When the body is wrapped, they place her on a wooden litter and raise her. They start chanting and head out of the clearing and onto a broad path through the forest. Glancing around me, I realise that the safest way to get back to the village or the road is to follow them. Worst case, I’ll have to tag along with these murderers until the end of the show, but the alternative is being lost in the forest and in time forever.

Murderers? Sounds ridiculous. This is a show. I knew what I signed up for. I’ll just go along with it. The audience’s mood is celebratory, as if they’re enjoying a summer festival rather than carrying a corpse.

Soon, the procession comes out of the trees at the island road. My relief at seeing road signs and lights on houses tucked into the cove is indescribable. As if there’s zero chance of any passing traffic, or even suspicious neighbours, the hosts lead us along the middle of the road and down a slipway towards the water. It is midnight, after all, I need to remind myself in the moonlit dusk.

Just for a moment, I believe it will all be okay.

I spot the boathouse to my left and, trying not to stand out from the other white-robed crows, I shift to the left of the group. As I do, I pass the funeral bier being borne on the shoulders of hosts and volunteers. I glance at the linen-wrapped shape on top, and – despite how tightly she’s been swaddled – she shifts and her arm flops out.

The green nails on her fingers. They reach for me.

She sits up, the black hair stuck in the gaping wounds on her neck and chest, clotting with the blood.

She smiles at me, with broken, gore-smeared teeth.

Her eyes are dead. She is dead.

* * *

And that’s what has sent me scurrying and hiding from ghosts in a boathouse on the Oslofjord.

When the panic passes, I reassess what I’ve seen. It must be the stress. Maybe they added special ingredients to the wine or the food.

There is singing and laughing a little way down the slip road. The audience are performing their ritual. Somehow, right now, the lure of company is more powerful than the fear of what I will see down there.

Still wearing my mask and robe, I make my way out of the boathouse and down to the water’s edge, where they’ve set the sacrificial litter down. Piece by piece as they sing and laugh, the audience is removing what they made and placed there and offering it to the water – straw dolls, little wooden rafts with flower-wrapped candles, paper balloons that rise up like sprites over the water.

There is no corpse on a litter. It strikes me that there never was.

Nobody here but me has a corpse to dispose of.

* * *