H01 - The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  THE BUS STOPPED AND LET me off in the rain on a deserted country road on the Uppland plain. I’ve never liked Uppland, and yet as a child I always dreamed of it. I imagined that the big Uppland towns, despite the inhospitable landscape around them, would welcome an odd sort like me, in contrast to rolling, attractive Södermanland, with its cookie-cutter little working-class towns and narrow-minded inhabitants.

  I made my way across the road and onto the small gravel lane leading up to the farm. The November darkness enclosed me in its wet, ice-cold embrace, and I knew that I was invisible from the illuminated windows in the main building. The wind howled in the treetops, but nothing can frighten me now. Now I was the one you should be afraid of, and I went ahead with undisturbed calm, past a few hedges and a small patch of forest.

  There was soft light from the stable, but no sounds of anyone inside. Some dogs were barking somewhere in the vicinity, but that did not bother me. I sneaked around the house, and through the beautiful transom windows I could see large furnished rooms, with warm colors and wall panels and wooden furniture. The upper floor was dark, and on the ground floor a solitary woman was sitting in a large, modern kitchen with a country touch, doing a crossword puzzle. Something was boiling on the stove and a bottle of wine was already opened. The aroma of meat and spices forced its way into the autumn chill outside the kitchen window, and suddenly I felt hungry.

  I took careful hold of the door handle and discovered it was locked. Even though the moment of surprise would be lost, I had to ring the doorbell. After a few moments, the door opened and Carina Ahonen looked at me with surprised blue eyes. I cannot maintain that I was struck with amazement, because she was very pretty even as a child, but she looked much younger than the forty-four I knew her to be. What surprised me more was that as soon as she opened her mouth, she lost all the dignity that the pretty face, wavy blonde hair, well-proportioned figure, and proud posture gave her at first glance. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the broad Sörmland accent had been exchanged for a more standard Swedish, marked by a vowel inflection normally associated with upper-middle-class suburbs like Danderyd or Lidingö, she immediately gave a stupid impression. Her gaze looked unsure, while her way of talking betrayed self-righteousness and condescension. In brief, her very appearance played into my hands, and after a few minutes together, I had all the tools I needed to carry out my fourth murder: impassioned hatred and a big carving knife.

  “Who are you?” asked Carina Ahonen, after studying my no doubt out-of-date and definitely drenched appearance for a few moments.

  “Have I come at a bad time? Are you in the middle of dinner?” I asked cunningly.

  “No, I’m waiting for my husband to come home. Did you come on the bus?”

  “Yes, I did,” I answered truthfully. “But no one else got off here. In case you were wondering.”

  “I see,” she sighed, without being able to conceal a certain resignation, and I could tell that so far the circumstances had not thrown any wrenches in the works for me. “So, what do you want?”

  “May I come in?” I asked politely. After a moment’s hesitation she answered, “Sure, be my guest.”

  The door locked behind her and I wriggled out of my jacket and handed it to her imperiously. She looked surprised, and observed me with some skepticism before she took the drenched weatherproof jacket and hung it up.

  “We knew each other a long time ago,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Preschool.”

  She made no effort to escort me from the hall and into the house, so I had to take the first step myself. She followed me into the kitchen and looked suspiciously at me as I pulled out a chair and made myself at home at the long, rustic oak table. On it, besides the crossword and a ballpoint pen, was a rough cutting board and a big knife.

  “What do you mean, preschool?” she asked antagonistically.

  I had a feeling she would have treated me with the same antipathy if I had told her she’d won a million in the lottery. It wasn’t what I said that provoked irritation, but the fact that I was the one saying it. Me—a disgusting person, with an ugly face, so-so body, ridiculous hairdo and out-of-date clothes. I radiate loser, exhale loser, look like a loser. And Carina Ahonen saw that the moment she opened the door. She could sense it before I even opened my mouth. This made me furious.

  “We went to the same preschool. In Katrineholm—Forest Hill.”

  “I don’t remember you.”

  “Do you remember anything at all from preschool?”

  “Sure, but not you.”

  Her way of looking at my clothes and not at my face when she talked further underscored the contempt she felt for me. I could have killed her right then, but that would have been too merciful. I debated with myself about how to continue, but could not come up with anything other than that a little wine would be really nice.

  “Are you offering a glass?” I asked.

  She was surprised, presumably by my pushiness. In any case, she stared at me incredulously for a few moments, after which she shook her head and took a wine glass down from a cabinet, filled it halfway, and placed it in front of me on the table. Then she sat down across from me and took a sip of her own wine.

  “Cheers,” I said, raising the glass before I brought it to my mouth.

  She glared morosely out the window.

  “Why so hostile?” I asked.

  “What the hell do you really want?”

  “I’m just saying that we went to the same preschool. And so I dragged myself out here to the wilderness in the rain, and you can’t so much as spare a smile. Not particularly hospitable, if I may say so.”

  There was a light from the oven door and I realized that was where the good-smelling aroma was coming from. A plan began to sprout in my mind.

  “You weren‘t exactly invited here. Now tell me who you are.”

  From the back pocket of my jeans I pulled out the worn black-and-white photo from 1968, unfolded it, and set it in front of her on the table.

  “This is me,” I said, pointing at myself where I sat tailor fashion on the floor in the front row of children.

  Her face unexpectedly broke into a smile, and it did not take her long to find herself, at the top in the right-hand corner, right next to the teacher.

  “And there’s me,” she said, happy now. “I’m not sure I have this picture.”

  “Do you recognize anyone else?”

  “I recognize her,” she answered, with her finger on the stomach of Ann-Kristin.

  “Dead,” I said, taking a sip of wine.

  “Dead?” asked Carina with some alarm.

  “Ann-Kristin is dead,” I explained.

  “Her name was Ann-Kristin, yes. How is it that she’s dead?”

  “She was strangled in her apartment last week. After first having been tortured. But she was a prostitute, so probably no one really cared that much about it.”

  “Good Lord!” Carina exclaimed, with an uncertain smile on her lips, but her eyes revealed the sensationalism that was aroused inside her.

  She looked at me curiously and I smiled back courteously. I had brought out the worst in her.

  “This one then,” I continued. “Do you recognize him?”

  I was showing her Hans. In the very front in the middle. He was on one knee, grinning toothlessly into the camera. I emptied the wineglass in two quick gulps and Carina, who had thawed out considerably, did not take long to refill while she tried to think of his name.

  “Valdenström, Vallenberg, Vannerberg... His name was Hans Vannerberg, wasn’t it?”

  “Bravo,” I said. “He’s dead, too.”

  “Him, too? It feels awful when people your own age are starting to die, don’t you think?”

  “Not particularly, to be honest. It was worse when they were alive,” I answered dryly.

  “What do you mean by that?” she asked, without waiting for an answer. “So how did he die?”

  “Beaten to death with a k
itchen chair. Nose broken and then ’poof,’ the nasal bone right into the brain.”

  I demonstrated the procedure with my hands wrapped around the legs of a pretend chair.

  “You’re joking... Is it something contagious?”

  “In Miss Ingrid’s kitchen,” I clarified, pointing to our old teacher.

  “No, but stop fooling around now! What happened? Is she dead, too?”

  Schadenfreude glistened in her eyes, and giggling, she poured herself another glass of wine, too.

  “No, she’s still alive.”

  “More, more!” Carina Ahonen cried enthusiastically. “Tell me more! I want to know all the details.”

  The previous ice-cold was now gone, and it occurred to me forty years too late the simplest way to find the way to people’s hearts.

  “Lise-Lott,” I said. “Do you recognize her?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Carina answered, shaking her head. “But wait... Don’t tell me she’s the mother of two in Katrineholm who was drowned in a footbath a few days ago!”

  “Bingo,” I said.

  She suddenly turned her eyes to me with an inquisitive, slightly guarded look.

  “How do you know all this?” she asked carefully. “Are you a police officer or something? Is that why you’re here?”

  “No, I’m not a police officer,” I answered. “I know all this, because I’m the one who killed them.”

  She stared skeptically at me for a few moments and then suddenly she started to laugh. Imagine that a person who takes so long to give me the slightest smile suddenly just laughs at everything I say!

  “You joker,” she clucked, giving me a friendly thump on the back.

  Quick as a lizard I grabbed hold of her wrist, stood up, and pulled her arm up behind her back in what is known as a shoulder lock (thanks again, Hans, for the good advice). She let out a scream and I reached quickly for the kitchen knife on the cutting board. With the knife against her throat I was able to shove her over to the refrigerator. Its mirrored door was exactly what I needed.

  “You still don’t remember me?” I asked threateningly.

  “No, I... Well, maybe...”

  “That’s what’s so funny. Imagine if you’d recognized me. Imagine if, at some point, you’d thought about how things turned out for that poor child you constantly tormented. Then maybe this evening would have ended differently.”

  She was breathing heavily now and her body suddenly started to shake, as if she had the chills. Her voice had become shrill, on the border of screeching.

  “I did not torment you! I never hit you!”

  “There are many ways to torment the life out of a small child. You chose the simplest. You led the audience, the cheering section. Without your encouraging shouts and your scornful smiles, the terror would not have had a breeding ground. You weren’t the one holding the axe, but you were the one who decided who would be beheaded. You were the one who set the pace and provided the tone, what was right and what was wrong. You were the one who decided that I was the ugliest and most disgusting little kid who ever set foot on this earth, and that mark could never be washed away, Carina. That’s how it works in a little town like Katrineholm. You’ve barely taken your first steps before a sugary-sweet, little power abuser like you shows up and puts you at the bottom of the social status ladder. If you ever dare try to climb up a rung, you’re immediately kicked down by the lackeys on the next rung above you, and at the very top there you sit directing, out of everyone’s reach. You could have let me be. If you didn’t like me you could have been content with that. But you just had to spread your venom and let everyone know what a miserable specimen I was. You had to enhance your own excellence by showing the other children my—just my—imperfection. And why I was the chosen one I still don’t understand to this day. I don’t really know who I am, either—or who I could have been, if you and your ilk hadn’t crushed the little me that once was sprouting in a soft little innocent child’s body. And you destroyed it, you beat it black and blue and you punched holes in it and made it hard and rough. You bent its straight back and turned my expectant eyes down toward the asphalt. You not only destroyed my childhood, you took my whole life from me. What you did then—what you did, Carina—was to destroy a person’s life. You sentenced me to a life without friends, a life without pleasure, a life in complete isolation. That is a serious act, don’t you get it? Neither one of us has a life to look forward to, now. What separates us is that you have a life to look back on, while I have nothing. All because of you.”

  She was staring at me in the mirror with big, wide-open, blue eyes, and I felt her pulse pounding in her wrist. I was struck by a sudden desire to disfigure the beautiful woman before I killed her.

  “I... I realize now how wrong I was,” she tried ingratiatingly.

  “Unfortunately, it’s a little too late to wake up now,” I said, as I let go of her arm and instead took a firm grip on the blonde hair that was billowing over her shoulders.

  I sawed through the hair on the back of her head with the carving knife, and when I was done, and her head was hanging forward as the last strand of hair was removed from her scalp, I was quickly back with the knife against her throat. The sharp blade paralyzed her and she did not dare move. Panting rapidly, she looked at the mirror image of herself with tear-filled eyes.

  “What can I do?” she sobbed in desperation.

  “It’s too late to do anything now. I do and you feel. How ugly you’ve become,” I smiled, but she did not reply. “What’s in the oven?”

  “A moose steak,” she answered, and the tears running down her face left black marks of mascara on her cheeks.

  “A moose steak? Oh, thanks! And to think how hungry I’m feeling. Shall we take a look at the steak?”

  I shoved her ahead of me over to the oven.

  “Open the oven now.”

  She carefully cracked open the oven door and let the steam issue out from the narrow opening before she opened it all the way. In the oven was a long pan on a grill at chest height, and I forced her head into the oven with brute force. The edge of the long pan struck her nose and cheeks, and the oven grill ended up on her chin. It sizzled as the hot metal burned the thin, sensitive skin on her face, but the unpleasant sound was quickly smothered by a frightful howl that made the windowpanes in the kitchen rattle. She managed to get her head out of the oven from pure reflex, but in her shaken condition, and in the increasing pain from the burns, she could do nothing but hysterically stamp her feet, with her hands in front of her mangled face, screaming out her torment.

  I took a step back and witnessed the drama in fascination for a few moments. Then, when I approached her with the knife in my hand, she simply struck wildly around her, without seeming to care about the consequences. She forced me to cut her on the forearm, and when she noticed she was bleeding, she calmed down a little. I put my arm around her throat and once again dragged the wriggling creature to the refrigerator’s mirrored door. I forced her to look at her disfigured face, and she wept in desperation at the sight of the two broad, parallel burn marks.

  “That wasn’t pretty,” I said in a smooth voice. “Not pretty at all. You do realize you are an ugly person, don’t you?”

  For a few moments of indecision, I seriously considered leaving her like that, just for the joy of knowing she would be a very unhappy, and presumably also terrified, person for the rest of her life. Finally, however, I listened to reason and decided to go on with my work.

  “Imagine having to live with such a handicap,” I said philosophically. “Having to put up with people’s curious, maybe even disgusted, looks every time you set foot outside your door. Hear their giggling, see in the corner of your eye how they can’t keep themselves from turning around after you. Feel how they point and whisper behind your back. And the children, not to mention the innocent children, how they openly discuss and question your appearance. No, listen, Carina, that’s not something you would wish on your worst enemy. Or what
do you say?”

  Carina Ahonen said nothing, simply stood shaking and gasping for air, with her hands before her eyes. The burns were too painful to be touched.

  “It’s better that we end this now, so I can eat. You can be grateful, Carina, that the torment was so brief.”

  Without hesitating, I quickly made a deep cut with the carving knife across her throat. A fountain of blood sprayed in an arching, deep-red pattern of drops over our mirror image on the refrigerator, and she sank lifeless down on the oak parquet floor. Finally, it was quiet and peaceful.

  I presume that I wasn’t fully responsible for my actions, but I went over to the stove and checked with a fork whether the potatoes were done. They were, so I put some potatoes on a plate, took the marvelously sweet-smelling moose steak out of the oven, and carved a big, juicy, pink slice. In the refrigerator I found a fresh salad to go with it, and then I sat down at the kitchen table, drank what was left of the wine, and enjoyed Carina Ahonen’s planned Friday dinner. Without so much as casting a glance at the recently so lively person on the kitchen floor.

  I now feel, to an even greater degree than before, that basically I am not a physical person. In reality, I’m not at all suited for physical activity, which I've always known, and I’m not a particularly suitable executioner either. The murder of Hans was in many ways a disappointment, but still the beginning of something big. The murder of Ann-Kristin might well be considered the high point of my career, and that’s the murder I prefer to think back on. But afterward, I felt very strongly that I couldn’t bear to carry on with that sort of thing any more. Killing is one thing, torture another. It’s too physical somehow. Chinese water torture might be something, but I’m impatient, too. I want results, and besides, there’s always the risk that someone will show up.

  Whatever, the murder of Lise-Lott was a real flop. The stupid cow didn’t understand a thing and you couldn’t really expect her to, either. She did get to suffer quite a while, but I doubt whether she even knew who I was. And now—now here I sit with blood on my hands again. This time in both the figurative and literal sense.