Iskalde Grøss #8/1990

In "Den eldgamle historien," a young woman's marriage to a wealthy older biologist quickly turns sour when she grows bored and schemes to leave him for a younger lover. After extracting every last penny, she announces her departure—only to find herself the victim of a chilling farewell toast, as the biologist secretly doses her drink with an aging hormone that begins to unravel her youth in horrifying fashion.

In "Nødrett!", a hardened detective haunted by a past conviction confronts the chilling consequences of his own judgment. When he finally investigates the plea of an old woman he once jailed for stealing food, he uncovers a tragedy that unravels his sense of justice—and sets him on a path he never expected.

In the dusty heat of India, a traveling magician and his wife are drawn to a mysterious girl who performs with a rope that defies gravity—rising into the air as she plays a haunting melody. When she refuses to sell it, the couple devises a cruel plan, luring her to their hotel room with false kindness. But their greed awakens something far older and more dangerous than they ever imagined, and the rope they thought they’d mastered begins to move on its own, with a will of its own.

In "Bondefangerne," two con artists scheme to swindle a quiet village by selling fake oil stock, but their plan unravels when one fakes his own death and is buried—only to find his grave sits atop a hidden oil pocket. When the other, a careless smoker, digs him up, a single dropped cigarette ignites the trapped oil, setting off a sudden and catastrophic explosion.

In "Et tilbakevendende problem!", Florence and Bert are haunted by a corpse that refuses to stay buried—after they dump her husband’s body in the ocean, it keeps washing ashore, each time more disturbing than the last. As they try to outrun the tide, the lighthouse becomes a trap, its walls echoing with dread as water creeps in and the light goes dark. When Bert returns from a desperate attempt to bury the body far away, he finds Florence alone and terrified, climbing the tower to escape something she can’t see. The story unfolds in chilling silence and rising dread, where every wave brings a new horror and the past refuses to stay drowned.

In "Vampyrjakten," a grieving chemist, driven by his father’s death at the hands of a vampire, concocts a desperate plan to end the threat: he ingests a radioactive substance and leaves behind a note for his brother, instructing him to use a Geiger counter to track the vampire through the isotope-laced blood. But as the brother follows the trail, the line between hunter and hunted begins to blur in ways no one could have foreseen.

In "Ren redsel!", Ernie, the newly minted manager of the Hudson Soap Company, enjoys the quiet comfort of his success—especially the fact that his difficult predecessor, Benny Anderson, vanished without a trace. But when he takes a shower using one of the company’s signature bars of soap, the past begins to rise in the most horrifying way, and the secrets he buried start to surface.

In "Ambra kadavra," a sea captain's cruel revenge takes a grotesque turn when he lures a rival to a plague-ridden island, only for the man’s corpse to be swallowed by a whale and later regurgitated. The captain, seeking profit from the macabre, collects the remains and delivers them to the man’s wife as a twisted gift—presenting her with a perfume said to hold the essence of death itself. When she applies it in the bathroom, the transformation begins, leaving her fate hanging in the air.

In the shadowed halls of a crumbling castle, a young boy endures the cruel whims of a spoiled prince, forced to bear punishment for crimes he never committed. As Christmas nears, he returns home for a single day, clinging to hope that Santa might still bring him a gift—despite his suffering. But when the boy wakes to find a shocking surprise in his stocking, the line between innocence and horror blurs, and the season’s magic turns to dread.