When we reached our building, Tor let me out of the car at the curb and drove Gretel into the garage. I noticed that once he got back outside, he fiddled with his smartphone to shut the garage door.
“Did you put the garage on the security system?” I said.
“Yeah. We’ve got a car worth stealing now. And on Thursday someone’s going to install motion sensors out in back. Among the trees, y’know. If Nils tries lurking up there, there’ll be lights, and an alarm going off.”
We went upstairs in the house that was slowly turning into a fortress. Tor went into the kitchen and got himself a bottle of dark beer. He didn’t bother with a glass.
“What did you think of Bryndis?” he said.
“I liked her. Your grandfather, though! I’m sure glad I never had to meet him.”
“You’re lucky, yeah.” He had a long swallow of beer. “I’ve got a portrait of him if you want a look at him. He had a bunch of portraits painted. Me and Liv each inherited one when he died. So did my dad, so I’ve got two of them now.” He paused to put his beer down on the counter. “I don’t think he ever realized that we didn’t like him.”
Tor kept the portraits downstairs in one of the long drawers of the built-in storage unit. He brought out a big canvas about three feet by four, unwrapped it from the piece of faded gray corduroy that protected it, and set it up on the lectern under the overhead light. Despite its modern wood frame the portrait was conventional, even old-fashioned, painted in oils and then varnished, a frontal view of a middle-aged man in a red velvet chair against a dark background. Despite his gray hair and eyebrows, he reminded me strikingly of Tor. He had the same strong jaw and brown eyes, the same large hands, which in the portrait gripped the arms of the chair as if he bore the wood a grudge. He looked straight out at the viewer without even a trace of a smile.
“A grim old guy,” I said. “The painter, though—whoever did this was technically really competent. I wonder why they didn’t sign it.”
“Liv wondered about that, too. Probably Grandfather didn’t want anyone else’s name on it. That’d be like him.”
The more I studied the painting, the more uncomfortable I felt. The eyes of any portrait will follow you if the sitter’s looking straight out of the canvas. I knew that. Still I felt that he, or someone, or something, was watching me through this particular pair of painted eyes. I remembered Brittany saying that portraits might have frightened Nils somehow.
“Tor, do you think Nils got one of these, too?”
“Probably. Halvar admitted Nils was his kid, after all. Huh, if all Nils got from the will was this lousy portrait, no wonder he’s pissed off.” Tor grinned at me. “Like that t-shirt joke.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, but the portrait creeps me out, and if he’s got one, I bet it creeps him out, too.” I turned away with a little shudder. “I’ve seen enough. More than enough.”
“Okay. I’ll put him back in his coffin.” Tor picked up the cloth wrap. “That’s how I always think of this drawer.”
Watching him wrap the portrait up jogged my memory about another grim family story.
“When we were at Bryndis’s, y’know?” I said. “She mentioned the name of Gerda’s mother. Rosalie, wasn’t it?”
“No.” He hesitated. “Rosilde.”
“Something’s bugging you about that, isn’t it?”
He shrugged. He put the painting away and shut the drawer, then turned off the overhead light. I followed him when he left the closet-room and went into the library. He strode over to the window, where he stood looking out with his back to me.
“Tor?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“We didn’t have a source of supplies in the resistance, only what we could steal.” He turned around, and I’d never seen his eyes so bleak, so full of remembered pain. “So we stole it from the Nazis. I’ve told you about the supply trains. And killing their patrols. When we wiped out a patrol, we’d ski down and strip them of everything we could—ammunition, guns, food, anything they carried that we could use. And one time I was stripping a man I’d shot, but he was still alive. I don’t think he realized I was Norwegian. I was wearing a Nazi winter jacket I’d taken from another soldier. He looked at me and said in German, tell Rosilde and our little girl I loved them.” Tor shoved his hands into his jeans pockets and tipped his head a little back. “So I said I would, and he died.”
“Oh god! You don’t think—”
“It’s not that common a name, Rosilde. Wyrd, Maya. I knew I felt wyrd all around us.”
I wanted to tell him that he couldn’t possibly remember, that he had to be wrong. That Nazi officer—he couldn’t have been Nils’ grandfather. Too much of a coincidence—but if everything I’d read about wyrd was correct, then coincidence had nothing to do with it. Over Tor’s shoulder I could see, just outside the window, three women standing in the yard. I stared, took one step toward them, and saw them disappear into shadows. I squelched a scream.
“What is it?” Tor said. “What did you see?”
“The Norns. Just for a second.”
He nodded,his mouth set and grim. “Wyrd,” he said eventually. “I knew that when I found you again, the threads, the knots—they’d start to unravel.”
I could think of nothing to say to that. Tor shrugged, and the mood around us broke.
“Y’know,” he said, and his voice stayed perfectly calm, “I think I’ll cast the rune staves. I want to make sure that Nils isn’t going to give Bryndis any trouble. And I want to email Liv, too, and tell her what Bryndis said.”
I went back upstairs. I thought about drawing, but I was afraid of the images that might appear. I avoided looking at the writing desk, too. I did keep thinking about wyrd, and the knots and tangles. I felt convinced without knowing why that a lot of those tangled threads led back to Grandfather Halvar
Another remembrance of that sour old man sat on Tor’s chest of drawers, a leather case embossed with Halvar’s initials, obviously an antique. I’d noticed it before, but I’d never seen Tor open it. That afternoon I released the little gold latch and flipped back the lid. On a lining of blue velvet, crushed down and worn in places, lay a pair of military hair brushes, a straight-edge razor, and other toilet articles. The brushes had tortoise-shell backs, but the razor and the rat-tail comb were steel. They must have been manufactured in the 1930s, I figured from the severe Deco shapes. Worn straps kept the brushes in place, but the comb had come free of its restraint. I picked it up and noticed a couple of tiny splinters of wood lying on the velvet beside the razor.
I took the comb and picked out the splinters, then closed the case. Looking at the skinny fragments of wood lying in the palm of my hand gave me an oddly uneasy feeling. When I examined the gouges on the bedroom door, the splinters matched. I went over to the closet door and knelt down. The rat-tail end of the comb fit into the supposed toothmarks in the wood. I remembered the non-existent animal hair on the blankets, too. For a moment I wondered if Tor had been faking the shape-change, but I’d seen the pain in his eyes and heard it in his voice whenever he mentioned the bjarki. I’d lived through the bear-nights and listened to him moan and growl.
Besides, why would anyone fake something like that?
I heard Tor come upstairs. I called out, “I’m in the bedroom.” He walked in and waved a piece of paper in my direction. I was still kneeling by the chewed-up door.
“The staves looked pretty positive,” Tor said, “but not one hundred per cent positive. I want to get a better fix on Nils. I—what are you doing?”
“Trying to figure something out. Tor, look, these marks on the door. Do you remember chewing on it when you were in bjarki form?”
“Not what you’d call remembering.” He thought for a moment. “More like dream images, just bits and pieces. Floating around my mind. When I came back, after the bjarki left me, I mean, I saw the damage and sort of remembered chewing.” He thought again. “My ja
ws hurt.”
“But you don’t have a real clear memory of opening your bear’s mouth and putting it on the door.”
“No, I sure don’t.” He stared at the floor and thought for several minutes. Finally he looked up with a shrug. “That’s strange, now that you mention it.”
“Come look at this.”
Tor folded up the paper and put it into his shirt pocket. When he knelt down beside me, he displayed not one little trace of the anxiety or fear of being caught out in a lie. A person who’d made up an elaborate fiction about themselves would have had some kind of reaction. I handed him the comb. He stared at the sharp end of the handle, then at the door.
“Shit!” he said. “Maya, this is really creepy.” He twisted around to look back at the door into the room. “Does this match those marks, too?”
“No, but I found these when I looked in your grandfather’s leather case, the one on the dresser. They were lying by the razor.”
When he handed me the comb back, I dropped the splinters into his open palm. He studied them for a long moment.
“But I remember clawing at the door,” he said eventually. “Not real clearly. Not like remembering playing basketball or something like that, but I remember it.” He hesitated and held up his other hand. “I remember seeing the gouges appear in the door. I don’t remember seeing a paw.”
“You told me once you saw a bear in the mirror when you looked.”
“Yeah. Now that I do remember.” He stood up and glanced in the direction of the bathroom. “In the mirror over the sink.”
“How tall is the bjarki? I mean, like, would his head be high enough to see over the sink if he was on all fours?”
Tor shook his head no. He walked over the wastebasket, and dropped the splinters into it before he said anything. “I don’t remember standing up on hind legs, but bears can, y’know, and they can walk or dance like humans. I remember walking in and seeing a bear in the mirror.”
I got to my feet. “When you were bitten,” I said, “you had rabies shots, right?”
“Yeah. It’s a sequence of shots. First you get immunoglobulin, right near the bite, and that hurts like hell.” He rubbed his thigh, remembering. “Then there’s a series of vaccines.”
“They started the shots right away?”
“Oh yeah. I went straight to the ER, down at Marin General. The bite was still oozing. They figured the dog—we all thought it was a dog—had to be rabid. Why else would it have run right up to me and attacked? A healthy lost dog would have tried to get me to take care of it. Y’know, fawned around my feet. That kind of thing.”
“Some people say lycanthropy’s a virus, don’t they?”
“Yeah. Not that any doctor’s ever done any kind of study.”
“Of course not, but the shots, they’re vaccines against a virus, aren’t they? What if lycanthropy’s related to rabies? Doesn’t rabies give people hallucinations?”
“Do you think I did get rabies?”
“No. I’m wondering if those shots weakened the disease. Like, they couldn’t prevent it because it’s not exactly the same virus, but maybe you didn’t get the full effects. That might explain why you feel like an animal, but you don’t turn into an actual bear.”
Tor stared at me so long and so silently that I began to wonder if I’d said something really stupid. He caught his breath and nodded.
“I bet you’re right.” He sounded weary. “Huh, I hired you to see through illusions. You’re doing a good job.”
I forced out a smile.
“I feel like the bear,” Tor continued. “I act like one, but I’m still an ape in here. Grab a tool and bang on the door when I want to get out. Think I’m biting it. The sore jaw—just from grinding my teeth in anger, I bet. Y’know, rage. Frustration.”
He turned and strode out of the bedroom. I put the comb back into the leather case, then followed. He sat down on the edge of the couch and leaned forward to stare into the empty fireplace. He let his hands dangle between his knees, a gesture that made them look like paws. I sat down next to him.
“If I really turned into an actual bear,” Tor said, “I could rip that door right off its hinges, locks or no locks. They’re powerful animals, especially one my height.”
“A grizzly?” I said.
“Or an Arctic brown. They’re big motherfuckers. Y’know, the old legends are full of bears that act like men. Even bears that get women pregnant. That’s where the bjarki, the bear’s son, legend comes from. Like Beowulf and Bodvar Bjarki.”
“Huh! The girls just made that up when their fathers wanted to know who got them pregnant.”
Tor managed to smile at that—a weak, brief smile, but a smile. “What I see in the mirror,” he continued, “is what I expect to see. I feel like an animal. I was raised on those old stories. What else would I see but a bear? But the hair on the blankets must be real. No, I could be just projecting that, too. You didn’t see it.”
“And when we went to look for it, you couldn’t see it either.”
“That was probably because you’d tipped me off that it might not really be there.” He thought for a couple of minutes before he spoke again. “When you study sorcery, you learn to see things outside of you that are really inside of you. Inside your mind, I mean. Unconscious content. Once you learn how to project it out, then sometimes you do it without thinking.”
“There are some people,” I said, “who can hold an image in their mind and then push it out onto the paper where they can see it just like it was really there. An instructor told my class once that people who can cut elaborate silhouettes can do that.”
“That’s exactly what I mean, yeah. The bite, the virus, whatever it was,” Tor went on, “it set me up to act like a bjarki. And feel like one, too. But I must not transform. Not all the way, anyway. I wish there was some way you could see me and tell me, but it wouldn’t be safe. I’m enough animal to maybe harm you. We could cut a hole in the door, or no. Maybe I’d do something creepy through it, stick a claw through, something.” He shuddered. “Besides, I still couldn’t see myself.”
“What about a camcorder? We could set one up in a corner of the bedroom.”
“Up high, where the bjarki couldn’t reach it, yeah. You could turn it on and then lock me in.” He shuddered again, violently this time. “Ugly thought. It’s probably kind of disgusting. But I’ve got to know.”
I felt totally creeped out, myself. The man I’d been sleeping with, the man I’d come to love—in the locked room he turned into something, someone, different and dangerous. The possibility of seeing what happened terrified me, but like him, I had to know.
“I guess,” I said, “we could just set the thing up and let it run. I don’t know anything about those. We never had one when I was a kid. Maybe we could ask your friend Billy.”
Tor rolled his eyes. “You know what he’d think, don’t you?”
“No. What?”
“That we wanted to record ourselves having sex.”
Totally squicky! I squealed, not at the idea of recording us, but at the idea of Billy thinking we were going to and maybe imagining things. “Scratch that idea,” I said. “Wait a minute! What about those nanny cams? Y’know, you can set one up in your baby’s room to watch while it sleeps.”
“There we go! I’ve heard about those. You can control them from your laptop.” Tor smiled at me, a lop-sided twist of his mouth. “Nanny to a bear cub.”
“Well, when I took the job I told my friends I was an au pair to a bear.”
Tor’s smile disappeared. “I’m surprised that you’d want to stay with a freak like me.”
“Don’t say that! Don’t call yourself that!”
“Why not?”
“Because I love you. Besides, I’m a freak too, if you’re one.”
Tor caught my hand in both of his. “I love you, too,” he said. “And I always will.”
He raised my hand to his mouth and kissed my fingers, then let me go.
“A
lways” is easy to say. Deep in my mind a knot of fear remained, like a thorn that’s worked its way into your body through the skin: what if he got tired me of me one day and turned me out to die? When I remembered his joke about concubines, the thorn stabbed me near my heart.
That night the thorn worked its way into my dreams and turned them to a nightmare. Once again I stood on a night-time bridge over dark water, but this time I had no idea where I was. I turned and tried to see lights in the distance. None shone. I looked down and saw in a bubble of bluish light a dead woman floating in the water. At first I thought she was the woman I’d been, Magda, but she had long blond hair that tangled around her neck, as if she’d been hanged in her own hair. Her blue eyes bulged out from the strangling and seemed to stare right at me.
“No!” I said. “No no no!” The last ‘no’ rose to a wail and woke me.
Tor had turned on the lamp on the end table by our bed. He sat up cross-legged next to me. I lay still and trembled.
“Another nightmare?” he said.
“Yeah. The water again and a woman’s corpse.”
“You need to start thinking about drawing these dreams. And why you don’t want to.”
“I just don’t.” My voice whined like a stubborn child’s. I took a deep breath. “They frighten me.”
“Well, yeah, that’s what nightmares do.” He smiled briefly. “Maya, you’ve got to start looking at this stuff.”
“What do you mean, stuff?”
“Whatever the nightmares represent. You won’t know until you look at them.”
I lifted a hand and watched it shake. He caught it between both of his.
“I bet you know what I’m going to say next,” he said.
“Yeah. I’ve got a talent for sorcery.”