Dustin Long - Icelander

“Have you heard?” he’d asked, tentative, perhaps unsure of how to broach such a troubling subject if she hadn’t. But before she could answer he’d ordered a pint of Heidrun for himself and another for her. She’d drunk already six of the same, and the two of them continued to drink until their wallets were emptied.

Once, when Our Heroine was sixteen, she drank a couple of 250-pound Norwegian thugs under the table. Her mother had uncovered their secret smuggling ring, and they had been holding her captive in the hidden basement of an Orkney haberdashery for two days. Ever resourceful, however, she managed to convince them to play a few rounds of King’s Cup—a drinking game that they had mentioned to her on the first day of her captivity—ostensibly just to pass the time.

“You’ll have to untie my hands,” she’d told them.

“Uh… I dunno. The boss definitely told us not to…”

“Look, are we going to play or not? I’m sure not trusting either one of you to pour shots down my gullet. Or are you scared that I’m going to overpower the two of you?”

“Ah, go on. Untie her, Haakon.”

Our Heroine wrapped herself in Hubert’s white robe—pulled from the hook behind the bathroom door—sheveled her golden hair into a thin black elastic that she’d left on the sink-top the previous evening, and returned to the bedroom. Standing just this side of the doorway, in a robe that was not her own, she gained new understanding of the situation. She was alone, in Hubert Jorgen’s house.

All variety of villainy crept heh-hehing into her head. There were closets and drawers to rummage through, diaries to find and read, possibly some hidden stashes of pornography to peruse… The forbidden door in the basement to look behind (she wouldn’t have even been curious if he hadn’t expressly forbidden her to look behind it the night before; why did he always have to act so mysterious?). She had Hubert’s whole physical subconscious to explore. [1] In the typescript, an interesting interpolation, more Valisonian than much of the text, has been stricken through: “Crawling eight years old, cramped, through passages of porous rock that crumbled beneath knees and fingers, crashing down to disrupt the final phase of Prescott’s ascension—or at ten, with a twist of a rusty candelabra (cadabra, as she called it), discovering the hidden staircase in her own home in New Crúiskeen, then spiraling up to years of musty solitude and…” One wonders where this passage could have led. But this fancy was only fleeting, replaced almost immediately by further grim recollection. Of yesterday. Of Shirley. And suddenly Our Heroine’s exploratory impulses felt frivolous, forcing her again to reappraise her situation. She was alone, in Hubert Jorgen’s house.

Leaving then the bedroom and sweeping through the rest of the place did not dissolve her sense of solitude. Hubert was not in the study reorganizing his collection of Vanaheimic relics or in the library parsing the mysteries of some ancient Refurserkir tome. Neither was he in the kitchen thoughtfully preparing her breakfast. She poured herself a large glass of water. Well, then. It was time to go.

Our Heroine first met Hubert Jorgen during the case of the Reykjavik Museum Manuscript Murders. [2] See Volume 9 of The Memoirs of Emily Bean . Emily Bean had become convinced that someone was planning to steal Codex No. 1005 —the Flateyjarbók —from the Royal Library and replace it with an exact replica, and Hubert was called in as the reigning wonder kid of the library-science world; he specialized in forgeries in general and ancient texts in particular. Fifteen at the time, Our Heroine became briefly infatuated. She’d always imagined herself marrying someone like him. Tall, thin, and bookish. Tousled brown hair and rounded glasses, leather elbows on his tweed coat, knit tie, and only ten years her elder. His attention, however, was all on Emily. At first he sneered and tried to tell her how absurd her idea was—how it would be impossible to produce an even halfway believable copy of the book, it simply couldn’t be done—and even if it could, the cost involved would far outweigh any black-market value for the real thing. But Emily proved correct in the end, of course, and thus had begun Hubert’s life-long fascination with Surt, the master forger who’d been behind the whole thing to begin with.

Her thong from off the bed and up between her buttocks—long-johns would have been wiser—then on with the rest of her clothes, as bundled as she could. She gave another glance to the flecks of snow plaughtting against the window, grabbed her fleece coat from the front hall closet, and shivered expectantly against the cold before shoving through the door.

“Wordless curses to the northern winds,” she muttered; her nose felt red already. She bunched her coat up around her cheeks and pulled the door to a close behind her. As the mechanism’s metal tongue slipped with a click into its cavity, she heard the phone begin to ring within. The door responsibly locked, however, there was nothing she could do.

Yesterday Our Heroine had woken to a call from Barthes down at the coroner’s office. He hadn’t been able to reach Duplain, he explained, and so thought that he should call her instead. And then, before she could even express her confusion, he’d told her. In all the gory detail. When she’d regained a bit of her composure, Our Heroine had thanked him—though she wasn’t sure what for—and assured him that she’d do her best to find Blaise and let him know.

Blaise had finally answered his phone about four hours later.

“How has this happened?” he’d asked once he was able to speak in articulate English sentences.

She hadn’t been sure if she should go into the details with him over the phone, and so after the initial shock of the situation he’d agreed to meet with her at ten a.m. the next day—today—at the Elite Café.

The morning smelled of meat or oil behind the crispness of winter air, and the sky was a translucent gray, like fried chicken bones. Eight o’clock. Two hours to go. Across the street, the little blue building of the local store was already opening its door. She’d just have to concentrate on the shopping. For her father: stockfish, six eggs on the verge of rot, and a pint of buttermilk. For Garm, a box of meat-truffles. A bundle of peppermint for herself.

She was concentrating so intently on the shopping, in fact, that she forgot to concentrate on crossing the street; consequently, she almost allowed herself be run down by a big black car as she stepped blindly from the curb. Yet she did not allow herself to be unduly phased. “One must maintain composure, even in the face of utmost adversity,” as her mother had always said. Picking up a small plastic handcart, she reflected that it would have done her well to recall this little bon mot the previous morning.

At least Barthes hadn’t wanted her to come identify the body. Stabbed in the eye. Our Heroine had seen some gruesome corpses in her time, but… But this was Shirley.

She paused in the bread aisle to dry her tears.

Once, Our Heroine beat in a man’s skull with a brick of gold. He’d been holding a gun on her mother in a volcanic cave in Vanaheim. Our Heroine crept up behind him with the brick, one of many that he’d been planning to smuggle out of Iceland. She only meant to knock him out, but the first whack just made him angry, and he turned around and started choking her after the second, and he didn’t let go until the sixth, and her eyes had been full of tears, and it was so dark that she could barely even see him until her mother lit the acetylene torch. And by then it was too late.

Our Heroine’s father, Jon Ymirson, lived in his library. Shelves he’d hammered up from oaks he’d felled himself spanned all the walls, which were fifteen feet high and bookfilled beyond saturation; Ymirson had read each word and written many himself. He’d not, however, as went the popular lore, fattened and slaughtered the very lambs that had died to vellum the parchments.