Hour of the Wolf Read Online Free

in fact, but in different sizes: a boy smiling cheerfully with dimples, slightly slant-eyed, dark hair combed forward. No hood, no blood. He didn’t recognize him.
    When he got home he read that the boy was Wim Felders, that he had celebrated his sixteenth birthday only a few days ago, and that he had been a pupil at Weger Grammar School.
    Both newspapers were full of details, information and speculations, and the overall attitude that was perhaps summed up by the headline on page three of Den Poost :
    HELP THE POLICE TO CATCH
THE HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER!
    There was also a lot written about possible consequences if the police succeeded in tracing the culprit. Two to three years’ imprisonment was by no means out of the question, it seemed.
    He added in his alcohol consumption – which could no doubt be established by interviewing the restaurant staff – and increased the term to five or six years. At least. Drunken driving. Reckless driving and negligent homicide. Hit-and-run.
    Five or six years under lock and key. What would be the point of that? Who would gain from such a development?
    He flung the newspapers in the rubbish bin and took out the whisky bottle.

3
    He dreamt about the boy for three nights in a row, then he vanished.
    Just as he’d vanished from the newspapers, generally speaking. They wrote about Wim Felders on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, but when the new working week began on Monday, reporting was restricted to a note saying that the police still had no leads. No witnesses had turned up, and no technical proof had been ascertained – whatever that meant. The young boy had been killed by an unknown driver who had then fled the scene, assisted in his efforts to remain anonymous by the rain and the darkness. This had been known from the start, and was still known four days later.
    He also went back to work on Monday. It felt like a relief, but also an escape route to more normal routines. Life was trundling on once more along the same old pathways – familiar and yet also remarkably alien – and during the course of the day he was surprised to find himself pondering on how frail the link was between the mundane and the horrific.
    How frail, and how incredibly easy to break. That link.
    After work he drove out to the supermarket in Löhr and bought some new seat covers for his car. He found a set almost immediately in more or less exactly the same shade as the existing upholstery on the seats, and when he eventually managed to work out how to fit them in the garage later that evening, he had the feeling that he was home and dry at last. The parenthesis was over and done with now. The parenthesis around nothing. He had put in place the final element of the safety strategies he had evolved after long and careful consideration. All steps had been taken, all traces erased, and he was somewhat surprised to note that it was still less than a week after the accident happened.
    And there was nothing for the police to hit on and follow up. He hadn’t discovered the slightest thing to suggest that he ought to own up to what had happened during those fateful seconds on Thursday evening. Those horrific and increasingly unreal seconds that were rapidly hurtling away further and further into the darkness of the past.
    He would pull through this. He took a deep breath and knew that he would pull through this.
    To be sure, it had been claimed – both in some of the newspapers and in the television news broadcasts that he had happened to catch – that the police had certain leads that they were working on, but he realized that this was a lot of hot air. A heavy-handed attempt to give the impression that they knew more and were more competent than was really the case. As usual.
    There had been no mention of a red Audi parked at the side of the road near the scene of the accident with its lights on. That is what he had been most afraid of: perhaps not that somebody would have noticed the colour or the make, never mind the