Grälmakar Löfberg was not really his name; it was just something he called himself. He was being buffeted by a gusty wind coming from the street, so he stopped. It was an unreliable wind, constantly shifting. Through the trees he could see the Ludvig Daaes Gate as snowflakes blew past the streetlights like swarms of soundless insects in the night. The cars had disappeared, leaving Trondheim in silence. The gusts slowly subsided, and few thoughts crossed his mind. Only the memory of a dream. It was weeks ago that he’d dreamed of anything at all, but old dreams still whirled in his thoughts like withered leaves. He’d met the devil over on Nonnegata, right outside the kiosk where he went every day to buy his cigarettes.
Satan was a polite man with a black coat and a hollow gaze.
“Have you finally come to get me?” Löfberg asked.
“No,” said the devil gloomily. “You’ve been here a long time.”
When he asked what that meant, he received no reply. Only after awaking did he understand the meaning: Hell is having to keep doing what you’ve always done.
Slowly he allowed this phantom of a dream to disappear into the dark of night. He took the music box out of his pocket and wound it up. The music began as soon as he let go of the key. He turned around, took two steps back, and set the music box on top of her. That was when he heard footsteps on the deserted street.
It felt like the wind was following her, poking her in the back the whole way, as if the icy gusts were trying to hurry her through her nightly walk, back to the bed where she should have been with her snoring husband. For once, Evy Saupstad hadn’t fallen asleep before he started his loud sawing, and then it was too late. Now she was paying for how soundly she’d slept on the plane home from Tenerife. She envied her husband, who had waited until they got home to sleep. At the corner of Ludvig Daaes Gate and Bernhard Getz’ Gate, in the Rosenborg district where she lived, she stopped to let her dog do his business.
She looked at her watch. It was three-thirty in the morning. She was glad she was still on vacation for a few days yet, so she could sleep late.
Her side of the street was lined with trees. This green oasis in the neighborhood was a wooded hill that rose steeply for several hundred yards.
She was about to straighten up when she heard the melody. It came from somewhere among the trees. A slow, rolling tune, bright and clear. She walked toward the music.
She was less than ten steps from the street when she saw something in the pale shimmer that filtered through the bare wintry branches of the trees. It was a lovely little thing, a cylinder-shaped box with a ballerina twirling on the lid as the music played. The ballerina seemed to be trying to shake off the snow that had settled on her hair. As soon as Evy Saupstad caught sight of the music box, it abruptly stopped. Silence descended over the trees, and she thought about how quiet it was at this time of night. The lonely hours. If someone really wanted to be alone in a city like Trondheim, this was the time to go outside.
The dog started barking, and that was when she saw it. The music box was not sitting on the ground. The snow had spread a white blanket over the figure underneath, a lifeless human body. As she moved closer, she saw that the snow was red near the neck. Blood had gushed out of the slit throat and congealed in the cold. A metallic smell wafted past her nose, then disappeared with the snowflakes and the wind gusting past.
Evy couldn’t help gasping. She looked around anxiously. Footprints led away from the corpse and into the woods before veering toward the entrance to a motorcycle club. The driveway to the club was approximately fifty yards farther along Ludvig Daaes Gate, toward Rosenborg School. The footprints were starting to disappear under the snow. She turned on her heel and ran the few yards out of the woods. The dog stopped barking as soon as they reached the street. The little creature made her feel safer, even though she realized that a one-year-old miniature dachshund would be no match for the monster who was responsible for what she’d just seen.
Then she pulled out her cell phone and called the police.
He headed toward the bomb shelter. He could see her from where he was standing. She leaned down to pet the dog, and fortunately it stopped barking. He couldn’t stand the barking. It made his head spin. He took a deep breath.
The woman took a cell phone out of her pocket and tapped in a number.
He stood and watched as she talked. He could hear the shrill tone of her voice but not the words she said. His footprints were starting to be erased from the ground, but the body had been found before it vanished completely under the mantle of white. Did it matter? He took a roundabout way back to the car and then drove home, to the yellowish brown ceiling over the bed and the hours of sleepless agitation.