Jo Nesbo - The Leopard

‘Take my hand!’ Harry shouted above the roar and stretched out his hands, one to Kaja and one to Kolkka. He saw them race towards him as the air was sucked out of the cabin, as if the avalanche had breathed out first and then in. He felt Kolkka’s hand squeeze his hard and waited for Kaja’s. Then the wall of snow hit the cabin.

It was deafeningly quiet and pitch black. Harry tried to move. Impossible. His body seemed to be cast in plaster, he couldn’t move one single limb. Indeed, he had actually done what his father had told him: held a hand in front of his face to make room for an air pocket. But he didn’t know if there was any air in it. Because Harry couldn’t breathe. And he knew the reason why. Constrictive pericarditis. What Olav Hole had explained happened when the chest and diaphragm were packed together so tight by snow that the lungs were unable to function. Which meant you had only the oxygen that was already in your blood, about a litre, and with normal consumption, at around 0.25 litres a minute, you would die within four minutes. Panic struck: he had to have air, had to breathe! Harry tensed his body, but the snow was like a boa constrictor that responded by tightening its grip. He knew he had to fight the panic, had to be able to think. And think now. The world outside had ceased to exist; time, gravity, temperature didn’t exist. Harry had no idea what was up or down or how long he had been in the snow. Another of his father’s wisdoms whirled through his brain. To find your bearings and determine which way you are lying, dribble saliva from your mouth and feel which way it runs down your face. He ran his tongue around his palate. Knew it was fear, the adrenalin that had dried out his mouth. He opened wide and used the fingers in front of his face to scrabble some snow into his mouth. Chewed, opened again and let the melted ice dribble out. He panicked instantly and jerked as his nostrils filled with water. Closed his mouth and snorted the water out again. Snorted out what was left of the air in his lungs. He was going to die soon.

The water had told him he was upside down, the jerk had told him it was possible to move after all. He tried another jerk, tautened his whole body in a spasm, felt the snow give a little. A little. Enough to escape from the stranglehold of constrictive pericarditis? He breathed in. Got some air. Not enough. The brain must already have been suffering from a lack of oxygen, nevertheless he clearly recalled his father’s words from the Easters up in Lesja. In an avalanche where you can hardly breathe you don’t die from a lack of air but from too much CO2 in your blood. His other hand had met something, something hard, something that felt like wire mesh. Olav Hole: ‘In snow you’re like a shark, you’ll die if you don’t move. Even though the snow is loose enough for some air to come in, the heat of your breath and body soon forms a layer of ice around you, which means air won’t come in and the poisonous carbon dioxide in your breath can’t get out. You are simply making your own ice coffin. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, Dad, but take it easy, will you? This is Lesja, not the Himalayas.’

Mum’s laughter from the kitchen.

Harry knew the cabin was filled with snow. And that above him was a roof. And above that probably more snow again. There was no way out. Time was ticking. It would end here.

He had prayed that he wouldn’t wake up again. That next time he slipped into unconsciousness would be the last. He was hanging upside down. His head was throbbing as if it would explode. It must have been all the blood filling it.

It was the sound of the snowmobile that had woken him.

He tried not to move. He had done at first, jerked, tensed his body, tried to free himself. But he had given up his attempts fairly quickly. Not because of the meat hooks in his calves – he had lost feeling in his legs long ago. It was the sound. The sound of tearing flesh and sinews, and muscles that snapped and burst when he jerked and twisted, making the chains attached to the storehouse roof sing.

He stared into the glazed eyes of a stag hanging by its rear legs and looking as if it was in mid-dive, antlers first. He had shot it while poaching. With the same rifle that he had used to kill her.

He heard the plaintive creak of footsteps in the snow. The door opened, the moonlight plunged inside. Then he was there again. The ghost. And the strange thing was that it was only now, looking at him from upside down, that he was sure.

‘It really is you,’ he whispered. It was so strange speaking without any front teeth. ‘It really is you. Isn’t it?’

The man walked behind him, untied his hands.

‘C-can you forgive me, my boy?’

‘Are you ready to travel?’

‘You killed them all, didn’t you.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Let’s go.’

Harry dug with his right hand. Towards his left hand, the one which was squeezed up against some wire mesh he couldn’t identify. Part of his brain told him he was trapped, that it was a hopeless race against time, seconds, that for every breath he took he was one step nearer death. That all he was doing was prolonging his suffering, postponing the inevitable. The other voice said he would rather die in desperation than in apathy.

He had managed to dig his way through to the other hand and put the right hand over the wire mesh. Pressed both hands against it and tried to push, but the mesh wouldn’t budge. He sensed that his breathing was already heavier, the snow was becoming smoother and his grave coated with ice. Dizziness came and went, just for a second, but he knew it was the first warning that he was inhaling poisoned air. Soon the drowsiness would come, and the brain would shut down, room by room, like a hotel approaching the low season. And that was when Harry felt it, something he had never experienced before, not even during his worst nights at Chungking Mansion: an overwhelming loneliness. It wasn’t the certainty that he would die that suddenly drained him of all will to live, but that he would die here, without anyone, without those he loved, without his father, Sis, Oleg, Rakel…

The drowsiness came. Harry stopped digging. Even though he knew this spelt death. A seductive, alluring death taking him into its arms. Why protest, why fight, why choose pain when he could succumb? Why choose anything other than what he had always done? Harry closed his eyes.

Wait.

The mesh.

It had to be the fireguard. The fire. The chimney. Rock. If anything had withstood the avalanche, if there was one place where the mass of snow had not penetrated, it would have to be the chimney.

Harry pushed against the wire again. It wouldn’t budge a millimetre. His fingers clawed the mesh. Powerless, resigned.

It was predestined. This was how it would end. His CO2-infected brain sensed a logic to it, but was unsure quite what it was. He accepted it though. He let the sweet, warm sleep envelop him. The sedation. The freedom.

His fingers slid along the wire. Found something hard, solid. Tips of skis. Dad’s skis. He offered no resistance to the thought. It was less lonely like this, with his hand on Dad’s skis. Together, in step, they would enter the kingdom of death. Take the last steep slope.

Mikael Bellman stared at what lay before them. Or to be more precise what no longer lay before them. Because it wasn’t there any more. The cabin was gone. From the snow cave it had looked like a little drawing on a large white sheet of paper. That was before the boom and the faraway crash that had woken him. By the time he had finally pulled out his binoculars it was quiet again, there was just a distant, delayed echo reverberating from the Hallingskarvet mountain range. He had stared himself blind through the binoculars, scanned the mountainside beyond. It was as if someone had erased everything from the paper. No drawing, just peaceful and innocently white. It was incomprehensible. A whole cabin buried? They had snapped on their skis and taken eight minutes to arrive at the avalanche scene. Or eight minutes and eighteen seconds. He had noted the time. He was a police officer.