After a while the drunk comes stumbling out of a flat farther down in the house, and starts hitting the banister with her shoehorn and mumbling something about how people aren’t allowed to take baths at night. The drunk does this a few times every week. There’s nothing abnormal about it.
“Turn off the water!” mutters the drunk, but Elsa doesn’t answer.
Nor does anyone else. Because people in houses like this seem to believe that drunks are like monsters, and if one pretends they are not there they actually disappear.
Elsa hears how the drunk, in a passionate exhortation for water rationing, slips and falls and ends up on her ass with the shoehorn falling on her head. The drunk and the shoehorn have a fairly long-drawn-out dispute after that, like two old friends at loggerheads about money. And then at last there’s silence. And then Elsa hears the song. The song the drunk always sings. Elsa sits in the darkness on the stairs and hugs herself, as if it is a lullaby just for her. And then even that falls silent. She hears the drunk trying to calm down the shoehorn, before disappearing into her flat again. Elsa half-closes her eyes. Tries to see the cloud animals and the first outlying fields of the Land-of-Almost-Awake, but it doesn’t work. She can’t get there anymore. Not without Granny. She opens her eyes, absolutely inconsolable. The snowflakes fall like wet mittens against the window.
And that’s when she sees The Monster for the first time.
It’s one of those winter nights when the darkness is so thick it’s as if the whole area has been dipped headfirst in a bucket of blackness, and The Monster steals out the front door and crosses the half circle of light around the last light in the street so quickly that if Elsa had blinked a little too hard, she would have thought she was imagining it. But as it is she knows what she saw, and she hits the floor and makes her way down the stairs in one fluid movement.
She’s never seen him before, but she knows from his sheer size that it must be him. He glides across the snow like an animal, a beast from one of Granny’s fairy tales. Elsa knows very well that what she’s about to do is both dangerous and idiotic, but she runs down the stairs three steps at a time. Her socks slip on the last step and she careers across the ground-floor vestibule, smacking her chin into the door handle.
Her face throbbing with pain, she throws the door open and breathlessly churns through the snow, still only in her socks.
“I have mail for you!” she cries into the night. Only then does she realize that her tears have lodged in her throat. She’s so desperate to know who this person is that Granny secretly talked to about Miamas.
There’s no answer. She hears his light footfalls in the snow, surprisingly agile considering his enormity. He’s moving away from her. Elsa ought to be afraid, she should be terrified of what The Monster could do to her. He’s big enough to tear her apart with a single tug, she knows that. But she’s too angry to be afraid.
“My granny says to tell you she’s sorry!” she roars.
She can’t see him. But she no longer hears the creaking of his steps in the snow. He’s stopped.
Elsa isn’t thinking. She rushes into the darkness, relying on pure instinct, towards the spot where she last heard him put down his foot. She feels the movement of air from his jacket. He starts running; she stumbles through the snow and catapults herself forward, catching hold of his trouser leg. When she lands on her back in the snow, she sees him staring down at her, by the light of the last streetlight. Elsa has time to feel her tears freezing on her cheeks.
He must be a good deal more than six feet tall. As big as a tree. There’s a thick hood covering his head and his black hair spills out over his shoulders. Almost his entire face is buried under a beard as thick as an animal pelt, and, emerging from the shadows of the hood, a scar zigzags down over one eye, so pronounced that it looks as if the skin has melted. Elsa feels his gaze creeping through her circulating blood.
“Let go!”
The dark mass of his torso sinks over Elsa as he hisses these words at her.
“My granny says to tell you she’s sorry!” Elsa pants, holding up the envelope.
The Monster doesn’t take it. She lets go of his trouser-leg because she thinks he’ll kick her, but he only takes a half-step back. And what comes out of him next is more of a growl than a word. As if he’s talking to himself, not to her.
“Get lost, stupid girl. . . .”
The words pulsate against Elsa’s eardrums. They sound wrong, somehow. Elsa understands them, but they chafe at the passages of her inner ear. As if they didn’t belong there.
The Monster turns with a quick, hostile movement. In the next moment he’s gone. As if he’s stepped right through a doorway in the darkness.
Elsa lies in the snow, trying to catch her breath while the cold stamps on her chest. Then she stands up and gathers her strength, crumpling the envelope into a ball and flinging it into the darkness after him.
She doesn’t know how many eternities pass before she hears the entrance porch opening behind her. Then she hears Mum’s footsteps, hears her calling Elsa’s name. Elsa rushes blindly into her arms.
“What are you doing out here?” asks Mum, scared.
Elsa doesn’t answer. Tenderly, Mum takes her face in her hands.
“How did you get that black eye?”
“Soccer,” whispers Elsa.
“You’re lying,” whispers Mum.
Elsa nods. Mum holds her hard. Elsa sobs against her stomach.
“I miss her. . . .”
Mum leans down and puts her forehead against hers.
“Me too.”
They don’t hear The Monster moving out there. They don’t see him picking up the envelope. But then, at last, burrowing into her mum’s arms, Elsa realizes why his words sounded wrong.
The Monster was talking in Granny and Elsa’s secret language.
It’s possible to love your grandmother for years and years without really knowing anything about her.
8
RUBBER
It’s Wednesday. She’s running again.
She doesn’t know the exact reason this time. Maybe it’s because it’s one of the last days before the Christmas holidays, and they know they won’t be able to chase anyone for several weeks now, so they have to get it out of their systems. Or maybe it’s something else altogether—it doesn’t matter. People who have never been hunted always seem to think there’s a reason for it. “They wouldn’t do it without a cause, would they? You must have done something to provoke them.” As if that’s how oppression works.
But it’s pointless trying to explain to these people, as fruitless as clarifying to a guy carrying around a rabbit’s foot—because of its supposed good luck—that if rabbits’ feet really were lucky, they’d still be attached to the rabbits.
And this is really no one’s fault. It’s not that Dad was a bit late picking her up, it’s just that the school day finished slightly too early. And it’s difficult making oneself invisible when the hunt starts inside the school building.
So Elsa runs.
“Catch her!” yells the girl somewhere behind her.
Today it all started with Elsa’s scarf. Or at least Elsa thinks it did. She has started learning who the chasers are at school, and how they operate. Some only chase children if they prove to be weak. And some chase just for the thrill of it; they don’t even hit their victims when they catch them, just want to see the terror in their eyes. And then there are some like the boy Elsa fought about the right to be Spider-Man. He fights and chases people as a point of principle because he can’t stand anyone disagreeing with him. Especially not someone who’s different.
With this girl it’s something else. She wants a reason for giving chase. A way of justifying the chase. She wants to feel like a hero while she’s chasing me, thinks Elsa with unfeasibly cool clarity as she charges towards the fence, her heart thumping like a jackhammer and her throat burning like that time Granny made jalapeño smoothies.
Elsa throws herself at the fen
ce, and her backpack lands so hard on her head when she jumps down on the pavement on the other side that for a few seconds her eyes start to black out. She pulls hard on the straps with both hands to tighten it against her back. Hazily she blinks and looks left towards the parking area where Audi should show up at any moment. She hears the girl behind her screaming like an insulted, ravenous orc. She knows that by the time Audi arrives it’ll be too late, so she looks right instead, down the hill towards the big road. The trucks are thundering by like an invading army on its way towards a castle still held by the enemy, but in the gaps between the traffic Elsa sees the entrance to the park on the other side.
“Shoot-up Park,” that’s what people call it at school, because there are drug addicts there who chase children with heroin syringes. At least that’s what Elsa’s heard, and it terrifies her. It’s the sort of park that never seems to catch any daylight, and this is the kind of winter’s day when the sun never seems to rise.
Elsa had managed just fine until lunchtime, but not even someone who’s very good at being invisible can quite manage it in a cafeteria. The girl had materialized before her so suddenly that Elsa was startled and spilled salad dressing on her Gryffindor scarf. The girl had pointed at it and roared: “Didn’t I tell you to stop going around with that ugly bloody scarf?” Elsa had looked back at the girl in the only way one can look back at someone who has just pointed at a Gryffindor scarf and said, “Ugly bloody scarf.” Not totally dissimilar to how one would look at someone who had just seen a horse and gaily burst out, “Crocodile!” The first time the scarf caught the girl’s attention, Elsa had simply assumed that the girl was a Slytherin. Only after she’d smacked Elsa in the face, ripped her scarf, and thrown it in a toilet had Elsa grown conscious of the fact that the girl hadn’t read Harry Potter at all. She knew who he was, of course, everyone knows who Harry Potter is, but she hadn’t read the books. She didn’t even understand the most basic symbolism of a Gryffindor scarf. And while Elsa didn’t want to be elitist or anything, how could one be expected to reason with a person like that?
Muggles.
So today when the girl in the cafeteria had reached out to snatch away Elsa’s scarf, Elsa decided to continue the discussion on the girl’s own intellectual level. She simply threw her glass of milk at her and ran for it. Through the corridors, up to the second floor of the school, then the third, where there was a space under the stairs that the cleaners used as a storage cupboard. Elsa had curled up in there with her arms around her knees, making herself as invisible as possible while she listened to the girl and her followers run up to the fourth floor. And then she hid in the classroom for the rest of the day.
It’s the distance between the classroom and the school gates that’s impossible; even a seasoned expert can’t be invisible there. So Elsa had to be strategic.
First she stayed close to the teacher while her classmates were crowding to get out of the classroom. Then she slipped out the door in the general tumult and darted down the other flight of stairs, the one that does not lead to the main gates. Of course her pursuers knew she’d do that, they may even have wanted her to do it, because she’d be easier to catch on those stairs. But the lesson had finished early, and Elsa took a chance that lessons on the floor below were still in progress, so she had perhaps half a minute to run down the stairs and through the empty corridor and establish a small head start while her pursuers got entangled with the pupils welling out of the classrooms below.
She was right. She saw the girl and her friends no more than ten yards behind her, but they couldn’t reach her.
Granny has told her thousands of stories from Miamas about pursuit and war. About evading shadows when they’re on your tail, how to lay traps for them and how to beat them with distraction. Like all hunters, shadows have one really significant weakness: they focus all their attention on the one they’re pursuing, rather than seeing their entire surroundings. The one being chased, on the other hand, devotes every scrap of attention to finding an escape route. It may not be a gigantic advantage, but it is an advantage. Elsa knows this, because she’s checked what “distraction” means.
So she shoved her hand into her jeans pocket and got out a handful of coins she kept there for emergencies. Just as the throng of children was starting to disperse and she was getting close to the second stair towards the main entrance, she dropped the coins on the floor and ran.
Elsa has noticed one odd thing about people. Almost none of us can hear the tinkling sound of coins against a stone floor without instinctively stopping and looking down. The sudden crush and eager arms blocked her pursuers and gave her another few seconds to get clear of them. She made full use of the moment and bolted.
But she hears them throwing themselves at the fence now. Trendy winter boots scraping against the buckled steel wire. Just a few more moments until they catch her. Elsa looks left, towards the parking area. No Audi. Looks right, down at the chaos of the road and the black silence of the park. She looks left again, thinks to herself that this would be the safe option if Dad turned up on time for once. Then she looks right, feels an abrasive fear in her gut when she glimpses the park between the roaring trucks.
And then she thinks about Granny’s stories from Miamas, about how one of the princes once evaded a whole flock of pursuing shadows by riding into the darkest forest in the Land-of-Almost-Awake. Shadows are the foulest foulnesses ever to live in any fantasy, but even shadows feel fear, said Granny. Even those bastards are afraid of something. Because even shadows have a sense of imagination.
“Sometimes the safest place is when you flee to what seems the most dangerous,” said Granny, and then she described how the prince rode right into the darkest forest and the shadows stopped, hissing, at the edge. For not even they were sure what might be lurking inside, on the other side of the trees, and nothing scares anyone more than the unknown, which can only be known by reliance on the imagination. “When it comes to terror, reality’s got nothing on the power of the imagination,” Granny said.
So Elsa runs to the right. She can smell the burning rubber when the cars brake on the ice. That’s how Renault smells almost all the time. She darts between the trucks and hears their blaring horns and her pursuers screaming at her. She’s reached the pavement when she feels the first of them grab her backpack. She is so near the park that she could reach into the darkness with her hand, but it’s too late. By the time she’s being pulled down into the snow, Elsa knows that the blows and kicks will rain down on her quicker than her hands can shield her, but she pulls up her knees and closes her eyes and tries to cover her face so Mum won’t be upset again.
She waits for the dull thuds against the back of her head. Often it doesn’t hurt when they hit her; usually it doesn’t hurt until the day after. The pain she feels during the actual beating is a different kind of pain.
But nothing happens.
Elsa holds her breath.
Nothing.
She opens her eyes and there’s deafening noise all around her. She can hear them yelling. Can hear that they’re running. And then she hears The Monster’s voice. Something is booming out of him, like a primeval power.
“NEVER! TOUCH! HER!”
Everything echoes.
Elsa’s eardrums are rattling. The Monster is not roaring in Granny and Elsa’s secret language, but in normal language. The words sound strange in his mouth, as if the intonation of every syllable slips and ends up wrong. As if he hasn’t spoken such words for a very long time.
Elsa looks up. The Monster stares down at her through the shadow of the upturned hood and that beard, which never seems to end. His chest heaves a few times. Elsa hunches up instinctively, terrified that his huge hands are going to grab her and toss her into the traffic like a giant flicking a mouse with a single finger. But he just stands there breathing heavily and looking angry and confused. At last he raises his hand, as if it’s a heavy mallet, and points back at the school.
When Elsa turns around she sees
the girl who doesn’t read Harry Potter and her friends scattering like bits of paper thrown into the wind.
In the distance she sees Audi turning into the parking area. Elsa takes a deep breath and feels air entering her lungs for what seems like the first time in several minutes.
When she turns around again, The Monster has gone.
9
SOAP
There are thousands of stories in the real world, but every single one of them is from the Land-of-Almost-Awake. And the very best are from Miamas.
The other five kingdoms have produced the odd fairy tale now and then of course, but none of them are anywhere near as good. In Miamas, fairy tales are still produced around the clock, lovingly handmade one by one, and only the very, very finest of them are exported. Most are only told once and then they fall flat on the ground, but the best and most beautiful of them rise from the lips of their tellers after the last words have been spoken, and then slowly hover off over the heads of the listeners, like small, shimmering paper lanterns. When night comes they are fetched by the enphants. The enphants are very small creatures with decorous hats who ride on cloud animals (the enphants, not the hats). The lanterns are gathered up by the enphants with the help of large golden nets, and then the cloud animals turn and rise up towards the sky so swiftly that even the wind has to get out of the way. And if the wind doesn’t move out of the way quickly enough, the clouds transform themselves into an animal that has fingers, so the cloud animals can give the finger to the wind. (Granny always bellowed with laughter at this; it was a while before Elsa worked out why.)
And at the peak of the highest mountain in the Land-of-Almost-Awake, known as the Telling Mountain, the enphants open their nets and let the stories fly free. And that is how the stories find their way into the real world.
The Fredrik Backman Box Set Page 36
