Whale Fjord

One

September 2023

Gerdur’s Hollow had terrified Jón when he was a little boy.

Even now, after spending the entire fifty-eight years of his life on the farm of Selvík on whose margins it lay, it made him uneasy.

It was his grandmother’s fault. She had told him about Gerdur, the witch who had lived in a hovel along the track between Selvík and the larger, more prosperous, neighbouring farm at Laxahóll. Sometime in the distant past, Gerdur had lain a curse upon the farmer at Laxahóll, and his daughter had died. Appalled, the locals had turned on her and stoned her to death, burying her in a shallow cave covered with rocks in the hollow, which from then on bore her name.

The hollow lay in a fold in the steep, rock-strewn hillside, out of sight of the road. It was a dangerous place. This was either because it was haunted by the tormented Gerdur, or because the rock face was unstable, or both.

According to Jón’s grandmother, there used to be a small cairn at the base of the hollow. Anyone who ventured in there was supposed to place a stone on the cairn. Once, eighty years ago, Jón’s grandfather had omitted to do this, and the following night there had been an earthquake which loosened the stones and toppled the cairn.

Since then, Jón’s grandfather, then his father and then Jón himself had avoided the spot if they possibly could. If a sheep got lost in there, Jón would send in his sheepdog to fetch it out.

Jón swung his mallet down on to the fence post. It was early September, and white clouds rolled into and then out of the valley, impelled by a stiff cool breeze hurrying from the sea fifteen kilometres to the west. Soon he and his neighbours would be rounding up their sheep on the hills to bring them back down to their farms. The fences had to be ready. Jón should have had his own son to help him with this work, but the boy had been taken away from the farm by his mother when he was only eight, and now he was studying for his accountancy exams in Reykjavík. Big strong lad too. A waste.

The boundary between Selvík and its larger neighbour lay in a bend in the valley of the Selá, a clear, fast-moving river rippling with salmon and sea trout that hurried down past the farm to Hvalfjördur — the Whale Fjord — sparkling in the sunshine a kilometre away. The valley narrowed at this point, allowing only a few acres of meagre meadow for Selvík. Further upstream, broad, lush green fields fed the horses, sheep and cattle of the wealthy Laxahóll farmers. Thus had it always been.

Jón stood up straight, and was preparing a mightier swing, when he heard a cry.

He looked up.

Two figures were running towards him from the direction of Gerdur’s Hollow, shouting and waving. A man and a woman dressed in bright rain jackets. Hikers.

They had got themselves into some kind of trouble. Idiots. Perhaps a friend had tried to climb up the scree and fallen.

‘Hey! Hey!’ The man in front was shouting and waving at him.

Jón waited.

The man stumbled over the tussocks of yellow grass until he was panting in front of Jón. He was in his thirties, short and dumpy, and unfit by the look of him. His trailing girlfriend was shorter and dumpier and even more unfit.

‘We found something!’ the hiker said, in English.

‘What?’ Jón asked, curtly, also in English. Foreigners. Not surprising they had got themselves into trouble.

The man swallowed. He seemed distressed. Scared even. Despite himself, Jón felt that fear transfer on to him.

‘What?’ Jón repeated.

‘A skull.’

Jón blinked, and then pulled himself together. ‘An animal skull? A sheep?’

‘No. A human skull.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quite sure.’

The hiker’s companion staggered up next to him. ‘It’s definitely a human skull,’ she said.

‘Show me.’

Jón was a tall man with long strides and he was used to walking over rough ground. Kappi, his black-and-white sheepdog, bounded along beside him. The hikers had to run to keep up. A pair of ravens circled, watchful, overhead.

He remembered as if it were yesterday his grandmother warning him about the hollow. As he had grown up and become a father himself, he understood how the story had probably developed over the years as a means of keeping children away from what was a genuinely dangerous area of steep, unstable rocks and scree. Yet he had also learned that historical documents showed a witch had indeed been arrested and executed in these parts in the seventeenth century.

He was determined not to let his nervousness show.

A short, steep bank of yellow grass led up to a twist in the hillside and a dark gully shaded from the sun. Jón sent Kappi in first, just to be on the safe side.

The hillside rose up above him about a hundred metres. The hollow itself was a scar only a few metres wide, which had been filled with stones and rocks the last time Jón had seen it the previous summer. Things had shifted since then. Rocks had fallen. Somewhere beneath the debris, water trickled. The air was dead here, out of the wind.

For the last couple of years, there had been a swarm of earthquakes throughout the south-west of Iceland accompanying the volcanic eruptions on the Reykjanes peninsula eighty kilometres away. They were rarer and less severe in the Hvalfjördur region. Not enough to bring down mountainsides, but occasionally enough to shift loose stone.

‘Where?’ Jón snapped.

The male hiker led him to a boulder a couple of metres up from the bottom.

‘Bettina was sitting on that. I was taking her picture. And then she saw it.’

Jón glanced at the girl. ‘Behind the rock,’ she said, pointing.

Jón climbed up on to the boulder and looked down the other side.

Sure enough, two blank eye sockets stared back up at him out of a cracked sphere of bone.

Struggling to hide his fear from the two hikers, he reached for his phone.