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“World’s Best Mom.” He held it out, knowing that he might be making a stupid mistake.

 
    5
    Richmond, August 2010
    The cleaning woman at the Edgar Allan Poe Museum had four different jobs. She tried to put together the wages from several lousy jobs to make one halfway decent income. She arrived at three in the morning and unlocked the door to the Stone House as usual but was startled to see that the lights in the display cases were still on. She had noticed that the curator had been oddly absentminded the past few weeks. He was often spaced-out when he arrived in the morning, as if he was brooding about some all-consuming secret. It hadn’t mattered that much to her, because she seldom had time for small talk. Nevertheless, she was a bit worried about the circumspect old man. Not all secrets should be borne alone. Now he had begun to make mistakes, like forgetting to turn off the lights. Soon he might forget to lock up, so that some early morning she might discover the door open and a homeless person or two camped out on the floor.
    As she worked her way through the Stone House and the Memorial House, she couldn’t help thinking that Efrahim Bond had begun to lose his grip. After she was finished with the first two buildings, she always took a cigarette break in the Enchanted Garden, which was modeled after Poe’s poem “To One in Paradise.” When she sat down on a stone bench near the fountain, she noticed something odd in the dim light over by the Poe monument at the far end of the garden. She got up and went closer. Edgar Allan Poe’s marble head was whiter than before, and no longer fastened to the five-foot-high pedestal of red brick. Edgar Allan Poe had acquired a body, a bloody body without skin; the sinews, muscles, and blood vessels all lay exposed. She noticed that below the flayed torso the corpse was wearing trousers, and that the boss’s card key was attached to the belt.
    She raced up to the offices in the exhibition building as if the Devil himself were at her heels. She grabbed the phone in the boss’s office and dialed 911. Before she got an answer, she saw all the blood on the desk. Then she caught sight of the head in the wastebasket. There he lay staring up at her with bulging eyes—curator Efrahim Bond. He looked sadder than ever.
    A voice said something at the other end of the line. All she could do was scream in reply.
    Trondheim, September 2010
    Vatten opened his eyes and stared up at the familiar light fixture. He had persuaded the janitor to change the fluorescent tube a few days ago, after it started blinking and disturbing him as he was reading. The fixture was mounted directly above his easy chair, between two rows of shelving. This was in a part of the stacks where there was no natural light. For the first time he found the artificial light irritating. He closed his eyes again and felt a thundering headache, as if his pulse had been amplified fifty times and was being pumped full blast through the tiniest capillaries of his brain. Vague memories flickered between beats. He remembered that he had said, Yes, thank you, to a sizable mug of Spanish red wine. He remembered drinking it as he and Gunn Brita kept chatting about Edgar Allan Poe. Then they had moved on to talking about the library’s many rare books.
    She had an astonishing amount to say about the book the so-called Johannes Book . It was an odd collection of texts from the 1500s, written on parchment by a priest at Fosen who had been a Franciscan monk before the Reformation. Second only to the diary of Absalon Pederssøn Beyer, it was an important historical source for the period following the Reformation. But it was strange and baffling. While Beyer’s diary was systematic and scholarly and written with a larger public in mind, the Johannes Book was insular and cryptic, full of incomprehensible allusions. It had obviously been written for the priest’s eyes only, and in several places it cast doubt on whether the owner