The Ice Fair

Chapter 4 The Southwark Strangler

A curious figure stood in the vicarage orchard, from afar it appeared a badly painted splash of enflamed red topped with a charcoal smudge of a wide brimmed hat. It stood tall and broad, gnarly and resolute as a ship's captain, feet apart in the heavy snow, watching the febrile light emanating from the attic room window that blinked out from the mossed tiles on top of the house. It seemed in the semi –darkness to take the aspect of a far off lighthouse illuminating a storm swept headland.

The effect of the moonlight was singularly picturesque, the thick blanket snowfall robbing the landscape of any features. For a moment Loki felt he could have been transported away, as far as the far off rugged wilds of Skaana Aua where the bone chilling winds blew all day and night, and the bent trees clung remorselessly to the barren earth under a sky that ebbed with the bivrost, the great red fire bridge where warriors crossed from Earth to Heaven.

Pulling at a golden chain he drew a handsomely engraved fob watch from his pocket and checked the time. The skeleton timepiece displayed its innards, a vibrating mass of springs, cogs and movements. The mysteries contained within its graceful metal case entranced Loki. For Loki had thus told the time by the movement of the celestial heavens and the arc of the hoary rimmed moon across the star bitten sky. Those earthly things told him how long it would be until he would hear the first chattering of the birds and see the sun rise and send its tentative fingers crawling across the landscape. They told him when the darkness would fall across the land and the temperatures plummet in the vicious Siberian wind.

How the miraculous treasure worked confounded him. He nested it to his ear to listen the tick-tock of its mechanical heart and beamed with the pleasure of the thing. Holding it in awe, between the tips of his fingers like a stolen eagle's egg for a full ten minutes he watched the gilt minute hand nudge its assured way to the hour to mark eleven pm.

As if on the mechanical marvel's signalling the hour, the tower St Stephens omitted a great blast of air into the night like the foul exhalation of a kraken emerging from the fathomless deep. A few seconds of stillness followed, then a thin willowing wail emanated from church and suddenly from the tower arose a crawling, biting, tumbling throng. Like a blast furnace chimney spewing out its obnoxious fumes, a raging cloud leapt from the belfry and crawled across the face of the heavens, a thousand disquieting shapes momentarily blotting out the night sky.

The flapping fury of ragged blackness tore across the garden and churned its way through the orchard. Then the multi-fanged, bloodsucking monster, a conflagration of the blackest fire, engulfed Loki, a solitary victim standing alone in the snow.

As they leapt upon him Loki turned his face to the moon and shut his eyes, arms outreached, as if rejoicing the coming of the first rains of the season. Suspended in the whirling mass of bats he bent his head up and laughed wildly, his white teeth glittering in the moonlight, his jaw sprung wide open as if to swallow the moon whole. He stood unmoved, feeling the beating of giant wing tips and scrape of sharpened teeth tear at his skin.

Loki swung his head around and snapped his teeth. Out of the toxic air he snared one of the vampires. Caught like an unsuspecting albatross trapped in teeth of a shark the vile creature screamed piteously, its leathery wings thrashing about Loki cheeks. Loki's tongue extruded itself from his mouth, wrapped around the bats head and with a great gulp and mashing of flesh and bone he gobbled it up and swallowed it whole, still kicking feebly as it passed down his gullet.

Panicked by the loss of one of their host, the multitude of speckled rags broke away and flew chaotically off into the woods. Loki, face still flushed with exhilaration, wiped a trickle of putrefying blood from his lips, checked his fob watch, flexed his arms to displace the cold induced stiffness and with one last glance up at house, turned and stalked into the night.