The Hidden

CHAPTER ONE

Hellisheiði, Iceland. Summer 1999

I stare out of the car window like a child seeing the world for the first time. The lava fields rush by looking like black coral with patches of deep green moss clinging to their jagged edges. As we descend down the mountain, fast approaching the town of Hveragerði, the landscape changes. Steam rises from hot springs leaving clouds of vapor swirling in the cool air. I’m so grateful that Mom is behind the wheel and not Dad, he has this habit of making eye contact in the rearview mirror while talking, as if he can’t be heard otherwise. He turns around to look at me and I smile.

“I spoke to Geirfinnur yesterday,” he says. “He and Sigrún wanted to wish you a safe trip, said they are really going to miss having you. I mean, you practically grew up on their farm, you’ve gone there every summer since you were what, eight years old?”

“I know,” I say, giving him my most content smile. I am sad to not go back—I really loved their place. But I don’t want my parents to worry about me, and I’m sure this new farm will be just as good.

“It’ll be strange. You used to be a half an hour from home, and this place is an extra hour.”

“Hour and a half more,” Mom chimes in. “It’s a two-hour drive, if you drive non stop.”

Hveragerði town emerges like a green oasis. It is pulsing with vibrancy. Rows of greenhouses as far as the eye can see. But in a matter of a few minutes, this little town is already behind us. The land starts to look like a wild and untouched place, much like it did a few hundreds of years ago when the Vikings first settled in Iceland. In the hills I catch sight of small, abandoned farmhouses, their grass-covered roofs sinking into the earth. Homes that look as though they should belong in a Grimm brothers’ fairytale that’s been left behind. What a magical looking place, I think to myself.

After we pass Skógarfoss waterfall, Mom takes a left turn off the main road. She’s slowed down quite a bit as we make our way up a gravel driveway, headed towards a house nestled at the foot of the jagged Eyjafjallajökull mountain. I can’t help but be mesmerized. Its peak rises like a crown of blackened spires, piercing the sky, dark and cruel. Mist spills from the cracks, coiling like smoke as it pours down the slopes. It’s as if the mountain itself is breathing. I wonder what secrets lie hidden up there. Maybe one day—if I’m brave enough—I’ll climb it and find out for myself.

We pull into the driveway and a petite older woman with stringy brown hair in a pixie cut comes out. She introduces herself as Yrsa and gives us a quick tour of their home, going on and on about the weather and how last summer’s drought ruined their crops.

“My husband, Grímur, is running errands in town,” she says. “And Logi, our son is in the barn. I’m expecting them both any minute now.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t have much time,” Dad says. “I have to be at the airport in the afternoon, I just wanted to tag along to say goodbye to Ísa.”

“That’s fancy,” Yrsa says with a half-smile. “Vacation?”

“Work trip. Have to be in Stuttgart for an important meeting.”

“I see…”

The air feels heavy, and I shift my weight to one side.

“Well, we better get going then,” Mom says and claps her hands together. I let out a breath of relief—for a second there, I thought we were going to drown in awkward silence.

Just as my parents’ car descends down the driveway, Yrsa’s demeanor seems to shift. I can see her eyeing me with some sort of uncertainty. Something sinks inside me, slow and heavy and I vision myself flinging the door open and running full speed down the road after my parents, dust rising behind me as I scream for them to stop. But the image vanishes before I can make a move, and they are long gone.

“Put your things away and meet me in the kitchen,” she says, her voice now brisk. “There’s work to be done and I won’t have any excuses. I expect them done every day without a fuss.”

And there it is. It seems that she had put on a show while in the presence of my parents—this is the true personality of Yrsa.

***

I’m getting a lecture on how thoroughly the dishes should be washed when a tall and skinny boy around my age with brilliant green eyes enters through the back door. His long, shaggy hair is red like the midnight sun. It makes him look almost otherworldly. If I were into boys, he’d probably be my type.

“And here he is, our adopted son, Logi,” Yrsa says. I find it odd how she puts an emphasis on the word adopted. Logi stares at me—his eyes practically drilling through me like I’m a delinquent that’s arrived. I can’t tell whether he’s nervous or just being plain rude. He mutters something unintelligible and heads back out without so much as a proper introduction. What a weird kid. If Yrsa’s husband is anything like these two—I’m in for a miserable time. I do not belong here with these people. After an odd lesson on how soap and water works, I explore the farm, greeting the horses and goats. It seems like a tranquil place…as long as I’m by myself with the animals. By early evening, as I set the table for dinner, I hear the crunch of tires on the gravel driveway. Someone’s arrived. And just moments later, Yrsa’s husband, Grimur, a freakishly tall man steps in through the kitchen door. He too seems to have no manners as he gives me a stare that is starved of words.

“Hello, my name is Ísa,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper, as if it doesn’t belong to the outside world. I feel so small beneath his gaze.

With slow but deliberate movements like that of a giant, he takes off his coat and gloves.

“I thought we agreed on not taking in teenagers for the summer. It’s enough to have Logi eating us out of house and home,” he says through me to Yrsa with palpable disdain.

She scoffs. “How else do you expect our debts to be paid?”

I wish I could disappear into the cracks in the floorboard and make friends with whatever critters live there, I’m sure I could handle that better than this. This is not at all what I thought it would be, and it’s just day one.

“Did Yrsa explain your job?” he says. “You will do nothing with the animals. You are to help around the house, cleaning and cooking, you hear?”

“But I—”

“There is nothing to discuss. We don’t need a farmhand,” he scoffs and walks off.

***

Dinner conversations were stiff. We all ate in complete silence, and it was so uncomfortable. It’s the kind of awkward quiet where every clink and clang of the silverware seems to grow louder with each minute. When the three of them have turned in for the night, I grab the telephone and sneak it into my room to call home. The cord barely reaches from the hallway bench, but I manage to stretch it just far enough to shut the door. This phone is so much older than ours at home—I didn’t think anyone had rotary dial phones anymore. I’m about to turn the dial when a loud crackling sound comes through the earpiece, like a static voice on an old radio. It grows louder. What’s wrong with this thing? I hear distant conversations of random people coming through. Maybe the phone wires got crossed? I’m sure they still have above-ground wires unlike underground as it is in town. I try to ignore and continue to dial home. It’s busy so I dial the number to my grandparents. I’m so relieved when my amma answers.

“Hello, Elva speaking.” Her voice is so sweet it almost makes me choke up.

“Amma…”

“Dear, sweet Ísa, I’m so glad you called! How is the new farm?”

“Nothing like the other one,” I say. “I don’t like it here.” As the words come out of my mouth, the cold, hard truth hits me like a freight train, and I realize how much I want to go home.

“My sweet Ísa, I can only imagine how you feel. You are with a new family in a new place, further away from the city than you’ve ever been. It’s no wonder you don’t like it right away. You must give yourself time to acclimate.”

“I thought I would be helping out with the animals and riding horses, which was the whole reason for coming out here.”

“What are they having you do then?”

“House chores, cleaning the house like a maid…Amma, they are so rude and cold towards me.”

“Sweet child, it breaks my heart to hear this. Just be your lovely self. I am sure once you are settled in and these people get to know you, they will see what a wonderful person you are and how well you do with animals. It is a true gift you have, you know, how animals listen and trust you. You’ll see.”

I can almost see it—the summer I’d dreamed of fades away like the morning mist. No slow rides up the mountains or hours lost writing poetry in sun-drenched fields—it will not be happening here. I think of their adopted son, Logi. How it must feel to grow up here all alone with Yrsa and Grímur as company. I have no idea how he can cope.

“Their kid, Logi is a bit strange,” I say. “I couldn't figure him out. He just stared at me when he met me, looking at me like I had two heads. And his mother told me he’s adopted. I don’t know why she told me that, as if that mattered.”

“When kids grow up sheltered you are entering their world. And you, being from a large town, going to school with your peers—you are used to being around all kinds of people. Social anxiety and awkwardness are common. And on top of that, being adopted, that poor child. If he got taken away from his birth mother and not given the chance to be held in those precious first moments of life, he may struggle with forming secure attachments. Trusting others may not come so easy with him. Even those adopted into a loving home could carry with them a sense of abandonment, grief, even loss.”

She’s right. The way he looked at me was as if he’d never seen a girl before. And who knows, maybe he hasn’t. I have entered his world, and rather than being upset for not being treated the way I am used to, I just have to submerge myself into this world. The whole concept of who I am is being challenged ad for the first time in my life, I’m experiencing a fractured sense of self.

“You are right. I was beginning to regret this, thinking I should have stayed home for the summer, but I will give this place a try. At least a few more days.”

“One day you will look back on this, and it will be but a mere blip. Besides, this program the city offers only allows kids eighteen and younger to stay at farms. Next summer will be your last.”

“I don’t feel like a seventeen-year-old. It’s almost like it was yesterday that I celebrated turning ten, it felt like such a big moment going from a single digit to two.”

Amma lets out a little laugh. “I know, my little heart. I’ve watched you grow from a little crying potato to the darling young woman you are today. To me it was just yesterday that I watched you running around in the garden wearing only your diaper.”

I smile. Amma knows better than anyone how I don’t take well to change, so she’s trying her best to lift my spirits. And for a moment, I feel like she has.

“Time is a strange thing,” I say.

“And it only gets stranger. We live inside a dream of time, stitched together by memory and motion. Einstein showed that time is not fixed but shaped by motion and gravity. If you want time to go by faster, you can. You have complete control over it.”

“And in another universe, I’m already heading home.”

“I will let your parents know of your concerns, sweet Ísa.”

We say our goodbyes, and I return the phone back to the bench in the hallway. My heart is at ease, and I feel like I can conquer anything. Amma is incredible. She really knows how to make me feel better. I’m startled when I hear a low growling thunder coming from outside. From the kitchen window, I catch a glimpse of a shadowy figure in the hillside right before vanishing into the fog. The sky has turned dark, and the top of Eyjafjall mountain, hidden by the low clouds, leaves my imagination to play tricks on me. I go back to my room but to my surprise, I see the telephone is not on the bench where I’d left it. I see the cord…leading into the bedroom. Strange. I know I’d put it away. I return it back to the bench—again—and go to my room. I pull out my journal from my backpack and just when I’m about to write, I feel a sudden change in the air. The sound of the wind blowing through the trees outside is disrupted by a deep, resonant neigh. It’s low and guttural, like the sound of thunder brewing in the distance. I pull up the blinds and my eyes lock on a figure standing at the edge of the farm’s property just barely visible in the fog, shrouded in shadows with the murky mountain in the backdrop. It’s a beautiful black horse and its eyes gleam with an otherworldly light. The horse’s deep, dark coat seems to absorb everything around him.

My heart skips a beat…

…is it watching me?

With each breath, a wave of anxiety washes over me, and I feel like I’m in a trance, but my rational mind tells me there’s nothing to be scared of—I’ve never been afraid of horses, in fact, they are one of my favorite animals. There’s a sudden searing pain right in the middle of my forehead followed with the feeling of electric currents surging through my hands from the tip of my fingers to my head. A strong headache is something I’ve been experiencing lately, but this intensity and the strange feeling in my hands is new. I rub my temples and just then, the horse turns around and takes off galloping back into the fog. I take a deep breath to shake this feeling it’s left me with and look back down at my journal in my lap. With every stroke of the pen, every word, the headache gradually dissipates and the radiating feeling of heat in my hands goes away. I etch my feelings into the paper with the black ink of my pen.

A heavy gloom drapes this house, a veil of shadow so ancient that those who dwell within have long ceased to remember the light.

Night has pressed its weight upon the land, swallowing the voices of creatures stirring in the dark.

Silence reigns where life once hummed, yet if I were to lay my ear to the ground, perhaps—just perhaps—I would hear the faintest tremor of laughter from a time when joy had not yet been banished.

Once, happiness lived here, fleeting and golden, but Fenrir, that nameless hunger, has devoured it. Now it lingers in the cavern, lost in the slow and endless turning of its vast merciless night.

I long for the evenings when I would play cards with the farmers till late at night, and I miss my midnight walks visiting the horses who were always happy to see me even if they were half asleep. I lean over the page and picture myself being back home. I might be able to stay two or three more days, but I doubt I can last two months. Somehow whatever I just saw out there in the fog has left me with such a strange feeling, like that thing was trying to erase the memory of safety, unraveling something deep inside me. And all I could feel was the weightless panic of falling. Not through air, but through myself. I was losing the grip of my identity. A warm tear drips from my eye and onto the page, bleeding the ink into the resemblance of the rays of a black sun. Just as my eyes begin to grow heavy, I slip the journal beneath my pillow and allow my lids to fall shut. I take a deep breath, and the faint scent of eucalyptus rises from the pillow, clean and cool, and I let the strange weight of the day drift away, melting into the air as if it had never been real at all.