The little boy thought the new place was weird, and it took time before he grew used to it, but it got better over time. They did not have quite so many books here, but the walls were thicker, so he couldn’t hear people talking about him at night, and the lady who was in charge was also quite nice. Helene. She did not look at him strangely, like people had done in the other places. She treated him like just another young person living here, because there were no small children in this home, not that it mattered. He preferred his own company anyway.
There were seven teenagers, but only one boy, Mats, and he really liked Mats. Mats reminded him a little of his mum, always talking about the terrible state of the world, and how sick people were in their heads. Mats also liked putting on make-up, not quite like Mum: he put black around his eyes, and he painted his nails with black nail polish. Mats liked everything black. He only ever wore black clothes and had posters on his walls of people playing in bands; they, too, were dressed in black, with white make-up on their faces, and bracelets with spikes. Metal. That was their music. The young boy did not say very much; he would mostly listen while Mats played music in his bedroom while he lectured him. There were many different types of metal. There was speed metal, death metal and, Mats’s personal favourite, black metal. He did not think much of the music – too much howling – but he liked the stories, especially the ones about black metal. About bands sacrificing goats and having naked people crucified on stage, and lyrics about Satan and death.
When the boy had been there about a year, he felt almost at home. It was not like living with his mum, of course not, yet this place was better than the other one. They had greenhouses and he learned how to look after plants and flowers, and he liked the lessons, too; although he was younger than the other students, he was the cleverest and his teachers would often take him aside after class.
Have you finished this already?
I think we’re going to have to get you some new books.
He liked all the subjects: English, Norwegian, maths, geography; every time he opened a new book it was like encountering a new world, and he could not get enough of it. The boy was especially fond of Rolf, one of the teachers there, the one who praised him the most. Rolf gave him assignments none of the other children got. He would smile broadly every time he completed them. It was Rolf who made sure he got his own laptop – not everyone had one – and for a while he could barely sleep. It was almost as if he did not need sleep, because there was so much to learn. He liked staying up all night surrounded by books and with his laptop, and he could hardly wait until he was given another assignment.
But, mostly, he liked spending time with Mats. He tried keeping clear of the girls as best he could. He was sure they were exactly like his mum had warned him girls were, smiling on the outside but dishonest and rotten on the inside, so it was best to keep his distance. Mats did not like girls either. In fact, Mats liked nothing except for metal. He loathed books, unless they were about rituals and blood and Satan and how to bring people back from the dead.
‘Helene is a moron,’ Mats had said to him one evening in his bedroom, but the boy thought differently.
He regarded Helene as one of the nicest people he had met since he was taken away from his mum, but he said nothing. He did not want to fall out with Mats, in case Mats would not let him come to his room again.
‘But her brother, he’s cool.’
‘Henrik? The one with the shop?’
‘Yes.’ Mats had smiled.
‘Why is he cool?’
‘Did you know that they used to belong to a sect?’
‘No,’ the boy said, not entirely sure he knew what a sect was, but Mats continued to smile, so it was probably a good thing.
‘In Australia,’ Mats went on. ‘When they were kids. A sect called The Family. They experimented on the kids. Made them think that a woman called Ann was their mum. They had to wear the same clothes and have their hair the same way. They were stuffed full of drugs – Anatensol, Haloperidol, Tofranil. Even LSD. Imagine that? Kids getting high on LSD while being locked in small, dark rooms all on their own.’
The boy, who was now becoming a teenager, did not know what those names meant, but Mats was an expert on medication; he had to take pills every day, though he did not always do so, so there was no doubt that he knew what he was talking about.
‘They totally freaked out. It messed with their heads.’ Mats smiled. ‘Especially the brother, Henrik. He believed he was an owl.’
‘An owl?’
‘The bird of death.’
The boy was spellbound as Mats spoke.
About how Henrik, the brother with the shop, who seemed like a normal person, used to glue feathers to his body and perform rituals in a hideout by the fence, killing birds in order to make people come back from the dead.
‘It’s a long time ago, but I’m telling you it’s the truth. I hear he’s normal now, but for a while he was completely wacko. Just like you.’
‘Like me?’
He had not understood what Mats had said.
‘Yeah, like you. I mean, hello? Locked up with your mum in that house your whole life, never seeing other people? Living with a crazy bitch like her? We’re so alike, you and I. You may look like a dimwit, but in your mind you’re a real sicko, and I like that. Screw normality. An owl, I mean … He glued feathers to his body – how cool is that?’
The boy had not felt much when Mats took him out on the moors and showed him how to make people come back from the dead. They had taken a small bird from its nest and Mats had strangled it with a shoelace. Then they had placed it in a pentagram of candles while Mats read aloud strange words from one of his books.
He had not felt very much afterwards either.
When he had killed Mats.
With a knife he had stolen from the kitchen. His reaction was more one of curiosity, the way the black kohl eyes stared up at him as the blood spilled across the dark ground.
Mats had tried to speak, but he had not been able to, just his big eyes staring up at the boy until he finally stopped moving.
‘We don’t talk about Mum like that.’
No emotion. Just vague curiosity. The air had stopped coming out of Mats’s mouth. His eyes did not close, although he was no longer alive. Death. A bit of a let-down, really.
He didn’t like to look at the bird, though.
He had carried it carefully through the woods after rolling Mats into a bog and watching as the body disappeared into the black soil, and then he had buried the bird in a beautiful place with flowers and sunlight spilling through the trees. He had made a crucifix from sticks – not an upside-down one, like those he had seen on the posters in Mats’s bedroom, but an ordinary crucifix like the ones you saw in cemeteries – and, later that night, as he crawled under his duvet, he had felt the weight of disappointment. Because it had not worked.
He had had the same feeling a few years later.
He was in his mid-teens by then, and his teachers still praised him. Rolf was no longer there, but there were others, and they also gave him books the other teenagers could not read. He had got himself a moped and was able to drive himself anywhere he wanted to go. He had driven back to the house, of course. Back to his mum. The house had been smelly, the windows broken, and animals seemed to have been living there, so he had started to tidy up. When he was not in the classroom, or tending to the plants, he would get on his moped and, after several months, the house was starting to look nice again.
Same feeling. The bird must have been too small an animal, so he chose a cat the next time. He copied what Mats had done with the candles and the words, but still she had not come back. Then he tried with a dog but that had not worked either.
The owl. The bird of death.
He had bought glue from a shop and stolen feathers from a nearby farm where the Nurseries normally bought their eggs, from the cages where the laying hens lived. He had smeared himself with the glue, stuck the feathers on to his skin, arranged the dog’s paws the way Mats had said they needed to be, at certain points in the pentagram based on sketches in his books, but it had not worked either.
That night, after the dog, he had not felt well. He had lain in his bed, unable to sleep. The dog had had nice eyes. Just like the cat. The boy continued to stare at the ceiling, and then he made up his mind. Animals – it was not their fault. His mum had been right. People were rotten. But not animals. They just lived in nature. You had to take care of animals. They had never hurt anyone.
It would have to be a person.
In order for it to work.
A dead ringer.
For his mum.