a face at the defiant erection, and without further ado drove the screwdriver straight through her piece of paper, all the way to the handle.
Max Hansen screamed through his nose, snot spurted out, sweat poured down his forehead and his body quivered for a few seconds before becoming still once more. The erection didn’t subside, but remained sticking up about three centimetres below the handle of the screwdriver; it was about the same thickness.
It was Linn’s turn next. She had to stand on tiptoe to stab through the label below the right collarbone with her slender chisel. Max Hansen’s back squelched sweatily against the bench as he reared up and fell back down. Blood was trickling out of his wounds and dripping slowly onto the plastic.
Teresa had worked out that if they left the tools in place, it would take longer for him to bleed to death. She had also made sure she chose thin, short spikes and blades. He wasn’t going to die until everyone had done what they had to do and played their part.
Caroline was the sixth in line, and when she drove her knife through the label in the inside of his right thigh, Max Hansen let out a completely different kind of groan as he ejaculated with such force that the semen spurted into his face and over his head. Miranda, who had been standing behind the bench, squeaked in disgust and wiped her top with a cloth.
By this stage a fairly large pool of blood had begun to gather on the floor, and Teresa waved the girls forward more quickly so that they would all have their turn before it was over. Max Hansen’s penis finally collapsed and he was hardly even twitching as he was stabbed now.
In the end only Anna L, Cecilia and Teresa remained. Theres had said that she would prefer to watch, and was following the procedure curled up on the workbench at the side, humming ‘Thank You for the Music’.
Anna L stepped forward. She had been given a fine awl, because her label was dangerously close to the heart. She frowned, raised the awl and looked at Max Hansen’s eyes; only the whites were visible now. Then she shook her head and lowered her hand. With tears in her voice she said, ‘I can’t. This is crazy. It’s wrong. You can’t.’
Theres jumped down and went over to her. ‘Do you want to sit in your car?’ she asked. Anna L shook her head as tears welled up in her eyes, and she said, ‘I just can’t.’
‘You can,’ said Theres. ‘You have to.’
‘But this is crazy.’
‘It isn’t crazy,’ said Theres as she gripped her wrist, moved the hand holding the awl to the correct position, ‘it isn’t crazy at all’, then she thrust Anna’s hand down so that the awl went in halfway. Theres banged it with the palm of her hand, hammering it all the way in, then climbed back onto the workbench. Anna L crouched down by the wall with her hands over her head as Cecilia drove in a long nail.
Max Hansen’s body was limp, perforated in thirteen places and white from loss of blood. Shafts and handles stuck up through sticky pieces of paper, moving in time with his shallow breathing. A film covered his eyes as the pupils rolled back into place, and his gaze fixed on Teresa. He moved his head as if he wanted to say something, and since Teresa didn’t think he could possibly have any strength left to scream, she pulled off the tape. He looked at her and whispered, ‘Teresa…’ She leaned closer to his marble-grey face. ‘Yes?’
Max Hansen’s lips didn’t move and the consonants were no more than faint puffs of air. ‘That was fantastic. That was fantastic…that was fantastic…that was fantastic…’
‘Just one thing,’ said Teresa. ‘That stuff you’ve got on Theres. Is it going to get out?’
Max Hansen made a movement with his head, the hint of a shake, a no, then he carried on whispering, ‘That was fantastic…that was fantastic…’
Teresa shrugged her shoulders. ‘Glad you thought so. Bit of a shame, though. You might change your mind now.’
She picked up the drill that had been charging all day, pressed the button. The bit, which was the thickness of a little finger, was spinning around at twenty revolutions per second. She showed it to Max Hansen, revved the motor a couple of times then pushed it into the label attached to his temple.
And at long last came the scream she had longed for.
The girls gathered around the body, which was twitching like a landed fish as the blood spurted, with dwindling force, from the hole in the temple. Theres stood at the top and stroked the sticky hair from Max Hansen’s forehead. She said, ‘Come closer.’
They moved right in, fourteen girls. A rattling came from Max Hansen’s throat, then the body lay still. The blood stopped flowing from the temple, and as if that little black hole were a point of higher gravity, they were all drawn closer, as close as possible, as thin wisps of smoke extended like cobwebs.
They breathed in collectively, inhaling the essence that had been Max Hansen and incorporating it with the circulation of their own blood. But it was so little, much too little. Several of them moved their lips closer to the hole to force out something that was no longer there, almost kissing Max Hansen’s lacerated skull in order to lap up the very last bit.
They straightened up and the light in the garage was so bright, the iron-rich smell of blood so strong, and the sound as their feet stuck to the plastic and pulled free sliced through their ears. Their breathing was uneven as they returned to their wide-open bodies.
‘We are here,’ said Theres. ‘Now we are here.’
Many spent the night crying. Their senses were open wounds, their perceptions too powerful. They consoled and held one another, shared sleeping bags or lay caressing each other’s faces without speaking.
But in spite of the tears and the need for comfort, the underlying feeling was one of
It was yet another sleepless night, and before dawn they went out under cover of darkness to clean up. A group of them carried Max Hansen’s plastic-wrapped body down to the grave and threw it in along with his clothes, then filled the hole with earth and stones before carefully replacing the turf and stamping it down. Within a couple of weeks the turf would have grown into the surrounding grass. The others tidied up the garage, washed all the tools and scrubbed the work benches.
When dawn came and they had restored everything to its original state, they gathered on the jetty to watch the sun rise. Linn still had tears in her eyes, but not for the reason the others thought. When they had allowed the first rays of the sun to warm their faces for a while, Linn folded her arms, turned to Teresa and said, ‘Next time
It was perhaps not quite the last thing Teresa had expected, but almost. Linn’s little face looked so sulky that Teresa burst out laughing, and soon several of the girls were laughing. Linn looked around, her expression furious.
‘What are you laughing at? I got practically
The laughter quickly died down and there was silence as they looked at each other. They no longer needed to talk as much in order to communicate, and it appeared that several of them had been thinking along the same lines as Linn.
Next time. There was going to be a next time.
At about twelve o’clock the shuttle service to the bus stop began. Theres had had a long conversation with Anna L, and Anna said she did want to be involved in the future, but that she would need the others’ help. She would get it; that was the whole point of being a pack rather than fourteen girls. They gathered around her, they held her and shared their strength with her. Ronja offered to drive her car to Morby so that she could travel on the bus with the others.
This turned out to be a valuable experience, because it was only on the bus that the experience finally seemed to settle within her, as they took up the whole of the back of the bus together and Anna found herself in a familiar environment, but no longer defenceless and afraid. No, she was sitting here now with
