Red Snow

by Will Dean

  ‘Someone, or, if you listen to some Grimbergs, something. Now, mock mojito or mock negroni?’

  How old am I, ten? I can taste a real mojito in my mouth when he says the word and I need to stop tasting it right now.

  ‘Mojito, thanks,’ and then I add, quickly, too loud. ‘Mock. Mock mojito.’

  He takes limes and sprigs of mint from the fridge and takes crushed ice from the bowl he used for the Spritz. He makes a show of filling two tall glasses and breaking up the mint leaves with a pestle and mortar, and rolling and squeezing the lime.

  ‘The wings weren’t connected to the main house; they were some twelve metres away from it. One was guest accommodation and one housed Cecilia Grimberg and half her collection, the pieces not stored in the factory. Ludvig Grimberg would buy her masses of clothes. Perhaps a form of bribe, or an arrangement, because of his philandering.’

  ‘When was the big fire?’ I ask as David passes me a glass with half a mint plant scrunched into the top of it.

  ‘Tell me what you think?’ he asks. ‘Honest opinion. This isn’t one of those pre-mixed monstrosities, this is my own concoction.’

  I sip it and it tastes just like a pre-mixed non-alcoholic supermarket special.

  ‘It’s really good. What year was the fire?’

  He looks pleased with himself but then I see him pour a small measure of rum into his glass and stir it with the plastic mixer and I want him to do the same to mine.

  ‘February 2011. Nobody was hurt, no major heirlooms lost, but the investigators were baffled by the fact that both wings went up but not the main house. One wing could have been an accident. All three buildings could have been an accident. This looked like mindful arson, but the family eventually received the insurance money despite much delay. Some blamed it on “old evil” whatever that is. Gustav told me he suspected teenagers from the nearby sailing camp and apparently Cecilia blamed lake sprites or whatever it is she calls them.’

  ‘She lost half of her clothes collection?’

  ‘It was moved to the factory a week before the fire,’ he says.

  I raise my eyebrows.

  He nods.

  ‘I’ll ask more about this tomorrow,’ I say. ‘They’ve never mentioned it.’

  He snorts through his nostrils like they haven’t mentioned a lot of things yet.

  ‘Coffee?’

  I look at my phone screen. No reception. Five past seven.’

  ‘Quick one. I don’t want to rush through this snow and I really shouldn’t be late for my own leaving drinks.’

  He breaks up a slab of 90% cocoa dark chocolate, the sort that tastes like black slug pâté, and arranges the shards in a ramekin. He places a cup of ristretto espresso next to it and then looks out the window.

  ‘Take it easy down the hill,’ he says. ‘My thermometer says minus eleven and that’s a good thing, it’s minus two you don’t want. The colder it is the better the grip. How are the tyres on your vehicle?’

  ‘Don’t ask,’ I say, taking a micro-bite from the bitter chocolate. It has salt flakes embedded in it. I wash it down with the coffee.

  ‘If you have any problems just get Viggo to drive you. His Volvo can get through most weather.’

  Not in a million fucking years.

  David Holmqvist taps the coffee scoop into a silver bucket he keeps under the gleaming machine. The bucket’s a large wine-cooler complete with French logo.

  ‘Compost,’ he says. ‘I add this to my pile, the lilacs adore it.’

  I excuse myself to use the bathroom. I skip upstairs, the oversweet mojito still coating my teeth, and step onto the landing. The door to the first guest room, the archive room, is open. His bedroom door is also open, mirrors all over the walls. His second guest room door is closed. I look down the stairs and then step toward it. I open the door. There’s an old mahogany desk with green ink blotter and a huge-screen apple computer with ergonomic keyboard and weird-shaped mouse. The keyboard’s raised on a little shelf and behind the desk is a bookshelf with dozens of titles, some translated. Three are about the Medusa murders from last year. None are in David’s name.

  An innocent room.

  My imagination has a lot to answer for. I close the door gently and slip into the bathroom. It’s above average, with a rain shower and decent tiles. Lena taught me to notice these things. I finish up and then wash my hands, my dry face looking back at me. I touch the edge of the mirror and open the cabinet it conceals. Shaving foam, razors, toothpaste, deodorant, heel balm. I shouldn’t intrude. I have to. There are five bottles of pills and two boxes of condoms.

  I head downstairs.

  ‘Just a few more days of your research left,’ he says, my coat loose in his hairy hands. He holds it up. ‘Then I’ll be quarantined here finishing the first draft.’

  ‘How many books have you written?’ I ask.

  ‘Twenty-three and zero,’ he says. ‘This will be my twenty-fourth but most importantly it will be my first, the first with my name printed on the spine. The Holmqvist name would die with me if it wasn’t for this book.’

  ‘I’m sure your parents would be very proud,’ I say, my back to Holmqvist; my left hand trying to find the sleeve.

  ‘Why would you say a thing like that?’ he says.

  ‘Your first book in your own name.’

  I’m still struggling to find the sleeve hole with my hand, my forearm thrashing about deep inside the folds of goose-down padding, my body getting hotter and hotter.

  ‘They read my early work,’ he says, still behind me, still holding the coat, adjusting it so I can find the sleeve. ‘Before their accident. My mother said “I suppose it’s a start” and my father told me “don’t give up the day job”. I was seventeen years old.’

  ‘Parents,’ I say, turning, both arms now in my coat sleeves.

  ‘Don’t disappoint me, Tuva,’ he says, his lip quivering slightly. ‘Do the best you can and I’ll include you in the acknowledgements. You’ll have your name inside the book, your actual name. In print. I need as much information as you can extract from the family. You must promise me you’ll do your best.’

  I look at him and sweat starts to bead at my temples and I have a strong compulsion to get outside into cold, dry air.

  ‘I’ll do my best,’ I say.

  He opens the front door. The veranda covers us completely but my boots sink into snow blown over by the wind. I say goodbye and trudge to the Tacoma and the security lights brighten everything around me. Dazzling fresh snow in the air and on the ground and all over my truck. I walk around to the dark side, the driver’s door side, conscious that I’ll need to be gentle with the handle, Janitor Andersson’s words clear in my ears, but I can’t even get the key inside the lock. Where the hell is my Hilux with its bleeper? Potato-head is probably cruising around in it right now boring some poor girl to tears and talking at length about his own opinions and his own lame predictable favourite movies and I can’t even open my own door.

  ‘Dead?’ says Holmqvist, suddenly beside me.

  ‘Frozen lock,’ I say.

  He steps into his house and comes back with a pen torch in his hand. He’s back-dropped by the dog kennel, unoccupied, ready for removal or burning or sale, and he’s wearing a woolly hat.

  ‘Can’t get the key in,’ I say.

  He shows me the little de-icer bottle in his hand and I curse myself for leaving mine inside this truck like a Grade A idiot. His breath clouds in between us and he squirts at the lock and takes my key from me and focusses the pen torch and slowly pushes the key into the lock and the truck door opens. An avalanche of snow drops onto my seat.

  ‘There,’ he says. ‘I expect I’ll see you at the factory tomorrow. Drive safely now.’

  I get in and he walks back indoors. I turn the key in the ignition and the weak headlights beam out at the road, which doesn’t look like a road just a white absence of spruce trees. I scrape and wipe and pull out slowly onto the track, my wheels crunching through deep powder, the unde
rcarriage of the Shitmobile scraping the high snow between my tyre grooves.

  The one saving grace is the overhanging trees. I drive at twenty, my eyes on high alert, my aids switched up to a volume I don’t usually like. It’s freezing cold and I’m leaning forward so my head almost touches the windscreen.

  I trundle down past the wood-carving sisters’ workshop, their fire still glowing, their razor-sharp tools glinting in my headlights. I drive on toward the hill. I’ll be late for my drinks, maybe fifteen minutes late, but that’s acceptable. Twenty wouldn’t be, not in Sweden, but fifteen I can get away with.

  The snow gets deeper up here with the trees spread further apart and the forest is as dark as the bottom of a cave. I speed up to take a small incline, the one before the big descent, and my tyres make a screaming noise. I try to steer out of the skid but it doesn’t work and I slide, my hands tight on the wheel, the slow-mo inevitability of it all, the powerlessness, down into a steep ditch.

  I come to a rest at an angle, the truck chassis shaking on its wheels.

  Shit.

  I drag my fingers over my cheeks. Consequences flash before my eyes: explanations and apologies for being so late, and then I see the disappointed faces of guys who’ve sacrificed a big ice hockey game on TV to dress up and toast me and my new job and my new life in the south.

  My foot presses down on the accelerator, my window more open now. Zero traction. Nothing. I’m tilted in this ditch and I can’t move. I climb out and slip a little and then I pull my hood over my head. There are no people here, but just about every wild animal you can imagine is a few trees deep watching me, waiting. There are bears in this part of the world. There are moose, unpredictable moose, hundreds of them. There are bats and polecats and wolves. But there’s nobody to help and my nose is starting to freeze. I try to attach the snow chains to my tyres but how the hell do these work? I sweat and swear and manage to get one on straight and the other half on and I’m so exhausted from this, just from this. I get back in the truck, snow everywhere, my hands red raw because I couldn’t attach the chains wearing gloves. I try to drive up and out.

  Nothing.

  I am stuck solid. No phone reception. No traffic.

  Silence.

  I almost cry but then I mentally slap myself in the face. Leaving drinks. There must be a way. I have maybe twenty people waiting for me at Ronnie’s and I’m not the kind to get stuck in a ditch and just die quietly. I am not that person.

  I clamber out of the truck, more positive now, snow falling down the back of my neck, and then I wade through deep powder, knee-deep snow, it’s exhausting to walk through, you know, and I break off two pine branches. I saw this once in a film. I lay the branches around my tyres because I need traction and pine-scented traction will do. I scrape again. My windscreen’s covered in splodges of snow that have dropped from nearby branches. I floor the truck and it just skids on the spot.

  I wave my phone around looking for a signal.

  Nothing.

  Must be minus twelve or thirteen, the kind of minus where everything starts glistening with transparent panko-breadcrumb Hoare frost. The forest creaks and crunches. My cheeks are cold, not frostbite cold, but red-skin-that-won’t-clear-for-a-few-days cold. My mouth tastes like over-sweet mint, like too many sugar-free gums chewed all at once, and if I had a bottle of something in the truck right now I’d open it.

  About a kilometre downhill to the taxi driver’s house – him and his covered garage-project and his terrified little boy – or two kilometres uphill, deeper into the wood, backward, the wrong way, to the wood-carving sisters.

  What a choice.

  I choose uphill because there is no way in the world I want to be stuck out here with Viggo Svennson. I lock up my truck and take my torch and get walking.

  After fifteen minutes my legs ache from the unnatural gait I’m using. I have to lift my boot to knee-level before taking a step, and it hurts. The snow is colder now and sometimes the hardened crust on the top holds me so I can walk like Bambi on a frozen pond, but most of the time it doesn’t hold and I kind of tentatively step, then fall through to the depth of my shin or even my knee.

  I walk on.

  Utgard forest is a different kind of terrifying now than it was in October. It’s a silent killer now. There are no bugs, they’re all frozen solid. Deceased. I can’t see any evidence of elk or deer or badger, but they’re all here, just deeper in the woods.

  There’s a noise.

  A snort somewhere deep in the trees. I stop dead. My pulse is racing. I swing my torch left and right, trying to look into the solid pine walls each side of me. An elk? I see a flash of green above, something behind the clouds, an aurora maybe, but I’ve never seen one properly, not a good display. I keep looking up to see it again but there’s nothing up there and now I doubt if I ever saw any colour up there in that heavyweight sky.

  My skin’s scorched with cold and my breaths have stopped clouding because I’m frozen on the inside now.

  I keep seeing snow skulls, dozens of them, staring at me from each side of the track, some laughing at me, others wailing, their mouths gaping open. But they’re not skulls. They’re snow-topped rocks. I walk faster.

  Every now and then there’s a whoosh noise as a mini avalanche rumbles down a branch onto the track in a white explosion.

  I go on.

  I have no weapon. I have a phone and my emergency chocolate, unopened, and my wine gums, half gone. They’re frozen hard like some kind of fad confectionary.

  I stop every hundred metres and look and listen and shine my torch. My heart’s pounding and there’s an elk out there somewhere. There are dozens of them.

  I can’t see a single thing. There are noises from behind me, from the track not the trees. Footsteps? A man? Is Viggo somewhere behind me? The Ferryman? I think back to that neck wound, that neat slice, that canine tooth. I turn on my axis and the noise stops. The footprints stop. I pant and I stare into the dark white nothingness. Waiting. It’s just your imagination, Tuva. It’s nothing. And then I turn around and keep on going. My heart is a steam train fighting a steep incline and my mouth is completely dehydrated.

  Woodsmoke.

  The sisters’ workshop becomes clearer as I round a bend. I slip over, the deep snow cushioning my fall, and then I see their dark grey van. It has a dent on one side like it’s nudged another vehicle. Maybe they can pull me out with a tow chain? I start to check out their tyres when a voice calls from an upstairs window.

  ‘What you looking at, girl?’

  31

  ‘Can I use your phone, please?’

  She burps from the window. I can’t hear it but I can see her blow air from her cheeks and then recoil slightly.

  ‘Phone’s out,’ she says.

  I look up at her. Everything around us is wild silence. When I shuffle my feet I can hear cracks and dull screeches, as ice crystals scrape against each other but when I’m still and she’s still and all the beasts around us are still it is absolutely noiseless here.

  ‘Out?’ I say.

  ‘The snow. Phone lines are out. Be back in the morning I expect.’

  ‘How can I call a tow truck?’

  She laughs at this and reaches out and closes the window. I wait, comforted by the smoke hanging in the clear ice air and by the lit house in front of me. If there’d been a power cut as well as a phone outage I may have lay down and died. The door opens and it’s Alice, the quiet sister, in a nightie and long johns, wrinkled all the way down to her quite shapely ankles like two concertina pipes. She’s wearing thermal slippers and a big red ski jacket. She waves me inside.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, stepping past her.

  This is new to me. I’ve never been inside their home, just the open-fronted workshop.

  ‘Can’t get no tow truck up this track tonight, girl,’ says Cornelia, the talking one. ‘You ain’t seen the drifts?’

  ‘I slid into a ditch.’

  ‘Don’t know why you’re out driving o
n a night like this, do you, Alice?’

  ‘Nope,’ says Alice, pulling off her red jacket.

  ‘You’ll take the sofa. We’re heading up in fifteen minutes,’ says Cornelia. ‘Cocoa?’

  I’m taken aback by this. Not because they’re offering me ‘safe harbour’, Cici’s phrase, but the cocoa. They’ve never offered me a drink before, and now it’s as if we’re a trio in some odd short-lived way. Perhaps because of what happened last year. That awful thing. And now with all this snow. Uniting us.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Thanks for taking me in.’

  ‘Ain’t got no choice, have we Alice?’

  Alice shakes her head.

  ‘You go out there, you’ll die, won’t she Alice?’

  ‘Die,’ says Alice, pouring milk into a saucepan and placing it on the hob.

  ‘We’ll give you blankets and we’ll build up the fire. We always keep the fires in when it’s this bad, one down here and one upstairs. Not been like this since ’82 but that was back in Norway.’

  Alice exaggerates a shiver and pours thick cocoa into two mugs, one for Cornelia and one for herself, and into a teacup for me. There’s a range of tools on the sideboard. Gougers and plains and blades, all sharpened and oiled.

  We stand by the range sipping, these two in their insulated nighties, both with long johns the colour of old dishwater, and me with my keys and no truck.

  ‘It’s my leaving drinks tonight.’

  ‘Your what, girl?’

  ‘I’m moving south next week and tonight should be my leaving drinks in Gavrik, all my colleagues and friends are waiting for me.’

  ‘You said about it before at the bank,’ says Cornelia, pointing to the window. ‘Just look outside. They’ll know why.’

  I think I’m getting kindness from these troll-carvers, these women with sparse eyelashes, with toenail clippings they store in a glass jar to use on their demonic, sick little dolls. And it’s unnerving me.

  ‘Why south, girl?’ asks the speaking one. ‘Not enough news up here?’

  Alice grins and two of her teeth are missing: one from the top and one from the bottom.

  ‘Better job,’ I say. ‘More scope.’