Last Rituals (30 page)

 

 

"I recognize this from the photographs on Harald's computer," said Thóra, looking back at Matthew. The pathway was so narrow that they could not walk side by side.

 

 

"Were there many shots from here? Anything worthwhile, I mean?"

 

 

"Not really," Thóra replied. "Actually just typical tourist shots, apart from a few that he took inside the museum, where photography is prohibited." She cautiously skirted a patch of ice on the path. "Watch out here," she warned Matthew, who strode over it. "You're not exactly wearing the right shoes for walking." She glanced at his black patent leather shoes. They matched Matthew's other clothes: pressed trousers, a shirt, and a half-length woolen coat. She was wearing jeans and outdoor shoes and had put on her goose-down coat as a precaution. Matthew had not yet commented on the coat—making do with a raised eyebrow when he picked her up and she squeezed into his car, the upper part of her body triple its normal size.

 

 

"The last thing I expected was to have to go hiking," Matthew said crossly. "He could have warned me, that man." "That man" was the curator of the sorcery and witchcraft exhibition at the museum, whom Matthew had phoned the day before to make sure it would be open. "It's good for you. It will teach you not to be such a dandy," teased Thóra. "That doesn't work up here in Iceland. If we don't finish this job soon I'll have to take you into town and buy you a fleece jacket."

 

 

"Never!" declared Matthew. "Even if I had to stay here until my dying day."

 

 

"If you don't, that day will come sooner than you suspect," she retorted. "Aren't you cold, though—maybe you'd like to borrow my coat?"

 

 

"I made a reservation at Hótel Rangá for tonight," he said, swiftly changing the subject. "And I'm going to swap the rental car for a Jeep."

 

 

"See, you've gone half-native already."

 

 

Finally they made it all the way to the museum—without slipping on the ice. The museum looked old-fashioned from the outside. The yard in front of it, enclosed with a stone-built wall, was covered in beach gravel and a few driftwood logs. The door was deep red, contrasting sharply with the earth-colored hues of the building itself. A portly raven was sitting on a wooden bench outside. It looked skyward when they arrived, opened its beak wide and cawed. Then it spread its wings and soared up to the gable where it watched them go inside. "Appropriate," said Matthew as he opened the door for Thóra.

 

 

Inside they found a small service counter on the right with several shelves directly in front of them displaying witchcraft souvenirs. All very unpretentious and tidy. Behind the counter sat a young man, who looked up from his newspaper. "Hello," he said. "Welcome to the sorcery and witchcraft exhibition."

 

 

Thóra and Matthew introduced themselves and the young man said he had been expecting them. "I'm just working here temporarily," he said after shaking their hands and introducing himself as Thorgrímur. His handshake was old-fashioned, firm and steady. "The director of the museum is on sabbatical, but I hope that's no problem."

 

 

"No, it's fine," said Thóra. "But is it true that you were here this autumn?"

 

 

"Yes, that's right. I took over in July." He gave her an inquisitive look and added: "May I ask why you want to know?"

 

 

"As Matthew told you yesterday, we're investigating an incident connected with a person interested in witchcraft. He came here this autumn and we thought we ought to drop in for some insight into his world. I presume you remember him."

 

 

The man laughed. "You can't be sure. A lot of people come here." Then, realizing that they were the only visitors, he added: "This time of year is nothing to go by—it's packed here in the tourist season."

 

 

Matthew gave a faint smile. "You know, this man isn't so easy to forget. He was a German history student with a very unconventional appearance. His name was Harald Guntlieb and he was recently murdered."

 

 

Thorgrímur's face lit up. "Oh, yes, he was all—all covered in—how can I describe it—ornamentation?"

 

 

"If you can call it ornamentation," said Thóra.

 

 

"Yes, sure, I remember him. He came here with another man, a bit younger, who said he felt too hungover to come inside. Soon after that I read in the paper about the German being murdered."

 

 

"That fits," Matthew said. "This guy with the hangover—do you know anything about him?"

 

 

The man shook his head. "Not exactly—when your friend said goodbye he told me he was a doctor. I think he must have been joking. He had to make an awful noise to wake him up when they left. I was in the doorway watching. I remember thinking how improbable a doctor he was, passed out on the bench outside."

 

 

Thóra and Matthew exchanged glances. Halldór.

 

 

"Do you remember anything else about their visit?" asked Thóra.

 

 

"I remember he was very well informed. It's nice to have visitors who know as much as he did about history and witchcraft. As a rule, people don't know anything; they can't even tell a revenant from a poltergeist." From their expressions he could tell these visitors were two more in that category. "How about taking a walk around the museum and I'll tell you about the main exhibits? Then we can talk about your friend."

 

 

Thóra and Matthew exchanged glances, shrugged, and followed the curator inside.

 

 

"I don't know how much you know about these matters, but I should maybe give you a little background." Thorgrímur walked up to a wall covered with the skin of an unidentifiable animal. The fur faced the wall, and on the hide facing outward a magic symbol had been drawn, much more complicated than the one carved on Harald's body. Beneath the skin a wooden box was mounted on the wall, resembling an old-fashioned pencil box. It was half-open and full of what looked like hair, along with a silver coin. A simple symbol was carved on the lid and on top of it was a strange creature that could have been mistaken for a mutant hedgehog. "In the age of sorcery, the common people in Iceland lived in appalling conditions. A handful of families owned most of the property while almost everyone else starved. The only way they could see to escape from their poverty was through magic and supernatural powers. In those days this wasn't considered unusual. For example, they thought the devil went around in the company of men, trying to ensnare their souls." He turned to the hide on the wall. "Here's an example of a spell to get rich—the symbol represents a sea mouse or circular helmet. You needed the skin of a black tomcat, then you drew this symbol or circular helmet on it with the menstrual blood of a virgin."

 

 

Matthew grimaced and looked out of the corner of his eye to see whether Thorgrímur touched the symbol. Noticing this, the curator told the German dryly: "We used dark red ink." Then he continued. "They had to catch a small vermin that according to folklore lived along the shore and was called a sea mouse. It had to be caught in a net made from a virgin's hair." Thóra felt Matthew running his hand down her long, loose hair. Stifling a giggle, she brushed his hand away inconspicuously. "Then they made a nest for the mouse from a wooden box and the hair and put a stolen coin in it, and then the mouse was supposed to fish a treasure from the sea and into the box. Then you had to put the circular helmet over it to prevent the mouse from escaping and causing a storm at sea."

 

 

He turned to them. "So it wasn't just hocus-pocus."

 

 

"No," replied Matthew, and pointed to a wall with a glass case containing what looked like the lower half of a human body. "What on earth is that?"

 

 

"Ah, that's one of our most popular exhibits. Corpse breeches. They were also supposed to make you rich." Thorgrímur walked over to the showcase. "Of course this is just a replica—obviously." Thóra and Matthew nodded eagerly. Behind the glass was the skin of the lower half of a male body. To Thóra it resembled a pair of gross, pink tights, hairy and with the genitals attached. "To acquire corpse breeches you made a contract with a living man to take the skin off the lower half of his body when he died. When that person died his body was unearthed and the skin removed from the waist down, in one piece. These were the corpse breeches that the other person would wear. Corpse breeches were supposed to graft to the wearer's body and if he put a coin in the scrotum—a coin that he had to steal from a rich widow at Christmas, Easter, or Whitsun—he would never find the scrotum empty, because it would always contain plenty of money."

 

 

"Couldn't they have chosen a different place?" Thóra pulled a face. Thorgrímur simply shrugged.

 

 

"And what's this?" Matthew asked, as Thorgrímur took them over to a large photograph of a woman in a long, coarse skirt in folk costume style. She was sitting down with her skirt hitched up to expose her bare thigh. On the thigh a wartlike protrusion pointed up in the air.

 

 

"You know of course that the majority of sorcerers who were executed in Iceland were male—there were twenty men but only one woman. This is because it was mainly thought to be men who practiced witchcraft in Iceland, unlike in the rest of Europe. This spell—known as a
tilberi
—is remarkable for being the one Icelandic charm that only a woman could perform. To make a tilberi she had to steal a rib from a grave on Whitsun night, wrap it in wool and wear it inside her clothes between her breasts, go to the altar three times and spit the communion wine over the bone, which would bring the tilberi to life. Then it would grow, and to keep it hidden under her clothes the woman had to make an artificial nipple from the skin on her thigh. The tilberi fed there, in between roaming the countryside at night to suck the milk of ewes and cows, which it spat into the woman's butter churn in the morning."

 

 

"He wasn't exactly a pinup," Thóra said, pointing at the exhibit. The tilberi was wrapped in wool and barely visible apart from an open toothless mouth and two tiny white eyes with no pupils.

 

 

Judging from Matthew's expression, he agreed. "Was this one woman who was executed for witchcraft accused of doing that?"

 

 

"No, in fact she wasn't. But there was a case in the southwest of Iceland in 1635 when a woman and her mother were suspected of having a tilberi. It was investigated but did not turn out to be true, so they narrowly escaped."

 

 

They went on strolling around the museum, looking at the exhibits. Thóra was struck most by a wooden stake standing in the middle of the room surrounded by bushels of straw. As she stood silently contemplating it, Thorgrímur came over and told her that all twenty-one suspected sorcerers had been burned alive. He added that three were known to have tried to break out of the pyre when the stakes to which they were tied burned through. They were thrown back into the flames to die. The first execution took place in 1625, he said, but the proper witch hunts began when three sorcerers were burned at the stake in Trékyllisvík in the northern West Fjords in 1654. Thóra mentally calculated how recent this actually was.

 

 

When they had seen enough, Thorgrímur took them to the upper floor. On the way they passed a sign stating that photography was prohibited—the same sign that had appeared in the photo Thóra had seen on Harald's computer. Thorgrímur showed them a large family tree showing the kinship among the most prominent witch hunters in the seventeenth century. He pointed out how members of the ruling class had planted their descendants in the offices of the magistrates and judges. After reading the genealogy, Thóra understood exactly what he was talking about. Matthew paid little attention. He left them and went over to look at a showcase containing replicas of sorcerers' handbooks and other manuscripts. He was bent over the case when Thóra and Thorgrímur came up to him.

 

 

"Actually it's incredible that any books of sorcery have been preserved at all," Thorgrímur said, pointing to one of them.

 

 

"Do you mean because they're so old?" Thóra asked, leaning forward to take a better look.

 

 

"Well, that too, but mainly because it was a capital offense to possess them. Some are handwritten copies of older manuscripts that had presumably suffered damage, so the originals are not all from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries."

 

 

Thóra stood up straight. "Is there any index of all these magic symbols?"

 

 

"No, unfortunately there isn't. No one has made the effort to record them as far as I know." With a sweep of his hand he said: "All these symbols on exhibit here represent only a few pages from the manuscripts and old books—a tiny sample. So you can imagine how many symbols there are."

 

 

Thóra nodded. Damn it. It would have been marvelous if Thorgrímur could have shown them a list against which they could check the unknown symbol. She moved to look at more manuscripts. The showcase stood in the middle of the room, enabling visitors to walk around it while viewing the pages on display. Matthew, who had been hunched over to get a closer look at one of the panels, suddenly straightened up.

 

 

"What's this symbol?" he asked excitedly, tapping on the glass with his finger.

 

 

"Which one?" Thorgrímur asked, and took a look at the document.

 

 

"This one." Matthew pointed it out to him.

 

 

Although Thóra had to lean across the case to see what Matthew was pointing at, she was quicker than Thorgrímur to realize which symbol had caught his attention—simply because it was one of the few symbols that she recognized, the one that had been carved on Harald's body. "Well, I'll be damned," she muttered.

 

 

"This one at the bottom of the page?" Thorgrímur asked as he pointed one out.