The Age of Odin - James Lovegrove [173]
When they fell, all was darkness.
After they fell, all was silence.
In the darkness and silence, I was alone.
There was nothing.
Only me.
Adrift.
Isolated.
Enclosed.
And then...
...light.
A tiny glimmer of it. A twinkle, like a distant blue star.
And someone saying my name.
"Gid."
Someone I knew.
"Gid. Wake up."
Someone who was dead.
"Listen, you've got to wake up."
Abortion.
"They're on their way. I got a signal. Had to go all the way back up to the road to get it, but I got one. They said keep you conscious, don't let you nod off. They said they won't be long. I think it's a chopper that's coming."
The light, a mobile phone screen.
"That's it, keep those eyes open. We're going to be okay, Gid. They're coming. We're going to be okay."
Seventy-Three
So there I was, in hospital, in a corner bay in a six-bed ward, woozy with super-strength painkillers but too wired to sleep, waiting for the dawn to come and with it, hopefully, some enlightenment, some certainty.
All I had to keep me company through the dark was the mumbling and snuffling of the other patients in the ward, and my own confusion. Questions swirled, and questions within questions, and I struggled to make sense of them.
I was prepared to accept that everything I believed had happened, hadn't. I could live with the idea of it all being just a delusion. Asgard, Odin, Thor, Loki, frost giants, trolls, the battles, the lot - just events conjured up in my brain during the time it took for Abortion to leave the crumpled car, climb the slope, make the 999 call and come back down. What had seemed to be weeks of my life had taken place in a few minutes, a full-length narrative unfurling at lightning speed in my head while I'd been suspended upside down inside the Astra. I'd been hovering in and out of consciousness, perhaps even on the verge of slipping into a coma, and my mind, prompted by various cues, had chosen to play out a complex fantasy of war and death amid the snow and ice of other worlds.
A dream, in other words. A vivid hallucination I'd lapsed into, somewhere in the depths of myself, somewhere where I no longer had control over what I was thinking. I'd created an action movie featuring the Norse gods, with myself as the star and a major supporting role for one very famous real-world personality. It had been exhilarating, scary, sometimes far-fetched, sometimes illogical, like any good action movie. There'd even been a romantic subplot, the leading man winning over the gorgeous love interest in spite of her initial frostiness towards him. All the elements that made for an entertaining couple of hours down at the local multiplex, or perhaps an evening in with a rental DVD.
I could happily go along with writing it off as nothing more than a figment of my imagination.
Except...
How come it had felt so real?
There had been pain. Lots of it. There had been danger that had had me sincerely fearing for my life. And that wasn't all. The biting cold. The trolls and their noxious smells. The angst of watching people I liked getting brutally killed. All experiences that were too harsh, too diamond-sharp, to be purely imaginary. I could recall, without any difficulty, the sensation of the wolf's teeth sinking into my wrist, the way the issgeisl shivered in my hands when Hval the Bald struck it with his, the feel of my skin tearing off on the handle of Bergelmir's ice knife... How was it possible I knew exactly what it was like to undergo such things, in the finest detail, unless I really had?
So, what if it hadn't been a dream? What then?
Suppose I'd died in that car, just for a few moments, and my soul, spirit, essence, call it what you will, had travelled elsewhere?
It wasn't the least bit plausible. But just suppose.
There were a few clues to support this theory. Bergelmir had mentioned the Einherjar, Odin's army of "heroic dead." Say I'd been one of them, if only briefly.