THE SKULL OF ASKE

There is something striking about the appearance of Daegne Carçis. For any of you reading this in manuscript form, you should know that Daegne is pronounced, Dane. And Carçis, well, you should already be familiar with the cedilla, such as you find in words like façadeor garçon. Say to yourself—KAR-Siss, and you will have it. Dane KAR-Siss.

I admit I felt profoundly uncomfortable when I first met the man. At this point in my studies, I was already familiar with the term, karcist, which was a magician, sorcerer, or thaumaturge.

“No,” he replied, when I asked him about it, “My family is very old, and very reclusive. My explorations of lands other than the Isles of India and China have made me almost a black sheep to the family. We are inveterate gleaners of ancient myths and secrets. I just happen to believe the New World could be a treasure trove of untapped wealth of lost and forgotten knowledge. Over the years I've gathered a virtual museum of the arcane and forbidden.”

But I was speaking of his appearance. He is tall, but not over-tall. A man of indeterminate age. I would not put him above forty, but his silver-streaked whitish hair hits he is far older. But his features are those, almost of a youth, as if it were chiseled out of suggests a far greater age. This is belied by his face which is almost perfect, as if chiseled out of some rich, pale stone and polished to a fine finish.

But it is his eyes that draw you. They are silver, an uncanily brilliant metallic hue. The first time I saw them I wondered if that was what the Greeks meant when they gave their Goddess the epithet of, grey-eyed Athenè. They were compelling and commanding, but I never saw Daegne Carçis abuse this power he had.

After that first meeting I visited him often. His home was a modest edifice, but I would get the weird feeling that it was somehow larger within, than it appeared on the outside, like the TARDIS from the Doctor Who television show.

In his life time he had gathered many strange curios from all over the world. I was sure each of them had their tale to tell.

The metal sculpture that vaguely resembled a rooster. I had made the mistake of feeling one of its tail feathers—I but near sliced half my finger off!

“Hodag. Found in the woods of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. 1899.”

I felt rather uneasy. It wasn't the dangerous keenness of those razor sharp feathers. It was the uncanny skill of the sculptor. They must have taken decades to craft it so exquisitely.

The lifeless doll, clad in harlequin motley...

“The corpse of Petruschka, murdered at the Shrovetide Fair in Krasnoyarsk, 1910. A mechanical doll so lifelike it was thought to be a human being. I obtained it from an abandoned factory once belonging to Grissom's Omniversal Gadgets.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Be glad you haven't. They would have changed the whole balance of world power in 1913, if they'd had their way. We'd still be fighting World War One if it was up to them.”

Then he showed me a glass jar inside of which was what looked like a human hand.

“Inside that jar is an airless vacuum. But watch what happens when this lever allows in a steady stream of oxygen.”

There was a hiss of in-rushing air. The hand suddenly burst into furious flame.

“Reminds one of the burning bush in the Book of Exodus. Exposure to oxygen sets it on fire, yet it is never consumed. But this isn't what I brought you here to see.”

What he showed me was an immense skull. Had this belonged to a living man, instead of being an incredibly skillful sculpture, he would have been a veritable giant. I calculated swiftly what the size of such a man must be, and I wondered where the sculptor would have obtained his model.

“Over seven feet in height. That forehead bone ridge is slightly more pronounced than in modern homo-sapiens. And you can see where the neck muscles would have been attached—incredible, that an artist would go into such careful detail. The muscles would have been far stronger than in an ordinary human. Cro-Magnon, if I haven't missed my guess.”

“I had the help of some very good men, getting this. I owe Carnacki, Dr. Hesselius and especially John Silence a debt of gratitude.

“It was found in Greenland—deep in the interior, early two miles beneath the ice sheet. Ancient Greenland was surrounded by a ring of mountain peaks. There's a canyon in the center, longer and deeper than the Grand Canyon. The weight of the ice sheet has sunk the land beneath, in places more than two hundred feet below level.

“This is tied up with the history of the Eirik the Red's settlement of Greenland in the late Tenth Century. The Viking settlement of Iceland's continued till this day. But the Greenland settlements were all gone by the end of the Fifteenth Century. No one knows exactly why, though there are many theories. Plague? The supply ships from Iceland stopped coming (and Greenland had few natural resources of its own—that would have killed them)? Invasion from the native Inuit inhabitants? Resurgence of the Ice Age? Combination of all four?

“Here's what I think. I've found traces of something cataclysmic, something was unleashed in the settlements, something after which, there could be no possible recovery. The native Inuit were unaffected, whatever it was. It just took out the Vikings.

“They accepted Christianity in Iceland in the year 1000 A.D., though they did allow for the keeping of pagan traditions in private. Iceland's like a microcosm of the world. Christianity marches on in triumph—but they cannot expunge the old pagan ways—not fully, though they did try. There's little record of paganism in Greenland, but I think it was there—and I think, somehow, that the ancient paganism clashed with the Church. A kind of Ragnarök, if you will. A war between the Christian forces of blindness and intolerance (so like the Hrimthursar Frost Giants of old)—and the adherents of the old religion, Greenland's ancient pagan faith, who worshiped the Æsir Gods.”

Daegne had been looking at me sharply.

“I've traced your bloodline back that far—and farther. Memories can be inherited, though it is very difficult to bring these to the surface, especially after the passage of centuries, and even millennia. But, as with dreams, the strongest ones struggle for survival and fight their way back to the surface. What does the Gray Wolf mean to you?”

He looked at me very strangely at that. His gaze was piercing. I found those silver eyes very unsettling, to say the least.

That name...it shouldn't have meant anything out of the ordinary, but...

“Just...an old story in our family. A kind of...tutelary guardian figure. Kind of some kind of werewolf figure, actually.”

“There was a Norse Saga that came out of Greenland—Grar Ulf Saga. Lost to the world, but I found traces of it. The Gray Wolf was a pagan man in Greenland. He fought against the corruption that was in the church. He wore a coat of wolfskins. That would make him one of the ulfhednar—their name meant wolf coat wearers. They were said to be fiercer and more dangerous than berserker warriors. Rumors said they could actually turn into wolves.”

“Like Sigmund and his son, Sinfjötli, in the Volsunga Saga.”

“Yes, but the Gray Wolf disguised himself, and nobody knew who he was. He went about unsuspected, during the day. At night he turned into the wolf warrior and was never known.”

“You're saying he was like The Batman, then? I've never heard any of this before.”

“You are descended from him. Our discussions led me to suspect your origins. My researches confirmed them.”

“I still don't understand what that's going to be in aid of.”

“You are of the Gray Wolf's bloodline. You have inherited his memories. I believe we can unlock them and you can learn their secrets.”

If what Daegne was saying was true, it would explain things I had been wondering about for many years. It was only a story, little better than a fairy-tale, yet I admit that that story had fascinated my since I was a child. If there really was more to that story than I supposed, I owed it to myself—indeed, to my whole family—to find the truth. I felt something burning inside me, as if I was on the verge of lifting the lid from a great treasure.

“What do we have to do?”

I had seen Daegne Carçis' psychic abilities before. I had no trouble believing he could put me in trance deeper that that of the most skilled hypnotist.

“Take hold of the skull. Keep in physical contact with it. It is the key. But why is it the key?”

He began to play a CD on his stereo. Sir Arnold Bax. Symphony No. 1 in E-flat. Despite the stridency of the first movement, I found myself relaxing and drifting off.

I began to see a bleak, arid landscape. There were immense rocks that seemed as if they had grown out of the rough ground. Even in that strange, passive state, I knew, I was witnessing the landscape of Greenland—centuries and centuries ago. These was the inner territories, ones that were never approached, not even by the Skraeling Inuit.

The thing was out there. A thing fearsome, like Grendel was to King Hrothgars' people 800 years earlier. But no Grendel could ever be as terrible as the thing they called the Raptor.

It was out there in the wilds. There was fear. But also a calling, a moment of destiny.

I knew it was out there.

They called it the Raptor and I was seeing it for the first time as it rose from behind, almost from out of the rocks. It loomed high. It was so great, not so much in size—but simply in its presence.

The eyes, they glowed, burning with a fire, like the flame of a volcano—but brilliant, azure, sapphire blue. But the grin on the creature's face signified nothing. It was as if this being could not find the way to signify its emotions into anything that would register with a normal human being. It smiled, and the eyes, those volcanic orbs, they exploded with interior flames. It was the face of a mad man—and it smiled. Blindly. Insanely.

The thing was older than could have existed in any sane world. The fear I encountered was that of feeling the universe, the rational universe, being torn apart. I was in the presence of a thing that should not—could not exist.

It's head turned to its side, like a dog or a wolf trying to understand. I sensed, without words, that this thing, this being, was ancient beyond ireckoning. How long had it been here? How long had it walked among us? How long had it struggled to comprehend us?

Its shape was that of a man. What looked like burst sections of riven chain mail cloaked its legs and loins. The hair of its head was black as coal, falling in unmannerly ringlets. It reached out an arm and touched me on the shoulder with questing fingers. It was as if in those mad eyes was the expression of something that wanted to understand but could not.

It crouched from its ten foot height—and still it loomed over me. The touch of that hand on my face was sleek, smooth like metal—cool, but not icy like cold steel would have been. Suddenly, the creature seized my face in its hands. The azure fire of its eyes burned into my eyes.

I woke with a start. The second movement of the Bax Symphony was playing. Everything I had seen in that trance vision was like a visualization of the music.

“Slow down, Wulfgar—take deep breaths. Drink this. Be calm. Then tell me what you saw.”

In a few moments I had regained my composure. But I could never forget what I had seen—or what had been awoken in me. When I was calm enough I began to speak.

“You were right. I was him. Or at least I inherited his memories. It was a time of great struggle. There was a bishop—archbishop, actually...Algyr was his name. He'd been sent there especially to combat the underground strongholds of paganism that still remained. Against those found guilty, he enacted worst punishments than confiscation of property, or outlawry.

“It all came to a head with that skull. This was what the disputation was all about. It seems the pagan Greenlanders believed that was the head of Aske, who they claimed was the first man. His wife was called Embla. They said the three Gods, Odin, Hoenir and Lodhurr found an ash tree and an elm tree. They turned them into the first man and woman. And they believe that this had been done long ago in Greenland.”

“So Greenland would have been their Garden of Eden.”

“But the Archbishop claimed it was only a carven stone skull. He commanded it to be destroyed so the pagans wouldn't worship it. But no matter what they tried, the head was stronger than their mallets and mattocks.”

“Many religions have creation stories about the first man and woman. And they are very different from one another—but instead of welcoming the differences, this Archbishop, and your Gray Wolf went to war over it.”

“Yes. It was like having a complete book downloaded in only moments, but it's organizing itself in my mind. It was a real war. But it looked like Archbishop Algyr won. He ferreted out the old pagans, and it seems like only a handful of them survived—one of them was my direct ancestor. She was the wife of the Gray Wolf. His name was Einclé. He made off with the skull and buried it deep, probably in the place where you dug it up again.

“So what happened to the pagans that weren't killed?”

“They managed to escape from Greenland, or go out into the most remote regions. In the end I think they all left Greenland. All except for Einclé, the Gray Wolf.”

“And...the Archbishop, and all the Greenlanders who he didn't kill—what happened to all of them?”

“You were wondering why the Viking settlements were all abandoned. I think I know the reason, now.

“This thing—the Raptor. Even what little I saw in its eyes...it was enough to drive me mad. It was almost completely alien. It's not even from our universe. It's from somewhere where the natural laws are all different. Somehow the thing has survived in our universe. I don't know how. The Vikings spoke of the Nine Worlds. But there was another one. They called it Utgard. If I had to guess that is where the Raptor came from. From somewhere outside.

It's not evil, though. Not as we'd think of evil. It's just...different. And our world is as alien to it, as its world would be to us. But I think it wants to understand, to be able to make its way in a foreign land.

“I think it understood some of what it saw in my mind—in my ancestor's mind. Maybe he even went out into the wild to call it. Maybe he called it, and it answered him. It understood what he wanted. What he needed. The Archbishop and his men had pursued the Gray Wolf. I think they were close to catching him.

“I think the Raptor killed every single one of them. I think he destroyed the entire settlements. Maybe he even destroyed the Gray Wolf, with them. I only know whatever I inherited from my ancestor, there was nothing beyond that moment.”

Carçis looked thoughtful.

“Your ancestor went into the wilderness. He awoke this Raptor. It destroyed the entire settlements of Greenland. That completely fit with every scrap of information I've been able to glean all these years.

“And it was all because two men fought a religious war. A war over whether the first man and woman were made out of unliving clay—or whether they were made from trees that were already alive. It would almost be laughable, if it weren't so tragic.”

“Which of them do you think was right?”

“Well, I think your ancestor fought a battle against imperialistic intolerance, of his people's right to choose their own belief. And this Archbishop was attempting to force—by whatever means necessary—conformity to the 'Religiously Correct' belief. Despite its many admirable qualities, the Christian faith has had a long tradition of ruling by force, rather than by love. No, I believe your ancestor was in the right. But that does not necessarily mean the Biblical story of Adam and Eve's creation from the dust of the ground is incorrect.”

“Then you believe the Biblical account to be the true one, rather than what the Elder Edda says?”

“I did not say that. I do not believe that men and women were made from dead dust and clay. No we, our ancestors were made from the substance of living trees. I suspected that long ago, but once I found the skull of Aske, I became convinced. You and I, Wulfgar, have held in our hands the skull of our first ancestor, Aske, whom the Gods formed from an ash tree.”

“You can't be serious. It's an exquisite likeness, but it's only carven stone.”

“No. Not stone, and not carved. This is wood. Petrified wood.”