We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [228]
ANTON HAD ONCE tried to make us believe that the murdered man stood in the potato bed every night, calling for his head, but we'd never believed him. Then one night a black, stooping figure really did appear in the dark garden below his window, and a voice halfway between a whisper and a hoarse cry called out to Anton for a head—not his own, but his victim's.
"Anton Hansen Hay!"
Anton, who was fast asleep, dreamt that he was being told off by a teacher or by his father, because they were the only ones who ever used his full name. It took a while for him to wake up and even longer to work out where the voice was coming from. He looked out the window and saw the figure, but couldn't make out who it was. He wasn't scared; it had been ages since he'd thought about the dead man's skull, and at first he had no idea what the man below was referring to. He'd never believed in his own story about the ghost haunting him at night, and besides, the black figure standing there now wasn't headless.
Then he woke up fully, and though the man beneath the window still hadn't identified himself, it didn't take Anton long to work out who he was. And then he was scared, more scared than he'd ever been of any ghost, more scared than he'd ever been in his entire life—though that wasn't really saying much. If Herman could kill his stepfather, he could kill Anton too. It would be no problem for him at all.
Having got this far in his reflections, Anton slammed the window shut and hurried downstairs to make sure that all the doors in the house were locked. They weren't, but fortunately the keys were in the locks, and he frantically secured them all, one after another, before running back to his room and hiding under the bed.
Eventually the voice outside the window stopped, but Anton was too exhausted to climb back into bed. His last thought before he fell asleep on the floor was that he was lucky there was no one around to see him.
Anton's father wasn't at home: he'd gone to sea nine months before and he wouldn't be back for at least another year. He knew nothing about Anton's spectacles and Anton was convinced that the day he came home and saw his son's face, his greeting would include the word "four-eyes." No: Anton would never confide in the Foreigner, nor would he ever dream of confiding in his mother or any other adult. Anton was of the opinion that a boy should solve his own problems without expecting help from anyone else, least of all from adults, who's were the natural enemies of children. If they had to choose between believing a child and one of their own, they'd never choose the child. Least of all the Terror of Marstal, who'd shot Kristian Stærk in the eye and kept a murdered man's head in his room for months without saying a word, even though he knew who the victim was and could have helped bring the murderer to justice. Anton had always been completely indifferent to the legal significance of his find. As far as he was concerned, Herman was free to go about his business. Now he realized what a foolish attitude that was. But he saw no way out of the fix he was in.
The morning after he'd heard the voice in the garden, Anton found Tordenskjold dead in his cage; his neck had been wrung. His wings had been broken and nearly ripped from his body, as if by a person of unusual strength in an uncontrollable rage. Anton's hands started to shake at the sight and it was a long time before he was able to bury the dead seagull.
From then on, every night he locked all the doors of the house.
"What are you doing that for?" his mother said. "You've grown very strange recently." She was well aware that Anton had changed, but she didn't know whether or not it was cause to celebrate. She didn't ask him if something was wrong. Everything in Anton's life seemed so remote and alien to her that