The Girl in the Ice aka A Price for Everything

CHAPTER 19

He is a child, and he is lying in his bed at night. The room is illuminated by a weak bulb set directly in the socket, which gives off a subdued green light that has a soothing effect on children. He is afraid of the night light, but even more afraid of the dark.

In the room there is a window that faces the forest. It is made up of two parts, each with six small panes divided by peeling white bars. All four hasps are securely fastened, and the curtain is drawn completely. If the hollyhocks get too high, his father nails a tack to the sill and ties up the stalks, so they don’t knock against the panes in the wind. He is afraid of the window, but even more afraid of the unknown outside.

When fatigue overcomes his anxiety he falls asleep, but is wakened by a soft sound coming from the window behind the curtain. A small, metallic clack. It is the witch pulling the hasps up one by one. A witch can do that sort of thing, pull hasps off windows from outside.

At first her dark green silhouette is enlarged upon the wall. Then he sees her little body as she crawls in with difficulty. Her limbs are long and slender like spider’s legs, her fingers crooked, her nails sharp. With a quick pull she tears the curtain away and looks greedily at him with her small, blinking eyes. Her dirty hair sticks out in tufts, but the worst thing is the mouth. It is missing.

He runs.

As fast as he can, he bolts down a hallway. At the end his mother is standing with her arms open, but the faster he runs, the farther away she is. The witch is right behind him. He hears her panting, smells her. Finally, finally he reaches his mother, throws himself against her and hides his face in her skirt, while he weeps with relief and notices how she holds him protectively.

That is how the nightmare begins.

He looks up, but it is not his mother’s face he is looking into; it is the witch’s.

As far back as Arne Pedersen can remember, he has suffered from nightmares. Always the same, and always with the same result, namely that he wakes up bathed in sweat from head to toe, with a fear inside that it takes the rest of the night to overcome. In his childhood this happened often, once or twice a week when it was at its worst. As an adult he experiences it much less often. Six months might pass in between episodes; plenty of time to repress the memory, until one night there it is again. Like the flu, only over more quickly. For this reason his recurring nightmare has no further effect on his life, and so far he’s paid no particular attention to it. It is a congenital nuisance, there is nothing more to say about it. His mother called it the bad dream. His wife refers to it simply as it… “My God, did you have it again?”… and always sweetly gets up with him and makes him a cup of chamomile tea, before she goes back to bed again. He wishes she wouldn’t.

Now for the third night in a row he’d been awakened by the nightmare, and he could not remember that ever happening before. Either as a child or as an adult. His wife was worried. She set down the mug of chamomile tea on the table beside him and asked cautiously, “Is there something wrong, Arne? Is something bothering you?”

He shook his head, nothing was wrong.

“If this keeps up, you’ll have to see a doctor.”

She was right. He had basically not slept and that could not go on, as she matter-of-factly pointed out a few times. As if she needed to tell him. He shrugged it off, and shortly afterwards she went to bed. He chucked the chamomile tea down the sink and poured himself a cognac, moderate, not too big-it wouldn’t help anyway. With the palms of his hands he massaged his temples briefly, while he hissed to himself, “I want to kill him.”

And shortly afterwards, “I swear, I fucking want to kill him.”

Then he turned on the television, turned down the sound and prepared himself for a long, sleepless night.

It was ironic. When he was a child, he couldn’t tell his mother about his nightmare. Not all of it anyway. Now the same thing applied to his wife.

Because the dream had taken a new development and in the green light he now saw other things, worse than the witch’s face.