Shadows of the Short Days

that, back when he lived. Invited the devil into his own head, offered him his own bones, his own flesh. Gottskálk was an inhuman bastard, by all accounts, and likely to match the devil in feats of ill temper and evil. If anyone could contain a demon in his own bones – tame the beast and use it for his own desires – then it was the Reverend Gottskálk “the Cruel’ Nikulásson. But not Sæmundur. He knew himself too well. Too capricious, too weak. One day, perhaps. But not now. He had to find something else.

Mæja pranced back to him and gave him a miserable mew. She looked as if she had lost weight. Sæmundur petted her and tufts of fur came loose with each stroke. Poor Mæja. This wasn’t a cat’s life. She didn’t ask for much. Water, perhaps the occasional drop of milk, and something to eat. Almost anything. And a warm place to snuggle. But she hardly got even that. He was pathetic. Not being able to care for a single, tiny cat.

An idea struck Sæmundur’s mind and he stopped petting the cat. In the thick, drugged fog of his mind he felt as if a black candle had been lit, a black conflagration, a black sun. He became distant. Cold. Frozen. Mæja kept butting her head against him and purring.

He couldn’t. What would Garún say?

Nothing.

She would never find out. He looked at the cat and the elliptical chalk circle.

“Kitty-cat. Are you hungry, Mæja, dear? Come, let’s eat. Come.”

*   *   *

He cleared the junk off the amplifier and lined up the tallow candles on top of it. The only light came from their weak flames, yet it appeared vigorous in the oppressive darkness. The spiral seemed to move in the flickering light. Sæmundur had tied Mæja’s limbs together with string and the cat lay mewing in the centre of the circle. She cried out ceaselessly and her hoarse cries merged with the scratching in the wall. He felt nauseous. The slow realisation of what he had done and was about to do threatened to overwhelm him. Make him freeze. He shut himself off from the horror of it.

The candle lights were many and spread out, multiplying Sæmundur’s shadow. The flames gleamed and the shadows danced on the walls. He began the ritual.

First he closed the circle. He put down branches of birch at the edge of the spiral while mumbling an incantation. The birch branches slid from his hand, falling to the floor like heavy iron rods. When the circle of invocation had been sealed he started walking widdershins around it while chanting thrice the eleven forbidden names, summoning the forces that were simultaneously the bridge and the barrier between worlds.

It was as if the room was in free fall into the depths of the earth. Gravity felt vague, fleeting. The walls seemed to slide past at extreme speed, as if in an elevator, but still they were not moving. The scratching intensified and the floorboards groaned. The moss sent electric waves through his body. Sæmundur heard a murmur rise within his head and beyond the wall simultaneously, but he paid it no heed. The gates were open.

Mæja had stopped mewing. She was stiff, the hairs on her back standing up. She didn’t fight, didn’t try to escape. The cat just stared at Sæmundur. Stared and kept quiet. He looked away.

He took his place in the same spot where he’d started, the candles at his back. The shadows danced over the invocation circle in front of him, playing in the dizzying spiral, which was now turning lethargically, but turning nonetheless.

Fear paralysed Sæmundur when he realised that he couldn’t recall the key incantation, the summoning itself. He completely froze. Yet, before he knew it he was spouting the incantation without hesitation, even though he could never recall the next word before he spoke it out loud.

He felt the sound of the world surrounding him. He drew it in, closer, weaving it around him. Noise from factories, vehicles, animals and people. People talking, laughing, walking, singing, fucking, screaming, whispering. Sound from dust settling, wood rotting, water running, flames that burn. Sound from worms crawling, flowers dying, trees growing, mountains being weathered down, grain by grain. He heard the deafening rumble of clouds moving across the sky, the crackle from the embers of the sun, the clamour of the stars and the overwhelming, never-ending tone of everything that is.

The pressure built up and everything trembled. Cracks splintered across the walls until the darkness surrounding him grew so deep and thick that he could no longer see them. The pitch darkness smothered the candlelight, and his shadows grew darker and stronger. Intense, incomprehensible words of longing came from beyond the walls. Sæmundur had to summon every ounce of strength he had not to run away and tear away the boards, letting in that which was knocking on the window of his soul, begging to be let in.

Mæja screeched loud and long. A primal, panicked scream. Sæmundur had finished the invocation without realising it. The cat convulsed in agony, twisting and fighting in its desperation to escape, but the knots were too strong and the twine cut deep into her. She hissed uncontrollably and suddenly Sæmundur understood why. The shadows slid together, flooding into Mæja like oil down a drain.

Something cracked within the cat. Mæja screeched even louder. The candles flickered. Sæmundur’s hair and beard moved in a wind from nowhere, even though he felt no breeze on his face. His shadow had vanished. It was if he wasn’t standing there in the light at all. The cat twitched and squirmed involuntarily. Sæmundur heard her bones break and saw them moving underneath the fur, as if something was trying to hatch. Her back arched, swelling, and a spatter of blood erupted over the floor when the stretched-out skin finally gave. Mæja had stopped screeching. Instead only deep, dying gurgles came from her.

Pitch-black chitin, shining with blood and ichor, pushed itself out of the