Dustin Long - Icelander

Sometimes I really want to XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX {illegible/scrawled-over} .

There is much that I do not understand.

All my words shall be stallion, not a workhorse among them. We must create incomprehensible things in order to have an analogy for our incomprehension of the universe. Obscure reality to make it more attractive. We must keep secrets, so that others may have the pleasure of uncovering them: wow .

She succeeded in creating many incomprehensible things.

Trying to chat with the shopgirl while the son was off taking a piss and the father was still busy “niggling,” I suddenly realized just how strange it was to be in a place where I couldn’t understand the local language and no one would speak to me in English, so I just shut up and headed outside. The father was already standing outside the shop door, smoking another cigarette. This time I didn’t even bother to hint that I wanted one.

The son took his time, but eventually he came out, and I followed him and his dad through the turnstiles and down a long unlit tunnel. And then we entered the first major cavern, which—according to my guidebook—was known as the Hall of Foxes.

I have never had much fondness for hounds. When I was a young boy I had a hound. He would often chew things that I did not want him to chew, and though it was I who answered for his crimes, he refused to learn from my instruction. I had but a small fondness for him.

My wife has a fondness for hounds. This increases my ill feeling toward the creatures, for I am selfish and Emily’s fondness could be devoted all the more strongly to me were she to refuse it to them. I have told her this often. Though it was a hound that first brought me to my Emily. The Fenris Dachshund is a good hound, as hounds go. I do not always object when he licks my face. Hounds have their place in this world, but that place is mostly not within my fondness.

Every dog has his day, and a bad dog might have two .

It is last night and I am reading Shirley’s journals for the first time since her death.

She kept no record of dates. Her habit was to open journals at random and write her words wherever her pen first found empty space. This renders her story difficult to follow. It was her pleasure to be cryptic.

I can’t tell Blaise about this .

What cur was this of which she could not tell me? What deed was it for which Shirley deemed him a “bad dog”?

The portions of the journal which aspire to relate particular events tell me very little. Her shorthand was overly honed.

Clement weather, meeting tonight, café with bad Turkish phlogiston. Ugh. Consistency like: mud? K. Order something else. Or at least know next time not to drink the dregs .

But I know my wife better than this. The surface of these entries is not where her story is to be read. I know her tricks, for she was always too eager to explain them to me. I see from this last fragment, for instance, that I was the cuckoo—what happened in Denmark?—and I begin the journals yet again with this new view in my mind.

“It’s good to see you,” Constance Lingus said as we met her halfway down the block. She looked a bit ridiculous with her short ginger hair and puffy red jacket framing her cold-flushed freckled face. “I figured you wouldn’t be far from your dog.”

“Where!” I grabbed her and my father each by an arm and dragged them back in the direction from which she’d come.

“Well, what is the cause d’aventure today, then?”

“I’m just looking for my dog.”

“I am only too delighted to show you the way to your missing pup, but I thought that perhaps you could be enticed to answer a few—No need to pinch, now! I can better lead the way if you unhand me.”

“Sorry… I’ve been worried about him all morning, though. I just want to make sure he’s okay.”

She rubbed her arm over-dramatically where I’d been holding her.

“Well, you need worry no more. He looked to be having a very good time, bounding through the snow in pursuit of some canine companion. I hesitantly suggest that we can safely slow to a saunter without endangering his life.”

“I don’t want to lose him.”

Constance murmured something snide to which I chose not to reply.

“Addressing Mr. Ymirson, now,” she continued, “I wanted to tell you that I overheard the police call about your library. I’d been on my way there to make sure that no one had fallen in the way of harm when I happened across first your dog and then the two of you. As we head away from the fire, might I ask if its source has been determined yet?”

“They haven’t told us anything official,” I answered.

“The police call didn’t say anything about any injuries, at least. Or deaths… I suppose you’ve heard about Shirley?”

“I got the call yesterday.”

“I should mention that I’m covering the story… An interview—”

“She is that dread reporter, dear thing. Do not answer her questions.”

“Sorry, Connie, but I’m going to have to bow to my father’s wishes on this one.”

The father and son were leading the way, and the passage was pretty narrow, so I didn’t get any preview of the Hall of Foxes until I’d already entered it. Once I saw it, though, it just sucked the breath right out of my lungs. I’d been expecting something like the underground cities of Turkey—cramped passageways connecting the relatively few rooms that you could actually stand in. But not even the Catacombs of Alexandria could have prepared me for this.

The cavern must have been about thirty meters high, which was odd since I didn’t think we’d descended that far. The walls formed a rough pentagon, and scenes from Vanatru mythology were carved all over them. I recognized a few of the images, like Frey’s death in the autumn and his resurrection in the spring, but most of the significance was lost on me.

Natural pillars of shiny, black volcanic rock held up the ceiling, which was blanketed in ormolu lichen. The neon tubes back in the shop had led me to expect something more glaring and sickly, but the glow of the real thing was gentle. Organic, and warm like steam. The look of it, like the green sky before a Midwestern thunderstorm, [27] The Master’s description of a similar scene in The Fox in the Snow ( The Memoirs of Emily Bean Vol. 4) as “the light of a green sun whose orb was diffused across the entirety of the sky” takes into literary account the fact that the primary deity of the Vanatru religion is Frey—a sun god—and not the more popular thunder god apparently favored by the author of the current narrative. almost made me forget I was underground.

The locals had set up a few booths along the main avenue through the cavern. They were mostly just hawking the usual souvenirs—fake wooden idols and fox figurines, some dried bits of ormolu lichen—but next to one of the booths there was a dirty little black-haired kid selling these glossy four-colored maps. Somehow I’d thought everyone here would look stereotypically Nordic, but—based on the people I’d seen so far—most of the Vanatru were smaller and darker than my expectations. The kid was wearing a shirt that read “Adodis” and had a subtle knock-off of an Adidas logo on it. Something about that just cracked me up, so I asked him how much the maps were.

“You won’t need that,” the son told me.

I bought one anyway, though, and then we headed down the avenue.

Once we’d gotten a little beyond the main cavern, the avenue walls bottlenecked together. Like that narrow canyon that Harrison Ford goes through in Indiana Jones before he finds the Grail Castle. Now that we were in the son’s territory, I suddenly noticed there was no more talk of Hollywood.