Medusa by Torkil Damhaug Page B

up.
     
    Marlen lay with her head beneath the duvet. He pretended he couldn’t find her, felt around on the bed until he came across a foot, which he tickled under the toes.
    – Can’t you sleep? he asked as she emerged.
    – I daren’t.
    He sat on the edge of the bed.
    – What are you afraid of?
    – That monster, she whispered. – Medusa. I’m never going to look up into the sky again.
    Marlen had a tendency to overdramatise things, but he could hear now that she was genuinely afraid. He’d been too successful in bringing the story of Perseus alive; he hoped her classmates weren’t all lying awake in bed too.
    – All this about Medusa is just a fairy tale, Marlen. I’ll tell you why that star winks at us. Actually there are two stars there. When the weaker one passes in front of the strong one, the light gets cut off.
    He demonstrated with his hands how the two stars orbited around each other.
    – After a few days, the strong one appears again, and from down here it looks like it’s flaring up. The two stars make us believe they are one and the same.
    He had to repeat the explanation several times to convince Marlen that it wasn’t an evil eye up there looking down at the earth and winking. Eventually she calmed down and went to sleep. The myth of Medusa had released her from its hold.
     
    I T IS THE sixth of October. Not when you hear this but now when I’m speaking to you, it is the sixth of October. I’ve killed today. I think about it and it makes me feel calm. Then I think of how I’m saying this into the Dictaphone so that you’ll hear it and I feel a thrill of expectation. You’ll be lying here where I’m sitting now and hearing my voice saying this. You can’t move and you can’t interrupt me. For the first time you realise it’s going to happen to you too.
    I didn’t plan to kill. Not even when I saw her walking along the forest path towards me. It was nine days ago. I stopped and talked to her. She liked to talk. In the end I had to tell her to shut up. She went rigid and stared at me. Suddenly she turned and began to run back along the track. Then I knew she would die. I caught up with her and grabbed hold of that skinny neck. She started screaming. I was angry as fuck and I closed her shrieking mug. But it wasn’t going to happen just yet. She had to know about it for a while first. Same way you’ll know about it. I dragged her in among the trees. Had to tape her mouth shut. Tape her hands that kept trying to scratch my face. Found somewhere to tie her up to wait until I could come back and fetch her. It took a couple of hours and by then she was all screamed out. She’d messed herself like a baby in nappies. Didn’t weigh much more either, stinking old bag.
    I couldn’t face taking her clothes off the way I’d planned. But I like to change plans. The best plans are the ones that just come along. Like the way I’m sitting here talking to you. I don’t know how it’ll be. Nor what’ll happen to you. All sorts of eventualities can crop up and get in the way. As I’m recording this, you still don’t know that this whole thing is about you. You’ve done everything you can to forget. But we are joined together. That’s what you were trying to say that time you told me about the twins that no one could part. No matter how much you have let me die in your thoughts. You said once that everyone has his own animal. You read that somewhere and wanted me to think about it. We were sitting in the classroom then too, but we weren’t alone there. It was just before the lesson began. And when I couldn’t think of anything, you said a bear, that was my animal.

PART II
     

16
     
Sunday 7 October
     
    D ETECTIVE C HIEF I NSPECTOR Hans Magnus Viken was standing high above the gully. He’d been there for several minutes. Below him the crime scene was bathed in light from the two large lamps the technicians had rigged up.
    He had still not been down there. Not because he dreaded getting a