Chapter 4
The Man Who
Taught Me Poison
Elara
The newsroom empties before sunset, though sunset doesn’t mean much here.
The sky has been bruised the same shade for days. The lights inside hum too loud, the coffee burns, and the cursor blinks like a heartbeat I can’t control.
I stare at the open draft on my screen.
A local fisherman was found dead on Grímsey Dock. Authorities suspect chemical interference. Police have yet to confirm connections to previous incidents.
The words feel lifeless, obedient. They say nothing about the cold bite in that warehouse, or the way the sea held its breath while we stood there.
I delete the last sentence and type another.
Some ghosts prefer to breathe through other people’s lungs.
Too much. I backspace again.
Sigrun packs her notes, glances at me. “You’ll stay until the lights die, won’t you?”
“Probably.”
She sighs but smiles, the tired kind that means affection disguised as annoyance.
“Go home soon, Elara. The world won’t end if you sleep.”
I watch her leave, the door swinging shut behind her, snow curling in from the gap. The office feels like an empty jar—whatever air remains is stale.
I save the file, close the laptop, and tell myself that’s enough truth for one day.
The road to my mother’s house winds along the edge of the fjord. The headlights catch the snowdrifts, the thin fences, the distant blur of fishing boats rocking in the dark. My phone loses signal halfway there. It always does.
Her home glows like an ember in the gray. Smoke curls from the chimney. Through the kitchen window I see her moving, a small shape in a heavy sweater, her hair silver and loose.
When I knock, she opens before I can say anything. “You didn’t wear a hat again.”
“I forgot.”
“You always forget.” She kisses my cheek anyway, cold lips, warm hands. The smell of sugar and cardamom hits me like memory. “Tea’s ready. Cake’s cooling.”
The house hasn’t changed in years. Narrow rooms, shelves lined with glass jars; dried herbs, salt, and sea glass. Everything hums with a quiet kind of order, a life built from small repetitions.
I sit at the kitchen table while she pours the tea. The steam curls between us.
“How’s the paper?” she asks.
“Busy,” I say, cutting a piece of cake. “Someone new came through town.”
Her hands pause around the teapot. “Not that man again.”
“It’s just a case, Mama.”
“You said that last time.”
“I have to write it.”
She studies me with that soft, steady gaze that used to make me confess things. “You look thinner.”
“I’m fine.”
She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “Eat.”
I do. The cake is sweet and heavy, blueberries bleeding into the crumb. The taste drags me back years; to mornings when storms shut the roads, when she baked because she was afraid of silence.
We talk about safer things: the neighbor’s new dog, the power flickering last night, the ferry schedule.
I leave out the details; the rope burn, the chemical scent.
Some truths don’t belong in a kitchen.
After tea I follow her to the small room at the back of the house, the one that used to be mine. The desk still faces the window; the view still opens onto the dark line of pines that fence the fjord. My sketchbook lies there, exactly where I left it.
The paper smells faintly of graphite and pressed leaves. I flip through the pages; ink drawings, clean lines of stems and petals, each labeled in small, neat handwriting. I used to keep my plants here.
Atropa belladonna. Aconitum napellus. Digitalis purpurea.
Poison dressed as grace.
Mama stands in the doorway, arms crossed. “You still draw those awful things.”
“They’re not awful. They’re beautiful.”
“They kill.”
“Only when misunderstood.”
She laughs softly. “Spoken like a journalist.”
“Spoken like your daughter.”
She shakes her head, but there’s pride hiding behind the worry. “At least you draw. It keeps your hands steady.”
I glance down at them; ink-stained, a small nick on the thumb from a scalpel blade I use to sharpen pencils. “Sometimes.”
The pencil moves easily tonight. I add shading to the foxglove sketch, small strokes to darken the bell-shaped blossoms. Used wrong, it stops a heart. Used right, it saves one. That balance always fascinated me—the thin line between cure and catastrophe.
Mama brings another cup of tea and sets it beside me. “You could draw something pleasant, you know. A birch tree. A bird.”
“These are pleasant,” I murmur. “They just have teeth.”
She sighs, but she’s smiling as she leaves.
The house quiets around me. The storm has died completely. Outside, the moon slides through cloud like a blade through cloth.
I keep drawing until the light blurs, until the petals on the page start to look like something breathing.
The longer I sit in that room, the more it feels like the walls remember me.
The air smells faintly of graphite, salt, and old paper; the same scent it had when I was fifteen, when I used to fall asleep at this desk, sketching until dawn.
Mama never cleared the shelves after I moved out.
Books still line the wall, their spines cracked and sun-faded; Nordic Flora, The Language of Poison, The Anatomy of Flowers. Some of them were gifts from my father before he left; others I bought secondhand when I was too young to understand half of what they said.
There’s a small cabinet by the window, glass-paned, still filled with the things I collected like talismans; a fox skull I found near the cliffs, jars of dried thistle and moss, a pressed fern between two panes of glass.
Tiny worlds, preserved. I remember how Mama hated them, how she used to tell me I was keeping pieces of death.
Maybe she was right.
I open one of the jars now, hold it close. The smell of old soil and decay lingers faintly, not unpleasant, just honest. Nature doesn’t lie about what it takes.
The fox skull is light in my hands, almost fragile. The teeth are still sharp, small crescents of white. I used to study them when I was drawing, how they fit together perfectly, how precision exists even in predators.
Back then I wanted to be a scientist. To study toxicology, maybe. But writing offered a softer kind of danger; one that let me observe without touching. I thought that would be safer.
It wasn’t.
On the desk, a photograph leans against the lamp.
It’s old me, maybe five years old, sitting on the dock with my father.
He’s showing me something in his palm, a plant stem or a fishbone, I can’t tell.
The edges of the photo are curled. His face is half in shadow.
He left when I was ten, disappeared into the folds of Reykjavík, another man who couldn’t stand the dark he helped create.
He worked for a specific department in the army; a researcher for a private lab on the coast. He studied human fragility, the mind, and how the body behaves under extreme circumstances.
He was brilliant, magnetic, but brilliance in this country always turns quiet, and quiet men start building their own gods.
At first, he brought home stories. About men with unknown strength. Then he brought home the samples; vials, jars, small bottles labeled with numbers. He said he was studying balance levels, but sometimes, when he thought no one was listening, he’d whisper to the chemicals like they were alive.
Mama used to say the work changed him, but it wasn’t the work. It was the way he started looking at everything like an experiment that could fail.
When I was seven, he showed me a plant pressed flat between glass; Aconitum napellus, monkshood. He told me it was beautiful because it could kill and heal depending on who held it.
He stopped sleeping soon after. He’d go down to the docks at night, watching the water move under the ice. Sometimes he came back smelling of gasoline, other times of salt and blood. Mama stopped asking questions when she realized he’d stopped answering them.
There were rumors later; that his research was being used by people who wanted results, not ethics.
That he’d sold formulas to a private buyer, someone tied to smuggling or chemical trade in the Westfjords.
The company fired him quietly, but no one ever pressed charges.
He walked out with his notebooks and never came home again.
Mama said he left because the guilt ate him. That she’d always expected this outcome, that he’d been playing with fire long before I was born. I think he left because he wanted to see what it felt like to be the poison instead of the cure.
I missed him, I missed him so much I stopped eating. Eventually developing an eating disorder, and every now and then when I miss him a little harder I lose appetite again.
They found him weeks later. Or what was left of him.
A body pulled from the sea near Hafnarfjoreur.
No wallet. No coat. Skin burned in patches that didn’t match fire or frostbite, a face so fucked-up no one could recognize him.
The report said “accidental drowning.” Mama burned the newspaper before I could read the rest. They were able to identify him by his teeth, so they said.
They said the water was clean. I don’t think it was.
Sometimes, when I draw, I think of his hands; how steady they were when he taught me to hold a scalpel, how steady they must have been when he made the thing that killed him.
Sometimes wondering why he chose the path he chose, leaving me and mama behind.
My obsession with the underworld and black market started there.
All things dark, hidden and those who live underneath us.
I tell myself I’m nothing like him. But every time I touch a poisonous flower, every time I sketch its perfect lines, I feel the same pull he must have felt, the one that says look closer. Just like the stories I write, the darker the more intriguing.
The same hunger that asks, what if beauty isn’t harmless at all?
Sometimes I think I inherited the wrong half of him. The quiet half. The part that likes to watch what people do when they think they’re alone.
I close the cabinet and return to the desk.
My mother’s footsteps move softly through the house, the familiar rhythm of tea, dishes, evening prayers murmured under her breath.
She’s a woman built from routine, from kindness.
I used to think she was fragile, but I see it now; her steadiness is armor.
She keeps the world together by pretending it isn’t falling apart.
I used to be good at that too.