Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) by Elizabeth Hand Read Free Book Online Page A

what the sagas teach us, and I would not argue with those words.” His gaze remained unfathomable. “I’ll show you the rest.”
    One by one he set out the remaining photos, his gloved hands meticulously removing each sheet of the protective tissue until the entire sequence covered the table. All were in the same oversize color format; all had been shot in the winter; all had, somewhere, Ilkka’s signature flare.
    “This is Svellabrjótur. Icebreaker.”
    Beneath the ice of some northern lake, air pockets and bubbles formed a glittering constellation in a man’s blond hair. His eyes bulged, and his mouth opened as though caught in the middle of a yawn. The photo had been taken at night with a long exposure, beneath a moon so brilliant it resembled a halogen bulb in a sky streaked with stars. It would have taken a while to set up, and then the photographer would have been there in the frozen dark with a corpse beneath the ice, calmly counting the minutes till he closed the aperture. I wondered how much the temperature dropped when Ilkka entered a room.
    Ketrókur, Meat Hook, seemed almost mundane compared to the other pictures. A middle-aged man, heavyset and wearing a black overcoat and a business suit, sprawled on a rocky, snow-sifted beach with a meat hook through his head.
    “Where was this?”
    “Huk Beach, in Oslo. A nude beach.”
    “It looks cold for a nude beach.”
    “Homosexuals would go there for sex. He was not mourned, either.” He gestured at the final photograph. “Hurðaskellir. Door Slammer.”
    A landscape so heavily drifted with snow that there was no sense of scale: Fir trees, boulders—all had disappeared beneath blue-white dunes poised to break above a calcified sea. The shutter speed was so fast that I picked out individual snowflakes as they swept near the lens in crystalline explosions. Elsewhere, whirling snow made it seem as though you looked at the scene through gauze, streaked black where the wind exposed a bare tree limb.
    But no matter where you looked—no matter that the sky was lowering and featureless—that unearthly radiance suffused everything, as though the world had erupted into a ghostly supernova. It was the kind of photograph that makes a career; a once-in-a-lifetime shot.
    And if Ilkka was telling the truth, no one else had ever seen it.
    I was so entranced that it took a minute for me to notice the body. It lay in the foreground on a plank—a door—outstretched limbs so pale I’d mistaken them for ridges of snow. Unlike the other corpses, this one was a naked woman, small breasted, with platinum hair. Her face was bleached of color, her lips leaden; her open eyes revealed irises cloudy green like old glass. Her head was turned so that she gazed directly at the camera. Her body was eerily untouched by snow. I stared at her, my neck prickling, and fought an almost irresistible urge to disappear into that brutal, beautiful space.
    “They do not sicken you,” murmured Ilkka.
    “No. They’re incredible.”
    “Most people would find them horrifying.”
    I shrugged. Photography is the art that justifies atrocity: war photography, pornography, memento mori, footprints left on a landscape where the last great auk died. None of us is innocent.
    “The way you capture light…” I stared at the girl’s unseeing eyes, a travesty of the detached gaze all great photographers cultivate. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You didn’t use a flash gun?”
    “No—that would have been petkuttaa, a ‘cheat.’ Only the flashbulb. I show what the world hides from us—the true world. The sun doesn’t lie. The night doesn’t lie.”
    “But how did you do it? It’s impossible. There’s no available light.”
    “No. What is impossible is to take a photograph where there is only light. You can never shoot the midday sun without a filter; you know that. But there is no true darkness. There is always light, somewhere.”
    “Not enough for that.” I gestured at the print.