A man passes by, his chest bare. He’s wearing a wolf mask and he’s beating a kettle drum. Pan Night has a heartbeat now. The violinists start playing again. Beats and screeches. Bass and treble. The bee spins. A man sits on a bench, his legs crossed, oblivious to a couple underneath ripping at each other’s clothes. The man on the bench is holding a rat. Its tail must be as long as my forearm. Brown fur. Lifeless. The man holds it out in front of his face and looks at it, shows it off to the crowds. He’s salivating. He opens his mouth and takes a bite and fluid dribbles down his neck and stains his chest. Rivulets streak down past his nipples. The rat isn’t a rat, it’s a rotisserie chicken, the kind with dark sugary-brown skin, and it has a tail adornment skewered into the flesh. Genuine rodent or quality imitation, it’s difficult to tell in this light. The bonfire smoke intensifies and I watch the man gnaw the imitation rat carcass and pick his teeth with the bird’s-wing bones as the couple under his bench start to groan with pleasure.

More beating of drums. More demonic string section accompaniment. A man in a straitjacket and bright-red lipstick shuffles over to me. He’s almost comical but then he starts cackling and trying to rub himself against me so I kick him in the shin. He comes back harder, puckering his scarlet lips so I say, ‘Bee sting,’ and he deflates and walks off in the other direction.

The Sheriff’s patrolling the square. Walking around with a worried look in his eye, his hand close to his radio.

A woman passes by Konsum with two Irish wolfhounds, each one wearing a high quality ‘bald man’ mask. They look appalling.

I approach the bandstand because people are talking there. Not wailing or dry-humping or howling, just talking. I might learn something. There may be gossip.

But actually they’re not chatting, they’re each chanting, ‘As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear no evil,’ at double-speed, on a loop.

All around the square people pull burning logs from fire baskets. The man next to me, a man with curled ram horns adorning his rough-stitched leather mask, whispers, ‘Hydrogen.’

The people with the burning pine logs hold them up and others step to them. Clusters of large, black bladder-balloons form. Elk bladders, mostly. Some cow. The logs are held close to the clusters and the balloons flare and burn and light up the square in bright light and the man with the ram horns points at the bronze anvil upon which Adolf-Fredrik Edlund is standing resolute, and he says, ‘That’s not a mask.’

20

Everyone in the bandstand goes quiet and looks over at the statue.

At the anvil.