Gunfriid and the Troll

One cold evening, the kind of night when all wise folk should be inside with their doors locked, Gunfriid was walking from Tralheim to Knorr. She had heard that a giant lived in the mountains to the north of Knorr, and she was determined to ask it if it knew the way to the Baba Yaga's house, for as you remember, she still sought to find out what had happened to her brother and sister. The path was dark and overgrown with trees, but Gunfriid was enjoying her walk, using her spear as a walking stick and staring up at the moon, for the night air was cold and clear; a perfect time for traveling. Gunfriid wasn't too surprised when another traveler walked down from a side path and joined her. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow in a long, black cloak that obscured his face entirely. Gunfriid nodded as he began to walk in step with her.

"A fine night," she said. "A bit cold for my tastes, but the air is clear and the night is peaceful. What say you, stranger?"

"I like the cold," said the tall man. 

"Fair enough," said Gunfriid. "Where are you headed? Up to Knorr?"

"I go where I please, woman," said the tall man.

"That's a bit rude," said Gunfriid. "Still, I suppose your business is your own." The tall man nodded, and they walked in silence for some time. At last, however, they reached a small clearing in the trees from which there went forward two paths, one straight on through the forest and one up into the hills. Gunfriid stopped in dismay. The folk in Tralheim had not told her there were two roads, and she did not know which was the right way. The tall man began to walk up the path towards the hills, but stopped and looked back at her.
"What is wrong, woman?" he said. 
"Do you know which of these is the right way to Knorr?" said Gunfriid. The tall man considered for a moment, and put up a hand to stroke his unseen chin. Gunfriid noticed he had very hairy arms, but she didn't think it would be polite to say anything. 
"Both paths will take you to Knorr," said the tall man after a while, "But the hill path is faster."
"Then I shall go that way, if you do not mind me accompanying you," said Gunfriid.
"I do not," said the tall man. "But I must warn you, it has been said that a troll lives in the hills and attacks travelers. That is why the forest road was built at all."
"I have never seen a troll, but I should like to meet one," said Gunfriid. "and I am in a hurry to reach Knorr." the tall man shrugged his shoulders and continued up into the hills. Gunfriid followed him. 
They walked for some miles across the tops of the hills, dipping in and out of small valleys and between the pines, until they came to the top of a ridge with a small cabin built on it. The tall man turned to the cabin and stopped again. "This is my home, here. Knorr is down the ridge--see those lights over there?-- you cannot miss it if you only follow the path." He made as if to head inside the cabin and then hesitated. "The slope is dangerous in the dark, and if you prefer, you could spend the night in my cabin. I have a bedroom for guests."
"I have walked many miles this night, and though at first you were rude, you helped me find my way this far," said Gunfriid cheerfully. "And I am very tired." The tall man nodded and she followed him inside his cabin. It was small and dark, even when he lit a foul-smelling candle, but Gunfriid knew the value of hospitality and she said nothing, not even when the tall man offered her a joint of rotting meat to eat, nor when he spread a bloody bearskin on the ground by the fire pit for her to sleep on. "I am afraid I have nothing to give you in trade as thanks for your hospitality," she said, siting down and trying to avoid a clot of blood, "But i you would like, I can tell you the story of why I have come here, so far from my home."
The tall man said nothing, and only nodded, so Gunfriid began to speak in a sing-song voice of how her brother and sister had been stolen away in the dead of night and her father and mother enchanted, levying only her to find them. And as she spoke, she saw the tall man's hood slip back farther and farther until his whole face was revealed, squat and sullen, with great tusks and ram's horns and a bronze ring through the nose--the face of a troll. But Gunfriid was very polite, and she said nothing, only finished telling the story of how she sought the Baba Yaga who knew all secrets and might know where her brother and sister were hidden. Where she had finished, she said good night to the troll, turned over, and fell asleep in the blink of an eye.
The next morning, when Gunfriid woke, the troll was nowhere to be seen, and on the bearskin next her was a small pile of gold coins. Gunfriid took them, walked out of the shack, and headed down the ridge towards Knorr, whistling as she went. After all, she had always wanted to meet a troll.

Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery

My adventure began in the least portentous way possible: an invitation from an old University acquaintance by the name of Gregory Shaw to attend a meeting of "Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery," a society that he had joined in the years since our parting. I was surprised to hear from him after so long, for although we exchanged Christmas cards, we had not met in person in nearly ten years, having gone our separate ways after our time at Oxford. The last I had heard, he had been living in Scotland, but the address he included in his letter was far closer to home, a small coffee shop in the outskirts of London. 

On the appointed day, I took the train down to the area and met him. We talked happily of things in our pasts, drank tea and coffee and ate small pastries, simply passing the time as we waited for the hour, later in the evening, when this so-called lodge was to meet, in a private house nearby. Gregory, good-humored as he had been in our earlier days, nevertheless dodged all my questions about the lodge or indeed his involvement with it, saying only that he thought I would enjoy my time with his fellows, and I pressed the matter little, for I was happy to simply chat with him once again. Although, to be completely truthful, it must be said that even then I noticed something a little off about him. He had never been a fat man, but now he was almost skeletally thin; his eyes darted around, and though he often smiled the emotion did not reach his nervous stare; and he had taken up smoking.  At the time, however, I put it down to his vague protestations of working a "government job" and his natural worry about the business on the Continent. I could not have been more wrong.

As evening began to fall, Gregory and I at last left the little coffee shop and headed up the street towards the house where, he told me, Sharpe's Lodge held their meetings. We stopped outside the door of a small row house and he turned to me and spoke, quite seriously.

"Now, Charles." he said. "You may see things in here that will, ah, surprise you."

"I've seen surprising things before, Gregory," I said, "But thank you for the warning. Shall we go in?" Gregory didn't move.

"I mean it, Charles. If you want to leave, I won't blame you. You can go, and we can meet for coffee again tomorrow before I head north again."

"I suppose I'll have to be the judge of that myself, shan't I?" I said. I will admit that at this point I was beginning to have reservations; Gregory's behavior was so unlike how he had been in the coffee shop earlier. My concern was entirely overshadowed by my curiosity, however. What could Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery possibly hold within its shabby halls that made Gregory so loath to enter?

Gregory waited for another moment and then smiled, a great, genuine, smile of relief that put me completely at ease. He opened the door and we stepped inside the house's front room, a large and almost completely empty space, floored and roofed with wood slats that smelled of ancient must. The only furnishing was an elevator car, newly installed, its brass and iron railing glinting in the dying light that filtered through the cracks in the curtains. Gregory boarded the thing and beckoned me alongside, then hit a button to start the mechanism. We immediately began to descend.

"I have to say, this isn't what I was expecting," I shouted over the squeal of metal. 

"You'll be saying that a lot, Charlie," Gregory shouted back. Then we broke out of the narrow shaft into a large and brightly lit space, and for a moment I forgot how to speak. 

The headquarters of Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery lay beneath north London in a shelter built during the Great War, a hastily-converted series of root cellars and basements linked together into one cavernous space. In the center was a series of generators, providing power to the lights that arced and flickered overhead, as well as a number of more strange and esoteric devices ringing the edges of the cave. Wooden panels divided one section into offices and private rooms; another was lined with steel cages that appeared to have ben sunk into the floor. There was an echoing bang and I flinched instinctively; Gregory, seeing my discomfort, slapped me on the back and pointed to the far end of the space, where a man was shaking some kind of rifle at the ceiling in celebration. The elevator juddered to a halt and Gregory stepped out, a huge smile still plastered on his face. 

"Welcome to Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery," he said.

"Name?"

"Charles Wentworth."

"Age?"

"Thirty-two."

"A bit young to have seen action in the big one, eh? No matter. Know how to handle a gun?" The man across from me was white-haired, white mustached, and possessed of one glass eye. He was currently using his real one to fix me with a stern stare. 

"I've done a little hunting," I said. "My uncle used to take us on trips at his estate."

"Well, that may come in handy." said the man, who was dressed in a military uniform of some kind, although adorned with no badges of rank. "Have you ever handled a pistol."

"I never have," I admitted. " Why exactly are you asking me all these questions?"

"Didn't Gregory tell you?" said the man, surprised. "I swear, these recruiter lads get more and more lax every day." He stroked his mustache and thought for a moment before speaking again, picking his words carefully. "Any man with eyes can see that the Hun is up to his old tricks again, eh? The Germans and the Italians are planning something, and if things keep heading the way they've been going, we'll be at war here before too long." I nodded reluctantly. "Now that's the easy part. You look like a bright boy, so I won't bore you with explanations, but suffice it to say that the next war will not be fought solely on the battlefield, slogging through the trenches and all that."

"The advance of machinery, tanks and the like." I said, anxious to seem like I knew what he was talking about.

"That's one way, aye," he said, and stood up suddenly. "Maybe it'd be easier if I just show you. Follow me, Wentworth." He walked out of the office and back into the bustle of the Lodge. I saw Gregory speaking to an engineer engaged in some sort of repair on the generators, and tried to catch his eye, but his back was turned. The military man led me across the cavern to the banks of cages and down towards the end. It was dark here, the lights above sparking and sputtering. 

"We keep it dark back here on purpose," said the military man conversationally, pulling a service revolver from somewhere inside his coat. "We think it likes it that way."

"What likes it that way?" I said.

"That." said the military man, and pointed with his gun at a crumpled body lying in the cage. It was shapeless and pathetic, the husk of a human being. Clearly, it had been dead for many years. It didn't even have a smell that I could detect over the pervasive motor oil stink of the cavern. I turned away, bewildered and a little disgusted. "A dead body?"

"Not quite," said the military man, and slammed the butt of his pistol into the bars of the cage. There was a dull ringing, and the "corpse" turned its head to face me, its eye sockets empty, its jaw missing. It raised one skeletal hand and reached out towards me, its wasted, mummified flesh slithering across the broken concrete. I stood transfixed, unable to look away, until at last the military man clapped his hand on my shoulder. 

"Welcome to Sharpe's Lodge of Mystery, Wentworth." he said, and pressed his revolver into my hand. "Keep this. You'll need it."