Trolls

by Stefan Spjut

  Granted, a sculpture could look pathetic – especially a sculpture of a Sami from the twenties, when people were still wrapping measuring tapes around Sami people’s skulls. And the name. She obviously knew it alluded to The Thinker by Rodin, but given how the Sami were viewed back then, it acquired different connotations. Like how the unique thing about this particular Sami was that he was actually thinking.

  But that’s not what they had meant when they had written that he looked pathetic. They hadn’t been capable of that kind of insight back then. They had slapped that word on to create distance to the assignment. To the requirement. A distance signalling rebellion. Against the school. Against everyone and everything. At the end of the day, everything was meaningless, but what were you supposed to do about it? Suck on a shotgun like Alice Älvros’ dad, who had made such an ungraceful exit it gave Alice bulimia. They had laughed about it behind her back, and the thought of that stung now when she wondered whether their jeers had ever reached Alice’s ears. So callous! So incredibly callous.

  Joking like that and mistrusting anything that was less morose than a heroin-infused grunge ballad had obviously been a survival strategy. A pact that offered a certain amount of protection from the mechanical, masculine force at work in the mining town, which ground people into identically sized gravel with identical technical skills. Come to think of it, their attempt at resistance had been pretty heroic.

  *

  She remembered the day Susso had sauntered into the classroom clearly; she remembered the exact moment, like a film. The unconcerned look in Susso’s eyes when she shuffled down between the desks to her seat. That was eighth grade. Halfway through the school year, after the Christmas break, in 1994. An odd girl from the village school in Abisko who looked like she had walked all the way down to Kiruna on foot, because her cheeks were bright red and so was the tip of her nose.

  She had worn a big Fjällräven coat, puffy and exclusive. Diana had had the same one; she had nagged her parents all autumn and been given it for Christmas in an enormous package.

  They had found each other immediately. It was like fate.

  And they looked so alike as well. Everyone had always pointed it out. That they looked like sisters. Here come the sisters! Myran and Sillen.* Their coats gave them identical outlines, but it wasn’t just the coats. They had the same kind of hair – mousy, if she was being honest. The same heart-shaped faces, the same upturned noses. The same height, the same physiognomy. They had even had their first periods the same month – unless Susso had lied about that. The same way of speaking. And the same laugh. Above everything, the same laugh. Whose laugh it had been originally she didn’t know. It was something they had created together. The same was true of their way of speaking. They had their own language. An idiom. It was dead now, but she was certain it would be revived immediately and without effort when they met. Just like Sumerian would if two Sumerians rose from their graves and were brought together.

  When they met.

  Not if.

  The phase they were in now, when they had, for various reasons – what you would have to call external reasons – grown apart, was just temporary.

  But what if it wasn’t?

  Squatting there by the moving box, clutching the twenty-year-old school assignment, she suddenly realised she had taken that for granted all these years. Subconsciously, she had assumed they would be reunited, and there had been no reason to dwell on it. She had assumed Susso felt exactly the same way. That they mirrored each other in that too. In their feelings for each other. In their memories of each other.

  But what did she really know about Susso’s memories? The way Susso viewed her? What she felt when she thought about her? Maybe she felt nothing at all.

  The tensions had begun to appear after upper secondary school, that autumn when there was no school to go back to, which had come as a shock to most people. Some moved south. Mostly girls. She herself had applied and been accepted to medical school in Umeå, but Susso didn’t seem to have any plans whatsoever. She worked in a shop and seemed content. Did sporadic shifts as a carer. Natta Simonsson worked in care too, so she and Susso started hanging out, drinking pretty heavily. Simonsson was friends with Sporty, and that was where Diana drew the line. Sporty had not earned her name by being into sports but rather by sleeping with a visiting floorball team from Sälen. The entire team. Not all at once, but over the course of the week she had worked her way through them all and played with several sticks at least once. At least that’s how rumour had it. That Susso would go out and get trashed with Sporty, this infamous harlot, was incomprehensible. They had used to make fun of her! Joke she didn’t just suck, she sucked a whole floorball team. This development had made Diana distance herself and as a consequence her move to Umeå had been less of an abrupt goodbye. They emailed a little bit back and forth, but then that petered out too. And when she moved back home to do her residency at the local hospital, Susso was still working in the same shop, virtually unchanged.

  Except that she had become a cryptozoologist. In earnest.

  The aerial photograph Susso’s grandfather had snapped in Sarek National Park had exercised a powerful pull on them during the part of their teenage years when they were drawn to anything that was somehow eccentric. Anything that was odd. Susso had shown her the blurry picture, furtively, without her mother’s permission, and it had filled her with a titillating and trepidatious horror that she could, in fact, still recall today.

  The small photograph, which was kept in an unmarked manila envelope, had been a door to a different world. A portal to a supernatural realm no one else knew about or could be allowed to know about. This was something Susso’s family had decided. The Picture wasn’t even spoken of, and that’s what made it so remarkable and exciting. Diana had been let in on the secret and she had felt like she had become a Myrén and she had even wished she were one.

  However, over the years, she had come to the conclusion that the secrecy surrounding the photograph probably sprang from shame. An unwieldy shame that no one in the family knew how to handle. There was no other explanation than that the patriarch, the great nature photographer Gunnar Myrén, world-famous in the north of Sweden, had produced a fake picture and his descendants found that embarrassing.

  Why it was such a big deal, she had never been able to figure out. She had never met Susso’s grandfather, but had assumed he was a bit of a prankster. Wasn’t it actually kind of funny? Why had it been such a sore point? Because it definitely was a sore point. Susso had always found it surprisingly difficult to talk about it. You didn’t know Grandpa. That was her only argument. Diana thought she should pull herself together; in fact, she more or less kept waiting for that to happen. For Susso to come to her senses and abandon her childish fancies. Grow out of them. Was she really serious when she claimed she believed in trolls? Susso said she was, but it was hard to tell whether she meant it or was just being contrary. Torbjörn had always taken Diana’s side, though he had been careful not to admit it. Susso had a temper on her, as he was very well aware. But he had giggled at Diana’s comments and given her cautious backup, and thus they had formed a pact against Susso; maybe it was this pact that had driven her into the arms of Simonsson.

  She had no idea how Susso had lived after she left for Umeå, but there seemed to have been a vacuum of some kind, and Susso had filled this vacuum with cryptozoology. For lack of better options. It had been a hobby at first. But it had grown. Assumed new forms.

  And that was because of the internet.

  She had made contact with people who shared her delusions on cryptozoological forums and bolstered by this community, she had constructed a website that revolved around the secret photograph. Which thereby became anything but secret, since now the whole world could see it. Diana had visited the website but hadn’t even wanted to show it to Håkan. She didn’t want him to slap some cynical diagnosis on her best friend.

  Because that’s what she was. Or at least there was no one else
who could aspire to that title. But what kind of friend had she been to Susso? Since she moved back, they had barely seen each other and after what happened in 2005, when that boy disappeared and Susso was in the papers, she had outright avoided her. And not just her. All of Vänort Square and the surrounding area had been a no-go zone for her, and when she had to walk past the shop she had always quickened her step and stared at her phone to give her eyes an alibi. If Gudrun had managed to catch her eye from inside, she would have been forced to go in. And talk. And ask. And find out about the thing she didn’t want to know anything about.

  Not knowing was so much easier. Hiding behind that. Strangely enough, she hadn’t given her own behaviour any thought. Not discussed it with herself, which she normally made sure to do as soon as she had an internal conflict that posed a threat to her conscience. After all, Susso and she had been practically joined at the hip all throughout their teens.

  What Gudrun had told her in the park didn’t make any sense. So it was after Susso had killed her website that she had started acting oddly. She figured it should have been the other way around. That she should have snapped back in. Besides, she had a hard time imagining Susso isolating herself like that.

  But what did she really know?

  They hadn’t talked to each other in over ten years.

  My God, could that really be right?

  Why hadn’t she been there for her? Talked to her? She knew why. Susso didn’t fit into her life. That was the bitter truth. She had rejected her and when she put that into words, she was instantly filled with self-reproach that stung so badly it must have been gathering force at the back of her mind for years.

  She tossed the school assignment back in the box and closed it. The front door had squeaked open and the hallway was full of Kiruna’s chirping and Håkan’s rumbling. He told the girl to take off her boots and then told her to put them away neatly. Both of them!

  Diana went downstairs, still dazed by the feelings that had emanated from the box like swamp gas. The little girl wrapped her arms around her leg and clung on. Her hair was dark and she smelled like a wet little animal. Diana asked if the dragon had flown away and the little girl shook her head. The dragon was still there and she had gone on it twice. And she had found birds lying on the ground.

  ‘Fieldfares,’ Håkan said. ‘Chicks. They’re everywhere.’

  ‘Dead?’

  ‘I didn’t perform a clinical examination. But they were on their backs in the grass, and none of them responded when spoken to.’

  Diana looked at the little girl.

  ‘They jump out of their nests too soon. Before they can fly.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. They just do.’

  * The girls’ nicknames mean ‘ant’ and ‘herring’ respectively, and are a play on their surnames.

  Lennart hung the headlamp around his neck and in the same movement removed his glasses and handed them to Abraham, who was staring at his eyes with unveiled curiosity.

  The bunker had been blasted into the mountainside; the imposing entrance was neatly cut. Made of poured concrete now streaked with white lines of limestone tears. At the top of the pile of excavated rubble blocking the entrance was a crevice that had been stoppered with a tangle of rusty-brown barbed wire.

  The first rock he put his foot on shifted, almost sending him sprawling. He grunted and continued, half crawling, with his injured arm pressed to his chest. When he had made it to the summit of the rockpile, he reached out and grabbed the barbed wire. It was jammed in tight; he had to tug hard several times to get it out.

  The daylight barely made it past the opening. He could see the tunnel floor, a channel of brown, stagnant water. The tiny white limestone stalactites hanging from the ceiling. Further in, darkness. Solid, like matter.

  As he crawled across the rubble on his belly, his body blocked the light; for a few moments, he could see nothing. But as soon as he started sliding down the slope, the tunnel became visible once more. He crawled down and got to his feet.

  He stood stock-still, listening. The mouse sitting in front of him was listening as well. It gingerly poked the stuffy air with its nose and whiskers. Then it pattered off. It ran in a straight line, like a tightrope-walker. Suddenly it stopped and sat back on its hind legs. Apparently, that was as far as it would go, at least by itself, because it turned back and looked at him.

  His nostrils flared, but the only thing he could smell was wet concrete and stagnant, subterranean air. Rusting iron.

  He strapped on his headlamp and switched it on.

  Further on, the tunnel turned sharply and in the wavering beam of the headlamp he could see the water ripple away from his feet and lap against the walls.

  There was a door to the right. A small room. Some kind of rack on the walls. Bent iron pipes that looked deep-fried in rust.

  He splashed on down the tunnel, led by the mouse, and after rounding the corner, he stopped. There was something there. He turned his head to catch it. A whiff of rot. He moved his head this way and that, sniffing, testing the air from different angles. Rotten meat.

  A few paces further in, he stepped over a high threshold, entering a cave. Glassy bumps protruded from the rough cave walls. When the light hit the drops of water hanging from the ceiling, they twinkled like constellations.

  Something lay on the floor in the middle of the room. He went up to it. A backpack. There was a water bottle in the mesh side pocket. A small stuffed moose with a rounded muzzle dangled from a string. He studied the backpack and the ridiculous moose for a long while.

  He let the beam of light from his headlamp sweep across the uneven walls, but there was nothing to see. Except a staircase.

  He stayed where he was, pondering. Then he filled his lungs with air, rounded his lips and whistled. A high note that he held for as long as he could; when the echo had subsided and remained only as a memory in his ears, he whistled again, but lower. He waited and repeated the signal. The same two notes, one high, one low. A desolate melody for the gutted insides of the mountain.

  Then he listened.

  As though expecting a reply.

  And he got one.

  A thud. From above.

  The beam of light swept across to the staircase, its smooth steps littered with mounds of gravel.

  A low rumbling. The crunch of gravel.

  Now he could smell the old one. He was near. He might be standing at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Adja?’

  He waited. The bear was moving above. Pacing to and fro with a heavy, dragging tread. Snorting. Growling deeply.

  ‘It’s me. Lennart-bardni.’

  The big one panted.

  ‘Can I come up and join you?’

  He slowly moved toward the stairs.

  ‘Do you want me to turn off the light? I’m turning off the light.’

  Darkness enveloped him and he continued on with his hand sweeping through the air in front of him. The old bear’s scent was so powerful he could follow it to the stairs.

  After reaching the top, he stopped. There were shades to the darkness. The scents multiplied and grew stronger and the strongest of all emanated from the bear, rising like steam from its fur.

  ‘Skabram. Lea go jur dådas dån.’

  The big one breathed heat and blew it out. Grumbled and rammed its head against his chest, rammed it hard. Almost knocked him over. He reached out and tried to put his arm around the massive neck in some kind of sentimental embrace, but the bear wouldn’t have it; it rolled its head away and snorted Lennart’s face wet and foetid.

  Slowly, it moved away from him. He heard the pads of its feet rasp against the concrete further away. He was leaving now.

  Lennart fumbled his way to the wall and put his palm against it.

  He pulled off his headlamp, shoved it under his shirt and found the button with his thumb. A light flared to life in his chest; he cupped his hand over it, as if to protect a precious flame. Eventually, he was able make out
contours in the dark, contours that slowly filled with content. The length of the corridor. A long passage of smooth rock. The bear that stood watching him with its enormous head. The hump on its back.

  He took a few more steps toward it.

  ‘Boade deike,’ he said. ‘Rahkis guoibmi.’

  The erect ears. The black toad skin of its nose and the cavernous tunnels leading into it. The drooping lower lip.

  ‘Karats is gone. Urtas is gone. And Luttak. Leat javkan. But I’m here. Lennart-bardni.’

  The old one backed up a few steps.

  ‘Tjåvo mu.’

  He chanced another step closer as he surreptitiously pulled the headlamp out from under his shirt. He let it hang down so its beam hit the floor. Two concentric circles dancing across the concrete.

  ‘You have to come out of this mountain. To the children. Jurddes unnoras asiide.’

  Now the old one rattled out a noise.

  ‘You can’t stay here. Gal dån ipmirdat, adja.’

  A displeased sound.

  ‘You just disappeared. When I came back, you were gone. So I never had a chance to talk to you about what happened. What happened to Karats. Do you want to know what happened to Karats? Sorbmejädji. Nu dat lei. Sorbmejädji.’

  The bear turned around and lumbered off.

  Lennart hung back a moment. Then he followed.

  The old one had moved into a chamber and lain down. Lennart stopped in the doorway and cast the light around the revolting room. A human was on the floor, facing the wall. Fully dressed. Boots with deep-tread soles. Blue wind-breaker down to his thighs. Strands of hair that had rotted inside the hood.

  Skeleton parts from God knows what creatures were scattered across the floor. Bone sticks, bone hooks. A curved bone column. A small ribcage. And over there was an entire cat. Except without its abdomen. Like some kind of miniature cheetah. The stench was a noxious gas; he coughed discreetly as he walked over to the bear and sat down on the floor next to it. After a while, he reached out and placed a hand on its wide brow.