Where Monsters Dwell (2 page)

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Before the cock crowed he was out on the streets of Bergen. Hoarfrost covered the turfed roofs, and the puddles left after yesterday’s rain had a thin crust of ice. He cinched his cowl tightly about him and followed the innkeeper’s directions from the night before.

When he arrived and opened the door to the dark room where the beard-cutter tended to his customers, the well-known artisan had just gotten up and was sharpening his knives. It was early. Nobody had yet arrived to have his hair cut, drink a glass of ale, or chat away the morning, as was the custom in places like this. The monk took a step into the room but did not lower his hood.

“I think you must be in the wrong place,” said the beard-cutter. “Here we do no work without payment, and my cupboard is bare, I’m afraid.”

The mendicant monk stood there looking at him from the shadow of his hood. The beard-cutter hadn’t recognized him. Not so strange, perhaps. Many summers and winters had passed, and he was no longer a youth.

“I have come neither for food nor to purchase your services,” said the monk.

The beard-cutter set down the knife he was sharpening on a little table next to a set of other knives meant for various purposes. He was a master with all these knives. For the moment he hardly did anything but trim beards and lance boils. But occasionally he might be called down to the wharves to amputate a gangrenous leg from a seaman. The time for great deeds was past.

Before he retired to this lonely town at the edge of the world, he had been assistant to Master Alessandro, down south in Padua. And his hands were behind many of the great master’s discoveries about the human body. They had spent nights together in secret, bent over the stinking remains of criminals—the beard-cutter with his knives, the master with pen and parchment.

As a young boy, the monk had been forced to lie under the bier, listening and breathing in the smells until he fell asleep and the beard-cutter carried him to bed. The sight of the knives brought back childhood memories: the smell of wood and newly sharpened knives, and of almost suffocating on the stench of rotting human corpses.

“If it isn’t food you want, there must be some other reason why you are here,” said the beard-cutter.

“You’re right,” replied the monk. Then he sprang forward. His fist landed where he intended, and the beard-cutter slumped to the floor. The monk tore off his hood so that the light of dawn coming through a hatch in the wall lit up his face. The beard-cutter stared up at him in confusion.

“May God have mercy on my soul,” he said. “It’s you.”

“I’m afraid it’s too late for a heathen as rotten to the core as you to turn to the Lord,” said the monk.

“You’ve returned from hell. What have you come here for?” It sounded more like a plea than a question.

“I’ve come for your knives,” said the monk. “Better knives cannot be found in all of Christendom.”

2

Richmond, Virginia, August 2010

Life can be a
roller coaster. The first hill, when the cars are dragged up to the top, screeching, is the beginning. After that it’s mostly downhill. At least, that’s how life had been for Efrahim Bond. He’d been waiting a long time for the end, but the coaster had gotten a bit stuck on the last creaking curve heading toward the exit ramp.

How long had he been with the museum? It had to be more than twenty years, because he started here when he was still married and could remember what the kids looked like. Once he had been a promising student of literature, but he got bogged down writing a doctoral dissertation on Herman Melville that he never finished. Goddamn that white whale. So he’d ended up as a far less promising writer. In the decade after college he’d had two hopeless poetry collections published, which everyone including himself had long since forgotten. He also got married and had a couple of kids. Fine children. They had grown up to be fine human beings. Better than he was. He’d lost contact with them long ago.

After he stopped writing he got a job as a teacher at a Catholic school in Richmond, Virginia, but he couldn’t stand the students. So he took on a whole series of other jobs before he finally wound up at the museum. And then his wife left him. So here he sat, in a dusty office that was only cleaned once a week, and then only the floors. He was surrounded by old books. Mostly he just looked out the window. Some days it rained, and other days the sun shone and it got unbearably hot in his office. He had no idea what had happened to the air-conditioning. It definitely wasn’t working the way it should, but he didn’t make much of an effort to find out what the problem was. For a long time he had imagined that this was how it would end. Up until now. Now he was finally onto something big. A free ticket for another ride on the roller coaster.

Until now Efrahim Bond had known only one thing about Norway. There was a little town there called Horten, and in that little town at the edge of the world, annual rock festivals had been held in the seventies. At that festival—could it have been in 1978?—a shivering Bob Marley had sung his tropical laments. It had been a wet and stormy summer day, the way summer days apparently often were in Norway.

He knew about the rain in Horten only because he had once listened to a lot of Bob Marley, enough to want to read a little about him, and in an interview in some magazine he remembered reading that the great reggae singer had complained about the weather and the cold in the middle of summer. He couldn’t remember anything else ever being written about that concert in Horten; just that one complaint about the weather in some magazine.

He once fell into conversation with a visitor to the museum, something he used to do in the old days. The visitor was a Norwegian, and not particularly interested in the museum. He had been dragged there by his wife, who was more intellectual, better-looking, and more social than he was, a wife who would certainly not stay with him for the rest of her life. This Norwegian had been to the concert and was able to tell Efrahim that an organization called something like Red Youth had passed out flyers criticizing Marley, accusing him of being a traitor to his class. They thought that his most recent album, which must have been
Kaya
, was lacking a revolutionary sting, and that the foremost hero of the Third World had been corrupted. What these young upstarts didn’t get was that
Kaya
contained several songs that Bob Marley had written and recorded nearly ten years earlier. Marley always alternated between rebellion and reconciliation in his songs.

This incident summed up all Efrahim knew about Norway and Norwegians, and it really didn’t tell him very much. But several months ago his interest in this cold, long strip of a country had bloomed unexpectedly. In particular, he had started investigating various aspects of Norwegian criminality. The murder rate in the country was so low that he almost thought it could be politically controlled, that they were running some sort of social-democratic planned criminality. In contrast to all other Western countries he knew of, Norway had had only one serial killer, a melancholy nurse with syringes filled with curare and an overdose of mercy.

But that was no longer the case. After he’d compiled the results of his last month’s work, it turned out that peaceful Norway possessed a serial killer of a far bloodier type. Actually, they’d had this killer for a long time without knowing it. He was sitting with the proof right in front of him on the desk. Not only the murderer’s own confession to every single one of the killings, but also organic matter presumably from at least one of the victims. How this material came to be in his museum was a long story, but he was only a few lab tests away from confirmation of his theory.

He ran his fingertips over the rough paper on which the confessions were written. One bloody description after another, all jumbled together, but no longer indecipherable.

There was a knock on the door. Quickly, with an inexplicable feeling of guilt, he opened the top drawer of his desk and shoved the confessions inside, as if they were his own. He closed the drawer and said, “Come in!”

Efrahim had hoped it was the messenger from the university bringing the results of the tests, but it was not. At first he didn’t recognize the person. When he finally did, it dawned on him that he had never seen this person in real life, but only in photographs. Pictures in which the visitor looked friendly. But this was no friendly visit, and it was the person he least wanted to see right now.

“So this is where you sit brooding over your big discovery,” said the visitor with a surprisingly faint accent.

An unpleasant shock passed through Efrahim. How did the visitor know about the discovery? How was it possible? The plan had always been that they would keep this to themselves. How could they have been so careless? At the same time he understood that this was merely small talk. He understood that when he saw the crowbar the visitor held in one hand.

Efrahim Bond had never liked his office. It was much too small. There was such a short distance between the desk and the door that the legs of the desk were always pushing against the small Persian rug that was supposed to give the office some class. It would bunch up on the threshold so that he often tripped over it on his way in or out of the office. He sat so close to the door that anyone standing in the doorway was almost leaning over the desk. In other words, the visitor was one step away from landing a well-aimed swing with the crowbar. Provided the rug didn’t get in the way.

“I took the liberty of closing up the museum for you. You had no appointments, and I thought it would be nice for you to work in peace and quiet.” The tone was relaxed. The visitor was dressed informally in a light wool sweater with a V-neck, loose casual trousers, and deck shoes.

“Peace to work,” Efrahim said hollowly. He glanced at the letter opener in the pen holder on the desk. He evaluated the distance between it and his right hand. How many tenths of a second would it take until the crowbar struck the first blow? Was it enough time to grab the letter opener, which was made of steel and was as sharp as a bayonet, and use it to parry the attack? Stab blindly and hope to get lucky? Maybe escape?

He had never been brave. Had never imagined attacking anyone, much less trying to disarm or even kill somebody who was attacking him. But this might be his only chance. It was no longer a question of courage. With Melville’s white whale, with his writing career, with his wife and kids, there had always been an alternative to courage and strength. There were ways out even though he knew they weren’t good choices. There were ways out for someone who gave up, someone who never bothered to try, someone who was afraid of adversity. But they were ways out that he could live with. Now, however, he was facing a simple choice: act or die.

For a fraction of a second he sat there hesitating. He was thinking about the thrill he’d felt this past month, impatient to reveal his discovery, the imagined press conferences, the book he was going to write that would be published in both Norwegian and English, the guest lectures, the seminars. Finally things would turn around. He had actually considered calling one of his kids to tell him about the whole thing before it came out. He had Bill’s number. It was written in his address book lying next to the pen holder.

Again he glanced at the letter opener. He was sure he grabbed for it with lightning speed, but he wasn’t fast enough. At the same instant the visitor swung the crowbar. It was done with such calm, such concentration, the way baseball players look when they’re shown in slow motion on TV. The blow missed Efrahim, but that was intentional. The crowbar hit the pen holder precisely one inch in front of his fingertips. The pens and the letter opener struck the bookcase to his right, just below the spot where, with a little help, he had made his great discovery a few months ago. There was still a gap in the row of books where the volume with the peculiar leather spine had stood.

“No need to hurry,” said the visitor, still holding the crowbar. “We have all the time in the world.”

3

Trondheim, September 2010

The old wooden house
on Kirkegata in Trondheim was a perfect place to go to the dogs, Vatten had decided, so he refused to move, even though people were constantly urging him to do so—to get some distance from the whole thing. He no longer used all the rooms in the house. From the hallway he could go straight into the kitchen. From there he could continue on to the bedroom and bath upstairs. The rest of the rooms on the ground floor he used only to store newspapers and books. He hadn’t been to the third floor in several months, or was it years? He could hardly remember what it looked like up there. An architect he knew from his school days in Horten had helped him redesign the whole third floor when they moved in. He could remember almost word for word the discussions they’d had about space solutions, windows, and access to sunlight. Just as clearly he saw in his mind’s eye the working drawings and little sketches of details like moldings and cabinet doors. He could even remember the colors of the paint spots he got on his old jogging pants, when he did the final finishing work himself. But that was all he remembered. The way the rooms had looked, the pictures on the walls, the broken LEGOs scattered all over the floor, the view of the cathedral that they had been so intent on showcasing, the telescope at the attic window, the Christmas trees that came and went every year, the dirty diapers, vomit, caresses, and reproaches—in short, the life they had lived up there. Now it lay in utter darkness.

He sat in the kitchen leaning both elbows on the table, warming the morning stiffness from his hands on a coffee cup as he looked at a fly dying on the windowsill. It gave up fluttering its wings sometime after his third cup of coffee. He poured a fourth and sat gazing at the dead insect. When he finished his coffee he carefully picked up the fly and dropped it in the trash. It was almost nine o’clock. Time to get moving and go out.

Out, as always, meant the Gunnerus Library. He never went anywhere but to work and back home, and he always took the same streets. If anyone, such as a colleague, had confronted him about never going anywhere, he might have protested and replied that he went for walks on Sundays. Sometimes he walked through Marine Park and along the riverbank of Nidelva, other times up to Småbergan to the fortress, and maybe even all the way up to Kuhaugen, the way they used to go three, four, or was it five years ago, when they were three. And he would have been right. He did go for walks on Sundays.