The door opened a crack, revealing a topless human. A youth. The beard around his mouth split into two ginger feelers.

‘Where’s Rune?’

‘He’s not here.’

Lennart grabbed the handle and tore the door open. The young man backed away. His arms were covered in tattoos that looked homemade. He was holding a boxcutter.

‘You’re not allowed here,’ he said.

Lennart glanced into the kitchen. A brown refrigerator door reflected the fluorescent ceiling lights. There was post on the table, a fan of white envelopes. He pushed past the young man and followed the music into the living room.

He was sitting on the sofa. The wrinkled face that had been Rune’s was streaked with brown discolouration and a yellow eye was staring out through one of the roughly cut holes where Rune’s eyes had once been; looking into that eye was like meeting the gaze of a lunatic through a keyhole.

A skinny girl was sitting pressed up against this horrifying figure. Her head was shaved and her arms verdant with meandering tattoo tendrils. She was clasping the old man’s hand, which was hidden inside a work glove, between her own.

For a second or two, Lennart stood motionless, staring at them. Then he turned without a word and walked briskly back to the hallway and out through the front door.

*

Grete was sitting outside the motorhome and saw him lumbering back up the road. When he drew near, she grabbed her crutch, an aluminium pipe with a cuff of solid plastic, and stood up.

‘Wasn’t he home?’

Lennart sat down, panting.

‘Both yes and no,’ he said.

The narrow strip of forehead that was visible between her sunglasses and headscarf furrowed.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it. Rune’s dead. And the wolf has used his face to make a mask. He’s pulled the skin from his skull and made a mask, with hair and all the rest.’

The motorhome door opened and Ingvill came out and sat down on the steps. She was wearing a men’s shirt and knitted hat.

‘You can’t do things like that with claws,’ the old lady said. ‘He must have had help.’

Lennart nodded.

‘A boy and a girl in their twenties. They have a little one too.’

‘A child,’ Grete said thoughtfully and dug the crutch’s rubber tip into the gravel while she studied the house on the other side of the meadow with newfound interest.

Then she turned to him with a smile.

‘Are you telling me you’ve never seen it before? A mask.’

He shook his head.

‘Not that kind. Made from a human.’

‘No,’ she said, nodding agreement, ‘it’s likely a wolf thing. Were you scared?’

‘I don’t know about scared. But it wasn’t exactly what I had expected, put it that way. The question is what we do now.’

‘But what did he say?’