22

A man shouted. I opened my eyes as someone tried to pull me to my feet.

“Pétur! Getir tú hjálpa mér?”

I kicked but my legs wouldn’t move. I was in a room, dimly lit by a single kerosene lamp. After the endless dark outside I was blinded and saw only a blurred figure above me. A giant of a man, bearded, naked, and glaring.

“Hver í veröldinni ert tú?” I shook my head, and he demanded, “Who are you?”

My cracked lips couldn’t form a reply. The man frowned, and his anger faded somewhat. “He’s frozen! Pétur, help me get him into the bed.”

A second man joined him, much younger—a boy, almost, twenty-one or -two. The first man hefted me in a fireman’s carry and strode into another room.

It was dark there. The giant set me down on a bed. “You have hypothermia,” he rumbled, his voice so deep it was as though the stones spoke. “You need to get out of your clothes so we can warm you.”

I thrashed feebly as they peeled off my boots, socks, leather jacket. I heard a chink as something fell to the floor, and a low hiss from the big man. The boy, Pétur, pulled off my jeans and sweater and quickly stepped back.

“What the fuck? It’s a woman!”

The older man stared at me. “Go heat some water for her to drink,” he commanded. “Hot, not boiling. Put something sweet in it. Then get me some more blankets. And put the lamp on.”

Pétur hurriedly lit another lantern and left the room. The big man slid into bed beside me.

“Don’t be afraid. We have to warm you, but not too quickly or you’ll die. Do you understand?” I groaned and tried to move away, but he pulled me to him, tugging the blankets over us. “Do you want to die? No? Then be still. I will not harm you.”

The bed was still warm—someone had been sleeping there—and the man’s body radiated heat like a stove. His broad chest enveloped mine, his long hair and beard scratched my face. He reeked of sweat and semen. “You’re like ice,” he said, and shouted for Pétur to hurry. “Just lie still.”

As heat seeped back into my feet and hands I began to sob with pain. The big man reached down to cup my foot in one huge hand. “It hurts, yeah? That’s good,” he said. “That means the nerves may not be damaged. Try not to move.…”

I drifted into a nightmarish state between wakefulness and delirium. My skin felt as though someone dragged a hundred soldering irons across it; my arms flailed uncontrollably. At some point I drifted into unconsciousness, then woke to the man running his hands across my body, as though checking a horse he might buy.

“You are warmer.” He looked to where Pétur stood at the bedside, holding a steaming mug. “Let’s see if you can drink this now.” He pulled me upright, cradling me against him like a child. He took the mug and sipped from it, nodded thanks at Pétur, and held it to my lips. “Here—”

Whatever was in it was black and sweet; hot, but not scalding. I gagged, but the man stroked my back and continued to bring the mug to my lips, until it was empty. He set it on the floor and took my face in his hands.

“Can you see me?” I nodded. “Can you talk? Do you know your name?”

“Yes. Cass.” My throat felt as though I’d swallowed glass. “Cassandra Neary.”

“Cassandra, okay, I’m going to let you sleep. I’ll check back on you. We can talk later.”

He withdrew and tucked the blankets lightly around me, lowered the lantern flame, and left. Pétur remained for a minute, staring at me in wonder.

“No one has ever walked here in the winter. Not even Galdur.”

“Galdur?” I whispered, but the boy was gone.

Exhaustion won out over unease: I closed my eyes and tried to will myself to sleep. Instead I imagined myself with my feet rotted off and blackened stumps where my hands had been. When the man finally returned to check on me, I pushed myself onto a pillow.

“I need to get up.”

He looked at me doubtfully. “Can you stand?”

“I think so. If you help me—”

“Wait—you need clothes to stay warm.” He rummaged around the dim room, returning with a pair of jeans, a flannel shirt, a baggy Icelandic sweater, and heavy wool socks. “These are Pétur’s; they should fit.”

I took the clothes then turned away, swearing when he tried to help me; I swore more loudly when I had to ask him to pull my arms through the sleeves and tug my socks on.

“This is so fucked.” I shrugged into the sweater, trembling. “I can’t even move my fingers.”

“I think you’ll be all right: You didn’t get frostbite, which is incredible. The fact you are alive is incredible. Come in here; I’ll get you more to drink.”

I hobbled after him into the main room of the Quonset hut. It smelled of sulfur and wet wool, a compact space with two smaller rooms carved from it—the bedroom I’d just left and a bathroom. The curved ceiling was covered with rolls of insulation, and on to this were tacked pictures of stars and constellations, hundreds of them. Most had been printed from a computer, though there were several framed color photos, washed out by exposure to sunlight. It took me a minute to realize that the photos formed a star map, like what you see projected on a planetarium dome, showing all the constellations of the northern sky. There was a large telescope, too, in the kitchen area, and on the far side of the open room a set of amps, a drum kit, and an electric guitar.

But not a lot in the way of furniture. Bookshelves, some plastic storage bins. No TV. A pile of rocks in the center of the room, a makeshift hearth or cairn. Pétur was flopped in an armchair, staring at a laptop. There was a sofa and a desk with a flat-screen computer monitor. Sheepskin rugs on the floor. Another laptop vied for space on a table with dirty dishes, wineglasses, and an empty bottle, and there were cases of wine stacked beside the front door. A small gas cookstove. No refrigerator, but who needed one? The entire back forty was a refrigerator. The only light came from kerosene lanterns that flooded the honeycombed walls in gold.

I pointed at the electric guitar. “You’ve gotta be off the grid here. How do you play that?”

Galdur regarded me coolly. At last he said, “There are solar panels on the roof. They are not very useful in the winter, so I run a generator a few hours a day when I need to. There’s a hot spring not far away; I pipe water for heating and washing up. I do not have a lot of demands. If it wasn’t for that”—he gestured at the guitar—“I could live without electricity. But some things I will not sacrifice.”

He sank onto the sofa, ramrod straight. Sitting, he was nearly as tall as I was standing; broad shouldered, with arms as big as my calves and hands that looked as though they could crush a boulder like an acorn. He wore a black T-shirt and black jeans, heavy felted slippers. A bronze ring circled one upper arm. His brown hair was streaked with blond, his carefully trimmed beard gray flecked.

But he had an ascetic’s face, saved from delicacy by a square chin and long, slightly slanted eyes of a shimmering topaz I’d only seen once before: the Marvel Comics version of his brother Einar. He made a fist and inclined his head in a salute. “I am Galdur. Who has sent you here?”

“Uh, no one.” I grabbed a chair and sat. “I was … lost.”

Pétur looked up from his laptop. “Lost? No one comes here, especially in winter.”

“And no one comes here by mistake,” said Galdur.

He stared at me fixedly. I tried to return his stare but gave up: In sixty seconds, I didn’t see him blink. I looked at the photos on the ceiling, the Big Dipper so enlarged that each star seemed to have exploded into red fragments. I was thousands of miles from anyone who knew me, except for Quinn, who may well have been murdered by the same man who’d killed Baldur and the others; the same man who now, inexplicably, had saved my life. It was starting to hit me that maybe he hadn’t done me a favor.

“I wandered off,” I said slowly. “I’m a tourist, I didn’t have a fucking clue where I was.”

“Don’t lie to me. Not even tourists are stupid enough to come to the highlands in winter on foot. You should be dead. No woman can survive, dressed like…”

He crossed the room, seized my leather jacket from a drying rack and shook it furiously, then kicked at my boots on the floor. “… like a cowboy. There are people lost here whose bodies are never found; did you know that? Icelandic trekkers who have climbed the Himalayas—in the winter they die here. So I ask you again—”

He flung aside my jacket and sat, regarding me with those vulpine eyes. “How did you come here? How did you come by this?” He held up the spiked bracelet. “Tell me!”

He threw the bracelet at me. I caught it, clutching it like a weapon. “Someone gave it to me. In Reykjavík.”

“Who?”

“A woman in a tourist store. Brynja.”

“Brynja?” Galdur looked taken aback. “Brynja Ingvarsdottir?”

“I don’t know her last name. She owns a tourist shop. A friend of mine dropped me off there.”

“The rune shop?” broke in Pétur. “The one at the edge of town?”

“I guess. She had a lot of stuff like that—books and rune stones. Souvenirs.”

“Is that who brought you here?” asked Pétur.

“Brynja would not leave the city if it was under nuclear attack,” retorted Galdur. “And she doesn’t know where I live; she doesn’t want to know. So I ask you again: How did you come here?”

I flushed but said nothing.

“Did you follow someone? See anyone else?”

“Only a bird.”

“A bird?” Galdur laughed. I glanced over to see Pétur watching me. He caught my eye and shook his head, almost imperceptibly.

“Yeah,” I said. I was pissed that when I finally told the truth, no one believed me. “I saw a big black bird. A raven.”

“You’re lying.” Galdur grabbed my sweater, pulling me until my face was inches from his. “No one sees a raven here in winter in the middle of the night.”

“I did,” I insisted. “I mean, maybe I was delirious, maybe I imagined I saw a fucking bird. But look—” I pointed at the gash on my face. “It clawed me—I tried to run and it attacked me.”

Galdur let go of my sweater. He touched my cheek then drew closer to me, staring at the scar beside my eye. “What is that?”

“I was attacked a few weeks ago. It hasn’t healed yet.”

He stared at me pensively, then gestured at my abdomen. “You have a scar there, too; I noticed it when I was warming you. Show it to me.”

I lifted the sweater and shirt, exposing the map of scar tissue and faded tattoo. Pétur stepped over to peer at it.

“‘Too tough to die,’” he read. “That’s no fucking lie.”

Galdur shook his head. “Tell me your name again.”

“Cassandra Neary—Cass.”

“You’re American?” I nodded, and Galdur turned away. “Cassandra was a seeress. Brynja, too. I don’t know what this means.”

Pétur stood. “It means I’m going to grab a smoke.”

“Take her with you.” Galdur got up and stalked toward the bedroom. “If she wants to run away, let her.”

I felt like shit, but the confined space was making me feel claustrophobic. I hurriedly pulled on my leather jacket and boots and followed Pétur outside. He leaned against the Quonset hut, surrounded by cartons of empty wine bottles, and cupped his hands around a lighter.

“Smoke?”

“No thanks. Christ, my boots are still wet.”

Pétur inhaled and narrowed his eyes, staring at the sky. Night had faded into the northern dawn, a sooty expanse of snow and rock broken by distant black crags and a bright ridge atop the highlands, shining like a blade where an errant ray of sun struck it. The wind blew scattered snowflakes and sent smoke streaming toward us across the plain.

“What’s that smoke?”

“That’s the hot springs.” Pétur wore only an Icelandic sweater and jeans and Converse low-tops but seemed impervious to the cold. “It looks farther away than it is. Like the glacier looks closer than it is. In Iceland, everything is an illusion.”

He laughed. Like half of Iceland’s population, he could have been a model, clean-shaven with long, stringy black hair and azure eyes. I thought of the single mattress inside the hut. I wouldn’t kick this kid out of bed, either.

“Do you live here?”

Pétur spat at the frozen ground. “Not in winter. It is possible, barely, to get here with a good truck, so I visit. I’m at university in Reykjavík, but we’re on Christmas vacation now. By the old calendar, this is midwinter night, Jöl, and Galdur wanted me to be here. I come every month or so to make sure he’s still alive, also to play music. He’s one of the greatest guitarists in the world, you know that, right?”

“Sure.”

“That’s why he gets so angry: Sometimes people try to find him, you know? Like a pilgrimage. But that’s in the summer. I’m here then, so I send them away. ‘What, you’re looking for Galdur? You must be crazy! No one could live in this place. Go back and look in Reykjavík. Or Oslo.’”

He laughed again, then cocked his head. “But yeah, you know, it’s bad fucked that you’re here. He really doesn’t like it. A few years ago a guy showed up, he wrote for Terrorizer magazine? Galdur beat him so bad he had to be taken out by rescue helicopter.”

“Jesus. Did he go to jail?”

“No, he said it was self-defense. Because the guy came inside to wait while no one was here, and when Galdur came home he found him in the living room. With, you know, a camera and digital recorder—very dangerous weapons! He was unconscious when they took him out. Don’t feel too bad; he wrote a good story out of it, even though Galdur destroyed his equipment.” Pétur tossed his cigarette, a spark against the gray sky. “He had trouble with the law before, in Norway, but here in Iceland, I think they would rather not have to be responsible for him.”

“Yeah, I heard about that shit in Oslo.” I hesitated. “Do you know a guy named Quinn? American, about my age?”

Pétur shook his head. “No, sorry.”

“He has a table at the flea market; he sells old records.”

“Oh, yeah.” Pétur brightened. “Yeah, sure—he works with the albino, right?”

“Yeah, that’s him. Does he ever come out here?”

“No. I tell you, no one comes here. And Galdur, mostly he stays away from all the old music scene. He goes into Reykjavík a few times a year, to get supplies. He records music here—mostly ambient stuff he does on his laptop. We met at the upstairs room at Sirkus a few years ago. A great bar, but they closed it.” He grimaced and spat again. “Fucking bastards. I went there a lot. I heard Galdur sometimes went, too, because no one bothered him, especially after that Terrorizer guy got pounded. I could not believe it when I was there one night, and I looked over, and he was drinking a glass of wine. I had a few beers so I wasn’t afraid. My friends thought I was crazy, but I went over and talked to him for a long time. That was how we met. The thing no one understands about Galdur—he wants them to believe he is, you know, the man of stone and ice. Nothing touches him, he is above the world, he is god of all he can see. It’s that mathematician brain: Everything can be explained by cold logic. Maybe some things, but not everything. Not me.”

He grinned, and I huddled into my jacket, shivering. “If he’s so logical, why’d he flip out about the raven?”

“That’s what I mean. Probably it was because of the Odin thing. Ravens are sacred to Odin, and Galdur’s very spiritual; he is a follower of Ásatrú. Then he sees your eye, and of course Odin has only one eye. At first we think you are a man, but you are a woman, and Odin too dressed as a woman and practiced women’s magic.

“So when you show up at the door in the middle of the night and say that a raven brought you—well, Galdur will be very agitated. You know what else is weird? I only got here yesterday, too. I might have seen you hitchhiking, right?” He laughed. “A real traffic jam at Lindvidi.”

“What’s that?”

“The name of Galdur’s house. It means ‘wide land.’ In the sagas, Lindvidi is where Viðar lives—he is the god of silence and vengeance—so of course it’s where Galdur lives.” He turned to kick at the Quonset hut’s wall. “He brought this out from the Keflavik airbase a long time ago, before it closed. It’s sweet, huh?”

“Yeah. Silence and revenge, huh? I just thought it was a good name for a band.”

“It’s a great name. Viðar is more famous now than when Galdur started it. The only band Ihsahn said was as good as Emperor. Some people say better. That guy from Terrorizer, when he wrote his story he said that the greatest true Norwegian black metal artist is not Norwegian, but Icelandic.”

“I like their stuff.” I looked past him, to the wall of steam erupting from the horizon. “That song on their first album, where you can hear voices in the background.”

“That would be their only album. That’s the song most people know, but there’s some bootlegged stuff; it’s fucking great. They must have kicked ass live. I wish I could have seen them, but I was, like, five. But that song—every time I talked to Galdur about it, he just says Blot is holy and we don’t talk of these things.”

“‘Bloat’? ”

“Blot means ‘sacrifice.’ An old Norse word. In Ásatrú, it means the midwinter feast and ritual. Once upon a time, something else.”

But definitely not a prog-rock band.

“I have to get something out of my car,” Pétur announced. He headed toward the back of the Quonset hut. I caught up with him as he opened the door of a badly dented SUV and pulled out a large cooler. “I bring my own supplies. Galdur can live on wine and salted fish, but not me. Grab that six-pack, will you?”

He set the cooler down in the snow outside the front door, retrieved a plastic quart container and a paper bag, and took the six-pack from me. “I’m ready for breakfast. Are you doing okay?”

I shrugged. “I could be worse.”

He looked at the raw landscape around us, the snow glowing blue and gold as the sun edged above the horizon, and turned back to me. “How the hell did you get here?”

“Good drugs,” I said as we went back in.

I was relieved to see no sign of Galdur inside. The bedroom door remained shut. I drew a chair up to the table while Pétur made coffee and put out bowls and plates.

“Skyr.” He set the plastic container in front of me. “Icelandic yogurt.”

It tasted more like sour cream, but I wasn’t going to argue. He’d brought some pastries, too, and bread and cheese and some kind of salami. It was the best food I’d had since leaving New York. Almost the only food. The coffee was decent, too.

“What day is this?” I asked.

“Monday. Why?” Pétur laughed. “You have to be somewhere? Good luck.”

“No. It’s just hard to tell; it’s always so dark. And these windows don’t help.” I pointed at the small panes near the front door, all choked with snow.

“Yeah. I tell him, you’d get more light in an igloo. He doesn’t care. There’s never anyone else here to complain, except me.”

“Doesn’t his brother ever come?”

“What, Einar? He’s not welcome here. Galdur hates him. Everyone hates him. Einar came visiting in October, right after the crash. He needed money and he had a crazy idea that Galdur would help him. He wanted Galdur to release the Viðar album with some new tracks. When Galdur said no, Einar argued with him about doing a concert—you know, a special gig at the Iceland Airwaves festival. They would make a lot of money, and Einar would record the live show and release it on DVD, then he’d make even more money. I thought Galdur would kill him.”

“You were here?”

“No. But from the way Galdur talked about it afterward … he went berserk. So I would not mention Einar’s name to him. I wouldn’t mention Einar to anyone. He’s one of the motherfuckers who screwed this whole country.” Pétur’s face grew red. “He and Galdur, they fell out a long time ago. I don’t know what happened. But if you know Einar, you’ll have a good idea: He’s a fucking arrogant asshole. He’s one of the útrás. What we call ‘outvasion’ Vikings, the bankers who stole everyone’s money and used it to buy English football teams and Porsches and build themselves mansions. Everyone in Iceland hates them. You can tell their houses because people throw red paint on the walls. Four years ago we were one of the richest countries in the world. Now it’s horrible: We have lost everything. My mother took investment advice from Einar, and she lost her home. Not Galdur—Galdur wouldn’t give him one krónur. But some people trusted Einar because, you know, he is a fucking banker and he studied in America.”

He laughed bitterly. “They fucked us, and now we are supposed to pay off their gambling debts? Do you know what it would cost to do that? Fifty thousand dollars for every person in Iceland. Einar had a house in Greece, a big new mansion here. His wife went to New York for a boob job, and so did his daughter. Now the house is repossessed, and the place in Greece—who knows? And he owes money to some people in the Russian mafia. So no, Einar is not welcome here.”

He gathered the plates and stacked them in a plastic tub. I finished my coffee and tried to square Pétur’s account of Einar with Quinn’s, and both of those with the aging black metal fan in a Dolce&Gabbana suit, squatting with his wife and daughter in an abandoned construction site. The hardest part was imagining Galdur and Einar as brothers. The two looked alike, but the resemblance seemed to end there, except for their gift with numbers and the ability to scale down their domestic needs to kerosene and alcohol.

Also, the inexplicable fact that they shared a love for tremolo guitar and blast-beat drumming. Maybe there was something in Reykjavík’s sulfurous water supply that contributed to seasonal affective disorder on a mass scale, but the predisposition toward musical anhedonia still didn’t seem to have caught on here the way it had back in Norway.

It all made me miss the sunny optimism of The Smiths.

I stood and paced the room warily, trying not to make any noise that might disturb Galdur. I thought of Quinn, and for the first time in decades, maybe, felt on the verge of tears. I should have forced him to take me with him Sunday morning. I wouldn’t be trapped here, in the middle of an ice desert. Or I’d have talked him out of meeting Baldur; we’d have found a bar and gotten shit-faced and fallen back into bed, or boarded a plane for someplace warm. Baldur would be dead, but we’d be gone to ground in Greece or Turkey or the Costa del Sol. We’d throw the dice and begin again.

I knew that all of these scenarios were impossible. Quinn was wrong: I could see into the future, but all I ever saw was my own dead gaze staring back. I glanced at Pétur, sweet-faced, spooning Skyr from the container as he leaned against the sink. It was difficult to think of him shacking up with a serial killer; almost as tough to imagine as him shacking up with a legendarily brutal musician who’d beaten a man to death with a guitar.

The Quonset hut had only one door: If I fled, I’d die in the wilderness. My only hope would be to steal the key to one of the vehicles—Pétur’s, preferably—let the air out of the Econoline’s tires, and hightail it across the desert. It was a stupid idea, but less stupid than dying. I looked for something that might be Pétur’s—a coat or backpack—someplace he might stow a spare key. I saw nothing except for my own jacket slung across the sofa. I’d wait till Pétur stepped out for another cigarette, then do a more thorough search.

I distracted myself by perusing Galdur’s books, which were impressive for a rock musician. He had hundreds of volumes, in English and Icelandic—abstruse works on applied mathematics, astronomy, navigation; archaeological monographs; tomes on excavations of Viking sites in Norway and Great Britain; Icelandic folklore and the sagas. Unlike Brynja’s New Age bunk, these were nearly all from university presses, or scholarly texts published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I pulled out a book on human sacrifice in northern Europe. The dust-jacket photo reminded me of the one in Ilkka’s living room. A bog burial, different photo, same body, with its flaxen hair and broken spear in the crook of one leathery arm. The Windeby Boy. There were more photos inside: bog bodies with mutilated faces and decapitated heads; skeletons sitting cross-legged, minus their skulls; skulls that had been impaled on metal pikes then buried. Their gaping lower jaws made them appear to be screaming.

But the faces on the bog bodies seemed weirdly peaceful, even those who still bore nooses around their necks or whose throats had been severed to expose blackened vertebrae. They reminded me of Ilkka’s Jólasveinar photographs; their subjects human, but their deaths so far beyond imagining that the images possessed the abstract purity of a funerary stela or ancient paleoglyph.

I replaced the book and stepped over to the indoor cairn. It didn’t seem any more out of place than the electric guitars or drum kit in this weird little world. A carved wooden disk sat atop rocks chosen for their symmetry: black lava, bluish granite, round stones that looked like oversize, freckled eggs. The wooden disk reminded me of the antique askur with its gruesome souvenir: It had the same motif of the gripping beast. A few artifacts were carefully arranged on it, along with a cell phone. An iron blade, dimpled with rust, its edge gnawed by the centuries; a bronze band that looked as though it had broken off from something bigger, like a sword or helmet. I picked up another object, too small to be a weapon, the width of my hand and also made of iron, with a pair of tiny tongs at one end and a narrow blade at the other—an ancient surgical tool, maybe, like a scalpel. Heavy for its size, it would have demanded a steady grip and steadier eye.

“That’s mine, sorry.” Pétur crouched beside me, picked up the cell phone, and flipped it open. “That’s the only place I never lose it. You asked what day it is, and I thought I better check. Yes, it’s Monday. It doesn’t work here; some places in the highlands you can get reception, but not here.” He lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I think Galdur blocks it with his mighty brain.”

He laughed, set the phone back on the cairn, and walked off. I replaced the scalpel beside it, then saw something protruding from between the stones—a small white knob, like an ivory tuning key. It was wedged in tight, so I tugged until it slithered free, then dropped it, startled, catching it before it could hit the floor.

It was a skeletal hand, the slender finger bones mottled like tortoiseshell, five cold spindles. Unlike Suri, whomever this belonged to had died long ago. I placed it beside the ancient scalpel and noticed a slab of crystal beside the cairn, the size and shape of a piece of old-fashioned block ice, with a hardcover book on top of it. The book was open, its pages displaying Icelandic text that faced an English translation.

… blood from a man whose death was not mourned and inscribe first upon one’s own right hand and then upon the tombstone these staves in blood. You must do this on the fourth day of the fourth week of summer, when the earth is yet fresh. The dead man will awaken, and you must take care the earth thrown up by his awakening does not touch your feet, else you will walk the same path he does. You must ask him, Who mourns you? And if he names a man or woman or child, you must cast the staves upon him and depart. But if he is silent, you must observe when the corpse-froth begins to spill from his mouth and nostrils, being certain to lick it from them before he …

“That does not work.” I cringed at the rumble of Galdur’s voice, but he only took the book from my hand and set it aside. “This, however, does.”

He picked up the block of crystal. It had been roughly polished, and I could see striations within it, like threads spun from the rock. “This is a sunstone. Iceland spar—they mine it in the east. In ancient days the Vikings used it to navigate. It is a naturally polarizing lens; you hold it to the sky when clouds hide the sun, and it changes color, so you can determine the sun’s location. Come, I’ll show you.”

We walked outside. Pétur was behind the building, bent over something that looked like a lawn mower. The sun had been swallowed by clouds the color of the lava fields near Keflavik. It was difficult to tell where the sky ended and mountains began.

Galdur looked at me. “Which way is north?”

I shrugged. “Damned if I know.”

He held the crystal in front of his face as though it were a pair of binoculars, scanned the sky, and handed the stone to me. “There—see?”

I looked through the crystal and saw a brilliant, cyanic flare in its heart. “That’s amazing.” The radiance faded as I turned in the opposite direction. “Does it work at night?”

“Only to confuse you, if you were trying to navigate by the stars. Look at Pétur there.”

I did. “Holy shit—it doubles everything.”

“It’s called birefringence. Double refraction. The crystal splits the light in two, and each beam travels at a different speed. So even though they look the same, they are different. One is an ordinary ray. The other is an extraordinary ray.”

“That’s fucking amazing.” I turned the crystal on Galdur and saw his face doubled. “Can anyone tell the difference between the two rays?”

“No.” He took the crystal from me. “‘Anyone’ cannot. But I can. For years no one believed our ancestors could have used these to steer by. Then, very recently, scientists proved that what I have always known is true. When the power grid fails, and all of those satellites have fallen from the sky, I will still be able to find true north.”

He smiled, but I couldn’t tell if he was joking. A roar split the silence and I jumped.

“The generator,” Galdur shouted as Pétur walked toward us. “Go in and take a shower while you can.”

I did, in scalding water, and kept a close eye on the stall door, then dressed in my own clothes, now dry. I still didn’t know if Galdur’s sudden conversational flashes were meant to be reassuring or if he was just biding his time to work me over with an Iron Age scalpel. I thought of my camera, in Einar’s Range Rover or tossed somewhere in the ice desert, along with my passport and Ilkka’s photos, all save the one picture hidden in my jacket lining. I stuck my hand into my pocket, but there was no envelope of crank there, no Focalin or anything else that might tweak my brain chemistry enough that I could keep myself from imagining all the ways I could die. I pulled on my boots, ran my finger across one steel-tipped toe, and returned to the main room.

With the generator on, several electric lights had blazed to life. Galdur had set the sunstone back upon the altar, upright so that it resembled a piece of contemporary sculpture. I heard the anodyne hum of an amp. Galdur stood tuning his guitar as Pétur settled behind the drum kit and threw out some one-handed rolls. I crossed my arms and watched, nodding as Pétur grinned.

“You’re good,” I said.

“Yeah, I know.” He shook his hair from his face, and they began to play.

Pétur was great. And he was fast, his sticks ricocheting between skins and snare in a blur.

But Galdur was incredible. He had that trademark black metal sound down cold—tremolo picking, when you pluck the same string repeatedly to produce a single note. You hear the same effect in traditional Irish music, where it’s usually done on a mandolin. But the most famous exemplar is probably Dick Dale’s work on “Misirlou,” which he first did live, on a bet that he couldn’t play an entire song using only one string. You might think it’s a long way from the King of the Surf Guitar to Norwegian black metal, but music makes these cosmic leaps all the time. “Misirlou” originated in Smyrna: Dick Dale had seen his Lebanese uncle play it using only a single string on an oud. Every electric guitar chord roaring down the last fifty years, from Hendrix to Buckethead, is an echo of that tremolo, and I’d kick the chair out from under anyone who claims there’s a better guitarist than Dick Dale.

Galdur came pretty fucking close. From the wrist up, his arm was completely motionless; only his fingers moved, digits on a disembodied hand. I moved close enough to get a better look at his ax, an original 1957 Strat, maple neck, alder body with that two-tone sunburst finish. A guitar worth fifty grand; an original pickguard for one will cost you four thousand bucks on eBay, if you’re lucky. This one still had all its white Bakelite pickup covers and knobs; the vinyl ones they started using as replacements turned yellow after a few years. Galdur was shredding it in a homemade Quonset hut with an amp powered by a gas generator, for an audience of one, backed up by a kid who looked like he’d been air-dropped in from an Icelandic Gap advertisement.

It was maybe the greatest musical experience of my life. Tremolo done right can sound like two guitars, not one: When I closed my eyes, I could imagine an entire band filling the room in front of me. After a few minutes, Galdur let the last few notes drain off into reverb. He adjusted the amp; Pétur dropped his sticks and started to drum with his fingertips, now and then tapping the edge of the cymbal so it rang softly, like a distant bell echoing through steady rain. I could hear the generator’s muted drone above a sudden rush of wind and feel the Quonset hut tremble slightly, as though it, too, were a bell that had been struck.

After a minute Galdur joined in with a single plucked note and then a repeated minor chord. He’d turned the volume low, so it took a while for me to recognize the same insinuating strains I’d heard first on Quinn’s turntable and then in Einar’s Range Rover. He played with his head bent over the guitar neck, tawny hair obscuring his face. Pétur nodded and after some time picked up his sticks again. The guitar chords thundered into a crackle of feedback as Galdur edged back to nudge the volume knob with his foot.

He began to sing, a resonant baritone that bore no trace of the choked snarls I’d heard on the albums at Quinn’s stall. I couldn’t understand the Icelandic words, but he sang in such a low voice I could hardly hear him anyway. Pétur mouthed the words along with him, eyes squeezed shut. Without warning, the electric lights went out, and the amp. Outside, the generator fell silent.

Pétur looked at Galdur. The only sign that Galdur had noticed was that he stepped closer to the drum kit, and Pétur quickly picked up the beat again. Instead of growing softer, the unamplified Strat actually sounded louder: I could feel that maple slab board resonating in my bones. Before, the kerosene lamps seemed to give everything a bright, varnished gloss. Now their glow seemed dulled, as though the glass chimneys were choked with ash. Pétur’s shadow flowed into that of the drum kit, looming against the wall behind him, like the mountains etched against the winter sky.

Galdur’s shadow leapt like a flame, only to disappear when he lifted his head, eyes closed, and cried out a string of words—a list of names. He looked anguished, as though he struggled to tear something from the Strat’s neck, and the guitar fought back.

I’ve seen a million guitarists work this angle onstage, and they always look like idiots. Galdur looked terrifying. If someone distracted him from whatever internal battle he fought with the music, he’d lunge for the interloper’s throat. I froze, afraid to draw attention to myself. The music rose and fell, Galdur’s guitar quickening with the howling wind outside. The sound grew monotonous, hypnotic; more than once my eyes began to close.

To distract myself, I stared at the ceiling, first at the photographs that comprised Ursa Major, and then at the only other constellation I recognized, Orion. Small photos of the stars represented his flexed bow and raised sword; a separate photograph of three stars formed Orion’s belt. These stars were much brighter than the rest and also much larger.

It took a moment to realize they weren’t stars that made up this constellation, but faces. Galdur, much younger but still glowering, his pale eyes an uncanny, bleached white. Ilkka, his dark hair long and straight, eyes invisible behind glasses splintered silver from a camera’s flash. The third face didn’t belong to a living man at all. It was a skull, cupped in their upraised hands like a trophy. Tufts of black hair protruded from desiccated skin, and a string of tendon stretched between its jaws. Something that resembled a rind of dried fruit clung to one side, with a bright spar dangling from it—a silver earring.

A wall of black water hit me, the ozone stench of damage. My ears rang, a chime that bled into the tremolo flutter of a guitar. Galdur raised his head, hair swept back from a face streaked with sweat. His topaz eyes flared, his mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying. A note welled inside me as though I had become a sounding board. The kerosene lamp behind him swayed, and I saw that its base was not rusted metal but the pitted globe of a skull, liver colored and banded with leather. The drums fell silent.

“Now, that’s what they call an evil chord.” Pétur stared at me, head cocked. “You okay?” He turned to Galdur. “She looks sick.”

Galdur slapped the Strat’s neck. A guitar string snapped as the chord flattened into a metallic thunk. Frowning, he glanced at me, then crouched over the instrument, removing a string winder from the guitar case. After a minute he stood, wound the broken string into a shining coil, and slipped it into his jeans pocket. He set the guitar against the wall, switched off the powerless amp, and stepped toward me.

“What did you see?” he asked.

I shook my head, and he grabbed my chin. “You saw something—don’t lie to me.”

I twisted to point at the ceiling. Galdur looked up, then back at me, his face torn between rage and fear.

“How do you know this?” He grabbed my arm. “How do you know Seiðhr, our ways?”

“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I shouted, and pulled away.

For a moment I thought he’d strike me. Instead he turned and strode across the room. The bedroom door slammed. I walked shakily to where the guitar leaned beneath the skull lantern and stared at the lamp’s lunar-white flame, a pulsing blue heart. Pétur came up behind me.

“What does that mean?” I asked without looking at him. “‘Saythe’—what he called me.”

“Seiðhr. It is what I spoke of before—sorcery.” He touched the lantern’s base. “I mean, if you believe in it.”

“You don’t.”

I turned to him, and he shrugged. “I believe that he believes in it. He didn’t make it up: You read about it in the sagas. Seiðhr means ‘sorcery.’ But it is, hmm, more like seeing things, you know?”

“Like clairvoyance?”

“Yes, I think so. It is like a kind of seeing, or a kind of singing, that makes the forms of things unseen visible. It is usually women’s magic, but sometimes powerful men practice it too. Like Galdur.”

“So you’re another one majoring in paganism?”

“God, no. I’m studying business and Chinese. But we talk about it a lot. Well, Galdur talks, and I listen. Mostly I just want to play the drums. Some of it makes me uncomfortable. It’s misogynistic, a bit. And other things. In black metal, a lot of the people are homophobes.” I snorted. “Yes, I know. Galdur is a complicated person.”

“No shit.”

“He’s changed a lot.” Pétur sighed. “People who knew him back then—in Oslo—the things they’ve told me, I can’t believe.”

“Like almost beating a rock journalist to death?”

“That guy should have known better.” Pétur’s blue eyes glittered. ”He should not have come here.”

“Yeah, sure. Guy was just asking for it, right?”

My irony didn’t translate: Pétur nodded in agreement. “Sure. But that was a long time ago. Galdur spends all his time now studying or looking at his telescope.”

I ran a finger across the skull’s rounded base. “I assume this is real—someone you know?”

“It’s from Gotland, Sweden. It’s very ancient. From a burial.”

“Very tasteful. I can see a whole line of these at Barneys.”

“He collects things like that. Viking artifacts. He showed you the sunstone.” Pétur shook his head. “I’m surprised, you know? That he’s speaking to you at all.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t deck me. And you know, he’s not speaking much at the moment.” I checked to make sure the bedroom door was still closed. “Listen—I’ve really, really got to get to the city. I have to catch my flight back to New York. Can you give me a lift or something? I’ll pay you.” I patted my empty pocket and tried to look ingratiating, then pointed at his drum kit. “You can tell me how you got into this whole death metal trip.”

“Black metal.” Pétur frowned. “Look, I can’t leave. I told you, I just got here. It’s my only free time: I have to return to classes at the end of the week.”

“This is totally fucked.” I kicked the wall in frustration. “I can’t be here. This is all a mistake.”

“But you are here. Maybe it’s your wyrd.” He tapped the skull lantern. “Everything you’ve ever done, coming back to bite you in the ass. That’s what Galdur would tell you, anyway.”

“Yeah, well, that would be just about my goddamn luck.”

I paced back to the center of the room. I felt exhausted and suddenly ravenous. But I couldn’t see much that looked like food, not unless you counted those cases of wine beside the door. Iron-gray light seeped through the windows, canceling out the glow of the kerosene lamps. Even indoors, I was trapped in this infernal, endless dusk. I looked up and scanned Galdur’s handmade star map. There were other black-and-white images there, stapled alongside the printouts of constellations unknown to me.

And while I couldn’t see them clearly, I discerned faces in the photographs, a telltale burst of radiance sparking from an eye or tooth. I walked to where Pétur had settled on the sofa with his laptop and nudged him.

“Who are those pictures of?”

He glanced up. “I don’t know. Friends of Galdur’s, I guess. I never really looked at them.”

The bedroom door opened. We both looked over to see Galdur pulling on a black anorak. He gave Pétur a sharp look.

“I’m going to put more gas in the generator. You obviously didn’t check when you turned it on.”

“I did, it was almost empty. The gas can was empty too.”

“There should be some in the van. You should have checked first.” Galdur pulled up his hood and walked outside.

I turned to Pétur. “He’s going to siphon gas from the van?”

“No—he stores extra containers in it so they don’t get buried by the snow. I don’t think there’s any left; he hasn’t been to Reykjavík for a long time. Or anywhere else,” he added.

“I thought he just got back from Helsinki.”

“Helsinki?” Pétur laughed. “I don’t think so! He’s never been to Finland, I don’t think. And he hasn’t been to Norway in years. When he was young he did time on that island prison, Bastøy. Manslaughter. I suppose he could return to Oslo if he wants, but he always tells me how much he hated it there and would never go back. Sometimes a promoter will try to get in touch with him, to see if he will perform, but he always says no. And of course he lost his passport. I wanted him to come with me to Rome for the holiday, and he couldn’t find it. But he never travels, so it’s not a problem.”

“He never travels? Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course. He wouldn’t go now, anyway. Jöl night, and he knew I was coming this week. No, he would never go to Helsinki,” he ended with certainty. “He has bad memories about someone there.”

I stared at the floor, cracked laminate made to look like wood. It had started to peel in yellowing strips that resembled fingernail parings. Frigid wind blasted into the room as the front door opened and Galdur stormed in, his hair and anorak covered with snow.

“What is this?”

To my shocked amazement, he held up Ilkka’s Speed Graphic camera. I had a glimpse of my own face in its reflector before he set it down, then threw something at me—the askur—followed by my satchel. The askur’s lid flew off, its grotesque relic spilling onto the floor. Pétur gagged and pulled his T-shirt over his face. I fell to my knees and grabbed my satchel, pulled my camera from the nest of wadded clothing and checked that it was intact, then clambered to my feet.

“Where did you find this?” I demanded.

“It is yours?” Galdur’s cheeks had gone pale with fury. “I found it where you put it—in the van.” He picked up the hand, walked to the door, and tossed it out into the storm. “Along with that. And my askur, which was stolen from me last fall.”

“The van? What the hell are you talking about? I’ve been inside this whole time. It was—”

Too late I tried to snatch my bag. Galdur grabbed it, turned it upside down so that my clothes went flying, along with the bulky cylinder wrapped in my shirt. He swooped on this, ripping the T-shirt open so that Ilkka’s prints scattered across the floor. Pétur caught one and stared at it, dumbfounded. Galdur bent to pick up another just as I reached for it. He straightened, lunging for me.

“What is this? What have you done? Why do you have these things?”

“Einar,” I gasped.

He dragged me to the wall, pinning me there. “Einar? My brother Einar? What are you saying?”

“Your brother kidnapped me.” I fought to keep my voice steady. “In Reykjavík. He said he was coming here and then he dumped me out there somewhere—” I gestured at the door. “He left me to die. I walked here; I don’t know how but I did. That’s all I know.”

“No.” Galdur shook his head. “This is your bag, your cameras. These clothes are yours, yes? And these photos—how did you get these photos? Tell me.”

So I told him. At the news of Ilkka’s death he grabbed me again. I thought he’d strangle me, but Pétur pulled him away. Finally I fell silent. Galdur remained where he was, breathing heavily. Then he slapped me, hard enough that blood sprayed from my nose across the wall.

“Again. I want to hear it again.”

I tried to stanch the bleeding with my sleeve and recounted it all a second time. Pétur retreated to the couch but said nothing. His gaze flicked from me to Galdur and then to the photo in his hand. By the time I was done, Galdur’s tawny eyes had grown so bloodshot they appeared crimson in the lantern flame.

“You’re lying,” he said.

“Lying? Who the hell could make this shit up?”

Galdur didn’t reply. He stepped away, staring up at the trompe l’oeil constellation formed by the photograph of him and Ilkka and their trophy skull. His face contorted—with rage, I thought, and I flinched, fearing another blow. But when he turned to me once more, I saw that he was weeping.

“This should not have happened,” he whispered.

“What in hell did happen?” Pétur shook his head, holding up the Jólasveinar photo of the man beneath the ice. “Who is this man? Who killed him?”

“I don’t know who he was. A vagrant,” said Galdur. “We found him in the forest one day, where he should not have been. Near my friend’s cabin. He was drunk and propositioned me.”

Pétur gave a sharp, disbelieving laugh. “And you killed him?”

Galdur turned that malefic, unblinking gaze on Pétur. I edged away, but Galdur didn’t seem to notice. Neither did Pétur, who returned Galdur’s stare fearlessly.

“Yes,” said Galdur. “I do not regret it. I made an offering: His death was a gift. The salmon were very grateful.”

“I can’t believe this.” Pétur began to pace, running his hands through his long hair. “Do the police know?”

“No one knows,” said Galdur.

“Was Ilkka there with you?” I asked. “In the woods?”

“Yes, of course. Ilkka was always there. It was two, three months in the winter; we moved from one place to another place. There are always people who are where they should not be.”

“Why did you stop?”

Galdur’s gaze remained fixed on Pétur. “The police began paying attention to other people we knew. Ilkka returned to Oslo to do other things. When I was arrested for manslaughter, he would not have contact with me: He was afraid the police would ask questions and learn about the Jólasveinar sacrifices. Ilkka left the country, and when I was released I had no more reason to be there, so I came back to Niceland.”

He went to the table where he’d set the Speed Graphic, picked it up, and turned it gently in his hands. I could see a fine line across the blue flashbulb that Ilkka had hoarded for so long, for nothing. After all that time and care, the fragile glass had finally been damaged.

“It was Ilkka’s idea,” Galdur said, and stared at the camera. “That we should resanctify the Jólasveinar. He had such great passion for many things. Every day for the last fifteen years, I have thought of him.”

Pétur glanced at me, then at Galdur. “So you didn’t kill him?”

“Why would I kill him?” Galdur retorted angrily. “How could I kill him? I have not left here in months. And Ilkka would not speak to me. I have not seen him in all this time!”

He stepped to the pile of rocks in the center of the room, bent, and placed Ilkka’s camera directly behind the sunstone. I could see the reflector’s eye staring back at me through the clouded crystal, its flawed iris a darker blue than it had been, almost violet. “‘We know that love will be reborn,’” he recited softly, “‘that death holds its own marvels, that both worlds hold joy.’”

For several minutes no one spoke. I touched my nose gingerly, drew away a finger flecked with blood. Then I picked up my leather jacket and withdrew the photo I’d hidden in the lining. I stared at it, then handed it to Galdur.

“Remember this guy?” He looked at the photo, his mouth grim. “Who was he?”

“This is the basement at Forsvar. I don’t know his name. Someone who owed Anton money.”

“That’s Anton?” I pointed to the stocky man with thinning hair. Galdur nodded. “Who are the others?”

“Ilkka Kaltunnen. Brynja Ingvarsdottir. Myself. Quinn O’Boyle.” His ran a finger across one of the shadowy forms. “Nils Pederson.”

“What happened to him?”

“He hanged himself a few months later.”

“Why was Quinn there?”

“He was there because Anton paid him.” Galdur rested his hands upon his knees and bowed his head, as though praying. “Quinn disposed of things for him.”

“Like this guy?”

“Among others.”

“Is this when you made the tape?” He nodded. “Why? Why would you make a recording of something like that?”

“Ilkka thought we should. As a ritual, but also as a competitive thing, he thought, with some of the others in the scene. To prove we’d really done a blood sacrifice. I was the one who thought we should use it on the track. We only played it that once, in the studio, and then Ilkka destroyed the tape.”

“He didn’t destroy it. He kept it in his darkroom. I didn’t know what it was; I took it and then I played it in Einar’s car.”

Pétur stood. “This is crazy. This conversation, both of you…” He shot me a desperate look. “You know these people too? Maybe you killed them all, right? Maybe that’s why you’re here now.”

“He set you up,” I said slowly, and looked at Galdur. “Your brother. That’s why your passport disappeared. He needed money. Ilkka or Anton told him about the deal for the photos; he killed them and took the cash and the photos. Did he know about the Jólasveinar?”

Galdur’s eyes widened. “Yes. I told him, once, a long time ago. A year or so after this all happened. Einar and I had been drinking. It was before I went to prison. He was the only one I ever told, because … he is my brother. I wanted someone to understand.”

“Yeah, well, he understood, all right.” I walked over to the skull lantern and stared into its guttering flame. “He had your passport and used it when he went to Oslo and Helsinki four days ago. Even if he didn’t need it to travel, he could flash it around and someone would have a record that you’d been there. You look enough alike. I don’t know what he did to Baldur; but the others, he set it up like one of your Yule guys. He broke Suri’s neck in the door, and I guess he took her hand, because…”

I looked at Galdur questioningly.

“Because he’s a fucking freak,” said Pétur.

“He knew it would work.” Galdur stared at the skull lantern and then at the stone altar. “The police would come here and see all these things and remember that I was in prison, also some other events.”

“Were there tire tracks outside?” Pétur asked, and walked to the window and peered out. “Now it’s snowing hard.”

“I saw no tracks. But the wind would have covered them.” said Galdur. “She left no tracks, either.”

“‘Winter swallows everything,’” I said. I got the bottle of Focalin from my bag and popped three of them dry. “That’s what Ilkka told me.”

“You spoke with him?”

“Yeah. That was the whole point of this enterprise—to look at his photos. Anton wanted my eye.” I laughed. “He got the whole shooting match.”

“What did you tell him? Not Anton—what did you tell Ilkka?”

I looked at Galdur, and for a second saw the same boy Ilkka must have known, long blond hair framing a face so beautiful and fraught with expectation that I had to turn away.

“I told him they were amazing,” I said at last. “The most beautiful photos I’ve ever seen.”

Galdur was silent. He took my chin in his hand, tilted my head, and gazed at me, his finger tracing the scar beside my eye and the open wound left by the raven. “You have his eyes,” he said.

He let go of me and sank back onto the couch. “Einar has betrayed everyone he ever knew.”

I sighed. “Well, he thinks on his feet, I’ll tell you that. He dumped me out there, dumped my stuff in your Econoline, and hightailed it back to Reykjavík. Would he know Pétur was here with you?”

“Why should he? We don’t talk. Pétur’s car is parked in back; probably Einar didn’t see it there. So…”

Galdur clapped his hands and stood. “I have an alibi. Lots of alibis,” he added with a glance at me.

“You’ll need them.” Pétur turned from the window, his face grim. “Because someone is coming.”