Draugr

This novel is dedicated with love to my parents, Robert and Anne Slade. I owe you so much more than I can ever repay.

I also want to extend my gratitude to Emily, the town librarian. Thanks for lifting those heavy books on Norse mythology and passing them down to me when I was a little boy.

And my apologies to the wonderful inhabitants of Gimli, Manitoba. In the course of writing this novel I may have accidentally moved around an ice cream shop, a graveyard, and a few other things. I promise to put them back when I'm done with them.

Draugr
(draw-gur) m. ‘undead' man, ghost

—Definition taken from
E.V. Gordon's
An Introduction to Old Norse

Grandpa was going to murder us.

Not with an axe. Not with a shovel. But with words.

“Sarah sit down,” Grandpa said softly to me. “I haven't even started my story.”

“But I'm scared already.” I'm young, I'm fourteen, and I have my limits. His last tale ended with a headless woman searching through the streets for her head every Halloween. I wasn't going to sleep tonight. Why did Mom and Dad send me here every summer?

Grandpa rubbed his big, rough hands together. He was tall and even though he was in his late seventies, he had the energy of a man half his age. “This is my last yarn for tonight. I promise. And it's my best one.”

I sat down. At the bottom of my beating heart, I really did like his stories. So did Michael, my twin brother, and my cousin Angie, who were both hugging pillows, waiting for Grandpa to begin. Michael and I looked nearly the same, with blue eyes and dark hair. Except, of course, he was a boy and about half as smart as me. Angie was our opposite, with bright red hair and green eyes. This was one of the few times that she was actually quiet.

Grandpa smiled and his face creased into a thousand wrinkles. “The difference between this story and the others is this one is true. Every word of it. I do want to ask you a question before I begin though . . . are you afraid of death?”

“Well . . .” I started. “Uh . . . I haven't really thought about it.”

“That's alright, Sarah,” Grandpa said softly. In the dim light he looked suddenly older and tired, as if just voicing that question had taken years from his life. He cleared his throat. “I have an even more important thing to ask you. Are you afraid of the dead?”

How do you answer something like that? What do you say? “No,” I lied. Michael and Angie shook their heads. This was becoming a little too weird, even for me.

Grandpa stared, those blue haunted eyes of his looking right through me. He seemed to be in a trance.

“Yoo-hoo, Grandpa!” Michael called. He snapped his fingers. Once. Twice.

No reaction.

“Are you okay?” I whispered. “Grandpa?”

Grandpa shook his head.
“Draugr,”
he whispered as he crossed himself. The name echoed through the room and though I didn't know its meaning, I felt it. There in the quivering of my stomach, in the dryness of my throat. The name.

Grandpa was still staring. I whispered to him, but he didn't seem to hear me. Finally he looked directly into my eyes. “Long ago,” he said, his voice even and controlled, “when I was quite young and I still lived in Iceland, I had an evil cousin, evil in the way only men can be evil. He respected no one, not his parents, not his kinsmen. No one. He complained about the work he had to do, about the way others did their work. He had venom in his blood and his tongue was like a serpent's—he spit only insults at the world and defied everything. His name was Borth.”

Grandpa paused. He closed his eyes and I imagined him looking back in time, seeing his cousin standing amidst snow-covered hills in Iceland.

Grandpa opened his eyes again, still staring into the distance. “Borth was a strong youth, he could outwrestle many of the men in the valley and he loved fighting. His mother died giving birth to him and from that day forward he carried
ólán
—bad luck. If he walked by your house, your cows would run loose, your food would burn in the oven; women would prick their thumbs if he entered a room as they were sewing. He used to hit me as if I were nothing more than a bag of flour. No one had any love for Borth.

“One day in December I murdered him. Not by myself, I had help, but I
murdered
him. I know I am old and harmless now, but then I was beaten, a beast, a dog. I had been kicked by my cousin too often and finally a time came when I could take my revenge. A group of us, my kinsmen and friends who had all been violated in one way or another by Borth, made a pact to teach him a lesson. We were just children, that's all. Children, hardly even as old as you three. I was the eldest though, and they all followed me.

“We hid in the pass at Ogen's valley, all six or seven of us, on a night when there was a full moon. We knew Borth would cut through the valley on his way into the village. We had dressed in rags and made masks of wood and feathers, so that we looked like mound dwellers. Some of us had even grabbed stones to throw at him. Just to scare Borth, that's all we wanted, to run around and poke him with sticks, to yell his name, and then run away. It was supposed to be a trick, a warning, nothing more.

“Borth rode up a little after dark. The clomping of his horse, a beast as huge and evil as him, echoed in our ears. I glanced and saw that my companions were frozen with fright, hypnotized by that sound and the sight of Borth. He looked so big in the saddle, his shoulders as gigantic as a troll's, his long cloak flowing down behind him.

“I knew nobody would move unless I did, that we would sit there and he would pass. Our moment would pass. So right before he arrived, I threw myself onto the path in front of him and screamed, waving my arms and launching a handful of dirt. Everyone else followed me, yelling and hooting around the horse, slapping its legs with their sticks. We were like little dwarves up from out of the ground, finally getting our revenge. His mount reared up, its giant hooves sliced the air above us. It neighed in anger, nostrils flaring. But we weren't frightened; we felt strong then, all of us, powerful with vengeance. We continued our attacks. The horse reared again and Borth shouted in anger, yanking with all his strength on the reins. One rein snapped and he tumbled from the saddle, still yelling.

“The path was very rocky. Even above the ruckus we were making, I heard a soft thud when his head struck a stone. His horse bolted and we surrounded Borth, poking him with sticks and kicking at him, screaming his name in our lust for vengeance. Then as one, realizing something was wrong, we stopped. Borth didn't move. We all looked at each other, but no one said anything. We knew he was dead.

“I don't know who ran first, one of us did, and then we all followed, just running and running down the pass and across the fields, away from Borth's body.

“One of the villagers found him the next morning in a pool of frozen blood. We buried him three days later in the family cemetery. It was a strange funeral. No one cried. No one could.

“I returned to my daily work, not able to tell anyone my story. And I prayed nobody would discover what we had done. Then one morning, about two weeks after his death, I went into my family's hen house and found one of our chickens dead on the floor. It had been strangled. There were no tooth marks, so I knew it hadn't been killed by an animal. I figured one of the children from the village was just playing games and I forgot about it. But when I came back the next morning, another chicken was dead. This time its legs and head had been severed and placed beside its body. It made me sick to see, sick and very angry that someone would do this to our livestock. So I decided to catch whoever it was.

“That night I took my pitchfork with me and I stayed in the coop. I leaned up against the far wall. The coop was small. I could almost reach the door from where I was standing. It was warm too and I was dressed in a thick coat, so I soon sat down in the hay on the floor and fell asleep. I dreamed of a river filled with acid and blood that was slowly overflowing its banks. There were snakes in that river, huge snakes, the sons of Jormungand. Fire burned along the far bank. It was a strange, powerful dream, a dream from the old times.

“Then a noise woke me. The hens were moving around restlessly in the same way they do on the day I take them to the block. I stood up, still tired, the dream making my thoughts slow. I could sense the same thing as the chickens. The feeling that Death was floating through the air, searching. I wanted to get in a corner, to hide, but there was nowhere to go. I waited.

“At first nothing happened, then I heard a noise like something being slowly dragged across the ground outside the coop. The sound would stop, then start again. There was this growling too. The noises ended before I could really be sure I heard them. I breathed in, relieved, then the door to the coop creaked inwards against the wooden bolt. A scratching sound filled my ears, as if a huge nail were being slowly drawn from the top of the door to the bottom. I froze, my breath caught in my mouth. The chickens had stopped moving. Everything was completely silent.

“Then again came the scratching, this time louder, harder, so it seemed a groove was being dug into the wood. The door began to rattle, the whole coop creaked as if a giant hand were pushing on its side. I felt suddenly cold. The scratching started for a third time; one of the planks on the door snapped, and splinters and wood fell in on me.

“I could wait no longer. I grabbed my pitchfork, stepped forward, and yanked the shaking door open. An icy wind swept straight into my eyes and I had to squint against it. Before me, with one arm raised, was a huge shadowy man, misshapen in the moonlight. He took a shambling step towards me and became clearer so that I saw he was covered with dirt. Grass was stuck in his frozen, messy hair. He stepped again, moving as if his legs were made of wood. I realized his head was not frozen with water but with black blood. His eyes glowed.

“
‘Cousin,'
he rasped. He stepped again.
‘I hate you.'

“A huge white hand reached towards me. I stepped back, slipped, and struck my head on the hen's loft. I fell unconscious to the floor. There I slept as if dead.

“When I awoke, hours later, I was sore and stiff and there was a dirty palm print on my jacket.

“I knew what had happened to Borth. He was a
draugr
,
a revenant. My cousin was so full of hate he had become the walking dead. I did not know what I should do. The next time he returned he would drag me to his lair and tear me limb from limb. So I went home, took the silver cross my mother had given me, and I walked to the cemetery and buried that holy symbol in the soft dirt of his grave.

“He has not come back, but he is not gone. He waits underneath that earth. The dead know who killed them, they know, and if they hate enough—if they hate enough—they'll find a way back. Sometimes I can hear him screaming in the wind. And I wonder what will happen if someone goes to his grave and removes the cross?”

Grandpa leaned back in his chair. He looked very serious. Once or twice I caught him staring at the door as if he thought something might be lurking outside.

We sat there silently for a few minutes.

Grandpa clapped his hands, startling all of us. “Bed time,” he said. “Hope you have a great sleep.”

We slowly got up and prepared for bed. When I came out of the bathroom, most of the lights were off and Michael and Angie had gone to their rooms. Grandpa was sitting in his reading chair, squinting at an old book. A full moon shone through the window, giving him a pale, eerie look.

“Grandpa,” I whispered, “how come the moon's so bright tonight?”

He looked up, seemed a little surprised to see me. “Oh,” he said, “it's just a full moon—the
Hagalaz
moon. The kind of moon that makes hair grow on werewolves.”

“What?”

He winked. “I'm kidding. It's just your everyday, normal moon. Nighty-night.”

I went to bed. It took me quite a while to fall asleep.