The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

Harry swallowed before stepping out of the back door. It had been more than thirty years ago. And
still his body bristled.
He had been staying at his grandfather’s house in Åndalsnes during the autumn holiday. The farm
lay on a mountainside with the mighty Romsdal Mountains towering above. Harry had been ten and
had gone into the forest to look for the cow his grandfather was searching for. He wanted to find it
before his grandfather, before anyone. So he hurried. Ran like a maniac over hills of soft blueberry
bushes and funny, crooked dwarf birch trees. The paths came and went as he ran in a straight line
towards the bell he thought he had heard among the trees. And there it was again, a bit further to the
right now. He jumped over a stream, ducked under a tree and his boots squelched as he ran across a
marsh with a rain cloud edging towards him. He could see the veil of drizzle beneath the cloud
showering the steep mountainside.
And the rain was so fine that he had not noticed the darkness descending; it slunk out of the marsh,
it crept between the trees, it spilt down through the shadows of the mountainside like black paint
and collected at the bottom of the valley. He looked up at a large bird circling high above, so
dizzyingly high because he could see the mountain behind it. And then a boot got stuck and he fell.
Face down and without anything to grab. Everything went dark, and his nose and mouth were filled
with the taste of marsh, of death, decay and darkness. He could taste the darkness for the few
seconds he was under. And then he came up again, and discovered that all the light had gone. Gone
across the mountain towering above him in its silent, heavy majesty, whispering that he didn’t know
where he was, that he hadn’t known for a long time. Unaware that he had lost a boot, he stood up
and began to run. He would soon see something he recognised. But the landscape seemed
bewitched; rocks had become heads of creatures growing up out of the ground, bushes were fingers
that scratched at his legs and dwarf birch trees were witches bent with laughter as they pointed the
way, here or there, the way home or the way to perdition, the way to his grandmother’s house or the
way to the Pit. Because adults had told him about the Pit. The bottomless swamp where cattle,
people and whole carts vanished, never to return.
It was almost night when Harry tottered into the kitchen and his grandmother hugged him and said
that his father, grandfather and all the adults from the neighbouring farm were out looking for him.
Where had he been?
In the forest.
But hadn’t he heard their shouts? They had been calling Harry, she had heard them calling Harry all
the time.
He didn’t remember it himself, but many times later he had been told that he had sat there trembling
with cold on the wooden box in front of the stove, staring into the distance with an apathetic
expression on his face, and had answered: ‘I didn’t think it was them calling.’
‘Who did you think it was then?’
‘The others. Did you know that darkness has a taste, Grandma?’
Harry had walked barely a few metres into the forest when he was overtaken by an intense, almost
unnatural silence. He shone the torch down on the ground in front of him because every time he
pointed it into the forest, shadows ran between the trees like jittery spirits in the pitch black. Being
isolated from the dark in a bubble of light didn’t give him a sense of security. Quite the opposite.
The certainty that he was the most visible object moving through the forest made him feel naked,
vulnerable. The branches scraped at his face, like a blind man’s fingers trying to identify a stranger.