Dustin Long - Icelander

“I don’t care about the public, Connie. And you’d better not quote me on that. But I’m just not a public person, all right?” Sledders were beginning to notice us, now, which belied my statement just a bit.

“It seems to me that you just don’t know how to mourn her,” Connie said. “Faced with a meaningful death after a lifetime of conveniently forgettable corpses, Our Heroine—”

“Enough already. I haven’t forgotten a single one of the people who’ve died in my life.”

She was looking down at the ground, now. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to imply that your mom—”

“Let’s just drop it, ” I sighed. “Garm’s not here. But I’m worrying about this too much. He’ll probably just find his own way home, anyway.”

“The same old plan,” she muttered. “Just let him run free for a bit and maybe he’ll come back to you. And that theory has worked quite well in the past, hasn’t it?”

“What?” I asked, sincerely unsure of what she’d said.

“I assure you, I’m only trying to—Is your father all right?”

“What does my father have to do with it?”

“Well, he’s lying face-down in the snow behind you, there. I can’t say what that has to do with your personal problems regarding Prescott and/or promiscuity, but it seems, to me, a pressing issue for him.”

“Oh, God,” I said, turning around. “Pa, why are you doing this?”

He murmured something into the snow that I couldn’t comprehend.

“We have to get him indoors,” I told Connie.

“We’re going to help you up, Mr. Ymirson.” She said it as if she were speaking to a child. “If that’s all right with you, that is. You’re going to have to work with us on this, though, as you’re still a rather well-built man and I doubt that we two mere females could lift you on our own. Are you ready?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “I do not object.”

We pulled him to his feet and each took an arm.

Constance looked across my father’s back at me and gave a resigned sigh. “Of course I know that this is all confidential. I’m surprised that you would even suggest otherwise. You know I’ve always put our friendship before my professional interests.”

“I just want you to promise me you won’t print any of this. I want you to say it.”

“Not a whit of what I’ve seen nor even what you’ve said shall see print, I promise. Now let’s get your father home.”

The only anomaly we were able to find in the store proper rested between an early printing of Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and a first edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear . [29] Considering Hubert Jorgen’s status as the most ingenious library scientist of modern times, all facets of his organizational style should have been recorded in detail. Though horizontally the book may have been found between the two volumes mentioned, perhaps more relevant information might have been revealed if the investigators had taken note of the fact that the book’s vertical neighbors were, say, Vladimir Nabokov and Elizabeth Peters. Not that I have any way of knowing. As it is, one can only speculate what valuable data was lost in their clumsy account. In a store devoted to rare and antiquarian books there glistened brightly out of place a shiny, new paperback copy of Magnus Valison’s The Case of the Consternated Cossacks . Lacking age, scarcity, and value, there was no reason that it should have taken space on any shelf of this store. Furthermore, we ourselves were featured as characters therein. We thus hypothesized that this book might provide us some clue as to what precise connection Our Heroine had to the librarian, Hubert Jorgen—and, more significantly, what connection he might have to the missing manuscript of Shirley MacGuffin.

Mr. Pacheco had read the book upon its initial release, and a brief perusal was enough to reacquaint him with its major themes and leitmotifs. The plot concerned restaurateurs, Refurserkir, Surt’s hatred for imperialism in general and Denmark in particular, forgery, memory: cultural and personal, and the usual attempts of the Bean-Ymirson clan to bring everything to a tidy and just resolution. What relevance this had to the death of Shirley MacGuffin or to her Hamlet project, we could not yet guess with any certainty. The forgery theme was evocative, however. Jorgen was an expert on the subject. Perhaps someone wished to pass Ms. MacGuffin’s approximation of Kyd off as the real thing. Or, conversely, perhaps someone wished to ensure that none would ever have the chance of mistaking it for the real thing.

Yet these were only hypotheses, and more information was required before we could either validate or refute them. Certain pages of the book we had found were dog-eared, and an almost illegible word was scrawled on the book’s title page. Perhaps “Amleth.” It did not appear to be Magnus Valison’s signature, at least, and so we tentatively assumed it to be the name of the volume’s previous owner. We resolved to study this in greater detail when time permitted, however. For the moment, Mr. Wible slipped the book into a plastic bag and stowed it safely in his leather satchel.

A final tour of the shop floor revealed no further anomalies, and in the interest of utilizing our time to its fullest value—the deepest mysteries being most often secreted in the innermost chambers—we decided to remove our search to the back room. The key was kept, predictably enough, in a drawer beneath the store’s cash register, and a piece of plastic molded in the shape of an Arctic fox was attached to the keychain. The connection between this animal and the Refurserkir did not escape our attention, and the memory of our first encounter with those furtive beings was full in our minds as we opened the door and entered the darkness beyond.

What I could make out of the darkened interior of the Refurserkir temple was a lot plainer than I’d expected. No lichen grew within, and the father only had a little handpumped flashlight like they use in bomb shelters in all those Cold War movies. The dim pulse didn’t shine coherently for any more than a meter in front of us, though, and all it revealed was dirty ground and bare gray walls. I had to keep my hand to the surface, and still the occasional crosspaths made me stumble a few times. The stone felt more like plastic than rock. We mostly followed the main tunnel spiraling inward.

“These walls are amazing,” I said.

“They were not made by human hands,” the son told me, his silhouette changing shape as he turned his head. “Before Vanaheim was settled, trolls lived here. The Refurserkir hired a troll to build this temple.”

“You really believe that?”

“It is the story I was told when growing up. When the troll came for his payment, the Refurserkir denied him, so he cursed the temple to darkness. This is why no ormolu grows here. The troll demanded his payment again after this, but the Refurserkir discovered his name, and he became a part of the stone when they said it aloud. There is a place within here where you can see his face in the wall.”

“Wait, he turned to stone just because somebody said his name? That’s a pretty big weakness. I mean, how did anyone ever get his attention?”

“Names are powerful things. They are not to be given lightly.”

“Well, what was this troll’s name?”

“Sometimes he is called Short-Legs, but that is not his name. His name is a secret of the Refurserkir.”

“I see.” I let out an emphatic cough. “So, why didn’t the Refurserkir just pay him for his services in the first place, since he built the temple so well?”

“He was a troll… But you must not ask so many questions about our lore.”