does Fiona know what a Jotun’s eyes look like?” she asked.

“She doesn’t. But she described them. They were the size of tennis balls, she said, and white like the moon behind thin clouds, sort of fluorescent and ghostly. She couldn’t see pupils, but she knew they were eyes. They hung just above his head on either side, and she couldn’t see any face they belonged to.”

“No face?” said Aslaug, shivering.

“It was the right rune,” Stephen said. In spite of being right, he sounded a little less arrogant than he had before last week’s fight and making-up - more subdued, Imogen thought.

Up ahead, the crescent of trees was only a pale smudge on darkness. Imogen shuddered at the thought of making their way to the cave mouth. But she had argued convincingly that it was just as easy to ambush roving Jotuns at the entrance to the rock maze. Stephen, after some objections, had agreed.

So they found seats among the jagged boulders inside the grove. Imogen tossed a camping blanket on the bare dirt and settled behind Stephen so she could see over his shoulder. Stephen unwrapped the sword from its cotton-batting sheath and presented it to Aslaug, holding it flat with one hand on the hilt and the other pinching the tip. “It isn’t as sharp as it could be,” he said. “But neither was your axe. I don’t think you want to do a big slash to the side, like you’re chopping a tree. I think you want to do one stroke straight down through where the heart would be, if you can reach that far.”

He moved both hands to the hilt and demonstrated. Aslaug flinched, but she took the sword and practiced a few swift downward strokes before letting it fall to her side. There she allowed it to hang, as if it were a walking stick. “I’m not really aiming for their hearts, am I?” she said. “Do they have hearts?”

Stephen shrugged. He lowered himself to a boulder and turned to Imogen. “Do you have that tea?”

They stayed quiet for a while. Imogen poured tea from her thermos into three cracked plastic mugs. Aslaug sat down on a second boulder, the sword balanced on her knee, her eyes fixed on the place where the rock wall opened to admit a path.

Several yards downhill, where the long grass began, a single cricket keened. Lights twinkled in the valley, then sank in a sea of mist. Through the ash boughs, nearly bare now, Imogen could see a bright planet rising in an island of clear sky.

She poured more tea and checked the time on her phone. Nearly fifteen minutes had passed.

“They’re taking their time,” said Stephen.

Imogen wanted to ask him how he knew they would come tonight at all. But while she was deciding how to phrase it so it didn’t sound as if she was doubting his ability to do anything right, Aslaug asked, “Do you think God has any issues with this?”

Imogen thought she had misheard. Stephen said, “Which god do you mean?”

“The Christian God,” said Aslaug, a bit apologetically. “I mean, Jotuns are from Norse mythology, you know? But the Norse people ended up believing in Jesus. If you go there now, they have their churches and special saints and everything.”

“A lot of people must have kept the old beliefs,” said Imogen. “As superstitions.”

Aslaug took a large guzzle of tea. “But what I mean is,” she said, “is it wrong for us to believe in Jotuns? I mean, if you do, do you have to stop believing in God and start believing in … Odin?”

Imogen saw no reason to think like this. If you saw Jotuns, then fine, you believed in Jotuns - what choice did you have? It would be the same with angels or goblins or Shiva or even the Easter Bunny, if you happened to meet him hopping in your garden. But to believe in super-beings you neither saw nor heard nor felt - now, that was weirder. Harder. She still had trouble wrapping her mind around people who killed other people for believing in different invisible powers than they did.

Unlike her, both Stephen and Aslaug seemed to like this conversation. “I was christened,” said Stephen. “I used to go to church and do the praying, you know? On my knees, with candles and hymns. I believed in Mary and the Son and all of it. But when a cloud came over the sun, I would think, ‘Baldr’s hiding his face.’ When I saw a raven, I would think, ‘That’s a messenger from Odin.’”

“I didn’t think anybody believed in those gods nowadays,” said Imogen.

But Aslaug and Stephen seemed not to hear. They started talking about some photos they had seen in Fiona’s books: crude wooden carvings of Sigurd the Hero that had hung on the doors of Norwegian churches in medieval times. Apparently the Old Norse saw no reason not to believe in both Sigurd and Jesus. (Or maybe, Imogen thought, they just hadn’t bothered to think very hard about it. To her it sounded like a church putting images of Superman or Batman in its stained-glass windows.)

“Sigurd was a dragon slayer,” said Aslaug. She sounded less shy and stuttery than usual. “That’s why they put him on churches. Because the devil is a serpent or a dragon in the Bible, and St. Michael slays a dragon, too. The book says Sigurd was the Norwegian St. Michael.”

“He seems kind of bloodthirsty for a saint,” said Imogen. In the book she had read, Sigurd was always either tricking someone or killing someone. With the dragon, he did both.

“They were all bloodthirstier back then,” said Stephen.

Aslaug hugged her knees to her chest under her big jacket. Imogen wondered if she was still bothering to watch the gap in the rock. “So what I’m thinking is,” she said, “if Sigurd’s dragon is the devil, maybe these Jotuns are like demons? They come from deep down in the rock, after all. That’s like hell. And they make people miserable.”

Imogen squinted skeptically into the darkness, which was solid now except for a faint blue patch in the western sky. “That’s possible,” said Stephen.

“I don’t know. I’m not super-religious like my mom. But I think it’s important that we know we’re going after something really bad. Don’t you?”

Imogen opened her phone again. Had forty-five minutes really passed? For the first time ever, she found herself wanting to feel the chill a Jotun brought. “Do they have to be demons to be bad?” she asked.

“No. But there has to be some… some guarantee.”

Imogen sighed. To her relief, the gods-and-demons conversation fizzled swiftly. After a short, enthusiastic discussion of the similiarities between Freya the Norse fertility goddess and the Virgin Mary, and then between Baldr the sun god and Jesus Christ, Aslaug said, “And Loki. I’ve been trying to think who he is. His hair makes me think of a herald angel.”

Stephen made a horribly derisive noise in his throat. “Loki is a trickster, Aslaug. And kin to Jotuns. If he’s anything in the Bible, he’s Satan himself.”

“Satan was a fallen angel,” said Aslaug timidly. “And I don’t think-”

Even in the dark, Imogen could feel Stephen tensing. “Has he been to see you again? Or was the last time when he tricked you into killing Mr. Blanding and then stole his identity? That is him inside, you know. Fiona saw him with Jotun eyes because he is one.”

“You said everyone who’s Jotun-touched will show some sign in the mirror,” Imogen pointed out.

“I did. They will. But Aslaug told me herself - that’s not Mr. Blanding. It’s Loki in his form. And he’s a Jotun, Aslaug.”

Because she had never seen him, Imogen found she had trouble believing in this Loki. “Fiona says Mr. Blanding’s turned into a great kisser,” she said. “Is that because he’s Loki? And do all Jotuns kiss well, or just him?”

Stephen failed to find this amusing. “Loki is a seducer. It’s what he does. You should tell your sister to stay away from the teacher from now on.”

“But she’s having so much fun,” said Imogen.

Stephen started to respond indignantly, but at that moment Aslaug jumped to her feet. The sword clanked.

Without thinking, Imogen crouched behind Stephen, whose shoulders had stiffened again. “Are they here?” she whispered.

“No!” said Aslaug. She sounded as strident and self-righteous as Stephen in his worst mood. “They aren’t here, and it’s been like an hour already, and we’ll need our flashlights just to find the path home. If they aren’t coming now, they’ll just have to come without me. I won’t be doing any slaying tonight.”

Stephen got up, too. “Half an hour more,” he said, with something approaching an actual plea in his voice. “They always come soon after dusk.”

Aslaug’s voice faltered. “Fifteen minutes.”

So they all settled down again and waited. It was so dark now that Imogen thought she might be grateful for the greasy light shining from the Jotuns’ eyes when they came down the path.

“Maybe I can only meet them at the actual entrance to the cave, or in the cave,” said Aslaug in a small voice. It was clear how she felt about the cave in the dark.

But Stephen, who was apparently determined to try to be nice, said, “I don’t think so.”

“Maybe she should start coming at sun-up again,” said Imogen. She yawned. “With us, of course.”

“Dusk is better. But it’s well past. Maybe they’re not coming tonight. Maybe I was wrong about the moon being past the quarter.”

“Maybe they’ve Jotunized enough people in town,” said Aslaug, with a firmness that surprised Imogen.

By unspoken mutual consent, they found themselves standing and brushing off their clothes. Then Imogen clicked her flashlight, and Stephen clicked his, and they found the brown tail-end of the path and followed it down into the grassy fields.

Once they were free of the trees, Imogen felt better. She flicked off her flashlight and discovered that it was easy to trace the path by the light of the quarter-moon and stars. The planet she had seen earlier was dipping toward the horizon. Under the grass, the earth had that hard-packed feel it has after the first frost, and a faint irony smell.

“What’ll we do on Halloween night?” Aslaug was asking. “It’s going to be almost new moon then.”

“We’ll let the Jotuns come down from the mountain if they want. What we have to do is more important.”

As Stephen said this, a chill gripped Imogen. As if something had seized her shoulders and gripped hard and rotated her, she found herself turning back to look at the dark wall of mountain.

For an instant, she thought she saw a pale, dead light bobbing where the crescent of trees should be. Then it was dark. She clamped her eyes shut; opened them.

“What is it?” asked Stephen.

Imogen turned on her flashlight. She thought of asking, What if the Jotuns don’t follow your rules? What if they come out whenever they want?

But there was no point. What other rules did they have to guide them? She said, “Nothing.”