The Devil in Jutland (vii)

            

              Constable Andersen was a bachelor.  He lived in a small cottage on a bluff overlooking the sea.  It was a cool evening, and a fire flickered in the hearth.  Soren Christensen’s clothes were drying on a line next to the stones.  Constable Andersen stood with his hand against the hearth, smoking a pipe.  Soren Christensen was seated on a low stool near the fire grasping a bowl of stew with both his hands.  The Constable had just asked Soren to repeat his last word.

            “The Devil,” Soren said emphatically.

            “The Devil?” the Constable repeated.

            “Yes,” Soren laughed, “you’ve heard of him, I gather.”
            “Of course,” the Constable answered gravely as he sucked on his pipe. “And I believe he exists, just as I believe in God, his only begotten son Jesus Christ, the Angels, and Heaven and Hell.  I have since I was a boy, and I will die believing it all.”

            “To your credit.  To your credit,” Soren said with a gentile smile. “God will reward you for your faith.”

            “If I’m worthy.”

            “Oh, you are.  I know from hard experience. I tell you, the Devil led me on an odyssey for ten years!  Things happened to me that I would not have believed possible!” Soren laughed and sipped his stew.

            “How do you know that he was the Devil?” the Constable asked as he knocked the tobacco from his pipe against the hearth, and then refilled the bowl with a pinch of tobacco.

            “How do I know?  How do I know?” Soren Christensen laughed again, even slapping his knee in childlike glee.  “Because I did not believe in him.  And when it was all done, he was all I was capable of believing.  If that is not the true test of veracity, I don’t know what is.  If there is anything else in the universe beside him, any good, any God, any higher power, I do not think we can know it.” On hearing this, Constable Andersen shrugged his shoulders.

            “With what you have been through, Mr. Christensen, I can understand why you would believe such a thing.”

            “When I lost my family, I did nothing but take sedatives for months.  I hardly ate or drank.  I don’t think I slept much at all.  I heard voices.  They were happy voices, sad voices, all the things you hear in a family, a house.  I knew they weren’t real, but they sounded real enough to sustain me for a while, and then they stopped and another voice replaced them: the voice of that Australian man, Wormwood, who visited me on the day I lost my family.   

              The scoundrel had black clothes, and a full red beard; he had a sly and appealing manner, but was subtly disquieting.  Have you even read any of my books, the ones I wrote all those years ago?” The Constable shook his head. “That’s good, you would have wasted your time on dangerous nonsense.  I said that there was no evil in the world.  That men often think it exists, but it is only because they lack ‘The Divine Perspective’ -- that was a big concept of mine.  I spent years elaborating it.  It was criticized, of course.  But every new book is; I defending it zealously.  I could not believe that God created a universe where evil exists.  The bad things that happen, I reasoned, must not be bad at all.  It must be a problem with how we see things.  It can’t be a problem with God, or with his work, his creation.  How could God create a faulty thing?   

             Then this man came -- this Wormwood fellow, and none of his criticism was all that new, or even that forceful.  But he left me disturbed.  And right after he left, well, you know the rest…” Christensen stopped for a moment and sipped some stew.  He stared into the fire with great concentration.  The wood crackled softly.

            “When the voices of my family died, my wife, my precious little boy and girl, I started to hear Wormwood’s voice.  He kept saying the same thing: ‘How can you not believe in the Devil, after this?’  One morning I was lying in bed.  I had not slept much that night. I finally dozed off before dawn, just for a few minutes, and I was awoken by the same words.  When I opened my eyes, Wormwood was in the chair next to my bed.

            “‘And how can you continue to live in this house?’ he asked softly, even kindly.  ‘It is like a tomb.’

            “‘Where should I go?’

            “‘If this world is as good as you say it is,’ Wormwood answered gently, ‘it is your duty to go out and live in it.  Not in this crypt.’ I said nothing, and Wormwood laughed. ‘Or maybe you don’t believe in such notions any longer.  Then you certainly wasted a lot of ink and paper.  Is that why you lay here, mired in self-pity?  Because of your loss?  Three coagulated lumps of clay with a tiny spark of light in them have been extinguished, and you lay here like a Chinaman in an opium den, shutting out the light with bamboo curtains.  What does it matter in the grand, the divine scheme you so treasured?  Your emotions, your small perspective mean nothing, remember…’

            “He went on in this vein for some time.  Its odd, but I did not think it strange that Wormwood was in my house, and speaking so coarsely about my loss.  It made sense.

            “‘I feel sorry for you, Soren.  I feel sorry for men who live with a gap between their ideas of the world and the way the world truly is.  You suffer from a pernicious disease: the inability to see the world’s suffering.  And that is why you suffer.  I pity you, and I’ll close that gap, right now.’ Then he touched my wrist, and we were no longer in the bedroom.  We were on the outskirts of this town.  We were in the cottage of the woman who did my laundry.  Her husband was pitilessly beating her.  It left her with a black eye; her cries were terrible to hear.   

             Then we moved to another cottage, not that far from here, along the strand.  A family did not have enough to eat that night, and the father was deciding who would eat supper and who would not.  The father’s agony in choosing who would eat was worse than that of the children, who knew they would not eat that day.  We did this for some time.  And we did not travel to exotic locations.  No starving peasants in China; no teeming slums of Calcutta.  It was all in our own backyard!  He showed me all the suffering.  A wife raped by her own husband; an apprentice beat so hard by his master that his hand was permanently deformed.  Little boys stuffing rocks down a puppy’s throat until the poor beast died… it was horrible, all of it.  I cried so hard I was rocking and moaning.  I couldn’t stop.  I saw one thing; thought I could not cry any more, saw another, and somehow found another fund of tears.   

            I was overcome with grief when my family drowned, but now I was a blithering idiot.  The pain!  The suffering!  The blind cruelty!  And all within a few miles of my house, and this house!  I begged Wormwood to stop.  But he took me to one more scene: a man, some drifter, dying of hunger out in the dunes, about a mile down the strand.  He just fell and died.  It was such an anti-climax after all the suffering he showed me, but something about this annihilated me; it was such a pathetic and lonely death.  He was surrounded by people, mostly very good -- all the people here are decent folks -- but he died alone, on the strand, like a dog, as if no one in the universe cared for him, for anyone.  Suffering was so common – so pedestrian.”

            Constable Andersen stopped smoking his pipe and gazed at Soren Christensen through narrow eyes.  He suddenly remembered that shortly after Soren disappeared, ten years ago, a drifter was found dead near the strand.  The Constable began puffing on his pipe again.

            “Finally, Wormwood stopped.  He touched my arm again and we were on a rocky crag.  I don’t think it was in Denmark.  I don’t know where it was, really.  But we could see the world below us and it was teeming with suffering and pain.  It was crowded with evil.

            “‘This is the world, Soren,’ he stated authoritatively. ‘And you only saw your corner of it.  A hop skip and a jump from your cozy little house and your overheated cottage.  People suffer and die in your yard, and you sing the praises of the world -- this pile of dung.  You are grown in the sewer of the womb and will rot in the sewer of the grave.’ Then he touched me again, and we were in a forest.  It was no longer night but had turned to a beautiful summer day.  He led me to a cabin in a clearing.  Red flowers dotted the field and seemed to genuflect in the breeze.  Katrina was there with the two children.  They were playing with toys.  Katrina was drawing water from a well.

            “ ‘What is this?’ I asked Wormwood.’

            “ ‘A gift,’ he answered, ‘and a rare one at that, given my record.  Dwell here for as long as you wish.  But when you are through, and there will come a time when you need to leave, you must do a task for me.’”

            

The Devil in Jutland (vi)

 

           Ten years later, a stranger entered the town.  He wore a long and ragged coat, and shoes with holes that he had stuffed with newspaper.  He had a long beard.  His face was so filthy it was nearly black.  His hands shook and he muttered to himself, as if imparting secrets to the air.  As he walked from the strand to the town square, someone alerted Constable Andersen.  He came striding out to intercept the man, and holding out a broad hand, halted him.

            “That’s far enough, fellow,” the Constable barked.  “There is no crime in being poor and sick, but the people here have given me a job to do, and I must do it.  I’ll have you driven anywhere you want to go – anywhere in reason.  But you must take it out of this town.”  The man had stopped moving and listened keenly to the Constable.  Before he spoke, his cloudy eyes seemed to clear for a moment, and a glint of mischief filled them.  He stepped forward and smiled impishly.  Despite his filthy face, his teeth were white and gleaming.  The Constable squared his shoulders and grasped his truncheon.

            “You don’t recognize me, Constable Andersen?”  The voice was deep and resonant and familiar, but the Constable could not at first place it.  When he did, he removed his hand from the truncheon.

 “Soren Christensen?”

The Devil in Jutland (vi)

        

         “How can you say the Devil doesn’t exist, after this?”  He said the words in the church before their bodies were buried, and then he heard it a second time, somewhat later and altered in tone.  The voice was familiar; it seemed to be that of Devon Wormwood, oddly accented and mocking.  It came as Soren lay in bed, three months after the deaths.  

          Soren’s doctor had given him a sedative.  At first he used it only at night, but had begun to take them during the day as well.  But sleep seldom came.  Instead, he heard voices.  He thought he heard his wife calling him, his children's voices raised in gleeful play.  At first he cried bitterly; then, he grew accustomed to the voices, which became comforting in a sad, distant way.  Then one day they stopped.  Soren seemed to suffer again from the death of his family.  He cried without control.  Friends and colleagues feared for his sanity.  They were afraid he would drown himself in the North Sea.

                                   

            Two months later the maid knocked on Soren’s bedroom door.  There was no answer.  She was afraid to open it, so she ran for Constable Andersen.  He rapped hard on the door.  It was locked.  He called Soren’s name authoritatively, asking him to please open the door.  There was no response.  After a few well-placed kicks the door swung open.  Soren Christensen was gone.

The Devil in Jutland (v)

            

              

              He rushed home.  They had not returned.  He ran back down the hill and into the shops along the waterfront.  None of the alarmed merchants had seen them.  He then ran to Constable Andersen’s  office and alerted him.  The Constable saw Soren Christensen in uncharacteristic distress, and tried to reassure him.

            “Don’t worry, Mr. Sorensen, they probably ducked into one of the cottages along the strand to get out of the squall.  Go back home in case they return, and so I know where to find you when I locate them.”

            But as the Constable and Soren left the office and stood for a moment in the bright, cobbled street, a fisherman approached.  Soren recognized  Knutsen who live up the strand.  He looked at Soren, and then lowered his eyes.

            “Constable,” he said hoarsely, “I’ve found some bodies that have washed up on the strand.”

            “Please stay here, Mr Christensen…” the Constable said, but Soren insisted on accompanying the men.  When they arrived, he lowered his head.

            “Get some blankets, Knutsen,” the Constable ordered roughly, as if the sight offended him.

            When the bodies were covered the world seemed to go white for Soren Christensen.

The Devil in Jutland (iv)

            

             Afterward, Soren could no longer work.  The visitor had left an unsettling presence, as if a  heavy residue clung to the cottage. Soren’s mind was ill at ease.  Wormwood had said nothing that a legion of other critics had not said before, but something in his tone and demeanor disturbed Soren.  He felt a vague sensation of dread as if something with dire consequences was about to happen. 

            He stepped out into the garden.  It was still sunny, but clouds had begun to congeal on the horizon, and they were steadily marching like threatening columns of troops across the sky.  By the time Soren reached the house, the sun was hidden, and the world was cast once again into a dark, wintry gloom.  The house was empty and quiet.  It was unnerving.  Soren went from room to room looking for someone.  Nothing was touched, but nothing seemed essentially as it was supposed to be either.  A mounting sense of panic gripped him.  He rushed into the kitchen.  The maid was crying.  Soren was horrified, and then relieved, as he realized she was peeling onions.

            “I’m sorry, Mrs Ingalsen, but do you know where Mrs. Sorensen and the children are at?”

            “Oh, Mr. Christensen,” the woman smiled and brushed away her tears, “it was such a pleasant day that Mrs. Sorensen thought she’d take the children down to the esplanade for a walk, although it’s snowing now, it seems.  Perhaps you should fetch her?  She didn’t even take a coat for herself, although I asked her to.  This time of the year, I said, the weather can change so quickly.”

            Soren walked quickly out of the house.  He was somewhat relieved to know where his family was, but when he looked at the blinding snow falling to the ground, and the increasing wind, he grew alarmed once more.  Without a coat, he rushed to the town; he ran down the spiraling, cobbled streets to the town square.  He could not see more than a few meters in front of his face.   

            The wind whipped around the clock tower and almost knocked the large man from his feet.  But he continued.  He realized he was near the municipal dock, and finding the railing, he was on the walkway of the esplanade.  He screamed Katrina’s name into the wind.  He yelled again and again.  There was no answer.  He rushed up and down the board walk.  It appeared to be empty. He heard the rough waves of the North Sea slapping on the strand, but the board walk was dry.   

            The wind grew so strong that Soren soon needed to take shelter.  He knew there was a booth with an enclosed bench, but the snow and wind were so fierce he could not see it.  He felt along the handrail until he reached it, crouched down in the aperture, and slumped against the wall.  He prayed that Katrina and the children had made it to safety.  They may have even made it back home.  There was a quick way back to the house, up the dunes, and they may have taken that route, effectively passing Soren in the heavy snow.  As Soren Christensen began to pray, he felt the waves of the North Sea, seemingly inflamed with anger, swamp the board walk and lick at his feet.