by Ane Riel
I started crying again. And I looked at the dog lying on its side, watching me. I looked at its teeth, which were disappearing in white foam. Its tongue hung limply down on the grass. This dog wasn’t going to bite me, no matter how scared it was. It was desperate for help.
Its chest was heaving and sinking in front of me. It was almost as if the howling was coming from in there. I took a step back, got ready and aimed. It was my best arrow.
I’m sure I shot it straight through the heart. I looked into its eyes and, for a brief moment, the dog and I were as one.
Then it was dead.
I hadn’t decided what I was going to do next. Nor did I have time because, as soon as the howling stopped, I heard shouting.
‘Ida!’ someone called out in the distance. A man. ‘Iiiida!’
I ran faster than I’ve ever done. Although I wanted to run straight back to the container more than anything, I didn’t dare because the man might spot me crossing the open area, and I didn’t know how much time I had. So instead I decided to run the shorter distance to the edge of the forest. I could hide between the tall trees and, if he decided to follow me, I could lose him in the forest. Whoever he was, he wouldn’t know the forest as well as I did.
I found the spot where I would be completely hidden by pine branches but still have a good view down towards the juniper bush. I could see him now. He wore a big, green coat – and he had something around his neck. I think it was a lead. It was probably his dog.
I was sure that I had seen him before, but I couldn’t remember where. I had never seen the dog. I hoped that he had been good to his dog, but people down on the main island probably weren’t as kind to animals as we were. Seeing as they weren’t particularly kind to people.
I tried not to think that it was my dad who had made that metal trap and set it. But I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
What if the man was a doctor? But surely Dad wouldn’t have …? And who was Ida? Was that the dog? I hadn’t even noticed if it was female. But it had a beard, a grey beard. White almost. I hoped that it was an old dog.
The man was kneeling by it now. He was saying something to it, I could see. He stroked it. And wiped its mouth. And tried to prise the metal teeth apart with his hands. And he gently pulled out the arrow. And he pressed his face to the dog’s chest. And he sat up again and looked at it. And he spotted the long end of the branch I had used and tried separating the metal teeth from one another with the branch. Until it snapped. Again. And he shook his head.
I think he was crying.
I saw him get up. He dried his eyes on his sleeve and stared at the dog for ages. Then he bent down, picked up my arrow and spent a long time staring at it. It looked as if he was examining it, and I hoped that he would think that it was a really fine arrow. I had worked very hard on it.
Then he turned and looked up towards our house. From where he was standing, he could see the container and, behind it, the wooden building with the workshop and the white room. There was a single small window into the white room, but I knew it was impossible to see anything through it. To the left of the workshop the man would probably see the roof of the house. There was a cluster of spruces and birches that gave some privacy. The gravel road ran alongside them and disappeared into the corner between the house and the workshop before the yard began. The yard where, it has to be said, there was very little free space these days.
I wondered why he hadn’t just walked up the gravel road. He should have reached the barrier and either turned around there when he saw our sign or followed the path around the barrier in order to walk on up to the house. Then he would have come into contact with the tripwire and there would have been a noise … And that was when it dawned on me that he had followed the sound, the howling. The dog must have run in an arc away from the barrier and the gravel road, and up towards the Christmas trees and the north forest. It might have been chasing a wild rabbit; I knew there was a rabbit warren near the place where I was hiding.
I also wondered what would have happened if it hadn’t been the dog but the man who had stepped on the metal trap and been doing the screaming. And if I would have shot him in the heart until he stopped.
And if Dad had made any more of those traps.
I hoped the man would go back. I hoped with all my heart that he would leave and take the dog with him, although I couldn’t see how, because it was trapped and the trap was fixed to the ground. And I hoped that he would leave my arrow behind.
He left the dog and took my arrow and walked up towards the container.
I held back for a while. Then I followed him, hidden by the trees.
Liv, the noise has stopped. It’s so very quiet.
It is making my mind loud.
I hurt all over. It’s the sores, they are on fire. And my hands, mostly the right one.
Difficult to write now.
Perhaps I’ve started to believe in God. I would like to believe in something. In someone. I believe in you.
Is that a voice?
One Big Mess
Roald had once seen a fox trap. It was a fiendish contraption, but this one … it was far worse. Someone had taken a fox trap and refined it in an effort to turn it into the worst imaginable instrument of torture. The metal teeth had practically severed the dog’s lower leg. Just imagine the damage such a trap could have done to a human being. It was big enough to snap a grown man’s leg, not to mention a child’s. What if the boy he had seen run north in the darkness had stepped in it?
Roald shuddered at the thought and tried to swallow. The lump he had felt in his throat when he heard Ida howl was choking him now. The poor, poor animal.
And poor Short Fuse’s Lars. What was he going to tell him?
He couldn’t even take Ida back until he had found something with which to cut the chain; it seemed to be fastened around an underground root. Who the hell would deliberately do something so cruel? It might be kinder to Short Fuse’s Lars to cut off the dog’s leg, so that he would never have to see the trap and the injuries it had caused.
But there was more than that. It wasn’t just the trap.
There was also the arrow.
How come the dog had an arrow through its heart? An arrow which had evidently been made lovingly by hand, right down to the smallest detail.
He had to find Horder to get an explanation. Could Jens Horder have set the trap himself? He undoubtedly had the skill to make it, but did he also have the heart not only to make it but also to use it? Anyone who set a device like that must have a heart of stone.
Was it malice? Was Jens Horder an evil man? Judging by what people had told him about Jens, quite the opposite. Kind and helpful, gentleness personified. And behind the gentleness, clearly devastated by the loss of his twins. He might be an introverted and monosyllabic man, but that wasn’t a sign of malice, was it? Surely he must be a frightened man, to retreat and put in place emotional and physical barriers to prevent people from getting too close.
But traps? Such vile, cruel traps?
Roald looked up towards the Horder home. It consisted of several buildings and a big, closed skip stood in front of one of them. The postman had mentioned the skip repeatedly and gone on about how Jens Horder was hiding Mafia money inside it. Or worse. Of everyone who drank at the pub, the postman was the only one who insisted on drinking nothing but Red Tuborg; then again, he was a few stamps short of full postage. Still, in his own way, he was the most entertaining too. Roald, for his part, wouldn’t want to be without him. The others had merely proffered dull theories about how perhaps the Horders had finally decided to get rid of some of their stuff up on the Head, and not a moment too soon.
Except for the postman, no one really spoke about Jens and Maria Horder these days. Then there was the whole subject of the drowned daughter; that made it difficult for most people to talk about the couple. It wasn’t enough to be separated from the tragedy by a thin strip of land. Tragedies take time.
Roald wondered whether to m
ake his way down to the gravel road and then follow it up towards the house, but in the end opted to take a direct route. The risk of stumbling across more traps was surely the same in either case, so he kept an eye out for where he put his feet between the small trees, the grassy knolls and the twigs.
He paused only when a rabbit jumped past him on its way to the forest. More than anything, he wanted to run back towards the Neck, but he knew he had no choice but to carry on.
The memory of the boy in his kitchen still haunted him.
Once he got closer to the skip, he could see how old and battered it was. It had probably been cheap, and it was unlikely to be rented, given how long it had sat there, according to the postman. It had slanted walls and hatches along the top.
Roald walked around it. There was a gap of a couple of metres at most between the skip and the wooden building behind it. There was little actual clear space because there was junk everywhere. The nearest hatch was unlocked, and he opened it to look inside. The skip was filled practically to the brim with what looked, undeniably, like rubbish. The postman was unlikely to be right in his bizarre assumptions.
It would have made sense to walk the short stretch along the skip to the end of the house, but the small window at the far end of the wooden building that overlooked the forest piqued Roald’s curiosity. He decided to explore what was behind it.
He had to step blindly in between wooden posts and hubcaps and sheets of tarpaulin and collapsed log piles before he could reach it. All the time, he prayed that a set of metal teeth wouldn’t suddenly snap shut around his foot.
But he could have saved himself the trouble. Behind the windowpane, it was as if someone had constructed a wall of densely packed books and compressed rubbish, and even if all the lights in the world had been lit up beyond it, they still wouldn’t have been able to penetrate it. Down on the small windowsill, squashed between the glass and a tinfoil tray, was a dusty hairbrush matted with blond hair. Next to it was something that had once been a plant.
Roald decided to walk around the end of the house which was nearest to him, and as he glanced towards the spruces, he thought he spied movement. He stopped and narrowed his eyes, but he couldn’t make out what it was. He was still holding the arrow in his hand and suddenly felt unpleasantly exposed. After all, someone had fired that arrow, not that long ago.
Whatever he might have seen behind the wooden building was nothing compared to the sight he encountered in the farmyard. Shocked, he stared at the forest of rubbish shooting up everywhere. A red silage harvester soared above it all. It reminded him of a dinosaur looking across a landscape of prehistoric junk.
And it wasn’t the only animal. Roald shuddered when he spotted a rat making a dash for a steel tube. Faint sounds could be heard everywhere whenever the breeze caused something to lift or bump into something else. A piece of transparent plastic flapped under a wooden pallet, the cardboard tube from a roll of toilet paper unfurled itself in front of a tarnished copper pot. The wooden building to his right was actually rather beautiful, but blighted by its surroundings. There was a door and a window near him, and further down another couple of windows and a door. At the end of the farmyard, the main house rose in the morning sun. Painted white, but peeling so badly you could be forgiven for having doubts that it had ever been painted. The curtains on the ground floor were closed, but from the first floor two windows glared at Roald like a blind animal with pitch-black eyes covered by a milky membrane.
If he was to reach the front door, he would have to zigzag between the piles because there didn’t seem to be a direct route. Some noises made him turn his attention to the barn across the farmyard. It was a stone building in just as poor condition as the house. Despite a thick layer of moss, the corrugated-iron roof looked far from waterproof. Could they really be keeping animals in there?
Roald decided to walk around the piles and up to the half-door at the end of the barn. The top half was ajar, and in the darkness he saw a horse. Dappled grey. Its far too skinny neck and head hung over the edge of its stall, as if held in place, barely, by an invisible rope. A faint whinnying was coming from its nostrils. He could hear more animals inside the barn. Something shifted, something breathed, something squeaked. He had no wish to investigate. The acrid stench not only suggested that mucking out was long overdue but also that something inside there was dead.
From behind the barn he heard another pitiful sound, and he walked around to see what it was. In the chicken coop a solitary cockerel with miserable plumage was trying to communicate. Its eyes seemed dead, probably because it was looking at his dead fellows on the ground: five ruffled chickens whose eyes were just as empty. He could see that a fox had tried to tunnel its way under, but the chicken coop seemed to have been secured against that kind of attack. Perhaps it would have been more merciful if the chickens had ended their days with a sudden death.
There was a field beyond the chicken coop, but the only things moving out there were a couple of crows and three black plastic bin liners rolling languidly across the autumn grass whenever the wind caught them. Further away lay something which might be a dead, horned animal. Or maybe just the remains of one; whatever it was, it didn’t move.
Roald walked along the field, past the pump and the upended wheelbarrow, straddled some big stones and old tubs, and approached the back of the house. There was a washing line with a fluttering newspaper and a couple of yellowing, torn sheets on it. An impressive rosebush next to it stretched its branches up into the wind like tentacles, waiting for the next crumbling bedsheet. It was a little windy here, where the forest didn’t provide quite so much shelter.
At the end of the house was a door with a windowpane, only partly covered by a piece of fabric. It was dark inside, but he got the impression that it led to some kind of pantry.
He hesitated for a moment. Would he be better off walking around and knocking on the front door? Should he do that? Then again, the place seemed so deserted it surely didn’t matter what he did. With his hands up around his eyes, he pressed his nose to the windowpane. When his eyes had adjusted to the darkness, he spotted his missing freezer gloves from the pub’s stock room. They were lying on top of some bubble wrap, which he also recognized, and nearby was that roll of oilcloth he had bought at the ironmonger’s in Sønderby. It gave him a strange feeling that he was entitled to enter.
He grabbed the door handle. The door was locked and he knocked a few times, without expecting an answer. Then he took a step back and looked about him. It was here, the key. Somewhere. There was always a key. On a nail behind something. Under a flower pot. A stone. Or placed on top of a beam.
It turned out to be under the flower pot.
The door didn’t open without a struggle. The hinges needed oiling and squealed hideously. Roald let out a startled gasp when some kind of furry animal passed him in the doorway, brushing his leg. He followed it with his eyes as it bounced out into the grass and breathed a sigh of relief when he realized that it wasn’t a giant rat but just a rabbit.
A tame rabbit? Should he try to catch it, in case it turned out to be someone’s pet? He didn’t have time to make up his mind before the rabbit vanished among the grass and the junk and he lost sight of it. That decided it.
The air inside was more oppressive than any air in any house he had ever set foot in.
And yet it was nothing compared to the smell. The stench. It materialized in his nose as an intolerable mixture of dust, mould, decay and solvents and … he feared … urine, excrement. He opened the door fully so that he could stand it. Now that a little daylight was entering the room, he was better able to see what it concealed. There was every imaginable kind of tinned food stacked randomly or in boxes. Some were still held together by shrink-wrapped plastic. And there were packets of cereal, crispbread, bags of bread, crackers. He didn’t need to check the best-before date to know that they were way past it. Pretty much all the bread he could see through the packaging was green from mould. He picked up his sto
ckroom gloves, but dropped them immediately as mouse droppings rolled from them, scattering on to the bubble wrap like dry rain.
The light switch clicked impotently when he flicked it, and the naked lightbulb over the door remained unlit. When he discovered the chest freezer along one wall he knew where the worst of the smell was coming from. There was no light glowing in the small indicator lamp on the side of the freezer, but he had no doubts that it contained food, because there was a terrible stench of rotting meat.
Roald breathed a sigh of relief when he realized that he wouldn’t be able to check whether he was right because the chest freezer was buried under things, including an enormous old television that must weigh a ton. The dust on the television was thick, and he didn’t want to think about how long the freezer had been turned off.
Again, he wondered whether he should leave. He ought to hurry back to Korsted and get hold of the police officer and the vet. The vet could see not only to the animals in the barn but also to dead Ida. Roald no longer had the strength to deal with the dog in the trap himself. Someone else would have to take over. He discovered that he was no longer holding the arrow. He must have put it down outside, by the flower pot.
It beggared belief. No one could possibly live like this, and yet someone must come here. The boy, for instance, since his recent swag was locked inside this room.
But who had fired the arrow?
And where were Jens Horder and his wife? There was no one here to tend to the animals, and the house seemed completely dark and closed up, as if it had been abandoned long ago. But they couldn’t have moved, or the postman would know.
And that was when Roald remembered a call he had once had at the pub. It had been during the herring course of their New Year’s Day’s lunch, so he hadn’t paid much attention and he might not have been entirely sober. But someone had asked about Jens Horder, and possibly also about his mother. Roald could remember nothing more than that.
