“You should be grateful that I bother to tell you before you hear it from someone else. But you need to know that I’m the only one who defends you, Rose. Don’t forget it. And you do need to earn some money, also for your mom’s sake.” He seemed genuinely touched by his own lies but changed in a second as always, and his expression hardened. “It’s never been cheap to have you hanging around in the house, but that’s more than your small brain can grasp, isn’t it?”
He took a couple of steps back as the magnet lifted up the next slab, noting that she was about to protest. His eyes began to glare with pleasure and contempt, and his mouth widened to unimaginable proportions. His teeth were like stone pillars, and the spray of spit forming a cloud around him washed her away.
“And on top of everything else, I have to do all your work. If only management knew. It’s not like they’re doing well as it is, so maybe I’d be doing them a favor by telling them how I think you’re doing. So what do you think I should do, hmm? And I’ll tell you something else . . .”
Rose was clutching the vibrating pager in her pocket, using all her strength to block out his words and fill her lungs to their breaking point so that the words that were always on the tip of her tongue could explode in his face.
“If you don’t stop now, you bastard, I’ll . . . !”
And as expected, he stopped. The world around him disappeared as a blissful smile spread across his nasty face. Moments like this were the best of his life. Rose knew that nothing could compare with it.
“What will you do?”
When Rose’s hallucinations reached the point between unconsciousness and reality, she tried to wriggle free. Since the girls had tied her up more than three days ago, she had relived the same dream over and over again. In this state the words tended to merge together to pure black, while her memories of the sounds from the other side of the furnace at the steel plant took center stage. The same thing over and over for three days. Every time she tried to return to reality, her nightmare continued with the sound of the rolled slab being cooled down quickly with water. It was a high-pitched whistling sound that she had been unable to bear ever since.
“You won’t do anything,” sneered her father through the steam. “And you never will,” he said, pointing at her.
And then Rose touched the pager while for the last time taking in the scorn he threw at her.
That moment would become her ultimate triumph. The happiness of her father’s accusing finger freezing as the shadow was released from above.
Afterward, she couldn’t remember the sound of the magnet releasing the slab—only the sound of his body when the steel colossus hit him, crushing every bone in his lower body.
—
She woke up gradually with the feeling of sweat gathering on her eyelashes. She half opened one eye, realizing once again where she was and that her already weakened state was worsening.
Rose’s legs hurt terribly. The slightest shiver of her calves shot up through her nervous system like needles. In contrast, she hadn’t been able to feel her feet for more than two days, and the same went for her forearms and hands. Of course she’d tried to wriggle herself free. If only she was able to jerk one hand free from the belt that tied her to the railing on the wall, she knew she would stand a chance. But the more she struggled, the more the belt cut into her skin.
The first time Rose felt the full effect of the cold room, she knew how her stomach would react. All her experience told her that if her bare abdomen was subjected to this cold temperature for a sustained period, she would develop diarrhea. It had been the same year after year whenever they had gone to J?gersborg Deer Park when the hawthorn was in bloom and her sisters had begged to go on a picnic. It was usually freezing cold to sit on blankets on the ground at that time of year, and it always made Rose ill, much to her father’s delight. He used to use it against her, forcing her to stay seated until she couldn’t hold it in anymore. It resulted in days of diarrhea and vomiting, so Rose couldn’t go to school, and then that was a problem. And here in Zimmermann’s bathroom she had been ice-cold from the waist down for days. Even though it had been a long time since she had eaten, so there couldn’t be much left in her intestines, something suddenly streamed violently out of her.
As expected, she had developed a burning sensation, so if she had been able to make them remove the duct tape from her mouth for a moment, she would have begged them to wipe her behind. But it was clear to her that both these hopes were wishful thinking. The only thing they did for her was give her something to drink when they remembered. The strongest of the girls, the one called Denise, had only allowed the other girl to put the straw in her mouth into a glass of water. Rose had overheard them shouting something about a third girl, but she wasn’t sure what because she had been hallucinating most of the time and was never entirely sure what was going on around her.
The previous evening when Denise had been peeing in the sink as she normally did before heading to bed, she had spoken directly to Rose for the first time about giving her something other than water.
“Maybe you’re wondering what we’re doing here?” she said and told Rose that Rigmor was her grandmother, and that the woman had been a witch and a devil, and that she was glad she was dead.
“So you can understand that it’s only fair that we’re using her apartment, right?”
Perhaps she had expected Rose to nod, but when it didn’t happen her expression changed.
“Maybe you think she was a good woman? Do you?” she said coldly when Rose turned her eyes away from her. “She was a plague, and she ruined my life. Don’t you believe me? Look at me.”
Her lipstick was bright red and her teeth pearly white, but her mouth looked as repulsive and distorted as Rose’s father’s. Her hatred seemed just as extreme. Maybe she had killed her grandmother, thought Rose. That sort of crime often took place within families. Parents killed their children and children killed their parents and grandparents. No one knew this better than she did.
“Are you listening, pig?” she said from the sink as she dried herself.
But Rose wasn’t.
She busied herself inspecting the room while there was still light. There was a ventilator in the air vent, which activated only when the light was on. But up here on the second floor of the building, it was as if the world had ended. If there had been an upstairs neighbor, she might have been able to whimper and be heard through the vent, though the chance would have been very slim. But apart from this hypothetical chance, there were no other means of communicating with the outside world.
She twisted her head up toward her right hand, where the belt was least tight around her wrist, but she couldn’t twist far enough to make any attempt at loosening it farther. In short, she was incapable of helping herself, and there was probably no chance the woman sitting across from her would show any mercy.