The end of August arrived, humid and sticky, but no arrests were made. Joanna, Freya, and Ingrid each retreated to their own corners to deal with their anxiety and frustration in private. Freya went back to the bar, surreptitiously helping out with the bartending, while Joanna spent most of her time visiting Tyler in the hospital, and Ingrid worked at the library.
It was after hours and the library was ghostly quiet and deserted, but Ingrid took comfort in the familiar and well-loved surroundings. She sat at her desk and went through everything that had happened in North Hampton that summer. The silvery tumors she’d found in the women; the rash of unexplainable diseases affecting the townspeople; the dead animals in Lionel Horning’s barn; the underwater explosion that had released a poisonous toxin, one that was similar to others found around the world—was it possible they were all linked? There was something here she was missing, something that would allow her to pull it all together.
It all tied back to Fair Haven and the missing blueprints, she was sure of it. Mother said that Fair Haven held the seam, but there had to be something more. There was something there that someone did not want her to see, did not want her to find out—and with a flash, Ingrid remembered the image she had taken on her phone earlier in the summer. She’d taken not only a photo of the door but of the ballroom floor plan as well and sent both to her father. She turned on her desk lamp to a brighter setting and removed her phone from her purse. Her fingers quickly tapped and swept the touch screen until the tiny image of the blueprint appeared. Yes! She sent it to a computer terminal and a few minutes later the page from the missing architectural plans was rolling out of the library’s decade-old printer.
Ingrid examined the paper. The printer had automatically sized the tiny photo to fit a letter-size sheet, and the image was grainy, as it had been enlarged many times its actual size. She found the scrollwork in the tiny architectural drawing key, a swirl of dark lines and cryptic characters. As she examined the curving arabesques she caught sight of another faint image, lines and text running at an odd angle across the image. These characters were smaller and lighter than the rest of the text, and some of the characters looked different from those on the key.
She brought the drawing over to the old copier, laid it on the glass, and set the enlargement to two hundred percent and the brightness to the lowest setting. A large blackened image rolled out the far end of the machine, and when she looked at it closely she noticed that the second set of text was actually written backwards, as if seen through a mirror. Ingrid puzzled over it for a moment until she realized that the bright little flash on her new phone must have shone though the thin paper, revealing the lines that had been written on the back of the sheet. She tried to think if she had ever examined the backsides of blueprints and could not remember ever doing so. Blueprints were several feet long and wide and a person reading them tended to just open the page halfway to stare at some portion of the drawing. To flip the pages completely over would have required a desk eight feet wide.
Ingrid grabbed the sheet of paper and ran into the bathroom, excited by her new idea. She held it to the mirror and snapped another photo with a real camera, one with a much higher resolution. Using the mirror would invert the text so that it could be read. She took the camera back to her desk and printed the new photo.
Now she understood. The text was separated into two bands; the top was written in Norse, the language she had learned as a child from her father. The second line contained the same lettering that surrounded the design tags, in a language she could not understand. The characters corresponded to one another, like a Rosetta stone. Since she understood the first language, that was all she needed to decipher the keys.
Ingrid worked on translating quickly. The letters were faint and there were spots where words and characters dropped out, but she could still glean a basic understanding. The first sentence, a title of sorts, read: “Yggdrasil.”
Yggdrasil.
Ingrid leapt from her desk and dashed to the back of the library, where they kept the reserved books no one was allowed to borrow. There was a book there, one she had inherited from her father many years ago, that she had donated to the library when she first started. A book that contained their history. The front cover was nearly torn from the book when she pulled it from the shelf, although it appeared to have spent the better part of the last few decades entirely undisturbed.
Yggdrasil.
The word resonated with power. Ingrid sat on the floor in front of the bookshelf resting the heavy book on her folded legs. She flipped through the pages, turning them back and forth until she found the section she was looking for.
Yggdrasil: The Tree of Life that held the Nine Worlds of the Known Universe.
There was a picture of a mighty tree growing in the void of space. Free of the earth, its shape formed a perfect hourglass, with a circle of branches at one end and a ball of roots at the other. The tree floated, its densely woven branches forming a spiraling shape that reminded her of the Fair Haven blueprint. She compared the image in the book with the image on the architect’s drawing and suddenly, everything made sense.
Fair Haven was somehow a part of this great and ancient tree; it housed an entryway into the skeleton of the universe. She began to translate the design tags, finding their corresponding meaning in Norse. Ingrid studied the terms one by one, jotting down the translations as she worked diligently for the better part of an hour. Her head hurt a little and her eyes felt dry from straining at the faint symbols. Ingrid penned the last character and then pulled back, her spine aching from having sat bent in one position too long, but she had found what she set out to discover.
She read the translation again, and her mind whirled, recalling that clandestine trip to Fair Haven when she had discovered the hidden door. At the time, she had guessed that the house had been built to create the mystical doorway. But now she understood from reading the symbols that the house was not an entryway to the tree but had been created as a fortress to protect it. The house was a barrier, not a door.
Ingrid gasped. It was all so clear now. She knew now what was causing all the problems—the silvery darkness, the underground explosion, the barren women, the dead animals, the toxin in the water and in the air. It all pointed in the same direction, to the man who had handed her the plans to the site from the beginning.
Killian Gardiner. He was a Guardian, an immortal who was, historically, meant to protect Fair Haven and the tree. But what if instead of protecting the tree, he had endangered it somehow?
He had come back to Fair Haven after traveling the world. He had worked off the coast of Australia and on an Alaskan freighter—places where the toxin had also been found. She did not know if he had been near Reykjavík, but she would bet on it. He had traveled the globe, spreading the toxin.
As she read the words again she found she could barely breathe. “The time of Ragnarok is at hand, when the earth is submerged in poisoned water. Thus will begin the age of the wolf, when brother will turn against brother, and the world will be no more. Lest the poison of the Nine disperse, the living should not pass the way of Yggdrasil.”
chapter forty-two
G?tterd?mmerung