I halted, trying to get my bearings. The trees all looked the same, an endless progression of spruce, birch, beech, scraggly hemlock, which formed a shifting, vaporous web of vegetation. Yellow leaves carpeting the ground gave the illusion of sunlight. I walked by instinct, hoping I’d eventually come across the dead fox. Failing that, I’d backtrack to find Quinn.
After several minutes, a pale object appeared in the shadows. It looked uncannily like a body, or part of one—an arm or a leg suspended from one of those black trees. Then the wind shifted, and for an instant the sun broke through. What I’d mistaken for a body was the white column of a birch. Bark peeled from its trunk in long strips. Something moved in its upper limbs—a raven, fluttering to where the dead fox dangled from a branch.
The raven halted, its black beak stabbing with precise, impartial patience at the fox’s exposed rib cage. I froze, holding my breath; then raised the camera to my face, opening the aperture as far as it would go. I waited. Three heartbeats, and the raven cocked its head to stare at me with one yellow eye. I pushed the shutter release, its gentle click more the memory of a sound than a sound itself.
The raven hopped and twisted its head to regard me with its other eye. The feathers on its neck rippled as though another creature moved beneath them. It clacked its beak, gave a low gurgle.
Not a sound of alarm—it continued to stare at me, as though waiting for a reply. I remained still and it repeated the gurgling cry. At last it raised its wings and flapped away from the fox’s carcass, flying so close above my head that I could hear the whistle of air through its feathers before I lost sight of it among the trees.
Chapter 47
I realized I was clutching the Nikon as though someone had tried to snatch it from me, and lowered the camera. Somewhere overhead a bird clacked. Other than that and the scratching of branches in the wind, the forest was silent. I walked toward the birch tree, the spongy earth releasing a whiff of fungus and leaf mold with each step. I stopped to stare at what remained of the fox.
The raven had done its work. Strips of matted fur hung from its abdomen like ruined velvet. Despite the cold, beetles crawled within the stomach cavity. Most of the animal’s flesh was gone. So were its eyes, picked cleanly from their sockets so that the bone gleamed in the gray light. I didn’t bother to raise my camera: the carcass was neither beautiful nor sinister but simply dead.
I walked a few more steps into the forest, but saw nothing more unusual than some scattered black feathers on the carpet of dead spruce needles. I picked up a long, blue-black quill—a raven’s. More littered the ground nearby, pinion feathers, and also tufts of down.
Ravens weren’t the only predators here. But did owls eat ravens? I dropped the feather and looked around. A few feet away, something white protruded from the ground, a bone from the dead raven. I crouched to get a better look, then picked it up warily.
It wasn’t a bone but a dart, with a red plastic fletch and translucent plastic cannula. The steel tip looked lethal. I pinched it between my fingers and held it to the light. As the needle caught the sun, I flashed to that overflowing garbage can in Victoria Park and a dead sparrow, and before that the dead pigeon in the parking lot in the Vale of Health, with what looked like a syringe nearby.
It hadn’t been a syringe, but a dart like this one. A half inch of clear liquid still remained in its plastic chamber. I held it with the steel tip well away from me, scanning the ground as I walked. After a few minutes, I came across a second cannula, at the base of a tree. This one was spent, its chamber empty. I nudged it with my boot, then looked up.
That tree was the most immense birch I’d ever seen, mottled bark no longer white but cement gray, encrusted with lichen and old-man’s beard and the stalactites of some pale fungus. It must have been hundreds of years old. Just above the level of my head, its papery outer bark had peeled away, exposing a patch of smooth trunk the color of sherry.
Someone had scratched three concentric circles here to make a target, the outermost circle slightly flattened into an ovoid. The target and the surrounding bark were pocked with hundreds of tiny holes, as though the tree had been attacked by a miniature woodpecker. I ran the fingers of my free hand across the bark, scrutinizing the crudely etched target; drew my head back to get a better look.
The target represented a human eye. I inserted the dart’s tip into one of the pinholes, as though probing a rotten tooth. It fit perfectly.
I withdrew the dart and looked around. I saw no one, but couldn’t shake a sense of being watched. The raven, perhaps, or some other animal. I picked up the second, spent dart, and with extreme care tucked both into my pocket. I shot a few frames of the homemade target, trying to capture the details of the crude eye. As I replaced the lens cap and stepped away, the wind whipped up to shake the evergreens, and a rain of dead needles stung my face. I turned and quickly retraced my steps.
Chapter 48
What happened?” asked Quinn as I slid into the passenger seat. “Somebody see you?”
I shook my head, out of breath, flapped my hand to urge him to drive. He put the car into gear and pulled onto the main road, peering into the rearview mirror to make sure we weren’t followed.
I looked behind us. The road was empty. “Find another place we can pull over,” I said. “Not near here.”
After a few minutes we veered down one side road, then another, driving past farms and villages that weren’t much more than a few houses clustered near a neat white church or café. The Jetta slowed as Quinn made another turn, down a lane bordered by wooden fences thick with blackened rose vines. We passed an overgrown cemetery, its gravestones nearly lost to weeds and creeping ivy. Maybe fifty feet away were the ruins of an ancient stone church, its roof gone and windows gutted. Beech trees grew where its nave had once been.
Quinn stopped the car, switched off the ignition, and turned to me. “So?”
I held out the first dart. “Look at this—careful, it’s still got something in it. I found another one, but it was empty.”
He took it from my fingers, frowning as he studied it. The wintry light made him look younger despite his four-day beard, the scarifications hidden so that it was easier to imagine the face of the teenage Quinn beneath. I touched his cheek, and he flinched.
“Careful,” he warned. He twisted the dart back and forth. “Where’d you find this?”
“On the ground, in the woods. Can you tell what’s in it?”
“No, but I don’t want to find out the hard way.” He glanced into the back seat. “See if you can find something to put this in.”
I found a wadded-up bag that had contained the groceries we’d bought and handed it to him. He wrapped the dart in it.
“Put that in your bag,” he said. “Let me see the other.”
He scrutinized this even more closely, cautiously removing the fletch and sniffing at the empty tube. He covered the cannula’s open end with his finger, tipped it upside down, and checked to see if any residue remained on his fingertip.
“So?” I asked.
“I’m not a chemist. But with a dart like this, my best guess is that it’s some kind of animal tranquilizer. Ketamine or fentanyl. Don’t get any ideas,” he added, and returned the dart to me. “Anything else?”
“Yeah.” I told him about the crude eye carved into the birch tree. “Someone was using that tree for target practice. I found feathers, too, like they’d shot a bird, probably more than one. A raven.” I hesitated. “Look, I know you won’t believe me, but I’ve seen those darts before—one in Victoria Park, one in a parking lot near Harold’s place. Dead birds, too.”
“So, some dead birds, and some darts.”
“And two dead people shot in the eye with no sign of a bullet’s exit wound, and maybe a dog. And a target—”
“That looks like an eye. That is a weird fucking MO, Cass.”
“As opposed to what? Whoever murdered Tommy wanted it to look like an accident. When Ludus Mentis made him freak out, they
plugged him with a dart so he couldn’t tell anyone what had happened. Getting tased by the cops was icing on the cake. If that’s fentanyl, he was probably already dead, or close to it.”
“Toxicology will show if he had drugs in his system. Your bookseller, too. And maybe the dog. Frigging amateurs,” Quinn muttered, taking out a cigarette.
We returned to Slagghögen. Back in the room I went onto Quinn’s computer. Quinn made himself a rum and Coke, heavy on the Myer’s, and sipped it while I scrolled for news. Other than the obligatory hand-wringing over the circumstances of Tommy’s death—person of color, white nationalists, when would there be a stop?—I came up cold.
“There’s nothing.” I felt like throwing the laptop out the window. “How can there be nothing?”
“It’s London,” said Quinn. “You’re talking nine million people, one dead book guy, one dead black guy. Oh, and a dead dog.”
“And Tindra.”
“A missing girl ain’t news.”
“It will be when someone makes the connection between all of them.”
“For Christ’s sake, give it a rest, Cass!” Quinn’s green eyes were bloodshot, his face more haggard than I’d seen it since we’d met up. “Your book is gone, that girl is gone. You’ve got at least two dead people killed by stupid people. If the girl’s dead, too, that’s too bad. I don’t give a fuck about your boyfriend Gryffin.”
His icy gaze held all the things he’d lost to prison and his work as a contract killer, to heroin and alcohol and despair. I knew he was ready to add me to that list.
“You’re spun, Cass. It’s crazy, all this stuff about voices and the app and pictures moving on the page. None of it makes any sense. You wanted to find that book because it’s worth money and we’d have a nut. So let’s find it. Otherwise we can leave now. Or I will.”
I took a deep breath, trying to stay calm. “Yeah, okay,” I said, and closed the laptop. Quinn’s expression didn’t exactly soften, but the cold rage in his eyes gave way to resignation.
“You know it doesn’t add up to much, Cass. Your darts and some feathers—actually, it doesn’t add up to anything.”
“It does if someone used a tranquilizer gun to kill Harold and Tommy and the dog. And Tindra, for all we know.”
“You can’t prove anything. You got zip, Cassie.” Quinn drained the rest of his drink. “They’ll claim Tommy got taken out in self-defense. A brown-skinned guy at an alt-right rally—witnesses say he swung at somebody, and why wouldn’t he? No one’s come forward to state otherwise.” He poured another shot into his mug. “And where’s his sister in all this? Any mention of her?”
“I don’t know. No.”
I went to the window and stared out at the slag heap. Quinn flopped onto the bed, yawning.
“We can drive to Norderby,” he said. “Have lunch and walk around. If the museum’s open, we can go there. But I gotta catch some z’s. You got me up way too goddamn early.”
Even with his eyes closed, his expression signaled that he was done. He’d given up any hope of us finding the book. He’d given up on me. He was trying to salvage the trip. Pretend we were on vacation, act like normal people. Tomorrow we’d be on a flight back to Reykjavík. He’d remain there. I’d return to my rent-stabilized shithole until I got booted out, go on unemployment and cadge money from my father, use whatever cash I could scramble together to buy booze and drugs so that I could pass out and pretend that I’d never found Quinn again, never lost him, never gave a fuck about him or anything else.
I sank beside him on the bed, placing my hand on his chest. “I just wanted us to be happy,” I whispered.
“People like us aren’t happy, Cass,” he said without opening his eyes. “It’s enough that we’re alive.” He rolled over and didn’t speak again.
Chapter 49
I couldn’t rest. After a few minutes, I got up as quietly as I could and paced the room, waiting until Quinn began to breathe deeply. I stood over him and watched him, his arm flung out above his head, mouth slightly open to show one eyetooth.
Quinn slept like the dead when he napped, an hour, sometimes longer. The rum would help push that limit. When I was sure he wouldn’t wake, I took the car keys from where he’d tossed them on the nightstand. I wasn’t signed on the rental agreement as a driver, but I didn’t plan on going far, or for long. I grabbed my leather jacket and camera and left.
I hurried downstairs and through the lobby. No sign of the girl behind the hotel desk. I strode to the car, glancing up at the shipping containers as I slid into the front seat. A young woman in a head scarf stood in the open doorway of the same apartment where I’d seen the boy the night before. When she noticed me, she went inside and shut the door.
I followed the route that Quinn and I had taken earlier. There was hardly any traffic. All of the snow had blown off the road, and gashes of blue sky showed through the unsettled clouds overhead. When I reached the gravel road, I did a U-turn. I drove back a short distance and pulled onto the shoulder, parking beneath a dense overhang of conifers. I sat, waiting to make sure no cars came into view. The sun was already a third of the way above the horizon. I’d track its passage and give myself half an hour before heading back.
I slung my camera around my neck and got out, ran across the road and down the gravel drive to clamber up the embankment and into the trees. I passed the dead fox, another raven picking at the ground beneath it, and kept going. Beech and birch gave way to more recent growth, ash and conifers that formed a nearly impenetrable thicket with lethally sharp branches. I fought my way through, trying to keep my camera from getting snagged. Every few minutes I paused to listen for any sound: a car, footsteps, voices. I heard only a few birds and the steady patter of dead evergreen needles dropping to the ground.
The trees began to thin. The spruces had been cut, and their stumps formed a treacherous maze, slick with acid-green moss. Dead ferns rattled in the wind. The smell of fresh manure overwhelmed the resinous scent of spruce.
I halted, debating whether to continue. A few yards to my left, the gravel road turned to packed earth, wide enough for one vehicle and cratered with potholes and frost heaves. Directly in front of me, a fence made of woven branches marked the edge of a field of close-cropped, yellowing grass and wind-stunted trees. Their trunks and limbs all pointed the same way, so that they appeared to be crawling across the field. Half a dozen boulders stood in the pasture. Then one of the boulders moved, and another, until all had turned to stare at me. Not boulders but sheep, five black ewes and a black ram with an imposing set of curled horns. They seemed not to blink, each of their eerie amber eyes slashed by a horizontal black pupil.
I held my breath. Those woven branches wouldn’t be much of a barrier if the sheep decided to charge. But they remained motionless, their gaze never leaving me. After a minute, I slowly lifted my camera, staring through the viewfinder at the black ram. I focused the lens until the viewfinder held nothing but a single iris, its flattened pupil a portal into an unknowable darkness. I adjusted the focus a hair’s breadth, pushed the shutter release.
The ram snorted and bolted toward me. I fled, keeping to the woods bordering that rough one-lane road.
When I was a safe distance from the sheep, I cautiously hopped down onto the road. Behind me, it wound between trees and fields, disappearing from view. Ahead, it curved out of sight, fences and fields dissolving into black spruce and white birch. There were tire tracks in the dirt at my feet, deep ruts where a vehicle had gotten stuck and churned the mud into a knee-high ridge, now frozen.
I assumed the road led to a house or farm. But the only structure I could see was a small wooden outbuilding tucked into a pine grove—not much more than a shed, painted white with a red metal roof, small windows with lace curtains, and a red door. I couldn’t see any lights or flicker of motion; caught no sound of voices, TV, or radio or computer. If anyone was inside, they would have seen me by now and confronted me.
My head ached from the steady cold win
d. Clouds hid a sun the color of solder. I thought of Quinn asleep in that dismal room, waking to find me gone. I should head back. I should eat, but the crank had long since burned any hunger from me. I should do what Quinn had told me to do, forget all this and return with him to Reykjavík.
Instead I headed for the shed, ducking beneath pine boughs until I reached the back of the structure. The white clapboards were veined with black mold. A door with a small window sagged from its hinges. I wiped cobwebs and grime from the glass and peered inside.
Dim light filtered through lace curtains webbed with dust. A surfboard rested atop the rafters. Hand tools lay in neat rows on a worktable against one wall, and glass jars filled with screws, nails, nuts, and bolts. Knives glinted on a piece of leather, arranged by size, the smallest as long as my finger, the largest a wicked crescent, like a scimitar.
I jiggled the doorknob. It was unlocked. I stepped inside, closing the door behind me, and clapped a hand over my mouth and nose against the reek of mildew and a fainter odor of decay, like a dead mouse trapped beneath the floorboards; also a choking chemical smell that reminded me of high-school biology class. Formaldehyde or some type of solvent. Eyes streaming, I cracked open the back door, letting in a waft of cold air, and looked around.
Open cardboard boxes covered the floor, all filled with dirt. Posters had been tacked to a wall—a white singer named Saga, the logo for the band Skrewdriver. As I drew closer to examine a third poster, my skin crawled.
It was the back-cover art for Stone Ships, the album by Jötunn’s Egg. The same ancient monument made of sharp-edged stones; same moody background of a mist-bound evergreen forest. Whoever spent time in this shed knew the Svarlight label.
I turned away. On another wall, more implements hung from a pegboard: shears, forceps, hammers and saws, trowels, a hatchet. Stacks of feathered masks covered a worktable, wings jutting above eyeholes punched in the leather. I stepped through the maze of cardboard boxes and picked up one of the masks.
The Book of Lamps and Banners Page 22