Читать книгу The Ice People 37 - The City of Horror - Margit Sandemo - Страница 6

Chapter 1

Horror comes in many forms.

Horror can be a small, kind, middle-aged lady wearing a grey hat and coat, with an unfortunate desire to help people in distress.

It took this form in the Norwegian city of Halden during the cruel winter of 1937, when a short, inconspicuous woman held the city in such a tight grip of horror that it shook the whole of Norway, with the eyes of the Western world focused on the place.

One cold, dark morning in January 1937, as the sirens from the paper mill and the sawmill wailed discordantly with those of the other factories, the breath of death swept across Halden.

Nobody realized it at the time. Not the pale girls on the bus, who shuddered, half asleep, on their way to work at the cake shop or the shoe factory, exhausted after a long, exciting evening and too little sleep. Not the workers, wrapped in their winter clothes but casually bare-headed, who sloped across the square carrying their lunch boxes under their arms. Not the young policeman, Rikard Brink of the Ice People, who a few days later would be made to feel that the future of the whole city rested on his shoulders.

Clemens Post, the doctor, didn’t know anything either. How was he to know that in a few minutes his telephone would ring? Not even after the conversation was over did he grasp the scale of what was about to happen, or had already happened.

Nine people were the first to be involved in the great horror. Nine individuals, then two large groups: one consisting of sixty-two people and the other of twelve. It fell to Rikard, a member of the Ice People, to find them all and see to it that no more people became infected.

Actually, it had already happened, in several places, on the previous day.

Nine different individuals ...