The first year passed astonishingly quickly, and Elliott was in a state of near-constant bliss. The other critical staff positions filled quickly after Elliott, Pike, and Reza consulted Nik about what sorts of expertise they needed.
After Karl had arrived, he was quickly followed by Gemma Glowacki, the Australian finds manager who had taken an instant liking to him. As a professionally-trained archivist, Gemma was responsible for the physical organization and maintenance of the finds library, as well as documenting and inducting each individual find into the digital archive. Karl and Gemma were natural kindred spirits in fastidiousness and organization. She, Anouk, and Pike’s bourbon were the only things that could coax Karl into more than a few clipped sentences at a time, a challenge she relished.
Elliott and Pike had immediately taken bets on how long it would take them to officially hook up, but they had both been surprised when Gemma instead expressed interest in Pike herself. Elliott had doubled over with laughter when Pike told her this news, still looking shocked.
“Whatever happens between you two, just don’t let this job turn into an episode of the Real World,” Elliott had said with mirth, and then added seriously, “And don’t tell poor Karl, and for heaven’s sake don’t let Swill find out. He’d start marketing the field school as a dating camp.”
William Ainsley, or ’Swill’ as he was secretly called by Pike and Elle, was the outward face of the field school. He was the first point of contact for the public, wrote the press releases, conducted tours for the general public every weekend on a rotating site schedule, and was often employed to visit universities around Europe and Scandinavia to pitch the school.
Will’s hair was always long enough to be best described as ‘moppy’, his smile was too wide and too thin, his suits were too loose, and he was a master of charm and spin. He seemed slimy and somewhat sinister to Elliott, hence the unflattering nickname. Most people, however, were willing to overlook the characteristics that made her uncomfortable in favor of his carefully-refined British accent, which sometimes slipped into a far more charming but clearly far northern brogue when he wasn’t paying strict attention. And most people didn’t have to interact with him regularly, or for prolonged periods like Elliott did.
Anouk and Anders, however, had quickly taken an active dislike to Will. Will was constantly promising outlandish luxury to potential clients, and Anouk and Anders took turns tag-teaming him for it afterwards—Anders sniffing at the deliverability and legality, and Anouk scolding him over costs and practicality. Anouk was the only non-academic on the team—even snake-oil William had a PhD, but in what, Elliott was unsure—but she made up the bulk of the practical knowledge among the team and had become invaluable in every way.
The final position had been the hardest to fill, and one that Elliott had secretly hoped to take over if a suitable candidate wasn’t found. The education director of the field school was the person who would organize the seminar series that brought in guest speakers from all over the world, or organize special events for school kids, or provide academic support for the people using the field school. They would also be in charge of running the half-day orientation for new campers before they were handed off to either Nik or any of the three site administrators for specific onboarding. It all sounded like a dream to Elliott, although she had no idea how she would ever manage to make time to do it.
Alas, eventually Nik had hired Kjirsten Steen, and gotten even more than he bargained for in the serious, capable, sardonic woman. Part absent-minded librarian, part steel-willed IT nerd, she installed and instituted the lending library and computer lab, which she ran on her own. She also worked remotely for the Göteborg library system, using the vast trove of worldwide online resources to supplement the field school’s resources. She had the technical background to act as Karl’s assistant and often helped him with sample processing and analysis.
Kjirsten and Karl had known each other at the University of Göteborg and she considered him a friend, despite his obvious reluctance, which Elliott found very funny. She also found it very funny that Kjirsten refused to converse with Karl in Swedish, even though it was their native language. They were a multi-lingual and multi-national operation, and Elliott often wondered at the unfairness of running something like this exclusively in English. She once made the mistake of mentioning this to Nik, who had laughed at her and said, “Learn another language, then!” and she couldn’t tell how serious he was.
Altogether, they got along well and enjoyed their work. Karl, Kjirsten, and Gemma ran the main building like a university department. Pike, Elliott, and Reza spent their days in the field. Anders and Will sat in their offices and made phone calls and sent emails and filled out paperwork. Anouk watched over them all with a stern scowl. Nik did all the mysterious things that Nik did.
They settled in to their routines and got to know each others’ habits and quirks and mostly seemed content with the success they had found in Nik’s unusual arrangement. Elliott had found her feet as a field school instructor and discovered that she loved teaching almost as passionately as she hated diving.
Diving was mercifully limited to the weekends, but with teaching during the week, writing and prepping every night, she had almost no work-life balance to speak of. Her brief periods of respite came on the rare occasions that the severe Öland weather confined them all to their homes, or in the quiet periods between field schools and whenever she could manage it, Elliott scheduled a day or two away from the compound to rest and unwind. Lately, though, she found that Nik was preemptively claiming her free time far in advance, sending her to various functions in Stockholm with Anders and Swill, or Pike and Gemma.
These events were usually tedious, and she found she spent most of the time talking about Nik, rather than the project. People were simply fascinated by him. Those who had met him always had a story about him, and those who hadn’t met him had even more stories. In the early days of the project Elliott had enjoyed the status that she gained among her peers simply by being associated with him. After a year, though, these weekends were no longer her idea of ‘time off’, but the stories were still entertaining.
Someone would always start with an anecdote that might have been partly true, but it would always devolve from there.
“Once, in the Congo, he was mistaken for a French mercenary. By the time the Swedish consulate could intervene, they found him at some hole-in-the-wall bar. Nik had gotten all the Congolese police officers heartily drunk and learned a few phrases in Lingala that had them all roaring with laughter.”
“Oh I can totally see the French mercenary thing, but getting drunk with cops?” the other person would shake their head admiringly. “He already speaks like 30 languages, right Elliott?”
“I heard that one time, on a dig in the Dead Sea, I think it was that Byzantine barge, right Elliott? Anyway, he found an Israeli sea mine. I know, and he managed to disable it. But apparently he’d also dislodged it, so there was a national emergency when it washed up on the shore later that week.”
“Oh come on, disabling sea mines? He’s not James Bond, he’s an archaeologist, right Elliott?”
And then she would either confirm or deny whatever outlandish tales reached her, and usually supply one of her own, “He once told me that he knows at least a dozen people in every single country and territory in the world. I challenged him with a few countries, and he gave me first and last names, and even what they looked like. He remembers everything.”
“I’d believe that,” the person would say, “I heard that one time….” and it would continue this way for a long time.
Nik didn’t just meet people, he became an episode in their lives, an unforgettable moment that they looked back on later with awe. His charisma was electric, and he had a way of focusing on you that made you feel like the most interesting and important person he’d ever met.
Still, despite the irritation, visits to the Swedish mainland did have their advantages. The modernist hotels with their saunas and no-nonsense approach to comfort were a major draw. She and Gemma or Pike would suffer through another weekend of maddeningly disorganized conference talks, followed by the real attractions: the cocktail hours and after-parties.
Elliott did enjoy the museums, the events, the nightlife, the chance to put on a dress and interact with people without being covered in dirt, sweat, or salt water. Sometimes she even ventured out on a date with one of the numerous other post-docs or archiving types that her few friends were constantly trying to set her up with. She was a natural flirt and could navigate such awkward encounters with ease when it suited her, but she found the whole procedure of dating exhausting.
Pike, on the other hand, would simply hook up with whoever seemed to fancy her at the events, even once ‘comforting’ the bereaved at a memorial plenary, which Elliott never let her forget. Pike was unassailably discreet, but Elliott preferred to avoid unspeakable sexual encounters with potential future colleagues.
Usually Elliott preferred to stay on Öland alone and explore a new part of the island; there were plenty of places to get lost. The compound where she lived and worked was on the southern end, so she preferred to head north for her getaways. Her favorite place to stay was in Borgholm, just near the bridge to the Swedish mainland. The quaint cafes, quiet tourist vibe, and endlessly fascinating history drew her in and took her mind away from her job for a few blissful moments each day.
Like most Americans, she’d been surprised to learn that Sweden still had a royal family, and that this royal family maintained a summer residence in Borgholm. This was the Princess whose birthday Nik had been talking about a thousand years ago when he’d sent her home for the holidays. Their royal palace in Borgholm was an angular Italian-style vision in white, combining a beautiful facade with obvious durability. It was nestled in a magnificent garden, full of quirky statuary and scenic views. The grounds were always open to visitors, but on special occasions like Midsummer, it played host to spectacular events that Elliott and her colleagues had begun to really look forward to.
Still, the royal palace was only the second-most famous landmark on the island. Most people came to Öland to explore the Stora Alvaret, which had finally begun to grow on Elliott somewhat after her parents had come to visit that autumn. Seeing the strange, nearly alien landscape formed by the exposed limestone shelf through their eyes had relaxed her inexplicable panic somewhat.
Limestone can be a hard rock, but is famously porous and degrades quickly when exposed to the acids and heavy metals present naturally in rainwater. For this reason, the Stora Alvaret is covered in a thin layer of tenacious grasses, as no trees can take root there. The ground is scored by thick lines where the rocks have shuddered and cleaved apart from centuries of expanding and contracting under the intense Swedish temperature changes. Certain grasses take root in these lines, and their wildflower blooms in spring and summer give the flat, expansive landscape the look of a painting.
The colorful squares and lines made Elliott think of Mondrian or Rothko, so she had been surprised when her mother had surveyed the windswept expanse and wondered aloud why none of the famous impressionist painters had ever explored Sweden. Her usually banal mother seemed to be getting more romantic as she aged. And so Elliott had stifled a snort of cynicism and suppressed her sarcastic comment about the Swedish winters. For 8 months of the year, her hands were so cold that she could barely type; she couldn’t imagine trying to hold a paintbrush. Winter seemed to be Öland’s natural state, promised in the smell of every northern wind, ominously resting in the shade of every cellar or dark glen.
Still, as interesting as the Stora Alvaret was, Elliott limited her visits to nighttime searches for the Northern Lights. During the day, the exposure of the open landscape still made her feel vaguely uneasy, and she found that her eyes were constantly being drawn furtively to the sea.
Her parents’ unhurried visit that crisp autumn had been surprisingly refreshing for her. Tom and Inga had insisted on hosting them at the bed and breakfast, and the four of them had formed an immediate bond. Elliott was having a difficult time juggling her responsibilities at the compound with her familial obligations, but Tom and Inga saw to it that the Morgan-Wests were comfortable and entertained every day.
Somehow both her parents had contrived to take a sabbatical in the same semester, so they were largely without an agenda, and acted almost like honeymooners. Elliott had never seen them so happy. She joined them every night for dinner in the spacious den and stayed over as often as she could get away with it. The bay windows of the den were thickly and professionally insulated against the weather, and the warm fireplace made it the perfect place to relax any time of the year.
The best part, however, were Tom and Inga themselves. Tom was a salt-blooded New Englander just like Elliott’s father. Unlike Elliott’s father, however, Tom had spent more of his wild life traversing the sea than land. Inga was the towering daughter of generations of Swedish fishwives; she was the ancient coastline that hemmed in Tom’s temperamental sea.
Elliott had never met two people who understood and loved each other, nor argued as keenly and hotly as these two. It was fascinating to watch them begin a story together, disagree sharply over a point, argue it out, decide who was right, and then continue without malice. And they had many stories to tell. Fearless Inga had volunteered all over the world and been arrested and deported by more world governments than most people have had traffic fines. She was passionately knowledgable about most of the issues threatening the world’s oceans, and never shrank from her convictions. Tom clung to her strength like a drowning man, encouraging and supporting all of her adventures.
When Elliott’s parents visited, she learned that Tom and Inga had given up their nomadic life in the late 80s and decided to finally settle down in one place because Inga had been diagnosed with cervical cancer. She was ready to face death, but she had planned to fight like hell, and wanted to do it on familiar territory. Tom bought a farmhouse that faced the sea and had thrown all his energy into renovating it into what was now a beautiful home and business. Whether from the early diagnosis, aggressive treatment, the power of home, or just her own tenacious will, Inga survived her cancer. The sickness had taken its toll on her energy, however, and she was content to stay permanently on Öland.
Elliott and her family listened to these stories night after night for nearly a month.
After one such evening, Elliott lay in the small bed at the end of their guest hall wing trying to calm herself down. There were 5 guest rooms above the wide lounge, and Elliott could feel the heat from the central hearth through the floors, even after the fire had begun to die. She had stayed up a little bit longer to finish a little bit of work after the others had headed off to their own warm rooms. As it was a weeknight nearing the off-season, she and her parents were the only guests.
It was a dark night, and the soft glow of the fire reflected back on the windows, obscuring her view of the sea. As she finished her last emails and moved to tidy up the dinner things and wine glasses, she began to feel unnerved by the quiet and her relative visibility to the outside. Öland didn’t often make her nervous, but she couldn’t help feeling just as exposed in this warm, safe room as she was out on the Stora Alvaret.
It reminded her of being on a stage. Her eyes were continually drawn to small movements just outside the range of her vision through the fire-obscured windows.
The back of her neck began to feel hot, and she scurried up to her room and locked the door.
After a while, she sighed and stood up. It was pointless to be afraid of her own imagination. She turned the lights out in her room and then carefully made her way to the window above her bed. The view from her room was almost identical to the view from the lounge, just higher up. Thin moonlight filtered through low, thick clouds and she scanned the beach and the dark forests on either side of the farmhouse. A light breeze was blowing the tips of the trees and waves were gently lapping at the shore down the hill from the building.
Apart from the temperature, which she knew must be nearly freezing, it was another picturesque night on Öland. She stood a long time at the window, wondering why she had been so nervous. She had almost convinced herself that she’d been being foolish when one of the tree trunks at the edge of the forest separated itself from the others and moved deeper into the woods.
Elliott’s heart rose to her throat and she strained to make out more details in the dark but there was nothing more to see. Quietly, so carefully, she unlocked her door and started down the stairs. Breathing deeply and slowly, she made a careful, silent survey of all the doors and windows on the ground floor, ensuring they were all locked. She knew the building well, but every small noise echoed in her ears and even the silence seemed too large and too loud. She could not bring herself to enter the cellar and check the small windows there, and instead contented herself that the door was locked tightly from her side.
Satisfied with the impregnability of the first floor, she climbed the stairs and checked whatever windows she could access on the second floor. Finally, she went back into her own room and locked the door, seeking refuge from the fears of the night under a thick, warm blanket.
Outside, the dark figure watched Elliott’s progress through the house with quiet satisfaction. She’d looked straight at him when she was tidying earlier, and he’d been so surprised that he wasn’t sure what to do. Then he realized from her narrow focus that she couldn’t see past her own reflection and his secret was safe. Whatever innate sense human beings have that tells them when they’re being watched, Elliott had it in spades. He was impressed at her knack.
He’d had plans for Elliott, but she was just so hard to keep track of sometimes that it made him unsure. Everyone else could be found in their predictable locations within the compound, but she seemed determined to maintain other relationships on the island and it complicated things for him. She was difficult to isolate, and he wasn’t sure if it was worth the trouble. Her friends were much more suggestible. Perhaps he could afford to leave Elliott alone. Perhaps Pike would prove an even better replacement.
He stood silently in the chilly darkness, a scarf tied thickly over his face to hide the fog of his breath, watching Elliott looking for him from her upper window. Her gaze was focused elsewhere and he took this opportunity to move further into he woods. Her head shot around in his direction and he saw her mouth open slightly and her eyes widen, searching. Again he was impressed.
He stood still and waited for her next move. Would she alert the sleeping couple who owned the large home, or their guests? He doubted it. Would she slip outside to confront him head on? He doubted that even more.
Her shape appeared outlined against a window on the ground floor and he watched with approval as she moved methodically through the house, checking the doors and windows. While she was distracted in her task, he moved further into the trees and slipped silently away.
As he walked, he thought about her. She was rational and careful, and not given to believing anything that she could not see with her own eyes. For his plan to work, she would have to be taken in wholly.
He didn’t think it would work.
His thoughts turned again to Pike, and his lips curled upwards under his scarf. She was also brilliant and rational, but underneath her boisterous, self-assured exterior, he knew she was hungry to be loved, to feel special, to belong in ways that Elliott was not. He decided to go check in on her next, knowing exactly where she would be tonight. He was perhaps the only person who knew that Gemma and Pike had begun a physical relationship after months of tiptoeing around the possibility. Pike would be in her cottage, and Gemma with her.
He had taken a long, winding path through the woods in order to avoid being seen and arrived in the dark glen behind Pike’s cottage after midnight. The night was still young for the two lovers, and they were enveloped in each others’ embrace as he had expected. Everyone was always where he expected them to be, doing what he expected them to do except Elliott. Why couldn’t she be as easy as the others?
Despite his desire for her, he ruled her out for the moment. Pike would be just as powerful a player in his scheme, but he had to approach her very carefully to avoid frightening her into retreating into her own cynicism. He’d already snared Anders and Karl easily enough. But women were a stronger, more delicious morsel to satisfy his hunger and more worth the thrill of the chase.
He would begin with Gemma. Gemma was young and easily led and he’d captured women of her sort before and knew that she wouldn’t present a problem. Perhaps he could even use Gemma to lure Pike into his trap.
He smiled at that thought and watched the writhing couple for only a few moments longer, and then turned back toward the darkness of the woods and his schemes.