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churchyard.”
    “This is not a good idea,” Holy Karl stuttered. “And I can get expelled from the Mission.”
    “I don’t think it’s a good idea either.” Elise, too, was getting cold feet. “Isn’t there somethingelse I can give up? My watch, for example.” Elise stretched out her arm so everyone could see the red wristwatch her father had bought her the time she moved in with her grandparents.
    Otto shook his head.
    “My Discman, then?” Elise patted her jacket pocket, where we knew she kept the little marvel no one else in class could match.
    I don’t think Elise was very sad about having to dig up her baby brother. I think Elise was afraid her parents would find out and send her away for good. For when Otto refused to yield, she didn’t insist, but merely said, “We have to remember exactly how the flowers were so we can put them back again afterward.”
    Otto now ordered Jon-Johan to bring a spade along; the other one we could borrow from Richard’s parents’ shed. Holy Karl was to bring his trailer, and Elise and I were to make sure we had flashlights with us. Otto himself would take a broom to brush away the dirt from the coffin.

    Holy Karl looked badly affected by the mention of the coffin, and I think he may even have cried had Otto not at that very moment concluded that it was all agreed: eleven o’clock at Richard’s bike shed.

X
    I’d set my alarm to go off at ten thirty, but I needn’t have bothered. I never managed to fall asleep, just lay in bed with my eyes open for more than an hour and a half before it was time to get up. At exactly twenty-five past ten I climbed out of bed, turned off the alarm, and put on my jeans and a sweater. I stuck my feet into my rubber boots and grabbed the flashlight I’d put out ready on the desk. I could hear the faint sound of the television from inside the living room. Fortunately, ours was a single-story home. I was able to crawl out of the window in my room without beingnoticed. I jammed a book into place to stop the window from closing again, and then I was away.
    It was colder than I’d reckoned.
    I was freezing in my thin sweater and had to beat my arms to get warm. I’d considered staying in bed, but it wouldn’t have helped. Otto had sworn that if anyone failed to turn up at Richard’s, the others would simply return home and leave whoever it was to do the job alone the following evening. Just the thought of being alone in the churchyard after dark was enough to make me hurry. Running helped against the cold, too.
    It was only ten to eleven when I got to Richard’s bike shed. Jon-Johan and Holy Karl were already there. Before long, Elise turned up too, and only shortly afterward Richard appeared in the mudroom doorway of his house. Otto arrived on the stroke of eleven.
    “Let’s go,” he said as soon as he’d made sure everything was ready: two spades, flashlights, and Holy Karl’s trailer.
    None of us spoke as we crept our way through the streets to the church.
    The town was silent too.
    There was never much going on in the evenings in Tæring, and nothing at all late on a regular Tuesday. We stuck close to the garden hedges as we walked along Richard’s street, turned down the street where Sebastian and Laura lived, ran past the bakery and ducked down the path behind Ursula-Marie’s house on Tæring Hovedgade, and arrived at the churchyard hill having encountered nothing but two amorous cats that Otto chased off with a kick.
    ————
    The churchyard hill was steep, and the path between the graves was covered with gravel. We had to leave the trailer at the iron gates. Holy Karl didn’t like it much, but Otto promised to beat up on him if he started acting up.
    The streets had been dimly and rathersinisterly illuminated by the yellow streetlamps. Tall fir trees sheltered the churchyard from the street, and although they may well have protected us from any inquisitive gaze, they also screened off the street lighting, which we