When he’d got as far as the letter F, there was a buzzing noise from the exchange. He’d been expecting that. Even so, he thought he reacted much too slowly. He closed the telephone directory, took his diary and pencil, and hid behind a cupboard. No sooner had he ducked down behind the cupboard than Asta Bagge came shuffling out of the room where she’d been asleep.
Then he saw the rucksack.
He’d forgotten it. It was next to the entrance door.
Numbskull, he thought. Numbskull, numbskull...
Asta had sat down in front of the telephone exchange and put on her earphones. Joel knew that he would have to retrieve the rucksack now. She couldn’t avoid seeing it when she returned to the back room.
Asta responded to the call.
Joel tiptoed over the floor, grabbed his rucksack and dashed back to his haven behind the cupboard.
‘What’s all this nonsense?’ said Asta Bagge.
Joel thought he’d been rumbled. He was in a right mess now.
But then it dawned on him that Asta was angry with the person who’d made the call.
‘The telephone is not a little boy’s toy,’ said Asta Bagge, and sounded really angry. ‘You are drunk, and should go and lie down and go to sleep instead of ringing here and talking nonsense. Goodnight!’
Asta switched off and went back to bed.
Joel waited until he heard her snoring again.
The he went back and continued sorting through the telephone directory. By the time he’d finished he had twelve numbers. Before starting on his mission, he felt he needed to take a breather behind the cupboard. He’d packed a few jam sandwiches in his rucksack. He ate two of them before he felt up to starting off on what he planned to do.
Asta was snoring. Spluttering and wheezing. Joel sat down in front of the switchboard. He had the numbers listed in front of him. He started making the various connections. There was the Reverend Nyblom’s number. Then Mr Malm, the chief of police. Lieutenant-Colonel Ceder, and the headmaster, Mr Gottfried. Local newspaper editor Mr Waltin...Twelve numbers in all. He made all the relevant connections. He could feel his heart beating, and he was covered in sweat. He slowly moved his right hand towards the switch that would start all the telephone numbers ringing at the same time.
The Lord of the Night, Joel thought. I’m going to wake the whole lot of you up now.
He threw the switch, and stared expectantly at the maze of connections on the exchange in front of him. When somebody answered, a lamp would start blinking. He adjusted a switch in order to make sure that the ringing wouldn’t be heard here at the exchange.
Why didn’t anybody answer? Had he made a mistake? Come on now, answer. Answer...
Now the first light started flashing. It was Lieutenant-Colonel Ceder. Then Mr Waltin’s number started winking, the newspaper editor. Before long the whole switchboard was covered in flashing lights. Joel pressed the button and started talking into the microphone. He grunted and growled in order to make sure that nobody would recognise his voice, and tried to keep the volume down so that Asta Bagge wouldn’t wake up.
‘The Caviar Man is a scoundrel,’ he hissed. ‘He spies on innocent people. He hides in the shadows. All shadows grow in the twilight. I repeat. The Caviar Man is a scoundrel. His shadow is long when twilight falls.’
Joel repeated his message over and over again. He could hear the indignant, sleepy, surprised voices wondering who was ringing, what it was all about. He repeated his message four times. Then he put a stop to it all. Pulled out all the connections, took his rucksack and sidled out. Just as he was about to close the door, the whole exchange started flashing and ringing. It looked as if it were about to explode.
‘What the hell...?’ he heard Asta exclaim from the back room.
Then he closed the door quietly and tiptoed down the stairs.
He ran all the way home. He was suppressing a loud salvo of laughter. But he waited until he was back in his own kitchen before allowing it to burst out.
His invisible revenge had now pinned down the Caviar Man. And Gertrud had got her own back.
He sat down at the kitchen table and rubbed out all the telephone numbers he’d written on the inside cover of his diary. Then he returned the book to the showcase featuring the Celestine.
He felt tired. Or perhaps it was a feeling of relief. Like when a stomachache passes over.
He had put things right.
It was all over, at long last.
Now he would be able to turn his attention to all the other important things. Finishing the geography game. Finding a good friend. A best friend. Going with Simon Windstorm to Four Winds Lake.
Gertrud would be back to normal.
The Miracle wouldn’t worry him any more.
When his twelfth birthday came round, he might well have forgotten all about everything.
Blasted the Ljusdal bus out of his mind...
He took a few more spoonfuls of jam. One of the jars was nearly empty. But he’d earned it.
He felt a bit sorry for Asta Bagge.
But only a little bit. After all, she’d helped somebody to do a good deed.
She might even believe that it was a Miracle?
That it really was the Lord of the Night who had called all twelve telephone numbers, then disappeared without trace...
12
The next evening Joel followed the tracks left by the Black Panther.
It was a Shadow Beast that only Joel knew about.
The Black Panther lived in a cave under the railway bridge. Whenever a train went rattling over the bridge, you could hear the beast roar...
The day after Joel’s revenge on the Caviar Man he was the most attentive pupil in the whole class. Only once, when he remembered that Miss Nederström might have climbed over the fence while wearing her woolly long johns under her long skirt, did he start giggling. A storm of laughter was brewing up inside him, but Miss Nederström gave him a stern look before it broke out.
Joel did everything he could to be like all the others. He didn’t want to be noticed. He didn’t want to be a Miracle Man. Now he just wanted to be an ordinary pupil.
He had dinner with Sara in the evening. Trying hard to make it sound like no more than an off-hand question, he asked what the beer drinkers in the bar had been talking about that day.
‘Huh, I don’t listen to their chatter,’ said Sara. ‘I’d get earache if I did. It’s bad enough having aching feet after all that running around.’
‘But there must have been something they were all talking about,’ Joel insisted. He wanted to know.
And he got to know.
‘Apparently there was some idiot phoning lots of people in the middle of the night and waking them up,’ said Sara. ‘Nobody seems to know who did it, or how. But I suspect it was Asta at the Telegraph Office who’d drunk a bit too much port wine.’
Joel could feel himself blushing. So he hadn’t been dreaming after all! He really had been in the Telegraph Office during the night!
‘That sounds odd,’ he said casually, chewing a piece of veal chop.
‘Asta only talks,’ said Sara. ‘There’s nothing odd about that...’
Joel felt in very high spirits when he walked home. Now at last he could be normal again. He sat down at the kitchen table and wrote in the inside cover of his diary:
‘The Secret Society Lords of the Underworld has completed its mission. The Caviar Man has been defeated.’
That meant that the book was completely full.
He would have to buy a new diary. He’d be able to write in it about all the things that hadn’t happened yet!
I’ll soon be twelve, he thought as he stood in front of the cracked shaving mirror. Then there’ll only be three more years before I’m fifteen.