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can't
do anything about that. He expects Anton Wiberg to
appear beside him at any moment.
    I'm out of my mind, he thinks and can feel himself
starting to cry with fear. He rubs and rubs. The bike will
never be clean and dry again.
    Just at that very moment he looks out of the window,
into the deserted street.
    There comes the dog!
    The solitary dog heading for a star.
    Joel knows right away that it's the very same dog.
There's no other dog like it, even if it seems to be just an
ordinary Norwegian elkhound.
    Suddenly it stops and looks round.
    Just for a moment Joel thinks it's looking straight at
him, through the shop window.
    Then it sets off running again.
    Joel rushes out through the back door, trips up on the
steps and falls headfirst.
    When he gets to the street the dog has disappeared.
The street is deserted. He goes to the streetlight, but
there's no sign of any pawprints. No sign of any dog.
    Joel sets off running through the night, and it's started
snowing again.
    Back in bed he thinks about the dog he's seen. The
dog really was there, he'd seen it. Perhaps a dog heading
for a star doesn't leave any tracks behind it.
    His fear gradually fades away. The Old Bricklayer
can't know that the bike Joel had ridden into the snow
had been pinched. And nobody will be able to find his
name peed into the snow. By the time he wakes up the
yellow marks will have been covered over. I'll get away
with it, he thinks.
    But the dog does exist. And the adventure, the great
adventure has begun . . .

4
    A few days later Joel fell asleep at his desk in school.
    He had no idea how it came about. All of a sudden he
was just sitting there with his mouth open, fast asleep.
    It was an RE class, and Miss Nederström was red in
the face with anger when she shook him by the shoulder
to wake him up.
    She had a patch of eczema on her forehead, just under
her hair line. When her face turned red and the spots
became white, everybody knew that she was furious.
    'Joel,' she bellowed. 'Joel Gustafson! How dare you
sleep through my lesson!'
    He woke up with a start. He'd been dreaming something
that vanished the moment he woke up. Something
about his father. In the dream Joel had been in a vast
forest, looking for him, but that was all he could
remember.
    When he woke up he couldn't believe that he'd been
asleep. Asleep at his desk?
    'No,' he said. 'I wasn't asleep.'
    'Don't sit there telling me barefaced lies. You were
asleep. The whole class could see that.'
    Joel looked round. He was surrounded by embarrassed
faces, grinning faces, curious faces.
    Faces that told him Miss Nederström was telling the
truth. He had fallen asleep.
    He was ordered to leave the room, and Miss
Nederström said she would be phoning his father.
    Joel didn't respond.
    She could find out for herself that they didn't have a
telephone.
    He sat on the floor in the empty corridor, eyeing all
the shoes lined up against the wall. He thought he might
get his own back on all those grinning faces by mixing
the shoes up. Or throwing them out into the yard. But he
decided not to.
    Instead he took The Secret Society logbook out of his
pocket. He'd forgotten to put it in Celestine 's glass case
that morning.
    He searched through the jackets hanging in the
corridor until he found a pen, then started writing.
    'The lookout on the mizzen mast, Joel Gustafson, was
so exhausted that he fell out of his crow's nest, but
survived without serious injury. After resting for merely
a couple of hours, he was ready to climb up the mast
once more.'
    What he writes is almost word-for-word something
he'd read in a book his dad keeps in his little bookcase,
and often thumbs through. That's the kind of thing you
put in a secret logbook, Joel thinks.
    Only somebody with inside information can know
that it's really about him being thrown out of the
classroom.
    It's not good, being sent out like that. Better than
wearing glasses or stuttering, but not good whichever
way you look at it.
    Joel can put up with his