Anders left the room. He paced a circle around the living room because he couldn’t stand still. He was suddenly overcome with an impulse to sit down on the sofa and stick the barrel in his mouth. He heard Stava’s hoarse voice from the bedroom. She was explaining something to the boy.

‘This is going to haunt you for the rest of your life,’ she said, ‘you can’t live with these images.’

After a while, she came out and closed the door behind her, carefully, as though she had just managed to put an infant to sleep.

She stood with her arms crossed, watching him. He was sitting on the sofa, poking at one of the holes in the coffee table.

‘Anders,’ she said and sat down next to him. ‘Don’t you think I know what you’re going through? You want me to push that pen against your head too. Don’t you?’

He nodded.

‘I would never do that. What you’re going through, it will pass. I promise you. This is just a phase. A transition.’

‘I can’t, I can’t do this.’

‘What can’t you do?’

He nodded toward the bedroom.

‘They’re just humans,’ she said and stroked his neck.

‘I’m a human too, aren’t I?’

‘You’re my human. That’s different.’

They sat on the sofa for a long while without speaking.

‘I want to go home,’ he mumbled.

‘We’re on our way.’

Suddenly, she whipped her head around to face the bedroom door. A sound had made her react. She listened and after a while she went over and opened the door. What she saw in the gloom on the other side disturbed her. She cursed and spoke heatedly in Finnish and moments later the wolf came shambling out into the living room like an old dog who’s been banished.

‘We have to get out of here,’ she said.

‘What happened?’

‘Grab the bag!’

They jogged back to the car. Anders didn’t know why they were suddenly in such a hurry, but he assumed it had something to do with Ransu no longer walking upright.

He put the rifle in the boot and after the wolf jumped in, he closed the lid. She had already started the car; he didn’t even have time to close the door before she drove off.

Diana couldn’t see anything…

Diana couldn’t see anything and all sounds except her own pulse were muffled. She never heard the child, but she heard the woman talking to it in a childish voice. A young woman. Not a local. The voice penetrated her numbed awareness in waves and when she had established that the woman was real and just outside, she started kicking. Inside the hood of warm and sticky scrim-backed plastic that enveloped her head, her screams turned into a wordless lowing. She kicked and thrashed until she heard the woman again.