He wiped the sweat from his brow. He was sweating profusely, and not only because he had run all the way from the forest. Now the door swung open. A girl stepped out. It was her, the one who had greeted them the night before. The one with the otter. The girl shut the door carefully behind her and ran off, her plaits bouncing.

Anders stepped out and waved to her.

She stopped and looked at him.

‘Hi,’ he said in a shrill voice he didn’t recognise, ‘remember me?’

Lennart was lying on his back…

Lennart was lying on his back in bed, staring up at a ceiling made of thin, stippled pine panelling. It was morning, new light in the room.

He walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer and dug out a brick of mince, which he put on a plate and popped into the microwave. When it beeped, he took the plate out, slammed the door shut with his elbow and went out to sit on the front porch. There was still a frozen core inside the block of mince; he hacked at it with a spoon. Then he picked the whole thing up and ate it like a fruit.

After a while, he raised his head as though he’d heard something. He stopped chewing. Sniffed the air with flared nostrils. A smell of rancid decay in the air. He stepped down from the porch. Stood there sniffing with his injured arm pressed to his chest.

*

The trail led him to a house on the outskirts of the village. It was old and in a poor state. One of the upstairs windows was broken. There was a pile of mineral wool in the grass, swelling like a gigantic slime mould. Broken glass. Tangles of metal-coated electrical cables, their staples like thorns. He tramped through the debris to the back of the house.

The stench broke over him like a foetid wave; when he pushed into the birch and willow undergrowth, he heard the flies.

It looked like someone had dumped a big dead pig in the woods.

Its head was gone and its body flayed. The pink musculature stained with membranes that had dried and turned yellow. Its claws had been pulled out but the fur on the paws was still there, like big, shaggy mittens, decorated with the smooth black stones of the paw pads.

*