The Wolf and the Watchman

by Niklas Natt och Dag

“Many of those whom we lost in the Gulf of Finland came back to us in the autumn. We found them under the walls of Sveaborg Fort, beneath the batteries. Those of us who had escaped the fever were sent to pull them out. Codfish and crabs had eaten what they could. Often they would start to move and that was the worst. Sounds came out of them, belches and moans. The bodies were full of eels that had eaten themselves fat in there and that reluctantly wriggled away across land when we interrupted their feast.”

With displeasure, Winge picks out Teuchler and Nystedt, two thugs in the agency’s employ who are half carrying a man whose blackened eyes and split lip bear witness to the fact that he has just confessed to whatever it is he has been accused of.

Fear of revolution and betrayal is a pestilence that spreads to all whose posteriors come too close to the throne.

“I’m sorry to say it, Cecil, especially since I know that I am not entirely innocent of the cause, but damn it, you look awful.”

Brutal

A short man with a potbelly trips over his own shoe buckle and pours his drink over the back of a sailor. In a few seconds, they have the sinner lifted onto a table and they force the poor sod to dance, while they surround him on all sides and tilt the surface of the table until the wood groans. One of their number has pulled out his knife and is hunting the man’s toes with its point.

Typical Friday night

War has taught Cardell that there is no honor in battle. And yet there is a ritual to be observed, as predictable as it is meaningless.

The position of watchman came to me through good contacts, but the devil take me if I plan to spend my time chasing derelicts and prostitutes to the reform house. I’ve no more chosen their fate than they have.”

One of the assistants places his foot between his shoulder blades while another pulls a strap around his right hand and ties it to the block. It will be severed first to ensure that the condemned prisoner does not pass into the other world devoid of suffering.

I broke the wax that sealed the bottle, unwound the coils of thread that kept the lid in place, and finally opened it. It had a familiar smell. The medicinal stink of the alcohol, but there was also something else, something both sharp and sweet. With my fingers, I fished out the lizard, slick and uncooperative. I shivered at the touch of the dead skin, which was completely smooth and lacked scales. I threw it off the side of the cliff, put the bottle to my mouth, and drank until nothing was left.

Vile

It was not the morning light that was reflected in the bay! The city sat in a puddle of blood and more ran along the streets. Before my eyes the dead awoke. There was hardly an inch in the city that had not at one time been used for executions, as a plague pit, or for the wide ditches where mauled soldiers were disposed of in the aftermath of battle. The hands of the dead, some clean and bone white, others worm-eaten or waterlogged as after a drowning, reached up between the cobblestones like weeds. They groped blindly after the feet of the living.

I saw in a state of dizziness how screaming women with pregnant bellies thronged Stockholm’s graveyards, giving birth to tiny pale corpses that slithered from their wombs straight into the graves, so quickly that the umbilical cords pulled their mothers with them underground.

From the palace at the Quayside and from the fine houses the gentlemen came in their finest clothes, with their teeth sharpened into cruel points. Laughing, they hunted down the paupers, the beggars, the orphans, spinning women, servants, and maids, ripped them into pieces, and feasted on their flesh until their bellies split open like overripened pustules.

A hate such as a desert landscape might feel towards the living travelers who have been foolish enough to test its dunes, as vanquishing and tenacious as eternity itself.

I asked what had happened to the tall one’s eye and the short one’s leg and then the short one said I would do best to hold my tongue and answer their questions instead of coming up with my own. Then I said that I would try but that it’s hard to hold my tongue and answer at the same time and then the tall one pulled my hair.”