Casting the Runes

It’s always in the dark. In the dark they come, the nightmares. In the summer when I was incarcerated in Walter Smith’s underwater lair, Silence, it was crickets and I soon found out that these dreams were a premonition of the terror to come as Spring Heeled Jack fell upon the Scottish media, BBC Scotland and myself in particular and every time he struck, there were crickets.

Now in the dark I dream of the cave. Not a premonition as I’ve been to the cave. The Traynor took me there on the island. It was always dark there too as we soon learned to sleep by day in order to stay alert at night when the darkness crept out of the jungle and even the circle of fires on the beach was no defence against Lawwell after he’d gone native.

The Traynor had taken me deep into the interior and into a cave, dank and dripping and black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat. The Traynor fired up a torch and led me deeper and deeper into that awful place until we could go no further and he held up the torch and showed me the runes.
‘Can you read runes, Spiers?’ he asked.
‘I can hardly read my own match reports,’ I told him and he grunted.
‘Who can? Well something tells me these runes are important. I can’t tell you why, it’s just a sense I have, I can almost smell their relevance.’
‘No, that’s me you can smell.’
‘You think I can’t tell the difference between your weather beaten corduroy and body odour and the malignancy of these ancient carvings? Look at ‘em, dug deep into the wall; hundreds of years before Christ. Imagine who put them here. What maritime disaster brought the rune writers this far south? And what foul message do they contain?’ Then he paused and I thought he was pondering his own questions until I noticed the feather dart sticking out his neck and he keeled over.
‘Spiers? I know you’re in there!’
It was Lawwell and he’d blow piped the Traynor which meant it was the machete for me so I was off in a twinkling, skipping on my tip toes through the cave in the dark, the only source of light left burning beside the unconscious body of the Traynor back at the wall. Somehow, miraculously, I managed to avoid Lawwell and made it back to the beach in one piece unlike Mark Daly who sat by the fire, shivering having been ravaged by Lawwell as soon as the sun went down. Chris McLaughlin was holding Daly in his arms and caressing his male pattern baldness and curiously, eyeing up his neck but there was no consoling him, even when I tried to tell them of my close shave in the cave.

Since then the runes have come back to me in my dreams. I’ve written them down as best I can and am taking them to an expert to decipher. Perhaps they’ll tell me something of the warning which concerned the Traynor before he was struck down? My only problem is, the expert. It’s Jorg Albertz, Demon Hunter.