Free From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjon Page B

breath, I strained my ears. For a long moment there was no sound but the piping of the newly wakened oystercatcher, strutting along the beach of the cove below us. Then I heard something tread warily into the thick moss on the other side of the rock. I realised at once that it must be the ghost come to meet us since no mortal creature could descend in a single stride from the scree to the heathery slope where Láfi and I were lying. I imagined it standing with one foot on high, the other down in the moss beside the rock, legs akimbo like a wishbone. I waited and the thing waited. I breathed out cautiously, without making a sound. There was a crack as the ghost’s upper leg whipped down and smacked into its lower leg. Clacking knees like that would have been painful for a living man but the dead one uttered not so much as a whimper. Láfi was woken by the crack. He raised his head from the ground, about to start his sleep-drugged ‘wha-wha-wha?’ when I signalled to him to be quiet. He obeyed, turning his head towards me so that I could give him further indication as to what was afoot. As imperceptibly as we could, and with utmost slowness, we now turned our heads towards the corner of the rock in whose lee the demon was standing. I thought I saw a shadowy human shape moving there; evidently the ghost was waiting and watching us too.
    Now the patience of the players was tested. The dead generally possess more fortitude than the living, as is clear by the way they lie still in their graves while man scurries around like a frightened field mouse, trembling and quivering in the rare moments that he pauses, resembling a mouse in that as well, but this time a house mouse that has fled from a cat into a crack in the wall and is listening for its footsteps, hoping that it will give up and leave, but unsure whether the cat is there or has gone, because a feline can also stand motionless for long periods without its knee-joints stiffening up. Láfi and I could expect Reverend Jón’s dead son to vanquish us in any battle that is won by the player who waits longest. I heard Láfi sigh and saw his eyes darting around in his head, from the rock to the sky, while I disciplined myself to wait for what was to come. And it came, a horrible sight that hung in the air for a split second, like the face of the fellow who shares one’s quarters, which floats before one’s eyes in the darkness like a purple mask after the candle has been blown out: one, two, three and it is gone. So the apparition’s loathsome head appeared and disappeared again as it craned it round the rock wall and scowled into my face. White skin, with a fist-sized bruise from the temple to the right-hand corner of its mouth, mouldering cheeks, hair straggling claw-like over its forehead above rolling, red, bestial eyes. The evil youth opened wide his skate’s jaw, inside which all the teeth were broken at the root or smashed in from the fall that had sent him to his death on the slab of rock; he clicked his tongue loudly and vanished the instant Láfi looked his way. Láfi turned to me and started gasping and whining with fright, for the vision had left behind an expression of such terror on my face that it was more than enough to unman him. I understood now why he had been unable to tackle the task alone. But before I could pursue this thought any further, and before Láfi had finished his wailing, the ghost launched its attack. The parson’s dead son sprang on to the crag, squatted on the edge and loosed the back flap of its breeches. Before we could dodge, it released a torrent of almost every imaginable kind of human filth: the excrement of men and livestock, human faeces and horse manure, lamb droppings, rotten eggs and animal bones, maggoty bird skins, the squitters of babes and fish guts, dead men’s rags and all kinds of other muck. Under this deluge we scrambled to our feet, flinging out our arms to ward off the seemingly endless diabolical flood that