They’ve given you courage, these Nordic church-burners across the ocean, obviously they knew more than you at first, being so much closer to the soil of your common roots. With Ragnarok on the way they’re making preparations, you wonder if they too heard the howl of Fenris on the second Thursday of each month, Fenris apparently too weak to claw through into this world.
His howling is to be the beginning of the end, the old Norse legends agree that the trickster and fire demon Loki will slip his bonds, then he and his followers will meet the gods for the final battle and Fenris the mighty wolf born of the trickster Loki will unleash his howl of devastation to come and there’s Ragnarok for you. Of course everyone must die before the earth can regenerate into a new and better place, it’s a necessary sacrifice, but look at most of the people around today and sacrifice starts to seem perfectly reasonable.
You remember hearing these old stories when you thought they were just that, just stories, tales your grandfather told to pass the winter afternoons after your parents no longer wanted you. He would take you for walks in the country, you were quite small at the time, you would help him take his dogs out to chase winter hares and laugh and kick at snow drifts and wander so deep into the forests that the day he fell over dead out there you knew you would never find your way back, late as it was, so you went to sleep instead.
It woke you with its hot breath and rough tongue, you opened your eyes but couldn’t feel your feet, your grandfather lay where he fell although now his big belly was torn open and great steaming heaps of things lay in the snow. The yellow eyes looked upon you as if they knew you, knew everything you were and would be, you’d never seen an animal like this before, never so big nor so black, the dogs were nowhere to be found, and when it took your hand in its mouth you couldn’t feel that either. It tugged you to your grandfather, to the ragged edges of the steaming wound, where frozen hands and frozen feet might be warmed, how it knew such a trick you couldn’t understand. It had vanished before they found you, the two-leggeds, who didn’t believe you anyway. “Where are the tracks?” they asked, and with your drippy hands you pointed at the snow but they wouldn’t see, so you quit talking. They didn’t deserve it.
You’ve always remembered the yellow eyes looking at you, how they recognized you even if you didn’t recognize yourself and even forgot yourself entirely until a month ago, the latest howl of Fenris brought it all back, you’ve known who you are ever since.
You are Loki, you are the fire demon, you are the trickster and you’ve been playing tricks ever since, with ground glass and toxins and whatever else is handy. You’ve slipped your bonds as the legends always said you would, you wonder if anyone ever guessed that the bonds were forged not of metal but of a gray life of rent and repetition, and the gods damn them, they made you just one more link in the chain. No wonder escape took so long.
But now you’re here, now you’re free, it’s finally the second Thursday of the month, the end of all that was never really you.
*
By dawn you made it to the building that you selected weeks ago for this morning and you’ve been here ever since.It’s tall, vacant too if you don’t count the vagrants below, they look asleep and in one sense they are. Two evenings ago you tricked them, you left warm deli sandwiches for them, cyanide has a very fulfilling effect, they want nothing from you now.
The building might’ve been a hotel once, its brick shell and musty hallways feel as though they were built in an age of sunnier dispositions. You wonder what happened, if the hotel died first and took the surrounding area with it, or if it was the other way around, if the hotel choked on creeping blight. It does no good to lock the place, whoever tries, vagrants only chisel it open again.
From a high window you view the streets below while awaiting Fenris, the insignificance of two-legged comings and goings is so much more apparent when watched from overhead, perspective is all. They’re marbles in a crate down there, they roll wherever they’re tilted, no pattern to it, and no purpose either. As a trickster you can appreciate the joke, but enough’s enough.
You’re minding your own business when he comes up to you, the way it happens to anyone. You sit on the floor, back against the wall, while you settle your stomach, settle your vision, your head feels hot this morning, never mind this chilly air. When you see him you shift as well as you can, it’s not easy with your crusted belly and thirty-two pounds of weight resting across your lap.
For a moment he only stares, the room is atrocious, plaster crumbled everywhere and wallpaper hanging in tatters, same as the hallways, the whole place looks like a mummy.
“I’d ask if you need help,” he says, “but I think I know how ridiculous that would sound.”
Your soul. He’ll want your soul, it’s as good as predestined. Even from across the room you can tell what he is, he’s wearing a ministerial collar, not Catholic though, Presbyterian maybe. He’s carrying an armful of blankets, it’s what his kind does, they find the homeless in their homes and bring them blankets for the coming winter, blankets with salvation, thanks, much earlier inhabitants of the region were brought blankets too, blankets with smallpox.
“I followed the blood upstairs. I don’t know what your story is … but son, I beg you to let me get you some help, I beg you not to do whatever it is you have on your mind.”
“Today’s Thursday,” you tell him. “You know why it’s called that, don’t you?”
No, no he doesn’t, you know it even before he opens his pale mouth to confirm it.
“Thor’s Day,” you explain, slowly. “The day they dedicated to the thunder god. The one with the hammer. How can you be a holy man if you don’t even know what’s holy? You’re as bad as the rest of them down there. No, worse — at least they don’t pretend to know much of anything.”
He’s asking if he can’t call for an ambulance, get you to the hospital, that’s a nasty-looking belly wound and maybe so but they take a long time to die from if you die at all, depends on how the rest of this morning goes.
“That’s—” He’s shaking, now why would that be, it’s not that cold. “That’s about the biggest rifle I’ve ever seen.”
He speaks the truth, across your lap rests a McMillan M-93 sniper rifle, each .50-caliber cartridge is nearly as long as your hand and each magazine holds twenty of them, it cost you every dollar you had in the bank and some you didn’t.
“You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t even recognize me,” you say, then he tries to fool you, says sure, sure he does, the light was bad is all, but who’s he kidding, can’t trick the trickster. “That’s all right, nobody else does either. I’m used to it by now. Not that it matters today, right before.”
“Before…?” he wants to know.
“You really are in the dark, aren’t you? Doesn’t your god tell you anything?”
It’s the wrong thing to say, all the lead-in he needs, next thing you know you’re getting a sermon, for God so loved the world, well he doesn’t actually say it but you know that’s what’s going through his head, there’s a remarkable consistency to the sheep of the lord, and if anything knows sheep it’s wolves.
There’s a beauty in devastation that escapes the appreciation of most, they’re so attached to what has been they never think of what might be, never consider how a decomposing body can enrich a bed of roses, and that’s just the small picture. With the entire world become a graveyard there’s no telling what may grow in time, it’s the great potential that is Ragnarok, so rejoice you deaf, dumb, blind, and ravenous, a better world will sprout from your fat and clutching fingers.