6.

Heimdall drove them in silence until they came to the turn off road for Chistleworth House. When he continued straight on rather than down to the house Thor turned to ask Heimdall where they were going. Heimdall did not answer straight away but pulled up the car, apparently in the middle of nowhere a half mile or so up from the house. He parked by the side of a dirt track, only just recognizable as a walking path running along the cliff edge, told Thor that it was a part of an almost ancient clifftop walk leading all the way to Broadstairs and let Thor out of the car.

"What are we doing here?" Thor asked. Heimdall acted as though he had not heard him and asked instead how he was settling into the house. Thor thanked him for having stocked up the kitchen in preparation for his coming and for keeping the garden in the functioning state he had received it in. Heimdall inclined his head in receipt of this thanks and suddenly seemed to grow bored of the conversation he had started.

"Tell me –" Heimdall cut in – "How long have you been able to contact the dead?"

"Contact the dead?" Thor frowned – "I don't know what you mean – I've never –"

"You've seen things, have you not?" Heimdall continued unfazed – "In the house. Dreamed of things perhaps. Received messages you can't explain?"

Thor could see in Heimdall's face that there was no point denying it.

"How did you know?"

"Because I have not."

It was, Thor realised, the opposite of the answer he had been expecting. Heimdall made a face; it was possibly the first expression Thor had seem him make at all – slightly apologetic as though he realised he was not making sense.

"I'll explain," he said.

"Yes, please do".

"I've been coming out to Chistleworth for a long time," Heimdall said – "It was not long before I realised there was something in that house. Something that was trying to make contact with me. But it never did. I noticed this because that's not the way it usually is. I asked you if you were someone who could contact the dead because I have been able to all my life and yet – did you never wonder why the house has not been lived in these seventy years?"

"I confess it seemed strange".

Heimdall nodded.

"Chistleworth house has not had a full time resident since the early twenty first century. Since that resident died, over five hundred years ago, no other person or persons who have moved into the house have felt able to stay for more than a year. All of them said they first experienced strange shadows, things making noises where they should not, doors opening and closing – all of them said it was as though something was trying to communicate with them. All of them failed to hear the message and then felt they were being pushed out of the house by the thing's anger and…. frustration. Yes, I think it was frustration that whoever it was could not get through. But it's different with you. When I heard that you had made the connection between your house and the theatre I knew that the suspicions I have always had as to the identity of your ghost were true."

"The person who died here in the early twenty first century," Thor guessed. Heimdall nodded.

"I've lived here a long time Mr Odinson; had time to learn the history of the place. And I dug up an interesting story from those days. You'll want to hear it."

Thor did not need to reply for Heimdall to go on.

"In the winter of 1990 a couple lived here by the name of Laufey and at that time they had a son. His name, as I read was Loki. Even back then the distance between the front porch and the cliff edge was eroding at a frightening pace. At that time they were already losing upwards of two metres of coastline a year. In 2013 an area of land the size of a large playing field crumbled into the sea, and the Laufeys decided to leave for the north of England. Loki stayed; he was a singer and actor with regular roles at the local theatre. I suspect you already know that."

"I had been starting to guess."

"This wasn't the dark ages, you see; we still have a lot of documented evidence regarding this period of history. Theatre records tell us that in the summer of 2015 Mr Laufeyson was involved in an experimental performance at the theatre, some kind of re-hashing of Norse mythology, written and directed by a Mister Thanos."

They were walking as Heimdall talked, on their left the fields sloping down towards the sea, a rickety fence cutting them off from the dirt road, and to their right the few metres of scrubby trees and bushes that separated them from the cliff edge.

"He died there," Thor guessed again – "At the theatre. Those men – the ones behind the play, they did something."

"Perhaps." Heimdall nodded thoughtfully "Perhaps they did. But he did not die at the theatre. His body was found washed up on Whitstable beach three days after the final performance. Nobody had seen him since he left – with them – that night. Everyone said he had gone over the cliff. They might have called it suicide but for two things."

"He had no reason to kill himself?"

"A lot of reports say he was angry, that he had criticised the production and got on the bad side of everyone involved. It would seem our ghost had a sharp tongue in life and a knack for pissing people off. But he was not in any way unhappy, or without plans for his life. The other thing was that when the body was examined they found a set of wounds – small puncture marks around the mouth that were unlikely to have been self-inflicted."

Thor felt a shudder go through him and a distinct prickling around his mouth in sympathy.

"What do you suppose –"

"I don't. I'm just telling you what I know because I think you're the one who can help."

"Help?"

"Ghosts don't hang around for five hundred years if they don't want some help with something, Mr Odinson. I think you might be the first person Mr Laufeyson has been able to contact since his untimely death, I don't know why any more than you, and I don't know what he wants. But I think you're here to work it out."

"Revenge?"

"For a murder – if it was a murder - five hundred years old? It doesn't sound likely."

Thor was about to put out another suggestion, anything he could throw out, when they rounded a corner as the cliff turned sharply to the left. Right in front of him the fields sloped up away from the sea and on top of the incline of the fields was a stunted tree, limbs quite ghastly against the grey autumn sky. Thor felt his head turn a circle as though he were dizzy, and he put out a hand to steady himself against the fence.

"Why did you bring me here?"

He felt sick. Heimdall looked at him for the first time in a complete lack of comprehension.

"I know this place," Thor said – "I dreamed this. There were men talking under that tree. I was afraid. As though they were going to kill me. How did you know about that?"

Heimdall kept looking at him thoughtfully.

"I didn't," he said – "I just thought it best not to speak of these things in any place where the dead might be listening."

Thor shivered and it was not just the breeze from off the sea. He wanted quite fiercely to be anywhere but here but he found his feet walking him forward with treacherous intent. As the clifftop curved the gap between the path and the edge got closer for a while, the trees thinning out until he was walking not two metres from the cliff edge with nothing between him and the drop but a recently erected fence. Where the gap was at its smallest Thor stopped, went to the fence and rested on it, tentatively. He was close enough, looking out to sea, for the salt spray to gently mist upon his face and looking down the sea at high tide was crashing close upon the rocks below. If he fell, he realised, the deposits of centuries of erosion would make his fall less than fatal as the cliff edge sluiced away from him in a tumble of brown earth and chalk but five hundred years ago –

Thor looked out at the cliff edge further up the path – some of them rose up sheer again, their edges less blunted by crumbling world. Up there if you fell the sea and the rocks would crush you between their teeth. Thor felt a sense of vertigo totally alien to him and turned away.

The dead tree upon the hill rose up directly in front of him. It felt like being trapped between the monstrous rocks and the whirlpool in one of those ancient stories his mother had told him. He walked back down the path towards Heimdall, putting the sea and the tree and the awful swirling feeling firmly at his back.

"You know about ghosts," he said to Heimdall, as they both began walking back the way they had come.

"More than most."

"I thought a ghost haunted a specific place." Thor had been thinking about this ever since the theatre – "That they – attached themselves to somewhere - but it was the same ghost in the theatre than at the house."

Heimdall nodded. He had clearly been expecting this.

"It was just the house," he said – "But it's not anymore." He looked at Thor as though he would love to pick him apart for study – "I think now it's haunting you. It's attached itself to you."

_x_

Hee, is plotty – I'm not great at plotty usually so I hope this chapter didn't suck! I actually had a toss up between two big things I could have given away at the end of this chapter so there's a huge give away now that'll have to wait for a bit! Interestingly there really was a chunk of mainland the size of a football field fell into the sea off the Kentish coastline two years ago; my parents were actually planning to get a house near there at the time – oddly enough they decided against it! But yeah, Loki comes from now – who guessed already? :-)

Now I gotta apologise in advance for as of tomorrow I'm working every day until Tuesday so updates may be slower this week, grr and argh. :-( But I'll do what I can! :-)