nothing when she heard this, but was quite surprised, since the small apartments were only a few dozen metres away. If people couldn’t make it safely such a short distance in bad weather, she hoped that the impending storm would pass over quickly. She frowned when Fri?rikka added that sometimes these storms could last for days. They decided to stay in the rooms on the wing, so as not to tamper with the apartments of the people who might conceivably return to work there. If they weren’t able to restore power to the sleeping wing they would set themselves up in the office building, since without power it was twenty degrees below inside as well as outside. The most probable explanation for the lack of heat in the employees’ quarters was that the generator supplying power was either broken or out of fuel, and Matthew, Dr Finnbogi and Alvar went to try to get it working again. Thora, Fri?rikka and Eyjolfur remained behind in the office, along with Bella, who had returned safely from her fag break.
The four of them stood in the little coffee room that had been set up in a nook in a corridor of the office building. The large coffeemaker was turned on and there was nothing preventing them from pressing a button and making coffee except that the doctor had explicitly prohibited them from doing so. He considered it unwise to consume anything in the camp while the fate of the two employees was still unclear. Thora thought this unnecessarily dramatic; all of the rooms and living quarters had been inspected and had revealed no signs of the missing men. People did not simply evaporate from food poisoning or sickness, she thought privately; but she didn’t dare make herself a coffee, even though she was parched and knew that her hangover, which was finally decreasing in intensity, would disappear almost entirely if she had a coffee or something stronger.
‘The system was actually divided into two to ensure that the entire area would not lose power all at once,’ said Fri?rikka, breaking the silence. ‘There is a separate generator for the office and another for the apartments and cafeteria. Everything here is heated with electric radiators, and even though the houses are well insulated, it gets cold quickly when the electricity goes off. But electrical failures don’t matter; we have a huge oil tank that is supposed to be enough to supply both generators through the winter, but if spring arrives late we have to shut one of them down until a ship can bring more supplies.’
‘Did that happen often while you were here?’ asked Thora. ‘The electricity going off?’
‘No, no,’ replied Fri?rikka. ‘At first there was some trouble with the exhaust pipe of one of the generators and the electricity went out when wind blew into the pipe, but that was repaired quickly. The system worked fine after that but I don’t know how things went after I quit. Maybe something was already going wrong then.’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ interjected Eyjolfur. ‘I was here two weeks ago and no one mentioned anything like that.’
‘Could the generator have run out of oil?’ asked Thora, directing her question at Fri?rikka. ‘And that’s why it shut down?’ She wanted to look outside, satisfy herself that the storm hadn’t hit yet.
‘No, that’s impossible,’ the other woman replied. ‘Spring’s still a long way off and there should be plenty of oil, unless someone badly miscalculated.’
It must have been odd not to be able to count on regular shipments except over the summer. The residents had to make arrangements for the winter at the end of that season. Thora would have liked to see her own shopping list if she’d lived under these conditions. The hut that housed the generator was in view, but she did not see any of the men that had gone there armed with torches and a toolkit. The wind was starting to stir up the snow and Thora shivered at the thought of having to go outside. She turned around.
‘How did it all work here, then?’ she asked. ‘It’s an unusual set-up, to say the least.’
‘I actually just made short trips here,’ replied Eyjolfur off-handedly. ‘I wouldn’t have stuck it out if I’d had to be here longer than a week.’ The answer hardly came as a surprise, since the computer expert was young and doubtless had a decent social life outside of work. Everything here must have centred on daily work tasks.
Fri?rikka shrugged and looked down at her toes. ‘It was all right. You had to get used to it, but on the whole it was fine.’ She drew a breath through her nose. ‘Naturally it’s not easy living where you work and associating only with your co-workers, but once you’ve got used to it it’s no problem. The salary was good and made up for the isolation. I’m single and childless, so it was okay really.’
‘But still, you gave it up.’ said Thora. ‘May I ask why?’ Eyjolfur suddenly became very interested in a little refrigerator and bent down to inspect it.
‘The atmosphere changed, you might say,’ replied the woman, pushing a red lock of hair that had fallen onto her cheek back behind her ear. ‘When we came here about a year ago everything was done professionally and all of our interactions were normal, but the group’s spirits deteriorated quickly. In the end I couldn’t bear the idea of being here any longer.’ She flushed, but then stuck out her chin and continued, focused: ‘I wasn’t even surprised when I was contacted and told that something had come up here. It was inevitable.’ She looked away from Thora. ‘There was – and probably still is – a curse on this place.’ She added quickly, ‘And I’m not alone in that view, if that’s what you think.’
‘It must be okay to have a Coke,’ said Eyjolfur loudly, standing up with a can in his hand. ‘I’m dying of thirst and this fridge is full of drinks. The Coke can hardly be poisoned.’ Thora wasn’t going to let him get away with changing the subject.
‘Do you agree?’ she asked, as he flicked open the can and swigged from it. ‘Do you think there’s a curse on this place?’ She choked down her own overwhelming desire for a Coke. They needn’t both become ill; it was better to wait and see whether he lost consciousness before she yielded to the temptation. She wondered whether a Coke could be counted as one of the doctor’s potentially contaminated canned goods.
Eyjolfur took another gulp and sighed happily before replying. ‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’ He looked at Fri?rikka as he spoke. ‘
Fri?rikka did not reply immediately, but looked disdainfully away from the grinning man and stared at the wall. ‘Doesn’t matter, because in the end it’s all the same. Maybe it was just all of you and what went on here that made the place bad.’
‘Could you be a little clearer?’ asked Thora. She was in no condition to read between the lines. Maybe what had happened here was unconnected with recent events; perhaps it had simply been typical work stuff, like an extramarital affair or some other gossip, but it still wouldn’t hurt to know what they were talking about.
‘For God’s sake, it was a lot of fuss over nothing,’ replied Eyjolfur. ‘Fri?rikka simply gave up and quit. She didn’t have the nerve for it, or the sense of humour you need under these conditions. There’s nothing wrong with the place itself, although the work arrangements were pretty fucked-up. This kind of workplace isn’t for everyone.’
He was hardly one to talk. By his own account he had only come here for a week at a time while others stayed for lengthy periods. However, Thora decided to say nothing, to protect Fri?rikka. The geologist might turn out to be a crybaby who had convinced herself everything was intolerable in order to justify her leaving. Thora could find this out later if necessary. She looked outside once more. ‘There’s smoke coming from the chimney on the roof,’ she said. ‘That must be a good thing.’
Fri?rikka peered out and nodded. ‘It looks like the generator is running again,’ she said. ‘Unfortunately it’s probably too late for the showers and water, but who knows. Hopefully it was shut off intentionally and the water drained from the system. Either way, it’ll be nice not to have to sleep in here on the floor.’
‘Why shouldn’t the showers be working? They don’t run on electricity,’ said Thora grumpily. It was bad enough not being able to have a coffee or an ice-cold Coke. Bella’s expression suggested that she felt the same.
‘If the camp has been without heat long enough for the water to freeze in the pipes, most of the lines are probably broken,’ said Fri?rikka. ‘Unless they left the taps trickling, but I didn’t notice that when we had our look around.’ Thora said nothing, hoping they had simply overlooked this during their inspection of the site. But she didn’t hold out much hope. They would probably have heard the water running in the oppressive silence.
‘Fuck,’ said Eyjolfur, seemingly just as pissed off as Thora. He didn’t elaborate, but took another huge gulp of Coke. He reached for the tap on the sink next to the coffeemaker and sighed in relief when water ran out of it in a dense jet. ‘Well, at least we can flush the toilet in this building.’
‘I guess I should go out and help them turn the lights on and get everything working,’ said Fri?rikka. ‘I know where everything is, so we’d get it done faster.’ Thora wondered for a moment whether she should be lazy and lag behind, but she pushed away the thought. They would all have to contribute.
The hunter Igimaq watched the four people emerge from the big building. Three females and one male, all dressed in colourful outdoor clothing that contrasted with the environment. Despite their thick clothing and their distance from him, the man realized at the same moment that all the women were too tall for his taste, and two of
