My Struggle: Book 3 Read Online Free Page B

sprites there. They’re dangerous. It’s true. Mom and Dad told me. They kidnap children and drown them.”
    “Could it come up here?”
    “Dunno. No, I don’t reckon so. No. It’s too far. It’s only dangerous by the water’s edge.”
    I was scared of the sprite after that, but not as scared as I was of foxes, the thought of them terrified me, and if I saw a bush stir or I heard something rustle past, then I was off, running to safety, to an opening in the forest, that is, or up to the estate, where the foxes never ventured. In fact, I was so frightened of foxes that Yngve only had to say, I am a fox, and I am coming to get you – he was in the upper bunk and I was in the lower one – and I froze in terror. No, you aren’t, I would say. Yes, I am, he would say, hanging over the edge and hitting out at me. Despite this and even though he did frighten me now and then, I missed having him there when we each had our own room and suddenly I had to sleep alone. It was all right, after all, it was
inside
the house, the new room, but it wasn’t as good as having him there, in the bunk above me. Then I could just ask him things, such as, “Yngve, are you frightened now?” and he might answer “No-oo, why should I be? There’s nothing to be frightened of here.” And I would know he was right and feel reassured.
    The fear of foxes must have worn off when I was about seven. The vacuum it left, however, was soon filled by other fears. One morning I was walking past the TV, it was on although no one was watching, there was a matinee film, and there, oh no, oh no, there was a man with no head walking up a staircase! Aaagh! I ran into my room, but that didn’t help, I was just as alone and defenseless there, so off I went in search of Mom, if she was at home, or Yngve. The image of the headless man pursued me, and not just in the night, which the other fearful visions I had did. No, the headless man could appear in broad daylight, and if I was alone it made no difference that the sun was shining or the birds were singing, my heart pounded and fear spread like fire to every tiniest nerve ending in my body. It upset me more that this darkness could also appear in the daylight. In fact, if there was one thing I was really frightened of, it was this darkness in the light. And the worst of it was that there was nothing I could do about it. Shouting for someone didn’t help, standing in the middle of an open area didn’t help, and running away didn’t help. Then there was the front cover of a crime magazine that Dad once showed me, a comic he’d had when he was a child, showing a skeleton carrying a man over its back, and the skeleton had turned its head and was looking straight at me through its hollow eye sockets. I was afraid of that skeleton as well; it too appeared in all sorts of expected and unexpected contexts. I was also afraid of the hot water in the bathroom. Because whenever you turned on the hot tap a shrill scream traveled through the pipes, and immediately afterward, if you didn’t turn it off at once, they started banging. These noises, which were one unholy racket, scared the wits out of me. There was a way of avoiding them, you had to turn on the cold water first, and then somehow fiddle with the hot tap until the temperature was right. That was what Mom, Dad, and Yngve did. I had tried, but the shrill scream that penetrated the walls and was followed by a crescendo of banging, as though something down below was working itself up into a fury, started the second I touched the hot-water tap, and I turned it off as fast as I could, and ran out, my body shaking violently with fear. So, in the morning, I either washed in cold water or took Yngve’s dirty but lukewarm water.
    Dogs, foxes, and plumbing were concrete, physical threats, I knew where I was with them, either they were there or they weren’t. But the headless man and the grinning skeleton, they belonged to the kingdom of death, and they couldn’t be