by Ane Riel
A second door led into the house, probably to a kitchen. He wasn’t sure if he had the courage to open it. No, he decided that it was time to call in the professionals. There were limits to what he, as one man, should stick his nose into, although he had come no closer to understanding the mystery of the boy in the last half-hour.
But he might as well knock on the front door on his way back. He was pretty sure there would be no answer, so it was mostly so he could tell himself he had at least tried that too. Tried. Half-heartedly.
He turned to leave, and it wasn’t until then that he heard them. The sounds. He had been so busy breathing and coping with the stench while trying to think clearly at same time that his hearing must have gone into hibernation. But now he heard them. All around him something was creeping and scratching and munching. A particularly loud packet of cornflakes was moving slightly on the shelf in front of him.
Roald stared at it. Now he could also hear faint squeaking. Rats? The thought that the house might be riddled with rats made him jumpy. Mice, he could handle, or a mouse. But rats, hell no.
He took another step towards the external door but was stopped by a sudden, troubling thought. What if someone was in there? Roald had once had a friend who had never forgiven himself for ignoring the silence from the flat next door to his and the junk mail piling up outside. He had also blocked out the stench to begin with. After all, people were entitled to their privacy, that had been his friend’s thinking. They found the old man three weeks too late. On the living-room floor. He seemed to have died as he crawled towards the telephone.
Was Jens Horder lying in there dead? Or his wife? Was there even anybody in there? And what was the boy’s part in all of this? Who was he? Where did he fit in?
Roald rubbed his chin. He decided to steel himself. Or at least call out from where he was standing.
So he did.
A standard ‘Hello?’
And he noticed that all the noises stopped for a moment, only to return, somewhat tentatively.
And he called out again. ‘Hello, is anyone there? Hellooooo?’
He sounded more at ease than he felt.
By his third ‘Hello’, the noises had grown used to him. A dark shadow slipped past a tin on a shelf. A small, dark shadow, thank God. As long as they were just mice, it was OK. A small mouse … preferably a shrew.
Which wasn’t a mouse at all, according to the plumber.
‘Helloooo …?’
But some kind of mole.
There was no response except from the animals. So he might as well leave, mightn’t he? Or should he just check inside the kitchen?
The two rabbits that slipped out this time did nothing to calm his nerves. He felt as if they had been lying in wait behind the kitchen door. They dashed past him, out through the pantry, into the light and across the field. Roald closed the door behind him without quite knowing why. Was he scared of letting too much out of a home he had no right to enter? Too many pets.
It had said No trespassing on the sign down by the barrier. But, for pity’s sake, he had just lost a dog in a horrible way near this property, and his floral oilcloth was in the pantry. That definitely gave him cause to enter. He was entitled to know what was going on.
Or did it say No entry? Suddenly, he had doubts.
There wasn’t much light in the kitchen because the faded brown curtains in front of the window overlooking the farmyard were closed. Even so, a little of the daylight pierced the fabric and cast a strange golden glow into the room. The smell was just as foul as in the pantry, and Roald had to pinch his nose. There was also a fridge, containing God knows what. He had no desire to investigate it further, especially after he had tried the light switch just inside the door and discovered that there was no working light in the kitchen either.
Again, it was almost impossible for him to move about because of boxes, and stuff, and all kinds of rubbish. It was impossible to reach the door at the far end of the kitchen, which was blocked by a big crate of engine parts. Roald guessed the door led to the hallway. It fitted with the location of the front door.
With the help of an otherwise useless umbrella, he managed to reach the curtain across the junk, pull it slightly to one side and let in more light. He regretted his decision immediately when he saw what it revealed: the dusty cobwebs that covered everything like a sticky, grey membrane, the dead, dying and still-living spiders and cockroaches, and all sorts of creepy-crawlies populating the room from floor to ceiling.
An open box of Liquorice Allsorts lit up the place with its fresh colours and simple shapes. It looked as if it had been left there recently. His favourites had always been the pink coconut wheels, but surely they tasted exactly the same as the yellow ones? On the wall was a faded poster of different species of fish staring at him with their dead eyes. Roald looked down before taking his next step. More sweets. A half-empty bag of wine gums had landed in a flower pot and someone seemed to have emptied a bag of salt-liquorice balls across the floor.
Salt liquorice? How unusual.
And when he bent down to take a closer look, he discovered that the droppings in the dust weren’t Haribo, but from the rabbits. Their excrement was everywhere. Could three rabbits really produce that much poo?
Four.
Because, as he straightened up and accidentally kicked a hubcap, yet another rabbit jumped out from its hiding place. It disappeared through a half-open door to his right, leading to the living room, perhaps.
The noises increased in number. And volume.
He decided to take a quick look inside the living room and then get the hell out of here. It was all too much, but one thought troubled him more than anything: he wasn’t sure that he could cope if he discovered a dead body inside the house. Better send the police out here. And then there was the air. It was suffocating. It was so dense with dust he felt the urge to cough the whole time. And somewhere in the back of his mind was the knowledge that the dog had been killed by an arrow which someone had fired not that long ago. Someone unlikely to be dead.
And yet his conscience compelled him to look inside. Just a quick peek before he left. He cautiously opened the door a little more. Yes, it was a living room. Or it had been once.
A wall of things had risen in front of the south-facing windows at the far end of the room. Rays of sunlight were trying to get through the cracks in the wall and into the room, but on their way through the dust they faded to weak shadows unable to produce anything other than a pale imitation of light.
Roald felt like he had entered an underground mine shaft. He was standing in a narrow passage that wound its way through the objects, which had merged together into what at first glance looked like one dark mass. Now he tried to make out the contours that slowly emerged from the twilight. He saw umbrellas, again. A stuffed owl. At least, he hoped it was stuffed. In several places the junk almost reached the ceiling. He took a step forwards and saw a piano to one side. A bust, an upended sofa, a tailor’s dummy, a dining table, barrels, clothes, plastic bags, cardboard packaging. It went on. A couple of other paths appeared.
Stunned, he stared at an object hanging from the ceiling. It looked like a tree stripped of its leaves – a hanging spruce? It was a Christmas tree; he could see the star now. And the paper-heart decorations. Some were close to falling off the bare branches; others had already done so. One of them released its grip as he approached. The paper hearts looked strangely dull but, on the other hand, the darkness probably didn’t leave much room for colour. The crunchy sound of spruce needles under the soles of his shoes roused his sense of hearing. The sounds. There was scratching and scurrying all around him.
He had to get out, and it couldn’t happen soon enough. And given that he had already moved some way through the living room, probably in the direction of the hall, he would continue that way. It couldn’t be worse than having to walk back past the fridge and the freezer. Roald cursed himself for having ventured so far inside the house; for even entering the house in
the first place.
When his path was blocked by a big canvas sack and he tried to push it aside three startled rabbits hopped away and disappeared in the darkness. As he picked up the sack to move it he could feel its contents trickle out over one of his shoes from a hole in the bottom. He set it down, retracted his foot and looked at it. Animal feed had settled like a small mountain range across the path, and the now slack canvas sack collapsed to one side.
He straddled the mountains and continued along the narrow path. He felt the need to support himself against the bulging walls on either side, not least because he feared that something might come crashing down on top of him, but at the same time he didn’t want to touch anything. The thought of feeling a rat against the palm of his hand made him shudder. He held up his hands to each side, not touching anything, but ready to grab out for support.
And then they came.
Maybe he had knocked the sack into something when he moved it a moment ago, but whatever it was had triggered a collapse behind him. He jumped at the sound of things cascading and falling and sliding and crashing into one another. When he turned, he saw the whole of one side of the room cave in. The owl fell. A big old radio tumbled over the edge, pulling with it something from the other side as it did so. Some cardboard slipped down, and a sack … and a little light crept in. But only a ray.
An image of avalanches popped into his head. Mudslides. Would everything come tumbling from behind and bury him alive? Death by suffocation?
And then they came. The rabbits. From every hole and corner and crack. Roald clutched his head and screamed as he tried to outrun the panicking pets.
The path was widening slightly now. He had a choice between running up the stairs, where a narrow passage had been created down the middle, or following the route to his left, through the hall, across to the front door …
He skidded to a halt.
The rabbits had gathered in small clusters, most of them in the corner behind the stairs under a go-kart. The noise had stopped.
He realized that it hadn’t been an avalanche, just a minor collapse. All the fallen items had settled themselves again. Behind them, in a thick beam of liberated sunlight, the dead tree hung like a silent witness.
Roald looked about him. There was slightly more light at this end of the living room, thanks to a small window up on the landing. It must be the east-facing end of the house.
Then a short section of the wall between the hall and the kitchen caught his attention. Down by the skirting board there was a fairly large hole with a jagged edge. The furry inhabitants of this house must have gnawed their way through the wall. A cable with protruding copper wire stuck out, it looked like a confused caterpillar, and on the floor in front of the hole bits of insulation lay scattered between excrement and scraps of wallpaper. Something similar had happened to the wall by the stairs, and Roald dreaded to think what other surprises might be revealed if the walls were stripped. The wiring constituted a fire hazard. And how much more gnawing and nibbling could the house cope with before the whole place caved in?
His musings were brutally interrupted by the sight of a rat darting across the floor.
‘Out,’ he ordered it, pointing to the corner as if he expected the rat to obey his command. The creature disappeared in another direction, but he could still see the end of its tail sticking out behind a wellington boot.
And that was when he heard it.
A knocking was coming from the first floor. It wasn’t an animal making a noise or a bird pecking or the wind causing something to slam. It was a human being knocking. It was a human being who wanted to be heard.
The trip up the stairs was a nightmare. One of those where you try to run but can only move forwards in slow motion. Perhaps the dust was hampering him. The heavy air. The stench. Roald’s lungs were screaming for fresh air, but he had to go upstairs. He didn’t want to suffocate in this place, but neither, as a decent human being, could he walk away.
The boy might be up there and in need of his help.
When he reached the first-floor corridor, he saw a light flicker from the nearest room. From where the sound was coming. A couple of rabbits pressed themselves against some long iron girders as he passed them to reach the door.
Roald had never seen a human being that big before. She was lying on a bed. That is to say, Roald presumed that she was lying on a bed. He could barely see the bed for notepads, books, paper plates, foil trays, knitting, wax candles, matches, paper cups, filthy towels, holey blankets, food scraps, mouse droppings – please let them be mouse droppings, he prayed. And body, body, body.
The air was intolerable, but the stench coming from her was unbearable. An unmistakable smell of urine and excrement. And rot. Roald fought to quell his nausea.
She was holding an umbrella in her right hand. She was slamming its handle against the headboard, and he realized that was how she had made the knocking sound. When she saw him standing in the doorway she let go of the umbrella and allowed her enormous arm to fall on to some knitting with what looked like extreme fatigue.
On a bedside table, on top of piles of books and papers, a wax candle sputtered in a holder. Roald’s joy at finding a source of light was quickly replaced by horror at the state of the room it was illuminating.
Mostly, however, at the woman lying in front of him.
She was in a terrible state.
‘Maria Horder?’ he asked, in a voice he no longer recognized as his own. Perhaps it was the dust.
She nodded slowly.
‘I … you, I … what are …?’ Roald found himself unable to think straight. ‘I’m Roald Jensen from the pub in Korsted,’ he managed to say, eventually.
The woman’s features seemed tiny in the massive face, but he had no doubt that she was attempting a friendly smile. Nor was he in any doubt that she was crying, even though he could only just make out her eyes in the black holes. Her skin looked grey in the guttering candlelight and a grotesque shadow from her nose settled across one cheek like a small, trembling animal.
‘You need help,’ he stated.
She nodded again.
‘I’ll go and get someone. But where’s your husband … Where is Jens Horder?’ His brain was starting to work again.
She reached for a notepad with her left hand, pushed aside the novel lying on her stomach and started writing something. He saw Madame Bovary slide into a foil tray.
Roald stepped forward to read her note; that is to say, he stepped across a lot of things to get close enough.
COMING SOON, NEED MEDICINE, DOCTOR, she had written. It was clearly a great effort for her to write. That it used not to be, he could tell from the many loose sheets lying scattered everywhere. Some were covered in a beautiful curved handwriting, others were not quite so elegant. Her handwriting now was bordering on a child’s scribbles.
‘Yes, I’ll be quick …’
SAVE LIV, she wrote, and stared at him with pleading eyes.
He nodded, wondering if she had trouble spelling. Did she want him to save her life?
‘I promise, I’ll … I’ll be back as soon as I can. Be careful not to knock over the candle …’
She gestured to indicate it was very important that she gave him more information before he left. Her exhaustion was plain to see. It struck him that she might not have had anything to drink for a long time.
WATCH OUT FOR TRAPS.
He nodded. Oh, yes.
‘Would you like me to fetch you some water before I go?’ he asked anxiously. He caught a glimpse of a hand-drawn sketch of two children on the wall behind her.
She shook her head and wrote again. She added a FIRST … after SAVE LIV. A whining sound came from her lungs.
NEED HELP ALL 3.
Roald couldn’t take the stench any more. He had to get out before he threw up. He had a horrible realization of what was in the bucket standing beside the bed. There were sheets of toilet paper and rolled-up towels next to it.
He didn’t dare open hi
s mouth to speak, but he nodded, then turned towards the door. It was only compassion that stopped him from vomiting before he was back in the living room, and then he did it as quietly as possible – into a cardboard box whose contents were unknown.
All three? Did she mean that the boy was theirs? And whose life should he save first?
Roald reached the front door and pulled it open so hard that it slammed into the wall. He had never needed fresh air as badly as he did now. He stepped outside and drew the light into his soul and the November sky deep into his lungs.
He spotted it purely by chance, the top of what looked like a quiver; a small collection of neat feathers moving for a brief second behind a bathtub over by the barn. Roald narrowed his eyes.
‘Oi, you!’ he yelled. ‘You over by the bathtub, I saw you.’ The next moment a child ran as if the devil were at its heels from the bathtub and along the barn in a semicircle towards the forest and the end of the wooden building from where Roald himself had come. The quiver bounced up and down the back of the brown-and-orange sweater.
Roald recognized the boy from the pub kitchen.
From the top step he could see that there was a more direct route across the farmyard. If he ran past the silage harvester, he might be able to catch up with the child.
SOMEONE WAS HERE
YOU WILL GET HELP, LIV
I LOVE YOU BOTH
SO MUCH
Nightmares
They had started when he burned his mother’s body behind the barn. Jens Horder’s nightmares.
First he dreamt that Else came back with a schoolteacher, a police officer and a doctor and took Liv away. He was busy mucking out the barn and didn’t notice anything until it was too late. He had time to see them get into a big car parked in the farmyard and drive off so fast that dust rose from the gravel road like thick fog. Jens ran into the dust, and when he came out of it he had reached the start of the Neck – but the land itself was gone. The sea had overwhelmed the Neck, and he could do nothing but watch as the car disappeared into the sunshine on the main island.
