Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

But not everyone who heard it laughed. Only a few days later a couple of men traveled up to the rapids where the bears had fished, they searched the entire area, but found nothing, not so much as a footprint. If there had been Nephilim there, there weren’t any now.

Five years passed. Then the events at the rapids were repeated. The location was different, and there were two men not three, otherwise the circumstances were the same. Two hunters had made camp by a lake, in the evening they sat by their fire talking, and one of them went down to wash before they turned in for the night. But instead of going directly up again, he walked along the shore for some distance. They had hung the roe deer they’d shot up in a tree there, and when he happened to turn toward the fire, he saw that a figure was standing among the trees only a few yards away from it. He knew at once what it must be, shouted a warning to his friend, and saw the Nephilim vanish into the forest.

Having discussed what to do for a while, they decided to follow it. It was around midsummer, the night was light and mild, and both were experienced hunters and could pursue a quarry for several days if necessary.

They caught sight of it for the first time on the other side of a meadow a few hours later. The range was extreme, but one of them put his gun to his shoulder and shot anyway. To their surprise they found blood on the ground when they stopped on the other side. If it was injured, it would be only a matter of time before they caught up with it, and they went on with raised spirits. Toward morning they saw it again. It was running down a wooded hillside not more than a hundred yards away from them, but as the landscape down below was flat and clear of vegetation apart from the odd tussock of grass, and covered by gravel and sand from the spring floods, they decided to hold their fire until it had got some way across.

Certain of their prey, they climbed down the hillside at their leisure. They had seen traces of blood all the way, it was clearly bleeding like a stuck pig, and they found it strange that it had managed to keep them at bay for as long as it had.

When they stopped at the forest’s edge and scanned the plain, they saw nothing. The fact that it had just kept running forward all the time, clearly hoping to shake them off by pure stamina, even though it was badly injured, had made them assume that they were dealing with a simple creature, a kind of manlike animal. Now they had to revise their assumption.

They looked at one another. If it wasn’t on the plain, it must be somewhere in the vicinity.

They went back up the way they’d come. The traces of blood ceased roughly at the place they’d spotted it. Perhaps it had calculated that they would react as they did, perhaps it was fortuitous. But having minutely inspected the forest floor, they worked out that it must have stanched the bleeding, taken some steps to the side and hidden behind a fallen tree, watched them pass a few yards away, waited until they were out of hearing, and run up the hillside again.

But this was the only cunning it displayed. For the rest of the day and into the evening it survived by pure strength. The half mile it had gained by its simple ruse, it managed to keep, but when they saw it had begun to bleed again, they knew that it was only a matter of hours before they had it.

It was almost exactly twenty-four hours from the time they first saw the creature until it lay dead at their feet.

It sat waiting for them. It was propped up against a tree trunk, quite motionless, and looking straight ahead when they came crashing through the forest.

They stopped, raised their guns, and walked slowly toward it. It was as if it didn’t see them. Even when finally it turned its head and looked up at them, it was as if it didn’t see them.

One of them pressed the mouth of his gun to its head and fired. They made a hurdle, tied the creature fast, and carried it between them all the way down to the coast.

This was the specimen Lamech had seen. The tent in which it was exhibited was a little distance from the marketplace itself, down by the docks. Even though Lamech had waited until the market’s final day, the line outside the tent had been a long one. He’d stood there all morning feeling cold, and after wandering about gaping at the myriad of stalls, tents, and people for nearly a week, he was too sated with impressions to enjoy looking at what was around him. With his hands in his pockets and his head bent against the wind, he moved slowly up the line. The whole town was decorated with flags, they flapped in the wind above him, filling the air with their omnipresent sharp slaps. Seabirds were being blown at high speed out across the harbor. Occasionally drunken men came staggering past, their faces wan and ravaged, their clothes disheveled, their laughter and shouts with something lackluster and resigned about them, as if they no longer could be bothered to put anything of their own into them, but simply made noise as they went and thought about something else. Sleep, presumably, Lamech thought. At all events it was what he yearned for. Sleep and peace. Perhaps most of all the latter. He never longed for life on the farm more than toward the end of market week.

Obal and Tarsis, his two uncles, sat waiting for him in a tavern on the outskirts of the town. Neither of them had any desire to see this Nephilim. Neither, strictly speaking, did Lamech. It was for Noah’s sake that he was there.

He raised his eyes and looked over the heads in the line. Luckily it wasn’t far to the ticket stall. Then he glanced over at the other line of people, the one emerging from the back of the tent, and tried to read from their expressions what lay in store for him. But apart from the fact that very few spoke, which might have had as much to do with the miserable weather as with what they’d just witnessed, everything seemed quite normal. Nobody looked excited or shocked, nor did he see anything of the disgust that so many people claimed they’d been filled with at the sight of this reportedly terrible creature.

He pulled his hands out of his pockets and rubbed them a few times, peered out at the waves that clawed greedily at the breakwater, saw out of the corner of his eye that the couple in front of him were stooping at the ticket stall, and got out the money for his ticket. When he’d paid, he followed the couple into the tent. The line continued along a temporary board fence that had been erected around a podium in the center. It was on this, in a coffin filled with ice, that the creature lay. Apart from the four flaming torches that surrounded it, it was completely dark inside. The air was hot and almost nauseatingly heavy. A tang of salt and decay from the sea mingled with the smell of sawdust, sweat, drunkenness, and damp clothes. A man in a black suit sat on a chair behind the coffin and stared listlessly at the crowd slowly filing past. The strong wind off the sea made the tent walls flap. The torches set up around the coffin flared constantly and uneasily in draft.

Lamech pushed his way to the planking.

The creature was more hideous than he’d expected. It resembled a human being but was also different somehow. Its skin was pure white, the same as its hair — that was completely white too, and its eyes. . well, its eyes. .

How was he to explain this to Noah? That this freak that couldn’t under any circumstances be afforded the right to live, that this repugnant monstrosity, had the same skin, the same hair, and the same eyes as him?

He couldn’t.

He’d have to memorize every bit of it, and give Noah a description so detailed that the revulsion the thing filled everyone with could be understood without either the color of the skin or the eyes being mentioned.

It lay on its side , he would say, with its head resting on its forearm and its legs slightly apart, this presumably to keep it balanced. All the time the ice was twinkling and glittering in the light from the torches. Can you picture it?