Follower

by Stephen Gallagher

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Noir

Synopsis

Joseph Visco had come to the remote Norwegian village to find work. Instead he found terror, lynch-fever and death. A village girl had been murdered and rumour was prevalent that a follower of the Norse myth - half wolf, half man with the power to take on the shape of its victim - was responsible.

Release date: March 26, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 304

Sample

IT HAD BEEN a bad start to the winter, and the signs were that it was going to get worse. The emergency road that led from the inlet village to the light-keeper’s house on the headland had been ploughed three times in the first two weeks of snowfall. On the night after the latest ploughing, the light-keeper’s wife turned her face from the pulsing of the shore beacon and tried to bury herself in her pillow. Tonight she finally accepted that, after the violent fiasco of three days before, she wouldn’t be seeing her afternoon lover again.

Everyone in the village had their preoccupations, keeping the streets clear and breaking the plate ice that was already beginning to form around boats that had been moored too close inshore. Her own interior space was crammed with despair, and its tenancy was getting to be more than she could handle. She made fists in the covers and screwed them tight, and she fought the sobs until she felt that she’d break like a wire.

When she felt herself weakening from the effort of holding out, she slipped from under the covers and left the bedroom, barefoot and silent on the pine boards. Back in the second bed her husband slept on, breathing to the even rhythm of the light.

In the cool air of the upper landing she paused for a moment, and then she made her way down towards one of the other bedrooms on the blind side of the house.

Her husband had built the frame house from Swedish plans with some help from the village, but he hadn’t added much in the way of imagination. Even though nobody ever stayed over there were beds in every bedroom, and he’d placed them just as the drawings had shown. Her own contribution had been to keep everything scrubbed and immaculate for him, too good to be touched.

The agony gave her another sharp twist, this time from an unexpected direction—a reminder of the complexity of the monster that struggled within her and defied any hope of understanding. The light-keeper had tried to give her the best home that he could, but he’d never really known how.

The second bedroom stood neat and precise in the graininess of her night-vision, dimly perceived in a handful of angles and planes. She went to the divan and crawled under the daytime dust cover, feeling the embroidered satin of the mattress cold against her face.

Paris, she thought, and for a moment she felt a sense of hope, of release; Paris had been wonderful, the kind of place that she’d left the islands for. Her love of the city had even been enough to overcome the awkward disappointments of the honeymoon—the light-keeper had tried his best, but he’d been scared to death. Anywhere with more than four streets and one hotel scared him to death, and he couldn’t sleep without the steady beat of his lamp.

On their return the reality of her future had been waiting, and it had wrapped itself around her like an iron shawl. She gently brushed the peachy down of her cheek against the brocade, her young life in ruins without hope of restoration.

Inside her the monster turned, twisting her despair a little tighter; she could have borne the thick-skulled fishermen and their jealous wives if only they’d left her with her afternoon secret. But now even that was gone, and she’d never again be called a gem, a china doll, never again feel skin against her naked skin in the delicious guilt of daylight.

Once more it turned a heart-stopping turn, once more she held on and tried to absorb the pain of it. She felt like a ripe fruit, ready to split. Crying might have helped, but she couldn’t cry; instead she tried to whisper the one name that might serve as a charm to bring her comfort.

And the monster knew.

It bellowed its rage from deep inside, a rapidly-expanding fire of raw emotion. The reaction was so fast and so strong that it seemed, for a moment, to be a punishing force that exceeded the limits of her sorrow; it had fed too fast and broken loose, and without even thinking or knowing how she pulled herself back and felt it rush by.

It was like a near-miss by an express train, but it didn’t last for long. After it came … nothing.

She waited.

She couldn’t believe it. Something had left her. She felt cleaned-out, restored, almost as if she was a child again and back in the islands.

Why think of the islands now?

Life out there hadn’t been any tougher or any easier than it was here, but she’d been amongst her own kind and from the age of five until nine she’d had Katya. Katya was a crossed husky and German Shepherd bitch, the meanest-looking dog imaginable with the nature of a teddy bear. At nights when the house was dark she used to sneak down and open the kitchen door so that the dog could follow her back to bed. Katya would curl against her, fitting into the spaces that she’d left and tainting the air sweetly with the musk of her breath. Before morning, the dog would be back in the kitchen again on her blanket by the old stove.

Twice a year Katya would come into season and they’d have to shut her in the yard until it was over. For a week or so afterwards she’d walk around looking doleful and carrying a soft toy in her mouth. One spring, the gate hinges gave and the dog got loose. When Katya managed to drag herself home, she was so badly torn up that her father spent a couple of minutes checking her over on the yard cobbles and then went for his shotgun. She’d been down by the quay at the time, watching the mail boat come in. It was only weeks later that she remembered she’d heard the shot, and had thought nothing of it.

Even though nothing really terrible had happened to her in the next ten years, she always remembered it as the start of the bad times. Nine-years-old had been when she’d started to grow, like it or not. It was strange to be back. I’m dreaming, she thought sadly, that’s all; she wasn’t home in the islands, and there was no warm pressure of Katya against her side. She waited for the dog to lose its form as the dream-kaleidoscope turned and gave her self-pity other, less remote shapes.

The mattress bounced a little as the animal stood, and then stretched, and then jumped down to the floor. She could hear the faint clicking of its claws on the boards as it crossed to the landing and started down the stairs. Morning already? She rolled over into the warm space where the dog had been, only there was no warm space.

She sat up slowly, pushing the hair out of her eyes.

Katya? she thought. But Katya was dead, buried as deep as the thin soil would allow and covered over with stones.

She got up, and went to check the other rooms. She saw nothing, just the cold empty spaces of a house laid out by mail order. She shivered a little in the thin nightdress. The cold empty space where her pain had been was just as real. Without switching off the lights, she returned to the second bedroom.

The covers were rumpled, as she’d left them. Down on the floor the amber-coloured boards were dotted with white scars, translucent as a fingernail, running in a widely-spaced line from the bed to the door. She knelt to touch them, almost expecting that they’d fade away, but there was nothing imagined about them; she could feel rough flecks on the surface of the wax.

They seemed to spell out a message. The message was, the worst is over. She touched the marks again, reassured by the contact.

The bad times were over. For the first time in three days, she smiled.

JOHN VISCO’S journey with Per Lindegren had begun to develop into a hard-luck story on four wheels. The rear-tyre blowout was only the start.

They stood on an empty stretch of the highway by the Hardangerfjord. Lindegren seemed dazed, shaking his head slowly at the sight of his Fiat van with one rim down on the tarmac. He was a short, round man, a bespectacled dealer in ladies’ dresses. He’d been making this run for six years without any hitch, and a breakdown now seemed to violate some natural law.

“Two of us can switch it,” John suggested. He was already starting to shiver in the cold away from the shelter of the high-sided van. “Have you got a jack?”

After a moment, Lindegren looked at him. It was impossible for John to tell whether the Norwegian was in a mild state of shock or if he simply hadn’t understood. “To lift the wheel off the road,” John went on, trying to show what he meant, but already Lindegren was shaking his head again.

“This never happened to me before,” he said, hollowly.

John fought down the urge to reach out and grab Lindegren’s collar and shake him back into life. “How about a breakdown wagon?” he said.

It took a couple of moments, but then the sun seemed to rise behind Lindegren’s glasses. “Yes,” he said, “I can call a breakdown wagon!” And he trotted around to the far side of the van to rummage around in the glove compartment for his auto club documents. His world was back in balance.

John took a stiff walk to the edge of the road, and looked out across the water.

The fjord was the colour of chopped steel, and the valley sides were mostly under snow cover. It was also bitterly cold away from the shelter of the high-sided van—he could feel the wind cutting through the blue serge of his surplus-store jacket, and it stripped through his jeans as if they weren’t there. Jesus, he thought, I’m mad—work in a place like this? And he pushed his fists deeper into his pockets and reflected that at least the cold would be working to keep them both awake.

They’d had three exhausting days and three sleepless nights, Lindegren in a ship’s cabin and Visco up above on the passenger deck. There were better routes across to Norway, but they closed down at the end of the tourist season and left only the Faroese lines making the North Sea crossing. They’d had engine trouble after the call at Hanstholm, and within a couple of hours of their first landfall at Stavanger the galley stores had run out and the restaurant had closed.

Up until the blowout, John had been watching Lindegren for any signs of fatigue at the wheel, but he’d either seen none or was too far gone himself to recognise them.

Lindegren emerged from the cab. He’d found the document wallet, and he was checking through it for his membership card as he crossed the road towards the water.

John hunched his shoulders, turned his back into the wind, and waited.

“Hey, Visco,” the little man said. His English was good but it was strangely put together, like a jigsaw from two different boxes. He looked over both sides of the card, and then held it out.

“Do something for me, will you?” he said. “Go telephone these people, the Automobil-Forbund. Tell them to get a wagon out here.”

John looked doubtfully at the card. “Me?” he said hollowly. “Come on, Per, I only just got here.”

“It’s no problem,” Lindegren said. “I’d go myself, but I can’t be leaving my stock. My whole life’s tied up in that van,”

John glanced around. The road was long, wide, and empty. When he weighed the demands of courtesy against his chances of getting another lift, the scales came down heavily on one side. It would take him less than an hour to walk back the mile and a half to the last buildings that they’d passed, or else he could plant himself by the gravel shoulder and stand there until his hitching arm froze at right angles to his body.

Besides, what was he scared of? A little confusion, a risk of embarrassment. Some way or another, he ought to be able to get the message through. If not, he should have stayed at home, because it was going to be nothing compared to the challenge that he was hoping to take on.

“Sure,” he said. “What do you want me to say?”

AFTER TWENTY-FIVE hours on the road for a trip that shouldn’t have taken half a day, Lindegren’s mind was made up. He didn’t say so in as many words, but he’d decided that there was a powerful source of misfortune sitting across from him in the cab.

John Visco started to be aware of it after the second blowout. Lindegren had not only lost a tyre, but he’d also ruined the wheel rim in a final five hundred yard sprint to get them onto the forecourt of an isolated general store.

He’d made his own phone call this time, and John had got out of the van to stretch. It had been early evening. The wind had been almost as keen as before, and now it carried a thin scattering of snow before it. The forecourt had been brightly lit, snowfall that had been beaten down and gritted; where artificial light spilled it was yellow like ivory, but beyond the ring was the chill and even blue of an unspoilt drift. A couple of other buildings had been showing windows higher on the valley side, and behind them had been the more solid darkness of woodland. Lindegren had been looking up at the single bulb in the phone booth with an expression of agony like a plaster saint in an alcove.

They hardly talked at all during the three-hour wait for the breakdown truck that followed. They took turns at kicking around the forecourt and sitting in the cab, and John slowly became aware that Lindegren seemed to be giving him a long, thoughtful stare whenever his back was turned. He caught him doing it a couple of times, but the Norwegian didn’t explain what was on his mind.

In fact, only one scrap of conversation from that wasted part of the evening was later to stick in John’s memory.

Lindegren climbed back into the cab. The engine was running, and the heater fan was on. A snowplough was going by for the second time that night, an immense spitting yellow lorry with a V shaped blade that bounced on the ground ahead of it. Lindegren watched it pass. Casually—almost too casually—he said, “You ever hear of a fylgja?”

“A what?”

“A fylgja. There isn’t an English word for it.”

John shrugged. “No, I never did.”

“It’s like a piece of bad luck. Only it walks.”

John looked across the cab, but Lindegren was carefully studying the pattern of the snowflakes on the windscreen in front of him.

“You mean like a jinx,” John said carefully, watching for a reaction.

Lindegren thought it over, but the concepts didn’t quite seem to match.

“Jinx is close,” he conceded, but he went no further. He didn’t develop the point, and he didn’t explain.

Out on the forecourt and looking for the eighth or ninth time into the unlit window of the general store, John shivered in the cold and let his anger blow off. What was he supposed to do, shoulder his pack and walk off into the blizzard taking his ‘bad luck’ with him? Even if the cold didn’t get him, the snowplough might. They’d have to scrape him off the blade like dried-on gruel.

He went back around the van. Most of the rear offside tyre had peeled away, and the wheel rim was bent all out of shape. It was ruined, but Lindegren had managed that all by himself.

John Visco climbed back into the cab. Lindegren was asleep over the wheel, and he didn’t wake up.

HELP ARRIVED around midnight, with the wrong size of tyre; Lindegren had misread the figures in the Fiat’s handbook. Help went away again, and didn’t return until morning.

When the day arrived, the weather started to improve. Lindegren’s air of desperation didn’t.

By nine o’clock, they should have been rolling into the city’s outskirts on the flat stretch of land at the head of the Oslofjord. But they were still on a mountain road, and they seemed to be climbing; if there had been any signs to suggest that they should have done otherwise, they’d missed them. Lindegren reached across John to the dashboard glove compartment and pulled out a clipboard, trying to steady the van with one hand as he did. On the front of the clipboard was a stack of invoices held down under an elastic band, and tucked under the band on the reverse side was a city map.

John watched the road apprehensively as Lindegren divided his attention between the map and his driving. There was a rise in the ground ahead, and no way of seeing what might be climbing up the other side of it. No way of listening, either, because Lindegren was keeping the Fiat in low gear even though it sobbed and strained to move up.

As it turned out, it wasn’t another car that was the problem; they came over the brow squarely in the middle without meeting anything, but then Lindegren lost the Fiat.

The ragged urging of the engine had become a roar as the van’s nose pointed downhill, and the leap forward as he finally changed up surprised him; he hit the brakes, and lost the back end. He knew enough to attempt to steer with the skid; he probably knew enough to take his foot off the brakes, too, but he didn’t do it. Instead of the complete spin that it had been attempting, the Fiat coasted broadside-on into the high bank at the side of the road. Visco was thrown against Lindegren, Lindegren was squashed against the driver’s door, and about a ton of polythene and assorted fabrics shifted in the back.

John had to get out so that Lindegren could climb across his seat to go and look at the damage.

It wasn’t so bad. The snow had only been falling for a few weeks, and so the roadside walls raised by the ploughs hadn’t had the chance to harden and become like the sides of a bobsleigh run. The van had demolished a length of the banking, but when Lindegren brushed the clinging ice away he uncovered only a few shallow dents.

But the van was nearly new, and he’d been making this trip for six years and never had a hitch, and …

He fixed John with a long and mournful look, and there was no disguising it this time. He couldn’t explain how or why, but he knew—somehow—where the blame lay.

He tried to back the van out, but his wheels spun and wouldn’t bite. John knew better than to ask if he carried snow chains; this was a man who didn’t even carry a jack. He watched from the road as Lindegren revved so hard he made the clutch squeal, spinning the back wheels and digging himself even deeper into a couple of ruts. Then as he came around to see if he’d managed to get himself anywhere, John said tentatively, “Anything I can do to help?”

“Anything you can do?” Lindegren said, wheeling on him. He had a day’s stubble and his hair was raised in spikes. “Anything you can do? You can stay out of my way, that’s what you can do.”

John shrugged. “Doesn’t seem like much.”

“It’s enough. Believe me, it’s enough.” And he bent with his hands on his knees to take a closer look at the rutted ground under his wheels.

John began, “You could put something under the wheels …”

“I know,” Lindegren said with exaggerated patience, making a little motion with his hands as if to push John away. “I live here, remember?”

He opened the back doors of the van, groaned at the way his stock had shifted around, and then started rummaging underneath it. He came out with an expensive-looking cardboard dress box which had been folded flat. He opened it out and ripped it in two with difficulty, jamming half under each of the drive wheels to improve traction.

At first it didn’t look like he was going to do it; again he spun the wheels too fast, and the cardboard began to shred whilst the van stayed in place. But then it jerked a few inches and rolled back, and Lindegren seemed to be getting the idea. He started to rock the van with short blips on the pedal, and on the fifth attempt he gave an extra burst and rolled free.

He carried on for nearly fifty yards down the road before he stopped; for a moment John didn’t think he was going to stop at all, but then the brake lights glowed and John ran to catch up.

Lindegren was staring straight ahead. He seemed to be angry with himself over something. As he climbed in, breath feathering in the cold air, John said, “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

Lindegren’s expression made it clear that there was no sane reply to such a question.

It was about ten minutes later that they passed the first vehicle they’d seen in an hour or more; it was a yellow Citroen with a loaded ski rack on its roof, two adults in the front and three children in the back. Lindegren was no longer trying to read the map as he drove. It was on the seat beside him, and he didn’t even glance at it. Within the next few minutes they’d passed three more cars, all of them carrying skis and all of them climbing towards the hills behind. When Lindegren saw a half-buried sign for a parking area, he pulled across the road and through the gates.

The area was a cleared oval about the size of an ice rink. The plough must have gone over it within the last couple of hours, because the ground had been scraped down almost to the bone of the night’s fall, and the tread of its big tyres with their teeth of chain still showed fresh. There was only one car already there, a black Mercedes with its radiator covered by a piece of old cardboard. It had a ski rack but no skis, and there was no sign of where the Mercedes people might have gone.

Lindegren put the Fiat alongside the other car. “First we break down, now we get lost,” he said almost philosophically, and started to zipper his quilted anorak in preparation for getting out. It came as a surprise to John; he’d been assuming from the evidence that they were on or near one of the city’s main roads and heading in more or less the right direction.

He said, “What now?”

“We get out and ask, that’s what now.”

“You want me to do it?”

“And get directions maybe to Sverige. No thanks, Visco, I ask for myself.” And then he opened the door, squirmed around on his foam cushion, and dropped the short distance to the ground. The cushion eased back into shape with a sigh.

John climbed out, buttoned his jacket as high as it would go and turned his collar up as Lindegren did his usual double-check of the locks. It took him longer than usual, allowing for the extra time he spent shaking his head over the new dents and scratches on the driver’s side. John could sense that something was going through the little man’s mind, but he couldn’t guess what.

They set off across the rink towards the road, their boots crunching on the fresh snow. Lindegren seemed to have some definite idea of where he was going, which didn’t exactly tie in with his claim that he was lost. John let him lead the way, and he watched from a few paces behind; the Norwegian seemed to be working his way slowly through a problem, as if he hadn’t had much practice.

They crossed the road and climbed over the snow bank at a point where it had been tramped hard into a bridge of grey ice. John saw the marks of ski sticks on the bank alongside, and in the clearing beyond he saw ski tracks, hundreds of them covering an area the width of a motorway, slicing on downhill through a clearing in a stand of high snow-laden conifers. Lindegren had his head down and was already twenty yards ahead, and John moved to follow.

It was an easy ski slope, and obviously heavily used by somebody. The untouched snow to the side was more than knee deep, but where the tracks ran it was compressed enough for walking. John wondered if Lindegren might have seen a light or a building to head for, but that didn’t seem to be so; the trees hid everything.

Lindegren was really moving. It took John more than a minute to make up the lost distance, and when he drew near he could hear that Lindegren was muttering to himself. As John came level, he said abruptly, “Listen, Visco. I’m a nice fellow, right?”

“If you say so,” John said, but it didn’t seem to be enough.

“Look, I take you off the ferry, I give you the lift. That make me pretty nice fellow, right?”

John nodded, and waited for whatever came next. Which was Lindegren hammering at the same issue, as if it was a point to be forced home before the next stage of the argument could be considered. “I come rolling off the boat and see you shivering there at the dock gates and I think, what hell. That’s what I’m like—you ask my wife, ask my friends, ask anybody.”

“I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

“I’m trying to say you bring me bad luck. I’m trying to say you’re a jinx, John Visco. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

The picture ahead came a little clearer as they emerged from the woodland and began a slightly steeper descent. There was a group of fair-sized buildings about a quarter of a mile on, and a railway track that cut across before them. The road was to their right, and the path would meet it again to bring them into the settlement. John started to say, “But I don’t see how—”

But Lindegren had gone.

His legs had shot from under him in a pratfall that carried him half a dozen feet on down the path, and he was only just coming to rest when John reached him and helped him up. At first he accepted the hand with breathless gratitude, but then he remembered that it was the hand of the jinx and pulled away in what seemed like genuine fear.

“Don’t touch me, please,” he said. “Just don’t.”

He unzipped his anorak and reached inside, bringing out a silver and leather hipflask that would hold maybe a quarter pint of spirits. He probed the ribs under where it had been lying, staring around into nowhere like he was feeling for rabbits in a hole.

Then he said defiantly, “You’re slipping, Visco, I break nothing. Big bloody bruise, though, thanks.”

He slipped the flask into an outside pocket, and tramped on. He had trouble getting his zip refastened.

John, having no real choice, followed.

Lindegren slowed to let him catch up when they were almost at the point where they rejoined the road for the last few yards. Most of the annoyance seemed to have boiled out of him, and he said, “I’m sorry, Visco. Call you names, give you a bad time. It’s not like me, I’m a nice fellow, really. It’s just …” and he flapped his hand, indicating a frustration that could never really be expressed.

“Yes,” John said. “I know.”

“Come on. I buy you coffee.”

The place they were heading for was a rambling wooden lodge, a snow-covered roof with timber ends carved into dragonheads and a terrace before it, around which a dozen or so cars were parked. Some of them had been there overnight and were almost buried.

There was firewood stacked under the eaves and the basement windows were shuttered, and they bowed their heads as they came in around the side to avoid being blinded by the fine mist of snow that was being blown from the roof’s edge.

“Restaurant,” Lindegren explained, “big ski-ing place about twelve, thirteen kilometres out. Oslofjord somewhere over there.” And he pointed vaguely across the terrace before climbing the steps to the main entrance, stamping the snow off his boots as he went.

“I thought you were lost,” John said as they moved through a double porch. They came through into a large dimly lit room built mostly around a double-chambered stone fireplace. Lindegren blinked and craned his head to look around; it was early and most of the tables were empty, but his glasses had misted up.

He said, “Damn roads all look the same in snow,” and took his glasses off. He started to reach for his handkerchief, remembered the condition it was in and changed his mind, and then waved them around vaguely as if that might clear them. Then he walked into a chair.

They finally made it to a table by the fire, and a white-jacketed waiter took their order. Lindegren polished his glasses on a corner of the tablecloth, and held them up to the light of a chandelier made of reindeer antlers. He held them for longer than he needed to, but it gave him an excuse not to look at John as he said, “I’m an honest fellow, me. Ask anybody. There’s something coming on behind you, John Visco, and you have to get rid of it.”

“Something behind me? Like what?”

“Bad luck like yours, it isn’t natural.” And with the worst of it said, he put his glasses on and looked around. Two children in a family group three tables down had to look away quickly, stifling giggles.

John said, “It kind of seems to me that the bad luck was all yours.”

“Six years I’ve been driving to England,” Lindegren began, but fortunately the return of the waiter cut him short. There was an . . .