Dustin Long - Icelander

His silhouette seemed genuinely upset.

“Hey, I didn’t mean to offend you,” I said, after a few minutes of silence.

He didn’t say anything for another minute, though his father, leading the way, hadn’t seemed to mind our talking for once.

“I think he was a tricky troll,” the son finally offered. “He probably tricked the Refurserkir into agreeing to an unfair price. So they had to refuse him his payment.”

I wanted to argue, but I figured I’d better just make peace. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

Eventually, after another silent minute or so of I don’t know how many left turns, the tunnel opened into a large chamber lit with halogen tubes set in fixtures in the ceiling. An old man and a young woman were sitting on wooden chairs in the far corner, and a bunch of guys dressed in fox fur were hunched about the rest of the room chattering with each other in their weird lilting language. The center of the room was dominated by a big stone lectern.

“This is the Thing Room,” the son told me. “It is where we meet to discuss things.”

“Are these guys the Refurserkir?” I whispered.

“They… No. They are servants. Like I and my father.”

“So, where are all the Refurserkir? This is their temple, isn’t it?”

“This is the Temple of the Refurserkir. They are all around us, though you do not see them. In the shadows, silent but deadly. Invisible like the wind, but even more silent than that.”

This sounded like bullshit to me, and I’m the bullshit king, but I didn’t say anything. The sulphur smell was stronger here than it had been outside, and it was more humid, too. I figured that there must be a steam pool somewhere. Without saying anything, the father went over and squatted with a group of the other servants.

“You wait here,” the son told me, and he went and squatted, too.

I guessed that meant we were staying for a while.

“I guess I’d better stay here with my dad,” I said, coming down from the bedroom where I’d tucked my father in to the living room where Connie was waiting for me. “Garm will have to wait.”

“Was that Dr. Albertine on the phone? Would it be beyond my place to ask what he said?” Constance asked.

“Not to worry, and that it was probably just stress. But I have to bring Pa in tomorrow afternoon. For now I’m just supposed to give him his medicine and let him get some rest… Thanks again for helping me bring him home.”

“I’m always ready to lend my assistance when needed. If there’s any other help I may offer, you’ve only to mention it.”

She was sitting on the couch with her legs curled beneath her. She’d removed her shoes in the mudroom so as not to track in snow. I sat down in a chair across the coffee table from her. Her smile was wide and she kept contact with my eyes.

“Look, Connie, I’m not sure what you think you’re doing here, and I really am grateful to you for helping me out, but if this is about an interview, or in any way connected to Shirley’s death—”

“Of course not! I’m only here to help you, I assure you. And I do believe you could use my help.” The wood-burning stove was beginning to warm the place, but her face was still flushed with cold. She’d had no sweater on beneath her coat.

“Well, if this is about Prescott, then… Thank you, but I’m fine. It’s been six months, and I don’t need a shoulder to cry on or any of that—”

“Naturally. I wouldn’t presume. Especially as you’ve a seeming surfeit of men with whom to drown whatever sorrows you might be suffering. Besides which, by my understanding of things the entire situation was your fault, so I’d be hard pressed to lend a sympathetic shoulder for your tears, even were you to want one.”

“What?”

“I’m only here to—”

“What do you mean it was all my fault? What do you know about it, anyway? Where do—”

“Perhaps I’ve said too much. But I only meant that I spoke with Prescott shortly after his decision to leave, and—from his version of the story—it seemed quite clear who the guilty party was.”

I began to rant. “Oh, so he couldn’t explain himself to me, but he could go talk to you about the whole thing, and you don’t see a problem with that? I mean, that doesn’t signal to you that there was a fundamental lack of communication in our relationship, on his part, and that rather than talk to me, his wife, about whatever problems he had, he went off and confided in you . I mean, you don’t see that as possibly symptomatic of the fact that there was a larger set of issues than whatever watered-down story he fed you? That maybe it wasn’t a case of guilty versus innocent, but that perhaps it was just a bit more complicated than that?”

“I feel the flush of heated discussion in my cheeks. Now we’re getting somewhere. But considering everything Prescott told me, it seems entirely appropriate that he confided in me without a word to you. After all, his decision to leave was directly set off by the fact that he caught you in the act of achieving… conversational catharsis, with Magnus Valison. I think Prescott was particularly hurt by the fact that you specifically mentioned that you could never have such a conversation with him .”

“He—First off, we were talking about writing, and I couldn’t have such a conversation with—”

“…”

“I mean, you make it sound as if I’d been having really boring phone sex.”

“And so I intended. Prescott’s precise concern was that you didn’t find him intellectually sexy.”

“He did not say ‘intellectually sexy.’”

“Ah, but he did, I assure you. I imagine he fancied it an intellectually sexy way of saying ‘smart.’”

“I can’t—I do not want to talk about this. Especially not with you. I told you earlier that I don’t want to talk about it, and I stand by that; I don’t.”

“Fine. That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then just why exactly are you here? You don’t want an interview, and you don’t want to badger me about my personal life. So…”

She sighed resignedly. “I’m only here because I can help you. I have to type up some of my notes… And I think it would be a convenient solution for both of us if I were to do my work here—on your computer—and watch over your father for you while you go out and search for Garm.”

“I—Well—”

Garm, Hubert; it would be better if I were at least out searching. Trying something .

“Well, I do have a typewriter you could use…” I said.

“Perfect. And I apologize if you inferred any insult from my professed desire to help you, but sincerely this is all I ever meant.”

Propositions: Meaning must be arrived at obliquely, through hints and feints. It must be suggested through the figurative rather than explicitly stated through the literal. Any attempt to capture meaning by direct approach will result in its death, and—like certain shellfish—meaning must not be killed prior to ingestion lest it be rendered poisonous or, at the least, unpalatable. Meanings that can be contained in words are not worth discussing. Nothing need be passed over in silence, yet some things may be merely implied through circumlocution. Absence as a defining characteristic. Subjects defined by negative space.

All of this occurred to us as we groped futilely in the darkness for some source of illumination. Illumination came only too late, however—after Mr. Pacheco had already scattered a pile of books over the floor with his clumsy stumbling and landed on his knees beside them—and it came from an entirely unexpected source. While Mr. Wible manically slapped the wall in search of a switch, Mr. Pacheco produced a large metallic flashlight from beneath the workbench beside which he had fallen. Of course, if Mr. Wible had packed his own flashlight, which Mr. Pacheco had reminded him to do before they left—