Chapter 17: The Blood Eagle
We dropped Weatherby and Lord Lepusstrom off at a pub called the Ramsholt arms where Cholderton, radioed earlier by Bauer, was waiting looking longingly at the warm yellow light of the pub windows. Barely were they out of the car than Bauer wheel spun around and away with me still in the back. 'Do you really think Lord Lepusstrom will be able to see her?' he shouted back to me.
'I don't know,' I said, leaning forward.
'This girl is slippery, I know from the train, and I don't think she's as close to her father as he thinks she is.'
'You don't?'
'Let's just say that if she was, he wouldn't have needed to send Cholderton and I after her.'
'It's a point,' I said.
'What about you?'
'What about me?'
'How close is she to you?'
I sat back down again. 'I'm not sure,' I said.
We drove on in silence for a bit, apart from the roar of the engine and the screaming of the tires as Bauer punished the car for some previous misdeed.
'You don't strike me,' he shouted back, 'and I don't mean anything by it, as the type who's ever sure. With women I mean.'
'I, err...' I stuttered.
'I'm not saying you're gay or anything,' he said, 'just that, you know, you're not sure if they like you or not.'
'That's probably fair,' I said.
'She likes you,' he said.
We sped on through the night, finally screeching to a halt just inches before plunging off a quayside into the river. We got out of the car, there was, at first glance, nothing there. Then I noticed a few houses off to our left, upstream. That was it.
'Where is this place?' I asked.
Bauer reached into the car and killed the engine and the lights. It instantly went very dark and very quiet. The night subsumed the houses off to our left. The rattle of the idling car engine died away so suddenly that I thought I could still hear it echoing around me. Gradually even this illusion left me and all I could hear was the gentle gurgle of the river going past.
Bauer pointed across the river, 'other there,' he said, 'though we can't see it through the fog, is the village of Felixstowe Ferry. This,' he stamped on the quayside, 'is where the Ferry lands.'
We stood there looking out into the fog girdled river, stamping our feet and blowing into our hands and waiting for we knew not what.
'How long will it take her to get here on foot?' I asked.
'A couple of hours if she's quick.'
I pulled up my collar, stuck my hands as far as they would go into my pockets, and exhaled a billowing cloud of air that merged and amalgamated with the fog.
'You want to wait in the car?' said Bauer. I nodded.
We sat side by side in the front of the car and did not speak, outside the fog shifted into dark shapes that moved ethereally towards us and then vanished just as they were about to become solid. I saw huge ships, with vast, storm tattered sails billowing loosely in a wind that was not there, bearing straight down upon us. I saw snake necked dragons rise up from the river and slop giant wet flippers onto the quayside. I saw dancers, moving to rhythms I could not hear, pirouette and leap on and off the water. I saw, countless times, a single dark haired girl move silently past the car.
The radio squawked once, after about an hour, and Bauer picked it up and answered it. The voice on the other end was obviously Cholderton, but what he said did not make a whole lot of sense.
'Woodwose calling Flagstone,' said Cholderton, 'this is Woodwose calling Flagstone over.'
'This is Flagstone over,' said Bauer.
'The Bees are still in the hive over.'
'Copy Woodwose,' said Bauer, 'any news of Sabrina over.'
'Sabrina has not been sighted over.'
'Copy, Flagstone out.'
'Woodwose out.'
Bauer put the radio down and stared back out the window. I cleared my throat. 'Oh,' he said, 'the druids have not moved and they haven't seen Miss Pfinnenwicken.'
I nodded and went back to staring out the window.
'Are you a religious man?' he asked.
'No,' I said.
'Me neither, I mean officially I'm C of E but I never go.'
'I don't think I'm officially anything.'
'It makes you wonder sometimes,' he said, 'this job.'
'I suppose it must.'
'I mean I haven't been doing it for long, haven't actually seen that much.'
'No?'
'Apart from what your friend did, and what that druid did.'
'I know,' I said.
'But some of the cases I've read about. Things the department has dealt with in the past.'
'Like what?' I asked.
'I can't tell you,' he said, 'and you don't want me to.'
'No,' I said.
'Makes you wonder though.'
'I bet.'
He took a cloth from the pocket in the door and wiped off some condensation that had formed on the windscreen. When he was done he handed me the cloth to do my side. I wiped away the grey haze inside in order to better see the grey haze outside.
'Have you ever heard of the Blood Eagle,' he said.
'No.'
'It's something the Vikings did. They cut away your ribs from the back, and then draped your lungs over your shoulders so that you looked like an eagle.'
I creased my face in disgust and made a noise, and then, after a moment, said 'would that even look much like a eagle.'
He thought about it. 'I don't know,' he said, 'but I'd rather not find out.'
We did not talk any more after that. I think at some point I nodded off, because the next thing I knew was Bauer elbowing me sharply in the ribs. I sat up with a jolt and was about to ask what was going on when he mimed me not to speak with a finger to his lips. 'Listen,' he said very quietly.
At first I could not hear anything, then I heard a splash, which I did not think was what he could have meant, but then there was another splash, and another, very slowly, but regularly, something was disturbing the water.
I looked at Bauer, it was obvious he was thinking exactly what I was thinking, but I said it anyway. 'Oars.'
He nodded his head, and then, very slowly, opened the car door without a click. Before he climbed out he took his gun from his holster. I took the door latch on my side and firmly but slowly pulled it back till I heard the clunk of the mechanism releasing. I pushed the door silently open and stepped out of the car, keeping low behind the open door, and staring blindly out into the impenetrable dark.
Bauer crept round the rear of the car to my side and, never taking his eyes from the river, whispered 'what should we do?'
'I don't know,' I said. There was only one thing for certain, in what was otherwise a moment of complete helpless ignorance, the splashing was getting closer.
Bauer ducked down besides me and aimed his gun over the lip of the car door. I noticed he was trembling slightly.
Very slowly, almost imperceptibly, the fog hardened into a shape. First just the sense of a shadow, a darkness on the water, and then the water itself was the only definite thing, a slight gurgling wake that ran ahead of the prow of the boat, dancing and leaping from its path, and then, rising over the glassy surface of the river, the carved effigy of a dragons head, slick black rotten wood bedecked in dangling seaweed and alive with tiny crabs that scuttled between its sodden craggy features, from empty eye socket to flaring nostril, from nostril to scowling mouth.
Both Bauer and myself were struck dumb with terror, unable to move, Bauer never even aimed his gun. We watched the horror grow ever more real as the fog itself seemed to rush inwards and accumulate and solidify to form the ship. Above our heads the spindly arm of a mast cleared the roof of the fog, and from it hung loose the tattered remains of sail and rope. The broken, jagged skeleton of the vessel's flank came in to view, half decayed, more mud than wood, the ancient ship dredged up from forgotten depths slid silently along. A row of oars pawed lightly and with spider slowness at the river, reaching out on long handles, barely brushing the black water, only one, fractured and hanging loose like a broken limb, dropped regularly on each stroke to break the surface.
We looked on, and as the ship finally drifted past by us, we saw rows of figures standing as still as tombstones in the belly of the boat, they gleamed slick and wet, decomposing putrescent slimy things from beneath the north sea silt. I recognised the rusty remains of a sword here, a shield there, the paper thin peak of a crumbling helmet and beneath that, a skull turning slowly to face us. In its empty sockets, two bright blue flames flared up with unmistakable hatred.
Bauer, I think, lost his grip on what little reason there was left to cling to, and started shooting. In a rapid serious of percussive blasts he emptied his entire gun into the ship, the bullets penetrating and exploding in chunks of rotten wood and seaweed and metal and bone. In seconds he was clicking frantically at the trigger and I was cowering to his side, hands over my ears that were ringing loudly. I looked up, and saw more movement on the boat, on one side the oars shuddered into the water and halted its progress, on the other they were working with renewed vigour, churning at the river till it looked like their thin brittle centuries old poles would snap. I grabbed Bauer by the shoulders and turned him to face me. He was fumbling with another magazine for his gun but unable to work the mechanism with his trembling fingers. His lips moved but I could not hear a word. I reached in to the car, thinking first of the radio before realising that I did not know how to work it, and seemed to have gone deaf anyway, I turned on the headlights. I looked out of the windscreen and saw the prow of the ancient warship heading straight for me, both rows of oars now pulling at the water with all speed.
And then, and I do not know how this was possible, I heard a splash, and saw something else in the water off to the side of the ship. I made out the shape of an arm and then the clear gleam of wet black hair, it was Selkie swimming towards the ship. The oars halted, and were raised up vertical, and the ship glided slowly to a halt and started to drift sideways in the stream. I looked and saw the fearsome things in the ship gather at the side and look down at Selkie swimming towards them.
Without thinking I ran out of the car and dived straight into the water. The cold nearly stunned me as I went under but I kicked and pulled and once I reached the surface and was moving I felt released and beyond its clawing grip. I pulled furiously at the water, kicking off my shoes and swimming with all my strength towards Selkie and the Viking ship, already I saw bony arms reach down to her, she turned and shouted something but I did not hear a word. Slimy, barnacle encrusted, skeletal fingers closed about her and pulled her up out of the water and on to the ship. They were taking her away, I knew it though I did not know how, they were taking her back with them to their silent graves. She would drown.
I cried her name I think, or maybe just put my head down and swam, I do not remember. I reached the side of the ship just as the oars were being lowered and it started to turn away, heading back to the sea. Rows of flaming blue eyes stared malevolently down at me, and in amongst them, the face of Selkie, unbearably sad. Without knowing why, I pulled the leather strap her father had given me and held it up. She pulled herself from their grip, reached down and took it from me, our fingertips touching just for a second. And then the oars pulled and the boat slipped away.
I fancy, though can not be sure, that I saw an animal leap from the side of the boat just before it disappeared into the fog.
