Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (19 page)

It is easier for me to let them go, knowing that you have seen them.

I thought of Quinn, of how his presence had irradiated the city for me thirty years before, imbuing it with a dark glamour that still clung long after Quinn had gone, long after the city itself had become a husk inhabited by the hip and the dead.

Now I gazed at an otherworldly landscape that Quinn had come to haunt as well, his scarred face gazing at me from the sky overhead and the scarified landscape below. Paved roads had long ago surrendered to gravel tracks that disappeared into a desert of snow-covered lava. Black spires like a forest of charred trees blotted out the stars near the horizon. I craved light, staring at the moon until my eyes ached, and finally sank into my seat with the shovel between my knees. I took a swig of vodka and held the bottle out to Einar. He shook his head.

“Takk, nei.”

I swallowed another mouthful. “So were you into black metal, too? That’s what you were listening to back there, right?”

“Yeah, sure. Mostly I listened when I was young. Sometimes, like tonight, I like to hear it. I have to be in the mood.”

“And that mood would be…?”

“It’s very cathartic. But black metal—its day has passed. The bands now are posers, just trying it on. Some bands I can still listen to. Enslaved. Emperor is always good. And Christ Beheaded. But that’s all just nostalgia for when I was young.”

I contemplated nostalgia for a band called Christ Beheaded. As someone who recalled the Exploding Mountbattens, I decided not to comment. I reached into my bag to grab one of the cassettes I’d nicked from Ilkka’s place.

“Here, play this. It’s … I dunno…” I tried to make out the handwriting in the moonlight. “Nuclear Holocausto. Do you know them?”

“Yeah, sure. Beherit, a Finnish band. He’s their guitarist and singer.”

He inserted the tape and cranked the volume. As a surge of feedback and growls shook the car, Einar pounded the dashboard with excitement.

“I saw them do this with the pigs’ heads on the stage. It was amazing! Nuclear Holocausto drank blood!” He glanced at me. “Most women don’t like this. Gilda, she hates it.”

“It’s okay.” I cracked my window, hoping the din might disperse, like smoke. “Do you know a band called Viðar?”

“Of course. That’s my brother’s band.”

I sat up, stunned. “You’re kidding.”

“No, it’s true. They were never a real band; they never toured. They were the house band at a club in Oslo. Forsvar. Jonas and two of his friends who were over there for a while—they did that one album together. Then they split up. A guy named Hallmar, he still lives in Reykjavík. I forget the other guy. The owner gave them money to go into a studio.” He frowned. “That album’s very rare—only a few hundred copies. I don’t even have one. Jonas played it for me when I visited him that first time; they’d just recorded it, and he was so excited. How did you hear of them?”

“I’m not your grandmother. I hear stuff.” I punched the eject button and removed the cassette, found another, and squinted at the label. “This looks like it says Impaled Nazarene.”

“Ah, they’re great!” Einar grabbed the tape and shoved it into the player. “More Finns. The Finns are demented, you know.”

I tried to pretend the noise pouring from the stereo was something more pleasant, like maybe a plane crash. Outside stretched an expanse of rock flensed of any vegetation, even moss or lichen. Wind-carved snow formed waves beneath craggy overhangs; ice bridges spanned crevasses and slabs of stone smooth and sheer as though planed by infernal machinery. Frozen waterfalls cascaded from spars of rock the color of a scorched rose.

For as far as I could see, in every direction, we were the only living things. Nothing moved except for eddies of snow and the black grit thrown up by the Land Rover’s wheels. It was inconceivable to me that people would ever have chosen to set foot on a landscape that looked as though it had been tortured, set aflame, and burned till nothing remained but cinders and slivers of bone. The moon seemed a more likely habitation. I hadn’t seen another car in hours. I turned to Einar.

“Where are we?”

“
Hvergi
. ‘Nowhere.’” He tapped the wheel in time with the staccato drumming. “Hundreds of years ago a few homesteads were here beside the rivers. The ruins are still here. Outlaws lived here; you can read about them in the sagas. If you could survive in this wilderness for twenty years, you could return to your farm. Now hikers come in the summer, sometimes; it’s only a few weeks, and there can be snow in August. But no one lives here except my brother.”

A sign loomed out of the night, marking a gulley between ridges of snow on a rising plain between two vast plateaus, ghostly blue and lunar white.

OFÆR! IMPASSABLE!

“That’s if you don’t have a four-by-four,” said Einar as the Range Rover dove into the gulley. “We go everywhere.”

“What are those mountains?”

“The big one’s Langjökull.” He pointed to the one on the left. “And that’s Hofsjökull. They’re glaciers.”

“No shit. I never saw a glacier.”

Wind-carved hollows in the snow revealed scabbed turf and funnels of ice. In the distance, plumes of white smoke streamed toward the horizon. The Range Rover slowed to a crawl and turned onto a plain where two frozen ruts stretched into the moonlit night. Once I thought I glimpsed a light shining within the white smoke, but it disappeared before I could determine if it was a house or vehicle or falling star.

“Are we close?”

“
Nei
. Not for a while.”

I let both sides of Impaled Nazarene play out. I was afraid of silence, even more afraid that the radio would find nothing but static. When the cassette clicked back to side one, I ejected it and stuck in the remaining tape.

“This band’s called Blot.”

I hoped the monosyllabic name meant they’d represent Ilkka’s progressive metal side—Can, Gong, Tool, Blot. Instead there was about a minute of hiss, followed by the indistinct drone of conversation, bottles clinking, heavy metal on the stereo—Metallica’s “The Thing That Should Not Be.” A party.

“Shit. Someone taped over it.” I hit fast-forward. Metallica had now been turned off. I could hear the voices more clearly but couldn’t understand them. A party. “What are they saying?”

Einar shook his head. “I don’t know. Listen.”

Men’s voices. An argument. Shouting. A woman laughed. There was a cacophony of breaking glass, furniture being overturned, curses.

Then a man’s voice rose above the others, angry at first, then wheedling, as though he argued with someone who refused to respond. His tone grew increasingly desperate and abruptly gave way to an anguished scream.

“What the hell is that?” I looked at Einar. He didn’t return my gaze but stopped the Range Rover and sat listening while the engine idled. The taped screams became so frantic that I found myself clutching the door handle. “Jesus Christ, it sounds like they’re killing him.”

“Shut up.”

Einar turned the volume as high as it would go. His face grew taut. I knotted my hands in my lap, straining to hear a second man’s voice, guttural, reciting a monotonous refrain. Not chanting; more like he was talking in his sleep. As the screams grew fainter I heard a muffled cry and the sound of someone vomiting, then a raspy, panting breath that went on, unbearably, for several minutes.

Then silence.

My mouth was too dry to speak. I reached for the eject button, but Einar knocked my hand away. He snatched the tape from the deck, turned on the overhead light, and stared at the label.

“What was that?” I tried to grab the tape from him. “Blot—whose fucking band is that?”

“Shut up!” He jabbed the cassette at my face. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it—”

“Where?” He grabbed my hair. “Where did you find this?”

“Helsinki! Someone’s house.”

He stared at me, his pupils shrunken to pinpricks by the overhead light.

“You stupid cunt,” he said, and slammed my head against the windshield.

21

I blinked, found myself slumped across the seat, my hands tied behind my back and my cheek sticky with blood. The window above me showed a dark wedge of sky smeared red and brown. As I pushed myself up, the passenger door opened in an icy rush and Einar dragged me into the snow, stopping when we were twenty feet away from the car before he let go.

“You can stand. Good.” He was holding the shovel. “Now walk.”

I kicked out, lost my balance, but couldn’t catch myself: He’d bound my hands with a jumper cable. He grabbed my upper arm and pushed me in front of him. “Just walk.”

I staggered a few steps while he remained where he was. When I paused to look back, he shook his head, grasping the shovel in both hands like a broadsword. “Keep going,” he shouted.

I walked backward, slowly, so I could watch him, but he didn’t move, just stood with the shovel in his hands and his loden-green overcoat flapping in the frigid wind. With every step, my boots punched through brittle snow, and something knocked against the back of my knees—the cable’s metal grips. After I’d gone another thirty paces, Einar turned and walked to the Range Rover. Before he got inside he looked back at me.

“He’s my brother.”

His voice echoed across the plain as the Range Rover did a 180 and roared out of sight.

I looked for something to shelter behind but saw nothing save a small outcropping of barren rock. I lurched toward it, crouched in the leeward side, and tried to catch my breath. Cold won out over panic, just barely. I had to get my hands free, but my fingers were numb and wet, and the cable slipped through them whenever I tried to grab it. Pellets of sleet stung my face as the wind gusted, hard enough to knock me down. I jammed myself against the rock, my face inches from my knees, and fumbled with the cable until I finally managed to clamp one of the grips onto a finger.

I hardly felt it—not a good sign—but it made it possible to tug the cable through one knot and then another. Einar wasn’t much of a Boy Scout. It seemed to take forever, but at last I shook the cable from my wrists. I unzipped my leather jacket and thrust my hands under my sweater, groaning: It felt like hot nails jabbing my skin.

Now I started to panic.

I wiped sleet from my eyes and stared at the snow-covered wilderness that stretched between two glaciers, the one to my left a whale breaching above an icy sea. The moon hung a hand’s span above it—a setting moon, so that would be west. Straight ahead of me, through the lunar glitter of sleet and wind-driven snow, white smoke billowed steadily.

It was miles away, and seemed like far too much smoke for a wood fire, and where would you find wood to burn? And I couldn’t imagine a power plant in this wilderness.

But then, until I came to Iceland, I would never have been able to imagine a place like this at all. I knew I had to keep moving. My wrist ached from the spiked bracelet Brynja had given me: The cold metal burned my skin. I struggled with numb fingers to unclasp it and stuffed it in my pocket, then pulled the collar of my sweater around my head to form a makeshift hood. I stretched the bottom of the sweater until it covered the top of my thighs, straightened, and stamped my feet.

My toes ached. At least I could still feel them. My face and hands were wet, my ass and legs freezing—one reason you don’t see a lot of people attempting K-2 in skinny black jeans. Otherwise the layers of wool and leather had kept me dry, even if I was starting to shake with cold. I couldn’t remember if shivering was supposed to be good or bad. All I knew about hypothermia was that you begin to feel warm and drowsy, then you lie down to sleep, and then you freeze to death. The rock wasn’t enough to shelter me. There was snow everywhere, but it was too hard-packed to burrow into, and that would just be resigning myself to an ice coffin.

The only aspect of this disaster scenario I might have been able to rise above was the not-falling-asleep part. I huddled back against the rock and dug in my pocket for the crank, shoved my finger into the envelope, then jabbed as much as I could into one nostril after the other. It burned like acid, searing the back of my throat. I swallowed a mouthful of snow, something else I was pretty sure you weren’t supposed to do. I wolfed down the chocolate bars I’d taken from Einar’s car, tied the jumper cable around my waist, pulled my hands up into my sleeves, and staggered to my feet.

I started walking.

In toxic amounts, crank induces hyperthermia. I knew a guy who swallowed his stash to avoid being arrested, and when they got him into the ER, his core body temperature was 114 degrees Fahrenheit before it was lowered by ice blankets. I’d spent so much of my life wasted that I always assumed when it was time to check out, I’d be too fucked up to notice.

Now, the irony wasn’t lost on me that I would be wide awake as I froze to death.

The wind was so powerful it was like forcing myself through an invisible wall. I was dimly aware of my head pounding where Einar had smashed it against the windshield, dimly aware of the blood frozen to a grainy crust on my cheek, and my wrists throbbing where they’d been chafed by the jumper cable.

But that was all background static to the wind. During World War II, the Nazis gave meth to soldiers, who’d fight until their legs were blown out from under them. Sometimes they wouldn’t give up even then, dragging themselves along the ground with exposed bone and scorched flesh until their hearts gave out. I thought about that zombie army as I broke into a shambling run, head down, staring at the white ground in front of me and counting mindlessly to a thousand, losing track again and again. Fine snow and windblown sand streamed through the air like fog, but fog that bit my face like countless stinging insects. Every few steps I stumbled. Sometimes I fell. The moon had dipped below Langjökull, though the sky was still eerily bright. Reflected moonlight bounced from the snow-covered plain and made strange patterns in the air, like swooping birds. The screaming gale became indistinguishable from the sound of blood pulsing in my ears. I heard high-pitched cries—more birds, I thought; but of course there were no birds here.