Harry waded through the snow to the edge of the hill, to the old bunkers where he, Øystein and Tresko used to come and drink themselves stupid while their contemporaries were celebrating graduation, National Day, Midsummer and whatever the fuck else they used to celebrate.
The council had padlocked the doors after a series of articles in one of the city’s papers. It wasn’t that they hadn’t known that the bunkers were used by drug addicts and prostitutes, and there had been pictures published before. Pictures of young people injecting heroin into arms covered in scars, and foreign women in slutty outfits lying on filthy mattresses. What made them react this time was one single picture. It wasn’t even particularly brutal. A young man sitting on a mattress with a user’s accessories beside him. He was staring into the camera with puppy-dog eyes. The shock factor was that he looked like an ordinary Norwegian youth: blue-eyed, with a traditional sweater and short, neat hair. You could have imagined it was taken one Easter holiday at his family’s cabin. The next day the council had put locks on all the doors, and set up signs warning about trespassing and saying the bunkers were regularly patrolled. Harry knew that was an empty threat — the Chief of Police didn’t even have enough money and people to investigate break-ins where things were actually stolen.
He inserted the crowbar into the crack in the door.
He had to use the whole of his weight before the lock gave way.
Harry stepped inside. The only sound breaking the silence was the echo of dripping from deep inside the darkness, which made Harry think of the sonar pulse from a submarine. Tresko had said he’d downloaded a soundtrack of sonar pulses from the net, put it on a loop and used it to get to sleep. Said the feeling of being underwater made him calm.
Harry could only identify three ingredients in the stench: piss, petrol and wet concrete. He switched the flashlight on and walked farther in. The beam found a wooden bench that looked like it had been stolen from the surrounding parkland, and a mattress that was black with damp and mould. Planks had been nailed over the horizontal firing slits facing the fjord.
It was — as he had thought — the perfect place.
And he couldn’t help himself.
He turned the flashlight off.
Closed his eyes. He wanted to try out the feeling now, in advance.
He tried to see it in front of him, but the images wouldn’t come.
Why not? Maybe he needed to feed the hate.
He thought about Rakel. Rakel on the stone floor. Svein Finne over her. Feed the hate.
And then it came.
Harry screamed out loud into the darkness and opened his eyes.
What the hell was going on, why was his brain storing these images of himself covered in blood?
Svein Finne woke up at the sound of a branch snapping.
He was wide awake in an instant, staring up into the darkness and the roof of his two-man tent.
Had they found him? Here, so far from the nearest buildings, in dense pine forest in such rough terrain that even dogs would have trouble getting through it?
He listened. Tried to identify what it could be from the sounds. A snort. Not human. Heavy steps on the forest floor. So heavy that he could feel a slight vibration through the ground. A large animal. An elk, perhaps. When he was young, Svein Finne had often gone off into the forest, taking his tent with him, and would spend the night in Maridalen or Sørkedalen. The Oslo forests were vast, and provided freedom and refuge for a young lad who often got in trouble, didn’t fit in, who people tended either to avoid or wanted to bully. People often reacted like that when there was something they were afraid of. Svein Finne hadn’t been able to understand how they knew. He kept it hidden from them, after all. He only revealed who he was to a very few people. And he could understand that they got scared. He felt more at home out here in the forest with the animals than in the city that lay just a couple of hours’ walk away. And there were more animals here, right on their doorstep, than most of the people in Oslo knew. Deer, hares, pine martens. Foxes, of course; they thrived on human waste. The occasional red deer. One moonlit night he’d watched a lynx sneak past on the other side of a lake. And birds. Ospreys. Tawny owls and boreal owls. He hadn’t seen any of the goshawks and sparrowhawks that had been common here when he was growing up. But a buzzard had drifted past between the trees above him.
The elk had come closer. It had stopped breaking branches now. Elk break branches. A snout pressed against the tent, sniffed up and down. A snout that was sniffing for food. In the middle of the night. It wasn’t an elk.
Finne rolled over in his sleeping bag, grabbed his flashlight and hit the snout with it. It disappeared and he heard a deep sniff outside. Then the snout was back, and this time it pressed so hard against the tent that when Finne switched his flashlight quickly on and off again, he was able to see what it was. He had seen the outline of the big head and jaw. There was a scratching sound of claws tearing at the fabric of the tent. Finne was as quick as lightning, grabbing the handle of the knife he always kept by the side of the underlay, pulled the zip down and rolled out of the tent, making sure he didn’t have his back to the animal. He had set up camp on a few square metres of snow-free ground on a slope, in front of a large rock that divided the meltwater so that it ran down either side of the tent, and now he tumbled naked down the slope. He felt no pain as twigs and stones cut into his skin, just heard the cracking of the undergrowth as the bear came after him. It had noticed his flight, and its hunting instincts had kicked in, and Svein Finne knew that no one could outrun a bear, not on this terrain. But he had no intention of trying to do that. Nor of lying down and pretending to be dead, the way some people say is a good strategy if you run into a bear. A bear that had just emerged from hibernation is desperate from starvation and would be more than happy to eat even a corpse. Fucking idiots. Finne reached the bottom of the slope, found his feet, pressed his back against a thick tree trunk and straightened up. He switched the flashlight on and aimed it at the noises coming towards him.
The animal stopped abruptly when the light shone in its eyes. Blinded, it stood up on its hind legs and flailed at the air with its paws. It was a brown bear. About two metres tall. Could have been bigger, Finne thought, as he gripped the sheath between his teeth and drew the puukko knife. Grandfather Finne had said the last bear to be caught in the forests around Oslo — in 1882, by forest ranger Kjelsås, next to a fallen tree in Grønnvollia below Opkuven — had been almost two and a half metres tall.
The bear fell onto all fours. Its skin was hanging loose around it. It was panting hard, swinging its head from side to side, looking alternately into the forest and towards the light, as if it couldn’t decide.