Where Monsters Dwell (3 page)

It was raining, which made the clapboard houses along Kirkegata shine. It was Saturday, and far too many people and umbrellas were on their way downtown. Vatten took it easy around the curve down Asylbakken, because the hill could be slippery on cold, rainy, fall days. His bicycle was what many would call cutting-edge, the kind that cost three or four months’ wages brand-new. But now it didn’t look so good. He had let it fall into pitiful disrepair. It was rusty, had loose brake cables, holes in the seat, and patched tires.

Once he safely reached Bakklandet, along the river, he sped up. Since nobody was around, he veered through the puddles on purpose, splashing water on both sides. His cuffs got wet underneath his rain pants, and the numbness that he usually had in his calves was replaced by a light prickling. But this modest childish behavior didn’t make him feel wild or free. He felt only half alive, as if something inside him still retained some contact with the outside world.

The cathedral was grayer than its own shadow, like an enormous tombstone in the rain. It made him forget all thoughts that there might still be life in this body of his, only thirty-eight years old. He liked the cathedral, but it was so damned dismal that he seldom looked at it, just rode past through its shadow, focused and breathing hard. Maybe it was a bit far-fetched, but sometimes he thought that the shadow of the cathedral was what got him ready for work.

He liked Saturdays the best. No, actually he liked Sundays the best, though they weren’t actual workdays, just days when he could have the whole library to himself after he finished his Sunday walk. Otherwise he liked Saturdays best, because they were only half days, a sort of transition period with fewer students, fewer questions, fewer coworkers. The office wing was usually deserted, and people never came up to the other wing, into the stacks themselves. There he could sit in peace and read all day if he wanted to. And on some Saturdays he did just that. Yes, that might be the best thing about Saturdays. He wasn’t really working. He was simply inside and could do whatever he liked. Sometimes he stayed only an hour or two, but as a rule he was there for several hours. He had installed a very comfortable chair on the top floor of the library stacks, and once in a while he spent the night.

When he rode across the parking lot to the junior college and along the road between the Science Museum and the Suhm Building, with its exhibits from the Middle Ages, he got the best view of the Gunnerus Library. The building stood stoutly planted in the hillside. The wing where the books were shelved had rust-brown siding, possibly chosen to resemble the calf leather on the spines of books at a distance. The only problem was that no one could see the library from a distance, because it was squeezed in between other buildings. Up close the siding made you think of an abandoned, rusted, factory building. The slightly eerie air of decay and perdition it emanated still managed in an odd way to embody the dignity a library ought to have. It was almost as though you could sense the weight of all the books inside. The part of the building with the brown siding looked like it was sinking a few millimeters into the ground each day. In a hundred years it would presumably be underground, and nobody who worked inside would have noticed a thing. The rest of the building was a combination of siding and glass, and it was this that lent the Gunnerus Library its distinctive character, a peculiar combination of lightness and gravity, age and youth.

He parked his bike in the rack outside. Locked it with two locks, double-checked that they were both secure, and went inside. Veronika, a grad student working on her master’s in archeology, was minding the counter. She smiled at him and he nodded back. As he opened the door to the administration wing, it dawned on him that he probably should have smiled. But he was familiar enough with his own reputation to know that it didn’t matter much whether he did or not.

He took off his rain gear in the cramped cloakroom, which was actually only a coatrack in the corridor. It was important to hang up his jacket and pants slightly apart from each other and make sure that the sleeves and pant legs weren’t twisted. Otherwise the rain gear wouldn’t dry fast enough and would start to smell bad. He took some time doing this, even turning around at the door to his office and going back to check that he hadn’t rolled up the sleeves of his raincoat.

The office wing consisted of a corridor with three small offices on each side. At the end of the corridor was a large room with beige
strié
painting on the walls and an atrocious green linoleum floor that was mopped every day but still looked dirty. A big, heavy table with metal legs stood in the middle of the room, seldom used for anything but holding piles of books or an assortment of coffee cups. From this room doors led into five additional offices. These were larger and brighter, with bigger windows. A sixth door was made of steel and had two combination locks. This was the door into the book vault. Inside were the library’s most valuable manuscripts: vellum fragments from the Middle Ages, prayer books, first editions of Tycho Brahe, Descartes, Holberg, and Newton, things like that. Worth several million.

Vatten’s office, with the control panel, monitors, and surveillance equipment, was at the end of the corridor, before the big room. He stopped and listened. At first he thought he was all alone in the office wing, but now he heard somebody inside the innermost room. He swore to himself. Then he took a step closer to where the sounds were coming from, stopped at the door, and scratched his nose. He took a deep breath, as if getting ready for a dive, took the last step, and went in.

Behind the table inside stood a woman in her midtwenties. She had curly blond hair, green eyes, and almost invisible freckles on her face. Her dress was dark green with a Mexican-inspired pattern over the shoulders. She was holding a steaming cup of coffee, or maybe tea, in one hand. With the other she was leafing through a book in front of her. When Vatten entered the room she looked up and smiled with dangerously intelligent eyes.

He tilted his head to one side, gave her an uncertain smile, and raised a hand, intending to wave in greeting, but the hand ended up in his hair instead. He stood there like that, smoothing his hair. I ought to say something, he thought, looking at the woman. She couldn’t really be called beautiful. If a panel of a thousand Norwegian men were asked, most of them would have given an indifferent shrug. Still, there would have been a few willing to contradict the majority, and he was presumably one of them. He liked her at once. He had seldom seen greener or livelier eyes. Her face was round and a bit asymmetrical. And then there were those freckles that hadn’t quite decided whether they were there or not. He had to say something before the situation grew more embarrassing.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Now she laughed. Apparently she had already gathered that he was unsure of himself and understood that he wasn’t trying to be rude. She could sense such things, he thought, and he wasn’t quite sure he liked that.

“Siri,” she said with a friendly laugh, coming around the table and extending her hand. “Siri Holm.”

Then it dawned on him.

“You’re new here, aren’t you?” he said with something resembling a smile. “Just wondering. We usually don’t allow outsiders into this part of the library. But I’m sure someone must have told you that. So are you here on your own? You’re not starting until Monday, right?”

She looked at him with a slightly amused seriousness.

“Dr. Vatten, I presume?” she said.

“Yes, of course,” he said. “Jon Vatten, head of security.” He was so used to his title that he didn’t react to a stranger using it. Vatten had actually written a doctoral dissertation on Archimedes, yet he worked as a lowly security guard at the university library. He had always considered his title to be an expression of respect, sympathy, and a little Trondheim humor.

“I’ve heard about you,” she said, with a smile that in no way revealed what she might have heard. “You’re not a librarian.”

He didn’t reply, merely stammering, “You can just call me Jon.”

“You look like a librarian,” said Siri Holm. “Of all the people I’ve met here, you’re the one who looks most like a librarian, which is kind of funny, since you’re not.”

Vatten felt dizzy. He looked around for a chair, but there weren’t any around the table. There never were. He felt like turning around and going back to his office and sitting down, but he couldn’t. It would be too brusque, even for him.

“And how does a librarian look?” he asked. He was almost sure he was still stammering.

“It’s not your appearance, it’s the way you move, the way you straightened your hair. Actually, I’m not quite sure what it is.”

She laughed. Her reaction somehow convinced him that he needn’t take what she said seriously, that it was just small talk. They were simply two strangers meeting for the first time. He admired her laughter. He stood there wishing that he could do things like that. Little social masterpieces. But he’d never been good at that sort of thing—not before and not now.

Some of his dizziness disappeared, and he was no longer so eager to get back to his office.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he pulled himself together to say.

“Which question was that?”

All at once the door to one of the offices opened and provided an answer. She wasn’t here alone. Gunn Brita Dahle, the librarian Siri Holm was replacing, entered the room in all her abundance. Had she cut her red hair? Something was different about her today.

“Oh, hi, Jon,” she said, hardly looking at him. She had her nose in some catalog. “I’m bringing Siri up to speed on some of her duties. I had to do it today because everything has already started at Rotvoll.”

“Right, I was just on the way to my office,” he replied, taking a step back. As he turned he felt Siri Holm tap him on the shoulder.

Again she gave a low laugh and said, “I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”

He didn’t answer, just left the room and closed the door behind him. In his office he quickly sat down on his desk chair. He didn’t quite know what to think. Then he straightened the creases in his pants, which were still a bit damp from his bike ride.

Near Trondheim Fjord, 1528

He went ashore on the island of Hitra, several days’ march from Trondheim. It suited him well, since he had been sitting in a boat long enough and yearned to use his legs again. The first part of the journey took him across the island toward a ferry landing, where he would be able to cross over to the mainland. From there he would follow the fjord toward the city. He was in no hurry to get there. In fact, he planned to make a lengthy stop on the way. He would spend the days out in the forest rather than looking for lodging. Not that he doubted that he could find an inn where a graybrother like himself would be treated well. The Lutheran heresy was mostly confined to the gentry in this country, the rich and powerful using it to justify their own avarice. But for the most part, people around here were true believers. Yet what he needed most of all was peace and quiet, free from the polite questions of a good host. When he wasn’t proceeding toward the city farther up the fjord, he wanted to spend time on his work, and nothing else.

He wanted the vellum to be perfect. He still had not scraped it enough. First he needed to build a frame for it.

On the first day, he settled for the night on a ridge with a view toward the dark sea he’d come from. He lit a fire to keep warm. In the leather sack he’d bought in Bergen lay the beard-cutter’s knives. In the firelight he picked up one of them and examined it closely. He imagined it in the hands of the beard-cutter. Those hands that had been so big and coarse yet could do such fine work. He did everything with his hands. Cut, made love, meted out punishment. The monk knew this man’s handiwork well. He knew how the calluses on his fingertips felt. A fatherly pat on the shoulder, a casual touch at the workbench, and the Devil’s claw around his neck. He fell asleep thinking of these things.

The next morning the monk grabbed one of the knives and went into the forest to find four good pieces of wood for the frame. He took his time and ended up with four slim branches from an ash tree, unusually supple for the season. He joined them together, fastening the corners with a solid hemp cord that he had bought in Bergen. Then he tested the frame by pulling and tugging it. When he was satisfied, he began to lash the skin to the frame.

4

Trondheim, September 2010

On the top floor
of the stacks stood Vatten’s comfortable easy chair. Not an expensive item. Vatten had bought it at a flea market. It was upholstered in imitation leather, a bit too round and puffy to win any design prize, but it was extremely comfortable. In his opinion, anybody who ignored unimportant things like fashion and style trends would consider this chair a bargain.

In genuine La-Z-Boy style it could recline, and naturally it had a footrest that popped up when he leaned back. It was the kind of chair he would have scorned five years ago, for reasons he could no longer remember. But now he loved it. Most important, of course, was the placement of the chair. These were surroundings that most recliners were never destined to encounter; it stood between warehouse shelves full of books, artwork, notebooks, and old broadsides—all the words and opinions, truths and lies that gave life to the room. When Vatten spent the night up here, he always had such peculiar dreams. It was also important that the room had a high ceiling, because Vatten suffered from an unusual form of claustrophobia. He had fantasies about being buried alive. He imagined that he would mistakenly be declared dead, and then buried before anyone noticed that he was still breathing. This fantasy of his was based on a specific incident. Once he had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, and his heart had nearly stopped beating. He was almost dead, but only almost. His dread about being buried alive could take on a physical manifestation. Whenever it happened, he would literally feel an unbearable pressure on his lungs, smell fresh earth, and sense the narrow coffin, the blackness of the night, the silence like a lake that was overflowing. All this while he envisioned the air and the grass up above. These fantasies were usually triggered when he found himself in narrow, tight spaces. But never when he was in the book tower.