ANNA, 1994
Ugly.
This was the first word that came to mind as Anna parked the car in the driveway and saw the gaping front door. The black hole in the wall looked like the entrance to a ghost house. The word came to her before she realized that the pane of the door was broken, before she looked for Helgi’s car, before she registered that no lights were burning. She knew that nobody was home, and the door ought to have been closed against the rain and unseasonable storm.
She switched off the ignition and sat watching the house for a moment until she finally persuaded herself to get out.
“You have to go in there. The door wasn’t closed properly. It blew open. That’s all. No reason to panic, Anna.”
Even the broken pane and the long, awl-like splinters of glass in the entrance could be explained; the door had been blown open, smashing it against the wall. The flurry whipped a few loose pages of paper over the floor as she carefully picked her way over the glass and closed the door behind her. The air was rushing through the frame.
“Hello? Helgi?”
Silence. Nothing but wind and darkness. In the kitchen, chairs knocked over. Jars of flour and pasta were shattered, their contents spread over the dinner table, smeared together with marmalade and marinated herring from the fridge.
Anna turned on the light and stood looking at the scene of destruction for a long time. Break-ins were not unusual in Klitmøller, but the summer houses were seldom targeted. And break-ins were rare after the high season, when the more rebellious teenagers in town couldn’t run after the tourist girls any longer. Then all that frustrated teenage sexuality was channeled into drinking yourself into a stupor, and whatever desires couldn’t be numbed by alcohol were sated by thievery and vandalism. But this was . . . unbelievably thorough. Anna picked her way to the range hood by the stove where some wise-guy had perched one of Ella’s ragdolls. A message had been stuck to its belly with a safety pin.
Jesus is coming—look busy.
The doll’s painted pupils and curling eyelashes had been painstakingly scraped off.
Anna took down the doll and tossed it into the trash can, which, miraculously, had been left standing upright.
In the living room the telephone cables had been ripped out of the wall. The line was stone dead—but who should she call? Nothing much had been stolen, she noted. Just a CD-player and a couple of hundred kroner from the petty cash bowl in the kitchen. It was the extent of the destruction that upset her most. Books were ripped out of their shelves and a couple of white porcelain vases had been viciously shattered, their remains sprinkled like snow over the living room floor, as were the shredded pages of her photo albums from the bookcase.
The terrace door had been left wide open and the curtains waved eerily in the cold. She hurried to close the door to her pitiful garden, but stopped dead.
A wooden stake had been driven into the middle of the lawn.
At least this is what it looked like from where she stood. She blinked against the driving rain and went outside with a renewed sense of dread. Neither Ella nor Helgi would dream of hammering a stake into the lawn. It had been her garden ever since they had moved into the house. Not that she was particularly fond of that wind-swept patch of earth. Nothing could grow there. The apple tree she had planted fifteen years ago was no more than a dwarfed and crooked trunk covered in scab, and she had yet to see a single apple blossom bloom. The hedge, which was meant to offer some wind protection to the west, was frayed and sparse, and in her flower beds a couple of razed pansies with yellow leaves and split stalks shuddered in the wind. The only plants she’d managed to save were her potatoes and the sea hollies she’d rescued from the dunes—hardly a victory over Mother Nature.
The wooden stake was a good two yards long and thick as an arm. Fir-wood, if she wasn’t completely mistaken. It still bore its scaly bark. Only the top part had been carefully sharpened with an ax or a large knife. A sticky, dark mass of blood and tufts of grey hair strutted from the light wood, and she recalled what Helgi had said about the neighbor’s cat the day before. That it had been killed by a marten.
But that cat wasn’t killed by a marten, Helgi. It was a band of teenage boys with too much time on their hands and too much alcohol in their systems. That’s all. No hocus pocus. Plain and simple. Primitive human behavior.
And yet, an all too familiar Bible quotation flashed in her head:
. . . when the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come!’ I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine, and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.
She clenched her jaw in grim determination and heaved the stake up out of the sandy ground. Ella was not to see the stake. Nor Helgi.
She didn’t want to talk about it.
Neither about death nor what the stake meant. It was nobody’s business but hers.