The Cold Song Read Online Free Page B

continued with her story: “And once the mother had made the cocoa she poured a sleeping potion into the cup. It was colorless. Tasteless. There are such things, you know—sleeping potions that you can drink without even realizing that you’re drinking them! You never know. It can happen any time. It could happen to you too. Your mother could put a sleeping potion into your cocoa without you knowing.”
    “Cut it out,” said Simen.
    “You cut it out,” said Alma. “I’m only telling you that it
could
happen. These are the harsh realities of life.”
    “Well, cut it out anyway,” Simen said again.
    “And once the girl had drunk the cocoa,” Alma went on, “she fell asleep in her mother’s big four-poster bed. Fell into a deep, deep sleep. And the mother put her ear to the girl’s mouth, and when she was sure that she wouldn’t wake up, she picked her up in her arms and carried her through the woods to this lake and threw her in.”
    “I don’t believe that,” Simen said.
    “That’s because you’re a little boy,” Alma said, “and because you don’t know what mothers do when they can’t stop crying—and that girl’s mother just couldn’t stop crying.”
    It was years now since Alma had looked after Simen and told him the story about the boy and the girl who had drowned in the green lake, and even though he didn’t believe the story one hundred percent, he didn’t like to swim there. He swam in the sea instead. He never wanted to swim in those greenwaters, thinking about how that boy and girl, turned to water lilies, might clutch at him, a foot or an arm, and pull him under.
    So Simen and his friends rode past the lake where he had sat with Alma when he was little and he thought to himself:
I know every inch of this forest
.
    The treasure—two hundred kroner in notes, a diamond crucifix on a gold chain, and an autograph book from Liverpool—was in the light blue tin pail, lashed to Christian’s handlebars. One shovel jutted out of Gunnar’s rucksack. Simen had borrowed a saddlebag and found room for the other shovel in that. Three boys, all fine as pencil strokes, riding full tilt through the dim green light, on the hunt for the perfect hiding place.
    The wood opened up and closed in and wrapped itself around them and suddenly Simen pulled up sharply and cried, “Look! Over there, under that tree!” They had come to a clearing in the woods and on the edge of this clearing was a clump of rocks shaped rather like the letter
S
—as in
sacrifice
or
Simen
or the greatest soccer manager of all time Bill
Shankly
—and in the middle of the clearing was a tree and the tree raised its branches to the sky as if it were cheering every single goal scored by Liverpool since 1892.
    But everything looked different in the autumn. Nothing was the way it should be. It was raining and it was cold and dark and you had to wear hats and scarves and thick sweaters andyou had to bring a flashlight, and the woods were brooding, dense, and still and there were no bright clearings with rocks in the shape of the letter
S
or cheering trees.
    But they did find a clearing, and they did find a tree that looked a little bit like the one from the summer.
    “So what was the point of burying treasure if we are just unburying it two months later?” Simen tried one more time. “I thought the point was to leave it there forever.”
    “Oh just shut up,” Christian said.
    “I wasn’t the one babbling on about sacrifice and stuff,” Simen retorted.
    “I want my stuff back,” Gunnar said. “Okay?”
    Christian was quite sure that this was the right spot, he recognized it, he said. Simen regarded the tree with its bare branches raised to the night sky. No way! This tree wasn’t anything like the other one. This tree looked like an old man shaking his fists in the air, very angry and close to death. And it wasn’t just because it had lost its leaves. This tree was fucked. But he said nothing to the others. They had been