As I stepped in he turned blindly towards me. His voice went up another tone. ‘Oh, Lord, Almighty God – in Your name and the name of Your Son, the crucified Jesus Christ – and with the power of the Holy Spirit – I beg You to drive out the demons from this young woman. Drive out the evil spirits. Drive them out.’

A trembling seemed to go through him and all of a sudden it was as though the whole room was being ripped apart. It was Sissel screaming, so shrilly, so piercingly and so unbearably alone. I had never heard anyone scream like that.

Tremors shook her and she clung to the priest.

Then she broke down into convulsive sobbing on his chest.

A boundless, peaceful expression appeared on Brevik’s face.

Within ten seconds I had become drenched in sweat.

Brevik focused on my eyes and said: ‘She’s free. The Lord has liberated her. Praised be the Lord. Amen, amen, amen.’

Then there was silence.

We didn’t move; we were frozen where we were. Brevik on his knees, Sissel in his arms like an empty sack, me spellbound by the door.386

Then I broke the spell by turning round, grabbing the handle and closing the door.

Brevik freed himself from Sissel, who slumped onto the floor, her face in her hands, as her sobs slowly dissipated.

Brevik went to the switch beside the door and put on the lights.

The vestry around us became normal, as clear as a drawing.

He walked over to the three candelabra and blew out the candles, one by one, like a ritual act.

Then he turned to me as though I had come to seek advice about a problem I had.

I looked down at Sissel, her slender neck, her young-girl’s jumper, her heart-shaped bottom in tight jeans, crouched over, abandoned to forces beyond her endurance as she had already been, to some extent, for many years.

The face between the bars of the bed. The four-year-old who had seen something that was so immense and black and incomprehensible that it created an inevitable psychosis in her, a thinking she was unable to understand or do anything about until she had become old enough. And that was what happened in 1985. Sissel became old enough. To send letters containing angels. And to call on the people to whom she sent letters.

Brevik read my gaze and coughed. ‘You know everything?’

I nodded. ‘Ruth’s been arrested. She’s confessed to it all.’

Sissel raised her head. Her hands fell from her face. Her neck was hidden behind her hair.

‘I understood it in the end,’ I continued. ‘There’s only one person in the world Ruth loved so much that she would take the blame for her.’

Sissel turned her head and looked at me. Hers was a face that was both child-like and old, a face that had experienced too 387much for too long, but had never quite grown out of that October night eleven years before.