Jo Nesbo - Midnight Sun

I closed my eyes and stuck the knife into the reindeer’s stomach.

There was a long groan as the gas inside escaped.

Then I drew the knife down its belly. I held my breath as the guts spilled out. There was less blood than I expected. It had probably gathered at the bottom of the corpse. Or had coagulated, maybe. Or been eaten up. Because now I could see that it wasn’t just the outside that was crawling with life. The flesh squirmed as yellowish white maggots ate, crawled and multiplied. Fucking hell.

I inhaled deeply. Closed my eyes, swallowed the vomit that rose in my throat, and pulled the silk scarf up over my mouth and nose. Then I stuck both hands inside the carcass and pulled out a huge slimy sack that I assumed was the stomach. I had to use the knife here and there to cut it loose. It sort of rolled out across the heather.

I stared into the darkness of the carcass. I didn’t want to get inside. In just a few minutes, seconds, maybe, they would be here, but there still was no way I was getting inside that stinking soupy corpse. My body refused.

I heard one of the dogs bark once. Shit.

I thought of Lea, of her eyes, her lips as a smile slowly spread across her face, and her deep, warm voice saying: ‘You did it, Ulf.’

I gulped. Then I held the flaps of skin open and forced my way inside the carcass.

Even if it was a big buck, and a good deal of the innards had been removed, there wasn’t much room. I needed to be completely hidden. And I had to try and seal it round me. I was sticky with various fluids, and it was so hot from the gases, the energy released by decomposition, and the collected heat of the mass of tiny insects moving about, the way it’s always hot inside an anthill. I couldn’t hold back the vomit any longer, and threw up time after time.

I gradually began to feel a bit better. But I was still visible from outside. How was I going to seal the opening in the gut? I tried grabbing hold of the two sides of the gap and holding the edges together, but they were so slimy they kept slipping out of my grasp.

I had bigger problems. Over the heather, bounding towards me, came two huge, black dogs.

They threw themselves at the reindeer, and one stuck its head inside the carcass and barked at me. I jabbed the knife at it and the head disappeared. Then the barking started. I had to get the carcass sealed before the men arrived. The barking was getting louder, and then I heard voices as well.

‘The cabin’s empty!’

‘There’s an animal down there!’

I stuck the knife through the reindeer skin at the bottom of the opening, pulled in the skin at the top, and managed to stick the knife through that as well before I lost my grip.

I used the knife as a bobbin, two twists were enough, then the gap was sealed. Now I just had to wait and hope no one had taught the dogs to talk.

I heard steps approaching.

‘Get the dogs away, Styrker. I thought you could control them.’

I felt a chill run through me. Yep, that was the voice of the man who had come to my flat to kill me. Johnny was back.

‘It must be the carcass,’ Styrker said. ‘It’s not easy when you’ve got a tiny brain and plenty of instincts.’

‘Are you talking about the dogs or yourself?’

‘Christ, what a stink,’ a third voice groaned. I recognised it at once: Brynhildsen from the back room, the one who was always cheating. ‘What’s that caught on its horns? And why are the guts out here on the ground? Shouldn’t we check...?’

‘The wolves have been at it,’ Mattis said. ‘Forgive me saying, but don’t breathe in too much of the stench, it’s poisonous.’

‘Really?’ Johnny’s quiet voice.

‘Botulism,’ Mattis said. ‘The spores fly through the air. One spore is enough to kill a person.’

Bloody hell! After all this am I going to die like that, in here, from some fucking bacteria?

‘The symptoms are an unpleasant tiredness in the eyes,’ Mattis went on. ‘And your ability to express yourself vanishes. That’s why we burn dead reindeer straight away. So that we can still see each other and make sensible conversation.’

There was a pause, during which I could imagine Johnny staring at Mattis and trying to interpret his inscrutable half-grin.

‘Styrker and Brynhildsen,’ Johnny said. ‘Turn the cabin inside out. And take those bloody dogs with you.’

‘He’s not in there, there’s no way he could be,’ Brynhildsen insisted.

‘I know that. But if we can find the money and dope, we know he’s still in the area.’

I heard the dogs bark frantically as they were dragged away.

‘Forgive me asking, but what happens if you don’t find anything?’

‘Then you might have been right after all,’ Johnny said.

‘I know he was the one sailing that boat,’ Mattis said. ‘It was only fifty metres from shore, and he’s an ugly southerner, we don’t have people like that up here. With a decent boat and a good wind behind him, he could cover quite some distance in a day.’

‘And you were lying on the seashore in the middle of the night?’

‘Best place to sleep in the summer.’

I felt something crawling at the bottom of my shin. Too big to be a maggot or ant. I was breathing through my mouth, not my nose. Snake or mouse? Please, let it be a mouse. A sweet, furry little mouse, even a hungry one, but not a...

‘Really?’ Johnny’s voice was even lower now. ‘And the quickest way from the village and up to the forest is to go round the whole ridge? It took us over an hour. When I came up here on my own the last time I was here, it barely took me half an hour.’

‘Yes, but you’d have been shot if he’d been at home.’

The animal — or whatever it was — was moving over my foot. I felt an almost irresistible urge to kick it off, but I knew that the slightest movement or sound would be detected.

‘You know what?’ Johnny sneered. ‘That’s what I can’t help wondering about.’

‘Oh? You might be a narrow-shouldered target, southerner, but your head’s big enough.’

‘It’s not that Jon Hansen can’t shoot, it’s that he hasn’t got the guts to.’

‘Really? Well, I could have shown you a quicker route if you’d mentioned that before—’

‘I did mention it, you Sámi bastard!’

‘In north Norwegian.’

The creature had reached my knee and was moving onto my thigh. It suddenly dawned on me that it was inside my trousers.

‘Shhh!’

Had I yelped or moved?

‘What was that noise?’

Total silence out there now. I held my breath. Dear God...

‘Church bells,’ Mattis said. ‘They’re burying William Svartstein today.’

What if it was a lemming? I’d heard that they were nervous little fuckers, and now it was approaching the crown jewels. Without making any obvious movement, I took hold of my trouser leg and pulled it tight in my clenched hand, making the fabric cling to my thigh and blocking the creature’s path.

‘Well, I’ve had enough of this stink,’ Johnny said. ‘Let’s check down by the stream. If the dogs are still confused by the smell of the reindeer, he might have hidden there.’

I heard them walk off through the heather. Inside my trousers the creature pushed against the blockage in the tunnel for a while, then resigned itself to going back the way it had come. Shortly after that I heard a voice call out from the cabin: ‘There’s nothing here, just a rifle and his suit!’

‘Okay, lads, let’s get back before the rain comes.’

I waited for what felt like an hour, but it could have been ten minutes. Then I pulled the knife out of the reindeer skin and peered out.

The coast was clear.

I crept through the heather towards the stream. I slid into the ice-cold water, letting it pour over me, washing me clean of death, shock and decay.