Doctor Proctor's Fart Powder by Jo Nesbø, mike lowery Page B

he isn’t locked up immediately.”
    â€œMr. Trane? And they believed him?”
    â€œOf course they believed Mr. Trane,” grumbled the Commandant. “After all, he’s the one who helped us invent the hardest and most secret material in the world. Which is used in the doors of the most escape-proof cell in the world …”
    â€œYeah, yeah, Dad, I’ve heard of all that,” Lisa sighed. “But what do we do now?”
    â€œNow?” The Commandant noisily sniffed the aroma coming through the open kitchen window. “Eat Wiener schnitzel—at least that’s what it smells like. Come on.”

    AS LISA WENT inside, the scent of Wiener schnitzel wafted out over the yard, where a light breeze caught it and carried the scent over Cannon Avenue, down to the fjord, to Akershus Fortress, in over the high stone walls, and past the towers and the black, old-fashioned cannons that were aimed out over the fjord. The guards standing outside the Dungeon of the Dead inhaled the scent with-out noticing it, and the part they hadn’t inhaled continued in through the bars to a corridor that led to a stone stairway going deep down, down toa very thick and very locked iron door.
    An exceedingly small amount of schnitzel scent seeped through the keyhole into a room that was shaped like the inside of a cannonball. A bridge ran across the center of the room and led to another iron door, even thicker and even more locked than the first. And with a keyhole so narrow that only a couple of Wiener schnitzel gas molecules made it into the corridor behind. The darkness in that corridor was penetrated only by laser beams that ran back and forth, up and down. The grid of laser beams was so dense that not even a tiny
Rattus norvegicus
could hope to sneak through without triggering the alarm. And the alarm was connected to the guardroom, where the guard on duty was stationed. And also to the main panel at police headquarters. And also to the command center for the Norwegian antiterrorism police. And to the command-command center for the anti-antiterrorism police. And I’m sure you canunderstand, triggering an alarm like that would result in a lot of running and yelling and maybe shooting, and definitely the rather rapid arrest of the little rat or spider that was trying to do something so foolish as to break out of the Dungeon of the Dead.
    At the far end of the corridor—and by now there was hardly any scent left—was the final door. And it was made out of a material that hardly anyone knows exists, but that is so hard, so ingeniously invented, and so secret that the author of this book had to promise the Norwegian government that he wouldn’t say anything else about the material in this story. The point—as you may already have surmised—is that the Dungeon of the Dead is absolutely impossible to escape from.
    And there, behind that last door, sat Doctor Proctor and Nilly. The walls and ceiling were white, windowless, and sort of rounded, so it made them feel like they were sitting inside an egg. Each onewas sitting on a cot on either side of the egg cell, which was lit by a single lightbulb that hung from the ceiling. There was a small table between the cots, and a toilet and a sink that were both attached to the wall, and a bookshelf with one single book on it:
King Olav—The People’s King
. Nilly had already read it four times. The book had a lot of pictures in it, and Nilly had gathered from the text that the best thing about Olav was how good-natured he’d been. But there’s a limit to how many times anyone sitting in jail wants to read a book about being good natured. And not just any old jail, but the most escape-proof jail in all of northern Europe, aside from Finland.
    As Nilly read, Doctor Proctor scribbled and sketched something on a scrap of paper he had had in his pocket, scratched his head with the pencil stub, mumbled a few passages in Greek, and then