Dustin Long - Icelander

“You know,” I said suddenly, “I’ve heard legends about these tunnels—about kids getting disintegrated in bursts of steam… And I don’t bring that up to scare you, but because I just recalled that all those legends mention ladders. Like a lot of ladders. It’s supposed to be really easy to get out of here—in case an accident actually does happen—but in the stories the students are always just about to escape when the steam melts the flesh from their bones, and then some tunnel worker finds the skeletal remains still clinging to the ladder’s top rung three days later.”

“Okay, so?”

“Well, where do all the ladders start?”

He stopped walking. “Huh. I don’t know. That’s a good question. But I guess they must be around here somewhere, right? Unless you think the Refurserkir got rid of—”

“Just a second,” I interrupted. “Be quiet… Did you hear something?”

He cocked his head to listen.

“Hear something like what?” he whispered back. “Not like a pipe bursting, right?”

“No, I—” I stopped mid-sentence to peer into the darkness behind us and listen a bit more closely.

“I don’t hear anything,” Nathan whispered after a few seconds.

“Precisely. It’s too quiet. Like the sound that the Refurserkir don’t make. We’d better keep moving.” I started back down the tunnel. “So how long have you been down here?” I asked.

Nathan didn’t answer. Nor did I hear his footsteps. I stopped, but I didn’t turn around.

“Nathan?” I said.

“So, are you too pusillanimous, then, to face me to my face?” came the response.

“Freysgo∂,” I pronounced, still refusing to turn. “I can’t believe this.”

“With certainty, it is I, though I do comprehend your incapacity to believe. You are indubitably perplexed by the modishness of my elocution. And yet that is only the inception of the variances that you will discern in me. Oh yes. A plethora has changed since I departed from you.”

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Rotate to face me.”

“I really have no desire to look at you right now.”

“Rotate to face me or I will percolate your companion.”

“I think you mean ‘perforate,’” I said, turning but keeping my eyes lowered. I just didn’t want to see him. Not here, not part of all this.

“You constructed me to feel unintelligent in the past, however you are incapable of doing so any longer. I do not aspire for your approval. I am the deity of my nation, and I will elocute as I will.”

I finally looked up at him, then. In the darkness, with only the vague orange glow of the streetlamp above to see him by, it seemed to me that he hardly looked anything at all like the man I’d married. But then I realized that I was wrong. The only difference was in the accessories; he was adorned now in fox fur and held a knife much like the one that Gerd had used to remove my finger. Otherwise, he was exactly the same: big and blond, with a perpetually manic gleam in his eyes that I’d always taken as a sign of his boyish sense of wonder. I guess I’d just never looked that closely before. Nathan was lying on the ground behind him.

“I hope you and Gerd are happy,” I said. “You know, for a long while I wanted to believe that she’d somehow brainwashed you, or played on your gullibility. I mean, I gave you the benefit of the doubt when you almost married her the first time. [46] See Experts Texperts , Vol. 8 of the Memoirs . But this is who you are; I see that now.”

“Do not endeavor to revise me. You may never have comprehended me in the past, however do not contemplate that you may abruptly comprehend me now, even considering the novel modishness of my elocution.”

“What do you want?” I asked flatly. “Are you going to kill me?”

“I am not the bad one. I aspire for you to perceive the veracity of this. You and your family were always the bad ones, who reciprocated great ills to my nation.”

“Do you mean ‘precipitated great ills’?” I asked.

“Whether I have fully assimilated my newly modish vocabulary is not—” He stopped mid-sentence to look down at the ground. I looked, as well, to see what was so interesting. It was hard to make out in the darkness, but there was something moving around his feet.

“Can it be?” Prescott said, kneeling down. “It is you. Garm, my dog.”

I stepped closer. It was really Garm. My neck shivered with adrenaline and I almost laughed. He was standing on two legs to try to lick Prescott’s face.

“Here is the only veritably noble affiliate of your family,” Prescott said, leaning farther down to allow Garm to lick him more fully. And then Garm bit his nose.

He put his hand to his face as he yelled in pain, and he knocked Garm away, toward me. “You have even turned my dog against me,” he muttered. And then Nathan kicked him in the head before he could rise to his feet.

“Come on,” Nathan said rushing past me as I knelt to pick up Garm.

“I missed you,” I whispered to my dog. But this was no time for a teary reunion, even though Prescott seemed to be out cold. I followed Nathan as quickly as I could with a dog cradled in my arms. After less than a minute of running, however, the tunnel came abruptly to an end.

“Fuck,” Nathan said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He slammed his fist against the wall each time he said the word; it made a hollow sound that only highlighted how silent it had become again.

I ran my right hand frantically over the wall in front of us, hoping for something…

The wall was blank. I couldn’t even make out any pipes. In fact—as nearly as I could tell in what little light we had—it was unadorned completely, the only exception being a small piece of handle-shaped metal sticking out about waist-level near the wall’s right edge.

It struck me slowly.

“It’s a door!” I yelled. And the handle actually turned.

The room that opened up on the door’s other side was darker than the tunnel had been, but we entered it anyway and I slammed the door behind us.

“Anybody home?” Nathan called into the blackness.

There was no answer, but the room sounded rather small.

Feeling our way slowly across, we found the far wall about eight feet away, and there was a second door—wooden—in its center.

That door, however, was locked. A dead end after all.

“Damnation!”

“Well, at least we made it this far,” Nathan offered.

“Not good enough. Help me look for a key,” I said.

I set Garm on the floor and felt around the doorframe, fruitlessly, and then we spread out. Against the right wall, I bumped into what must have been a big wooden desk. Drawers. Papers, pens, and clips within. Something heavy and leathern thereon.

“Come here, help me push this. We can at least stop anyone else from getting in here, even if we don’t manage to get out.”

We managed to get it against the door we’d come through. The desk drawers were facing toward us, and so I started to rummage, still hoping to find a key. But then behind me I suddenly heard Nathan throw his body up against the other door.

“Ungh! Ow. That was my good shoulder… Damn. What are we going to do?”

I sat down on the desktop and resisted the urge to hold my head with bloody hands. I definitely could feel the hyperclarity of the ormolu slipping away now.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just really wish my father were here.”

“Oh. About your father…” Nathan said, and then he got very quiet.

“What?” I asked. “Have you seen him?”

“Yeah, just a little before I found you, in fact.”

“Is he okay?”

“He’s—Well, I don’t know. Just let me start at the beginning.”