Very early the next morning, I untangled myself from Quinn. I staggered into the bathroom and retched, took a quick shower, did a bump, and stumbled back into the other room. My blinding headache subsided. I dressed and left Quinn still sleeping as I went downstairs. In the office, the girl with the Mohawk sat folding towels as she sang loudly and out of tune.
“Oh! Hej hej.” She smiled and removed her earbuds. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Is there someplace I can get coffee?”
“Oh sure.” She pointed to a table in the lobby. “I just made some this morning, help yourself. Or there’s a café at the harbor.”
“This is fine, thanks.”
She returned to her towels. I poured some coffee and sipped it, black, willing my hands to stop trembling as I gazed out the window. Cars drove past, sending up yellowish spume from the potholes. I finished the coffee and poured myself another cup, stepped to the side window to stare at the annex.
“Are those shipping containers?”
The girl plucked out her earbuds again. “Sorry?”
“That building looks like it’s made of shipping containers.”
“It is. The former owner, he won them in a bet. They used to be for visiting workers at the cement plant. Now we rent them out.”
“Must be popular for honeymoons.”
The girl laughed. “We don’t get too many lovers staying here.”
“I saw someone up there last night. Kids.”
“Yeah, there are some refugee families. Their house outside town burned down, they’re only here temporarily.”
“I thought that was over a year ago. You’d think if someone firebombed your home, they wouldn’t put you in a meat locker.”
The girl reddened. “It wasn’t a firebomb. It was an accident.”
“That’s not what I read.”
“No one has proved anything.” She began folding a towel with surprising vehemence. “I don’t know why they are here. We have no jobs on Kalkö. And Sweden has more refugees than anywhere in Europe, did you know that? The most, for a country of this size. Since I was born, there are twenty-five percent more Muslims here. The government pays for them—”
She gestured at the stairs. “But I live here with my brothers because we can’t afford our own flat.”
She gave me a challenging look. I just shrugged.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I said. “Do you have a pen and a piece of paper?”
She yanked open a drawer and produced a pen and a small pad of paper. “You can keep that.”
I stuck them in my pocket, refilled my mug and poured coffee into a second one, adding a splash of milk and four spoonfuls of sugar for Quinn, and made my way back upstairs. Quinn was in the shower. I set down the coffee and sat cross-legged on the bed, pulled out pen and paper, and stared at the blank sheet.
My nerves blazed like a lit fuse, the memory of symbols tumbling through the air in front of me, red and violet and indigo.
Wavelet. Fourier transform. Svarlight. Valknut. Ludus Mentis. Mind game. Lamps and banners. It’s all code.
I scribbled down the words and shut my eyes, trying to concentrate on just one of them.
Valknut.
Where had I seen it? Written in blood on Harold’s forehead, tattooed on Freya’s wrist, and Erik’s hand; carved onto an ancient Viking stone with figures of dead men and Valkyries.
What did it mean? Something about being among the chosen. Valknut, Vikings, Valkyrie…
I flashed to when I was in Reykjavík, searching for Quinn, and a bartender had spoken to me of Valkyries, quoting from an ancient saga.
“We sisters weave our cloth with the entrails of men, their severed heads: corpse carriers, our bounty chosen from the bodies of the slain.”
Someone else in Iceland had said much the same thing, a woman whose brother had just been murdered.
“On all sides she gathers hordes of the dead, back bent to bear them homeward to Hell. Shield-maiden, skull-heavy.” That is you…
So had a serial killer on an island off the coast of Maine.
You and me, we carry the dead on our backs…
And so had I, without even realizing it. That’s what photography is, I’d told Gryffin. A massive necropolis. The dead, we carry them with us everywhere we go.
If Tindra was right, and humans were all code, or coded, then we each might hold some meaning within us and some symbol to represent it.
Like a Valkyrie. Because what is a photographer but a chooser of the slain, someone who decides who or what is destined for immortality.
You’ll figure it out, Tindra had said of the valknut.
A Valkyrie would know which corpse to bear to Valhalla because it was marked with the valknut. That was why Tindra had turned white when I showed her that photo on Gryffin’s mobile. The symbol drawn on Harold’s forehead had not been meant for me or Gryffin or the police. It was a warning for Tindra.