Valkyrie's Curse Pt IV

How much trouble can an ancient viking be anyway?  Wouldn't you know it, college coeds start showing up dead.  waht kind of archeology site is this anyway?

As a bit of entertainment I thought y'all might enjoy this link.  Interestingly enough the location isn't far from where I've set my tale.  Check it out.  A Swedish Stonehenge

Valkyrie's Curse

Part IV

 

by

 

Ellie Mack

 

Chaos.  The entire camp was nothing but chaos.  The undergrads were panicked, Scott, Brad, and Joe scrambled to keep order.  It was a lost cause, after a while they just directed traffic.  Nialls Whitfield strolled out of his tent around nine, two hours after the police had cleared out.

”Is this how you run a camp? Why aren’t they at the dig site?”  He tossed out as he strode towards them.

Brad nodded in his direction. ”Not normally. Can’t start yet.”  He crossed his arms bracing for the argument.

Niall’s dodged a frantic female gibbering something about not signing up for  Halloween hell.  He stared after her before moving the two final steps to reach the men.  ”What the hell? What do you mean you can’t start yet?  You should have already done preliminary, and starting on excavation yesterday.”  He looked around, taking in the noisy students running around.   ”Where’s Helena Morris?  Isn’t she suppose to be running this camp?

 Brad jumped in.  He’d worked with Nialls before and knew his routine. ”Well Nialls, we’ve had quite a bit of excitement here this morning before you decided to get your sorry self out of bed.  Typically our days start around seven here, breakfast is served at that time.  Our schedules, if you would bother to read them dictate that personnel be on site by eight a.m.  However, the plan had to be deviated from as our Ms Helena Morris is in fact missing, possibly kidnapped as well as one of the new arrivals, Ms
Amanda Keefer.  The police have blocked off the site from our access until they finish scouring the area to find any evidence.  If you’d like to rush back and inform Dr. Montgomery of that development feel free.  Perhaps he can get some coordination with the police force down here for a more organized investigation.   In the mean time we wait.”

Nialls huffed indignantly.  ”I am not here merely to convey information to Dr. Montgomery.  He is in fact heading the funding of this and  therefore requires certain reports from me.  You’re just jealous you didn’t get the job Brad, as usual.  He was smoothing the front of his cotton button down shirt when the rest of what Brad had told him hit him.  ”Wait, what?  Helena has been kidnapped?  Why?  Who would want to kidnap her?”

Scott made a move towards Nialls, but Brad held him back and gave him a slanted brow,  ”Really Nialls, I don’t know how you are going to make effective reports when you don’t have a clue about what is going on.  Insulting the boss, and us isn’t going to get you any cooperation.”  He motioned to Scott to leave. 

”Wait.  Who’s the other girl?  Where are the police now?  Are you cooperating with them?”

”Guess you better run and make a report to Dr. Montgomery. ”  Joe tossed the words at Nialls in a mocking tone, then tsked him a few times before adding ”Always the last to know.”  Joe walked off towards the mess tent to start on lunch.

 

                                *                             *                             *                             *

 

Helena walked down the tunnel, with the man behind her.  It was so easy to get disoriented down here.  She tried to think about how the telemetry plan looked on the monitor.  She stopped, motioned to the man then knelt down grabbing a stone, and began scratching what she remembered of the tunnels from the radar.  The research from other sites that were similar, often had a distinct east west lay out. North and south were often burial chambers, or corridors leading to various rooms, and some connected to other sites as well.  She worked slowly trying to recall the image she had sen on the screen.  She closed her eyes trying to concentrate.

” Hvilken slags trolddom er det?”  The man squatted down near her.  (What sort of sorcery is this?)

Helena was trying hard to concentrate.  She understood part of what he said – What type of trickery is this.  "No tricks, a map.  Errr um, ingen tricks, et kort.”

She had a great mind for details.  She could remember things almost instantly.  As she drew out the map, the man took her hand and shook his head.   ” Nej, det er forkert. ligesom dette.” ( NO you’re wrong.) 

He picked up another stone and  touched her map with his fingers, then moved over to a spot next to her.  He brushed away the dust on the floor, then handed her the torch to hold.  He drew the front of the tunnels in the same fashion that she had, then drew concentric circles resembling the triskel with additional lines.  It was an elaborate design. 

Helena glanced between the two, then tapped both at the pint where she had come through the wall. 

”Ja”  He nodded eagerly.

She tapped the wall behind them, then made a  questioning expression and tapped the map.  He marked an x on his map.  It was just before a chamber on the left. He nodded, then touched where the chamber was on the map then motioned silently that it was just around the curve of the tunnel.  He tugged her to her feet then pulled her along to the chamber.  This had apparently been where he rested. Helena’s mind raced with wild thoughts , questioning his intentions before he shone the light on the wall of the chamber.  On it he had drawn an elaborate map.  He had drawn out next to it a calendar of sorts.  She moved closer to the map.  ”Crap!  You’ve contaminated the site.” 

As she looked closer she realized that he’d been here for a while.  There was a store of mead, some sort of stale bread, and a spot where he’d had a fire.  He offered her his journal he’d been keeping.  It was scrawled in some runic language she didn’t understand.  She flipped through page after page of it, but shook her head that she couldn’t read a word of it.  That would be Brad’s forte.  She surveyed the map closely, noticing he’d made notes of several locations.  It seemed to be an ornate labyrinth, without an exit.  ” Vi skal finde exit.”

He nodded his head but less enthusiastically.  He clasped her hand tenderly and began to wash her wound, then bound it in a strip of cloth. She gave him an earnest smile.

 

                                         *                             *                             *                             *

 

Brad and Scott sat in his tent, heads together poring over Brad’s translation notes.  ”Now, you see here how Helena slid down, cut her hand then appears to fall through the stone.  Well based on my translations – The stone guards the entrance to the in between place.  The Vikings believed the warriors would go to either Valhalla or Nefflheim.  This in between place is where they await their sentence until they are escorted to either by a Valkyrie.   The writing says  ”When blood is shed upon the door, by the moonlight shall the Valkyrie enter to guide the lost to their destinations until Ragnarok.  They must emerge by the full moon of Samhein lest they both be lost forever.  Another Valkyrie must open the door for the Valkyrie to return to the world of man.”

Scott looked at his friend as if he’d lost his mind.  ”So you’re saying that Helena fell through this , this door into another dimension because she’s a Valkyrie?”

”I know it sounds weird, man but look at the tape.  She fell through the freakin’ door!”  Brad defended his interpretation. 

”So in order to save her, we only have to find another ’valkyrie’.  Sure, let’s just line up the undergrads and have them touch the stone.”

”NO it’s not that simple.”

”Of course not.  It never is , is it?”

”The Valkyrie has to be a virgin.”

Scott stood turning his folding chair over. ”Great!  WE might as well head into town and hit the grade school then.  Not that the police won’t notice us taking small children from school, but then we're going to run them through some weird underground tunnel traumatizing them.”

”There’s more.”

Scott stopped, threw his head up to the ceiling, his hands on his hips.  ”Of course there’s more.  What?”

”It requires her blood as well.”

”So, what?  We have to find some sort of test to determine if some kids a Valkyrie or do we go to jail for slashing little kids hands open?”

”I’m working on it, OK?  We’ll figure something out.”  Brad worked diligently as Scott stormed around the room.  After several minutes he decided this was getting him no where.  ”I”m heading over to see what the police have found and what sort of damage they’ve done to the site.”

He jumped on the four wheeler and took off at speed, not noticing that Nialls was running behind him trying to catch up.  The police had tape everywhere sectioning off the landscape into squares in a similar fashion to what they would be doing for the dig.  There must have been twenty police patrolling the areas.  He would hear the click of their walkee talkees as they would check in, then  flag another quadrant. 

”You could have stopped to give me a lift.”  Nialls panted through the words breathlessly.

 ”Didn’t know you were there.”  Scott leaned against the four wheeler, arms akimbo as he scanned the landscape dotted with police.  ”This really blows.”

Nialls took a large drink of water, trying to recover from his brief jog.   

Just then Scott picked up on the report from one of the walkee talkees.   He walked over closer to the police car, listening through the open window.  ”Hey, they found something.”  He motioned Nialls to be quiet.  Scott listened intently as the radio chatter continued in broken short messages.  Several officers were migrating to the north end of the field, just where the land dipped into a rolling valley.  ”Oh god, it’s by the stones.”

Nialls head rose slightly from his hunkered over position with his hands resting on his knees.  ”Stones?  You mean like Megaliths like Stonehenge type of stones?”

”Yeah.  There’s a burial stone just over the rise.  We’ve been debating whether it’s a burial marker or a sacrificial alter. ”

 Scott and Nialls skirted to the west of the site, just at the edge of the open field.  They watched from the edge as the police tagged and bagged the body of the missing student.  Nialls wretched as he caught sight of the bloody mess.  Scott stood silent,swallowing hard, noting that it wasn’t Helena. 

He hoped beyond hope in an irrational thougth that Amanda wasn’t the virgin Valkyrie they needed to free Helena.