18

Brynja was bowed over the sink with the water running. After a minute she turned the water off and looked at me, her face flushed and wet.

“I feel better now.” She picked up a Yuleboy dish towel and dried her face on it, then bent to inspect her leg. “You attacked me. I should call the police.”

“Be my guest. It was self-defense. Look, do you have any idea where Quinn could be? He said he’d be back by two and that was, what? Three hours ago?”

Brynja looked at me with contempt. “You think Quinn is reliable?”

“No, but…”

She walked back to a closet and removed her coat and several bags. “I’m going home.”

“So, what—I wait here? Can’t you even call him? Can I?”

“I should never have let you in here. You or Quinn. Here—” She thrust a cell phone at me angrily.

“Do you know his number?”

“I do not.”

“Neither do I. Forget it.”

She started to pull on her coat. “You can walk from here; maybe he will find you in the dark. I’m leaving.”

“Look,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound as desperate as I felt. “I was always jealous of you and Quinn, that’s all. I wanted to know what was going on with you guys back then, and he would never tell me. He asked me to come here to Reykjavík. Now I’m here and I find out you’re here, too. I didn’t know whether you guys were still involved.”

It sounded half plausible, even to me. But I could see by Brynja’s sour face that she wasn’t easily placated. I pointed at the volumes of New Age wackery, hoping to distract her. “So what was that before? Some kind of Icelandic curse?”

“A curse?” she sneered. “No. That is from the Völuspá, one of the Eddic poems. In Iceland we grow up reading them.”

I grew up reading Hägar the Horrible, but didn’t mention that.

“It’s the prophecy of the Völva,” Brynja went on. “A wisewoman—a seer. But all she sees is ruin and the end of things. Fimbulwinter. Ragnarök.”

She stopped and stared at me, brooding. “You see things, too. Terrible things. Dead things.”

My skin went cold, and I looked away. “A prophecy. Is that what the cult was based on? With your friends in Oslo?”

“Ilkka’s friends were all involved in a revival of the old Norse religions. The boys in the black metal scene came from the suburbs, nice families, but they hated all that. They hated many things, but most of all Christianity. They believed the priests had destroyed the heathen religion—the true religion for the people of the north. And of course that is true. So they loved anything anti-Christian. Some played at being Satanists, like Emperor and Fenriz. Now most of them see it is ridiculous. They have become adults.

“But some, once they outgrew the Devil, they became devoted heathens. In Iceland that tradition remains close to us through our literature. That’s what Ilkka studied at university. He was a Finn, but he was obsessed with the sagas, Norse folklore and archaeology and anthropology. He was in love with old things. Dead things, like the Danish bog people who were strangled and thrown into the mire a thousand years ago. He was obsessed with finding connections between all the old northern European beliefs; he thought they could be revived. And even though he was a Finn living in Norway, he believed that the purest form of these beliefs would be found in Iceland. Because we are so isolated. Our language is the closest to Old Norse. We practiced our pagan religion longer than in Europe. And Ásatrú, modern heathenism, began here in the 1970s.”

“Those churches that burned down—did Ilkka do that? Was that your friends?”

She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know. I was gone by then. All those black metal guys hanging out at the Elm Street Café? None of them ever laughed, except for Quinn. I finally couldn’t stand it, so I came back here. In Iceland, no one cares if you are anti-Christian. Live and let live. But in Norway and Sweden, more groups formed. Ásatrú, Odinism. They read the sagas and Eddas, like Christians read the Bible. They follow the old gods. Many of them practice in secret, but they are real.”

“What do you mean, ‘real’? This is, like, a religion inspired by ‘Immigrant Song.’” I gestured at the posters for elf tours, the piles of plastic trolls and rune stones. “I know you sell all this to tourists. But you can’t believe in this Viking stuff.”

Brynja scowled. “Americans—all you ever want to talk about is elves and Vikings. And Björk. You don’t even know what Viking means. They are only the men who went to sea, the raiders. The heathen religions are much older than that. It is in our blood, whether or not you believe in it. And it doesn’t matter what I believe. Christ is real for Christians, yes? And what is not real, some believers will try to make it real. There may be no Satan, but the people who burned those churches and murdered were doing his work all the same.

“Scandinavia is not like America, and Iceland is the safest place in the world. We still have few murders. But the Internet has changed everything. And immigration, and now the bank crash—people have become angry. But in those days, violence was like a drug we weren’t used to. People fell in love with it—with hatred and death, darkness. Because there is a beauty there, too, in the darkness. The northern sky—the total emptiness. You cannot imagine it. You stand on top of a glacier like Vatnajökull at midnight in the winter—you will see how your life is worth nothing, compared to that. And some people, they see that emptiness and need to fill it up with even greater darkness.”

“Is that what you wanted?”

“For a little while. Until I saw what was inside that darkness.”

I recalled what Suri had told me about Anton Bredahl. He had a bouncer at that club, a really scary guy.… He was with his girlfriend one night, and she was carrying a bag, and there was a head in it.

“What did Quinn do when he was in Oslo?” Brynja didn’t reply. “When you met him—did he have a job?”

“He worked at Forsvar,” she said at last. “Anton’s club. He was the bouncer there.”

“What do you mean?” I grabbed her but she shook me off. “What do you mean, he—”

She walked to the register to retrieve her coat. “I’m going to Baldur’s. We’ll see if Quinn is there. You can ask him all these questions. Ask him about Jens Ramstad. And Ellisabet Anders, and all the other ‘work’ he did for Anton. Ask him why he cannot leave Iceland.”

“But—”

“I need you to go now.”

In the Opel, Brynja refused to speak; she just stared straight ahead as we drove across town. I clutched my bag and tried to stay calm, tugging at my sleeve: The wristband’s spikes had torn the jacket’s lining. I fought the urge to grab the wheel and drive blindly away from here, to—

Where? Toy city that it was, Reykjavík was unreadable to me. The grid of crosshatched streets seemed at once small yet infinitely complex, like a computer chip. Those distant, ominous mountains faded in and out of view as though some giant hand continually adjusted a vast gray monitor. I’d always assumed agoraphobics simply felt unnaturally attached to their cramped rooms, but now I realized what it must be like to sense the sky waiting outside the door, ready to crush you like a monstrous fist.

Fine snow flowed like smoke around the steady traffic. I couldn’t see much besides the ghostly lights of apartment buildings. Black-clad figures straggled along the sidewalk, heads bowed as though the approaching headlights would burn them. My head thrummed from the Brennivín. The Focalin buzz had long faded, replaced by dread that burned into my veins like quicklime and the same atavistic horror that fueled my night terrors.

But I was awake now. The poison inside me came from the world outside: people who wouldn’t meet my eyes; withered trees; that cancerous, enveloping darkness. I fumbled in my bag for a bottle that wasn’t there; fought a wave of nausea I knew was the precursor to blacking out. I cracked my window to let in a rush of cold air and forced myself to breathe deeply. Then I pushed up my sleeves and jabbed the spiked wristband against the inside of my arm until my eyes watered and I dropped my hand with a gasp.

“Close the window,” said Brynja. She reached to turn up the heat. “We’ll be there soon.”

The traffic had slowed; a line of crimson taillights crept ahead of us. It wasn’t snowing that hard; I would have thought that drivers here wouldn’t be put off by the weather. Brynja muttered to herself, then turned on the radio to a news station.

After a few minutes the bottleneck eased and we could see what had caused the slowdown. Several vehicles had pulled to the side of the road, including a police car. Two cops stood in the snow, talking to a small group of people.

Brynja frowned. The Opel slowed almost to a halt; the car behind us honked. Brynja tapped the accelerator and drove another fifty feet before turning down a road that led to a small apartment complex. A single streetlamp threw sulfur-colored light across drifted snow and a row of parked vehicles. Brynja’s mouth tightened as a police cruiser raced down the drive past us.

People were clustered beneath the apartment’s concrete awning, faces glowing blue as they held up cell phones to take pictures. Brynja slammed on the brakes. The Opel came to a stop. She jumped out and ran to where the cruiser had parked, its high beams spotlighting the ground beneath a straggly evergreen. I leaned over to turn off the engine, pocketed the keys, and followed her. A moment later she began to scream.