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of doctors. She had asked whether he had met anyone. And he had answered that he had met his childhood pals, Øystein and Tresko. The former was an alkie, taxi-driving computer freak; the latter an alkie gambler who would have been the world poker champion if he had been as good at maintaining his own poker face as he was at reading others’. He had even begun to tell her about Tresko’s fatal defeat in the world championships in Las Vegas before he realisedhe had told her before. And it wasn’t true that he had met them. He hadn’t met anyone.
    He had seen the waiter pouring booze into the glasses on the adjacent table and for one crazy moment he had been on the point of tearing the bottle out of his hands and putting it to his mouth. Instead he had agreed to take Oleg to a concert he had begged Rakel to let him see. Slipknot. Harry had omitted to tell her what kind of band she was letting loose on her son, since he fancied seeing Slipknot himself. Even though bands with the obligatory death rattle, satanic symbols and speeded-up bass drum usually made him laugh, Slipknot was in fact interesting.
    Harry threw off the duvet and went into the kitchen, let the water from the tap run cold, cupped his hands and drank. He had always thought water tasted better like that, drunk from his own hands, off his own skin. Then he suddenly let the water run into the sink again and stared at the black wall. Had he seen anything? Something moving? No, not a thing, just movement itself, like the invisible waves underwater that caress the seagrass. Over dead fibres, fingers so thin that they can’t be seen, spores that rise at the smallest movement of air and settle in new areas and begin to eat and suck. Harry switched on the radio in the sitting room. It had been decided. George W. Bush had been given another term in the White House.
    Harry went back to bed and pulled the duvet over his head.
    Jonas was awoken by a sound and lifted the duvet off his face. At least he thought it had been a sound. A crunching sound, like sticky snow underfoot in the silence between the houses on a Sunday morning. He must have been dreaming. But sleep would not return even when he closed his eyes. Instead fragments of the dream came back to him. Dad had been standing motionless and silent in front of him with a reflection in his glasses that lent them an impenetrable ice-like surface.
    It must have been a nightmare, because Jonas was scared. He openedhis eyes again and saw that the chimes hanging from the ceiling were moving. Then he jumped out of bed, opened the door and ran across the corridor. By the stairs to the ground floor he managed to stop himself looking down into the darkness and didn’t pause until he was in front of his parents’ bedroom and pressing down the handle with infinite caution. Then he remembered that his dad was away, and he would wake his mum whatever he did. He slipped inside. A white square of moonlight extended across the floor to the undisturbed double bed. The numbers on the digital alarm clock were lit up: 01.11. For a moment Jonas stood there, bewildered.
    Then he went out into the corridor. He walked towards the staircase. The darkness of the stairs lay there waiting for him, like a vast open void. Not a sound could be heard from down below.
    ‘Mummy!’
    He regretted shouting the moment he heard his own terror in the brief, harsh echo. For now
it
knew, too. The darkness.
    There was no answer.
    Jonas swallowed. Then he began to tiptoe down the stairs.
    On the third step he felt something wet under his feet. The same on the sixth. And the eighth. As if someone had been walking with wet shoes. Or wet feet.
    In the living room the light was on, but there was no Mummy. He went to the window to look at the Bendiksens’ house. Mummy occasionally went over to see Ebba. But all the windows were dark.
    He walked into the kitchen and over to the telephone, successfully keeping his thoughts at bay, not letting the darkness in. He