The Killing

One

Through the dark wood where the dead trees give no shelter Nanna Birk Larsen runs.

Nineteen, breathless, shivering in her skimpy torn slip, bare feet stumbling in the clinging mud.

Cruel roots snag her ankles, snarling branches tear her pale and flailing arms. She falls, she clambers, she struggles out of vile dank gullies, trying to still her chattering teeth, to think, to hope, to hide.

There is a bright monocular eye that follows, like a hunter after a wounded deer. It moves in a slow approaching zigzag, marching through the Pinseskoven wasteland, through the Pentecost Forest.

Bare silver trunks rise from barren soil like limbs of ancient corpses frozen in their final throes.

Another fall, the worst. The ground beneath her vanishes and with it her legs. Hands windmilling, crying out in pain and despair, the girl crashes into the filthy, ice-cold ditch, collides with rocks and logs, paddles through sharp and cutting gravel, feels her head and hands, her elbows, her knees, graze the hard invisible terrain that lurks below.

The chill water, the fear, his presence not so far away…

She staggers, gasping, out of the mire, clambers up the bank, splays her naked, torn and bleeding feet against the swampy ground to gain some purchase from the sludge between her toes.

At the ridge ahead she finds a tree. Some last few leaves of autumn brush against her face. The trunk is larger than its peers and as her arms fall round it she thinks of Theis her father, a giant of a man, silent, morose, a staunch and stoic bulwark against the world outside.

She grips the tree, clutches at it as once she clutched him. His strength with hers, hers with his. Nothing more was ever needed, ever would be.

From the limitless sky falls a low-pitched whine. The bright, all-seeing lights of a jet escaping the bounds of gravity, fleeing Kastrup, fleeing Denmark. Its fugitive presence dazzles and blinds. In the unforgiving brilliance Nanna Birk Larsen’s fingers stray to her face. Feel the wound running from her left eye to her cheek, vicious, open, bleeding.

She can smell him, feel him. On her. In her.

Through all the pain, amidst the fear, rises a hot and sudden flame of fury.

You’re Theis Birk Larsen’s daughter.

They all said that when she gave them reason.

You’re Nanna Birk Larsen, Theis’s child, Pernille’s too, and you shall escape the monster in the night, chasing through the Pentecost Forest on the fringes of the city where, a few long miles away, lies that warm safe place called home.

She stands and grips the trunk as once she gripped her father, arms round the splintering silver bark, shiny slip stained with dirt and blood, shivering, quiet, convincing herself salvation lies ahead, beyond the dark wood and the dead trees that give no shelter.

A white beam ranges over her again. It is not the flood of illumination falling from the belly of a plane that flies above this wasteland like a vast mechanical angel idly looking for a stray lost soul to save.

Run, Nanna, run, a voice cries.

Run, Nanna, run, she thinks.

There is one torchlight on her now, the single blazing eye. And it is here.