Dustin Long - Icelander

This is the third of the aforementioned semi-significant absences. Though Our Heroine claims, here, that she knows what this secret is and that she will “explain [it] later,” I can find no place in the text where she exhibits the slightest knowledge of said secret. One must conclude that she is a liar. Does she know what happened in Denmark? Doubtful. I would contend, rather, that her assertion to the contrary is included for the sole purpose of tormenting me with the possibility that she knows something that I do not.

Who? Whom? To whom did she whisper this? And what did he do with this information (surely a lie though it was)? Furthermore, was this mindless slander on her part, or was it carefully calculated toward a more terrible effect? After all, though Our Heroine claims throughout the novel to be entirely unmotivated by such petty concerns as desire for revenge, surely she was aware that others in the company were not so civilized; Valison was strangled shortly after the events of this novel, and it is my belief that Our Heroine indirectly killed him with this whisper, planting the idea in the mind of the true murderer. She will not deceive me as she did once before.

The suggestion, here—that Magnus Valison was the true identity of the arch-criminal, Surt—must, finally, exterminate any possible belief in the validity of this text. Anyone who ever met the man in the final years of his life can attest to the fact that he had neither the disposition nor the physical ability to perform any of the deeds ascribed to Surt in the Memoirs , and this suggestion to the contrary betrays the novel’s heavy reliance on the reportage of “Constance Lingus,” who—not long after the period of the novel’s action—suggested a similar thesis in her weekly tabloid column. She elaborated this claim into its most libelous form during the course of the already-cited article in which she published excerpts of Shirley MacGuffin’s supposed Vanaheimic version of the Hamlet story. The Reader will forgive me if I question Miss Lingus’s journalistic integrity and if I suggest that—in constructing this “factually based” fiction—the Author should have stuck more closely to the confirmable facts. Bear in mind that I, of all people, should know if there were any truth in this assertion. Being so close to Magnus Valison and so knowledgeable on the subject of Surt, I think I would have known if they were the same person. Never mind how, but I would have known.

At least one of her wishes came true.

I should have guessed that she was a lesbian.