Season of the Witch Read Online Free PDF Page B

if a light had been switched off. The little village by the sea huddled in the freezing whiteness, threatened by the snow-laden mountain slopes above. Paths had been trodden in the snow between buildings, and I saw the occasional person out and about. At the hotel, I was the only guest.
    Now, as then, Hotel Reydargerdi reminds me strongly of a 1960s school building. But the array of national flags on flagpoles at the entrance, which limply drooped on my last visit, now flutter proudly.
    The old concrete building that houses the municipal offices, across the main road from the hotel, and the plain boxy structure where Ásgrímur Pétursson runs his business, have both had a facelift: a paint job and repairs. The place is humming with life: cars, heavy machinery. Meaning: money. So this is what an Icelandic hamlet in the back of beyond, with a population numbering in the hundreds, looks like after an Extreme Makeover.
    It’s nearly one o’clock. “Since when do a journalist and a photographer get sent on a five-hour drive across moor and mountain just to cover a drunken weekend brawl?” I ask Jóa when I have squeezed the car into the hotel’s packed parking lot.
    “Since yesterday,” she replies.
    “And the only difference,” I continue, “between this weekend brawl and the ones that have taken place in Iceland every weekend for decades, or maybe centuries, is that this time the fighting is between groups who speak different languages or have skins of different colors or eyes that look different. What the hell is happening?”
    “I think your argument may be a tiny bit contradictory, dear boy,” says Jóa as she steps out of the car toting her camera bag and adjusting her dirty-blond ponytail.
    I turn the engine off and open my door. “Surely that comes as no surprise?” I ask with an injured look. “I can’t keep up with all the contradictions that are constantly being forced upon me. And there were enough of them to begin with.”
    Reydargerdi Police Station occupies one end of the ground floor of the municipal offices. Access is from the far end. The “station” apparently comprises a shabby reception desk and two offices. Somewhere beyond them, I suppose there must be some cells. After all, what’s a police station without cells?
    The beautification of the village has not yet reached in here. Gray paint is peeling off the walls, which are cracked and dented, as if they might have been kicked by a horse. Nor, apparently, has it had any effect on Chief of Police Höskuldur Pétursson, who offers us a seat in an office that’s about twice the size of my little closet in Akureyri. Höskuldur is a squat man in his late fifties, with bristling gray hair and a general grayness about him. Below his heavy-lidded eyes are deeply marked circles, dark as bruises against his square, good-humored countenance. There’s something familiar about that face.
    I start my tape recorder.
    “Well, yes, it’s been quite a difficult weekend,” he sighs, “but nothing to make a big fuss about. Just people out having fun, really.”
    “Where was this?”
    “At the new bar, Reydin, just down the road here.”
    I restrain myself from making a silly remark about Rage at Reydin. But it will do for a headline.
    “So the village has a bar now?”
    Höskuldur becomes animated: “Oh, yes, indeed. And another one’s due to open soon. The hotel simply can’t cope with all the new customers who are coming in.”
    “Well, that’s excellent news,” I comment. “But how did this ‘fun’ start, if that’s what you call the fight?”
    “Well, it’s never easy to say how these things start. It’s easier to say how they end. They end up here. With us.” His chuckle is strained.
    “So who was fighting?”
    “That’s not easy to say either. When you have a free-for-all, it’s not easy to say who’s fighting and who’s not.”
    There’s a lot here that’s not easy to say.
    “Were they locals?”
    Höskuldur shrugs his