The Book of Lamps and Banners

by Elizabeth Hand

  “What about the Nazi stuff?” I asked. “Did Ville turn your father on to that?”

  “My father believed in a fairy-tale Sweden, the way white Americans believe in a dream. After my mother died, he got very angry about everything. The holiday cottages failed. The sheep died. He worked for a while at the cement plant, but then that failed, too. After Ville came, things got easier, but that was when my father began to talk more about Swedish identity. Vikings, the stone ships, folk music. He was too old for the skinheads—Odium, bands like that. He thought they were immature, too violent. He liked Viking rock.”

  “Is that black metal?”

  “Of course not. It celebrates our heritage—myths and the sea, how fate rules us all, whether we like it or not. Some of it’s very good. Also very loud. But my father mostly liked folk music. Swedish folk music, and Bob Dylan. Ville would bring CDs for us to listen to, and sometimes he’d play tapes of his own songs. He talked about how it was important that we Swedes treasure our own ways and beliefs, otherwise they would be lost, the way traditions were being lost in England. My father and Erik, they agreed with that—they didn’t need to be convinced.”

  Her voice grew more thoughtful. “I don’t know if my father was always racist. I never heard him or my mother say anything about it. In school we were taught that all people are equal, but that was easy to say. There were no black people on the island then. I never saw a person with brown skin till I went to Stockholm. And when the cement plant brought in migrant workers from Bulgaria who would work very cheaply, my father wasn’t happy about that. But I was gone before the refugees started arriving.”

  “Did you know he had a podcast on the Herla Network?”

  “One of my cousins in Stockholm told me—she was horrified. I was, too, but I wasn’t surprised.”

  We walked in silence. An owl called, and something small chittered in the underbrush.

  “How did it start?” I asked. “With you and Gwilym?”

  “We would have a bonfire on the beach at night, and he would sing to me. I loved that, though some of the songs were frightening. Ravens picking out dead people’s eyes, ghost women. He said that folk songs were supposed to be scary. There was one about two dead sisters and a bone harp that used to give me nightmares.”

  She twisted her dreadlock around a finger. “I was really smart, but no one ever thought I was pretty. But Ville always told me I was beautiful. He’d bring me presents, clothes he bought in London. CDs. He took pictures of me, he said I could be a model if I wanted to.”

  “He was grooming you.”

  “Yes.”

  Her voice was controlled, her face composed. She seemed untouched by the cold, or any of the events of the last thirty-six hours. Except for her pallor and the lack of an artisanal sweater, she might have stepped from one of those ads for Kalkö wool. I sensed that same chilling absence as when I first spoke to her in the garage: the void left when someone has ceded emotion to something even more powerful and destructive.

  She cocked her head at me. “You really don’t look good.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I knew I wasn’t.

  Chapter 66

  We walked, the only sounds our feet crunching on the thin snow and the hiss of wind through evergreen needles. My jaw ached from clenching my teeth against the crank and the cold. My entire leg had started to feel numb.

  “What happened to your boyfriend?” Tindra asked.

  “Huh?”

  “The guy with the glasses, the bookseller. What happened to him?”

  “You mean Gryffin? He wasn’t my boyfriend.”

  “Why not? He seemed nice.”

  “He’s a geek.”

  “I’m a geek.”

  “You’re an entirely different level of geek—you’ve invented some kind of mind control app.”

  “It’s not mind control. It’s a symbolic language.”

  “It’s fucked up, is what it is. The day after I left your place, your friend Lyla tracked me down. She said you’d gone missing, you and your dog. Her brother went to find you, he got some text that showed your dog had been killed. What happened?”

  Her composure broke. She began to cry. “Bunny—someone poisoned Bunny. I don’t know how, but they did. In the park, we were going to the demonstration, and suddenly he fell over and then he was dead.”

  “And you recorded it on your phone?”

  “I thought he was having a seizure, I wanted to show the veterinarian so she could help him. But he, he just died so quickly, I never had time…”

  “It was the same drug that killed Harold. The same thing he used on you. Etorphine hydrochloride, an animal tranquilizer. This—”

  I reached into my bag for the remaining dart. “There’s enough here to knock us both out. Have you ever seen one of these before?”

  Wiping her eyes, she nodded. “I think so. Something like it—on the farm when I was still at home. There was a bad ram, with enormous horns. Me and a friend were playing in the field, the ram attacked us—it tried to gore her. We ran away and my father called a man he knew from Norderby. He came over with one of those guns and shot it and took it off in a trailer.”

  I put away the dart. “Why were you even at that demonstration? Did you meet him there? Ville?”

  She began to walk, fast. I caught up with her and grabbed her arm. “Tell me—how did you know he was going to be there?” She said nothing, and I tightened my grip. “Tell me, damn it!”

  “I keep track of him online,” she finally admitted. “There’s a Herla discussion board where he’s active. I log in under a different name to see what he’s doing.”

  “You’re stalking him.”

  She pried my hand from her arm. “If you want to call it that. When I saw he was going to be in London, I texted him.”

  “When was this?”

  “A few weeks ago. We started talking a few times after that. I told him what I’d been working on. That I was developing an app to help people recover from trauma, and forgiveness was part of that, but it wasn’t something you could just program into an app. So I needed to see him.”

  “And he agreed?”

  “Yes, a few days ago.”

  I shook my head. “So you arranged some kind of date at a Nazi rally?”

  “I wanted him to trust me.”

  “Trust you?” I tried to get a suss on what was going on. Maybe she wasn’t lying to me outright, but she was hiding something. If she’d really wanted to forgive him, her plan had backfired, big-time. It seemed likely that Birdhouse had raped her while she was unconscious in that cell beneath the cottage.

  “Back in London,” I said. “When you told me about Ludus Mentis, you said you’d been abused as a kid, but you weren’t afraid of him anymore. You said when your code was complete, you were going to make him disappear completely. What did you mean?”

  “Nothing. I was wrong. I don’t need the book for that—I can make him disappear now.” She took a breath. “There’s a flaw in the unfinished code. But it’s not a bug. It’s a feature.”

  “This bug—it’s what happened to me, right? When you showed it to me—I had a flashback to when I was raped. It was horrible. It didn’t help my PTSD. It triggered it.”

  “That was the first time I shared it with anyone. I didn’t know what it would do.”

  “But now you do. It triggers a memory of the most terrifying thing that ever happened to someone. I mean, how the fuck do you make a feature out of that?”

  “I do nothing. It finds where traumatic memories are stored and restores them. Once I have the book and finish the code, Ludus Mentis will be able to shuffle those same memories so that they no longer have the same emotional power over you. It’s like shuffling a deck of cards to get a different outcome. But now—”

  “But now it triggers a flashback. A violent flashback. Maybe you weren’t sure what it would do when you showed it to me, but you figured it out pretty fast. I only looked at it for a few seconds. And if somebody else�
�”

  I thought of Tommy. Did she even know he was dead? “If someone else was exposed to it for longer,” I went on, “someone who had PTSD, or a history of violence—it could make them crazy.”

  She nodded. “Yes. Like a berserker. You know what they are? Viking fighters who became like animals in battle.”

  “So if that’s a possible outcome, why would you take a chance on letting a bunch of neo-Nazis get hold of it?”

  “It was a mistake. A big mistake, yes. But I can fix it.” In the near darkness, her white skin, black hair, and black clothing made her seem like something conjured from the snow and icy wind. “Him, my father, Erik, those people in the park…how do we live with such evil?”

  “Going to the police and telling them about those missing girls might be a start.”

  “The police here will do nothing. People on Kalkö disappear. Women, refugees. There was a fire, and the police did nothing.”

  “But you have proof—he put you in a cell and drugged you! And you said he killed someone else. I think you’re right.”

  I drew the retainer from my bag. “I found this in his shed. He has boxes there where he puts animal skulls to decompose. Did you know that?”

  “He showed me when I first got here. For his photographs, like in the book. He’s very proud of his pictures.”

  “It’s not just animals. You need to show this retainer to the cops.”

  “Dra åt helvete.” She pushed away my hand. “Did you go to the police when you were attacked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did they help you?”

  “No. But—”

  “‘No. But.’ Do you know how many times I’ve heard women say that? ‘My husband, he hits me, I know I should leave, but.’ ‘I walked somewhere I’d never been before and was attacked and raped, but.’ ‘My father murdered my sister because she kissed a boy, but.’ I am not going to the police. I’ll be done before they get here.”

  I shoved the retainer into my pocket. “Did you tell Birdhouse about The Book of Lamps and Banners?”

  “Of course not,” she replied, too quickly.

  “Listen to me.” I pulled out the dart again and brandished it in her face. “Harold Vertigan was killed by a dart like this one. So was Bunny. It’s the same drug Birdhouse used on you. He must have known about the book! Did you tell him when you met in London?”

  “I don’t know.” She wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Maybe I did say something. But it was an accident if I did.”

  “I’ll say it was a fucking accident.”

  “What business is it of yours?”

  “It’s my business because I got dragged into your business.”

  “No one dragged you into it.”

  “Your friend Lyla did.”

  “Lyla?” Her eyes widened in alarm. “Did she send you? Is that why you’re here? Did she send you to look for me?”

  “No.” I stared at her, confused. Why would she be afraid of Lyla? She and Tommy were Tindra’s only friends—more than friends, Gryffin thought.

  So why did she look terrified when I brought up Lyla’s name? And why hadn’t she once mentioned Tommy? I shut my eyes, suddenly dizzy.

  “You did it,” I said slowly. “No one else knows about the app, no one else knows what it does. Tommy’s PTSD…when Bunny died, you sent him the video, and when he found you, you used the app on him. Witnesses saw him arguing with a woman. It was you. That’s why he attacked those people without warning.”

  “I loved Tommy! I didn’t kill him. The police did.”

  “The police didn’t. Gwilym Birdhouse did, with another of his toy darts. They’ll see that once they get the toxicology report.” I began to shake. “You saw what it did to me. How could you do that to Tommy?”

  “Because of Bunny. I wanted Tommy to find Ville and hurt him.”

  “But you knew what would happen—”

  “I didn’t know. I saw what happened with you, but that might have been a spurious effect. I needed to find out if it was replicable.

  “When Bunny died, I knew it was Ville who killed him. Harold, then Bunny…I put it together. Ville stole the book, and he knew I had developed the app. The dart that killed Bunny was meant for me. Maybe not enough to kill me, just to sedate me. But enough to kill a dog. I texted Tommy that Ville was at the rally and told him to meet me there. When he did, I showed him Ludus Mentis—I hoped he would hunt down Ville.”

  “But you knew you couldn’t control it.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “Have you used it on yourself?”

  “A few times.”

  She raised her head to stare at me, and I felt the way I had when I saw my reflection in the camera lens at Slagghögen: that I gazed into the empty eye sockets of a skull. Using the flawed version of Ludus Mentis on herself hadn’t relieved Tindra’s anguish. It had allowed her trauma to consume her, like the larvae in Gwilym Birdhouse’s cardboard boxes.

  Tindra’s icy hand touched mine, and we halted.

  “We’re there,” she said.

  Through the trees I saw the back of the same house I’d observed earlier. There were no lights on other than the floodlight. The shadow from the Odinist totem stretched across the yard, a black path leading to the front door. Between us and the house, a mass of weedy-looking trees formed a thick natural hedgerow.

  I looked at Tindra. “Do they have a dog?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “How early do they wake up?”

  “Early. Erik has to go check on the sheep.” She glanced at the sky. “But this won’t take long. We should have plenty of time.”

  She started toward the house. I pulled her back. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I told you, I’m not afraid of them.”

  “Well, I am. Do you have a plan? Tell me.”

  “Do you know the story of the Alder King?” she asked. “In English, I think people call it the Erlking.”

  “Like the poem by Goethe?”

  “Goethe mistranslated it. It’s a Scandinavian legend, not a German one. The alder is an evil tree that captures young girls and kills them so it will grow. It’s a real tree, and it really is evil—see those?”

  She pointed to the hedgerow. “Those are alders. They grow where the ground is boggy. They have a bacteria inside that allows their roots to grow underwater, and they grow so thickly they blot the light, so no other plant or tree can thrive around them. If you cut down an alder, a hundred new shoots will grow from its base.”

  “How do you get rid of it?”

  “You can’t. Erik said if you let goats eat the alders one year, and then pigs the next year, the alders will die. But you see that hasn’t happened here. And you can’t burn them, because their roots are underwater. They just keep coming back, no matter how many times you think you’ve killed them.”

  Without a backward glance at me, she darted off.

  I took off after her, but as soon as I hit the hedgerow, I floundered. Too late I realized she must have known a way around the alders. My boots punched through a skin of ice, sinking into frigid water. I slogged through it, muck the consistency of wet cement sucking at my boots. When I tried to move, I couldn’t. I’d heard of treacherous marshland and quickmud: Wasn’t that what preserved all those sacrificial victims thrown into northern European bogs thousands of years ago?

  My chest tightened. I reached for two branches in front of me, grasped them, and pulled myself forward. After a moment, the mud released my boots. I dragged myself a few more feet, until the mud gave way to dead grass, and I staggered into the yard.

  I wiped my hands on my jeans and opened my bag to check that the Nikon was undamaged. My fingers brushed against the leaf from The Book of Lamps and Banners.

  I stared at the page. It’s all there, not a line missing. I’ll be able to complete writing a code that was begun thousands of years ago.

  It was too dark for me to make out the luminous figures, but I knew they were there: decapitated he
ads, green arrows and swastikas, a tree whose uncounted branches grew from a single trunk. On the reverse side, runes that I couldn’t read, though maybe the people who lived here could.

  Angar’s work, beware, this is power…

  I headed toward the house.

  Chapter 67

  Tindra had been right—the door was unlocked. I wondered if there was a single working lock on all of Kalkö. I stepped inside warily, armed with the scissors.

  Boots and shoes were neatly lined up against the wall of a spotless mudroom. Anoraks, knit caps, and parkas hung from wooden pegs. I grabbed a cap and yanked it over my head. Turning, I spotted the tote holding Svarlight CDs and T-shirts on a bench beneath a window, three pairs of felted slippers beside it. A pink geranium in a white pot perched on the windowsill.

  My boots leaked filthy water onto an immaculate striped rug as I set my bag down and removed the dart. Very carefully, I placed it in a pocket of my leather jacket, then walked unsteadily into the kitchen.

  Three brightly striped rag rugs covered the floor, lined up with military precision. There was a brushed-steel stove and matching refrigerator, high white counter and matching stools for a breakfast bar. Wineglasses in a wooden wine rack. A white bowl of lemons. In a birchbark frame, a homemade painting of Thor’s hammer flanked by S-shaped lightning bolts. More geraniums.

  I went to the sink and gulped water from the faucet, then scanned the room for a weapon, grabbing a wooden mallet from a container of kitchen utensils. I stepped hesitantly to an open doorway and found myself looking into a well-equipped home studio: a table with two laptops and a desktop computer; microphones, speakers, audio interface for a DAW, and snarls of cable; a filing cabinet. Two glass-fronted barrister bookcases against one wall; windows covered with heavy black plastic to muffle outside sound.

  In front of the filing cabinet crouched Tindra. She whipped around, relaxing when she saw me. She turned back, snaking her hand into the drawer, and withdrew a smartphone; stood and walked past me into the kitchen without speaking.

  I didn’t move. Tindra had said she knew where Gwilym had stashed the book and her mobile: here. I stepped quickly to the filing cabinet and yanked open its drawers. I found nothing but farm reports and business statements related to Svarlight Studios, each with the label’s logo and the slogan MUSIC FOR A NEW DAWN.