Where Monsters Dwell

by Jorgen Brekke

  This incident summed up all Efrahim knew about Norway and Norwegians, and it really didn’t tell him very much. But several months ago his interest in this cold, long strip of a country had bloomed unexpectedly. In particular, he had started investigating various aspects of Norwegian criminality. The murder rate in the country was so low that he almost thought it could be politically controlled, that they were running some sort of social-democratic planned criminality. In contrast to all other Western countries he knew of, Norway had had only one serial killer, a melancholy nurse with syringes filled with curare and an overdose of mercy.

  But that was no longer the case. After he’d compiled the results of his last month’s work, it turned out that peaceful Norway possessed a serial killer of a far bloodier type. Actually, they’d had this killer for a long time without knowing it. He was sitting with the proof right in front of him on the desk. Not only the murderer’s own confession to every single one of the killings, but also organic matter presumably from at least one of the victims. How this material came to be in his museum was a long story, but he was only a few lab tests away from confirmation of his theory.

  He ran his fingertips over the rough paper on which the confessions were written. One bloody description after another, all jumbled together, but no longer indecipherable.

  There was a knock on the door. Quickly, with an inexplicable feeling of guilt, he opened the top drawer of his desk and shoved the confessions inside, as if they were his own. He closed the drawer and said, “Come in!”

  Efrahim had hoped it was the messenger from the university bringing the results of the tests, but it was not. At first he didn’t recognize the person. When he finally did, it dawned on him that he had never seen this person in real life, but only in photographs. Pictures in which the visitor looked friendly. But this was no friendly visit, and it was the person he least wanted to see right now.

  “So this is where you sit brooding over your big discovery,” said the visitor with a surprisingly faint accent.

  An unpleasant shock passed through Efrahim. How did the visitor know about the discovery? How was it possible? The plan had always been that they would keep this to themselves. How could they have been so careless? At the same time he understood that this was merely small talk. He understood that when he saw the crowbar the visitor held in one hand.

  Efrahim Bond had never liked his office. It was much too small. There was such a short distance between the desk and the door that the legs of the desk were always pushing against the small Persian rug that was supposed to give the office some class. It would bunch up on the threshold so that he often tripped over it on his way in or out of the office. He sat so close to the door that anyone standing in the doorway was almost leaning over the desk. In other words, the visitor was one step away from landing a well-aimed swing with the crowbar. Provided the rug didn’t get in the way.

  “I took the liberty of closing up the museum for you. You had no appointments, and I thought it would be nice for you to work in peace and quiet.” The tone was relaxed. The visitor was dressed informally in a light wool sweater with a V-neck, loose casual trousers, and deck shoes.

  “Peace to work,” Efrahim said hollowly. He glanced at the letter opener in the pen holder on the desk. He evaluated the distance between it and his right hand. How many tenths of a second would it take until the crowbar struck the first blow? Was it enough time to grab the letter opener, which was made of steel and was as sharp as a bayonet, and use it to parry the attack? Stab blindly and hope to get lucky? Maybe escape?

  He had never been brave. Had never imagined attacking anyone, much less trying to disarm or even kill somebody who was attacking him. But this might be his only chance. It was no longer a question of courage. With Melville’s white whale, with his writing career, with his wife and kids, there had always been an alternative to courage and strength. There were ways out even though he knew they weren’t good choices. There were ways out for someone who gave up, someone who never bothered to try, someone who was afraid of adversity. But they were ways out that he could live with. Now, however, he was facing a simple choice: act or die.

  For a fraction of a second he sat there hesitating. He was thinking about the thrill he’d felt this past month, impatient to reveal his discovery, the imagined press conferences, the book he was going to write that would be published in both Norwegian and English, the guest lectures, the seminars. Finally things would turn around. He had actually considered calling one of his kids to tell him about the whole thing before it came out. He had Bill’s number. It was written in his address book lying next to the pen holder.

  Again he glanced at the letter opener. He was sure he grabbed for it with lightning speed, but he wasn’t fast enough. At the same instant the visitor swung the crowbar. It was done with such calm, such concentration, the way baseball players look when they’re shown in slow motion on TV. The blow missed Efrahim, but that was intentional. The crowbar hit the pen holder precisely one inch in front of his fingertips. The pens and the letter opener struck the bookcase to his right, just below the spot where, with a little help, he had made his great discovery a few months ago. There was still a gap in the row of books where the volume with the peculiar leather spine had stood.

  “No need to hurry,” said the visitor, still holding the crowbar. “We have all the time in the world.”

  3

  Trondheim, September 2010

  The old wooden house on Kirkegata in Trondheim was a perfect place to go to the dogs, Vatten had decided, so he refused to move, even though people were constantly urging him to do so—to get some distance from the whole thing. He no longer used all the rooms in the house. From the hallway he could go straight into the kitchen. From there he could continue on to the bedroom and bath upstairs. The rest of the rooms on the ground floor he used only to store newspapers and books. He hadn’t been to the third floor in several months, or was it years? He could hardly remember what it looked like up there. An architect he knew from his school days in Horten had helped him redesign the whole third floor when they moved in. He could remember almost word for word the discussions they’d had about space solutions, windows, and access to sunlight. Just as clearly he saw in his mind’s eye the working drawings and little sketches of details like moldings and cabinet doors. He could even remember the colors of the paint spots he got on his old jogging pants, when he did the final finishing work himself. But that was all he remembered. The way the rooms had looked, the pictures on the walls, the broken LEGOs scattered all over the floor, the view of the cathedral that they had been so intent on showcasing, the telescope at the attic window, the Christmas trees that came and went every year, the dirty diapers, vomit, caresses, and reproaches—in short, the life they had lived up there. Now it lay in utter darkness.

  He sat in the kitchen leaning both elbows on the table, warming the morning stiffness from his hands on a coffee cup as he looked at a fly dying on the windowsill. It gave up fluttering its wings sometime after his third cup of coffee. He poured a fourth and sat gazing at the dead insect. When he finished his coffee he carefully picked up the fly and dropped it in the trash. It was almost nine o’clock. Time to get moving and go out.

  Out, as always, meant the Gunnerus Library. He never went anywhere but to work and back home, and he always took the same streets. If anyone, such as a colleague, had confronted him about never going anywhere, he might have protested and replied that he went for walks on Sundays. Sometimes he walked through Marine Park and along the riverbank of Nidelva, other times up to Småbergan to the fortress, and maybe even all the way up to Kuhaugen, the way they used to go three, four, or was it five years ago, when they were three. And he would have been right. He did go for walks on Sundays.

  It was raining, which made the clapboard houses along Kirkegata shine. It was Saturday, and far too many people and umbrellas were on their way downtown. Vatten took it easy around the curve down Asylbakken, because the hill could be slippery on cold,
rainy, fall days. His bicycle was what many would call cutting-edge, the kind that cost three or four months’ wages brand-new. But now it didn’t look so good. He had let it fall into pitiful disrepair. It was rusty, had loose brake cables, holes in the seat, and patched tires.

  Once he safely reached Bakklandet, along the river, he sped up. Since nobody was around, he veered through the puddles on purpose, splashing water on both sides. His cuffs got wet underneath his rain pants, and the numbness that he usually had in his calves was replaced by a light prickling. But this modest childish behavior didn’t make him feel wild or free. He felt only half alive, as if something inside him still retained some contact with the outside world.

  The cathedral was grayer than its own shadow, like an enormous tombstone in the rain. It made him forget all thoughts that there might still be life in this body of his, only thirty-eight years old. He liked the cathedral, but it was so damned dismal that he seldom looked at it, just rode past through its shadow, focused and breathing hard. Maybe it was a bit far-fetched, but sometimes he thought that the shadow of the cathedral was what got him ready for work.

  He liked Saturdays the best. No, actually he liked Sundays the best, though they weren’t actual workdays, just days when he could have the whole library to himself after he finished his Sunday walk. Otherwise he liked Saturdays best, because they were only half days, a sort of transition period with fewer students, fewer questions, fewer coworkers. The office wing was usually deserted, and people never came up to the other wing, into the stacks themselves. There he could sit in peace and read all day if he wanted to. And on some Saturdays he did just that. Yes, that might be the best thing about Saturdays. He wasn’t really working. He was simply inside and could do whatever he liked. Sometimes he stayed only an hour or two, but as a rule he was there for several hours. He had installed a very comfortable chair on the top floor of the library stacks, and once in a while he spent the night.

  When he rode across the parking lot to the junior college and along the road between the Science Museum and the Suhm Building, with its exhibits from the Middle Ages, he got the best view of the Gunnerus Library. The building stood stoutly planted in the hillside. The wing where the books were shelved had rust-brown siding, possibly chosen to resemble the calf leather on the spines of books at a distance. The only problem was that no one could see the library from a distance, because it was squeezed in between other buildings. Up close the siding made you think of an abandoned, rusted, factory building. The slightly eerie air of decay and perdition it emanated still managed in an odd way to embody the dignity a library ought to have. It was almost as though you could sense the weight of all the books inside. The part of the building with the brown siding looked like it was sinking a few millimeters into the ground each day. In a hundred years it would presumably be underground, and nobody who worked inside would have noticed a thing. The rest of the building was a combination of siding and glass, and it was this that lent the Gunnerus Library its distinctive character, a peculiar combination of lightness and gravity, age and youth.

  He parked his bike in the rack outside. Locked it with two locks, double-checked that they were both secure, and went inside. Veronika, a grad student working on her master’s in archeology, was minding the counter. She smiled at him and he nodded back. As he opened the door to the administration wing, it dawned on him that he probably should have smiled. But he was familiar enough with his own reputation to know that it didn’t matter much whether he did or not.

  He took off his rain gear in the cramped cloakroom, which was actually only a coatrack in the corridor. It was important to hang up his jacket and pants slightly apart from each other and make sure that the sleeves and pant legs weren’t twisted. Otherwise the rain gear wouldn’t dry fast enough and would start to smell bad. He took some time doing this, even turning around at the door to his office and going back to check that he hadn’t rolled up the sleeves of his raincoat.

  The office wing consisted of a corridor with three small offices on each side. At the end of the corridor was a large room with beige strié painting on the walls and an atrocious green linoleum floor that was mopped every day but still looked dirty. A big, heavy table with metal legs stood in the middle of the room, seldom used for anything but holding piles of books or an assortment of coffee cups. From this room doors led into five additional offices. These were larger and brighter, with bigger windows. A sixth door was made of steel and had two combination locks. This was the door into the book vault. Inside were the library’s most valuable manuscripts: vellum fragments from the Middle Ages, prayer books, first editions of Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Holberg, and Newton, things like that. Worth several million.

  Vatten’s office, with the control panel, monitors, and surveillance equipment, was at the end of the corridor, before the big room. He stopped and listened. At first he thought he was all alone in the office wing, but now he heard somebody inside the innermost room. He swore to himself. Then he took a step closer to where the sounds were coming from, stopped at the door, and scratched his nose. He took a deep breath, as if getting ready for a dive, took the last step, and went in.

  Behind the table inside stood a woman in her midtwenties. She had curly blond hair, green eyes, and almost invisible freckles on her face. Her dress was dark green with a Mexican-inspired pattern over the shoulders. She was holding a steaming cup of coffee, or maybe tea, in one hand. With the other she was leafing through a book in front of her. When Vatten entered the room she looked up and smiled with dangerously intelligent eyes.

  He tilted his head to one side, gave her an uncertain smile, and raised a hand, intending to wave in greeting, but the hand ended up in his hair instead. He stood there like that, smoothing his hair. I ought to say something, he thought, looking at the woman. She couldn’t really be called beautiful. If a panel of a thousand Norwegian men were asked, most of them would have given an indifferent shrug. Still, there would have been a few willing to contradict the majority, and he was presumably one of them. He liked her at once. He had seldom seen greener or livelier eyes. Her face was round and a bit asymmetrical. And then there were those freckles that hadn’t quite decided whether they were there or not. He had to say something before the situation grew more embarrassing.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  Now she laughed. Apparently she had already gathered that he was unsure of himself and understood that he wasn’t trying to be rude. She could sense such things, he thought, and he wasn’t quite sure he liked that.

  “Siri,” she said with a friendly laugh, coming around the table and extending her hand. “Siri Holm.”

  Then it dawned on him.

  “You’re new here, aren’t you?” he said with something resembling a smile. “Just wondering. We usually don’t allow outsiders into this part of the library. But I’m sure someone must have told you that. So are you here on your own? You’re not starting until Monday, right?”

  She looked at him with a slightly amused seriousness.

  “Dr. Vatten, I presume?” she said.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Jon Vatten, head of security.” He was so used to his title that he didn’t react to a stranger using it. Vatten had actually written a doctoral dissertation on Archimedes, yet he worked as a lowly security guard at the university library. He had always considered his title to be an expression of respect, sympathy, and a little Trondheim humor.

  “I’ve heard about you,” she said, with a smile that in no way revealed what she might have heard. “You’re not a librarian.”

  He didn’t reply, merely stammering, “You can just call me Jon.”

  “You look like a librarian,” said Siri Holm. “Of all the people I’ve met here, you’re the one who looks most like a librarian, which is kind of funny, since you’re not.”

  Vatten felt dizzy. He looked around for a chair, but there weren’t any around the table. There never were. He felt like turning around and going back to his office and sitting down,
but he couldn’t. It would be too brusque, even for him.

  “And how does a librarian look?” he asked. He was almost sure he was still stammering.

  “It’s not your appearance, it’s the way you move, the way you straightened your hair. Actually, I’m not quite sure what it is.”

  She laughed. Her reaction somehow convinced him that he needn’t take what she said seriously, that it was just small talk. They were simply two strangers meeting for the first time. He admired her laughter. He stood there wishing that he could do things like that. Little social masterpieces. But he’d never been good at that sort of thing—not before and not now.

  Some of his dizziness disappeared, and he was no longer so eager to get back to his office.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he pulled himself together to say.

  “Which question was that?”

  All at once the door to one of the offices opened and provided an answer. She wasn’t here alone. Gunn Brita Dahle, the librarian Siri Holm was replacing, entered the room in all her abundance. Had she cut her red hair? Something was different about her today.

  “Oh, hi, Jon,” she said, hardly looking at him. She had her nose in some catalog. “I’m bringing Siri up to speed on some of her duties. I had to do it today because everything has already started at Rotvoll.”

  “Right, I was just on the way to my office,” he replied, taking a step back. As he turned he felt Siri Holm tap him on the shoulder.

  Again she gave a low laugh and said, “I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”