15

I awoke to a world still twilit, the sound of waves and rattle of sleet on metal. Beside me Quinn yawned. He leaned over to grab a cigarette from a pack on the floor, lit it, and turned back to me.

“What’s this?” He touched the tattoo scrawled above my pubic bone. “‘Too Tough to Die.’”

I told him about the rape, the open wound left by a zip knife when I’d been left for dead. No more details than if I’d been reporting the weather or a timetable. When I was done, he bent to kiss my shoulder.

“That must have been terrible.”

I stared at the black square of window. From across the room his cell phone beeped. Quinn walked over and fumbled in his coat pocket. “Battery’s almost dead. It’s late. You hungry?”

“No. But probably I should eat.”

“There’s nothing here. I’ll grab us some takeout from Aktu Taktu. Feel like coming?”

I shook my head. He dressed and grabbed his coat, opened the door, and stopped. “Lock this after me. No one’s going to come by—but if someone does, don’t let them in.”

I pulled on my sweater, stood beside the window and watched as the car drove away, then drew the dead bolt. The cell tower’s beacon did nothing to illuminate the ground below. If someone crept up to Quinn’s place, I’d never know it. I remembered Anton’s admonition that I buy a cell phone in Helsinki. Too late now.

I finished dressing and drank about half a gallon of water, trying to throw off the shaky sense that none of this was happening, that it was all a dream ignited by jet lag and booze and a photo taken in 1975. When I opened the bottle of Focalin, my hands trembled; I felt sweaty and sick. The face that gazed back at me from the kitchen mirror was as ravaged as Quinn’s. I thought about his tattoos and wondered if murder had become instinctive for him, the way petty theft and lying were for me. I waited for my nausea to subside, then began to look around.

I didn’t find much. A kitchen drawer contained pens, razor blades, matches, an expired driver’s license, a ziplock bag of pot. In the bathroom were filthy towels, an overturned wastebasket, and a metal cabinet that contained several prescription bottles. The labels were in Icelandic; I didn’t recognize the pills inside and decided against popping any. On the floor beside the toilet were old issues of Record Collector magazine and a paperback of The Return of the King.

It was the same copy Quinn reread obsessively in the 1970s, its cover a psychedelic mashup of mountains in flame and monsters in bruised colors. When I picked it up, it fell open to a page filled with sticklike letters. A runic alphabet. The margins held more runes in faded blue ballpoint. Quinn’s name, I guessed, or maybe even mine, written decades ago.

I returned to the living room. A cheap particleboard chest of drawers held old band T-shirts and corduroy jeans, flannel shirts, a filmy red camisole, and several wadded-up thongs. I picked up the camisole, and a red passport fell out. The photo showed a blond woman, a few years younger but with the same pissed-off expression: Dagny Ahlstrand, born 15 March, 1960, resident of Uppsala.

I searched in vain for another passport or snapshots, notebook or spare set of keys—anything that might suggest a life other than the one conjured up by unwashed clothes and the empty bottles piled beneath the sink. I discovered nothing. No more alcohol, either, except for the Brennivín. I caved and drank some, chasing it with foul-smelling water, and went into the room where the LPs were stored.

It was like a meat locker in there: I could see my breath. I went from carton to carton, pulling out albums in hopes of finding some evidence of the Quinn I’d known.

At last I hit pay dirt. Beneath the room’s sole window were two boxes, covered by a frayed plaid blanket. I recognized the blanket from Quinn’s boyhood room in Kamensic, where he’d jammed it beneath the door when we were getting high. I pressed it against my face, breathing in dust and smoke, the faintest trace of jasmine incense, and settled on the floor, flipping through an alphabetized record of our shared adolescence. The Beatles, Chuck Berry, early Bowie; on through T. Rex and finally The Velvet Underground. I pulled out the original White Light/White Heat and tipped the glossy black album cover toward the overhead lamp. Under black light it revealed a skull, but now the ghostly sigil remained hidden. I pulled out the next album.

Spiky red letters spelled the word VIÐAR, the letter I an inverted cross. The minimalist cover photo showed a winter landscape: black spruce trees, a raven in flight above three young men wearing long black leather coats, black leather pants, high black boots. All tall and broad shouldered, their hair whipping around their shoulders. I’ve seen more cheerful faces in the Bellevue morgue. No corpse paint; just three piercing gazes that seemed to recognize me as an interloper in the northern wilderness. I held the album cover to the light, and sudden radiance leapt from the middle of the sleeve, igniting runic letters.

DOD SVART SOL

I realized then what it was: Dead Black Sun, the sole album by a Scandinavian band whose claim to fame, for me anyway, was that Ilkka Kaltunnen had shot their album cover, back in the early 1990s. That was long past the glory days of LPs, but bands still did vinyl pressings for the collector’s market. I wondered why it was misfiled with Quinn’s juvenilia. At least it was less embarrassing than Frampton Comes Alive!

Or maybe not—maybe this was the black metal equivalent of Gilbert O’Sullivan, and that’s why he’d hidden it away. I removed the record from its sleeve, put it on the turntable, and sank into a chair to listen.

I expected shrieking guitars and jackhammer drums. Instead, horns echoed in a mournful fanfare that slowly died away into ominous silence, broken by an answering flourish of brazen trumpets that soared into a single, chilling note, held longer than I would have thought possible, before it, too, faded.

Gradually I became aware of the same note, even more plaintive and plucked repetitively on an acoustic guitar. Then a second guitar joined the first, and after a minute both were drowned out by two male voices, chanting. The vocals were buried too deep in the mix for me to understand them or even to tell if the words were English or Norwegian. The effect should have been laughable, ersatz worshippers playing at a twentieth-century Black Mass.

Yet the voices, so raw and unpolished, had the opposite effect. One fell out of sync with the other, and I heard a sharp intake of breath, an unintelligible word sung off-key; and this conspired to make me feel as though I were listening to something that was in fact happening now, in this room, rather than fifteen years ago in a recording studio. The two voices grew louder, a litany abruptly silenced by the treble scream of an electric guitar. Beneath the razor chords echoed another sound—a third, guttural voice, grunting, and then a strident whine, like an engine in high gear. I drew my head beside the speaker, straining to hear.

For a fraction of a second it was unmistakable. Not a guitar or synthesizer, but an anguished scream. Almost immediately it was lost amid a cascade of drums and that same guttural voice, shouting hoarsely. The guitars rose to a deafening pitch as the voice faded. The song continued for another thirty seconds, ending in a cacophony of feedback, followed by a thunderclap.

Then silence.

I lifted the tonearm and stared at the record spinning soundlessly. Wind shook the walls; hail battered the lone window. At last I switched off the turntable and examined the album sleeve’s back cover. No song titles. No band photo or production credits. Inside, only a blank paper jacket.

Nothing more. It seemed like a self-annihilating thing for an unknown band to do with their first album, but maybe that was the point.

I removed the LP from the turntable and held it to the light. In the old days, you’d sometimes find messages etched into the run-out groove in the middle of a record, like “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law” inscribed on the original pressing of “Immigrant Song.”

The groove on side one of Dod Svart Sol was smooth and glossy as though oil had been poured onto it. I turned the record over, tilting it back and forth until I saw it.

There was no bolt of radiance as in Ilkka’s photographs; just a knot of coiled lines, fine as though etched with a sewing needle. I brought the disc closer to my eyes and lost the image, and after another minute’s scrutiny, found it again. Half the size of a fingerprint, and almost as difficult to see: three skeletal arms, each with a bony hand that formed an interlocking pattern where it grasped a wrist. In the center of the image was a ghostly face created by the negative space left by the surrounding images.

The same symbol that was tattooed on Quinn’s chest.

I stared until my eyes watered. What the hell was it? A record company logo? Then why would Quinn have it tattooed on his chest? I tried to remember what I knew about Viðar, other than the band’s fleeting association with Ilkka. I came up with nothing. What had been their appeal for Quinn—or Ilkka? I could see how the brutal music might have attracted a Quinn numbed and hardened by prison. But Ilkka seemed far too coolly genteel, corked way too tight for adolescent satanic pyrotechnics.

Though I guessed that might have been the allure, if you were a smart, middle-class kid from the Helsinki suburbs, the kind of college student who got off on crime-scene photos. Maybe that whole dark, violent Oslo scene had shaped the teenage Ilkka the way the downtown New York scene had shaped me a million years ago. Until he grew out of it and got a life and career and family—everything he wanted, till someone snuffed him.

I started to put the album back on the turntable when I heard the sound of a car. Quickly I slid the LP back into its jacket. Halfway in, it stuck. I pulled it out and tried again, but the same thing happened.

Something else was inside. I edged my fingers into the opening and felt around till they closed on a thin piece of cardboard. I pulled it out: a lurid vintage postcard, the now-familiar greeting scrolled above a horned figure who dragged a sled that bore two weeping children bound with chains.

GRUSS VOM KRAMPUS!

I looked at the back of the card. It was blank.

Outside, the car’s engine died. I pocketed the postcard, shoved the LP into its cover, returned it to the carton, and hurriedly draped the plaid blanket across it. I strode back into the living room just as Quinn stepped in, shaking rain from his coat.

“Dinner.” He handed me a steaming bag. I sat on the bed and waited for him to join me. “Sorry it took so long. The place was hopping.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak, but Quinn didn’t notice. We sat without talking and ate greasy burgers and reconstituted French fries stained red with paprika. When we were finished, Quinn smoked another cigarette, then threw his arm around me.

“You tired?”

“Not really.”

“Good,” he said, and pulled me down beside him.