Where Monsters Dwell

by Jorgen Brekke

  “What were you doing with the corpse, you little cur?” he whispered.

  He could not reply. The beard-cutter was pressing his hand too tightly over his mouth.

  “You’ve ruined everything. The corpse is for the knives. It is always just for the knives. You can’t touch it the way you did. What’s gotten into you? Your mother could see there’s a devil living inside you. I thought it was a guardian angel, but it turns out that your mother was right.”

  The beard-cutter wrapped his free hand around the boy’s throat. The boy’s eyes grew wide, and in the dim moonlight coming through the window, he could clearly see a tear running down the beard-cutter’s cheek as his hand began to squeeze. The dizziness came first. The night filled with light before it turned blacker than ever before.

  “Fortune has abandoned me again,” said the beard-cutter, somewhere in the dark.

  * * *

  The boy felt a rocking and a shaking that came and went. I am on the road to hell, he thought. Then his eyelids began to flutter. He blinked uncontrollably. When he finally stopped blinking, he lay still and was able to see. He was lying in a cart. In front of him sat the beard-cutter, holding the reins to the donkey. So we are going to hell together, he thought. But then he began to look around the dark landscape. They were riding along a cart path he recognized. This was not the road to perdition. Not exactly.

  His only hope was to lie completely still and breathe as slowly and as quietly as he could. He lay like that until the cart rounded the wall at the graveyard of the innocents and swung around to the back. He remained lying there quietly while the beard-cutter dug a grave for him outside the wall. When it was deep enough, he came over to the cart and grabbed the boy by the hair. The boy clenched his teeth so he would not scream as the strong man yanked him by the hair from the cart, as if he were unloading a slaughtered animal. Then the beard-cutter’s boots rolled him along the ground, until he fell into the grave. There he lay on his back with an arm over his face. The beard-cutter was in a hurry, and began at once to shovel dirt over him. The boy counted himself lucky that it was dark, so that he could put his hand over his mouth and make a little pocket of air. Soon everything went black, and there was a terrible weight on his chest. The boy remained lying there until he heard the last shovelful of dirt land on top of him. He, too, had been given a shallow grave. He could hear the beard-cutter get into the cart and whip the donkey into motion.

  When everything was quiet, the boy moved the hand covering his mouth and began to relieve some of the weight pressing down on him. He started to dig. As he did so the dirt fell in and covered his whole face. Sudden panic struck him. He was breathing in a little dirt every time he inhaled, and the mound over him was weighing more and more heavily on his chest, as if trying to squeeze the life out of him.

  But he did not stop moving his hands. Panic made him dig faster and with greater frenzy. Luckily the dirt was loose and not very deep.

  First he got one hand into the air, then the other, so he could dig a tunnel as he pressed his face toward the starry sky above. As fresh air came in, he could not help coughing. Bits of dirt and gravel sprayed out of his mouth, and his lungs filled greedily with fresh air with each breath he took. The prickling and numbness vanished from his limbs, and the dizziness was gone. For the first time since he had climbed down from the ladder to go to bed, he felt fully awake.

  Was it all just a dream he had awakened from? Was it not dirt but Master Alessandro’s heavy wool blankets lying on top of him? He felt with his hands. No, it was dirt. This had really happened. And so unexpectedly, the way everything happened with the beard-cutter. He had fallen into disgrace, and without warning the beard-cutter had tried to kill him. The boy lay there wondering what he had done with the corpse earlier in the day that had aroused such violent wrath. He could not understand it. He had only touched the body, nothing more. He had imagined that it was his own mother, and that he might bring her back to life. If the beard-cutter had known that he missed his mother so much, maybe he would not have flown into such a rage. Or would he? The yellow bile must be to blame, the boy thought. It could not be anything else.

  It had not rained much that fall, which meant the earth was dry and loose. That was what had saved him from a gruesome death. He kept digging with his hands. It took a long time to get his whole torso free, but as soon as that was done, it took hardly any time to get his legs loose. The boy who had been buried alive arose from the grave. He thought of the song the beard-cutter had been whistling the last time they were here. Was it a premonition that neither of them had registered or had the beard-cutter been planning to kill him all along?

  The boy stood there for a while looking down at the grave. Then he turned and walked toward the road. When he reached it, he continued in the direction leading away from Padua. He walked all night. At a crossroads he chose not to take the road to Venice but instead headed into the countryside. Not until daybreak did he lie down in a ditch to sleep. There he slept until late in the day, when a man in a gray cape woke him. The boy had seen mendicant monks like this along the road before, and knew what sort of men they were.

  “You look like you’re a long way from home,” said the grayfriar, peering at the boy with eyes that showed concern but were merry at the same time.

  PART III

  Scalpel

  The center of the universe is everywhere and its circumference nowhere.

  —GIORDANO BRUNO, 1584

  23

  Trondheim, September 2010

  Odd Singsaker had just come back to his office after meeting with Siri Holm when Felicia Stone phoned him.

  On his way upstairs he hadn’t spoken to anyone, only nodded and murmured hello when necessary. But his mind was in turmoil. He had just broken an unwritten but unalterable rule for a detective: Never get personally involved with a person of interest, no matter how innocent you think she is. He didn’t know how many times he had cursed himself on the way back. But he was more surprised than angry. The whole thing had happened so fast, and without warning. Siri Holm had obviously been right. Normally he had enough self-control to avoid what could be career suicide, especially of the magnitude involved here. But he had simply let go and allowed himself to be seduced. Odd Singsaker, the stoic detective and faithful husband for several decades, who until now hadn’t slept with any woman other than his own wife and a girlfriend he once had in his youth. Yet suddenly he’d let his dick take over. How could he have let that happen? Worst of all was that it had felt so good. Siri had taken control of him in such a thoughtful and tender way, as if she’d always known what he liked, better than his wife ever did. At the same time there had been something oddly impersonal about the whole thing. He had no idea why she had seduced him so wildly on the red sofa. There was nothing to indicate that she even liked him better than any other man. Most of all it felt as though she’d done it as a kind of service. As if she’d seen that he needed a fuck and viewed it as her duty to be helpful. A sort of adult girl scout’s good deed. He had to laugh. There was something liberating in that. Siri Holm was a remarkable woman in many ways, and he sensed that the next time they met she would act as if nothing had happened. As a witness she would most likely be just as objective. And she might turn out to be a very important witness. But she was no suspect. Or was she? Was he reasoning with the wrong organ now?

  Right before the phone rang he thought about how they’d parted. On the way out of the apartment, as she lay on the sofa with only a black belt around her waist, he’d asked her what sort of detective she thought he was, the systematic or the unsystematic type?

  “Detectives like that are only found in books,” she’d said with a laugh. “You’re a human being, Odd Singsaker. So you can be whoever you want to be. By the way, I don’t think you’d be very good as the hero of a crime novel. You’re too nice. You make compromises. I doubt that you have conflicts with your superiors very often, and if you drink, you don’t drink enough.”

  “A shot of a
quavit, Rød Aalborg, every morning,” he told her.

  “Ah, at least you have a favorite drink. And you make obvious mistakes, like going to bed with one of the witnesses. Maybe there’s hope for you after all.”

  He had laughed on the way out the door. A laugh that despite self-recrimination and regret had kept on resonating until now.

  * * *

  “Chief Inspector Odd Singsaker,” he answered the phone, wondering if it was cheerfulness he heard in his voice.

  “My name is Felicia Stone, and I’m calling from Richmond, Virginia,” said a woman in English on the other end. She spoke with an accent, American and from the South, both rural and sophisticated at the same time. Her voice was deep, and he had the mistaken impression that she might be a jazz singer. But she quickly introduced herself as a homicide detective. She didn’t beat around the bush as she continued, “I think the two of us are investigating the same case.”

  “Excuse me, but you will have to explain that some more,” he said in English that was not as fluent as he’d like.

  And so she explained. She told him about the corpse they had found in a museum dedicated to Edgar Allan Poe, and about a book that had been bound with five-hundred-year-old human skin. And even though Singsaker’s heart was almost pumping out of his chest, he replied calmly, “What makes you certain that these two cases are connected?”

  “We found a photo of your murder victim on the PC belonging to our murder victim,” said Felicia Stone in the straightforward way that he’d already begun to appreciate. “I don’t know what that tells you.”

  “It tells me two things,” he said. “First, that the two cases are connected, as you say. We are most probably looking at one and the same murderer. Second, now that we can demonstrate that our perpetrator has murdered before, we can abandon the notion that we are dealing with a serial killer.”

  He’d expected a bit of puzzlement at the other end of the line. Instead, she said, “You seem to know a good deal about serial killers. I was actually thinking the same thing. A serial killer usually kills victims chosen at random. They can be selected based on various criteria; the killer may have studied them for a while and planned the murders for a long time. But only rarely does a serial killer know any of his victims well. I’ve almost never heard of victims who knew each other across such long distances. There must be some connection that we’re not seeing. A motive that goes beyond the act of murder.”

  “And what do you think this connection might be?”

  “I don’t know, but it has something to do with books, I think.”

  “Books. I’ve never heard of anyone who killed because of books,” said Singsaker.

  “True enough. The motive is probably something else. But I think that the connection between Efrahim Bond and Gunn Brita Dahle is this Byron book I mentioned. And I also think that the killer must have something to do with that book.”

  “So perhaps we are dealing with a serial killer after all. One who is obsessed with an old book bound with human skin, and who kills random people who have anything to do with it. But the question here is what connection Gunn Brita Dahle had to this Byron book.” Singsaker felt that they were talking in circles.

  “Have you ever heard of a man named Broder Lysholm Knudtzon?” Felicia Stone asked.

  He had to ask her to repeat the name several times before he understood what she was saying in her thick accent.

  “Ah, Lysholm Knudtzon,” he finally realized. “Of course I’ve heard of him. There’s a room called the Knudtzon Hall at the Gunnerus Library, where Gunn Brita Dahle worked and was found murdered.”

  “Well, there’s our connection. The Byron book originally came from this Knudtzon’s book collection.”

  “I think you are on to something, but it’s still not much to go on.” Singsaker sat there thinking. So far he’d been playing along just to hear what the Richmond police had discovered. Now it was time for him to give something back. “Have you come across other Norwegians in your investigation?” he asked.

  “Like who?”

  “A Jon Vatten, perhaps?”

  “John Watson? Isn’t he from Sherlock Holmes?”

  He chuckled.

  “No, Jon Vatten,” he said with a distinct Trondheim accent. “But actually his work colleagues do call him Doctor Vatten.”

  “No, he hasn’t shown up in our case.”

  “That’s too bad. Vatten is someone we are looking at here. Very closely, actually. He was at the scene at the time of the murder, he gave unclear and doubtful information when interviewed, and he was previously a suspect in a missing persons case. We are only waiting for the analysis of the biological traces.”

  “Biological traces?”

  “Semen.”

  “Why didn’t you mention this before? That’s an important deviation from our homicide. In ours there was extreme violence but no sign of sexual activity.”

  “And what do you think that means?”

  “I have no idea. That Gunn Brita Dahle was a woman, and that our murderer prefers women to old, dried-up men, perhaps,” said Felicia Stone, but she didn’t laugh.

  “Anyway, the most important thing is Vatten,” he said a bit impatiently. “I suggest that you put all your effort over there into finding out if he has visited the USA recently. Then we will do some investigations here.”

  “No problem. We can check on such things with a few keystrokes.”

  “Stroke away,” he said, getting ready to end the conversation.

  “As a matter of fact,” she said, “I’ll have to get someone else to do the computer work. I’m getting on a plane in three hours. And I’ve got to make it through rush-hour traffic to pick up my suitcase first.”

  “Are you about to leave?” he said with trepidation, as he looked at the clock. It was afternoon in Virginia. But in Trondheim it was almost eleven at night. This had been the longest day of his life.

  “I’m coming to Norway,” she replied. “This case is too big for us to discuss everything we need to know over the phone. We need to compare notes in more detail.”

  “That may be true. But I don’t know how such things are done. Shouldn’t your boss speak with my boss first?”

  “While we’ve been talking, those exalted gentlemen, our bosses, have been e-mailing each other. Everything is already arranged. The proper papers have been signed and faxed over. I’m looking at the printouts now.”

  “My boss is a woman, not a gentleman,” he said.

  “Really? Norway is a land after my own heart,” she chuckled, and for the first time in the course of their conversation she sounded really American.

  “Don’t jump to hasty conclusions,” he said.

  Felicia Stone concluded the call with a snort of laughter that suited her.

  * * *

  When Singsaker put down the phone, his boss was standing in the doorway.

  “You’re going to pick her up at the airport tomorrow,” said Brattberg.

  “What should I do until then?” he asked.

  “We’ll proceed as before. Honestly, it looks like you could use some sleep. The only thing I ask is that you drop by and see Jens Dahle on your way home. We have to find out if his wife has been in Virginia recently.”

  “Fine,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “You won’t hear from me unless something interesting turns up. I think I need more than a normal night’s sleep. A twelve-hour coma should do it.”

  Both of them laughed, though it sounded a bit strained.

  * * *

  He had just fallen asleep when the phone woke him. He sat up with a jolt. He noticed that he’d forgotten to turn off the light, and the magazine Missing had slipped to the floor next to the bed, open to an article about a detective somewhere in eastern Norway. It was an old issue.

  He picked up his cell, pressed the button with the green stripe, and cleared his throat a couple of times before answering. It was Gro Brattberg. He looked at the clock. Quarter past midnight. Only a little over an hour s
ince he spoke with her last.

  “I hope I reached you before you sank into your coma,” she said.

  “I was just about there,” he said.

  “I’m calling to tell you that Knutsen has arranged a search warrant for Vatten’s place. We’re going over there tomorrow morning at eight. You can meet us there.”

  “Great,” he said, annoyed that she hadn’t bothered to tell him this an hour ago.

  “I assume Jens Dahle had nothing of interest to tell you, since I didn’t hear from you,” she went on with poorly concealed zeal.

  He swore to himself. Jens Dahle had told him something interesting. He’d debated whether to call Brattberg before he went to bed, but then made the mistake of lying down before he dialed her number.

  “Actually, I was just about to call you,” he lied. “Jens Dahle was awake and told me that his wife attended a library conference last spring, probably something about old manuscripts. And guess where the conference was held.”

  “Not in Richmond, Virginia, by any chance?”

  “That’s right. At the university in Richmond, in the Boatwright Memorial Library, to be precise.”

  “So we have even more to talk about with our American friend tomorrow.”

  “It seems so. But now you’ll have to excuse me. I’ve got an appointment somewhere in dreamland.”

  “I didn’t think people dreamed when they were in a coma,” Brattberg said with a laugh.

  “Don’t I wish,” he said, and he wasn’t laughing.

  24

  Odd Singsaker hadn’t been alone in dreamland. Siri Holm was there, too. She was naked, and she had talked to him in a deep Southern accent. It had sounded like a long lecture about Edgar Allan Poe. Yet it wasn’t what she said but what she did with him as she talked that he remembered afterward. For the first time in ages his dreams had been sweet, and he had woken up feeling almost refreshed. He could only think that he’d be paying for it in some way during the course of the day.