Nothing by Janne Teller Read Free Book Online Page B

must have been very fine and white when Elise’s baby brother had been put into it. Now the white finish was blistered and cracked and no longer fine at all. There was a worm crawling in some earth at one of the corners, and Holy Karl refused to carry until Otto had brushed it away. Then they bore the coffin, the four of them: Otto and Holy Karl on one side, Richard and Jon-Johan on the other. Elise, who had stopped crying when the town hall clock had struck, walked ahead and lit the way with her flashlight, while I brought up the rear with mine.
    ————
    The coffin was heavier than they’d imagined, and the boys were panting and sweating, but Otto wouldn’t let them rest until we’d gotten all the way down to the street. It was no loss to me. I could see no reason to hang about in the churchyard more than was absolutely necessary.
    Behind me there was a crunching of gravel.
    Sørensen’s Cinderella plodded slowly along after us as if she were the mourner in the procession. To begin with it was comforting and kind of made us feel braver, but when we got down to the street and the coffin had been handled into place on the trailer, we were somewhat unnerved to see her still following on behind.
    It wouldn’t do for the church warden to discover the next morning that not only was he missing two gravestones, but Cinderella was gone too. There was nothing we could do about it, though. No sooner had one of us taken her back to the churchyard than she turned around and followed us again. After we had tried to shake her off four times, we gave up and decided she could come along until she turned back herself. Which she didn’t. When we arrived at the sawmill, turned the code on the padlock, and opened up, Cinderella slipped in ahead of us.
    ————
    I turned on the lights, and the boys stepped in with the coffin between them. In the bright neon light it didn’t seem so scary anymore. It’s just a dead child with some wood around it, I thought to myself as I considered more closely the coffin that had now been placed at the foot of the heap of meaning, it being too heavy to be put on top.
    We were too tired to worry any more about Cinderella, so we just let her be, turned off the lights, locked up, and scuttled away back through the town. Reaching the end of my street, I said good night to the others and hurried off, rather more at ease than I had been setting out.
    The book was still jammed in the window, and I climbed inside and into bed without waking anyone in the house.

XI
    How they stared when they saw the coffin with Sørensen’s Cinderella on top.
    ————
    The six of us who had been at the churchyard may well have felt like falling asleep at school that day, but we certainly weren’t hanging our heads. On the contrary! The story was passed around the class and around again in an ever-increasing whisper until Eskildsen became furious and yelled at us to be quiet. Everything went still for a moment, and then it all started off againand Eskildsen had to holler at us some more.
    It felt like an eternity before the final lesson was over and we could set off in our different directions to the sawmill. But then there was no end to the heroics and the events of the previous night, the churchyard plunging deeper into darkness, looming larger and more forbidding as the story was told and told again.
    ————
    In the days that followed, there was no one anywhere in the town who wasn’t talking about the vandalism at the churchyard.
    Two gravestones had been stolen, someone had trampled around on little Emil Jensen’s grave, and Sørensen’s Cinderella had disappeared. The latter event was a source of very little regret; after all, it was a disgrace having that old mongrel going about the churchyard, urinating on the gravestones and depositing stuff that was worse who knows where.
    No one suspected us.
    My mom did ask me about the gravel and the dirt on the carpet in my room. But I just said I’d been