I drove the car onto a flat area of rock, fringed by withering heather, where it was easy to turn. Even through the car windows I had heard the muffled crashing of the sea. As I stepped out it was like being met by menacing drums of war, as though nature itself was summoning its warriors to defend itself against the intruder.
I slammed the door hard behind me and stood for a second taking in the view before I moved down towards the smallholding, which consisted of a white farmhouse and a grey, weather-beaten outbuilding, with a small chicken run where White Leghorns were pecking unenthusiastically at the greyish-white shell sand, having long abandoned any hope of finding a grain of gold.
The farmhouse windows were black, framed by white, soulless curtains, and as inviting as disused wells.
As I crossed the yard the nearest chickens looked up, frightened by the sudden movement in the vicinity, but not scared enough to retreat indoors.
I smiled reassuringly at them and followed the grey slate flagstones to the front door of the house.
There was nothing approximating a bell, so I knocked on the door frame at first, then on the door, but I heard no reaction from inside.
I looked at the chickens as if they could tell me where Halldis Heggøy was.
Then I pressed the door to see if it was locked. It wasn’t.
As I slowly pushed it inward I noticed some stains on the slate paving by the door and on the sill. My eyes followed them – like a string of pearls – further into the house.
I crouched down and touched one of the stains with my index finger.
It was still moist, and lifting up my finger I saw it was red.
I held it to my nose and sniffed. It definitely wasn’t paint.
31
I gently pushed the door wide open and ventured through the doorway, which was so low that I had to duck not to hit my head.
Raincoats and a couple of cloaks hung on hooks to the left of the dark, narrow hallway. A ladder staircase rose to an open hatch and a white door led further into the house.
I stopped and listened.
Nothing.
I followed the bloodstains to the white door. I placed my ear to the wall and listened.
Still nothing.
I held the door handle, pressed lightly and pushed.
I felt uneasy.
In my life I had gone into too many houses like this: ones with an ominous, oppressive silence.
I entered a kitchen with cupboards and worktops from the thirties, a Formica table from the early sixties and a refrigerator from the present decade. On one worktop there was a stained bedsit cooker, on a plate the remains of a piece of bread, a lump of butter and a crushed eggshell.
From the tap above the sink came a slow drip, like a Chinese water torture. In the sink there was a sharp knife. The rust-spotted blade was still red. With every drop of water on the blade the sink was splashed with pink blood.
The trail on the floor led to the sink, past it and through a half-open door to the next room. Faintly I heard a voice groaning, as if someone was in great distress.
I opened the door into a sitting room. The curtains were drawn and the atmosphere was stale and claustrophobic, which was not helped by the room being crammed with furniture from a period that required a lot more space than there was here.
The groaning was louder now, like a monotonous chant at a religious ceremony. It came from the adjacent room. There was a doorway hung with a dark heavy curtain. The trail of blood led towards it.
I drew the curtain aside and peered in.
The scene that met me sent a chill down my spine. For a moment I thought I was going to faint. I clung to the door frame, closed my eyes, shook my head and opened them again.
I hadn’t been seeing things.
I was still in my right mind.
The woman sitting in the lotus position with her broad, white back to me was naked apart from an old-fashioned, quilted, pale-blue dressing gown, casually wrapped around her hips as if she’d just let it fall from her shoulders.
In front of her was a primitive altar, clad in black velvet, with two silver candlesticks containing tall, black candles. On the wall above the altar hung the most blasphemous picture I had ever seen. It was a copy of a medieval copperplate engraving of Jesus on the cross. In red someone had painted an unusually evil smile on his face, bloodstained horns on his forehead and a colossal, engorged penis rising from his loincloth.
But that was not all. Above the altar a beheaded chicken hung from a wire attached to the ceiling. Hot, fresh blood dripped from the open carotid artery into a silver dish placed between the candlesticks and directly in front of the repugnant image of Christ.
As I was peering in, the woman reached out a hand, dipped a finger in the blood and daubed her body, chanting all the while, so low and monotonous that it was impossible to catch more than fragments of what she said.
‘…Make your sign on my body … Lord of Darkness, here and here and … the fruits of lust … the gateway of life, I write my words of welcome to you … Oh, Lucifer, let me ride on your staff through the myriads of darkness … Oh, Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies, fill my carcass with your servants, may they suck blood from dead animals and raise me to the Queen of the Dying … embrace the Universe with your dark hands and … make all races of the Earth your disciples as you baptise them in the name of Blood, Pain and the Holy Death … to you, in the name of Astaroth, Elimi incarnate and Baal Berith’s burning desire … fill me, fill me, fill me.’
While she was talking like this she raised her arms slowly to the picture on the wall and leaned back in blind desire. Eventually her head was so far back she would have looked straight into my face, had it not been for the fact that only the whites of her eyes were visible. In ecstasy she drew down her hands again, held them in front of her groin and began a series of focused, rhythmic movements. A gurgle came from her throat and her tongue appeared between her teeth. The flickering flames of the candles made her face look like it was growing and her short, swept-back, blonde hair was dripping with sweat. ‘Satan, Satan, Satan,’ she groaned as her movements became more and more frenzied. There was an arousing, strong aroma of incense and the sea in the room, and I stood transfixed, aroused and nauseous, and gripped by a fear I had never experienced before.
Then it was as if she had been seized by an invisible lover, forcing her even further backwards until the lotus position could no longer hold and her neck arched back until her head hit the floor, hard, again and again; and with her fingers buried deep inside her own body, she spread her big, strong thighs wide apart and let herself go until she met the wall, writhing all the while as though she were out of her mind.
Then she was suddenly calm, as though she had been knocked unconscious. Her fingers lay lifeless, entangled in the thick bush around her groin, streaked with the red blood she had daubed on herself. Her body was white and doughy as she gasped in long, trembling breaths. Around each of her large, light-brown nipples she had drawn a heptagram with strange letters and symbols by the points of the star. On her stomach she had drawn a star inside a circle, with another symbol in the centre, and around her groin there was a blood-red chain of even more figures and signs.
Then she came to and looked straight at me.
Her eyes bulged and an expression of rapture crossed her lips, as though for a second she believed I was a messenger from beyond, an emissary from the Prince of Darkness, someone who would perform his master’s acts with her and guide her into new rituals. Then her eyes went back to normal, she sat up with a start, grabbed her dressing gown and covered herself. As she rose to her feet she stood there for a moment in all her naked splendour, eyes flashing, crimson with confusion from the neck upwards, then she turned her back on me, wrapped the dressing gown around herself, shuffled her feet into worn-out slippers, spun round and met me with crossed arms and her face ablaze.
‘Who are you?’ she snarled. ‘What are you doing here?’
I backed away, into the clutter
ed sitting room, with my legs against a chair, almost losing balance, while she tore the curtain aside and came after me.
Then the normality of the sitting room seemed to bring her to her senses. She drew the curtain to and stepped half a metre into the room, as imperious as a matron, though less flushed now and her voice not quite so authoritative, as she said: ‘This is a breach of my privacy. You have no right to burst in here like this. I asked you who you were.’
I raised my hands in a disarming gesture, still shaken by the bizarre scene I had just witnessed. ‘My name’s Veum. Varg Veum. And I’ve come from … the past.’
She grimaced. I recognised her from the photograph, but her hair was lighter now. Her eyes were dark blue, and there was still something febrile and charged about her: she was breathing hard and her mouth was half open, and I couldn’t help but notice remnants of blood on the blonde down over her top lip. In the light-blue, quilted dressing gown she could have been a housewife who had overslept and suddenly found the chimney sweep at her door. But I knew better.
‘I’m here about Arild Hjellestad,’ I said.
Her face went through another transformation. A few more litres of blood disappeared from her features, which were pallid and tired now and contrasted with her blonde hair. Suddenly she looked ordinary.
‘Arild? What about him?’
I was still weak at the knees. ‘Could we sit down?’ I looked around as if to emphasise that there was no shortage of seats.
She nodded. ‘You sit down. I’ll stay on my feet.’
She didn’t move, as if she were standing in defence of her chapel of darkness. In my mind’s eye I again saw the beheaded chicken and still seemed to hear the blood dripping from its neck into the oval dish. There she stood, radiating her superiority, her up there, me down here.
I coughed. ‘I’m investigating Arild’s death … among others.’
‘Harry’s you mean?’
‘And Johnny Solheim’s. I don’t know if you’ve read the papers?’
‘I don’t read papers. I don’t need them.’
‘Well, Johnny’s dead too. He was killed last Saturday. Stabbed to death with a … knife … and…’ I came to a halt. My eyes drifted to the kitchen door for a moment. Then I met hers again. ‘I … It is a little strange, isn’t it? All these … sudden deaths connected to The Harpers.’
She looked at me, gimlet-eyed. ‘Yes. So what?’
‘Well, I was talking to Anita Solheim and was wondering if perhaps you knew anything about … these things.’
‘You’ve spoken to Anita?’
I nodded.
‘Did she tell you to talk to me?’
I nodded again.
She shook her head sadly, cast her eyes around the room, and said: ‘Why would I know anything? I haven’t seen either Arild or any of the others since the mid-seventies.’
‘Since 1975?’
‘Since October the sixteenth, 1975,’ she exclaimed with vehemence.
‘So you can pinpoint an exact date?’ I said in astonishment.
‘Yes? Anita could too, couldn’t she?’
‘No, I … She didn’t, no. Not with the same precision.’
‘But she told you what happened, did she? Who was in on it?’
I took a risk. ‘Yes, of course. But I’d still like to hear your version.’
‘My version? I wasn’t there myself. I just have it from Anita and even she…’
‘Yes?’
‘She was out. The girls were babysitting. They came back from a gig, didn’t they. They were off their heads, right, beer and spirits and probably a few joints. Back to Johnny’s – high as kites, right.’
‘But where was Anita?’
‘Anita? Tell me, how much did she actually say? I told you the girls were babysitting, and she left when she saw how the land lay. She only just got away, she told me afterwards.’
‘And who was there?’
‘You know!’
I counted on my fingers. ‘All The Harpers?’
She nodded.
‘Jakob, Johnny, Arild and Harry. Any more?’
‘No. Yes…’ She eyed me quizzically. ‘There was a school friend they’d met. He happened to be at the gig and then…’ She stopped and looked at me suspiciously. ‘You know what? I’m beginning to think you know nothing about any of this – you’re just bluffing.’
‘No, no. I…’
‘So tell me who Arild was.’
‘Arild? He grew up in Verftet, went to Nordnes school from 1950 to fifty-seven, later he was at Tanks upper secondary. He did teacher training, was at the Haakonsvern naval base, went to university and wrote in the papers. I knew him well. I knew them all. I went to school with them too.’
She sent me a disdainful look, but it was clear she was impressed.
‘And you? When did you meet Arild?’
She looked towards the curtains, out to the real world. ‘They were playing a gig here, one Saturday evening. I … was invited to the party afterwards. They stayed in the youth club, in the basement. We … got to know each other, Arild and I. We hung out afterwards. I moved to Bergen and we had a few great years, talked about getting married. Arild always introduced me as his “fiancée”. But then it finished.’
‘On the sixteenth of October, 1975.’
‘Yes! I couldn’t live with something like that. After all, I was brought up decently.’ She fidgeted uneasily, looking at the dark curtain.
‘So tell me what happened.’
‘You’d better talk to Anita. She’s the one who really knows.’
‘OK. She’ll soon be the only one.’ Again I counted on my fingers. ‘Harry’s dead, Arild, Johnny. Don’t you think that’s remarkable?’
‘Yes.’ She swallowed. ‘But maybe … rightly so.’
‘Was it that serious?’
‘It was.’
‘So serious that you broke off all relations with Arild, from that day forth?’
She shrugged and nodded. In a stifled voice she said: ‘Yes. I left a note on the table, packed my things, went to work and quit my job that day, caught the ferry here and…’ She looked around. ‘My parents were still alive. They let me stay with them.’
‘And you never saw him again?’
She shook her head.
‘What about him? He didn’t try to get in touch?’
‘Arild?’ Her face darkened. ‘From what I heard he soon found himself another “fiancée”. Anita said…’ Again she stopped.
‘So you don’t know anything about his last, dark years?’
‘No, it was finished, everything.’
‘And you never sent him any pictures of angels?’ I held my breath.
‘Angels? What do you mean?’
‘Him … and the others?’
‘I don’t understand what you’re talking about. Do I look like someone who sends pictures of angels to people?’ For an instant there was actually a glint of humour in her eyes, and I had to smile myself.
‘No, actually you don’t. But you do seem to be a whiz with a red felt pen.’
She pursed her lips and blushed.
Outside, darkness was descending. The light from the kitchen, where the tap was still dripping, fell in a rectangle into the room where we were, cutting off the tip of her slippers and separating my legs from the rest of my body. Everything else lay in twilight, like the past I had been investigating.
I looked over her shoulder, to the curtain. ‘What makes you devote your attentions to … stuff like inside there?’
Her shoulders tensed and she raised her chin threateningly. ‘That was … private. It’s how I find peace.’
‘Hm, peace. But anyway. You…’
‘If the whole world’s evil?’ she exclaimed angrily. ‘We have to have something to believe in, don’t we? Everyone needs a faith – something we can rely on, which is fixed and unchanging and can’t be … sullied. So why not admit that the world around us … Just look around you. Why not admit that Evil is in contr
ol and submit to it? In the struggle between darkness and light the powers of darkness have prevailed.’ She stared at the window again and for a moment I had to agree.
‘But out here you must’ve grown up with the chapel around the corner? You must’ve had a religious upbringing?’
‘So I was all the more open to an alternative baptism!’ she proclaimed triumphantly. ‘Rituals and blindness are the key. It doesn’t matter what you do or who you worship. What matters is that you do something and that you believe.’
‘And that gives you peace of mind and comfort?’
‘It does.’
‘Does it make you a respected and esteemed person in the local community?’
She swallowed again. ‘That’s got nothing to do with you. What goes on here is nobody’s business but mine. It’s self-denial for the Prince of Darkness’s sake. Something I’ll be rewarded for later. The same way you people make promises for your principles.’
‘I don’t make any promises.’
‘Then go to … heaven.’ She jeered at me, but in her voice there was a desperation that made her mockery seem self-defeating and evoke sympathy rather than anger.
I stood up. ‘So you still won’t tell me…’
‘No!’
‘Then I’m afraid you’ll have to expect a visit from the police.’
I let my reply sink in to see if that made her any more talkative.
‘I’ll have to expect them then. They can’t force me to remember something I’ve already forgotten.’
‘But you just said…’
‘By the time they come I’ll have forgotten everything.’
I watched her. She had a strange personality – strong and weak at the same time. She was the type of person who can make a foolish decision on an impulse and then cling to it, even if it leads straight to destruction and ruin. ‘Before you commit everything to oblivion, answer me one little thing that Anita omitted to…’
She eyed me with contempt. ‘Which was?’
‘You mentioned something about an old school friend who was with The Harpers that night.’
‘Yes?’
Fallen Angels Page 20