Was that a noise? He listens.

Is someone knocking far off after all? Very faintly?

Yes! he decides. There shall be knocking.

He must send a message about it quickly. But the thought withers away at once: How is he to do it? He knocks, but there is no reply. It is not the same as before, when the walls were trembling. Now they are passive and deaf.

But I know about it. I’ve joined in. There was a heart here, and it shall beat for ever.

He prattles to himself about getting out of his cell, and climbing up higher and higher, above the centre until he is up on the great night-dark roof of the house. From there he will look out. The centre will lie stretched out beneath him, but he will not feel a trace of fear. Avalanche upon avalanche is thundering down in the darkness beneath him, but he will be up there, composing a message. Like lightning and song. He can feel it within him. It is swelling within him, he who has been so poor. Everything that he has failed to say shall be expressed, and then the stone will be shattered. That is how it feels.

He lurches to his feet. Riches are revealed to him. Then he collapses again, choked and silent. One foot strikes the floor, and then nothing more.

Far, far inside the walls the prisoner is lying motionless. The event was so tremendous that it consumed what was left of him. Minute grey particles are hanging in the air and are already starting to cover him. The serpent in the lamp disappears as quickly as it came. It is quite dark. Let it be so. Avalanches are thundering down, but he who is lying here is one with Stig’s heart now, and is alive and beating through the stone.

16

Afterwards

The window-pane is blind, and the woman is staring at it blindly. Her breathing is quieter now. She hasn’t the strength. Somewhere there is a limit.

Peter came with the message. It has been made known that Stig is dead. Peter has gone again now.

Rascal was there too. He notices that his mother has fallen silent. ‘Mother?’ he asks, not daring to say more.

Rascal has fallen silent too. They are sitting in the enormous shadow of the message. They are nothing. But Rascal is so close to his mother that he notices her quietness at once and puts his question.

‘No, it’s nothing,’ she replies.

Suddenly everything has gone blank. She is incapable of thinking about anything. Rascal has his own secret little thoughts that race hither and thither – but they, too, come to a standstill in the face of the incredible, of something he is unable to grasp. He can see by looking at his mother that it is useless to express these thoughts.

She gives a shudder.

The house is cracking. This incomprehensible thing, that one thinks one hears, but which is not sound. Yet it exists in this charged air and in all the tension within oneself.