S. Gazan - The Dinosaur Feather

“He’s just lying there… I think he’s dead. He looks dreadful. They’re coming, emergency service said, they’re coming right away; they said I wasn’t to leave him, but I can’t look at him. His tongue… it’s his tongue.” Anna stepped into the corridor and joined the trio, who started moving away from her before she reached them. They were running now. Anna started running too, and ten seconds later they stopped in front of Helland’s open door.

For a moment they all froze. Professor Helland was lying in his recliner. He was still wearing the gray trousers that Anna had seen only minutes earlier through the gap in the door when she arrived. He slumped slightly, his arms hung rigid to either side, and his eyes were wide open. In his lap, as though he had been reading it, lay Anna’s dissertation. There was blood on it. Then she noticed his tongue.

It was lying on his chest. One end of it looked like an ordinary rough, flesh-colored tongue, the other was a severed, bloody limb, elongated and shredded like prepared tenderloin. Johannes was standing behind them, whimpering, and Anna, Professor Ewald, and Professor Jørgensen reacted simultaneously by retreating to the corridor.

“Jesus Christ!”

They had arranged to meet to discuss their paper, Johannes stammered, his hands and eyes fluttering. “I was on time,” he said. Helland had failed to answer the door, so he had pushed it open, and there was Helland, rattling, his tongue had fallen out of his mouth, that was how it had looked, as though it had let go of Helland’s mouth at that very moment and dropped down onto his chest. Johannes had grabbed him, only the whites of Helland’s eyes were showing; Johannes had panicked, run to the back office and called 911.

Professor Jørgensen went to the men’s room across from Helland’s office and threw up.

“We have to go back inside,” Anna said. “What if he’s still alive? What’s if he’s not dead yet? We have to help him.”

“I’ll go,” Professor Ewald declared.

“We mustn’t touch anything,” Johannes called out. “They told me not to.”

“Calm down, Johannes,” Anna said. She felt dizzy. Professor Jørgensen emerged from the men’s room white as a sheet. Then they heard the sound of the approaching emergency vehicles.

“Bloody hell,” Professor Jørgensen said, rubbing one eye with the palm of his hand.

The emergency vehicles were close now, and soon they heard people thunder up the stairs. Two uniformed police officers and an ambulance doctor arrived; the doctor disappeared immediately into Helland’s office and thirty seconds later another pair police officers arrived. One of the officers entered Helland’s office and the other three started asking questions. Professor Jørgensen and Professor Ewald talked over each other and Anna fixed her eyes on a button on the floor. The two professors disappeared down the corridor with one of the officers, and Anna stared at the button until a warm spot on her head told her Johannes was looking at her.

“Right, we had better have a chat,” a police officer said to Anna and Johannes. They spoke for five minutes. Johannes repeated what he had already said, and Anna explained who she was and said she had seen Helland’s trousers through the gap in the door as she passed on her way to her office, that she had heard agitated voices coming from inside, and yes, it might just have been one agitated voice, and no, she hadn’t heard exactly what had been said. Johannes kept staring at her. Anna tentatively held out her hand to see if it was trembling. It was.

The doctor emerged in the doorway and quietly briefed the two police officers, who nodded. One officer took Anna and Johannes a little farther down the corridor, where he told them to sit down.

“Please wait here. We’ll be a few minutes,” he said and returned to Professor Helland’s door. Anna watched as the two officers cordoned off the entrance to Helland’s office and a section of the corridor with red-and-white police tape.

More police officers arrived, uniform and plain clothes. Two of the plain-clothes officers put on thin, white boiler suits and face masks and disappeared into Helland’s office. A tall man came over to Anna and Johannes and introduced himself as Superintendent Søren Marhauge. He had brown eyes, freckles, and short hair, and he looked kindly into Anna’s eyes.

At Anna’s suggestion they went to the small library, which lay between Professor Jørgensen’s and Helland’s laboratories. Søren Marhauge had a soft voice with a strange, slow drawl, as though he struggled to articulate his thoughts. Anna grew impatient. She thought he asked her the same question over and over, and by the time there was a knock on the door twenty minutes later, she had nicknamed him the World’s Most Irritating Detective. An officer poked his head around the door, whispered a message, and the meeting was over. The World’s Most Irritating Detective disappeared down the corridor and Anna returned to her study. The corridor was teeming with police. She groaned to herself. In two weeks exactly she would defend her dissertation which, at this very moment, lay in Professor Helland’s office, soaked in blood.

It was early Monday morning, October 8. Søren Marhauge was driving to Copenhagen, his car right behind a red Honda. He was Denmark’s youngest police superintendent, based at Copenhagen’s Police Department A, Station 3 in Bellahøj. It was well known that Søren had risen quickly through the ranks because he could “knit backward” as he called it. He possessed an extraordinary eye for the true nature of things, and many of the most spectacular conclusions reached in Department A had been achieved by Søren. At the age of thirty he had been promoted to superintendent. That was seven years ago.

Søren was in a hurry, so he overtook the Honda. He was late because he had stopped in Vangede to have breakfast with Vibe. Vibe and Søren had dated for seventeen years, but three years ago they’d split up. They had lived together in Nørrebro in Copenhagen, but Søren now lived in a house in Humlebæk, north of the city. Vibe had since married and lived with her husband in a house by Nymosen in the suburb of Vangede.

When they were still a couple, Vibe and Søren had done everything together. Picked strawberries, taken the train together all through Europe, traveled to India, shared student housing, and opened a totally unnecessary joint bank account. They had even worn matching rings. In those seventeen years it had never once crossed Søren’s mind that Vibe might not be the right girl for him. Vibe was his girl. The end. They had met at a high school dance, their teenage romance continued into adulthood, and no one ever questioned it, least of all Søren.

Then one morning Vibe woke up wanting to have a baby. Having children wasn’t something they had ever really discussed, and when Vibe first brought it up Søren didn’t take much notice. But the genie was out of the bottle. Vibe’s biological clock had started ticking and soon the putative child became a sore point. Søren didn’t want children. He explained why: he had no parental urges at all. He thought that in itself was a good enough reason. Vibe began screaming at him. Vibe, who had been good-natured and sweet all through their time together, refused to accept his ridiculous position: there are two of us in this relationship, she argued. Søren tried to explain again. Needless to say, he only made matters worse. He went for a walk to think it through. He felt no desire to be a father, but why? For the first time since meeting Vibe, he wondered whether it was because he didn’t love her enough. That evening—without screaming—she made the very same point: if she wanted a child so badly and he wouldn’t give it to her, then it was because he didn’t love her. I do love you, Søren protested, desperately. But you don’t love me enough , Vibe had replied. She had her back to him and was taking off her earrings while Søren thought about what she had said. Slowly, she turned around. Your hesitation says it all, she declared, I think we should split up. Her eyes were challenging him.