I Visited My Friend's Family in Iceland. Something Is Watching the House From the Rocks.

The sleet came in sideways the last forty minutes of the drive, and the wipers on the rental car couldn't keep up with it. By the time I reached Hellisandur I was doing fifteen miles an hour with my face close to the windshield. The streetlights along the main road hummed. I could hear them through the glass, a low electric buzz, each one with its own cone of slanting white. Down at the harbour the smell got into the car through the vents, diesel and wet rope and cod drying on racks somewhere I couldn't see.

I'm a marine biologist. I was forty-two then, and I'd spent about twenty years counting seals from boats and cliff edges, mostly alone, mostly with a clicker counter and a thermos. It suits me. Standing at the edge of things and writing down what's there is what I'm good at. Rooms full of people are harder. I'd only come because Baldur asked.

Baldur was my oldest friend, and honestly my only close one, going back to university. He'd called in January and said it would be a year in March since his brother went off a small boat near the skerry. Then he said, "Nobody's coming. Nobody outside us. Could you?" I said yes before he finished. It was the kind of yes you don't get to think about afterward.

The Sigurdsson house sat one street up from the harbour, yellow siding gone gray, a light on in every window. Baldur opened the door before I knocked. He'd put on weight and his beard had gone rough, and his eyes were red at the rims. He didn't say anything. He took hold of my arm above the elbow and held on, and I let him.

"You made it," he said finally.

"Roads were bad."

"They're always bad."

Halla stood behind him in the hall. She was thin and very upright, steel-gray hair pinned back, a dark cardigan buttoned to the throat. I'd met her twice, both times at graduations. She took my wet coat herself and hung it on a hook, and she asked if the drive had been difficult and whether I had eaten. She was perfectly courteous. It took me a minute to see that the courtesy was doing a job. It kept the conversation on the road, on the weather, on the cottage, and off everything else.

Through the kitchen doorway I could see the table set for the evening. Four chairs, and the fourth pulled in square to the table with a plate and a folded napkin in front of it. There were three of us. Nobody said anything about it, and I didn't either. Baldur saw me looking and opened his mouth. Halla turned her head, just slightly. He closed it.

We ate fish stew and boiled potatoes. Most of the talk was about the harbour and the price of diesel and whether the sleet would clear by Thursday. Nobody mentioned the anniversary, and nobody said Einar's name. Around nine Baldur walked me down to the cottage they'd rented for me on the harbour road, a low fisherman's place with a tin roof and a key on a nail by the door. He stood on the step a moment like he wanted to come in. Then he said goodnight and went back up the hill with his hands in his pockets.

I unpacked. It didn't take long. Two sweaters, spare boots, my laptop, the field binoculars I take everywhere. The keys were in my coat pocket where they'd been since Reykjavik. Einar had left them to me, which I'd never understood. They came in a padded envelope in the autumn, forwarded through Baldur's mother's solicitor. It was an iron ring with three keys, one of them old and heavy and black, and a card in Einar's square handwriting: for the boat shed, when you visit. That was all. I'd met the man four times. Once at a wedding, once at a funeral, twice on a dock. We had talked about tides.

I touched the coat pocket while I hung up the sweaters. I touched it again when I set the binoculars on the sill. I didn't take the keys out. I just wanted to know they were there.

By eleven the sleet had turned to rain, then to almost nothing. I was standing in the dark kitchen with a cup of tea when I noticed the sound outside had changed. The water had gone out. Low tide, and a big one. The back window of the cottage looks over a strip of gravel and then the rocks, black and wet and shining under the one harbour lamp. I'd seen those rocks from the car, more or less. Past them the skerry was a long dark hump with the sea drawn back from its base.

There were seals on the rocks. I started counting out of habit, the way I do, left to right in blocks of ten. I reached forty and kept going. Forty or more, hauled out on rock in the middle of the night in March, which is odd by itself. Harbour seals don't like being that close to a lit road. And every one of them was facing the same way. Not toward the water. Toward the cottage. Toward the window where I stood.

I put the tea down and raised the binoculars.

Every head was lifted. Not one was sleeping or scratching or shoving its neighbor, none of the ordinary noise a haul-out makes. They lay there in rows with their eyes open, and they were quiet.

Then I found the other one. It lay at the center of the group, and the seals had left it a wide gap on all sides. It was far too big. I've measured gray seals near three meters and this was longer than that, and thicker through the body. It was also the wrong color. Not white, exactly. A waxy yellowish white, the colour of a peeled candle, with no mottling and no scars. I couldn't make out a face. I had the impression of one, turned toward me, but the lamp was behind it.

Its flank rose. Fell. Rose again.

I don't know how long I watched before I understood that my own chest was moving with it. In when it went in. Out when it went out. I hadn't decided to do that. I lowered the binoculars, and the rhythm went on anyway, easy and slow, and my body was fine with it.

So I held my breath.

The flank stopped. It stayed stopped, at the top of a breath, and out on the rocks the forty seals didn't move at all.

My lungs started to burn. I kept holding on, because I wanted to see what it would do. Now I think that was the worst decision I made that night.

I breathed again eventually. I'm not going to say how long it took, or what I saw when I did. The next thing I remember is gray light and the tin roof ticking as it warmed.

I went into the bathroom at ten past seven and stopped in the door. There were handprints on the window. They were on the inside, both palms flat, fingers spread, printed in water that hadn't dried. Two more smaller marks lower down where the wrists would have rested. The glass was fogged around them and clear inside them, and a thin line of water was running down from each finger.

The window is small and the latch was still shut. I checked it twice.

When I turned around I saw the floor. Scales, fresh ones, silver and thumbnail-sized, still wet enough to hold the light. They began at the front door and ran down the hall in a loose line, then across the boards and around the foot of the bed to the side I'd slept on. I knelt and picked one up. Herring, maybe, or a big capelin. I've handled enough of both. It stuck to my finger and I couldn't tell you why I smelled it, but it smelled of nothing. No brine, no fish. Cold, that's all.

I stood there longer than I'd like to admit. Then I wiped the window with my sleeve, top to bottom, until the glass squeaked. I swept the scales into my palm and dropped them in the toilet and flushed. Nobody had asked me to. Nobody was there. I just wanted them gone before Baldur came down the road and saw them, and I didn't examine that any further.

My coat was on its hook. I put my hand in the pocket. The keys were there.

Breakfast was at eight up the hill. Halla opened the door before I could knock, same as Baldur had the night before, and asked whether I'd slept. I said I had. She looked at me a second longer than the answer needed, then took my coat and hung it herself.

The kitchen smelled of coffee and rye bread. Baldur was already sitting, and he looked worse than he had in the hall, gray under the eyes, one sleeve pushed up. There was skyr and sliced cheese and a plate of cold smoked lamb. The table was laid for four again. The fourth chair was pulled in square, and this morning I watched Halla lay it. She came around with a plate and a knife and a folded napkin, set them down in front of the empty chair, and straightened the knife by half an inch. She didn't say anything. Baldur didn't either. She poured a cup of coffee at that place and left it steaming.

I took my seat. I looked at my bread.

We talked about the roads. The sleet had stopped, and the forecast said it would come back Thursday. Baldur said the harbour master thought it might hold off till the weekend, and Halla said the harbour master thought a lot of things. It was almost easy. I ate. I was thinking about the scales, and about how many hours a wet handprint lasts on glass in a cold room, and I wasn't listening when Baldur put his cup down.

"Tomas, I wanted to tell you, he used to sit right—"

Halla turned her head. That's all she did. She didn't speak, and her face didn't change. She looked at him, and the sentence stopped in his mouth as if she'd shut a door on it.

He swallowed. I watched it go down, his throat moving, the word gone back where it came from. He picked up his knife and looked at his plate and cut a piece of cheese into smaller pieces. Nobody said anything for what felt like a full minute. The coffee at the fourth place kept steaming.

I wanted to say something. I have never in my life been good at that, and I sat there with my hands on either side of my plate and did nothing, which is what I usually do.

So I did what I usually do about things I can't account for. I made a list. A stranded animal, first. An old bull gray seal with some kind of pigment condition, sick and hauled up in the wrong place. Leucism is rare but it happens. Seals will follow a noise or a light, and a sick one might draw a crowd. The handprints were condensation and a leaking pipe behind the bathroom wall. Scales get tracked in on boots, and I'd been at the harbour. The breathing was suggestion, plain and simple, the body copying a slow rhythm because it was tired.

It wasn't a bad list. I almost believed it, and I had my fork halfway to my mouth when the voice came.

It came from outside, from the water side, and it was carrying, the way voices do over flat water at low tide. A man's voice, warm, in no hurry.

"Baddi."

Just that. Then again, drawn out a little, the way you'd call a kid in for supper from the end of a dock.

"Baddi!"

I had met Einar four times. A wedding, a funeral, twice on a dock talking about tides. I couldn't have told you the color of his eyes with any confidence. But I knew that voice the instant I heard it, the easy weight on the first syllable, the small lift at the end. I'd heard him say my name exactly that way, on the dock, the second time. Tomas. Good, you came.

The fork was still in my hand. I put it down without a sound.

Baldur had gone white. His mouth was a little open and his hand was flat against the tablecloth, fingers spread, and he didn't move. Halla sat with her back straight and her eyes on the middle of the table. Neither of them looked at the window. Neither of them turned their head even a degree toward the glass, and the window was right there, two meters from Baldur's shoulder.

That was how I knew they'd heard it before.

The voice called again, once more, patient. The coffee went on steaming at the fourth place, and nobody in that kitchen breathed.

Nobody moved until the voice stopped. Then Halla stood, picked up her plate and Baldur's, and carried them to the sink. She left the fourth place alone. The coffee was still steaming there.

"I need something from the cottage," I said. "My notebook. I'll be an hour."

Baldur nodded at the tablecloth. Halla ran the tap and didn't turn around.

My coat was on its hook in the hall, where she'd hung it. I put my hand in the pocket before I put my arm in the sleeve. The keys were there, three on an iron ring, and I closed my fist on them all the way down the hill.

I didn't go to the cottage. The card had said the boat shed, and the only boat sheds in Hellisandur were behind the harbour, a row of them, tarred boards and corrugated roofs, all shut up for the season. It took me a few minutes to work out which was Sigurdsson's. Baldur had pointed it out once, years ago, when he was telling me about his brother and I was only half listening. It was the fourth one, with a green door gone mostly gray and a hasp bolted through the frame.

The wind was coming off the water hard enough to push the coat against my back. I tried the small brass key first, because it was closest to hand. It didn't fit. The second one was for something else, a cabinet maybe. The third was the old black one, heavy as a spanner, and it went into the padlock and turned with almost no pressure. The shackle dropped open into my palm like it had been oiled that week. I don't think it had. Salt air should have seized it a year ago.

Inside it was dim and smelled of tar, old rope, and something sweeter underneath, like dried kelp. Nets hung from the rafters in gray swags, and more were heaped on the floor with cork floats still threaded through. A hand winch stood on a timber frame by the slipway doors, rust on the drum but a fresh smear of grease on the handle. There was a workbench with a vise, a coffee can of bolts, and a pair of oilskin trousers hung on a nail with the knees still creased. I stood looking at those a while.

The book was on a shelf above the bench, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with tarred twine. It was the only thing in the shed that wasn't dusty. I took it down, worked the knot loose with cold fingers, and unfolded the cloth.

A black ledger, the kind with a cloth spine, the corners gone soft. Einar's handwriting was square, same as the card. The first pages were what I'd expected: dates, tides, wind direction, catch weights. Cod, haddock, a run of wolffish in October. He wrote the way I write field notes, short and flat, no adjectives. I liked him for it, a little late.

Somewhere around the middle the fishing thinned out. Then it stopped. The entries got longer and the tide tables disappeared.

Third night it has been on the rocks. Same place. Seals will not go near it but they stay.

It watches the house. Not the boat. The house.

It learns who is missing. I think it listens at the windows and counts, and where there's a gap it works on the gap. Tonight it used Dad's voice. Dad's been dead nineteen years.

I turned the page. My thumb left a damp print on it.

If you invite it, it stays. Doesn't have to be words. A door left off the latch is enough. A place set.

I read that one twice, and then I stopped reading it. I thought about the fourth plate and the folded napkin, and I turned the page again.

Do not answer it by name. Not mine, not anyone's. Whatever it says, whoever it sounds like. Say nothing and give it nothing. I'm sure of this now.

That was the last of Einar's entries. The date was eleven days before the anniversary, the one they weren't going to mention. He'd gone out in the boat after that. The ink stopped in the middle of the page, and the rest of the ledger was blank.

Except it wasn't quite. Under the last line, with a gap of maybe two fingers, there was one more. The ink was different, blue where Einar's was black, and the letters pressed harder into the paper, so that I could feel them from the back when I ran my thumb across.

Grief can't refuse it. Only someone who wasn't there can.

I don't know who wrote it. I looked for a date and there wasn't one. I stood there holding the book with the wind working at the shed door behind me, and what I noticed first was how cold my hands were. It took me longer to get to the rest.

Einar hadn't left me those keys because we were friends. We weren't. Four meetings, and two of them about tides. He'd left them because I wasn't family, wasn't from Hellisandur, hadn't been in the house when it started. He'd known what was on the rocks, and he had known who would be standing in the kitchen a year later hearing him call. He couldn't tell Halla, and he couldn't tell Baldur. So he'd written it down and picked the one man who'd come when asked and who'd have no reason to be grieving the right way.

I wasn't sure what to do with that. Being chosen is a strange thing to find out about yourself in a boat shed.

I read the last four pages through again, all the way, standing up because there was nowhere to sit that wasn't wet. Then I folded the oilcloth back over the book and retied the twine. I put the book inside my coat, against my ribs. I locked the padlock behind me, which seemed pointless, and did it anyway.

The tide was coming in. Out past the last of the sheds I could see the skerry, a long dark back with water starting to lap at its foot. I couldn't see the seals from there. I didn't look for them very hard.

The rule was simple. No answering, no names, nothing given. I could do that. Saying nothing was the one thing I'd always been good at, and for once it seemed to be worth something. I decided I'd keep to it the whole day, whatever came up from the water and whoever it sounded like.

I went back up the hill with the book against my chest and my hand still cold on the keys.

Halla had the kettle on when I came in, and she didn't ask about my notebook. She took my coat at the door again. I kept my arm pressed against my ribs so she wouldn't feel the book through the wool, and I said I'd keep it on, I was still cold. She let it go.

We ate a late lunch, rye bread and the rest of the lamb. I kept to the rule. Halla asked if the cottage was warm enough and I said yes. Baldur asked if I wanted more coffee and I nodded. Nobody said a name, which was easy, because nobody in that house said one where Halla could hear.

The voice came a little after two. I was drying a cup Halla had handed me, and Baldur was at the table with his elbows on it. It came from the water, the same warm voice, calling "Baddi." Then something else, longer, that I couldn't make out over the gulls. Baldur's shoulders came up toward his ears. Halla kept washing. I kept drying the same cup. It was already dry, and I kept drying it until the voice stopped, and then I set it upside down on the rack very gently.

It felt like passing a test. I want to say that plainly, because I was pleased with myself. For about an hour I thought I was doing it right.

Around three Baldur came to the sink while Halla was in the pantry. He stood close and kept his voice low.

"Tomas. You talked to him, on the dock. The second time. Do you remember what he said? I keep trying to think what he said to you."

I looked at him. He'd waited a year to ask somebody that, and I was the somebody. The ledger was right there against my ribs, and I opened my mouth and shut it again. I shook my head. It wasn't even an answer, just a movement.

His face closed up slowly. He nodded, like I'd told him something reasonable, and went back to the table. Halla came out of the pantry with a jar of pickled beets and looked at both of us and didn't say anything. I felt bad about it. I felt worse because part of me was relieved.

It was the coffee that started to bother me. She'd poured a fresh cup at the fourth place after lunch. The old one had gone cold and skinned over, and she'd taken it away and poured another without looking at it. The chair was still pulled in square. Four settings. Every day, probably, for a year.

I sat there with my hands around my own cup and went back through what I'd read. A place set is enough. It learns who is missing. I'd taken that as the danger, and it was. But I knew something else from twenty years of sitting on cliffs. A haul-out is a place nobody disturbs. Seals come back to a beach because nothing there pushes them off. Nothing in this house pushed. Nobody said his name and nobody argued with the voice. A whole house had gone quiet around one shape, and the shape was Einar's, and it was sitting right there at the table with a napkin folded in front of it.

She'd built it. Halla had. Not the thing on the rocks, but the chair, and the quiet around it. She'd set it out every morning, thinking she was keeping something out.

And I'd just spent the afternoon doing what she did. I'd stood in her kitchen and kept the same quiet as well as she had. Give it nothing, the ledger said. But nothing was what it wanted. It didn't need anyone to say yes. It only needed nobody to say no.

I didn't do anything with that yet. I didn't know how. I looked at my bread and let it sit in me, and the light went yellow and then gray in the window over the sink.

Halla went up to lie down a little before five. She said she had a headache. She stopped in the doorway and looked at Baldur for a second, then at me, and went up. We listened to the stairs. When the bedroom door shut, Baldur let out a breath and turned his cup a quarter turn on the saucer.

"She doesn't sleep," he said. "She just lies there."

I didn't say anything. He didn't seem to want me to.

"Do you know Gunnar Palsson?" he asked. "Knew, I mean. You wouldn't. He mended nets for Dad, before. Old guy. He did the nets for half the harbour, and he still had a workshop down behind the co-op." He was looking at the tablecloth. "He lived two doors down. He used to bring Mamma fish on Fridays."

He hadn't been asked. I kept still.

"October," he said. "About five months ago. He heard Einar out on the water. He told the man at the co-op he'd heard him calling. Einar had a way of calling, when he was bringing the boat in, and Gunnar said he knew it, he said he'd know it anywhere. He was seventy-four years old, Tomas. He went out over the causeway at night to the skerry."

The refrigerator ticked on. Upstairs a board creaked and stopped.

"They found him in the harbour a week later. Down by the fuel dock. The police said he'd slipped." He rubbed his beard with the flat of his hand. "Nobody said anything else. We went to the funeral and Mamma stood right at the front, and then we came home and she said, We don't say his name in this house. Not anymore. It hears it and it comes. She said if nobody feeds it, it'll starve. And that's been it. That's been all of it. Five months."

"Baldur," I said. It was the only name I let out all day, and it was his, and it didn't count.

He shook his head. "I wanted you to know. That's all. I don't know why."

He got up and started clearing dishes nobody had finished. I sat there and watched him carry the plates, and I knew what I'd known for about an hour, only now it had a body in it. She thought silence was starving it. It had been five months since Gunnar. In that time forty-odd seals had come to a bare rock and faced this house all night, and none of them was hungry.

Baldur asked me to stay the night. He asked it at the sink, with a plate in each hand, and Halla said from the stairs that the spare room was made up. I think she'd had it made up since the morning. I didn't argue. Nobody was going to sleep well down on the harbour road anyway, and I wasn't going to walk down there in the dark past a rock full of seals.

By ten the sleet had come back, days ahead of the forecast, and harder. It ticked on the kitchen window and then stopped ticking and just hissed. Halla came down for supper and went up again at nine. Baldur went up at ten, after he stood in the hall a while looking at me like he had something else to say. I told him goodnight. He said it back. That was all we managed.

I didn't go to bed. I sat in the spare room in my socks with the light off, then came down the stairs on the outside edges of the treads where they don't creak, and stood in the kitchen. I didn't turn a light on. The fourth chair was a darker shape against the dark, still pulled in square. I didn't look at it long.

I was standing there with my hand on the back door when the voice started. I don't remember crossing the floor. The latch was a plain steel thumb-lift, cold, and my hand was already on it.

"Baddi?"

It was low this time. Not the call across the water from the morning. It was right on the other side of the wood, a man talking to a door he expected to open.

I held still. I'd been holding still all day.

"Baddi, it's freezing out here. Come on. Open up, would you?"

The sleet was loud on the step. I could hear how close it was standing. The sound of it wasn't in the yard, it was at the height of a man's face.

Then it stopped, and there was a wait, and it came again, and it wasn't Einar.

"Let me in, love. I'm so cold."

That was Halla. I'd have known it anywhere after two days, the formal small vowels, the way she left the ends of her sentences tidy. It was Halla saying it gently, the way you say it to a child who's locked himself in the bathroom. My eyes went to the ceiling. Right over the kitchen, her bed. I'd heard her go up. I'd heard the board over the stairs give when she lay down, and it hadn't given again since. She was up there. She had to be.

I could have gone to check. That's the sort of thing I told myself in the first few seconds, that I could go and check, and I want to be honest that it was the guest in me talking. Somebody's at the door and it's cold. Twenty years of standing at the edges of rooms teaches you to be no trouble, and part of that is that you don't leave anyone out on a step in sleet. My thumb was on the latch and I was pressing it down. I felt the tongue lift a hair.

Upstairs Baldur started crying.

It wasn't loud. It was the sound from the night before, when I'd been down the hill and not heard it, except that I'd heard it in his voice on the phone in January, under the words. He was asleep, I could tell that. It had the long uneven breaths in it. It went up and cracked and went on, and then, very quietly, he said something into the pillow, and I didn't catch it, and I knew it was a name.

"Tomas," the voice said at the door. It was Einar again. It was warm, and it sounded glad. "Good, you came."

Same words as the dock. I gripped the latch and didn't push it and didn't let go.

I don't know how long. My knuckles started to hurt, then my forearm. It wanted the door opened. Every part of me that had ever been polite wanted it. And what I understood, standing there with my hand going numb, wasn't complicated. I'd spent the whole day doing what Einar's book said, giving it nothing, and the house had done the same for a year, and the thing was on the other side of the door anyway, asking politely. Gunnar Palsson hadn't been fed. He'd just answered once. And it was still here in March, calling in two voices, with forty seals on the rocks and getting more. Not saying anything wasn't keeping it out. It was the room it lived in.

It wasn't going to be starved by us. It had nothing to do with hunger.

"Please," Halla's voice said. Then Einar's, right over it, both at once, close together in the crack under the door. "Please."

I let go.

My hand didn't want to open. I had to peel the fingers off one at a time and flex them in the dark. Then I backed away from the door, not turning, and went along the wall to the hall. My coat was on the hook where she'd hung it. The pocket had the keys. I put my hand around the ring and the old black one was against my palm, heavy and cold, and I stood there with my boots half-laced and listened to Baldur's breath catch upstairs and go on.

I thought about waking him. I thought about that for about as long as it takes to lace a boot. He'd have come down. He'd have heard it, and he'd have answered. Anybody would have.

I did the boots up. I put on the coat and zipped it to my chin. The front door had two bolts and a chain, and I drew the bolts slowly, one, then the other, and then took the chain off and hung it on its nail so it wouldn't rattle. Behind me in the kitchen the voice had gone quiet. I didn't like that better.

The wind came in around my legs when I opened the door. Sleet hit my face, thick, more water than ice. The street was empty, the streetlights humming the way they had the first night, every one with its own cone of slanting white. I pulled the door shut until the latch caught. The yellow siding looked gray. There wasn't a light in any window now.

I didn't go round the side of the house. I kept to the front and went down the hill in the middle of the road, where I could see. At the bottom I could hear the harbour, halyards banging on the masts, the slap of the water against the concrete of the fuel dock. The tide had been out most of the evening. Now it was sound on the wrong side of quiet, the pull turning. I know that sound. I've stood on enough cliffs at slack water. It's a small hesitation, and then everything starts coming back.

The wind was behind me. It pushed on my shoulders the whole way along the harbour road and out past the last of the sheds, and I let it. Past the cottage I'd rented I didn't look at the back window. Past the sheds the road went to gravel and the gravel to the causeway, a dark ridge of stone with the sea sucking at both sides, and at the far end of it the skerry, low and long, with no lamp on it at all.

I had the key in my fist by then. I don't remember taking it out.

The causeway was already going under. Where it dipped in the middle, the water ran across it in a smooth sheet, ankle deep, moving the wrong way for anyone who'd been watching the tide go out all evening. I kept walking. The stone was slick and I felt for each step with the toe of my boot.

Past the dip there was no more causeway to speak of, just the skerry's landward shelf with the sea coming over it. I stepped off into knee-deep water and the cold went through my trousers in one go. I know what cold water does. The gasp comes first, and you can't stop it, so you get your mouth shut and breathe through your nose. I did that. Sleet blew in sideways and some got in anyway. It tasted of salt and nothing else.

Thigh-deep. Then the tide pushed at my hips and I had to lean into it, and my fist with the key in it stayed up out of the water without my telling it to. I could see the skerry now, low and black. The seals were on it. Forty or more, I didn't count. They lay in rows with their heads up, and not one of them made a sound, and not one of them looked at me. They were looking past me, back up the harbour road at the dark houses.

The big one lay at the end of the rock where the water was already lapping at it. Up close it was worse than through the binoculars. It was long, longer than any gray seal I've ever put a tape on, and the skin was that same waxy white, with nothing on it, no scars, no scratches from a life on rock. The sleet didn't seem to settle on it. Its face was turned to me. Broad, flat across the brow, with the eyes set too far forward. Dark wet eyes, and they were looking at me.

The water reached my waist. I stopped because I couldn't feel my legs well enough to go on.

"Tomas," it said. "Good. You came."

It was Einar. Warm, easy weight on the first word, the lift at the end. The mouth didn't move right for the sound. It was just open a little, and the voice came out of the space behind it. I'd heard that voice on a dock twice, talking about tides, and I had never in my life been so glad to hear anything and so sure I shouldn't be.

"I've been out here so long," Einar's voice said. "It's cold, Tomas. I only need someone to say it's all right. That I'm welcome. You don't have to do anything else. Just say I'm welcome."

I noticed my chest going in and out slowly, with its flank. I broke it. Took a short hard breath, then another, ugly ones, and felt the rhythm come apart.

"Say it," it said. "Please."

"Einar's dead," I said.

My voice came out small over the water. The thing went very still. The seals didn't move.

"Einar's dead," I said again, louder. That one was for Halla. She'd set a plate every day for a year so nobody would have to say it. She'd poured coffee at a chair and let it go cold and skin over. I said it for her, at the height of my voice, so it would carry back up the hill whether she wanted it or not.

The thing's mouth opened wider. "Tomas."

"Einar's dead, Baldur." I was talking to the sleet and the dark, to a man asleep in a spare room who cried out a name and couldn't say it when he was awake. My throat hurt. "He's gone. He went off the boat a year ago. You're allowed."

The third one I said to the kitchen. To the fourth chair, pulled in square, and the folded napkin. "Einar's dead," I said. "Nobody's sitting there. Nobody's coming in."

It screamed.

It wasn't one sound. It was Einar, and Halla, in that tidy formal pitch, and a big rough old man's voice I didn't know, and Baldur, twenty years younger, shouting Baddi, Baddi, and mine, my own voice, saying good, you came in my own mouth. All at once and none of them stopping for breath. The seals broke. I heard them go, a heavy slither and splash all along the rock, and the water around me churned with them.

It came off the rock at me. I didn't see it move. Something closed on my chest, two hands, wide and flat, and the cold in them wasn't water cold. Water cold I knew. This went in and stayed. It bore down and my boots left the bottom, and the tide came up over my shoulders and my chin and my mouth, and then I was under.

Black. Salt in my nose. I kicked and hit nothing. The hands pressed and pressed, and above me, through the water, I could still hear the voices, thin and bent, all still going. My chest burned. The reflex I'd been holding off for a minute wanted to open my mouth and breathe. I got my free hand up and shoved at an arm and it was like shoving a wall.

The other hand was still shut. I'd forgotten. The key was so cold I couldn't feel it, but I could feel the bit of it that stuck out between my fingers, the old black bit, and I knew where the face had to be. Right above me. Close.

I stopped pushing at the arm. I brought the fist down and around and up, and drove the key into the eye.

It went in with almost no resistance. Something gave. The scream changed pitch, came through the water as a shudder, and the hands came off my chest.

I came up because the tide shoved me up. My knee hit the shelf rock, and I coughed out what felt like half the bay and lay there on my stomach in a foot of moving water. No hands on me. No voices either. The sleet was still coming down, and that was the only sound.

I got myself into the lee of the skerry and stayed on my hands and knees. I couldn't feel my fingers. I was shivering hard, and I knew from work that shivering was the good sign. It's when people go quiet and calm that you worry. The key was gone. I'd left it in the eye and I wasn't going to ask for it back.

The light came slowly, gray and then a little less gray. The tide had dropped off the causeway again by then, and the stone lay black and streaming all the way to the harbour road.

It was on the rock about ten meters from me, on its side. The pale skin had gone the yellow-gray of old tallow. One eye was a dark hole with a smear around it. I watched the flank for a long time. It didn't rise. I noticed my own breathing, ragged and mine, and nothing was matching it.

Then it moved. It didn't lift its head or look at me. It dragged itself down the rock with its front flippers, slowly, leaving a wet track, and slid into the channel with hardly a sound. A ring went out on the water. I watched until the ring was gone and the surface was flat, and I kept watching a good while after that. Nothing came back up.

I crawled the causeway. I tried standing twice and my legs folded both times. The stone was gritty under my palms and I left skin on some of it. Gulls were already working the weed along the edges. It took me maybe forty minutes to do what I'd walked in five.

The village was awake in the ordinary way. A pickup idled at the fuel dock and a man in orange oilskins looked at me and then very carefully didn't. I went up the hill holding onto fences. The front door of the house was unbolted and the chain hung off its nail where I'd hung it. I pushed it open and went in without knocking.

Halla was at the kitchen table in her cardigan, buttoned to the throat. Baldur stood at the counter with his back against it. The table was set for two. The fourth chair had been pulled out and turned a little sideways, and there was no plate in front of it and no napkin. There was no cup either.

She was crying. She wasn't loud about it. The tears just ran down the lines in her face and she let them. I stood in the hall dripping onto her floor, and she turned her pale eyes on me and looked at me for as long as she'd ever looked at anyone.

"Einar," she said.

Her voice cracked on the second half of it. She said it again, slower, and then a third time, and put both hands flat on the tablecloth. "My Einar," she said. "Oh, my boy."

Nobody stopped her. Baldur made a noise in his throat and turned toward the window.

I said, "I'm sorry," which was the wrong thing, or not enough. Halla shook her head at me. She wasn't refusing it. She just didn't want it. Baldur pulled the wool blanket off the back of the sofa and held it out to me at arm's length, with his eyes on the floor between us. I took it. His hand was shaking.

"You heard it up here," I said.

"All of it," Halla said. "From my bed."

Baldur spoke then, to the window and not to me. "You said it first. You went out there and you said it."

"Baldur."

"Don't." He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. "I know why. I know. Don't."

That was all he said. He put a cup of coffee in front of me and went out through the back hall, and I heard him on the stairs, the outer edges of the treads, the way I'd gone down the night before. Halla reached over and squeezed my wrist once, hard, and let go. I drank the coffee. Nobody else said anything, and it was a different quiet from the one I'd eaten in for two days.

I slept in the cottage on the harbour road for eleven hours. When I woke the tin roof was ticking in the afternoon sun and the bathroom window was clear glass. There were no scales on the floor.

Baldur didn't come down. I saw him twice that week, once across the co-op car park and once at the top of the hill with a bag of groceries. Both times he saw me first and found something else to look at. I lifted a hand the second time. He nodded at the road. I've thought since that he'd have forgiven anyone else, and that it was because I was the one he'd asked to come that he couldn't. I don't hold it against him. I'd have asked the same of me.

Halla sent soup down with a boy from two doors along. The pot came with a folded napkin tied around the lid.

The seals came back on the fifth day. I saw them from the back window at low tide, a few dozen hauling out on the black rocks in the ordinary way, barking and shoving and rolling on their sides. They faced the sea, all of them, with their backs to the cottage, and the bull at the end of the rock scratched his neck with a flipper. I stood there with my tea until it went cold.

I wrote to the institute and said I'd need to extend the survey. They didn't ask why. I kept the cottage. I've got my clicker and the binoculars on the windowsill, and at every low tide I stand at the back window and count them, left to right in blocks of ten, the way I always have.

I write the number in the notebook, and I check it against the day before. Every time, there's one more.