“They haven’t told us anything official,” I answered.
“The police call didn’t say anything about any injuries, at least. Or deaths… I suppose you’ve heard about Shirley?”
“I got the call yesterday.”
“I should mention that I’m covering the story… An interview—”
“She is that dread reporter, dear thing. Do not answer her questions.”
“Sorry, Connie, but I’m going to have to bow to my father’s wishes on this one.”
The father and son were leading the way, and the passage was pretty narrow, so I didn’t get any preview of the Hall of Foxes until I’d already entered it. Once I saw it, though, it just sucked the breath right out of my lungs. I’d been expecting something like the underground cities of Turkey—cramped passageways connecting the relatively few rooms that you could actually stand in. But not even the Catacombs of Alexandria could have prepared me for this.
The cavern must have been about thirty meters high, which was odd since I didn’t think we’d descended that far. The walls formed a rough pentagon, and scenes from Vanatru mythology were carved all over them. I recognized a few of the images, like Frey’s death in the autumn and his resurrection in the spring, but most of the significance was lost on me.
Natural pillars of shiny, black volcanic rock held up the ceiling, which was blanketed in ormolu lichen. The neon tubes back in the shop had led me to expect something more glaring and sickly, but the glow of the real thing was gentle. Organic, and warm like steam. The look of it, like the green sky before a Midwestern thunderstorm,[27] almost made me forget I was underground.
The locals had set up a few booths along the main avenue through the cavern. They were mostly just hawking the usual souvenirs—fake wooden idols and fox figurines, some dried bits of ormolu lichen—but next to one of the booths there was a dirty little black-haired kid selling these glossy four-colored maps. Somehow I’d thought everyone here would look stereotypically Nordic, but—based on the people I’d seen so far—most of the Vanatru were smaller and darker than my expectations. The kid was wearing a shirt that read “Adodis” and had a subtle knock-off of an Adidas logo on it. Something about that just cracked me up, so I asked him how much the maps were.
“You won’t need that,” the son told me.
I bought one anyway, though, and then we headed down the avenue.
Once we’d gotten a little beyond the main cavern, the avenue walls bottlenecked together. Like that narrow canyon that Harrison Ford goes through in Indiana Jones before he finds the Grail Castle. Now that we were in the son’s territory, I suddenly noticed there was no more talk of Hollywood.
“The Treasury is probably Vanaheim’s best-known feature,” he told me as we slowed to a mosey, trapped behind a group of old tourists in the bottle-neck. “It’s the first big attraction a man sees when he enters at Snaefellsjökull. An artist’s representation of it is used on the front cover of Magnus Valison’s The Fox in the Snow.”
“Yeah, I read that. So, the Treasury’s the one with the big building face carved directly into the stone, right? All decorated with spears and shields and stuff? It looked pretty impressive on the book cover…”
“Yes, that is it, but the first big attraction that we will show you is impressive even more so.” Just as he said this, the avenue opened up to another big cavern. “This is the temple of the Refurserkir.”
Refurserkur literally means something like “fox-shirter,” and on the map that I’d bought the temple before me was marked with a little cartoon fox head. Cameras aren’t allowed in Vanaheim, but even if I’d had one, it couldn’t have done justice to the real thing.
The tourists in front of us were gawking in awe.
The front of the temple was actually shaped like a gigantic fox head, carved out of one big mass of rock. I couldn’t believe the detail of the thing, and on such a massive scale.
“Now why isn’t this called the Hall of Foxes?” I asked.
“Because this is the Hall of the Fox-Shirters,” the son answered me. “The men become fox. This is we. My father and I. We are Refurserkir.”
“Really?” I pulled my eyes away from the temple to see if he was joking. “I thought the Refurserkir were like ninjas or something.”
“We are like foxes that are full of tricks and stealth. That is why we wear the fur of foxes.”
“You’re kidding, right? I mean, don’t take this as an insult, but the two of you don’t seem particularly sneaky to me.”
“Of course we have other clothes for when we must be sneakier. These clothes are more for the resilience of the fox to cold.”
“Huh. I just thought you guys would be more imposing.”
“Like the fox, we are not so imposing to look at, but we—”
I don’t know if the father understood what was being said or if he just didn’t like the amount of talking going on in general, but he suddenly smacked the son on the back of the head and grumbled something at him in Vanaheimic.
The son rubbed where his father had hit him. “All right… It is true. We in actuality are only servants of the Refurserkir. But we are trained in their ways. Trust that we could impose you if such imposition were to become necessary.”
“Well, show me a trick or something.”
“Okay. Watch this.” He started to reach inside his parka.
I can’t say exactly how it happened, then—it was all kind of blurry—but the next thing I knew, the father had somehow spun around and thrown the son to the ground. And the son just lay there for a minute.
“Maybe I should not show you any tricks after all,” he said, eventually, accepting my hand to help him to his feet.
“Yeah, cool…” I said. “Can I go inside the temple, though?”
Though Our Heroine and the actor (whose words remained bright in our minds) had left the door unlocked, it seemed that no one else had infiltrated the interior of the librarian’s store. We were, to all appearances, alone. As the store was still immersed in its opaque bath of shadows, however, the accuracy of all appearances was difficult to ascertain. We treaded, therefore, carefully to the switchbox in back—neither fools nor angels—and dispelled the darkness.
Newly illuminated in the light of halogen, the amount of potential information with which we were faced overwhelmed us. Our Heroine had led us here, and we were thus confident that none of the books here shelved could fail to yield some relevant information concerning the case—just as no shell can fail to speak of the ocean or of the various species of oceanic mollusk-hunting fauna. Yet the cost in time of extracting the information must be balanced against the information’s value. Such equations were not easy to calculate on the basis of covers alone, however, and consequently it would not be a simple matter to narrow our search.
We walked the aisles of the store, then, with eyes open for the incongruous. The truly antique books in their glass display cases were kept separate from the merely rare, yet—other than this—the system according to which the store was arranged remained inscrutable to us. The traditional practice of organization in reference to author’s surname had seemingly been eschewed in favor of a method far more arcane.
This raised the question: How does one locate the incongruous in a system that emulates chaos? In the general semblance of maelstrom, what order was there from which to deviate? Most of the volumes possessed no commonalities save those of age and scarcity. On any given shelf, only the loosest of thematic or biographical ties bound together two adjacent tomes.
27
The Master’s description of a similar scene in