When I bent closer, the figure lifted a hand from inside the glasses. The world around me shivered. Somewhere deep within the cracked bone, a door unlocked, and cerulean smoke spilled into the air. The vapour smelled of damp peat and old, forgotten winters. I stumbled back, my heavy boots skidding on the sodden moss, but the strange reflection in the circular lenses did not fade. The tiny, cloaked figure stood motionless once more, staring out from the glass as if trapped in a miniature, frozen purgatory.
As a Detective Inspector, I had seen my share of grim discoveries in the Icelandic highlands, but the skull sitting in the black mud was entirely different. It wore rusted wire-rimmed reading glasses, and inside them, a miniature wood stretched into a misty distance. The worst part was the road winding through those microscopic trees. It was a replica of the path I had walked to get here.
I pulled off my leather glove and touched the cold iron frame of the glasses. A sudden, sharp prick of pain pierced my index finger.
The Echo in the Valley
The sky above the valley had turned the colour of bruised plums. The wind, howling down from the glacier, carried a familiar, rhythmic whispering that sounded uncomfortably like my own name.
I looked down at the skull again. The cerulean smoke had settled into the hollow eye sockets, glowing with a faint, bioluminescent light. In the right lens, the tiny figure had turned around. It was no longer looking at me. It was looking over its shoulder at something emerging from the trees behind it.
My radio crackled to life, the static harsh against the silence of the tundra.
‘DI Dagny, do you copy?’ Thorstein’s voice was fractured by the bad signal. ‘We’ve found the tyre tracks from the 1994 disappearance. They lead straight towards the ridge you’re on. But there’s something wrong with the topography. The maps aren’t matching the ground.’
‘I know,’ I muttered, my eyes locked on the glass. ‘The forest is moving.’
A Trap Made of Time
I knelt back down into the mire. The figure in the glass was smaller now, walking deeper into the reflection, fleeing the shadow that pursued it. I knew that coat. I knew the way those shoulders slumped under the weight of a heavy woollen scarf.
It was my father, Bjorn. He had disappeared in these woods thirty-two years ago. A sudden movement in the treeline ahead made me draw my service weapon. The birch trees were leaning, their bare branches twisting like arthritic fingers. They weren’t swaying in the wind. They were turning, pivoting on their roots to face me, as if the entire forest was looking back over its shoulder to see who had finally come to join the shadow.
