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.

‘Christ, the avalanche area is a square kilometre,’ he heard a voice shout behind him and watched the frail yellow beams from their torches sweep across the snow.

The walkie-talkie crackled. ‘Rescue Ops says the helicopter will be here in thirty minutes. Over.’

Too long, Bellman thought. What was it he had read: after half an hour the chance of surviving under snow was one in three? And when the helicopter got here, what the hell were they supposed to do? Stick their sonar probes in the snow to detect the remains of a cabin? ‘Thanks, over and out.’ ?rdal came alongside. ‘Spot of luck! There are two sniffer dogs in Al. They’re bringing them up to Ustaoset now. The County Officer in Ustaoset, Krongli, isn’t at home – at least he’s not answering the phone – but there was a man at the hotel with a snowmobile, and he can bring them here.’ He was flapping his arms to keep warm. Bellman looked at the snow beneath them. Kaja was down there somewhere. ‘How often did they say there were avalanches here?’

‘Every ten years,’?rdal said.

Bellman rocked on his heels. Milano was directing the others, who were trudging around prodding the snow with skis and poles.

‘Sniffer dogs?’ he said.

‘Forty minutes.’

Bellman nodded. Knowing the dogs would make no difference one way or the other. By the time they arrived almost an hour would have passed since the avalanche.

The chances of survival would be less than ten per cent even before they started work. After an hour and a half they would be, to all intents and purposes, zero.

The journey had begun. He was driving a snowmobile. Both light and dark seemed to be coming towards him, as if the diamond-strewn sky was opening itself and welcoming him. He knew that behind him in the snow stood the man, the ghost, aiming at his burned, charred and blistered back through the sights of a gun. But no bullet could reach him now, he was free, he was going where he intended, taking the path he had always been following. To the place where she had gone, along the same route. He was no longer tied up, and if he had been able to move his arms or legs he would have just stood up on the seat, twisted the accelerator and rushed forward even faster. He was cheering as he took off towards the starry sky.

59

The Burial

Harry sank through layers of dreams, memories and half-chewed thoughts. Everything was fine. Apart from one voice intoning the same sentence, again and again. Dad’s voice.

‘… and in the end you were bleeding so much that the big boys became alarmed and went on their way.’

He tried to hold it at arm’s length, to listen to one of the other voices. But even that one belonged to Olav Hole.

‘You were scared of the dark, but that didn’t stop you going there.’

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Harry opened his eyes to the dark. Wriggled and twisted in the icy snow’s iron grip. Tried to kick. Started digging in front of the wire. Made himself a bit more room. His fingers found the edge of the fireguard. He wasn’t going to die. Olav Hole would have to go on ahead; he would have to be that much of a bloody father! His hands were paddling like shovels now that they had some room to move. He got both hands on the inside of the fireguard and pulled it towards him. There! It shifted. He pulled again. And felt it. Air. Stinking of ash, heavy. But air nonetheless. For as long as it lasted. He pushed the snow away. Stuffed his hands in; his fingers found something that felt like polystyrene. He realised it was half-burned logs. The fireguard had stood up to the avalanche, the fireplace was free of snow. He continued to dig.