Where Monsters Dwell (7 page)

8

Near Trondheim Fjord, September 1528

It was from the
beard-cutter himself that he had learned the art of making vellum. It was tedious work. The dried calfskin was first softened in water, stretched on a frame, and then scraped until it had the proper pliable writing surface. Calf was considered the best, but the beard-cutter also taught him how to use other types of skin to produce writing material with different qualities. As he sat working with this skin, which was definitely not calf, he noticed what an excellent material it was, and he could not help but think back on the first time he had met the beard-cutter.

Trondheim, 1512–14

The boy was holding the cat by the tail, listening to the screeches that were so similar to those of a tiny, hungry baby.

“Crybaby,” he said to the animal, watching it writhe to get loose. The hairs on the cat’s back were standing up. It was trying to scratch him, but he held it at arm’s length.

“You are just a little crybaby.”

It was Nils, the son of Erik the smith, who had told him that cats always land on their feet no matter how you drop them. To see if that was true, he was going to throw the cat in the river. Then it would land softly, and it could swim. He knew that. He did not want to kill the cat. With one hand he gripped its tail, with the other he held the cat’s neck. Then he turned the animal over so its back faced the water below. The distance was at least the height of two men from the edge of the wharf where he was standing, alone in the shadows between two warehouses.

“Don’t worry, it’ll be fine,” he said. And then he let go.

He saw the cat turn in midair, just as Nils had said. Its paws were now pointing straight down, the skin under its front legs spread out, almost as if it had wings. An angel. Then the cat hit the water and disappeared in a swirl of bubbles and foam. When it surfaced, the little head looked even smaller out there in the current, which caught the cat and swept it along. He ran after it but could not keep to the edge of the wharf the whole way. In some places the warehouses stood at the very edge, and he had to run around them. He lost sight of the cat several times, but always managed to locate it again. The little head, the bravely struggling paws. The cat kept itself afloat but was being pulled farther and farther away from him. Where the wharf ended, a path ran along the river toward the fjord. He followed the cat the whole way but could do nothing to save it. All he could do was watch it being swept along by the current. When he reached the mouth of the river, he saw the animal for the last time, before it vanished into the white foam where the seawater met the river. Then the cat was gone. He sat down in the grass by the riverbank. He was seven summers old. He would no longer have the cat to sleep with at night, no one to lie awake with as he listened to the bellowing men who visited his mother in the bed right next to his, the ones who left money to put food on the table. There was no longer anyone to share his food with, or to rub against his leg when he came home after a long day on the streets or in the smithy with Johan, his mother’s friend. The smith never shared his mother’s bed, but he gave the boy work to do on the days when it was busy.

“That was a stupid thing to do,” he said out loud to himself, but he did not cry.

“I saw you,” said a voice behind him. “I saw you in-between the warehouses back in town.”

He gave a start and abruptly turned around. He hated surprises. They made him feel so small. A man with a big, dark beard and clear green eyes stood behind him wearing a blue woolen cloak. Under it he was dressed in fine, clean linen. The clasp on his cloak showed that he had money. The man looked tired, as if that was a constant condition for him.

“That didn’t go the way you thought it would, did it?” said the man.

The boy shook his head slowly, then looked out over the fjord. It was dark today. Maybe it was going to rain.

“You’ll see the cat again in heaven,” said the man.

“Do animals go to heaven?” asked the boy, looking the man in the eye for the first time. He did not usually look men in the eye. Not even the smith. What he really wanted to ask was, Will I go to heaven?

“Animals that are loved do,” said the man. He leaned over and put his hand on the boy’s head.

“Did I love the cat?”

“Didn’t you?”

“I don’t know.” The boy looked out toward the fjord again, at the cloister on the island. He saw it every day from the smith’s window, but it belonged to a different and more peaceful world than his.

“I think you did,” said the man. “And I think you’ve learned something from this. Remember that the way you treat animals says a lot about what sort of man you are.”

The boy understood that the man with the fine cloak regarded him not as a boy, like his mother and the smith did, but as a man. He had waited a long time for someone to realize that. He was a man.

“Come with me,” said the man, “and I’ll buy you a beer.”

*   *   *

The beard-cutter stayed in Trondheim for two winters. He made some attempts to get himself a cabin where he could carry out his work, but he could not find one for a good price, nor could he find a widow to marry. But he was not trying very hard. He had plenty of money after selling a house in Bergen, and could spend his time as he liked. Mostly that meant reading the books at the school, where he got along well with the headmaster, buying beer and food for the boys from the Latin school, and going on fishing trips up the river. He lived with his guild brother, and as time went on, he became better and better friends with the boy’s mother. Gradually more food appeared on the table, and the first autumn he was in the town, the beard-cutter managed to get the boy admitted to the Latin school. His mother no longer had to entertain the little group of craftsmen who had kept them alive until then. After a while they were able to move in with Ingierd Mattsdatter, the widow of Odmund the carpenter, a hot-tempered fellow who people had simply called Odmund the Hammer. Few missed him, least of all Ingierd.

After two years had passed, there were no more books for the beard-cutter to read, either at the school or at Archbishop Erik’s estate, and he began to feel restless. The boy was the first to notice, but his mother mentioned it one evening when the beard-cutter came to supper. The boy was sitting on the bed he shared with his mother, now that she was no longer sharing it with other men. His mother spoke softly, afraid that he might hear, but he heard it anyway.

“Are you leaving soon?” she said.

“I’m afraid so. There’s not much for me to do in this town. There never was.”

“Then why did you stay so long?”

“I don’t know. There were things I had to put behind me. But now I’m ready to move on.”

“I want you to take the boy with you,” she said.

“You can’t mean that,” said the beard-cutter, but the boy could hear from where he was sitting that he was not surprised.

“You can give him what I cannot. The boy has a good head on his shoulders. I’ve always known that, but I’ve never understood him. I can never seem to reach him. It’s as if a little demon lives inside, locking him away from me.” His mother sighed. “Maybe it’s just because he’s a boy.”

“I’m traveling far this time. I’m seeking happiness. But no matter whether I find happiness or misfortune, you will never see the boy again.”

“Then it will have to be happiness,” said his mother.

9

Trondheim, September 2010

Per Ottar Hornemann was
an impulsive boss. Siri Holm had known that the moment he hired her. She had seen the applicant list for the position, and there was no good reason why she should have gotten the job other than that she was young and knew how to charm head librarians pushing seventy.

Still, she stared in astonishment at the pudgy little man with the curly and surprisingly thick gray hair. He sat in his office, glasses perched on the tip of his nose, giving her a sharp glance in an attempt to fool her into believing that he wasn’t as amenable as he actually was. Still, she had never imagined that he would be quite this impulsive.

“But there are plenty of other people who’ve been here much longer than I have, people you know better.”

“That may be, but I’m giving it to you, starting today. You’re right out of school. Statistically that means you will stay here longer than all the rest of us. It’s important not to change the code for the vault too often. That’s why you’ll be in charge of it from now on.”

“How can you tell that I’ll stay here for a long time?” she asked with a sly smile.

“Of course, we can never know anything for certain, but people tend to stay here. For a librarian there’s no better place than the Gunnerus Library. It’s that simple. So now you have an office, and you’ve been given the code to the book vault. It’s time to get to work. I won’t keep you any longer.”

Siri Holm gave Hornemann a flirtatious smile, without knowing whether such things had any effect on him, and she took a look around. The library, particularly the special collections, contained many treasures: first editions of all the great Norwegian authors; antique maps; a heraldic globe; telescopes from the 1700s. A boss who was a bit more pompous than Hornemann might have taken the liberty of decorating his office with some of these things. But not him. He just sat there with his glasses on the end of his nose, in an utterly bare room, and did his best to look stern.

From the boss’s office she went to Jon Vatten’s door and knocked. It took several seconds before he answered and asked her to come in. He was eating lunch and actually smiled when he saw her.

We’re making progress, she thought. Incredible what a little trumpet playing can achieve.

“Guess who was given the second code to the book vault?” she said. “What do you say we open it tonight and make off with the most valuable treasures? A life of luxury in Bermuda awaits.”

“I hear it’s a great place to disappear, both for ships and hidden fortunes,” he said with a laugh. “So, the new girl is entrusted with the code; not atypical of Hornemann, I’m afraid.”

“I wouldn’t mind taking a tour through the book vault. Not a bad idea to find out what’s inside. Since I’ve become its guardian and all, I mean. I’m looking forward to seeing the diary of Johannes the priest. Did you know that I wrote my thesis on it in college, without ever touching it? It’s a strange book.”

“We could go right now,” said Vatten, stuffing the last piece of sandwich into his mouth with an eagerness that was unlike him.

“Gunn Brita, your predecessor, was also quite intrigued by Johannes the priest’s book,” Vatten said, as he punched in the code on the control panel of the book vault, after Siri Holm had done the same. They heard a click from the lock, and he slowly pulled open the door.

A horrible stench washed over them.

“What the hell?” Vatten said.

Siri turned away, holding her nose.

“What the hell?” he repeated. He opened the vault door all the way and took a step inside.

Siri forced herself to look, peering over his back as he leaned forward, clutching his stomach. Inside the vault, in the middle of the floor between the shelves, lay a body. It was clothed from the waist down, but the torso was not only naked, it was without skin. And the head had been chopped off. But she knew at once who it was. She recognized the pants from Saturday. They belonged to Gunn Brita Dahle.

What struck Siri was how unexpectedly slim Gunn Brita looked. The killer had not merely removed the skin, but also the layers of fat to reveal the muscles underneath.

10

Richmond, August 2010

“
Jesus Christ, is that
what was in his stomach?” Felicia Stone stared openmouthed at a tumor the size of a grapefruit, which the forensic pathologist had just cut out of Efrahim Bond’s dead and flayed body.

“Yep. The good Mr. Bond was a very sick man.”

“So if he hadn’t been murdered…” she began hesitantly.

“Then this would have done the job,” he concluded, holding the tumor up to the light of the work lamp and examining it as if it were a crystal ball with the answers to many of life’s riddles. Then he dropped it into a container next to the dissection bench.

“Do you think he knew he had cancer?”

“Impossible to say. He must have had symptoms: constipation, night sweats, things like that, but it’s incredible what people choose to ignore.”

“I don’t know which is worse,” she said with a sigh. “Dying abruptly and brutally like this or being slowly eaten up from inside by cancer.”

“Well, this is what gave him the big headlines.” The pathologist smiled laconically and nodded at the flayed corpse. He was the one who had picked up the body from the Enchanted Garden. Felicia Stone was still trying to remember his name. He was roughly her age and had worked in the investigative division about as long as she’d been with homicide. He was good-looking, tall, with dark hair and blue eyes. The type of guy who might make her feel embarrassed, even a bit dizzy and sick to her stomach in that dangerously churning way, if she’d met him in a bar and not on the job. She hadn’t had a lot to do with him for precisely that reason, but she had spoken to him enough times that it was too late to ask him his name without seeming dim-witted. She would have to look him up online when she got a little time to herself. Until then she had to be careful to avoid revealing that she didn’t know his name.

“He certainly did get headlines,” she said, thinking of all the commotion in the past twenty-four hours. The morning had barely started before the case had been snatched up by the national press; it had been the top story for several hours on Fox News and the biggest Web sites. The bloggers had immediately started writing about the latest serial killer in the States, despite the fact that there hadn’t been a similar murder anywhere else. Loads of theories had already been presented. Most of them naturally drew connections to Edgar Allan Poe’s literary world, but also discussed as possible sources of inspiration for the murderer were American Indian ritual killings, Roman execution methods, and animal slaughter. The press conference at police headquarters didn’t seem to put a damper on the public imagination. And this in spite of the fact that both the police chief, Ottis Toole, District Attorney Henry Lucas, and investigative team leader Elijah Morris did their best to present the murder as an isolated event that would be investigated the same as any other homicide case in the city.