The Book of Lamps and Banners

by Elizabeth Hand

  So had a serial killer on an island off the coast of Maine.

  You and me, we carry the dead on our backs…

  And so had I, without even realizing it. That’s what photography is, I’d told Gryffin. A massive necropolis. The dead, we carry them with us everywhere we go.

  If Tindra was right, and humans were all code, or coded, then we each might hold some meaning within us and some symbol to represent it.

  Like a Valkyrie. Because what is a photographer but a chooser of the slain, someone who decides who or what is destined for immortality.

  You’ll figure it out, Tindra had said of the valknut.

  A Valkyrie would know which corpse to bear to Valhalla because it was marked with the valknut. That was why Tindra had turned white when I showed her that photo on Gryffin’s mobile. The symbol drawn on Harold’s forehead had not been meant for me or Gryffin or the police. It was a warning for Tindra.

  Chapter 44

  I was still staring at the piece of paper when Quinn walked out of the shower. He sank onto the bed, naked, toweling his head. “Where’d you go?”

  “Nowhere. Just downstairs.”

  I handed him the coffee I’d brought him, now lukewarm. I poured some whiskey into my mug, sipping it as I sat on the bed behind him. If I told him about the valknut and Tindra, he’d think I was crazy. I was crazy.

  “Shit.” I crumpled the paper and tossed it across the room.

  Quinn looked over at me, set aside his towel, and took a sip of coffee. “What is it, baby?”

  “Just thinking.”

  “You think too much.”

  I trailed my fingers across his thigh, then buried my face in his shoulder. He put his mug aside and turned to wrap his arms around me. I stripped and lay next to him, breathing in his heat as we fucked, the scents of burnt coffee and sugar. The stubble on his face and scalp hid some of the scarifications, but not the ones between his eyes. I could feel them beneath my fingertips.

  They mean I killed a man. I’d never asked how many.

  We lay together after, Quinn snoring softly. I got up to take another shower. Despite the heat blasting from the radiator, I couldn’t get warm. When I returned to the bedroom, I found Quinn dressed and standing by the window, cracked open so he could smoke. His laptop sat on the table behind him.

  I finished drying myself and pulled on my clothes. “Any news?”

  “See for yourself,” he said without looking at me.

  On the Daily Mirror home page was a photo of Tommy in uniform, dun-colored hills towering behind him. A red scarf was wrapped around his head in a loose turban.

  POSSIBLE ISIS AGENT “WENT ON RAMPAGE” AT PEACEFUL RALLY

  “ISIS?” I snorted. “This is a damn tabloid.”

  “Keep reading,” said Quinn.

  Thomas Lewis, 29, Brixton, died of injuries sustained after he attacked unarmed demonstrators at a peaceful rally organized by Saint George Heritage Foundation founder and Conservative MP Ronald Morton.

  “I saw him get into an argument with a woman about a mobile. Then he charged a man out of nowhere,” recounted Angeline Bow of Beckton Park. Onlookers wrestled Lewis to the ground, but he escaped and fled into the crowd, where he was subdued by Metro Police. While the authorities have offered no motivation, Morton has stated that “this is clearly a terror incident, possibly linked to ISIS.” Lewis was employed as a private security guard for Swedish software magnate Tindra Bergstrand, who could not be reached for comment at this time.

  I gazed at the picture, Tommy’s dark skin contrasting with the red scarf wrapped around his head. The Arabic letters tattooed on his neck were clearly visible. “He’s from the East End. He was in the military, for Christ’s sake! They don’t even mention he was a British soldier who served in Afghanistan.”

  “Of course not. But this might buy us some time. The police will want to question his sister, especially if they can’t locate Tindra. They’ll advise her not to leave the country for a bit, which means she won’t show up here in the next twenty-four hours. Not that she’d want to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because of the funeral arrangements. She’s his sister, right? Any other family that you know of?” I shook my head. “So she’ll have to manage that before she goes anywhere. And if they run toxicology tests, which I’m sure they will, that can take a while, too.”

  “Will the cops hold her?”

  “Why would they? More likely she’ll start legal action against the police. She didn’t kill her brother—the cops did.”

  “I meant because of Harold. Once they look at their cell-phone records, it’ll all be linked. Tindra buys the book from Harold, Harold’s murdered. Tindra’s bodyguard freaks out and dies. Tindra disappears.”

  “I know. It’s a mess.” Quinn opened the window wider and leaned out, letting a blast of cold air into the stuffy room. “At some point your name is going to come up. When they question his sister, and when they question your boy Gryffin. Not if: when. And those two will have a physical description of me, even if they don’t have a name.”

  He rubbed his scalp. I started pacing the cramped room, trying to think my way out of this.

  “No one knows we left the UK,” I said at last. “No one knows we both have stolen passports. I can’t see Gryffin lying to the cops about me. But he wants that book, and I don’t think he’ll say anything that might screw up his chances of finding it. He’ll do what Lyla tells him to do, which will probably be to keep his mouth shut.”

  “That’s good. It still means they both might end up on Kalkö. The bodyguard, anyway. She’ll figure out this guy Erik lives on the island. How long it takes for her to get here depends on how long the police detain her, and what arrangements she makes for her brother. I give us forty-eight hours, tops.”

  He withdrew from the window, closed it, and leaned against the wall, arms crossed.

  “I’ll wait till tomorrow night,” he said after a long silence. “I booked this place and the car for two days. After that I’m going back to Reykjavík. I want you to come with me,” he added, fixing me with that green-glass stare.

  I bit down on a retort and looked away.

  Chapter 45

  I couldn’t sit still. I killed time by dumping the contents of my new handbag onto the bed, including the weather-beaten satchel I’d had since high school. I needed to lighten my load.

  Dead Girls was a heavy souvenir to keep lugging around. Then again, it was starting to feel like the sole connection I had to my former life. I put it and the copy of Skalltrolleri into my worn satchel, then loaded a roll of Tri-X into the Nikon. I stuffed the remaining rolls of film, the camera and pill bottles, and most of my clothes into the satchel—basically, what I’d packed when I left New York.

  Everything else I dumped into the leather bag. I kicked it under the bed, a present for the girl with the Mohawk, and looked at Quinn.

  “I want to go back to that place where we saw the fox.”

  I thought he’d argue or at least ask why, but he only nodded. I knew he was going through the motions till we could leave for Reykjavík. He already had on his leather jacket and watch cap.

  We walked out to the car. All the lights were off in the annex. An old Saab pocked with rust was parked in front. I gave it a quick once-over. No stickers or decals, nothing inside but empty pizza boxes and plastic energy-drink bottles. I circled back to where Quinn waited in the Jetta.

  “See anything?” he asked as I slid into the passenger seat. I shook my head.

  A steady line of traffic filled the opposite lane as we left Slythamn: people heading to work at the cement plant. The day was much colder and very windy, the eastern horizon banked with graphite clouds.

  “Snow,” said Quinn. “Weather here comes down from Siberia.”

  Once we left the town limits, we got stuck behind a school bus. Quinn rolled down his window to smoke, impatiently flicking ashes until the bus pulled over to let us pass. After a mile or two, pastures and tidy farm bu
ildings surrendered to evergreen forest. Trees leaned over the road, their branches touching to form a tunnel that seemed to breathe around us.

  The wind rose. Without warning a rippling wall of white moved across the road like a threadbare curtain—a snow squall.

  Quinn hurriedly closed his window and downshifted. Ghostly runnels swept the road around us. Another blast of snow, and the air grew calm once more. The dark spruces straightened, all the snow blown from their limbs.

  Quinn squinted up at the trees. “Why do you want to go back there?”

  “That fox…it was a weird scene.” It was the first time I’d spoken since leaving Slagghögen. “And you said someone connected to Svarlight might live there.”

  “I said I saw an old address online. That’s not much to go on.”

  “If nothing’s there, we can check out the other address in Norderby.”

  “That’s just a post-office address. And I don’t want to be wandering around asking questions about some crazy Swedish nationalist who works out of his basement.” He sighed. “I’d still like to know why he’d want this book.”

  “Because it’s worth a shit ton of money. But I don’t think he wants the book. He wants the app.”

  I tapped my fingers on the dashboard like it was a keyboard. “Stop that,” Quinn snapped. “Even if this is your guy, he lives in the middle of nowhere.”

  I knew he was arguing with me because he wanted to pull the plug and head back to Iceland. I gritted my teeth, then said, “It doesn’t matter where he lives. He puts up a link through his podcast, every racist nutjob in the world can download it.”

  “Will he even know how? And you said the app doesn’t work.”

  “It worked on me, only not the way it was supposed to. And…”

  I stopped. People who’d witnessed Tommy’s death said that there had been an altercation over a mobile phone. Yet what if that witness hadn’t seen an altercation, but Tindra’s app being deliberately deployed as a weapon against someone vulnerable? A veteran with PTSD, a black man surrounded by a threatening crowd. The beta version of an app meant to treat PTSD, which instead caused traumatic flashbacks.

  “She needs The Book of Lamps and Banners to fine-tune it,” I said. “That’s why the beta version’s not working. But someone wants to use it just the way it is, to mess with people’s heads.”

  Quinn groaned in exasperation. “But if it goes viral, it could fuck up all kinds of people, not just people targeted by white supremacists. What would be the point?”

  “Maybe there is no point. Or maybe that is the point—just set it loose and see what happens. Let it come down. Helter Skelter,” I went on, growing agitated. “Like Manson. Or Dylann Roof. You think you’re using it to start a race war, only you end up killing everyone exposed to it.”

  “But you didn’t kill anyone, Cass—it just freaked you out. And Tommy didn’t kill anyone, either.”

  “What if it works different on different people?” It all began to make sense, the staticky logic of methamphetamine. “So I flashed back to getting raped; Tommy flashed back to the war. So he might have killed someone—he might have killed a lot of people, if the police hadn’t tased him.” I recalled the explosion of blood and optic nerves in Tommy’s eye, and Harold’s. “Or if someone else hadn’t stopped him first.”

  “C’mon, Cass! This is like The Terminal Man.” Quinn laughed. “You don’t think that could actually happen?”

  “You want to find out?”

  “It would be crazy.”

  “Is there anything about these people that isn’t crazy? Witnesses said they saw Tommy arguing with someone about a mobile. What if it was Tindra’s phone? What if someone deliberately provoked Tommy and used Ludus Mentis, just to see what would happen?”

  “They’d have to know he was a vet with PTSD.”

  “Yeah, and maybe they did know that—if they have the app, they have Tindra, too. Though she wouldn’t have told them about Tommy…”

  “She would have if the conditions were right.”

  I stared at my hands, the little red half-moon where a fingernail had broken the skin. I longed to say, Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe whatever I’d seen in Tindra’s garage had been a manifestation of drugs and my own damaged psyche and nothing else. Maybe this was all my own delusion, and Quinn was just going along for the ride, out of love or inertia or whatever it was that connected us.

  I stared out at the snow. I thought of the dead fox; of Tindra’s dead dog, Bunny; of Lyla and Tommy moving brightly colored pieces across a Parcheesi board. I thought of the papyrus sheet hidden between the pages of Dead Girls; of sitting with Gryffin and Harold with The Book of Lamps and Banners. Words marching across a page, resolute and unstoppable as army ants.

  He that doth professe such dessire as to see the Devvill must seek Him yre and no further.

  “The book,” I said. “When I first saw it, in Harold Vertigan’s house. There was a page with a drawing, a tree and a black bird, a raven. I was staring at the raven, its wings started to move, and I heard the same voice…”

  “What voice?” asked Quinn. I didn’t reply. “Cass? Cassie, what is it?”

  He eased the car off the road, onto the frozen ground beneath a huge spruce, put the car into neutral, and took my shoulders, gently but firmly turning me to face him. “Cass. Do you want to go back to the hotel? We can get our stuff, go to the airport—”

  “No.” My breath came in shallow bursts, but I forced myself to go on. “When I looked at Ludus Mentis, I heard the guy who raped me, it was like I was right there again—him saying my name, trying to get my attention. And when I looked at The Book of Lamps and Banners, I had the same flashback, just like with the app. And the page I have in there—”

  I pointed at my satchel. “It fell out of the book at Harold’s place and I grabbed it. But every time I look at it, it makes me feel sick.”

  “Cassie, this is the crank.”

  “It’s not the drugs! Don’t you get it? It’s this!” I pulled Dead Girls from my satchel, opened it to the papyrus leaf. “This is the drug. This is the final piece of code. Tindra wasn’t crazy. Once she scans the entire Book of Lamps and Banners, everything changes.”

  “No, Cass.” Quinn’s face grew expressionless. “What changes you is meth and alcohol.”

  “Listen to me! If you were to look at it, the same thing would happen to you. She tried to explain it to me, something about wavelets and a mathematical theorem—how you can use it to rewire the brain. I don’t know how it works, but it does work. And if somebody manages to finish what she started…”

  Quinn’s brow furrowed, his concern at last giving way to curiosity. “Let me see that.”

  He reached for the book, but I slammed it closed before he could touch it.

  “No. You said we have till tomorrow night.” I placed his hand back on the steering wheel. “Drive.”

  Chapter 46

  Hang on.” Quinn gazed into the rearview mirror. “Someone’s coming.”

  I slumped into my seat, out of sight. Quinn picked up his mobile and held it to his ear as though listening. I heard the metallic rumble of studded tires as a car drove past us. It was the first vehicle we’d seen since the school bus.

  I sat up. “You see anyone?” I asked as Quinn steered the Jetta back onto the road.

  “Lady with a couple of kids in back. We’re good.”

  “How many people live here in the winter?”

  “Maybe four hundred. Why?”

  “Just running the odds that we’ll actually find these people.”

  “Maybe you should worry that they’ll find us.” He tipped his head toward an unmarked gravel road. “That’s where we were yesterday. You still want to do this?”

  “Yeah. Drop me off and pull over where I can find you. I’ll walk down and see what’s there and meet you back at the car.”

  Quinn looked doubtful, but after checking to be sure there were no other cars in sight, he stopped to let me out. “Don’t ge
t lost.”

  I slung the Nikon around my neck, hopped out, and headed quickly down the gravel road. Quinn did a U-turn and drove in the direction we’d come from, back toward Slythamn.

  Once I was out of sight of the road, I clambered up a sharp incline, into the woods. Frozen reindeer moss and dead leaves crunched beneath my boots, and branches tore at my hair. I looked back and muttered a curse. I’d left a trail of footprints on the thin skin of snow dropped by the squall. I hoped that another squall might cover my tracks before someone noticed them.

  The wind was frigid, and I wasn’t wearing gloves. I jammed my hands into my pockets. It felt like years since I’d had a camera with me, and I didn’t want my fingers to be numb when I used it. The air smelled of pine and raw earth and decaying leaves, with an underlying brackish scent. We weren’t far from the shore.

  After a few minutes of pushing my way through overhanging limbs and past mossy stones, I reached a clearing. I ran my fingers through my hair, dislodging bits of bark and lichen, then cradled the camera against my chest. The Nikon may have been heavier than my old Konica, but its heft and shape were as familiar as my own hands. Despite my underlying dread and my brain ticking like an overheated engine, I felt exhilarated. Those few days without a camera had left me feeling as though I’d lost a sense more deeply embedded than sight, the sense that I can see everything at once, past and future and present, before choosing the precise moment to hit the shutter release and capture the single image that best represents the truth.

  Digital photography expands that notion. Immediately and endlessly manipulable, it offers the illusion of infinite choice and recall: by constantly shooting or recording everything, one freezes the present, making it recoverable.

  And yet the present is always lost. Film photography creates images from the stuff we’re made of: salt, traces of metal, water, carbon. Digital process makes us believe that we can control time. Film reminds us that we dissolve in it, like salt in water or bone in acid.