We walked, the only sounds our feet crunching on the thin snow and the hiss of wind through evergreen needles. My jaw ached from clenching my teeth against the crank and the cold. My entire leg had started to feel numb.
“What happened to your boyfriend?” Tindra asked.
“Huh?”
“The guy with the glasses, the bookseller. What happened to him?”
“You mean Gryffin? He wasn’t my boyfriend.”
“Why not? He seemed nice.”
“He’s a geek.”
“I’m a geek.”
“You’re an entirely different level of geek—you’ve invented some kind of mind control app.”
“It’s not mind control. It’s a symbolic language.”
“It’s fucked up, is what it is. The day after I left your place, your friend Lyla tracked me down. She said you’d gone missing, you and your dog. Her brother went to find you, he got some text that showed your dog had been killed. What happened?”
Her composure broke. She began to cry. “Bunny—someone poisoned Bunny. I don’t know how, but they did. In the park, we were going to the demonstration, and suddenly he fell over and then he was dead.”
“And you recorded it on your phone?”
“I thought he was having a seizure, I wanted to show the veterinarian so she could help him. But he, he just died so quickly, I never had time…”
“It was the same drug that killed Harold. The same thing he used on you. Etorphine hydrochloride, an animal tranquilizer. This—”
I reached into my bag for the remaining dart. “There’s enough here to knock us both out. Have you ever seen one of these before?”
Wiping her eyes, she nodded. “I think so. Something like it—on the farm when I was still at home. There was a bad ram, with enormous horns. Me and a friend were playing in the field, the ram attacked us—it tried to gore her. We ran away and my father called a man he knew from Norderby. He came over with one of those guns and shot it and took it off in a trailer.”
I put away the dart. “Why were you even at that demonstration? Did you meet him there? Ville?”
She began to walk, fast. I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. “Tell me—how did you know he was going to be there?” She said nothing, and I tightened my grip. “Tell me, damn it!”
“I keep track of him online,” she finally admitted. “There’s a Herla discussion board where he’s active. I log in under a different name to see what he’s doing.”
“You’re stalking him.”
She pried my hand from her arm. “If you want to call it that. When I saw he was going to be in London, I texted him.”
“When was this?”
“A few weeks ago. We started talking a few times after that. I told him what I’d been working on. That I was developing an app to help people recover from trauma, and forgiveness was part of that, but it wasn’t something you could just program into an app. So I needed to see him.”
“And he agreed?”
“Yes, a few days ago.”
I shook my head. “So you arranged some kind of date at a Nazi rally?”
“I wanted him to trust me.”
“Trust you?” I tried to get a suss on what was going on. Maybe she wasn’t lying to me outright, but she was hiding something. If she’d really wanted to forgive him, her plan had backfired, big-time. It seemed likely that Birdhouse had raped her while she was unconscious in that cell beneath the cottage.
“Back in London,” I said. “When you told me about Ludus Mentis, you said you’d been abused as a kid, but you weren’t afraid of him anymore. You said when your code was complete, you were going to make him disappear completely. What did you mean?”
“Nothing. I was wrong. I don’t need the book for that—I can make him disappear now.” She took a breath. “There’s a flaw in the unfinished code. But it’s not a bug. It’s a feature.”
“This bug—it’s what happened to me, right? When you showed it to me—I had a flashback to when I was raped. It was horrible. It didn’t help my PTSD. It triggered it.”
“That was the first time I shared it with anyone. I didn’t know what it would do.”
“But now you do. It triggers a memory of the most terrifying thing that ever happened to someone. I mean, how the fuck do you make a feature out of that?”
“I do nothing. It finds where traumatic memories are stored and restores them. Once I have the book and finish the code, Ludus Mentis will be able to shuffle those same memories so that they no longer have the same emotional power over you. It’s like shuffling a deck of cards to get a different outcome. But now—”
“But now it triggers a flashback. A violent flashback. Maybe you weren’t sure what it would do when you showed it to me, but you figured it out pretty fast. I only looked at it for a few seconds. And if somebody else…”
I thought of Tommy. Did she even know he was dead? “If someone else was exposed to it for longer,” I went on, “someone who had PTSD, or a history of violence—it could make them crazy.”
She nodded. “Yes. Like a berserker. You know what they are? Viking fighters who became like animals in battle.”
“So if that’s a possible outcome, why would you take a chance on letting a bunch of neo-Nazis get hold of it?”
“It was a mistake. A big mistake, yes. But I can fix it.” In the near darkness, her white skin, black hair, and black clothing made her seem like something conjured from the snow and icy wind. “Him, my father, Erik, those people in the park…how do we live with such evil?”
“Going to the police and telling them about those missing girls might be a start.”
“The police here will do nothing. People on Kalkö disappear. Women, refugees. There was a fire, and the police did nothing.”
“But you have proof—he put you in a cell and drugged you! And you said he killed someone else. I think you’re right.”
I drew the retainer from my bag. “I found this in his shed. He has boxes there where he puts animal skulls to decompose. Did you know that?”
“He showed me when I first got here. For his photographs, like in the book. He’s very proud of his pictures.”
“It’s not just animals. You need to show this retainer to the cops.”
“Dra åt helvete.” She pushed away my hand. “Did you go to the police when you were attacked?”
“Yes.”
“Did they help you?”
“No. But—”
“‘No. But.’ Do you know how many times I’ve heard women say that? ‘My husband, he hits me, I know I should leave, but.’ ‘I walked somewhere I’d never been before and was attacked and raped, but.’ ‘My father murdered my sister because she kissed a boy, but.’ I am not going to the police. I’ll be done before they get here.”
I shoved the retainer into my pocket. “Did you tell Birdhouse about The Book of Lamps and Banners?”
“Of course not,” she replied, too quickly.
“Listen to me.” I pulled out the dart again and brandished it in her face. “Harold Vertigan was killed by a dart like this one. So was Bunny. It’s the same drug Birdhouse used on you. He must have known about the book! Did you tell him when you met in London?”
“I don’t know.” She wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Maybe I did say something. But it was an accident if I did.”
“I’ll say it was a fucking accident.”
“What business is it of yours?”
“It’s my business because I got dragged into your business.”
“No one dragged you into it.”
“Your friend Lyla did.”
“Lyla?” Her eyes widened in alarm. “Did she send you? Is that why you’re here? Did she send you to look for me?”
“No.” I stared at her, confused. Why would she be afraid of Lyla? She and Tommy were Tindra’s only friends—more than friends, Gryffin thought.
So why did she look terrified when I brought up Lyla’s name? And why hadn’t she once mentioned Tommy? I shut my eyes, suddenly dizzy.
“You did it,” I said slowly. “No one else knows about the app, no one else knows what it does. Tommy’s PTSD…when Bunny died, you sent him the video, and when he found you, you used the app on him. Witnesses saw him arguing with a woman. It was you. That’s why he attacked those people without warning.”
“I loved Tommy! I didn’t kill him. The police did.”
“The police didn’t. Gwilym Birdhouse did, with another of his toy darts. They’ll see that once they get the toxicology report.” I began to shake. “You saw what it did to me. How could you do that to Tommy?”
“Because of Bunny. I wanted Tommy to find Ville and hurt him.”
“But you knew what would happen—”
“I didn’t know. I saw what happened with you, but that might have been a spurious effect. I needed to find out if it was replicable.
“When Bunny died, I knew it was Ville who killed him. Harold, then Bunny…I put it together. Ville stole the book, and he knew I had developed the app. The dart that killed Bunny was meant for me. Maybe not enough to kill me, just to sedate me. But enough to kill a dog. I texted Tommy that Ville was at the rally and told him to meet me there. When he did, I showed him Ludus Mentis—I hoped he would hunt down Ville.”
“But you knew you couldn’t control it.”
“It doesn’t matter now.”
“Have you used it on yourself?”
“A few times.”
She raised her head to stare at me, and I felt the way I had when I saw my reflection in the camera lens at Slagghögen: that I gazed into the empty eye sockets of a skull. Using the flawed version of Ludus Mentis on herself hadn’t relieved Tindra’s anguish. It had allowed her trauma to consume her, like the larvae in Gwilym Birdhouse’s cardboard boxes.
Tindra’s icy hand touched mine, and we halted.
“We’re there,” she said.
Through the trees I saw the back of the same house I’d observed earlier. There were no lights on other than the floodlight. The shadow from the Odinist totem stretched across the yard, a black path leading to the front door. Between us and the house, a mass of weedy-looking trees formed a thick natural hedgerow.
I looked at Tindra. “Do they have a dog?”
“Not anymore.”
“How early do they wake up?”
“Early. Erik has to go check on the sheep.” She glanced at the sky. “But this won’t take long. We should have plenty of time.”
She started toward the house. I pulled her back. “What the hell are you doing?”
“I told you, I’m not afraid of them.”
“Well, I am. Do you have a plan? Tell me.”
“Do you know the story of the Alder King?” she asked. “In English, I think people call it the Erlking.”
“Like the poem by Goethe?”
“Goethe mistranslated it. It’s a Scandinavian legend, not a German one. The alder is an evil tree that captures young girls and kills them so it will grow. It’s a real tree, and it really is evil—see those?”
She pointed to the hedgerow. “Those are alders. They grow where the ground is boggy. They have a bacteria inside that allows their roots to grow underwater, and they grow so thickly they blot the light, so no other plant or tree can thrive around them. If you cut down an alder, a hundred new shoots will grow from its base.”
“How do you get rid of it?”
“You can’t. Erik said if you let goats eat the alders one year, and then pigs the next year, the alders will die. But you see that hasn’t happened here. And you can’t burn them, because their roots are underwater. They just keep coming back, no matter how many times you think you’ve killed them.”
Without a backward glance at me, she darted off.
I took off after her, but as soon as I hit the hedgerow, I floundered. Too late I realized she must have known a way around the alders. My boots punched through a skin of ice, sinking into frigid water. I slogged through it, muck the consistency of wet cement sucking at my boots. When I tried to move, I couldn’t. I’d heard of treacherous marshland and quickmud: Wasn’t that what preserved all those sacrificial victims thrown into northern European bogs thousands of years ago?
My chest tightened. I reached for two branches in front of me, grasped them, and pulled myself forward. After a moment, the mud released my boots. I dragged myself a few more feet, until the mud gave way to dead grass, and I staggered into the yard.
I wiped my hands on my jeans and opened my bag to check that the Nikon was undamaged. My fingers brushed against the leaf from The Book of Lamps and Banners.
I stared at the page. It’s all there, not a line missing. I’ll be able to complete writing a code that was begun thousands of years ago.
It was too dark for me to make out the luminous figures, but I knew they were there: decapitated heads, green arrows and swastikas, a tree whose uncounted branches grew from a single trunk. On the reverse side, runes that I couldn’t read, though maybe the people who lived here could.
Angar’s work, beware, this is power…
I headed toward the house.