Complete Stories (143 page)

Ola raised a forefinger to her lips, like a silent-movie ingénue signaling for secrecy. Mutely she handed Mark the Yotsa and pointed towards the surfboard-sized slab of blotchy stone that rose from the garden’s pink star-flowers.

Ola seemed to emanate a disorienting psychic power. Distractedly Mark focused on an embossed silver ring that the woman’s pointing finger wore. For a moment he thought it was the Worm Ouroboros, the mythic world-snake who bites his own tail. But then the fine details of the delicately crafted ornament seemed to swell up and fill Mark’s vision, and he could see that the creature was no land-dwelling serpent, but rather an aquatic being, an eel-like branching form.

“The ålefisk man?” murmured Laura, her thoughts in synch with Mark’s.

“My secret friend,” said Ola simply. “My lover. I call him Elver. Now go and look at the stone. It’s a kind of billboard for him. Elver thinks, and the patterns here bloom. I can read them, and with your magic glasses, you can too. Look at it, Mark and Laura. See and rejoice.”

Heads together like children peering through a crack, Mark and Laura shared the Yotsa goggles, each of them using one lens, studying the lichen-like patches on the rugged stone. The stele loomed as info-dense as any Egyptian or Mayan relic.

“It’s like a webpage almost,” said Laura. “A jumble of scenes. Look there, at the bottom. The eel man eating a cow. The grass in the pasture is covered in slime, and the poor animal is bellowing.”

“See the villagers chasing the eel man?” said Mark. “And they built fires to block him off from the fjord. Look there, they’ve caught him.”

“And they’re cutting off his tendrils and smoking them,” added Laura. “Tentacles as thick as logs.”

“You were eating that type of meat for supper tonight,” interjected Ola. “The ålefisk man is generous to his friends.”

“Eating the god,” mused Laura. “A mythic archetype.”

“The villagers didn’t fully kill him, though,” put in Mark. “A stub of the eel man is wriggling back into the fjord. And he’s growing all the time. He branches like a hydra.”

“Yes, yes, but I want you to look at his message near the top,” urged Ola. “This is your invitation.”

“Oh—oh my,” said Laura.

Seen through the Yotsa lenses, the rust-red blotch unfolded to show Mark, Laura, and Ola disporting themselves in the over-large bed of Room 3 upstairs. Someone else was in the bed with them, barely visible beneath the sheets—a playful, squirming figure, lively as an oil-lamp’s flame, wet bed linens pasted to his uncanny lineaments.

The Yotsa 7 trembled in Mark’s hand. Beside him, Ola was softly singing to herself in Norwegian. An intoxicating sweet musk was drifting from the folds of her gown. As if mesmerized, Mark and Laura let Ola take their hands and lead them upstairs to Room 3.

Far from being cold, Ola was warm and responsive beneath the comforter. She’d insisted on leaving the room’s windows wide open, and quite soon, the expected humanoid, anguilliform creature slithered up the porch’s columns, across the slanting roof and into the embraces of three lovers. Elver the ålefisk man. The love-making was unspeakably delicious, indescribably foul.

Hours later Mark awoke to the sound of Laura bumping around the room. Of the Yotsa 7, no trace. Slippery eel and human exudates, drying, had encrusted his skin. With the constant daylight, he found it hard to judge the time. Mid-morning, maybe. Memories of last night crashed onto him like a collapsing brick wall. Oh no. Had they really done all that?

“I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the hell out of here,” said Laura, hoisting her suitcase onto the bed. She already had her slacks and blouse on. She trotted into the bathroom and returned with her toiletries. And then she dropped them all on the floor and burst into wails.

“It’s okay, Laura,” said Mark, getting out of bed naked. He felt sticky all over. Tainted. “I’m coming with you, don’t worry. God. I hope that thing didn’t—”

“Didn’t lay eggs in us!” said Laura, her voice rising to a subdued shriek. “Oh, Mark, what if we suddenly feel the baby eels wriggling inside our flesh?”

“Did you take a shower yet?”

“Of course. And I used the icky bidet. You shower now, too, Mark. I’ll pack for both of us, okay?”

“Yes. I wonder when the next bus or ferry leaves? I don’t suppose we can ask—”

“Ask Ola?” said Laura. “How could we let that woman bring us down so low? Do you think she’s beautiful, Mark? Do you love her more than me?”

“Of course not. We must have been drunk. Or drugged? Maybe that eel man thing wasn’t—”

“Maybe it wasn’t real,” said Laura, completing his thought. “That’s what I keep hoping. Oh, hurry up and get ready before something horrible happens.”

Of course just then their door swung open. There was Ola, neat and lush as a Scandinavian buffet, bearing a tray of breakfast foods in her capable hands. She swept in, leaving the door wide open.

“No fears of privacy now,” she said, talking in a steady stream lest Mark and Laura interrupt her. “The older couple have—ascended. We have the hotel all to ourselves today. Us three and my dear Elver in his watery caves down below. There’s a tunnel that leads from here to a subterranean part of the fjord, you know. Elver and I thought that perhaps—”

“Did you steal our Yotsa 7?” demanded Mark.

“Elver has it,” said Ola with a happy smile. “He formulates some wonderful new ideas. But why are you two behaving so—”

“Stay away from us!” cried Laura. “I’ll call the police if you come one step closer.”

“I don’t think you will,” said Ola calmly. “I know that your government has marked you two for destruction.” She held up her hand for silence. “My Elver—he knows so many things. But there are things we are learning from you. Help us with our plan for your wonderful tool—and your secrets are safe.” Ola formed one of her eerily perfect smiles. “If you like, you’re welcome to stay on in Fjaerland for quite some time. My parents have left our family farmhouse empty. You could live there if you liked. And perhaps now and then we four could—”

“You disgust me,” spat Laura.

“That ålefisk man,” put in Mark, overcome with fear. “He didn’t implant anything in us, did he? No larvae?”

Ola gave a tinkling laugh. “What a thing to worry about! Elver has no children. He is only one, and he is immortal. One ålefisk man in the world and no ålefisk woman. Elver is lonely. He wishes that humans accepted him and loved him like those silly trolls you see in gift shops. Elver is a far nobler symbol of our Norsk heritage. Those trolls—
pfui
! They rot gullible brains with shopping-mall cuteness. Elver is deeper. Elver wants that many more people eat of his inexhaustible flesh, and that we know freedom from our carking cares. I believe, Mark, that you and your wife are very good at public relations?”

“You couldn’t prove that by the mess we engineered for ourselves,” said Mark.

“Mark, don’t even answer her!” Laura commanded. But her husband noted that she had ceased to bustle with her packing, as if intrigued.

Mark caught Laura’s gaze and sought to transmit his innermost thoughts to her, using a wisp of entanglement that had been generated by their sharing of the Yotsa 7 when viewing the stele.

Laura, please listen to me. We have nothing to lose by joining Ola’s cause. And maybe a lot to gain. The Yotsa 7 is too weird for humans to control. We need a mythic counterweight. And we need a friend against the feds. Let’s ride the bucking, fucking Eel Train to glory. It’s a win-win for us and Elver both! Let’s trust ourselves, and trust Ola, and trust this creature older than mankind. What do we have to lose?

Their locked glances persisted only a micro-second, but managed to channel a flood of information and feeling. And then they broke the connection.

Calm now, Laura turned to Ola. “What are you imagining that we can do for you?”

Ola grinned. “You do not realize the true potential of your invention. It is not just a receiver, but also a transmitter! This, my Elver has deduced. But it is best if I let him explain in his own way.”

Instinctively, Mark shot a look at the open bedroom window, anticipating the second appearance of the eel man. Ola understood his expectations, and corrected them.

“Elver finds sunlight burdensome, and makes his forays into the light but rarely, such as when he initiates newcomers like yourself. To meet with him again, we must go below.”

Laura’s voice betrayed some nervousness. “Below?”

“Beneath the basement of the Hotel Fjaerland is a natural cavern, connecting via a passage to an underground pool of the fjord. Down to Elver’s domain we will march ourselves, and meet him again in joy.”

Mark imagined Ola imparted a lascivious tinge to these words, but he tried to ignore it. Had the three of them really enjoyed sex with a humanoid eel? But surely it didn’t have to come to that again. Mark told himself that he only wanted to find out strange and devious ålefisk man could somehow unkink their problems with the feds.

The hotel basement was pleasantly domestic, containing as it did racks of wine, skis and snowshoes, casks of pickled herring, jars of preserved berries, dangling, log-shaped hunks of smoked meat, and a workbench with little figurines of eel-men standing on two legs with their long tails curled behind them. Ola led them to a a trapdoor and down a ladder to the underlying secret cavern.

The first sight to greet them there was less wholesome: the savaged corpses of the elderly couple who’d been the hotel’s other lodgers.

“Oh my god!” screamed Laura. “It’s a trap!” The oldsters’ pathetic, disemboweled bodies lay but a few meters away.

“Run for it!” cried Mark. “Back up the ladder, Laura!” He struck a defensive posture, fully expecting Ola to attack him.

But Ola only stood there gazing at them, her mouth set in a sad smile. “Oh, Mark and Laura, you know so little. These dear old ones, riddled with disease, they came down here to offer Elver their final homage, to lend him their good—their good vibrations?”

“I—I thought I heard you talking about this kind of plan before dinner last night,” said Laura. “But I didn’t realize you actually meant—”

“Elver grows strong from the numinous grants of his worshippers,” said Ola. “If one’s life is nearly at an end, it is well to pass one’s final energies to the eternal ålefisk.”

“Oh, sure,” challenged Mark. “That poor old couple came down here and invited that—that eel-thing to slaughter them like hogs? And you’re leaving them on the floor to rot?”

Ola winced, and a tear rolled down her cheek. “Tonight I am burying these sad husks in the churchyard, of course. These were, after all, my parents.”

“Your parents?” whispered Laura, stepping down off the ladder.

“Yes,” said Ola, regaining her poise. She tossed her head in a haughty gesture. “My parents. Surely you can understand that I only wished them glory.”

The odd woman’s sincerity quelled their suspicions, at least temporarily, and, after a quiet exchange of words, Mark and Laura agreed to follow Ola further into the depths.

The echoing cavern was faintly lit by veins of luminous mold criss-crossing the dank stone. On the side towards the fjord, the walls funneled into a downward-sloping corridor. Along the way they passed a squat stone altar in an alcove. Ola and Elver’s trysting spot.

Picking their way further the uneven but well-swept stone floor, the trio soon reached a subterranean shore where the black water lapped. Here rested patient Elver, his exposed torso gleaming, his lower appendages submerged. He was holding the Yotsa 7 to one of his eyes with a curly tendril that branched from his side.

“Elver, my sweet,” sang Ola. “Show our new friends your thoughts.”

The glabrous surface of the eel man’s body abruptly became a high-res display—his subdermal chromatophores, densely packed, were synched to his mind. And now Mark and Laura took in a little movie scenario.

In Elver’s movie, passive viewers around the globe are watching video displays and hand-held gizmos. A steady parade of bad news and horrors marches across their idiot screens. In speeded-up time, the media slaves become increasingly bestial and depraved. But now, from above, a celestial rain of glowing counter-imagery descends upon the benighted citizenry. The images are elegant glyphs encapsulated in comic-strip-style thought balloons: quaint cities amid verdant hills, cathedral-like forests, rich fields of fruits and grain, treasuries of fish and cheeses, temples of learning, artists at work and orchestras at play, joyous carnal orgies, swift ships sailing beneath smiling skies, and scientists peering into the heart of the cosmos. In Elver’s movie, the recipients of his ideational manna brighten and perk up. They turn off their screens and address one another face to face, laughing and stretching their limbs. They’re fully alive at last.

Mark’s spirits rose to see the energizing thought balloons and their effects. He savored the fusillade of upbeat glyphs, and reveled in the bountiful, idyllic futurescape that the images evoked.

But it was Laura who discerned the ultimate import of Elver’s show.

“That flood of counter-programming—the thought balloons—those stand for semiotic ontological transmissions from the Yotsa 7!” she exclaimed. “Elver wants to reverse what we thought was a one-way flow. We’ve been using the Yotsa 7 to perceive the hidden meanings of images, Mark. But now we can start with the most desirable meanings and wrap our images around them!”

“We’ll—we’ll made ads that people can’t resist,” said Mark, slowly. “Ads that change the world.”

“Indeed,” said the willowy Ola, leaning against Laura’s side. “This is the Elver’s lesson. He is proud to have such clever devotees.”

Mark beamed as if he were still ten years old and receiving his father’s praise for a perfect report card. But he hadn’t quite lost his head.

“If we’re going to advertise, we need a product,” he said. “You need a cash flow to pay for ads. It’s symbiotic—and in a positive way if you have an honest product.”

“Elver’s Smoked Eel,” said Ola, not missing a beat. “With special labels and trademarked Elver figurines. Today we four are designing the packaging and the ads. And thanks to your wonderful Yotsa 7, we are folding in our most utopian dreams.”