“There’s been a man here looking for me,” whispers Elsa into its ear, trying to sound brave. “I think he’s one of the shadows. We have to be on our guard.”
The wurse buffets its nose against her throat. She throws her arms around it, and feels the taut muscles under its fur. It tries to seem playful, but she understands that it’s doing what wurses do best: preparing for battle. She loves it for that.
“I don’t know where it comes from, Granny never told me about those kinds of dragons.”
The wurse buffets her throat again and looks at her with large, empathic eyes. It seems to be wishing it could tell her everything. Elsa wishes Wolfheart were here. She rang his bell just now but there was no answer. She didn’t want to call out, in case Britt-Marie smelled a rat, but she made a loud sniffing sound through the mail slot to clearly signal she was about to sneeze the kind of sticky sneeze that instantly covers everything in camouflage paint. It had no effect.
“Wolfheart has disappeared,” she finally admits to the wurse.
Elsa tries to be brave. It goes quite well while they are walking through the cellar. And it’s quite okay while they go up the cellar stairs. But when they’re standing in the vestibule inside the main door, she senses the smell of tobacco smoke, the same kind of tobacco that Granny used to smoke, and a lingering fear from her nightmare paralyzes her. Her shoes weigh a thousand tons. Her head thumps as if something has worked itself loose and is rattling around in there.
It’s strange how quickly the significance of a certain smell can change, depending on what path it decides to take through the brain. It’s strange how close love and fear live to each other.
She tells herself she’s just imagining it, but it doesn’t help. The wurse stands patiently next to her, but her shoes won’t budge.
A newspaper blows past outside the window. It’s the kind of newspaper you get through the mail slot even if you have a “No junk mail, please!” sticker on the door. It reminds Elsa of Granny. She stands there, still frozen, and the newspaper makes her angry, because it’s Granny who put her in this situation. It’s all Granny’s fault.
Elsa remembers the time Granny called the newspaper office and gave them a roasting for putting the paper in her mail slot even though she had a “No junk mail, ever. Thanks!” message in surprisingly clear letters on the door. Elsa had thought a lot about why it said “Thanks!” because Elsa’s mum always said that if one can’t say thanks as if one means it, one may as well not bother. And it didn’t sound like the note on Granny’s door meant it at all.
But the people answering the telephone at the office of the newspaper told Granny their newspaper wasn’t in the business of advertising but in fact “social information,” which can be put in people’s mailboxes irrespective of whether people thank them not to do so. Granny had demanded to know who owned the company that produced the newspaper, and after that she demanded a word with him. The people at the other end of the telephone line said that surely Granny could understand that the owner did not have time for this sort of nonsense.