He’d walked alone through the storm and had the city all to himself. The dog was inside a plastic bag. It was night. The streets were deserted. It was just him and the dog, whose body was still warm, and the snowflakes melting on his face. As he walked, he realized that from now on, there was only one path to take.
After unpacking the dog and placing him on their doorstep, he went home. Not to his childhood home that he was renting, not back to her, but home to his wife. There he had fallen asleep, and he had finally dreamed again.
The dream took him right back to the doorstep of the Edvardsen house. The dog lay at his feet. A police car was parked in the driveway, but no one had noticed him. He was looking up at the sky. There he saw the man with the hood again. This time he thought he caught a glimpse of the man’s eyes, and in one of them shone a star brighter than any other in the sky. Then he realized who the man was and understood.
Then the man with the violin appeared.
And then the procession with the coffin, but this time he was absolutely sure that it was his father inside.
He stood there bewitched as the murky giants trudged across the sky. The world around him felt like it was falling apart, as if there was nothing more to hold on to or believe in. He was looking at himself from the outside as he watched the procession, and he saw things that he couldn’t explain or describe. New figures were following the coffin. He didn’t know who they were or whom they were mourning. But it didn’t matter. One of them was a dog. All of them were up there in the sky. At the end of the line, behind all the others, were two girls he recognized. One of them was hesitating. She took a step and then paused, as if she’d forgotten what she was doing, and then she moved forward a bit. Blood was running out of her mouth. The other girl, the very last in the line, looked as if she wanted to sing. She opened her mouth. Then she stopped. She stopped under the moon and looked at him. Looked at him and opened her mouth.
Now he was in the bathroom at home, staring at the bottles of sleeping pills. Full bottles. Empty promises.
A thought occurred to him. He’d slept well for two nights recently. Both times after he’d killed. Silje Rolfsen first, now the dog. Did he really need that song? The only time he ever felt calm was after taking a life.
No, he thought. It’s the fly inside my head planting these ideas. It tickled the inside of his skull. There it was, flitting around inside. He was scared that soon it would start buzzing again, and he knew that it wasn’t the dreams he was waiting for. They couldn’t save him from the waking nightmare of the daytime. The lullaby and the young girl’s voice, he thought. Then he would finally have what he longed for.
He went into the living room and looked at the lullaby. It was years ago now that he’d first taken an interest in ballads. It was during that period when his slumber became more sporadic, but he was still able to sleep and to dream. Then he’d discovered the ballad called “The Golden Peace,” tucked away in a box in the Gunnerus Library, and he’d read the promise contained on its title page. When he read the text, he realized that he believed in the promise it made. But a long time passed before he stole it and brought it home to understand how it could be used. That was after sleep had deserted him completely, and he realized what he would have to do, that he couldn’t ask just anyone to sing the tune for him—not Anna, not anyone. He begged for it, just as he’d begged for sleep at night. Nothing comes to the one who begs.
Now the original text sat on the table in front of him. In secret he’d made a number of copies at work, long ago. For a while he’d been obsessed with finding out more about the ballad’s history. But he didn’t dare ask any questions after the first murder, so he’d contacted a genealogy specialist who had advertised her services online. He pretended to be an American searching for an ancestor. In reality he just wanted the genealogist to make inquiries about matters that he couldn’t risk researching himself. But when she replied with a lot of intrusive follow-up questions, he’d finally understood what his dream about the man in the sky was trying to tell him. Stop searching. It didn’t matter who Jon Blund was. The history of the ballad was of no consequence. The ballad meant sleep. It had to be sung properly, as if it were a matter of life and death, as if it were all that existed, as if it had no past. Good Lord! How he longed for sleep! To sleep, perchance to dream. Because when the song made him fall asleep, he could escape from this mortal sphere, and the dreams that came to him would finally give him peace.
He went into Anna’s room and kissed her on the forehead.
“Isn’t it cold in here?” he whispered, more to himself since he didn’t want to wake her when she was sleeping so soundly. They no longer slept in the same room. She kept the temperature much too low for him. She slept with the window open all winter long and refused to turn up the heat. Suddenly, he had an impish impulse. He tiptoed over to the heater and turned it up full blast. Maybe he was being childish, but it was freezing in here, damn it! He left the window open.
Then he left the house. Outside he shoveled the driveway. He was meticulous about tossing all the snow up onto the big pile that he’d made in the yard behind the garage.
After the job was done, he drove back to the house in town.
To her.