The shadows were dragons in the beginning, but they had an evil and a darkness of such strength within themselves that it made them into something else. Something much more dangerous. They hate people and their stories; they have hated for so long and with such intensity that in the end the darkness enveloped their whole bodies until their shapes were no longer discernible. That is also why they are so difficult to defeat, because they can disappear into walls or into the ground or float up. They’re ferocious and bloodthirsty, and if you’re bitten by one you don’t just die; a far more serious and terrible fate lies in store: you lose your imagination. It just runs out of your wound and leaves you gray and empty. You wither away year by year until your body is just a shell. Until no one remembers any fairy tales anymore.
And without fairy tales, Miamas and the whole Land-of-Almost-Awake die a death without imagination. The most repellent kind of death.
But Wolfheart defeated the shadows in the War-Without-End. He came out of the forests when the fairy tales needed him most and drove the shadows into the sea. And one day the shadows will come back, and maybe that is why Granny tells her all the stories now, thinks Elsa. To prepare her.
So the teachers are wrong. Elsa has no problems concentrating. She just concentrates on the right things.
Granny says people who think slowly always accuse quick thinkers of concentration problems. “Idiots can’t understand that non-idiots are done with a thought and already moving on to the next before they themselves have. That’s why idiots are always so scared and aggressive. Because nothing scares idiots more than a smart girl.”
That is what she often says to Elsa when Elsa has had a particularly concentration-challenged day at school, and they lie on Granny’s gigantic bed under all the black-and-white photographs on Granny’s ceiling, and close their eyes until the people in the photographs start dancing. Elsa doesn’t know who they are, Granny just calls them her “stars,” because when the streetlight comes through the blinds they glitter like the sky at night. Men in uniforms stand there and other men in doctors’ coats and a few men with hardly any clothes on at all. Tall men and smiling men and men with moustaches and heavyset men wearing hats, and they all stand next to Granny and they look as if she just told them a cheeky joke. None of them are looking into the camera, because none of them can tear their eyes away from her.
Granny is young. She is beautiful. And immortal. She stands by road signs whose letters Elsa can’t read; she stands outside tents in deserts between men with rifles in their hands. And everywhere in the photos are children. Some of them have bandages around their heads and some lie in hospital beds with tubes inserted into their bodies, and one of them only has one arm and a stump where the other arm should have been. But one of the boys hardly looks hurt at all. He looks like he could run fifty miles in his bare feet. He’s about the same age as Elsa, and his hair is so thick and tangled that you could lose your keys in it, and there’s something in his eyes as if he’d just found a secret stash of fireworks and ice cream. His eyes are big and perfectly round and so black that the surrounding white is like chalk on a blackboard. Elsa doesn’t know who he is, but she calls him the Werewolf Boy, because that is what he looks like to her.
She always thinks about asking Granny more about the Werewolf Boy. But the minute the thought occurs to Elsa, her eyelids start drooping and in the next moment she is sitting on a cloud animal and Granny is next to her on her own and they’re gliding over the Land-of-Almost-Awake and landing by the city gates of Miamas. And then Elsa thinks that she’ll ask Granny in the morning.
And then one morning there is no morning anymore.
Elsa is sitting on the bench outside the big window. She’s so cold that her teeth are chattering. Her mum is inside talking to the woman who sounds like a whale, or, at least, the way Elsa imagines a whale would sound. Which is difficult to know, admittedly, when you have never happened to run into a whale, but she sounds like Granny’s record player after Granny tried to build a robot out of it. It was slightly unclear what sort of robot she was intending to build, but whatever the case it wasn’t a very good one. And then it sounded like a whale after that whenever you tried to play a record on it. Elsa learned all about LPs and CDs that afternoon. That was when she worked out why old people seem to have so much free time, because in the olden days until Spotify came along they must have used up almost all their time just changing the track.
She tightens her coat collar and her Gryffindor scarf around her chin. The first snow came in the night. Gradually, almost reluctantly. Now it’s so deep you can make snow-angels. Elsa loves doing that.
In Miamas there are snow-angels all year round. But as Granny constantly reminds Elsa, they are not especially polite. They’re quite arrogant and self-important, in fact, and always complain about the service when they’re eating out at one of the inns. “There’s a right fuss, smelling the wine and all that crap,” snorts Granny.
Elsa holds out her foot and catches the snowflakes on her shoe. She hates sitting on benches outside, waiting for Mum, but she still does it, because the only thing Elsa hates more is sitting inside waiting for Mum.
She wants to go home. With Granny. It’s as if the whole house is missing Granny now. Not the people living in it, but the actual building. The walls are creaking and whining. And Our Friend has been howling without pause in its flat for two whole nights.
Britt-Marie forced Kent to ring the doorbell of Our Friend’s flat, but no one answered. It just barked so loudly that Kent stumbled into a wall. So Britt-Marie called the police. She has hated Our Friend for a long time. A couple of months ago she went round the house with a petition, to get everyone to sign it so she could send it to the landlord and demand “the eviction of that horrendous hound.”
“We can’t have dogs in the leaseholders’ association. It’s a question of safety! It’s dangerous for the children, and one must think of the children!” Britt-Marie explained this to everyone in the manner of someone who is concerned about children, although the only children in the house are Elsa and the boy with a syndrome, and Elsa is pretty sure that Britt-Marie is not massively worried about Elsa’s safety.
The boy with a syndrome lives opposite the terrifying dog, but his mother lightheartedly told Britt-Marie she believed the hound was more bothered by her son than the other way around. Granny couldn’t stop herself laughing when she heard this, but it made Elsa worry about Britt-Marie trying to prohibit children as well.
Elsa jumps off the bench and starts traipsing around in the snow, to warm up her feet. Next to the big window where the whale-woman is working there’s a supermarket with a sign outside: MINCEBEEF 49:90. Elsa tries to control herself because her mum is always telling her to control herself. But in the end she takes her red felt-tip pen from her jacket pocket and adds a neat “D” and a slash, to show that it should be two words.
She looks at the result and nods slightly. Then puts the pen back in her pocket and sits down again on the bench. Leans her head back and closes her eyes and feels the cold little feet of the snowflakes landing on her face. When the smell of smoke reaches her nostrils she thinks she’s imagining it. At first it’s even wonderful to feel that acrid smell at the back of her throat and, though Elsa can’t think why, it makes her feel warm and secure. But then she feels something else. Something thumping behind her ribs. Like a warning signal.