“We must,” Hroar told us, “find a dwelling free of the dead and make of it a dwelling for the living.”
We chose another of the still standing dwellings and entered therein and there too we found the dead, their bodies dry and hollowed out, like emptied sacks. There were nowhere signs of life, only a thin settling of dust over all things. We took from the house all goods and cans and stripped it of what lumber it could spare and still be a pyre, and then commended the dead to God’s notice and set the house aflame.
It proved the same with each dwelling standing, each clotted with the dead. Quickly we learned to approach the window of each dwelling and, seeing the dead, leave them undisturbed. It was Hroar who would have it thus, for, he asked, Why would God have left the town for us to discover if our only purpose was to destroy it? No, he said, if they were not disturbed, the dead would be willing to await their reward.
Thus at the end of the second day we had not found a dwelling to call our own. And when we camped, it was not within a shelter but on open ground, and though the ground was free of ice and we now had food and fuel for fires, many grumbled against Hroar and even suggested that we should merely heap the dead together and burn them all and keep their dwellings for ourselves.
On the third day we awoke to find our faces and hands strangely tender with heat and Hroar himself missing. We huddled together and consulted one another as to what should be done, and might in fact have left that place had we known a place to go. As it was, we clung to each other and sometimes searched through the ruins around us. Here too we found bodies, but not nearly so many, and most of them little more than piles of ash. Here too we saw, on what remained of building walls, strange figures: human in size and shape, but with their limbs and bodies odd and misshapen, as if the shadows of monsters had been torn from them to become immobile and fixed, and this filled us with dread.
The place which at first had thus seemed so much a deliverance to us now seemed a warning or perhaps a punishment. There were even those of us who claimed to see in the shadowed figures a premonition of our own deaths.
Hroar returned late in the day, claiming to have found a dwelling free of the dead, a wide and sumptuous hall with room for all, our new home. Let us rejoice, he proclaimed, for our wandering may cease at last.
We rejoiced and then did follow him. He led us through the ruined settlement and to the heart of the rubble and there, buried and hidden, where before we had seen only destruction, was a strange dwelling, partially covered over but seemingly intact. Under his direction we cleared a path to the doorway as best we could and then clambered our way inside.
It was, as he had claimed, a great hall, sufficient to accommodate all our tribe and even more. It was, as he said, intact, though the small windows along three sides were blocked and filled with rubble. Indeed, we would have been vexed to see for darkness were there not a glow from one corner of the room. There, at the juncture of wall and floor, was a hole brimmed with water, and through that hole came a bluish light and heat, and looking closer one could see the shape of a blinking eye. The water was hot and, as one reached into it and toward the blue eye, became hotter still. There were, too, here and there on the walls, the same dark shadows that we had seen elsewhere, but with more frequency here. Yet Hroar, who had shared none of our speculations about these markings, was of the belief that they were merely the guardians of the place itself, there to protect the place and preserve it for ourselves.
“This place is a gift from the true and living God,” he was quick to say. “He has prepared it for us.” And though many of us had our misgivings, we quelled them, found a place for ourselves on the floor, and slept.
I slept soundly and without dreams until the deep of the night, when I awoke to a strange rushing and gurgling sound, and when I opened my eyes the blue glow was gone. I could see nothing, but could hear some of my comrades stirring and some crying out, and the room growing hot and strange until there was the same rushing and gurgling and the blue glow began to return and the room started to cool. Then I sat up and looked about me in the half-light and saw many of my comrades in similar posture, but all of us finally lay down one by one and returned to sleep.
And yet when we awoke, it was to find our two comrades closest to the watery hole both dead, one side of their bodies afflicted with deep and grievous wounds. Some of the men behind them had wounds on their faces and hands as well, and yet they claimed to have felt nothing, and then we knew we had been victim of the creature whose eye we had seen in the hole. Hroar, full of fury, plunged his hand deep into the water to try to pluck out the monster’s blue eye, but brought back a hand boiled and stripped of much of its flesh.
We burnt the bodies of our comrades, and then we took counsel from Hroar and it was determined that as the creature had come at night it was a creature of darkness and would come again at night, at which time we would set upon it and lay it low. We prayed to God for strength and spent the day preparing our weapons.
The night again was peaceful until very late, when we heard the same rush and gurgle and the blue glow vanished. Immediately we were on our feet and striking about near the watery hole, the hall growing hotter until one of us managed to ignite a torch. But then we saw nothing except the water drained from the hole and the eye gone and terrible wounds on our hands and chest and arms — wounds that continued to grow without any tangible agent inflicting them, until one of our number, Hrafn, fell, and the remainder of us, sorely afflicted and knowing not where to strike, fled the hall.
The wounds continued to suppurate no matter how we tried to heal them. When several of us finally ventured back into the hall, we found the hole again filled with water, and the creature, eye staring balefully up at us, had returned to its lair. Hroar, heavy of heart and loath to lose more men, commanded us to leave the hall.
But we did not return to our wandering, instead circling day after day just outside the settlement that contained the hall we had thought offered unto us by God. Hroar, despite his boiled and dying hand, despite the wounds on his arms and face and chest, could not let go of the idea of the hall, of the end of wandering. And though we had been too sorely afflicted to venture a return to the hall itself, we had long followed Hroar and would not abandon him. So we stayed circling the town, while Hroar himself lost first his hand and then, from infection, his forearm. He grew gaunt and gray and ceased to speak. A few of us deserted him but the rest, stalwart, remained. There was, after all, food here for a time and wood to burn, and we were happier than we had been wandering — though the same could not be said for our Lord Hroar, who daily grew less of a man, more of a ghost.
Sometimes other wanderers would stumble into our midst. We would feed them and I would recount to them the tale of our lost hall and invite them to join us as we waited for God to relieve our suffering. To a man they declined, for who would swear fealty to a one-armed and maddened lord?
So we stayed and awaited God’s will. We awaited Hroar’s death, which would release us from our awful circling and allow a more aimless wandering. And yet he did not die. He was reduced to little more than a man of bone, eyes hollow in his sockets, but still did not die. Indeed, there were those among us who began to fear that he did not die because he was already dead, and these soon slipped away in the dead of night and were not seen or heard again. But the rest of us remained fatally bound to Hroar.