Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (25 page)

“‘Brothers shall slay each other; our land weeps with suffering.’” Behind me I heard Quinn half chanting under his breath. “‘The whore’s sons bleed the earth, wolf-time, wolf-years. The wolf runs free until Viðar fetters its jaws. Then Baldur returns, and the sun like gold.’”

Galdur turned to Quinn.
“Nú,”
he said.

Quinn stepped directly behind Einar, as though to embrace him. He lifted his hands and tightened the glimmering strand between them. A faint note sounded, then faded into a sharp intake of breath as Quinn stepped back and drew the cord across Einar’s throat, his hands moving so quickly I saw only a scythe of light and then a black tongue of blood lapping at Einar’s chest. I jammed my camera’s viewfinder against my face and started shooting.

Einar’s head lolled forward, knees buckling as the body folded in upon itself then fell to the ground. I cursed as the roll of film ran out, straightened, and wiped my eyes. Quinn knelt beside the body, quickly undid the jumper cable, then tugged the steel wire from where it had lodged in Einar’s windpipe. Galdur came up beside him, grabbed Quinn’s shoulder, roughly yanked him to his feet, then pushed him toward me.

“Don’t look,” Quinn said, pulling me with him.

I shook him off. I watched as Galdur grasped Einar’s lower jaw in one huge hand, jammed his fingers behind the upper jaw, then wrenched them apart.

“Fucking hell.” I gasped as Quinn hugged me close. “Who the hell does that?”

“Viðar,” said Pétur in an unsteady voice. “That is how he kills the Fenrir Wolf at Ragnarök.”

“Remind me to be out of town that weekend.” My hands shook as I replaced the lens cap and stuffed the flash into my jacket. I looked at Quinn. “Jesus Christ, Quinn.”

“What’d I say, Cassie? You and those big gray eyes.” He stepped to the edge of the hot spring and dropped one end of the guitar string into it. He dragged it through the simmering water as though it were a fishing line, pulled it out, and began coiling it. “The world will end and you won’t blink.”

I turned to see Galdur standing beside Pétur. He lowered his head, speaking softly. After a moment Pétur nodded, eyes squeezed shut as Galdur pressed his thumb against his forehead, leaving a bloody mark. Galdur turned, stepped over to Quinn, and did the same to each of us.

“Because you are part of this now, too,” he said.

He returned to Einar’s corpse, stooped and picked it up, slinging it over his shoulder as though it were a sack, and walked to the edge of the hot spring. Several large rocks protruded from the simmering water; Galdur stepped carefully from one to the next, his form swathed in steam. Near the center of the pool he halted, leaned forward, and let the body slide into the murk. There was no sound, only an upward surge of boiling water as Galdur quickly retraced his steps. As he walked toward us, he picked up his flannel shirt, paused to dip it into the boiling water, then sluiced it across his chest. He wrung out the shirt and tossed it to Quinn, who went to the water’s edge and used it to clean his hands and face before passing it to Pétur, who did the same.

“I think I’m good,” I said when Pétur turned to me. I wiped the smear of blood from my forehead and followed the others to the Quonset hut. When I glanced back, I saw a small black shape circling lazily above the steaming pool before it settled several yards from the edge and folded its wings to wait.

24

No one spoke when we got back inside. Pétur went into the bedroom and shut the door. Galdur opened a bottle of wine and tipped it to his mouth, swallowing more than half the bottle before he handed what remained to Quinn.

“It is a long history that is over now, I think,” he said in his bass rumble. He looked exhausted, about twenty years older than he had a few hours ago. “From that time, not many of us are left.”

Quinn took a pull from the wine and passed it to me. “Are you sorry?”

“That Einar is dead?” Galdur shook his head. “No. And that time is gone. But I am sorry for the friends I lost.”

He stared at the ceiling, then stood and gently pulled down the photograph of himself and Ilkka. “That was at Vitenskapsmuseet, the archaeological museum in Trondheim. Ilkka knew someone there, a curator. She took this picture. It was a few weeks after he and I first met at Helvete.”

He gazed at the photo, his topaz eyes damp, and set it aside. He glanced at the closed bedroom door. “I need to talk to Pétur. I will say farewell to you now.”

He stood. I glanced at Quinn and took a step after Galdur.

“Anton owed me money. From when I went to meet with Ilkka. He paid me half up front, and he was going to send the rest to New York. Do you know what happened to it?”

Galdur reached into his back pocket and withdrew Einar’s wallet, opened it to display a wad of five-hundred-euro notes. “How much money?”

“Ten thousand euros. But that can’t be all of it.” I pointed at the wallet. “He—”

Galdur peeled off some bills and handed them to me, counted out more and put them into his pocket. “I will give you five. This I will keep. I know a man who needs to buy a new whaling boat for himself and his son.” He stared at me. “It is time now for you to leave. First, please give me that film.”

“The film?”

He pointed at my camera. “The photos you took out there. I want them.”

“But—you asked me to take those!”

“Yes. And now they are mine.”

He extended his hand. I looked at Quinn, who only raised his eyebrows and nodded slightly. Swearing under my breath, I retreated to a dark corner, removed the roll from the camera, and handed it to Galdur.

“Takk.”
He gathered Einar’s clothes from the floor, picked up Ilkka’s six prints, and headed for the door. “Come. I’ll get you some petrol.”

Quinn and I followed him outside. It had stopped snowing. Above us the sky stretched black and scoured of stars. We waited as Galdur walked to the Econoline and returned with a plastic gasoline container. He tossed the clothes onto the snow-covered ground, poured gas on them, then set the pile alight with a match. As the flames rose from the little pyre, he tossed the roll of film onto it, then one by one, Ilkka’s photos. I barely resisted the urge to snatch them from the blaze and watched, my gut tightening, as the sparks whirled upward, a thousand tiny constellations that flared then died along with Ilkka’s legacy. And mine.

When the embers cooled, Galdur kicked snow across an oily black smear, all that remained of the Jólasveinar sequence. He handed the gas can to Quinn, who headed to the Cherokee to fill the tank.

“Here.” Galdur turned to me. He took my hand, opened it, and pressed something into my palm, then closed my fingers around it. “This is the one that Ilkka used when he took those photos: He set his flash so it would bounce off the crystal. He would have wanted you to have it, I think.”

I opened my hand to see a polished lump of dark blue crystal, winking in the starlight. “It is his
solstenen,
his ‘sunstone,’” Galdur went on. “I think perhaps you might need it sometimes, Valkyrie, to see your way in the dark.”

“Takk,”
I said, and held it tight inside my fist.

“We’re set.” Quinn stopped beside me and handed the empty can back to Galdur. “Thanks.”

Galdur set the can down. He clasped his wrist and raised it in a salute. Quinn returned it, and the two men embraced.

“I need to be with Pétur,” said Galdur as he turned to go. “I have my passport back now, and some money.… Perhaps we will visit Rome.”

We watched him go inside, then headed for the Cherokee. Quinn slung his arm around my shoulder. “Tough luck about your photos, Cassie.”

“Yeah.” I thought of the clandestine pictures I’d shot of Quinn while he was sleeping and rubbed my eyes. “Some bad fucking shit there. But I wasn’t going to arm-wrestle him over it.”

“Good idea.”

I gave him some Focalin, and we drove the five hours back to Quinn’s place, where we took turns showering, fell into bed for a few hours, then slept. When I woke, Quinn sat beside me, stroking my hair.

“I made you a reservation on the night flight to London.” I began to protest, and he pressed his hand against my mouth, then held up a red passport. “I’m giving you this. It’s Dagny’s. I figure if Einar can pass himself off as Galdur, you can pass for her.”

“I’m not Swedish!”

“I know. But listen to me. You can’t stay here, and you say you’re fucked if you go back to New York. And maybe you get stopped at Keflavik, but probably they’re just gonna glance at this and let you through. At Heathrow they’re all gonna speak English, so just try to fake an accent. Find a cheap hotel and e-mail me. I’ll find you in a couple of days, a week tops. There’s a bar in Brixton run by someone I know; I’ll give you his number. I’ll meet you there. What do you say?”

“Shit.” I rubbed my head, finally nodded. “Yeah, I guess. You’ll meet me there? Really?”

He leaned toward me till our foreheads touched. “Really. I didn’t go through all that shit just to kiss you on the runway and wave good-bye.”

“What happens when we get to London?”

“We’ll burn that bridge when we get to it. C’mon, get your stuff.”

It’d been a long time since I cried, but I came close when we got to Keflavik. Quinn went with me into the airport, walked me to security, then gathered me in his arms.

“We’ll always have Reykjavík,” he whispered.

“Fucking A.” I punched him gently, then pulled away. “I’ll see you in London.”

I watched him as I went up the escalator, the gray overhead light shadowing the grim lines on his face and that grotesque, scarred half smile. He raised his hand, clasped his wrist in farewell, and was gone.

The flight was nearly empty. I got a window seat, popped a Percocet, and chased it with the Jack Daniel’s minis I’d bought at duty free. I was just starting to drift off when I heard excited voices. I looked up to see the flight attendants clustered around a bulkhead window, staring out and pointing. I pressed my face against my own window, looked down, and saw the vast white expanse that was Iceland, with its ragged black hem of ocean. A red eye boiled within the snowy wilderness, its flaming iris surrounded by a plume of gray and black.

“A volcano!” One of the flight attendants peered over my shoulder. “It’s just erupted, see? A thousand years ago, the first monks saw that and thought it was the gates of Hell opening for them.”

“I can relate,” I said, and reached for another whiskey.

Also by Elizabeth Hand

Radiant Days

Glimmering
(revised edition)

Illyria

Generation Loss

Saffron and Brimstone

Chip Crockett’s Christmas Carol

Mortal Love

Bibliomancy

Black Light

Last Summer at Mars Hill

Waking the Moon

Icarus Descending

Aestival Tide

Winterlong

About the Author

Elizabeth Hand is the multiple-award-winning author of eleven novels and three collections of short fiction.
Generation Loss,
the first novel to feature punk photographer Cass Neary, received the inaugural Shirley Jackson Award for best work of psychological suspense. A
New York Times
and
Washington Post
Notable author, Hand is also a longtime book critic and essayist, a frequent contributor to the
Washington Post, Salon, Village Voice,
and
Down East
magazine, among many others. Raised in New York State, she studied playwriting and cultural anthropology at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and as a teenager in the 1970s was involved in the nascent punk scenes in both D.C. and New York City. For six years she worked as a photo archivist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum, before moving to the coast of Maine in 1988 to write full time. She has two children, and divides her time between Maine and North London, the setting for the third Cass Neary novel.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

AVAILABLE DARK.
Copyright © 2012 by Elizabeth Hand. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
by Roland Barthes, translation by Richard Howard, translation copyright © 1981 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc.

www.thomasdunnebooks.com

www.stmartins.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Hand, Elizabeth.

Available dark : a thriller / Elizabeth Hand.—1st ed.

         p. cm.

“A Thomas Dunne Book.”

ISBN 978-0-312-58594-5 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4299-5041-1 (e-book)

  1.  Women photographers—Fiction.   2.  Serial murders—Fiction.   3.  Finland—Fiction.   4.  Iceland—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PS3558.A4619A93 2012

813'.54—dc22

2011032833

First Edition: February 2012