Eventually it, too, would give up.
The voices came to her as if she were in a trance. They were calling her name. Entreating her to answer them. She opened her eyes and noticed at once that the abscess had stopped throbbing, and that her limp body was still lying next to the toilet bucket beneath the mirrored panes. She stared up at the ceiling, noticing that one of the fluorescent tubes had started to flicker faintly in the fixture high above her. She’d heard voices, hadn’t she? Were they real?
Then a clear voice that she’d never heard before spoke: “That’s right, she took out the fruit.”
It’s real, she thought, but she was too weak to be startled.
It was a man’s voice. Not a young man, but not an old man either.
She immediately raised her head, but not so much that they’d be able to see her from outside.
“I can see the fruit from where I’m standing,” said a woman’s voice. “It’s over there on the floor.” It was the same woman who had spoken to Merete once a year; the voice was unmistakable. Apparently the people outside had been calling to her and had then forgotten to shut off the intercom.
“She’s crawled over between the windows. I’m sure of it,” the woman went on.
“Do you think she’s dead? It’s been a week, you know,” said the man’s voice. It sounded so natural, but it wasn’t. This was her they were talking about.
“It would be just like her to do something like that, the little slut.”
“Should we equalize the pressure and go in and have a look?”
“What were you planning to do with her then? All of the cells in her body have acclimated to five atmospheres of pressure. It would take weeks to decompress her body. If we open the door now, she’ll not only get the bends, she’ll explode on the spot. You’ve seen her feces and how it expands. And her urine, how it bubbles and boils. Keep in mind that she’s been living in a pressure chamber for three and a half years now.”
“Can’t we just pump up the pressure again after we find out whether she’s still alive?”
The woman outside didn’t answer, but it was clear that under no circumstances was that going to happen.
Merete’s breathing became more and more labored. The voices belonged to devils. They’d flay her and sew her back together for an eternity, if they could. She was in the inner circle of hell. The place where the torments never ceased.
Come on in, you bastards, she thought, cautiously pulling the flashlight closer as the whining in her ears got louder. She was going to plant it in the eye of the first person who came near her. Blind the vile creature who dared to set foot in her holy chamber. It was the one thing she’d manage to do before she died.
“We’re not doing anything until Lasse gets back. Do you hear me?” said the woman in a tone of voice that demanded obedience.
“But that’ll take forever. She’ll be dead long before then,” replied the man. “What the hell should we do? Lasse is going to be furious.”
Then came a silence that was nauseating and oppressive, as if the walls of the room were about to contract and leave her there, like a louse squeezed between two fingernails.
She clutched the flashlight even tighter in her hand and waited. All of a sudden the pain was back with a wallop. She opened her eyes wide and drew air deep into her lungs to release the pain in a reflexive scream, but no sound came out. Then she got herself under control. The feeling of nausea remained, and the sensation that she was about to throw up made her regurgitate, but she didn’t say a word. She merely tilted her head back and let the tears flow down her face and over her parched lips.
I can hear them, but they mustn’t hear me, she chanted soundlessly over and over. She clutched her throat, fanned her hand over the bulge in her cheek, and rocked back and forth, clenching and unclenching her free hand ceaselessly. Every nerve fiber in her body was aware of the excruciating pain.
And then the scream came. It had a life of its own. Her body demanded it. A deep, hollow scream that went on and on and on.
“She’s there. Do you hear that? I knew it.” There was a clicking sound from a switch. “Come out so we can see you,” said the revolting female voice. Only then did they discover that something was wrong.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “The switch is stuck.”
Then the woman started tapping on the intercom switch, but it did no good.
“Have you been lying there eavesdropping on what we were saying, you little bitch?” She sounded like an animal. Her voice was raw, honed with years of cruelty and callousness.
“Lasse will fix it when he gets here,” said the man outside. “He’ll fix it. It really doesn’t matter.”
Now it felt as if her jaw would split in two. Merete didn’t want to react, but she had no choice. She had to stand up. Anything to distract the hammering sense of panic in her body. She propped herself up on her knees, noticing how weak she was, then pushed off and managed to sit back on her heels, feeling the fire ignite again inside her mouth. She set one knee on the floor and managed to stand halfway up.
“Good Lord, look at you, girl,” said the ghastly voice outside, and then it began to laugh. The laughter struck Merete like a hailstorm of scalpels. “You have a toothache,” said the laughing voice. “Ye gods, the filthy slut has a toothache. Look at her.”
Merete turned abruptly to face the mirrored panes. The mere act of moving her lips felt worse than death. “I’ll get my revenge one day,” she whispered, pressing her face close to the pane. “I’ll get my revenge. Just wait.”
“If you don’t eat, you’re going to end up burning in hell without ever having that satisfaction,” snarled the woman, but there was something more in her voice. Like a cat playing with a mouse, and the cat wasn’t done playing yet. They wanted their prisoner to live. Live for as long as they had decided, and no longer.
“I
“Is it an abscess?” asked the man’s voice.
She nodded.
“You’ll have to deal with it yourself,” he said coldly.
Merete stared at her reflection in one of the portholes. The poor woman before her had hollow cheeks and her eyes looked as if they might fall out of her head. The upper part of her face was distorted from the abscess, and the dark circles under her eyes told their own story. She looked deathly ill, and she was.
She set her back against the glass and slowly slid down to the floor. There she sat, with tears of anger in her eyes and a new awareness that her body wanted to live and was capable of doing so. She would take whatever was in the bucket and force herself to swallow it. The pain would either kill her or it wouldn’t; time would tell. In any case, she would not give up without a fight, because she had just made a promise to that awful bitch out there. A promise she was determined to keep. At some point that disgusting woman would get a taste of her own medicine.
For a moment Merete’s body felt calm, like a shattered landscape in the eye of a hurricane, and then the pain was back. This time she screamed as uninhibitedly as she could. She felt the pus from her gum flow on to her tongue and how the throbbing of the toothache spread all the way to her temple.
Then she heard the whistling of the airlock door, and a new bucket came into view.
“Here! We’ve put some first aid in the bucket for you. Go ahead and take it,” laughed the woman’s voice outside.
Merete quickly crawled over to the hatch on all fours and pulled out the bucket. She looked inside.
Way down at the bottom, lying on a piece of fabric just like a surgical instrument, was a pair of tongs.
A big pair of tongs. Big and rusty.
27
Carl’s morning had been an oppressive one. First bad dreams and then Jesper’s griping at breakfast had drained him of energy even before he sank into the driver’s seat of his car, only to discover the gas
