I couldn’t rest. After a few minutes, I got up as quietly as I could and paced the room, waiting until Quinn began to breathe deeply. I stood over him and watched him, his arm flung out above his head, mouth slightly open to show one eyetooth.
Quinn slept like the dead when he napped, an hour, sometimes longer. The rum would help push that limit. When I was sure he wouldn’t wake, I took the car keys from where he’d tossed them on the nightstand. I wasn’t signed on the rental agreement as a driver, but I didn’t plan on going far, or for long. I grabbed my leather jacket and camera and left.
I hurried downstairs and through the lobby. No sign of the girl behind the hotel desk. I strode to the car, glancing up at the shipping containers as I slid into the front seat. A young woman in a head scarf stood in the open doorway of the same apartment where I’d seen the boy the night before. When she noticed me, she went inside and shut the door.
I followed the route that Quinn and I had taken earlier. There was hardly any traffic. All of the snow had blown off the road, and gashes of blue sky showed through the unsettled clouds overhead. When I reached the gravel road, I did a U-turn. I drove back a short distance and pulled onto the shoulder, parking beneath a dense overhang of conifers. I sat, waiting to make sure no cars came into view. The sun was already a third of the way above the horizon. I’d track its passage and give myself half an hour before heading back.
I slung my camera around my neck and got out, ran across the road and down the gravel drive to clamber up the embankment and into the trees. I passed the dead fox, another raven picking at the ground beneath it, and kept going. Beech and birch gave way to more recent growth, ash and conifers that formed a nearly impenetrable thicket with lethally sharp branches. I fought my way through, trying to keep my camera from getting snagged. Every few minutes I paused to listen for any sound: a car, footsteps, voices. I heard only a few birds and the steady patter of dead evergreen needles dropping to the ground.
The trees began to thin. The spruces had been cut, and their stumps formed a treacherous maze, slick with acid-green moss. Dead ferns rattled in the wind. The smell of fresh manure overwhelmed the resinous scent of spruce.
I halted, debating whether to continue. A few yards to my left, the gravel road turned to packed earth, wide enough for one vehicle and cratered with potholes and frost heaves. Directly in front of me, a fence made of woven branches marked the edge of a field of close-cropped, yellowing grass and wind-stunted trees. Their trunks and limbs all pointed the same way, so that they appeared to be crawling across the field. Half a dozen boulders stood in the pasture. Then one of the boulders moved, and another, until all had turned to stare at me. Not boulders but sheep, five black ewes and a black ram with an imposing set of curled horns. They seemed not to blink, each of their eerie amber eyes slashed by a horizontal black pupil.
I held my breath. Those woven branches wouldn’t be much of a barrier if the sheep decided to charge. But they remained motionless, their gaze never leaving me. After a minute, I slowly lifted my camera, staring through the viewfinder at the black ram. I focused the lens until the viewfinder held nothing but a single iris, its flattened pupil a portal into an unknowable darkness. I adjusted the focus a hair’s breadth, pushed the shutter release.
The ram snorted and bolted toward me. I fled, keeping to the woods bordering that rough one-lane road.
When I was a safe distance from the sheep, I cautiously hopped down onto the road. Behind me, it wound between trees and fields, disappearing from view. Ahead, it curved out of sight, fences and fields dissolving into black spruce and white birch. There were tire tracks in the dirt at my feet, deep ruts where a vehicle had gotten stuck and churned the mud into a knee-high ridge, now frozen.
I assumed the road led to a house or farm. But the only structure I could see was a small wooden outbuilding tucked into a pine grove—not much more than a shed, painted white with a red metal roof, small windows with lace curtains, and a red door. I couldn’t see any lights or flicker of motion; caught no sound of voices, TV, or radio or computer. If anyone was inside, they would have seen me by now and confronted me.
My head ached from the steady cold wind. Clouds hid a sun the color of solder. I thought of Quinn asleep in that dismal room, waking to find me gone. I should head back. I should eat, but the crank had long since burned any hunger from me. I should do what Quinn had told me to do, forget all this and return with him to Reykjavík.
Instead I headed for the shed, ducking beneath pine boughs until I reached the back of the structure. The white clapboards were veined with black mold. A door with a small window sagged from its hinges. I wiped cobwebs and grime from the glass and peered inside.
Dim light filtered through lace curtains webbed with dust. A surfboard rested atop the rafters. Hand tools lay in neat rows on a worktable against one wall, and glass jars filled with screws, nails, nuts, and bolts. Knives glinted on a piece of leather, arranged by size, the smallest as long as my finger, the largest a wicked crescent, like a scimitar.
I jiggled the doorknob. It was unlocked. I stepped inside, closing the door behind me, and clapped a hand over my mouth and nose against the reek of mildew and a fainter odor of decay, like a dead mouse trapped beneath the floorboards; also a choking chemical smell that reminded me of high-school biology class. Formaldehyde or some type of solvent. Eyes streaming, I cracked open the back door, letting in a waft of cold air, and looked around.
Open cardboard boxes covered the floor, all filled with dirt. Posters had been tacked to a wall—a white singer named Saga, the logo for the band Skrewdriver. As I drew closer to examine a third poster, my skin crawled.
It was the back-cover art for Stone Ships, the album by Jötunn’s Egg. The same ancient monument made of sharp-edged stones; same moody background of a mist-bound evergreen forest. Whoever spent time in this shed knew the Svarlight label.
I turned away. On another wall, more implements hung from a pegboard: shears, forceps, hammers and saws, trowels, a hatchet. Stacks of feathered masks covered a worktable, wings jutting above eyeholes punched in the leather. I stepped through the maze of cardboard boxes and picked up one of the masks.
It wasn’t a mask but a skinned bird, its boneless torso soft and pliant as a glove. I set it aside to examine another bird, with a long slender black bill and dangling twiglike legs. In addition to dozens of birds, there were skinned rabbits, squirrels, voles, shrews, bats. A tiny hedgehog; mice. All eyeless.
I picked up a rat, its jaws parted in a toothy snarl, and sniffed. It smelled musty, but it wasn’t the source of the fetid odor that permeated the shed. Neither were the birds or small mammals.
I glanced out the window and did another lap around the room. A dead raven lay on a small table, its outstretched wings pinned to a piece of cardboard and exuding the stink of decay. A recent kill. The eye staring up at me had shriveled to a dull gray seed. When I grasped the raven’s beak and gently turned it, flies rose in a dizzying swarm.
In the raven’s other eye was a minute hole, as though an insect had burrowed to the skull beneath. I lifted my camera and zoomed in, tightening the focus until I could see a telltale black pinprick in the iris, then let the camera fall back against my chest. The raven’s eye had been penetrated by a dart’s tip, just like Harold’s, and Tommy’s.