This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

but evil dwarves, trickster sprites, as well as nattmaror, or nightmares, a species of enormous she-wolves that tormented victims in their sleep.

“And trolls,” Brand muttered to herself, staggering along. “Don’t forget trolls.”

No doubt she would soon be meeting up with trolls and whatever other varieties of folkloric horror the Swedes cooked up to scare children and American detectives. The whole pantheon would emerge by nightfall, which was being hurried briskly along by the storm.

Frostbite was probably a more concrete danger, but in the current environment Brand’s mind tended toward spooks. She thrust an ungloved hand into the pocket of her vest for warmth, and found the small stone charm that Moro Part gave her. Whatever positive vibe the dingus supposedly had wasn’t helping much.

As she plunged forward, her feet froze slowly upward from the toes. The snow infiltrated her clothing and then melted, making everything wet and miserable. Deep drifts alternated with treacherous stretches of bare, wind-swept ground, strewn with trip-hazard roots and rocks. She soon felt as if she were stumping along on twin blocks of ice.

Climbing a four-meter ridge of hardened snow, Brand abruptly realized she was out of the woods. The big drift had been piled high along the side of a roadway by a snowplow.

The Swedish urskog had released its American victim. Visibility still sucked. Brand followed the road to the right instead of the left, toward the little village instead of who-knew-where. Her breath came hard. She thought of tragic anecdotes told by her Dalgren relatives at the reunion, who seemed to relish the idea of a cold so vicious that it froze a victim’s lungs.

“Hammar!” she shouted again. She was wary of attracting the attention of the pint size gangbangers-in-the-making. They might descend and strip her naked as they had the Saab. But she had no choice. To lose a handgun represented a cop’s cardinal sin. To lose a handgun to a child? That had to be a capital offense.

Then the blizzard howled her name.

“Vuh-raahhh-nee-kah.”

Was she hearing things? Quite possibly, considering the shape of her mind in the wake of the assault. The fifteen-minute slog through the urskog had taken its toll.

“Hammar!”

“Vuh-raahhh-nee-kah.” The sound was eerie, directionless.

The icy tick of sleet became constant. There was a strange quality to the weather’s brutality. Occasionally the air would teasingly clear, only to be quickly obliterated again in a swirl of snow. It was as if the storm had multiple eyes, pockets of calm that opened and then just as suddenly, closed.

During one of these brief lulls, Brand witnessed two children tugging on a pair of chains that were fastened to opposite sides of a huge she-wolf’s neck. The nattmara bent toward a clump of rolled-up carpet that was lying in the snow. The hulking creature’s snout showed blood red. Brand realized the carpet was actually a human form.

The nattmara was…feeding on…tearing at…wolfing…human flesh. Its pair of kiddie handlers tugged gaily on the chain leashes as if they were leading the family dog on its afternoon walk.

In the instant before the pocket of calm slammed shut, Brand saw something else, too. Unaware or unconcerned about the sight of a giant beast devouring a corpse, a second pair of children knelt together a few meters away from the spectacle. The girl whom Brand had been pursuing, the little one in the black dress, held open the stolen backpack for an older boy.

The bigger kid pulled out Brand’s Glock. He stared as if the piece was the Holy Grail. Emitting a cry of triumph, he then banged off two shots, aiming downward at the well-bloodied body lying on the ground. The explosions barely sounded over the roar of the storm. Brand saw the supine form jolt with the impact of the rounds. Then the blizzard closed again. The shooter became merely a dark, shapeless silhouette lost in the white-out.

The nattmara had been spooked by the gunshots. It tried to tear itself away from its kiddie handlers, dragging them helplessly along as it bounded away from the dead body it had just been feasting upon.

In only a few strides of its long loping body, the beast was there. It came at Brand like a hellhound, like its name, like a nightmare.

23.

Cape Coast, Ghana, April 1957.

Gösta Kron took a table at a local chop bar’s terrace, kicking out one of the chairs for Loke Voss. His companion suffered from a tropical illness to a severe degree. He could barely do anything for himself. A case of dysentery was the ostensible cause. Kron judged the man’s true malady to be simple homesickness.

The chop bar’s terrace featured expansive views of the Bay of Guinea. Back over Kron’s left shoulder loomed the white-washed hulk of Cape Coast Castle. Loke saw none of it. He settled heavily into the cane chair offered to him.

Loke Voss was, what? Approaching forty? Kron had just turned twenty and was seemingly impervious to dysentery, malaria, guinea worm, camp fever and whatever else the tropics could throw at him. His only prophylactic measure was always to drink beer, never the local water, parasite-infested and lethal. He now motioned the boy waiter with two fingers now, ordering imported bottles of Guinness stout, a beverage which possessed the advantage of being okay to drink warm. The hometown brew was pure piss.

The two of them had just returned from the Ashanti gold fields, a hundred miles to the northwest. The place was in chaos. The British were pulling out. Only a month previous, on 6 March 1957, Kwame Nkruma, now president-for-life, had declared independence for the British colony formerly known as Gold Coast.

Such an enticing name, Kron thought. Gold Coast. The new one, “Ghana,” meant something like “warrior kingdom.” That was great, too, but didn’t exactly have the same ring as Gold Coast. There was a hole in every human soul, Kron believed, an emptiness that could only be properly filled by gold. Gold was good, gold was great, gold was…everything.

With independence, Ghana was in transition. The gold fields were