by Keith Rosson
“Yes. They urinated on everything.”
She leaned down, lifted a shirtsleeve from a pile of clothes on the floor with the tip of her pen. Brian could see the knife lacerations in the fabric.
“Your clothes?”
“My boss’s.”
She clicked the pen a few times, frowned. Absently tapped the pen against the badge on her chest in some quick internal rhythm. “Okay. Let’s get down to business then, Mr. Schutt. Let’s start with what was stolen.”
He paused. “Well, nothing.”
“Hmm?”
“Nothing was stolen.”
He told his story, what little there was. Jónsdóttir occasionally scribbled a note in her pad or grunted in affirmation. After spending a moment examining the bathroom, she came out and pointed at the lone unshredded jacket on its hangar. “So why would someone do this, Mr. Schutt? Destroy your things? Your equipment. This is expensive equipment, yes?”
“I don’t know why, honestly. And it is, yeah. Expensive, I mean.”
“Why did you bring all of this equipment here? This surveillance equipment, to Kjálkabein?”
“Oh! I’m sorry,” Brian said, flustered. “I thought I’d mentioned that. I’m here with my boss, Mark Sandoval. He’s a writer. He’s working on a book. He, uh, he’s the guy who wrote—”
Crouching down before the shattered insectile husk of an EVP recorder, once more touching it with the tip of her pen as if it were a corpse, the woman’s face positively bloomed in recognition as she turned to stare at him. “The Long Way Home?” Jónsdóttir said. “That Mark Sandoval? In Hvíldarland?”
Sandoval’s name always brought out interesting things in people. A weird miasma of fascination, contempt, admiration and mockery. Much of that was in play in the way the cop shut one eye and grinned at him. Brian was reminded again that Sandoval’s celebrity was an unabashedly weird kind of celebrity.
“That one,” Brian said. “Yeah.”
Jónsdóttir stood. “I’m imagining you’re here for the unicorn then.”
“How did you— Yeah. We are.”
“Out at the Hauksdóttir farm.”
“It’s a small country, I guess.”
Jónsdóttir nodded. “It is that.”
“That is why we’re here, yeah. What do you think about it?”
“About what? The unicorn?”
“Yeah,” Brian said.
“Ah,” she said. “You know. As kids we’re taught the stories.” She smiled and it sloughed some of the hardness from her, pulled a veil of years away in one motion. “Asmund and Signy. Hans. The Cat in the Cave. You know, kid’s tales.”
Brian nodded, maybe a little too eagerly. “Yes! Invisible, Hans slays the ogress, cuts off her head.”
Jónsdóttir nearly laughed. Not quite, but it was there. “Yes. It’s a weird mix here, different than Iceland. We’re more isolated. We are used to being alone. My friend’s mother believes in trolls. Really believes in them. I think we all just want the world to be bigger than it is. More magnificent.”
Brian tried to scope out a ring on her finger—that line about getting used to being alone reverberating inside him—and said, “But you heard about the unicorn.”
“Karla Hauksdóttir called us. She sent our detective the video she made.” Her look said it all—a kind of muted pity. Brian bristled, felt strangely protective of Karla, even though he doubted her as well. Their odd, lonely host, raising her children in that big, rambling house amid the fields.
“So . . . What about all this, then? What can we do?”
Jónsdóttir frowned. “I’m not too sure, Mr. Schutt, to be honest. We don’t get a lot of vandalism like this. There are only five constables and a detective here.”
“In Kjálkabein?”
“In the whole country,” Jónsdóttir said, and smiled again. “Which is mostly Kjálkabein, it’s true.”
“Shit.”
“Yes. Most of the time we deal with auto accidents, getting sheep out of the road. Folks having too much to drink, you know. I would say it’s not a good sign, all this damage.”
“I agree with you there,” Brian said, looking at the warped, drying pages on the bedspread.
“Whoever did this decided to destroy these things rather than sell them. That seems significant. And the pissing, well. This seems to send a message. It makes you wonder.”
“About what?”
“Well,” and here she clicked her pen again, and squinted down at her notebook, “did the people who did this know that this was Mark Sandoval’s room? Isn’t that the whole point? Random vandals would be taking a bit of a risk, já?”
The title of a new Mark Sandoval book flitted through his head: The Cops of Kjálkabein: Masters of Understatement. “I hear you.”
“I think it’s strange that there is no forced entry, though perhaps it’s simply a matter of picking the lock. I’d like to speak to the desk clerk after we’re done here. You’re welcome to come to the station and file a formal report. But without something stolen to look for, there’s not much hope.”
“Can’t you, I don’t know, dust for fingerprints or something? Get DNA from the, you know, urine?”
At last, it was a true smile that Jónsdóttir gave him, and it was a dazzling and pure thing to see. “Oh, I like that! ‘DNA.’ ‘Dust for fingerprints.’ Like in your CSI: Miami. But hundreds of people have been in this room. Do we run everyone’s fingerprints?”
“Shit,” Brian repeated.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Schutt. You’ve seen this country, yes? This isn’t—”
“This isn’t Iceland, I know. I’ve heard that.”
“I was going to say this isn’t CSI: Miami, but you’re right. I pay for my own uniform. I wish I could help you more. I’m sorry.”
•
He put the remnants of Monster Americana, such as it was, in one of the duffel bags, and left everything else for Viktor to take care of. An act of petulance he felt was fair payment for the bullshit he’d said about the cops—Jónsdóttir hadn’t been terribly helpful, but it was far from the shakedown Viktor had insinuated. Downstairs, he was spared a conversation with the man, who could be heard talking in hushed Icelandic with the cop. They quieted as he approached. He tossed the room keys on the counter, wordlessly took his purple and pink bike from behind the desk, and wheeled it outside.
The empty duffel bags slapped against his legs as he pedaled through town. Once again he was floored by the quiet, careworn beauty of the place. Kjálkabein was like a high-contrast photo in its searing, saturated colors: here was the steel gray wash of the sea spied between the slats of brightly-painted buildings, the wide-mouthed alleyways. Even the cars, boxy, rounded European models, were like bizarro versions of the vehicles he was familiar with: everything seemed suffused with a little magic, a murmur of strangeness. Jónsdóttir was right: Hvíldarland really wasn’t Iceland, wasn’t Reykjavík. It was scrappier, worn down, a little more busted up. Hvíldarland was the scabby-kneed little brother smoking cigarettes behind the school, and still it was beautiful. He slalomed along Road Seven, strangely aloft as he left the town behind.
Strangely, because Sandoval was clearly going to flip out. All of the equipment was gone. From a technical standpoint, they’d been unprepared for the size of the farm before this, and now what? They had virtually nothing.
The epiphany—if it could be called that, as it struck him with all the severity and grace of a punch to the forehead—arrived as he pedaled with a rippled, moss-furred lava bed on one side and a striated green and brown steppe on his other.
He stopped, veering onto the rocky shoulder and straddling his little bike, blinking at the pavement.
Christ, he was dumb.
Destroying their equipment wasn’t supposed to stop them.
It was supposed to scare them. It was supposed to run t
hem out of town.
This was classic noir shit: they’d been given a warning.
9
He jostled his way down the Hauksdóttir driveway and passed Karla, who waved with a gloved hand from the mouth of one of the greenhouses. The frame of his poor bike squeaked its way over the ruts. He found Sandoval behind the house, that stretch of land where the grass met the woods. Sandoval was crouched, attaching one of their motion cameras to its tripod. There was salt in the wind and Brian could hear the shirr of the pines beyond, a sound both intimate and woeful. It made him homesick as hell, and for a brief moment he wanted to tell Sandoval about his head, his poor ruined head and the thing resting inside it. He wanted Sandoval to tell him, fatherly and wise, appropriately somber, that it was okay to go home.
Sandoval heard him, or seemed to feel Brian’s eyes at his back. When he turned, his hair whipped across his face. His face was wooden, his eyes were impossible to read. The camera, tiny as it was, hung loose in a fist at his chest. His face changed then, bloomed, like what Brian imagined would happen after the hypnotist told someone to wake up. Like he recognized Brian again. He blinked and noted the limp duffel bags hanging at his hips.
“Where’s the stuff? You put it in the house?”
Brian paused—This is where the whole thing shits the bed, he thought—then told him. It didn’t take long. Sandoval listened, nodding here and there. Just Brian’s voice and the sound of the wind, the occasional clack of some forgotten shutter around the other side of the house. When he was done, Sandoval said, “That’s it?” He dipped his chin toward the bags. “That’s all of it?”
Brian nodded. “I saved the manuscript. Everything else is toast. I left the clothes.”
“And they pissed on my clothes?”
“Yeah. And cut them with a knife.”
“Jesus. Those jackets, too? Those jackets I brought?”
“Everything. I just left everything there.”
Sandoval leaned over and spit. “Those were nice jackets,” he said quietly.
“Yeah. A lot of nice gear, too. I’m sorry.”
Lifting his head and squinting against the pale silver coin of the sun burning through the clouds, Sandoval said, “Oh, don’t be sorry, Brian.”
“You’re not . . . I mean, you’re not pissed? That was a lot of gear.”
“Pissed?” Sandoval said. He came over and laid a warm hand on Brian’s shoulder. “I’m ecstatic. I’m thrilled. Inside this battered shell of mine, Brian, I am jumping up and motherfucking down.”
Brian felt that same sense of inertia, of disconnect, that had come with looking at his CT scans. “You are? What about your book?”
Sandoval shrugged. “That book sucked.”
“What? But it’s a, you know, book.”
“Brian, I have copies, dude. Besides, you know what this means, right?”
Brian resisted the sudden urge to turn around, look at who might be coming down the driveway. “Yeah. That someone’s threatening us.”
“Exactly. It means we’re on to something. That’s what it means.”
“I guess,” said Brian. “Mostly it just feels like we’ve been warned, you know?”
“We have been warned!” Sandoval cried, jubilant. “Listen. This comes down to one thing: People are messing with us.” He squeezed Brian’s shoulder again and leaned in close, all silver stubble and lantern jaw and bloodshot eyes. “There is no hook in a story like people messing with you. Guaranteed. We’re on the right track.”
“I think Viktor had something to do with it. The room was trashed, but the lock wasn’t broken.”
“That little mustachioed dick-rabbit. It wouldn’t surprise me. He just pockets some cash in exchange for a room key for ten minutes. Something like that, right?”
“Maybe. The cop was talking to him when I left. He didn’t want me to get the cops involved.”
Sandoval hooked his arm around Brian’s neck. “Are you worried? You look worried.”
“Yeah, I’m worried,” Brian said, uncomfortable with their proximity. “It seems like a pretty clear message, Mark. A real obvious ‘get the hell out of here’ kind of thing.”
“This is a good thing. I’m telling you. This is a significant development. Now I’ve got to go make some very expensive phone calls on Karla’s phone and get some new gear shipped out here, quick. But I’m serious, Brian. This is the best news we’ve heard yet.”
And there went Sandoval, practically humming as he jogged to the house. When he got onto the porch, he turned and called out, “Everyone loves a mystery.”
10
“So you’re saying there’s no way they’ll let us in?”
Karla washed her hands from a hose as they stood clustered around one of the greenhouses. It was the highest edge of afternoon in Hvíldarland, a time that they’d been assured didn’t last long. “Night,” Karla had told them, “comes very fast here.” The bracken and brambles of the woods were already becoming cloaked in shadow, the treetops hung with the last of their dusty light.
“Of course not,” she said. She turned the spigot off and flicked her hands free, a smear of dirt on her forehead, her hair pulled back. Brian saw through the semi-opaque skin of the greenhouse the globes of pumpkins stacked in their rows of soil, nestled there like strange, distended pearls. He smelled loam, earth, sea tang. The occasional cutting wind that brought with it the scent of pine. “It’s a military base. It’s not a community pool.” She laughed at her own joke.
“How long will it take to get there?”
“It depends. Do you want me to drive you? It won’t take long at all then.”
“But what if we get in? Are you going to come in with us? Wait for us outside?”
She put her hands on her hips and turned north, squinting at the line of trees beyond, making it clear that she would do no such thing. “With your bicycles it’s not a long trip, but the woods? The road?” And here she traded a glance with Brian, heavy with meaning—he remembered their talk the night before: her belief about the trees, the woods thronged with the weighted, furious souls of men gone a bad death.
She’s not kidding, he thought. She really fucking believes it. All of it. It stirred dread inside him like someone raking a stick through a dying fire.
And then: Of course she does. She sent you a video of a fucking unicorn. She believes every last word.
It was like being adrift at sea and understanding that no one was around for miles. It was a chilling, heartbreaking realization: You’re on your own here. These two are believers. Brooke, Dad, Mom. Don Whitmer. Dr. Bajeer—not one of them is going to save you. Once more he had a fierce, almost violent yearning for his childhood, the simplicity of it. The desire to go home.
Sandoval’s eyes roved between the two of them. “What?” he said. “What about the woods?”
“Nothing,” said Brian. “If we’re gonna go, we should go now, before it gets dark.”
•
They pedaled north, Sandoval sticking a digital camera in his pocket at the last moment. Risky if it was confiscated, but what was the point otherwise? Soon enough they were past the Hauksdóttir property and around the bend in the road. The forest grew heavier, limbs leaning in toward their inky, wending line of pavement. Even with daylight still above their heads, the dense, bracing copses seemed to swallow almost all the day’s illumination. Brian’s head suddenly muttered in disagreement and he wobbled and righted himself.
As he looked around, he could understand how such a place became one of stories. How it could be considered enchanted. Two hundred years ago, even a hundred, almost the entirety of the island would have been considered the wretched, untamable wild. It would have needed to be corralled in some way, contained, beaten back. If only by tale. We make up stories to define the world, and in defining it we conquer it, he thought, even if we have to pull monsters and spirits from
the air. The whir of their spokes in his ears, birds occasionally twittering in the branches, he rode his dumb little bike, always with the wind sloughing through the bows, pushing his hair back. He stared into the woods to the side of the road and, beyond a few yards, could see only darkness. The same thing behind him. Branches clacking like teeth in the wind, rhythmic like that. This was a place of myth, easily.
He could feel it, something charged in the air. Oddly, quietly electric. A hum in the bones, a feeling that made him almost want to hook his fingers under his ribcage, scratch the maddening itch that suddenly lived there.
“You feel that?” he asked Sandoval, who was leisurely pedaling beside him, ridiculous and rakish in his sports coat, knees skyward on his rainbow-colored bike.
“What?”
“I don’t know, just this place.” Like there’s a cloud of bees right behind my head? Like I’m sucking on glass shards? “I’m getting an álagablettur kind of feeling, I’ll be honest.”
Sandoval grinned. “Yeah? What’s that feel like?”
“Seriously? Like I’m chomping on tinfoil.”
They pedaled.
“And my head hurts,” he said. He wobbled once more and righted himself.
Threads of thin, gritty snow began to line the limbs of the pines, dust the ground. Were they rising in elevation? He exhaled deeply, saw skeins of fog purl in front of him. He tried imagining two centuries back, the wildness, the wilderness, and how the path below their feet—if there had been a path at all back then—would have been little more than a snaking thread of cracked, frozen mud. The forest would have invited such ideas as monsters and sprites. The forest would have bowed to the notion of unseen things, nearly insisted upon them. One could walk through a place like this in the brightest of days and then in a matter of steps watch as the canopy of trees overhead swallowed all the sunlight. From there it was not a stretch—no, not at all—to imagine the tickle of twined, misshapen fingers against the back of the neck, fingers light as silk, playful yet ready to seize. A chortle in the dark, a chorus of snapping limbs behind you. But when you turned back, those grasping fingers would simply be the many-nubbed spur of a branch, still and lifeless.