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 make 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.