We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [230]
"What the hell do you want?" he asked.
Knud Erik already felt defeated. He'd come out with it, and it had cost him, jeopardizing his still shakily formed manhood. "I miss you." Were those words so hard to understand? What else could he say? I want to help you, to be there for you, to hold out my hand to you? What good would it do, saying that. So Knud Erik said nothing. He'd run out of courage as well as words. He didn't know what else to say, and that's in fact what saved him, because in the pause that followed, Anton was able to compose himself and invite his friend up to his room.
There he blurted out the whole story. Knud Erik was too young to have heard about Jepsen's disappearance on that trip between Marstal and Rudkøbing, so he needed everything explained to him. The story was terrifying enough in itself, but it was more the way Anton told it that frightened Knud Erik. He heard a fresh sob hidden in every pause, which Anton managed to hold back only through considerable effort. The ferret was burying itself deeper and deeper in his intestines, and soon he'd start to scream again.
"He killed Tordenskjold," he said.
Knud Erik hadn't known Holger Jepsen, but he'd known Tordenskjold. He'd often joined in feeding the seagull fish and the sparrows that Anton could no longer sell to the farmer from Midtmarken because they were too far gone. The horror started to take hold of him as well.
"He's definitely going to kill me too." Anton closed his eyes as if he expected the killer blow at any moment.
"Why don't you just give him the skull?"
"I can't." For a moment it was still there, that old stubbornness. Then his despondency returned. "It's hopeless. He'll kill me anyway."
"Nonsense," Knud Erik said, summoning up more courage than he knew he had. "But it's definitely Kristian who told Herman about the head. He was the only one, apart from you, who knew who it belonged to."
Anton flared up in anger. "I'm going to kill Kristian," he hissed. "I can't get Herman, but I can get him."
"You've already shot his eye out. Don't you think that's enough?"
Knud Erik was increasingly astonished at himself. He'd never imagined himself talking to Anton like this. But Anton wasn't the boy he used to be. Which made Knud Erik free to change too.
"I've got an idea," he said.
AS HERMAN LEFT Weber's Café a few days later, he saw two boys hanging around on the other side of the road, staring at him. He walked up toward Kirkestræde, and they followed him on the opposite sidewalk. At first he thought it was a coincidence, but when he turned the corner to head south, they were still there. He didn't know either of them. He stopped and turned around: he wanted them to see that he was on to them. As he'd expected, they stopped too. But they kept staring. He stamped his foot on the cobbles. Startled, they retreated a step. But they continued to stare. When he reached the end of Kirkestræde, they disappeared. But then two more of them popped up in Snaregade, and when he started walking toward the seafront, they followed him, their eyes fixed on him in a persistent and mysterious manner.
"Do I look different from anybody else?" he roared at them. "What are you staring at?"
They didn't reply. He could see them freeze, out of fear, most likely. But they didn't run off. Nor did they taunt him. This baffled him more than anything. There was no point in chasing them. He was big and heavy, and they were better runners than he was. He just had to control himself and pretend they weren't there.
He was used to people in Marstal staring at him: he was a man who lived his life in full public view. He hadn't planned it that way, but he'd known how to exploit it when it happened. He had power, not over people's minds perhaps, but at least over the excursions their minds took. He was of the stuff that gossip and fear feed on, and in his case, both applied. They gloated when he fell, as he'd done when Henckel went to prison and the steel shipyard