“Shoot.”
“Okay, first of all, I would have shaped the stories such that they culminated climactically, but I would not have allowed that climax to be the sole focus of the book. I’d concentrate more on the full process of the act of love—figuratively speaking, of course—and less on the orgasm itself. With less of an ejaculatory, post-coital let down, as well… Ideally, then, I would leave the reader turned on with a few unresolved strands that might lead to further climax upon intense reflection of the experience. More negative space. What is not said placed on a level of equal importance with what is said. The suggestive… And perhaps some form of narrative cuddling afterward.”
“Huh. Interesting… But, oh yeah. The other reason is that I got into a fight.”
“Pardon?”
“I’m sorry. But you were asking me earlier about why I came here. And that’s the other reason. I read some Magnus Valison novels, and I got into a fight. An argument, actually. But I was totally right, and she was totally wrong.”
“I see.” It came out sounding like a sigh.
“I was stupid, and I just took off without settling things with the person I fought with, though. So I should probably go back, you know? I think she’s still there. But, yeah, that’s part of why I came here. I’m sorry, though. You were saying something… Why did you come here?” I stretched my arms out and accidentally let my stomach expand, but I quickly sucked it back in. It felt really good to stretch, though, and I yawned again.
“Why did I come here? Well…” She turned her eyes downward and let out a little harrumph. “I just needed to get away from Denmark. I have friends here that I wanted to talk to.”
“Cool,” I said. “You know what, though? I’m feeling great. Doesn’t this make you feel great? I mean, just sitting here. I feel so… nope, I can’t even put it into words. Grrreat!”
“Well, you’re basically soaking in ormolu tea.[36] It’s a neural stimulant of some sort; I don’t know the details of how it works… But it can be a bit overwhelming at first.”
“Huh. That’s really weird. But is it your job to sell this stuff or something? I mean, was this part of your sales pitch, getting me to come soak in this with you? Because if it is, I’m sold. This is so much cooler than caffeine.”
Her mood seemed to have shifted, though I wasn’t sure why. She was just more withdrawn all of the sudden and she wouldn’t meet my eyes with hers.
“To tell you the truth,” she said, “I was just trying to disorient you a little. I wanted to catch you off guard. In case you actually had followed me here. You’ll get used to it.”
“Wow. Subterfuge… Heh. Centrifuge… Is there such a thing as subterfugal force?”
“There’s no such thing as centrifugal force.”
“Really? Because I’m pretty sure that I’ve heard of something like that.” I started trying to think back to physics class in high school, but then I suddenly wasn’t sure if I’d ever taken a physics class.
“I’m sure you’ve heard of centrifugal force,” the woman said, “but it’s just a fiction… Imaginary, though we can nonetheless feel its effects, pulling us away from the people and things that we revolve around.”
“Huh. Probably not, then. And what would it do, anyway?”
“I’m afraid that I’m completely unable to follow the meanderings of your thought.”
“Oh yeah! Why exactly do you think people are following you?”
“I’m probably just paranoid.”
“Oh. I still don’t understand, though.”
“I didn’t mean you to.”
“Oh.”
“I will explain. Just give me a minute. I think I’ve decided that I want to tell you. I’m trying to work up the nerve… You don’t mind, do you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Good. Sometimes it’s just easier to talk to strangers, you know.”
“For the first time in a while, I understand exactly what you’re saying,” I told her. But if I knew what I meant when I said that, it must have immediately slipped my mind.
Immediately upon ascertaining that Our Heroine was no longer surveilling us, we returned via circuitous route to the house of Hubert Jorgen. To our disappointment, we found the windows of the ground floor to be more securely fastened than those of Our Heroine’s house had been. We were thus forced to resort to a greater degree of skullduggery in order to gain our entry.
Mr. Pacheco removed pick and torque wrench from an interior pocket of his overcoat and applied them to the simple lock of the front door handle while Mr. Wible stood watch upon the stoop. He noted no passersby. Most likely he was too busy fussing with his pipe to note much of anything.
Luckily for Mr. Pacheco—whose lock-picking skills could generously be described as meager—the deadbolt had not been turned, and after a few minutes of tinkering he managed to open the door. We took care to close and lock it securely behind us.
Our proof was approaching its logical completion. Though still lacking support for a few of our assumptions, and though the clues we had amassed might not have been apparent to the casual observer, we were nonetheless confident that all would be confirmed once we had explored Hubert Jorgen’s house in its entirety. Our intuition had led us in this direction from the beginning, and no datum to the contrary had yet arisen to dissuade us; the further we followed the clew of evidence, the clearer it became that our solution was the only one possible to the unstated riddle that we sought to solve.
The clew of evidence was leading us now to the bedroom. The most intimate of chambers, we reasoned that it was therefore the likeliest in which to discover hidden things. We assumed that it lay on the second floor, and the stairs—white and spiral—led directly up from the foyer. As we set our feet upon the first step, however, we heard a familiar noise emanating from a room immediately adjacent.
Rather, more precisely, we recognized the lack of any noise at all emanating from the room—as one might notice the left or right channel’s absence from a familiar stereophonic recording. We delayed our ascent.
“We have heard nothing like this before,” Mr. Wible whispered.
“So I recall,” Mr. Pacheco answered in a similarly quiet voice. “We heard nothing like it during our first collaboration with the Bean-Ymirsons.”
“Then you agree with me as to what it portends?”
“I do.”
We were not afraid. Rather, we were both agreed that our investigation must continue, regardless of the cost. With all of the gentleness that we were capable of mustering, then, we stepped down from the stair and moved in the direction of the room from which the noise did not emanate. Mr. Pacheco rummaged through his pockets for anything that might be used as a weapon, but the search was fruitless. Mr. Wible did not even try.
Though we crept up to the door slowly, we opened it quickly, so as not to allow the escape of whomever—or whatever—lurked behind it. Mr. Pacheco, however, spoiled any real chance of surprise by failing to contain a slight yelp just prior to our ingress. When Mr. Wible opened his eyes and emerged from behind Mr. Pacheco, of course, he saw that the room contained no immediate threats. Surprise, therefore, was not a relevant issue.
The general appearance was that of a dining room. A bowl of plastic fruit sat on a large octagonal table, which, in its turn, rested on a brightly colored rug of Turkmenistanish design that covered most of the tile floor. We noticed that the table’s oak veneer was covered in a thin patina of dust; no meals had been served thereon for many days.
Mr. Wible began to speak, but Mr. Pacheco placed an admonishing finger first to his lips and then pointed it in the direction of a closed door on the dining room’s far end. We could hear nothing happening on the other side; again with speed and stealth, we pressed onward, deeper into the house.
36
A potent and pungent tea (gaining popularity in topside Iceland, though it has yet to make a successful market-shift to the United States) can be made by boiling dried bits of ormolu lichen. Hubert Jorgen, during his extended stay among the Vanatru, was the first to chronicle this and the many other applications to which the remarkable lichen is put in Vanaheimic society: not excluding, of course, the details of its use in a multitude of tasty meals. Indeed, as nearly no other natural food-source is to be found anywhere in the vicinity of Vanaheim (save for the Arctic fox, which is sacred to the Refurserkir and therefore eaten only by their initiates), the ormolu lichen is something of a staple. Though its medicinal benefits have yet to be studied in any extensive detail, the lichen is undoubtedly a neural stimulant far superior to ginseng or gingko biloba, and the clarity of vision attained by a diet consisting solely of this marvelous manna-like substance was the direct source of Jorgen’s inspiration for his brilliant but doomed proposal of a rhizomatic replacement of the Dewey Decimal System. From an unpublished interview: “In Vanaheim, the World Tree of mainstream Norse mythology has been supplanted by the lichenous World Rhizome, binding the Nine Worlds together without hierarchy… just as familial relations, there, are also non-linear—or extensive, rather, along all possible lines of flight, each node bound to each other in an infinite skein of interconnections. Such is the library I envision; such is the library in my mind.”