The Book of Lamps and Banners

by Elizabeth Hand

  The innermost bag held neither film nor drugs but a plastic jewel case with a photo CD inside. Another outdated technology, introduced around 1990 by Kodak and long surpassed by scanners and more sophisticated digital processes.

  This wasn’t a Kodak disc, and someone had written 2004 Farm Stats on it in Magic Marker. I was willing to bet a commercial photo lab would never have processed whatever images this disc contained, and that they had nothing to do with farm statistics from 2004. Whoever shot those photos of the thirteen-year-old Tindra had taken a whole lot more of them, but he’d been savvy enough not to store them on his computer. I replaced the ziplock bags in the freezer, pocketed the CD in my jacket, and returned outside.

  Chapter 59

  I ran through the woods until I tripped and, with a sickening lurch, fell, taking the weight on my knee. I sprawled on the cold ground as I caught my breath, finally stumbled to my feet. I limped out of the evergreen cover, crossed the road, and walked, following the fence. Adrenaline and pain momentarily canceled out the cold. I tried to guess how much time had passed. Not more than an hour. That left a little more than two hours until dawn.

  The moon had vanished behind the black wall of conifers. The road felt increasingly claustrophobic, tunneling into a darkness that seemed solid. I kept moving, dragging one foot, then the other, as though I walked toward an unseen cliff edge.

  Phantom lights appeared in the darkness, random dots and lines that merged into symbols. An eye, an arrow; horned circles, spidery swastikas, and fiery grids. Threads of poisonous yellow light streaked the sky overhead, forming a map of fragmented insignia.

  I struggled to make sense of them, the way I used to read acid trails as messages from the future, even though I knew what this really signified: the early phases of amphetamine psychosis. Even when I closed my eyes, the symbols remained, branded on my eyelids.

  A voice whispered my name. I knuckled my eyes until the symbols disintegrated into blobs of red and muddy orange, blinked rapidly as I tried to focus. I saw no one.

  But in front of me shone a single light. I stared at it till my eyes watered, wondering if this was another hallucination. It didn’t move.

  I broke into a shambling run and halted where the road divided. To the right, it dwindled to a snow-patched, grassy track through the woods. In front of me, the road continued for a hundred yards, ending in a broad sweep of well-tended land illuminated by a powerful floodlight atop a barn. The wind carried the scent of woodsmoke.

  Scattered across the clearing were a half-dozen boxy structures resembling giant plastic Monopoly houses, all tidily kept. A two-story building, red with a green roof and a line of decorative stick figures stenciled along its white trim, half a dozen large propane tanks propped at one back corner. Two pickups were parked in front of a separate garage, along with the same blue Volvo I’d seen earlier. Near the garage stood a blue playhouse emblazoned with a cartoon bear. Two crossed axes were nailed above the door of a shed like the one where I’d found the dirt-filled cartons. There was also a single telephone or electrical pole with no lines running to it.

  The harsh floodlight made everything look garish and staged, a movie set waiting for the principals to show up. The impenetrable wall of black trees surrounding the homestead intensified the unsettling effect: the floodlight seemed like a futile effort to keep back the encroaching forest.

  I eased back into the shadows and stared at the house. Above the front door hung a disk painted with a black sun, an Aryan Nations hex sign. The decorative stencils that ran under the eaves weren’t stick figures but runes. The pole was a totem carved from a single tree, stripped of its bark and topped with an elongated man’s face—long mustache, beard, Viking cap, and a single deep-set eye, all chiseled meticulously from the tree trunk. Odin.

  Someone had swept neat paths in the snow between house and vehicles, barn and shed and playhouse. The large propane tanks were lined up as precisely as tenpins in a bowling alley. Despite the black sun and crossed axes, Odin totem and runes, the homestead seemed utterly mundane. It was easier to imagine its inhabitants as law-abiding Swedes whose taste ran to folkloric remnants of their country’s culture than as white supremacists. I had a vision of myself as Quinn—as anyone—would see me, a gaunt figure staggering to the edge of someone’s yard at 4:00 a.m., peering out from the trees like a demented scarecrow. I’d be lucky if they didn’t do what Quinn had warned: shoot me on sight. I turned and began the trek back to the main road.

  Chapter 60

  Within minutes, all signs of the homestead disappeared. My despair was indistinguishable from exhaustion and grief—grief for losing Quinn, and also Tindra. I’d had no plan as to how to find her, only crazed intent. Now even that was gone.

  When I reached the fork in the road, I stopped. The snow was deeper here, drifted against tree trunks. It covered the dead grass and tangled undergrowth that choked a trail narrower and, I suspected, older than the one I’d just left. A disused footpath, not meant for vehicles.

  I could lose myself here. Quinn wouldn’t bother looking for me. He’d assume I’d gone off on a bender. Which, I suppose, I had. I’d heard of people bottoming out, and knew plenty whose floor was the grave. I always imagined the process would be more dramatic: flames, screams, broken bones, blood; the orgasmic rush as the drug kicks in and the needle falls from your arm and you never feel your head hit the ground.

  This was more like the endless magnification of a photographic print, the image losing definition as it disintegrates into grains of light and shadow, until any distinction between darkness and light is erased. All that remains is negative space.

  Threads of light wriggled behind my eyes, through my skull. I opened my bag and dug around until I found one of the darts. I felt at the side of my neck until I detected the pulse of my carotid artery. With my other hand I pressed the dart against the skin, feeling the needle press against my skin without breaking it. I counted to a hundred, trying to summon the strength to take that final step, and fall without stopping. At last I lowered my hand and dropped the dart into my bag.

  I trudged on, with no sense of time or where I was. The air sparked with ghostly symbols, eyes and arrows and wheels. I heard a constant low thunder in my ears. Eventually I had to pause to rest. I braced myself against a tree, scraped up a handful of snow, and pressed it against my injured kneecap as I stared at the trees on the other side of the path. Birches, not evergreens, and larger trees with smooth gray bark: a grove of ancient beeches that encircled an area thick with gorse, the remnant of a farm or other homestead.

  I crossed the path, underbrush scraping my knees. The leafless canopy allowed the sky to show through, the color of charcoal ash. Wind parted the branches, the air no longer resin scented and evocative of Christmas but of something far more ancient: leaf mold and desiccated feathers, bones beneath the frozen earth. A shadow hulked in the center of the clearing, a pile of boards or an abandoned dinghy. I pushed through the thicket to see what it was.

  Gravestones thrust up from the snow, each one the point of a spearhead the size of a boogie board, arranged in the shape of an arrow. When I reached the stone that formed the arrow’s tip, I saw it wasn’t a tombstone but a slab of rock hewn into a ragged point. I stood at the prow of a stone boat—the same one on the cover of Stone Ships, a vessel picked out with dragon’s teeth.

  I stooped to touch a large rock encrusted with lichen like peeling gray paint. Slowly I walked around the perimeter of the ship, my hand resting for a moment on the tip of each stone until I returned to where I’d started. I counted sixty-seven. Shivering, I counted the stones again as I tried to distract myself from the freezing wind.

  This time I came up with sixty. I tried a third time—fifty-three—then a fourth. Fifty-one.

  My numb despair loosened into wonder. In the darkness, surrounded by snow and ferns and stalks of dead grass stirred by the wind, the stone boat really did look as though it moved upon the sea, the rustling of vegetation indistinguishable
from the susurrus of waves.

  It was an optical illusion that couldn’t be captured by any camera—there wasn’t enough natural light, and any artificial illumination would dispel it. Thousands of years ago, someone had designed this monument, a trompe l’oeil that had outlasted any folk memory as to its meaning or purpose. I tried one more time to count the stones—sixty-two—and walked away.

  Chapter 61

  I returned to the path and continued walking, clapping my gloved hands in an attempt to warm them. Even with two pairs of socks, my feet prickled with pins and needles. I’d gone too far now to turn back.

  To steady myself, I counted my breaths. After nearly a thousand, I saw a metal sign nailed to a tree. Freckled with rust, it looked like it dated to the early 1960s—a picture of two primitive log cabins surrounded by pine trees. A hint of blue in the background suggested water. I swiped snow from the metal to read the faded printing.

  SOLSTRÅLENS STUGBY

  I saw no sign of buildings, not even ruins. I kept walking, curious. The wind grew stronger, flattening my hair across my scalp. Colder, too, carrying a brackish smell—I must be very near the sea. The trees grew more sparsely, their limbs twisted into corkscrews. The persistent low thunder in my ears became the sound of waves.

  Before me stretched a vast darkness, white fringed with spray. Waves crashed over onto a pebble beach as I walked to the water’s edge. Miles and miles away, fairy lights glimmered, diamond bright: the running lights of container ships and ferries that plied the Baltic between Sweden and Estonia and Finland. Huge clumps of bladder wrack littered the beach, like bodies washed onshore. Plastic bags and bottles were everywhere, lengths of yellow nylon cords snagged on driftwood. Heaps of dirty snow turned out to be chunks of broken Styrofoam. A dead seagull lay atop a sheet of metal, its foot trapped in a refrigerator grating. I smelled rotting fish, a whiff of diesel fuel.

  I hugged myself, my leather jacket little protection from the unrelenting wind. Icy water oozed through the soles of my cowboy boots. I took out my camera, turning sideways to shield it from the spray, popped the lens cap, and shot a few pictures of the ruined beach. There wasn’t enough light, but that didn’t matter. The process of focusing, of framing the world as I wanted to see it, was enough. I replaced the lens cap and walked farther along the shore, searching for the cabins pictured on the metal sign.

  I nearly missed them, hidden within a dense stand of cedars a hundred yards from the beach. The trees and cabins occupied a miniature peninsula, separated from me by a twenty-foot-wide channel. During high tide or severe weather, it would have been impassable without a boat.

  Now the water was only an inch or two deep. Patches of ribbed sand rose above the surface to provide solid footing. I saw no lights in any of the cabins, just a wash of pale gray that stood out in stark contrast to the black cedar. I gave a cursory glance over my shoulder, then splashed across the channel.

  The frigid water flowed more swiftly than I’d anticipated, sucking hungrily at my boots. I found purchase on a small sandbar and stood for a moment, buffeted by the wind, before making my way to the other bank. I scrambled onshore and hurried up the beach, my knee ablaze from the icy water and the Baltic wind. I slipped and skidded on wet rocks before I reached hard-packed sand, then a wild hedge of dwarf rugosa roses and bayberry, and finally sandy soil feathered with pine needles.

  The sky was noticeably lighter now, the silhouettes of evergreens faintly green against indigo. A memory of summers past still clung to the lonely spit of land, the smells of balsam fir and bracken. Fist-sized stones marked out a path now thick with moss and pine needles.

  The point had been scoured of snow by the steady wind, but my boots squelched as I ran the last few steps to the closest cabin, nearly invisible behind the cedars. I slowed, looking for the door. Tree limbs had overgrown the roof and walls, as though seeking to protect the structure from the wind, leaving only a glint of windows.

  I limped to the side of the cabin. An immense cedar had fallen during a storm, a mass of crushed branches and dead greenery the size of a bus, exposing the cabin’s side wall. This was what I had glimpsed from the beach—weathered siding that had originally been rust colored, now gray. It appeared older than the log cabins depicted on the sign, more like a prefab cottage from the 1940s with board-and-batten siding. The torn tar-paper roof revealed uninsulated rafters and crossbeams.

  I rubbed at the only window, frosted with grit, and peered inside. A single unfurnished room, open to the rafters. Its stained plank floors were spattered with the husks of insects. I could see the sky softening to violet through holes in the ceiling.

  I turned and walked to the back of the cottage. Four other cottages stood within view, all as overgrown as this one, each with its own weather-beaten privy. They’d been sited to allow a discreet distance between them, screened by spruce and pine and the ubiquitous cedar. Beyond the four cottages was another channel, easily twice as wide as the one I’d crossed. The narrow peninsula was practically an island, connected to the mainland by a slender spit of land. In heavy weather, it actually would become an island.

  Whoever used to vacation here valued privacy. On the far side of the channel was the forest. A mile or so through those trees was the homestead, guarded by a one-eyed god whose ancient worshippers might have built the stone ship I’d seen.

  The cabins appeared neither nostalgic nor threatening. Like the homestead, the scene was disconcertingly mundane. Gazing at them, I felt the prick of damage, like a single hair plucked from my skin, and when I ran my tongue across my parched lips, I tasted something more acrid than salt or meth: the chemical afterburn of trauma. If Tindra Bergstrand was still alive, she was here.

  Chapter 62

  If I’d brought the burner, I might have tried to call Quinn. But there was no time to return to the car. Before long it would be sunrise. I chewed a few ibuprofen, hoping to quell the fire in my knee.

  I pushed through the cedars, until a gap between the trees revealed a screen door. The door buckled when I yanked its handle, but I pried it open and reached for the knob on the inside door. It was locked. I rattled the knob, then set my shoulder to the door and pushed until the cheap wood gave way.

  Like the first one, this cabin consisted of a single empty room, reeking of mouse urine and mildew. When I switched on the flashlight, an animal skittered across the rafters, sending down flakes of clotted dust. The roof had caved in, boards and tar paper dangling above the room’s center. I crossed the space cautiously, looking for loose floorboards, ran my fingers across the dank walls to feel for a hidden panel or door. I came up cold.

  The next cabin seemed pretty much the same, barricaded by dense cedars and utterly neglected. But its screen door opened easily, and so did the door that led inside. I stepped through and clapped a hand to my face.

  The stench of damage poured into my nostrils like fetid water as I swept the flashlight’s beam across the room. It was no larger than the others, but the roof was intact. Green carpeting covered the floor, like the artificial turf used around swimming pools, peppered with mouse droppings and shredded pine cones. The eye-watering odor of mouse urine was compounded by an earthier scent, just as foul. The cottage must have been downwind of one of the outhouses.

  I dropped my bag, knelt painfully, and rolled back a corner of the green carpeting. The softwood floor beneath was riddled with holes from wood-boring insects. I dropped the carpet back into place, stood, and looked around.

  The carpet didn’t extend to the back wall. I walked over and saw a metal vent installed in the floor. I aimed my flashlight through the vent but couldn’t see anything. When I crouched to hold my hand above it, I felt a slight warmth. No one would heat an abandoned cabin in February.

  I yanked the edge of the carpet and began to roll it up. Halfway across the room, it exposed a plywood trapdoor, about three feet square, with a small brass handle. The carpentry was careless, or maybe it had just succumbed to the cold. The plywood had split and
the adjoining hardwood splintered. Screws protruded from the hinges. I set down my flashlight, grasped the trapdoor’s handle, took a deep breath, and yanked.

  A wave of noxious air enveloped me, much warmer than the room. I sank to my haunches, grabbed the flashlight, and shone it down into the hole.

  “Hey,” I called softly. “Hey, who’s down there?”

  No one answered. Squinting, I made out the top of an aluminum stepladder about two feet below me. I couldn’t tell how far it extended to the floor beneath it.

  I slung my bag over my shoulder, grasped the flashlight between my teeth, and maintaining a precarious hold on the floor’s edge lowered myself until my boot touched the top step. The ladder wobbled, but I kept going, until I could grasp the ladder’s side rails. When my boots hit the floor, I grabbed the flashlight to look around.

  I stood in a room half the size of the one above, with poured concrete walls and floors. On an Ikea coffee table sat a gallon water jug, half full, and a battery-operated lantern that wasn’t switched on. The only other furniture was a futon mattress pushed against one wall, covered with soiled sheets printed with cartoon animals. Above the mattress a wall vent exhaled a breath of hot stale air. A white enameled bucket with a lid served as a chamber pot. The place reeked of shit and piss, and also of something dead.

  I switched on the lantern and stepped to the futon, breathing through my mouth so I wouldn’t have that ghastly smell in my nostrils. It made no difference. Fear seeped into me as my hand grabbed a sheet. I hesitated, and pulled it back.