It was no coincidence that the gate was there. There was power in this place, an energy that Garún felt, but could not name. If the heart of the city was somewhere to be found, it was here. As Garún walked up to the statue she wondered if something had been there before the students built the cairn. Perhaps a monument had always been erected here, since Reykjavík was founded. Perhaps predating it.
The clock struck midnight. Garún started walking anticlockwise around the statue. She counted the steps carefully and made sure to complete the first lap on the fourth stroke, the second one on the eighth. On the twelfth stroke she stopped in front of the statue and faced it, striking its concrete foundation with a flat palm.
As soon as her hand touched the rough rock her feet were swept from underneath her. The sky fell into itself, forming a black sun. A sharp, freezing wind tore into Garún, trying to drag her up into the roaring abyss. Above her was no longer the starlit darkness of cold autumn nights, but something else. Something behind the darkness. Something that was waiting.
All this happened in an instant, the moment between two beats of a heart. Garún collapsed. She was shivering and her vision vibrated. It only grew worse if she shut her eyes. She gave herself a few minutes to recover slightly before looking up.
She was in Reykjavík, but at the same time she wasn’t in Reykjavík. There was no church behind her, no buildings in sight. No moon or stars or clouds in the sky. At her feet was an irregular pile of rocks where the statue had stood just a moment before. They looked ancient. The city centre, where the streets were lit up by electric lamps, was now dark and vacant. A broad dirt road led down the hill on the same spot as Skólavörðustígur was in Reykjavík. It was always foggy here, and in the distance lonely hrævareldar lit the streets. The electronic music had transformed as soon as she passed through. A vague threat was hiding in the tune and the beat became irregular and paranoid. Static surged in the background.
The Forgotten Downtown. What Reykjavík once was, or could have been. A dream from another world. Rökkurvík.
Garún walked down the hill of Skólavörðuholt. Unlike Reykjavík, here the houses were low and simply constructed, with large, wide gaps between them. The corrugated iron was rusted, the shell sand panelling had cracked and crumbled. Trees spread their leafless branches over gardens overgrown and filled with rubbish. The trees were all dead, but still standing.
The Forgotten Downtown was like a faded photograph, blurred and vague. A disappearing memory. Its existence was not officially acknowledged, but it was irrefutably still a part of the city. Some research into the place had taken place when the Crown had just come to Hrímland with foreign technologies and knowledge, but it had very quickly been stopped and all traffic in between strictly forbidden. There was not a soul who knew for sure where the Forgotten Downtown was: if it was in another country, another planet or another dimension. Some thought it to be a part of the ruins of the hulduheimar, or a side effect of that apocalypse, but there was no way of determining it.
Here Lækjargata was a muddy track alongside the stream running from a marshland lake. The stream looked filthy and it ran deceptively deep in the ditch, separating the central city into two parts. Garún crossed the brook using a makeshift plank bridge.
She followed the instructions of Viður’s rough map down a path that she called Tryggvagata in her head, but there were no streets marked here. She walked briskly past the bar Gómorra and tried to lie low. There were not many people about and those that were passed each other with hunched shoulders, avoiding one another, their mere presence here a severe taboo. The music in her headphones picked up when she passed it, alerting her to possible danger, but Garún knew the beat and knew that she’d be safe as long as she didn’t stick around.
She recognised some of the derelict houses as they had an identical twin in Reykjavík. These were only phantoms of their counterparts in the real Ránargata. There was not a single unbroken window and every door had been nailed shut. These were the dwellings of shadows. Blue-tinted hrævareldar floated aimlessly down the streets, their eerie flames sputtering in the air, the only street lighting to be found in this dark and sombre place. Garún was careful not to look directly at one, in fear of being led to her doom.
Finally she came to the place that Viður had described. It was a two-storey house, with a deteriorated shell sand finish. The windows were dark and she couldn’t spot any movement inside. It looked as if the house had been abandoned for decades. She went through the overgrown garden on a paved pathway that was cracked and ruined. It led her behind the house to the basement. Two dead trees slanted precariously over the yard, which was filled with rubbish. A rusted tricycle lay upside down, the thick grass slowly engulfing it. She wondered if children had ever lived here, or if this was just a phantom of the past like everything else. A thing from nowhere, made of nothing and used by no one.
Garún stepped carefully down the crumbled stone stairway and knocked on the cellar door. There was no light inside, but the glass in the door was unbroken. There was no response. Nothing moved inside. She knocked
