Nothing by Janne Teller Read Free Book Online Page A

me one if I came running all of a sudden. I took a deep breath, cupped my hands together, and made a deep, hooting sound by blowing air through the crack between my thumbs into the hollow of my palms.
    Uuuuuh , came the faint sound.
    The gravel crunched again, and I hooted as hard as I could.
    Uuuuuh. Uuuuuh.
    Otto appeared beside me.
    “What’s wrong?” he whispered.
    I was so scared I was unable to answer. I just lifted my arm and pointed down the path.
    “Come on,” Otto commanded, and since I was just as scared of not obeying Otto as I was of whatever it was that was making the noise, I followed him off behind the fir trees where the light was dimmest.
    We snuck a few steps, then Otto stopped and looked around. I stood behind him and couldn’t see a thing. There was nothing there, and Otto continued on. We moved slowly so as not to make the slightest sound. My heart was pounding, thumping in my ears, and it felt like we were stealing around there between the trunks of the fir trees for ages.
    Then Otto pushed aside the branches and stepped out onto the path.
    “Ha,” he scoffed. I peered over his shoulder and felt stupid.
    It was Cinderella, Sørensen’s old dog. After the old man had died, Cinderella had refused to reside anywhere else than on top of her master’sgrave. The dog had grown inquisitive at the sound of the spades and had shuffled slowly and sedately up the hill on her arthritic old legs. Fortunately, she wasn’t one for barking. She just stared at us some and sniffed at my legs. I patted her on the head and returned to my post.
    ————
    Not long after, it was Otto who signaled.
    They were finished digging. The little coffin had been put out onto the gravel path and looked abandoned and so awfully sad, but there was no time to think about that — there was another problem. The boys had shoveled all the earth they’d dug up back into the grave, but the hole was still only three-quarters full.
    A law of physics we had never learned: When a physical body is removed from the ground, the level of earth at the place occupied by the body will diminish relative to the body’s volume.
    Anybody going anywhere near little EmilJensen’s grave couldn’t help but notice that little Emil Jensen was no longer occupying it. Now Elise began to cry and wouldn’t stop, no matter how much Otto insisted.
    We stood awhile without knowing what to do. Then I figured we could roll a couple of headstones from the other graves into the hole and cover them up with earth. The church warden was going to wonder about the missing stones, but he was never going to guess they were at the bottom of Emil Jensen’s grave. All we had to do was make sure we put all the flowers back as they were before.
    It took us a good while and a whole lot of toil to get the stones loose and roll them over to little Emil’s grave. We left the ones closest by in case anyone noticed the earth had just been dug. But down they went eventually, with a good heap of earth on top, and gravel topmost of all, and then the flowers, which had suffered some underway, but which would just pass after we’dbrushed them down a bit with Otto’s broom.
    The town hall clock struck midnight exactly as we finished up and turned toward the coffin.
    I stiffened, and even in the dark I could see the boys grow pale. The town hall clock had a deep, hollow resonance, and each stroke echoed through the graveyard like some ponderous, ghostly appeal.
    Come! Come! Come!
    None of us moved.
    I could neither look nor close my eyes and just stared stiffly at Jon-Johan like he was the only image I dared admit to my retina. I didn’t count the strokes, but it felt like there were many more than twelve. After an age the last one died away, and silence prevailed once more.
    We looked at one another nervously. Then Jon-Johan cleared his throat and pointed at the coffin.
    “Let’s get out of here,” he said. I noted his subtle avoidance of the word “coffin.”
    The coffin