“I can’t swim,” he said quietly.
“You can’t swim?” I said, realizing immediately it was a stupid thing to say. “Well, you can learn in no time here,” I said, quickly making amends. “I can teach you.”
The sea had darkened in the last hour. It lay there in front of us, deep blue and still. The smooth rock was aglow in the light of the descending sun. The wind had died down completely.
I could hardly believe they were dead. All three?
What could have happened?
Jesper was alive. I had to call him. But he’d be in custody if they thought it was him?
Was he crying?
“Hey, Viktor, what’s the matter?” I said, and sat down next to him.
“I don’t like it here,” he said. “And I hate you.”
“OK,” I said. “Hate’s a very strong word. What have I done to make you hate me?
He got up and walked away.
I let him go, not even looking to see where he went.
What had she done to the boy? Calling me an alcoholic and turning him against me. He’d be grown up before he understood who I really was. Telling him was no use. Don’t believe what your mother says. I’m not an alcoholic. I’m actually quite a decent person.
But there was more wrong with him than Camilla could be blamed for.
The family had continued their walk, passing along the shore below me now, no more than twenty meters away. It felt like an intrusion, they were well inside my personal space, and I got to my feet and went back inside. Viktor was lying on the sofa. I tipped a bag of crisps into a bowl, opened another bottle of soft drink, and put both things on a tray along with a dessert bowl and a spoon, a carton of chocolate pudding and another of vanilla sauce, and carried the whole lot into the living room.
“I’ll put this here on the table for you, in case you feel like it,” I said, then went outside again, lit up a smoke and sat down in the chair with my feet up on the rail. I called Jesper’s number from my contacts, only to get through to a generic voicemail saying the person at that number couldn’t be reached at the moment.
What could have happened?
It couldn’t have been coincidence. They were too preoccupied with violence for it to be that, filling their lives with all its symbols.
Could it have been one of the other bands?
I typed him a text.
I’m hearing all hell’s broken loose and you’re in trouble. Call me if you need help or want to talk with someone unconnected / Skallgrim
I sat and looked at it for a moment, deleted Skallgrim and put Egil instead, then sent it. Skallgrim was their name for me—because of Egill Skallagrímsson, of course, from the Viking sagas—but using it myself made it look like I identified with them, which I certainly didn’t. I’d found them interesting, yes. Had even been rather fascinated by them, for a while. But my interest and fascination was precisely down to my not being able to identify with them. I couldn’t understand them, and it was impossible for me to see how I could ever have become like them if I’d run into their kind when I’d been twenty. They were naive, their symbols and posturing nothing but an act, all about bigging themselves up—but still it had led them, consciously or not, into something else more dangerous, and infinitely more radical. The devil the satanist scene worshipped stood for the transgression of every law and rule, every notion of human kindness and solidarity; it was an egotism so great it could easily have driven them to kill another person and remain unmoved by it. As one adherent had said: a person dies every second, so why make a fuss about a single murder? He was in prison now for killing a random man in a park, a crime he probably would have got away with if he hadn’t boasted about it.
After spending a few weeks with them, I’d understood with dismay that in their eyes what they were doing was all about freedom. And that to them freedom and violence belonged together. Death was something they asserted and cultivated, believing, so I realized, that a person could only be free when death, whether one’s own or someone else’s, was no longer something to be feared and avoided. At that point, compassion for others came to an end, and such ruthlessness was of course freedom’s fundamental condition.
Nietzsche and Bataille were the philosophers of freedom, and ruthlessness was alien to neither, but their thoughts were only thoughts, their words only words. Bataille, and other members of the secret society that went by the name of Acéphale, had toyed with the idea of human sacrifice by decapitation, even going so far as to select a victim, though falling short of actually carrying it out. Kvitekrist, however, and the circles in which they moved, translated such ideas into action and made them real, presumably with little knowledge of either Nietzsche or Bataille, though the most charismatic scene members, Skjalg, or Heksa, had read Zarathustra, or at least claimed to have done. That was what made me get in touch with them.
Two of those I’d interviewed, and whose lives I had followed to a certain extent, committed suicide, one during my months of filming them, the other a year later. The whole thing was so toxic that eventually I pulled out, archiving the footage and dropping the project, whose working title had been The Devil in the Valley, for good.
I decided that as soon as Viktor had gone to bed, I was going to dig out the material and see what I’d got. I’d no idea how many hours of footage there was, but nothing had been edited. Some of it I’d never even seen.
Or maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, I thought a second later, reaching for my cigarettes. Maybe I’d just leave it alone. Three were dead now. And there was nothing anyone could do about it.
Far away in the east, it looked like the sky was darkening, more black than blue, rising up like a wall above the sea. It was hardly surprising with the temperatures we’d been having, I thought, and lifted the Bible onto my lap, proceeding to flick through the Gospels to see if I could find the passage where it said Jesus was the Morning Star, but it was hopeless as long as I didn’t have the slightest idea where to look, and so I put it down again, took a deep drag on my cigarette and gazed toward the sea.
The tourist family had appropriated my space, the grown-ups sitting on the rocky outcrop, the two kids swimming silently in the pool below. A gull cried piercingly, its horrid noise emitting into the open and immediately dissolving. I sensed the stillness that remained, the stillness of evening, leaned back in my chair and closed my eyes.
* * *
—
I awoke in the twilight.
A strange noise came from the woods behind the house. A throaty, clicking kind of noise.
kalikalikalikalik
Immediately, there was a response from farther away.
kalikalikalikalik
What could it be?
An animal of some sort, but what? I thought, getting to my feet. Only then did I see the campfire that was burning down at the shore, its flames bright and distinct in the gloaming.
A bird?
Herons made a prehistoric sound. But this wasn’t a heron.
I went inside. Viktor was asleep on the sofa, lying on his back with his mouth open, his eyes partially so, enough for me to see the whites.
Bless him.
I lifted him up and carried him into his room. His head lolled back, and he opened his eyes. They looked completely vacant, as if his soul had left him.
“Just putting you to bed,” I said.
“Mmm,” he said. “Mmmm.”
Once under the covers, he curled up in the fetal position. I couldn’t tell if he was asleep or not.
“Goodnight, little man,” I said, stepping back out and leaving the door open in case he woke up and panicked when he didn’t know where he was.
I opened a bottle of Delamain and poured myself a glass, drinking it standing on the veranda. I knew nothing better. A couple of drops on the tongue were enough for the magnificent taste to well in the mouth, and yet it w
as such a thin liquid. I ordered six bottles at a time from the state liquor store twice a year, ever since tasting it with my father some years previously.
The air was still warm, though moister now, almost steaming in the dusk.
Whatever kind of animal it was, it was quiet now.
My body was stiff after having slept for so long in the chair. I felt a bit of a chill, too, despite the warmth.
I went into the bedroom and took off my shirt, wiped the sweat away with a towel, put on a clean shirt, lightweight cotton, and a pair of white socks, then sat down on the stool in front of the sliding door while I tied the laces of my running shoes. After that, I looked in on Viktor to see if he was asleep. He was, well away by the looks of it.
I went outside, down onto the rock, though staying above the path for a while so as to avoid the tourist family from the boat.
A band of rose-colored light edged the horizon behind me, enough to still bring out the colors of the landscape, albeit only just: the dianthus were more gray than pink, the grass that grew in all the little hollows more ashen than yellow, but the rock itself was a tawny hue, and the sea below still blue.
It felt good to walk. And it was good to see the light slowly being absorbed from the ground by the hazy veil of darkness that so quickly grew dense in these last days of August.
If I was quick about it, I’d be able to find the tree while there was still enough light. I went up the stony beach toward the woods behind, where there was a small clearing perhaps a hundred meters in. Wasn’t there a little stream there too?
Yes, there was.
Lightning flashed in the black sky above the horizon. The thunder that followed sounded distant and faint. How strange that the sky in the west could be so bright and clear, while in the east it was thick with thunder-clouds.
It would be an hour, at least, before the rain came.
I hurried over the stones, cutting toward the woods along a path that ran between bushes of sloe and rose hip whose tops were like barbed-wire fences, entering then among the trees, which at first were no taller than me, though as I walked on they began to strive toward the sky, until the tallest rose up, ten and twenty meters, like watchtowers in every quarter.
The first part of the woods extended some two hundred meters before being traversed by the road; beyond the road were some open fields, and then the trees stretched away once more. There was a big pond in there, where as a boy I’d swum, but its water was so thick with algae now one could almost walk on it.
I followed a gravel track that ran through the fields, then a path that went up the hill into the woods on the other side. The darkness was falling faster than I’d anticipated, and I began to regret having come so far. But I liked there being a point to my walks. The clearing I was aiming for wouldn’t take more than a few minutes to reach, and Viktor had been so fast asleep he wasn’t likely to wake until morning.
Something rustled in the undergrowth close by.
For some obscure reason, the thought came into my head that it was a dead person unable to find rest.
But the dead were hardly likely to make a sound, I told myself, and smiled at the thought.
I’d only just written about a dead person I’d seen, so it wasn’t so strange that the thought had occurred to me like that. It had been lingering in my subconscious. But it was something I’d seen only once, and I wasn’t sure if what I’d seen had been real or not, whether it had been something inside me or something external. What’s more, I’d never know, I told myself, and just then I saw something move across the path in front of me.
I halted, standing quite still for a moment as I stared, but whatever it was had disappeared into the undergrowth.
A snake, most likely, I thought, and stamped my feet down hard as I went on, making sure it would know I was there. It had been moving away from me, but it was when they were surprised that they attacked. If it was an adder, of course. But it could have been a grass snake.
I hadn’t seen a snake since the spring, when I’d come across a number of them coiled up in the sun on the warm stones at the beach, as yet cold and sluggish from the winter.
Again, something moved in front of me. This time I saw it quite clearly as it slithered across the path into the bushes, its flat head slightly raised.
It was an adder.
But two in the same spot at this time of year? Or maybe there were even more?
My fingertips and toes tingled. Rationally, I wasn’t afraid of them; they weren’t dangerous, at least not if you were careful, but there was something about them as creatures that filled me with terror. It was a terror that had existed on earth as long as the snake itself.
Wasn’t it around here somewhere?
Yes, through that little dell there.
I walked on a bit, following the low outcrop of bare rock. After some fifty meters, the woods opened out into a clearing.
Sure enough, a stream ran beyond it on the other side.
And the apple tree was there ahead of me, set apart from the other trees.
I went up to it. Its branches were heavy with fruit. The summer had been good to it, I thought to myself, reaching out and gripping one of its apples, twisting it free and sinking my teeth into it.
Mmmm.
The taste, at once sweet and tart, was exactly as I remembered. A faint suggestion of bitterness that wasn’t there in any shop-bought apple, something unusual, unique.
The old world.
It was my uncle who’d brought me here first. My dad’s younger brother Håkon.
Distant in manner, gruff and stern.
But always good to me. He told me things about my dad that I’d never have known otherwise. It must have amused him, I thought, picking some more apples so that Viktor could taste them too, filling my pockets. And then, as I was about to go back, something moved again in the grass next to me.
Another adder.
It stopped and raised its head, its tongue flicking the air.
It seemed to be looking straight at me. But snakes could barely see a thing.
I stamped my foot hard on the ground, and then again.
It thrust its head forward, the movement transmitting through its body as it wound away toward the trees.
I looked around to see if there were any more. To see so many in such a short space of time was unusual. Were they gathered here to mate? Or perhaps their food was particularly plentiful here?
All was peaceful and still. The grass was gray in the dusk, darker among the trees, the tallest of which stood black against the sky.
I went over to the rock, whose slope was gentle enough for me to scramble up without using my hands.
From behind me came the sound I’d heard earlier.
kalikalikalikalik
I turned and surveyed the clearing. It had come from close by, perhaps from the trees across the grass.
If it was a bird, it was of considerable size.
There were no birds like that in this landscape, not as far as I was aware.
I climbed the hill and was making my way back down the other side when I saw what could only be a fire among the trees, not far from the pond.
There was a band of more open terrain there, sheltered by rock, slanting away toward the pond. I’d been there many times as a child. One summer, I’d found a dead cow there, lying in the stream. I remembered I’d poked a hole in its belly with a stick. The stench had been indescribable.
Unable to imagine anyone camping there anymore, I decided to go over and have a look.
The pond was tranquil, edged with reeds. The banks, which I remembered to be claylike and slippery, were now dry and cracked apart. And yet the memories returned; I recalled features and details of the place moments before my eyes picked them out, much as when I returned to a book I hadn’t read in years and thought I’d forgotten.
&n
bsp; I stopped at the foot of the narrow, open incline. The fire was burning above it, at the fringe of the wood.
I couldn’t see anyone there.
But they had to be close by. Who would leave a fire in the woods in a dry period like this?
I went slowly toward it.
There was no one to be seen.
I came to a halt at the fire, which burned gleefully in the dim late-summer night.
“Hello?” I called out. “Is anyone there?”
Not a sound.
I looked around, peering into the darkness among the trees.
What the hell was that?
Farther in, between the wood and the rock, was a kind of mast.
I’d never seen it before.
“Hello!” I called out again.
Strange.
It stood some fifteen meters tall, sheltered by the steep rock face. At its foot, two wooden ramps had been constructed, the mast itself rising up between them, thin and delicate, made of what looked to be wire mesh.
It wasn’t a radio or telephone mast, but seemed to be completely homemade.
A student project of some kind?
Whoever made it had probably lit the fire.
They could have gone back to their car to fetch something. It wasn’t far to the road.
In fact, I could go back that way, I thought. It would be quicker.
I followed the path into the trees. There was no one else around, and the car park was empty too when I came to the road. Whoever lit the fire must have gone for a walk, somewhere close to the pond, and felt sure the fire wouldn’t get out of hand.
It had been a well-constructed fire.
I went along the road until coming to the fields and the gravel track that led back toward the beach, from where I soon saw the light from the house in the distance, as if suspended in the air.
Reaching the smooth ribbon of rock that rose out of the water along the shore, I went up the slope to the right and followed the fringe of the woods for a bit before heading down again where the terrain flattened out.
The Morning Star Page 45