Cabin Fever

by Alex Dahl

  Now, we need to move forward. I’m so tired, so empty, wrung inside out. I can’t know what you will do with these words. Perhaps you’ve already abandoned them. In a way it wouldn’t surprise me if you had, I could imagine you might simply walk away and never look back if you suspected that something might compromise you in any way. It’s not a bad thing to be self-protective but I’m not going to lie, I hope you’re still reading. And listening carefully. We are going to be covering a lot of ground here, both past and present, and you will come to see that your life is enmeshed with mine in many more ways than one.

  Onto the next thing. The big thing. Kristina, we need to talk about your husband.

  59

  Kristina

  I can feel Leah’s hands reaching for me through time and space, closing around my throat and squeezing tight. She’s like a determined little dwarf star that sidles up to its unsuspecting neighbor and sabotages it until they both go up in flames. I can barely breathe. Onto the next thing. The big thing. I don’t want to know what she is going to say about Eirik; I can’t bear the thought of Leah having uncovered something sordid that will destroy my marriage. Because she’s right about one thing – my life is built on unstable foundations, like most people’s lives, and I need my husband.

  My head is literally spinning with an onslaught of thoughts. My mother, Elisabeth, Venezuela. And now, Eirik. I realize that the dread I felt as I got deeper into the Supernova document is precisely this – that Leah would stop at nothing, that she’d go from my mother and Elisabeth to Eirik, bringing my whole life crashing down in some misguided attempt to get close to me.

  I move a little, positioning the MacBook more comfortably across my lap, taking care not to graze my left ankle against anything, and yet a terrible pain chases up and down my leg. The battery is down to nineteen percent. It’s still relatively early and I’m nearing the end of the document; I should be able to get through it before the battery runs out. The question is whether I can bear to read another word. It is profoundly disturbing how wrong I got it with Leah Iverson. I look out the window at the sky, still opaque with white clouds.

  I’m still staring at the frozen, white world outside, about to return to the screen, when a peculiar blueish light sweeps across the snow outside. A comet? I push myself back up against the cushions to a more upright sitting position but the shift hurts my ankle so badly I cry out loud. The light appears again, bouncing across the dark shapes of trees at the edges of the clearing, then shining straight into the window. It remains there, held in place, its unbearably bright light projected directly onto the timber wall behind me. It is, without doubt, the beam of a very powerful flashlight.

  60

  Kristina

  I’m a calm person. I’m calm even now. I’m not someone who gives into wild panic or irrational thoughts. This isn’t true. I’m terrified. Calm down, Kristina, I tell myself, slipping quietly from the sofa and onto the floor. The beam of the flashlight is roaming the little cabin, as though whoever is holding it is inspecting it from every angle before deciding what to do. I push Leah’s MacBook under the sofa and begin to crawl toward the entrance. When I first came here, I noticed an ancient pickax hung in the space between the bathroom and the front door. It could be there for decorative purposes, or it could actually be that Leah used it to split firewood – either way, I’m glad it’s there.

  Stop, I tell myself. Whoever it is, they’re way more likely to help me than to hurt me. Unless it’s Anton. He might have just come out of police custody and headed straight here to cover his tracks before the police realize what he’s done. I’m in no doubt he’ll kill me in cold blood if it’s him, and in my current state that won’t be difficult.

  The beam from the flashlight is being moved alongside the length of the wall as if whoever is holding it is walking slowly around, inspecting the cabin. I drag myself across the floor, trying hard not to cry with the pain from my ankle. Whoever is outside seems to be moving toward the front door. I am obviously unable to outrun anyone, so what do I do? What part of a normal life might prepare you for something like this? Do I unhook the pickax and hold it in my hand just in case, risking looking utterly insane in the event it’s just a random neighbor who may have heard my screams earlier or seen the unfamiliar car parked at the head of the track leading to the cabin? But there are no neighbors. The track is used only for Leah’s cabin.

  If not Anton, who? Who else might have known Leah was here and come looking for her? Her mother? Could it really be Linda, unsettled after being contacted by the police about Leah’s whereabouts? From what I’ve heard about Leah’s mother, she is primarily concerned with her own pursuits and would be unlikely to get in her car in Årjäng and drive for hours and hours just to check whether her daughter is okay.

  My heart shudders in my chest and I pause for a long while, listening. There are no sounds coming from outside, not even the gentle rustle of swaying trees. I pull myself up by the door frame and unhook the pickax from the wall.

  Calm down, Kristina, I tell myself. Surely a crazed killer wouldn’t announce his arrival by shining a powerful flashlight in front of him? And surely the odds of encountering a murderer the one time you find yourself trapped in a remote cabin in the middle of the woods are fairly slim. I turn around and look back into the living room, but the roaming beam is gone and only the murky night lies beyond the windows. Could I have imagined it? Is this the beginning of a total loss of my faculties? My head, like my heart, is throbbing; I hit it badly when I fell and could be concussed.

  I hear something. A sharp cough. A man’s voice muttering. Then the muffled thud of footsteps on snow, approaching. I tighten my grip on the pickax’s wooden handle, biting into my bottom lip to stop myself from crying out loud. Then someone grabs the door handle and shoves it hard without knocking, and because I must have forgotten to lock it when I dragged myself into the cabin earlier, it shoots open inward, bringing a surge of icy air.

  Part III

  POINT-BLANK

  61

  Kristina

  The pickax is wrenched from my hand by someone much stronger than me and dropped to the floor. I am picked up, gently, and carried. I am held. I am rocked back and forth, my face pressed into a broad chest, the sound of a hammering heart beating directly into my right ear.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Kristina,’ says my husband, over and over. ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Eirik has placed me on the floor by the hearth on top of a sheepskin rug and a thick down duvet taken from Leah’s bed. He swiftly and expertly examines me, running his fingertips across my bruises and my bones. I watch him, feeling a flood of love rush into me, as if it were being injected directly into my veins. His hair, still wet from the snowstorm, glows in shades of chocolate and amber and coffee in the flickering light of the flames. His face is serious and concerned and I have to fight the urge to laugh. It must be shock. He found me. Eirik found me here against all the odds. I’m not going to die up here by myself.

  ‘Broken,’ I hear him say.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The ankle is broken, in two different places. I think your cheekbone is fractured, too.’ My husband’s eyes shimmer with tears and he looks around the cabin. He runs his hand through his hair and presses his thumbs into his eyes. He must have driven straight here after I messaged him. I feel giddy with love for him, this man of mine who drove through the night to my rescue, like a hero.

  ‘Happened.’ I see his mouth forming words and I hear them without being able to understand what he says. It’s as though I am separated from Eirik by an invisible membrane, like hearing him speak through water.

  ‘What?’ I whisper. My voice is raw and painful. He says something again and I can’t quite make it out. I close my eyes. Eirik kisses my neck, my face, my hands, and I sense his warmth. Don’t leave me, I want to say, but I can’t get the words to come. ‘Please,’ I whisper.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Kristina.’

  ‘Please…’ Please just hold me, I wan
t to say, but still, the words won’t come, but it doesn’t matter now, because my husband understands, and very gently lies down behind me, enveloping my body in spoons. I close my eyes for a long while, and my mind feels blurry and strange, as though it has simply crumbled now I’m safe and don’t have to stay on high alert. I clutch Eirik’s big, impossibly warm hand at my waist. I feel dizzy and nauseated.

  After a very long time, I open my eyes. Where we’re lying, we’re facing into the living room. I can make out the outline of Leah’s MacBook on the floor underneath the sofa, and just then, I remember her words, the terrible words I read just before the flashlight shone into the cabin.

  Onto the next thing. The big thing. Kristina, we need to talk about your husband.

  I need to think. And I need to know what Leah wrote next.

  ‘Water,’ I whisper. I need Eirik to get up off the floor so he doesn’t happen to catch sight of the laptop. ‘Please can you get me some water?’

  *

  He places me gently on the sofa, then sits down and places my head on a pillow in his lap. He strokes my hair, kneading out knots with his fingertips, tracing patterns on my scalp. I try to muster all my focus to gather my thoughts, but the fuzzy dense feeling remains. I sip water and watch the flames still dancing in the hearth. I think about Leah’s MacBook on the floor, just centimeters from my body.

  ‘What time is it?’ I ask. Eirik pulls his phone from his pocket.

  ‘Eleven forty,’ he says. ‘No reception up here. In fact, not since I parked, next to your car.’

  ‘How did you find me? I don’t understand?’

  ‘Honey, we need to talk.’ I turn around so I can see his face. He smiles gently at me, his fingers still buried deep in my hair. ‘Something very strange happened earlier this evening. When you messaged me, I had just walked through the door at home – my last two meetings and the dinner got canceled, so I caught the four o’clock flight back to Oslo. I figured I could always fly back to Bergen on Tuesday morning and I was going to surprise you. I knew you have had a lot on your plate recently and I knew you were feeling stressed about the situation with Leah Iverson, after everything you told me on Friday night. I was really worried for you. I was standing in the hallway, quite shocked to read that you’d set off to find Leah, and that she’d written about you, when the doorbell rang. It was a man, asking for you, and when I said you were out, he grew really agitated and so I went down to street level to speak to him. He seemed completely out of it. A young, kind of squat guy with these light-blue eyes. Quite a scary-looking guy. He said his name was Anton. I’m assuming that’s the ex-husband?’

  I nod. ‘Yes,’ I whisper.

  ‘Okay. Seemed totally nuts.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said… He said he was going to fuck you up since you’d called the police on him.’

  ‘Uh. I don’t. I don’t understand…’ I am trying to get my mind to compute that Anton came to my house.

  ‘Then he literally ran off. Krissy, I was terrified for you. I called and called and called and you didn’t pick up. I called the police, but without any other information there wasn’t much they could do. I didn’t know if he might have guessed you’d have come here to look for Leah, so I decided I had to find you before he did. Now, where is this woman? Leah.’

  ‘She’s dead.’

  ‘What? How do you know?’

  ‘I found her, outside. He’s killed her.’

  ‘Oh my God. How do you know?’

  ‘I— she’s shot. When I came here, I thought she’d committed suicide. She left a note…’

  We stare at each other for a long moment.

  ‘Wait. What? She left a suicide note?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So she shot herself?’

  ‘No. I don’t think it would be possible. It was a big hunting rifle; she wouldn’t have been able to turn a weapon like that on herself. Besides, she wrote that she was going to drown herself in the lake.’

  ‘Wait, are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. It’s so tragic and shocking. She lost her baby. I think the shock of it massively destabilized her, and…’ I have to pause for a moment, my voice is raspy and weak.

  ‘Where is the note? Can I see it?’

  ‘Yeah. Of course. But Eirik, there is something I just don’t understand… How did you find me?’

  ‘I found you on Find My iPhone.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Clever, huh? When I’d got the coordinates, I went on Google Earth and screenshotted the map so I’d be able to find it even if reception was bad. There was only one cabin, so I knew this must be where you were. But Jesus Christ, how remote is this place? Why did you come here alone? I need to know what’s happened. I’ve been so afraid.’

  ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ I whisper. And I am sorry. Eirik must have been terrified.

  ‘Where did you find the note? And why did you she write about you?’ I think of Supernova and the MacBook on the floor under where we are sitting. I don’t know why, but I know I must keep its existence from Eirik for now. We need to talk about your husband.

  His hands have stopped moving in my hair; he’s waiting for me to answer. My heart is hammering so loudly it feels like he’d hear it if I open my mouth to speak. I take several deep breaths, calm my mind down, and tell myself that I have the tools to handle this.

  ‘That guy. Anton. He told me that she was unnaturally preoccupied with me. And that she’d been writing about me,’ I say. ‘Like she wrote about him. I decided that I wanted to speak to her about it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this on Friday?’

  ‘I don’t know. I guess I forgot.’ Because I didn’t know about Supernova yet.

  ‘And had she?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Written about you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve looked around but there’s nothing. Just the note. And my diary.’

  ‘Your diary? How did she get hold of that?’

  ‘Honestly, I just don’t understand it. She must have taken it from my office during one of our sessions.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s so creepy.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come here by yourself. You could have died out there.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So what happened after you found the note?’

  ‘Well, first I found some bloodstains. In the bathroom and in her bed, and the note was on the pillow. She said she couldn’t face the rest of her life after she’d lost the baby. By then, I was shocked and afraid; it had started snowing heavily and I worried I wouldn’t find my way back down to the car. Then I found her, shot. It was so horrifying and I couldn’t help running away and then I fell badly on the steep part of the track. I was knocked unconscious.’

  ‘Oh, baby.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything…’

  ‘Shhh. I’m here now.’

  ‘Do you think you should go out there and do something? Bring her inside, or—’

  ‘Honey, I can’t bring her inside. It’s best for the forensic team to be the ones to move her. But you’re right, I should go out there. Is the weapon still out there? Did you see it?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ll go out there and secure it, and cover her with tarpaulin.’ I nod, trying not to think of the gruesome task Eirik has ahead of him, but when I close my eyes I see her, outlined beneath a shroud of snow, one hand curled like a claw. ‘And tomorrow morning I’ll go for help first thing, it’s going to take at least two men to get you out of here. It would be straight-up dangerous for me to try to get you down to the road in the middle of the night in a snowstorm. The safest place until tomorrow morning, is right here,’ he says, and his fingers start moving again, gently tracing little shapes on the skin behind my ears, before moving down to my throat and collarbone, pressing his fingers against the soft and firm parts of me under his fingertips.

  Eirik detangles himself from me and places my head gently back
down on the sofa.

  ‘If I don’t go deal with her right now, I’ll talk myself out of it,’ he says, stretching his limbs and staring out the window at the stormy night.

  ‘Be careful,’ I whisper. He nods and listens intently as I explain where I found her.

  When he has gone I have to fight the urge to get the MacBook back out and quickly read the next section – I have to know what Leah was about to say about Eirik but I don’t want to risk him bursting back into the cabin and asking questions about what I’m reading. I’m glad I don’t because he returns after less than ten minutes carrying the rifle, his face pale and twisted into a terrorized grimace. He places the rifle back in its cabinet, then I hear him in the bathroom, retching.

  ‘She did this herself,’ he says, when he emerges from the bathroom after a long while.

  ‘What? Why do you think that?’

  ‘She removed the shoe and sock on her right foot and pulled the trigger with her toe.’ I try to picture this scenario. Leah, so desperate she got the hunting rifle from its cabinet, took it outside, selected an apparently random spot on the hillside just off the path, and fired it straight into her own face. But I can’t.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Completely. Jesus, what a sight. That poor woman. I saw something similar once, when I was in the military. A guy in my barracks blew his brains out with a rifle. Same thing, used his toe.

  ‘I… I just can’t even—’

  ‘Shh, my love. You’re safe now. You need to sleep. Everything will be better tomorrow.’