Evening had set in when he sat down at Eva Lind’s bedside and began telling her about the discovery of the skeleton in Grafarholt. He told her about how the archaeologists demarcated small areas above the site of the bones, and about Skarphedinn with his fangs which prevented him from closing his mouth completely. He told her about the redcurrant bushes and Robert’s strange description of the crooked, green lady. He told her about Benjamin Knudsen and his fiancee, who vanished one day, and the effect her disappearance had on her lover as a young man, and he told her about Hoskuldur, who had rented the chalet during the war, and of Benjamin’s mention of the woman who lived on the hill and who had been conceived in the gas tank the night that everyone thought the world would be destroyed.
“It was the year Mark Twain died,” Erlendur said.
Halley’s comet was heading towards Earth at an unimaginable speed with its tail full of poisonous gases. Even if the Earth escaped being smashed to smithereens in a collision, people believed, it would pass through the comet’s tail and all life would perish; those who feared the worst imagined themselves consumed by fire and acid. Panic broke out, not only in Iceland but all over the world. In Austria, in Trieste and Dalmatia, people sold all they owned for next to nothing, to go on a spree for the short time they assumed they had left to live. In Switzerland, the young ladies’ finishing schools stood empty because families thought they should be together when the comet destroyed Earth. Clergymen were instructed to talk about astronomy in laymen’s terms to allay people’s fears.
In Reykjavik, it was claimed that women took to their beds from fear of doomsday and many seriously believed that, as one of the papers phrased it, “the cold spring that year was caused by the comet”. Old people talked of how terrible the weather had been the last time the comet approached Earth.
Around that time, in Reykjavik, gas was hailed as the key to the future. Gas lamps were widely used in the city, although not so extensively as to provide proper street lighting, but people lit their homes with gas as well. The next step planned was to erect a modern gasworks on the outskirts of town to meet the population’s entire gas requirement for decades to come. The Mayor of Reykjavik negotiated with a German firm, and Carl Franke, an engineer, duly arrived in Iceland from Bremen and with a team of experts began building the Reykjavik Gasworks. It was opened in the autumn of 1910.
The tank itself was a huge contraption, with a volume of 1500 cubic metres, and was known as the “bell jar” because it floated in water, rising or sinking according to how much gas it contained. Never having beheld such a spectacle, people flocked to watch its construction.
When the tank was nearing completion, a group of people assembled inside it on the night of May 18. They believed that the tank was the only place in Iceland to offer any hope of protection from the comet’s poisonous gases. Word spread that there was a party in the tank and people swarmed to take part in a night of wild abandon before doomsday.
Accounts of what went on in the tank that night spread like wildfire for the next few days. It was claimed that drunken revellers held an orgy till dawn, until it was obvious that the Earth would not perish, neither in a collision with Halley’s comet nor in the hellfire of its tail.
It was also rumoured that a number of babies were conceived in the tank that night, and Erlendur wondered whether one of them might have met her fate in Grafarholt many years later and been buried there.
“The Gasworks manager’s office still stands,” he told Eva Lind, unaware whether she could hear him or not. “But apart from that, all sign of the Gasworks has gone. In the end, the power source of the future turned out to be electricity, not gas. The Gasworks was on Raudararstigur, where Hlemmur bus station is now, and it still performed a useful function despite being a thing of the past; in biting frost and bad weather, homeless people would go inside to warm themselves by the burners, especially at night, and it was often crowded in the tank house in the darkest part of winter.”
Eva Lind made no movement while Erlendur told his story. Nor did he expect her to; he did not expect miracles.
“The Gasworks was built on a plot of land called Elsumyrarblettur,” he continued, smiling at the irony of Providence. “Elsumyrarblettur stood undeveloped for years after the Gasworks was demolished and the tank was removed. Then a block of offices was built on the site, opposite the bus station. That block now houses the Reykjavik police force. My office is there. Precisely where the tank once stood.”
Erlendur paused.
“We’re all waiting for the end of the world,” he said. “Whether it’s a comet or something else. We all have our private doomsday. Some bring it upon themselves. Others avoid it. Most of us fear it, show it respect. Not you. You could never show respect for anything. And you don’t fear your own little doomsday.”
Erlendur sat quietly watching his daughter and wondered whether it meant anything, talking to her when she did not seem to hear a word he uttered. He thought back to what the doctor said and even felt a hint of relief, talking to his daughter this way. He had seldom been able to talk to her calmly and at ease. The tension between them had coloured their entire relationship and they had not often had the chance to sit down for a quiet conversation.
But they were hardly talking together. Erlendur smiled wryly. He was talking and she was not listening.
In that respect, nothing had changed between them.
Maybe this was not what she wanted to hear. The discovery of the skeleton, the Gasworks, the comet and the orgy. Maybe she wanted him to talk about something completely different. Himself. Them.
He stood up, bent down and kissed her on the forehead and left the room. Engrossed in his thoughts, instead of turning right down the corridor and out of the ward, without noticing it he went in the opposite direction, into intensive care, past dimly lit rooms where other patients lay, their lives in the balance, connected to all the latest equipment. He only snapped out of his trance at the end of the corridor. He was about to turn round when a small woman came out of the innermost room and bumped straight into him.
“Excuse me,” she said in a slightly squeaky voice.
“No, excuse me,” he said in a fluster, looking all around. “I didn’t mean to come this way. I was leaving the ward.”
“I was called here,” the little woman said. She had very thin hair and was plump with a huge bosom just barely contained by a violet T-shirt, and she was round with a friendly face. Erlendur noticed a wisp of dark moustache over her upper lip. A glance into the room she had emerged from revealed an elderly man lying under a sheet, his face thin and pallid. On a chair beside his bed sat a woman draped in a luxurious fur coat, dabbing a handkerchief to her nose with a gloved hand.
“There are still some people who believe in mediums,” the woman said in a low voice, as if to herself.
“Excuse me, I didn’t quite catch…”
“I was asked to come here,” she said, gently leading Erlendur away from the room. “He’s dying. They can’t do a thing. His wife is with him. She asked me to find out if I could make contact with him. He’s in a coma and they say nothing can be done, but he refuses to die. Like he doesn’t want to go. She asked me to help, but I couldn’t detect him.”
“Detect him?” Erlendur said.