Chapter 44 - Old Man

Bjorn entered the fetid hole but left the entrance open in case anything happened, just as his hammer was waiting for him upstairs.

  He was going down slowly and feeling the ground with his feet, because he couldn't see anything. Soon he noticed that the stairs only had four steps and that the rest below looked like they had been broken. He intended to go in deeper before making light, but noticing the hole he moved the straws above to block the dogs' view and then lit the lamp again to find out how high the drop was.

 He found that the ground lay fifteen feet past the four steps. Soon he chose to hang himself again, wanting to avoid making as much noise as possible.

 He was stretched out by one arm and waited for his body to stop swaying, before letting himself fall and starting to walk through the tunnels.

 The floor where he walked was slippery, as it was full of moss and fungi, the dirty water that should have flowed in the middle of the tunnel had partially frozen in the last two days, making the environment cold, silent and decaying.

 'Where are you?' Bjorn thought, taking one slow step after another. 

 Crack!

 A sound of bones being broken rippled through the silent tunnels, scaling echoes in all directions.

 'Shit.' Thought Bjorn as he looked down to where a human femur lay crushed beneath his foot.

 He then stopped and expected the worst for a few moments. But nothing happened. 

'Look at the floor.To the floor.' Thought Bjorn running a hand across his forehead to remove the cold sweat before continuing.

 He then walked for a few more minutes to a corner, again stopped to think whether to continue or not. But the fact that nothing bad has happened so far has given him the courage to move on.

 Courage gone as fast as it came around the corner.

 For the vision before him looked like a painting made personally by evil itself. It was a great mountain of bones that rose to the ceiling.

 Looking at the desecration, the great Bjorn felt small, as if he were a boy again. A sinister feeling was coursing through his body and even under the light of the lamp he felt the same in the dark.

 He wanted to go back, he wanted to run, but he couldn't move his body, so he just stood there looking at the bones and… Hearing them. He heard the voices as whispers, but not as hallucinations but soft and insidious as a delirium, distant and vague. The sacrilege of bones whispered in his ear, words he did not understand, from a language he did not speak, from a dialect as old as the first man.

 And although he didn't understand the words, he knew their meaning. They were wails, torturous and agonizing, muffled screams, of souls that remained where they should never be. It wasn't natural, it wasn't right.

 Their wails were so heavy that they altered the physical world and created cold breezes of bitterness. 

 Breeze that extinguished the lamp. Leaving Bjorn alone, with cold, in the dark.

 "What is the purpose of wisdom? I have asked myself for a long time… I have come to the conclusion that it serves as a brake on the youth, as a consolation for the old, as a source of wealth for the poor and as an ornament to the rich", declared a voice that sounded old.

 There was silence for a moment, but then the sound of a match sounded through the tunnels and brought with it a small light which served as a spark for the lamp that an old man held.

 The man who once seemed to have only dementia in his eyes, the man who appeared to be frail and poor and decaying.

 But no more, there was no more dementia in his black eyes that now held a profound clarity, his formerly hunchbacked and frail body was rising erect and proudly filled with power, even the candlelight seemed larger and more vivid. 

 "It was not wise to come here," declared the man raising the lamp to his face. His features were wrinkled and old, full of indifference.

 Bjorn's instincts screamed for him to run but he couldn't. He used all his strength and all he could manage was to utter two words.

 "Who are you?" Bjorn asked, his body drenched in sweat, his throat was dry, his heart was pounding, his breathing was heavy and he just didn't tremble and fell to the ground, because his nerves were stiffened and petrified by the sinister sensation.

 "Me? I'm just an old man," the man declared as if it were obvious.