It had begun to rain again.
Not in warm thunder showers, but ice-cold, horizontal cascades that beat the leaves of the trees to the ground and made the air we were breathing raw and cold. The water soaked through my jacket and ran into Anders’s too-wide rubber boots. Farther on, Pinderup came into view through the blanket of rain. The low houses lay pressed under the gray sky, the commune with its curtains drawn and the driveway and front yard overgrown with thistles, field scabious and yellow bedstraw around the improvised campfire.
The blue Volkswagen T2 was still parked outside, but there were no signs of anyone by sight or sound. No lights in the windows.
I approached carefully, stepping into the front yard and wading through the damp, knee-high weeds. Garden snails, chocolate-colored with hard-candy striped shells in yellow and black and orange, crawled over the house’s black-tarred plinth with soft, semitransparent bodies and eyes hovering on stalks. Toads the size of my little fingernail sat along the wall, and I had to step carefully not to crush any of them under my heavy boots. At one of the covered windows, I leaned in and tried to look through the narrow slit in the curtain. It was dark inside, but then I remembered it was also Monday—they might be at work, if they did such a thing. Karsten and the little stocky guy and the two women.
The other houses had dark, shiny windows under the wet sky, too, so I followed the driveway around behind the farmhouse to a narrow, chaotic patch of land. A bathtub with a hole sat with its bottom in the air, and down by the wall were a pair of rusty Dutch hoes and a spade with a broken shaft that had fallen into an ankle-deep puddle. In the corner by the stable, somebody had knocked a sandbox together that stank of cat shit. The sand was patterned by the raindrops in the brutal downpour, and the wooden box was filled with yellow grass and dead leaves. A pair of forgotten plastic shovels, a sieve and a faded yellow bucket seemed to have been through a few too many summers. On the uneven cobblestones near the back door stood pots, a stack of plates and a pair of old cart wheels threatening to collapse against the stable wing. A fat black cat sat in the open barn door, staring hatefully out into the rain.
“Hey! Looking for someone?”
I turned around and saw Karsten standing in the doorway to the back hall, leaning against the frame. He looked normal, if it was possible to judge such a thing from his attire. Worn jeans, bare feet and a white turtleneck sweater. His long hair set in an impressive puff, big like a movie star’s.
I cleared my throat. My sense of invincibility had shrunk significantly with the reality and rain.
“I think I forgot my sweatshirt here. It’s a blue Adidas one.”
He squinted at me through the dense rain.
“You were the one who had the bad trip,” he said.
I hesitated. I didn’t really care for the way he was looking at me. His head slightly tilted, awaiting an answer.
“Yes. I just came to get my sweatshirt.”
“Of course,” he said. “I saw it somewhere.” He smiled, and I felt fairly sure it was out of kindness.
“If you come inside, it might be a little easier to talk about everything. I’ve just put some water on the stove. It should only take a few minutes to find your sweatshirt.”
I stayed in the heavy rain and looked from the fat cat to the open door.
“No, I . . . have to go. I’ll get it later.”
“You do? Right now?”
I nodded, starting to walk away with my heart pounding all the way up into my throat.
“Hey, you.” He was on his way through the rain after me. “I know exactly who you are. I’ve seen you with Ellen, too. You know her. Did she send you here?”
I turned around and saw him standing right behind me. He looked strangely hopeful, standing there in his bare feet in the rain. His wild mane was already hanging heavy and wet around his face. Full lips and a sharp chin, dark eyelashes. He wasn’t a big guy—just slender and long-limbed in an almost feminine way, like the members of the Rolling Stones.
“You’re not afraid of me, are you?”
I looked down at my rubber boots, which were whitewashed with lime and had cracks in the toes.
“Nope,” I said, trying to sound brazen and indifferent. “I have to—I’m—”
“Have to get back to Ellen?” He tilted his head back and considered me from under the dark eyelashes. “Tell me about her. What she’s doing with the old men.”
His voice was still friendly and normal. Like he’d said something banal about the weather, but there it was again, that corrosive, inquisitive look. Just for a second. Then he smiled and ran a hand over his face.
“Sorry,” he said. “That was a stupid thing to say.”
“I have to go home,” I said in a sure voice.
“Of course you do.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “But damn, at least wait until it stops raining. Anything else’d be crazy. I’ve got some dry clothes that you can borrow, too. Come on. We have important things to talk about.”
“Just leave your boots on.”
He walked ahead of me into the narrow hall, where there was a mountain of shoes in every color and size. Haphazard red children’s shoes with black laces, several pairs of sandals, scratched clogs and rubber boots. And under them dried cakes of mud on the hard, dirty concrete floor.
“Yeah, sorry.” Karsten glanced over his shoulder while striding over the chaos. He lit a cigarette. “There’s just no—it’s the damn kids, too, dragging all this shit in every day. Do you smoke?”
He threw a crunched-up cigarette packet to me and continued on. The kitchen was worse than the hallway. An old door balancing on a pair of sawhorses served as a kitchen countertop. Some creative soul had even tacked a flowered curtain up along the edge so the splintered horses were partially hidden. There was no sink, which explained the stack of dirty plates out in the rain, but it still seemed quite strange. The stove stood freely on the floor, its sticky cord running across the room to a socket by the door into the living room. In the area by the socket where it had once stood, the worm-eaten floorboards were savagely broken.
“Nikolaj and I are tinkering with the kitchen,” said Karsten, tossing out his hand. “The wood is almost pulverized from worms. See? It’s all old shit.”
He bent over, picked up a piece of wood and held it out to me.
I stared at the crumbling beam without knowing what to say.
“Soft as old cookies.” Karsten pressed with his thumb and index finger, transforming the wood into dust under a little pressure. “It’s bullshit.”
He shoveled mint tea leaves directly into a mug and poured hot water over them, then handed me the cup.
“I don’t think we have milk or sugar, but maybe the ladies will bring some back with them. They’re out doing a grocery run with the boys. Sit down and I’ll find your sweatshirt.”
He pointed with his cigarette toward the sofa in the dark room, then went over to the record player and began flipping through the pile of LPs on the floor.
Crumbs littered the coffee table and a patchwork blanket was thrown over the threadbare sofa to cover its holes. They’d moved the furniture around since I’d last been here, but the smell was the same. Wet and cold and like a summer cottage, as if the house had never been heated.
“Here. This is exactly what we need.”
He put a record on, carefully placed the needle in one of the grooves and began to sway to Joe Cocker’s hoarse vocals in “Something’s Coming On.” He’d apparently forgotten all about my sweatshirt.
“There was something else,” I said, almost having to shout to make myself heard over the music.
He scraped a few crumbs together in a pile on the table, leaned back and threw his feet up. “What is it?”
“Ellen said you had a peeping Tom here. I know the younger brother of the girl who’s disappeared, so I thought maybe you might’ve seen something. Or talked to the police about it?”
“No,” he said, laughing. “I’m not a fan of the system’s henchmen. And I don’t think those things are connected. There’re loads of people who like to spy on others and jerk off in God’s free nature. You should read a few books. Be a little more open and a little less box-shaped. It’d do you some good.”
He got up with a start, left the living room and came back with a pair of velvet trousers and my blue sweatshirt, which he handed me along with a towel.
“I am curious,” he said. “How does Ellen pass the time up there? Long walks with the retard?”
The downpour started again, flailing like heavy gray curtains outside the windows. I took a sip of my tea while I watched him over the edge of the mug. I left the clothes lying there, despite both my pants and T-shirt sticking to my skin and the fact that I was freezing like a dog. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him for as long it would take to pull a sweater over my head. Must be paranoia. I’d heard you could get that after smoking weed.
“I have to go home.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He shook his head, annoyed. “You’ll get there. What do the old folks say to suddenly having a young woman in the house? She’s not screwing either of them, but I know damn well what they’re thinking. Especially the retard. Always standing there, drooling over her.”
I didn’t answer.
“And what about you? What’s your name?”
“Jacob.”
“And how old are you, Jacob?”
“Fifteen.”
“Aha.” He plopped down on the sofa next to me and fished a hand-rolled cigarette out of a crumpled Camel packet on the table. “You could easily pass for seventeen or eighteen, couldn’t you? Muscles and all.”
I sat as though plastered to the sofa, caught in a panic that made me play dumb and dead at the same time while Karsten handed me the packet.
I hesitated, remembering quite vividly my senses putting the world into strange colors and patterns. Marijuana. I was almost sure that’s what it had been, despite Ellen not saying so.
“No, thanks.”
“Come on, have one. I don’t trust people who don’t smoke and drink.”
“I—no, thanks.”
He shrugged, leaned back again and picked a tobacco leaf off his tongue. Tapped his foot to the rhythm of Joe Cocker’s wild, jagged guitar.
“Let me guess,” he said finally. “You love Ellen with all your young, warm-blooded heart. Am I right?”
His words and the teasing smile on his beautiful Mick Jagger lips caused blood to rush to my cheeks.
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of. Women are good at making us love them, and Ellen is one of the best I’ve met. It’s biology, mein Freund. Just like this weed. It works, and everyone loves Ellen. I love Ellen, dammit, even though I really, really hate her. Believe me. I know exactly how you feel. Love hurts.”
He took a long drag of his joint, holding the smoke in for a long while before slowly letting it seep out of his nose.
My entire body felt the discomfort now. My stomach and head and chest.
“Here. Take one. You’ll feel better.”
He pushed the packet of roll-ups back to me. And I took one because I didn’t know what else to do, but I didn’t light it.
“You’re averse to believing me now, because she’s hit you with a hard left. You want to defend her to your last drop of blood. I can see it in you. And I also know why you feel that way.”
He reached out his hand and tousled my hair.
“That beautiful, beautiful body she pretends not to show off, but does anyway. When she wears men’s shirts, you can always see something. It’s unbuttoned all the way down to her breasts, right? And her ass . . . so clear through the soft material of her skirt. First you think it’s by chance, a slapdash peek that you can enjoy in secret. But she’s the one wearing the trousers. Those blue eyes. The little nicknames she bestows on all the guys she meets. What’d she come up with for you?”
I sat completely still with his strange, crystal-clear gaze honed in on me. Then he whistled softly and stared up at the ceiling. He actually looked like he was about to start crying until he smiled instead. A small, crooked grimace that didn’t look like a genuine grin.
“What if there is a man out there killing girls? What about Ellen? Did you get a good look at the peeping Tom?”
He nodded in the direction of the living room window that faced the front yard. “It was in the winter, and it was pitch-black. That was probably why he dared to come so close. Normally he just putters around down by the hedge between us and the neighbor, like a hedgehog.”
“But did you see him?”
“No. Only his back, because he bolted into the woods and I didn’t make it that far. Thought that run-in was enough to scare him.”
I nodded.
“I said all that about Ellen because I want to look after you. Be careful with your heart—it’s hard to be fifteen. Do you know why women hate us, Jacob?”
I shook my head.
“Women hate men because we only want to screw them for twenty years of their lives. They know it and we know it. And they get revenge while they can, by any means they can.”
He went over to the record player again. Put a new record on with music I didn’t know. Acid guitars and a keyboard woven together with a wailing male voice. I somehow managed to make it all the way to the door.
“Is there a woman-murdering monster out there? Is that what your friend says? The boy down at the chicken farm.” He turned to assess my expression.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The police believe she was murdered. By a man. That’s what everyone is saying.”
Karsten nodded.
“People like that should have their damn balls cut off. Isn’t that right, Jacob? We have to take care of our women.”