It began with a sound. At night, when the house was asleep, something knocked behind the skirting board in the hallway. Not loudly. As softly as a fingernail taps on wood. Lea heard it first, because her room was closest, and Jonas did not believe her, because he was older and being older, to him, meant not believing everything.
The next morning, in the hallway, exactly where the skirting board makes its bend, lay a strip of red-and-white paper tape between two matchsticks. Beside it stood a wheelbarrow no bigger than a walnut, full of pebbles. A note was tucked into the tape: BUILDING SITE. PLEASE DO NOT TRIP.
Behind the wall, Mille had worries. Her door was old, the frame had warped over the summer, and when she pulled the door shut a gap remained through which the hallway wind whistled. “A door has to close,” said Grandfather Aske, tapping the frame with his cane, “otherwise it is a hole with a handle.”
So they built. Mille drew a plan on a scrap of tea-bag paper, Aske read it with narrowed eyes, and Tove, who was five and wanted to help, handed over nails that were really needles. A piece every night: one plank, two planks, a new frame made from an ice-lolly stick Jonas had lost in the autumn.
Molly the cat watched. She lay on the rug, paws tucked under, pretending none of it interested her. But whenever a pebble rolled out of the wheelbarrow, it was back in its place by morning. Mille suspected that cats are secretly tidy.
The children came to look every morning. The tape moved, the wheelbarrow grew emptier, and once a tiny helmet made from half an acorn lay beside it. Jonas stopped saying that he did not believe. Instead he put a biscuit next to the wheelbarrow. For strength, he said. For whoever.
On the last night before the first of December, it was time. Mille painted the door red with berry juice, Aske hung the wreath, Tove straightened the mat that said HEJ. Then they sat down on the step and listened to the house sleeping above them.
In the morning the tape was gone. In its place stood a small red door, which Lea saw at once and Jonas half a second later. The wheelbarrow stood beside it, neatly parked. And on the mat lay a letter that began the way all good things begin: Hej, dear ones.
