by Stefan Spjut
‘You’re probably thinking I’m nuts right now.’
He shrugged.
I sat in silence for a while before pressing on.
‘Do you know what a stallo is?’
‘No,’ he said and put his head in his hands. ‘No, no, no.’ He was once again overwhelmed by the realisation of what he’d done; it was hitting him in waves.
‘Håkan. Do you know what a stallo is?’
‘It’s something Sami. A troll or something.’
‘Maybe Diana told you about the photograph my dad took in Sarek? It’s a picture of a troll. An aerial shot.’
He nodded.
‘They’re real, Håkan. Listen to me. Trolls are real. That mouse is a troll. A small one, but still a troll. And it’s absolutely deadly. We have to beware of it. Because it can do things to us and they won’t be good things.’
‘We have to call the police.’
‘If you want to call the police, you can always do that later. You’ll always have that option. But the option to get Diana back, that is about to expire. So you need to listen to me. I don’t want to hear any more talk about the police for a bit. Are you listening?’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Trolls are real.’
He nodded.
‘Say it, I want you to say it.’
‘Trolls are real.’
‘The reason you can’t find them is that they hide in animal form. They can shapeshift, as it’s called. It happens like this.’
I snapped my fingers and then pointed to the house.
‘That mouse is no mouse, and you can actually tell, because it seems to have only partly transformed. They come in all sizes. Some are mice, others are bears. But inside, they’re something else.’
He swallowed hard.
‘I didn’t see a mouse.’
‘But you felt it. It made you do something you would never have done otherwise. Didn’t it? And that’s proof it was there. You’re not a murderer, are you?’
‘I am now.’
‘No, you’re not. You’re innocent. It’s like that powerful drug, what’s it called, angel dust? You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re innocent.’
He covered his face with his hand.
‘Who was that up there?’
‘No idea.’
‘He might have killed them, they might be around here somewhere.’
‘I doubt it. I’m pretty sure Lennart Brösth has been here and taken the girls. You know who he is, the cult leader.’
He nodded.
‘The thing is that trolls like children. Just like in the stories; in that respect, it’s just like the stories. That was what the Jillesnåle Cult were doing. They protected the trolls and kidnapped children for them. And Susso was onto them. Through sheer happenstance, actually. And when they tried to kill her, she ended up killing a troll. I saw it with my own eyes. It turned into a bear the moment it died. That’s why they’re after her.’
‘But Diana hasn’t done anything,’ he blurted out. ‘She has nothing to do with this.’
‘Oh come on, Håkan, don’t be an idiot! Do you think it matters? That’s like saying a person who gets hit by a car had nothing to do with the car. She was unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘Then where are they, what did he do to them?’
‘I don’t know.’
He rubbed his face with his hand.
‘If we’re not calling the police, what are we going to do?’
‘We’re going home.’
‘But we can’t just leave him there. Or can we?’
I was quiet for a moment before answering.
‘No, I suppose we can’t.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘I think we’re going to have to try to get rid of him.’
‘How?’
‘Let’s see if there’s a shovel in the henhouse.’
‘Are you serious?’
‘I’m exactly as serious as the situation requires.’
‘I’m not burying anyone.’
‘I’m trying to help you, Håkan. I didn’t kill a man, you did. You’re the one who strangled him, I just watched. Remember that. If we’re looking at it from a legal point of view. The easiest and best thing for me would be to call the police. But I don’t want to do that. I want to help you. And I want to find the girls.’
‘Me too.’
‘So let’s bury him.’
‘I can’t.’
‘We’ll bury him and then we’ll never speak of this again. We bury him and then we shake on never speaking of it, with another living soul, for as long as we live, and not afterwards either. And that means not speaking about it to each other as well. Do you understand what I’m saying?’
He nodded.
‘It never happened.’
‘Okay.’
‘Is that a deal?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then say it.’
‘It never happened.’
‘Then let’s shake on it.’
Abraham had stopped at the top of the ridge and Lennart panted his way up the last stretch to see what he was looking at.
A tent. A small, blue dome tent, no more than fifty feet from the entrance to the bunker. They looked at it in silence.
‘How hungry do you reckon he is?’ Abraham said.
Lennart turned around and motioned to Susso to head back down again; on the way down the slope, Abraham informed him there was another entrance, one that wasn’t visible from the tent. It was sealed, but the rocks were reasonably loose and should be movable.
‘This way,’ he said, pointing as he jogged along a bank of excavated rock. Below the bank was a long, narrow ditch they climbed into. Further on, this trench turned into a tunnel. A gaping hole straight into the netherworld. Abraham stopped and was evidently not about to go any closer.
Lennart clambered over the sharp rocks, with a hand on the rough stone wall. Susso followed him. A mute, one-eyed companion with a face streaked with dried blood.
On the ground some way into the tunnel, he glimpsed something white; at first, he thought there was someone lying there. Then he realised it was a pile of snow. He went closer and peered into the darkness.
‘He’s not in there.’
A young woman was standing above him, looking down into the ravine. She had on a camouflage baseball cap and a blue thermal underwear top and was holding a rolled-up leather dog lead in her hand.
‘We’re just looking around,’ he muttered.
She tapped the lead lightly against her thigh.
‘Erasmus wants you to come.’
He stared stubbornly at the ground, at the crystallised snow that seemed to be inching its way toward the shade inside the tunnel.
‘What did you do to him?’ he said at length.
‘He’s with Erasmus. There’s nothing here.’
Now the wolf appeared behind the woman. Grey and bony, it stood by the edge, gaping at him, and in the darkness of its maw the white row of teeth in its lower jaw glinted like a sharp smile.
‘Come on already. You’re supposed to come with me.’
‘Where?’
‘To Erasmus.’
‘I have to bring her. She’s a gift.’
That caught the wolf’s interest. It leaned out over the small ravine and watched them. The collar that was just visible among its tufts of fur was made of dark, studded leather.
‘So bring her,’ the woman said. ‘But we have to go now.’
Lennart started walking. Then he turned around and motioned for Susso to follow. The wolf followed them up on the bank, like a guard dog with its eye on a couple of suspicious types. When they climbed out of the trench, the woman was already a silhouette at the top of the mountain; there was no sign of Abraham.
*
He watched the woman while she broke her camp. The wolf padded around them incessantly as if to remind them that it was watching them. One of its eyes had a white around it like a human ey
e. She packed up her tent and pulled on her backpack, which was so tall it towered above her head when she started walking.
‘Do you have a phone?’
He pulled his phone out of the pocket of his miserable tracksuit bottoms and stared at it as though he didn’t quite know what it was. She held out her hand and he put the phone in it.
‘I’m Ipa,’ she said. ‘Though that’s not my real name, my real name is Ida, but everyone calls me Ipa.’
They walked almost a mile to get to her car. A small, white off-road vehicle, a Lada Niva, parked on a diagonal with the sun on its windscreen. Ipa opened the boot and helped the animal scramble in. It wasn’t a big space, but that didn’t seem to bother the wolf, who immediately lay down and placed its head between its front paws. She put the backpack on the back seat and had Susso climb in next to it.
Once she was behind the wheel, she took her cap off. She pulled the hair tie out of her blonde hair and put it between her teeth, tossed her hair about, gathered it up, took the hair tie out of her mouth and made a new ponytail.
The car bounced along on the uneven terrain; Lennart hit his head on the ceiling. Then he hit it again.
Before long, they had reached the road.
‘Disengage the locking differential,’ he said, nodding at the dashboard. ‘The left lever. No, the left one.’
‘Fucking Russian piece of crap,’ she said.
Anders looked at the house on the other side of the horse pasture. A big brick house with a gable roof. The pool like a gash of mareel in the lawn. The L-shaped stable was as tall as the main house and a row of cars was parked along its side.
He climbed out, shut the door behind him, accepted the rifle she handed him and loaded it with trembling fingers. One cartridge fell into the gravel; he didn’t bother picking it up.
The old man he’d been too scared to think about was standing in the middle of the road, wrapped in a sheet he was holding closed under his chin with his clumsy, werewolf-like hand. His face wrinkly and ugly like a bog mummy.
Anders stared at the cartridge on the ground and couldn’t move; he could barely breathe.
‘What’s the matter?’ Stava said.
Anders didn’t reply.
‘You don’t have to be afraid of him.’
‘Who is he?’ he mumbled.
‘It’s Ransu,’ she hissed and wrapped the rifle in a blanket. ‘And you’re going to have to pull yourself together. It makes him sad when you don’t recognise him.’
‘I do recognise him, I do, I do, I promise, I was just a bit …’
‘Get it together!’
They walked toward the house. The tape fencing in the horse pasture drew white lines through the twilight, and white was the shroud around the figure eagerly dragging himself along behind Stava, like a deformed child on its way to a fancy-dress party in a useless costume his tired mum put together at the last minute.
A man and a woman were sitting at the end of a long table on the patio, engaged in quiet conversation, with the light of a small lantern between them. When they spotted the trio crossing the lawn, they fell silent.
Stava said good evening, but was given no greeting in return.
The man and the woman stared at the little ghost limping up to the edge of the illuminated pool.
‘You look like you’re having a nice time,’ Stava said and climbed the stairs to the patio. ‘Could we have some wine too?’
‘What?’
‘Could we have some wine too?’
The man got to his feet.
‘We were actually in the middle of a conversation here …’
‘Yes, it looks lovely. Anders, come sit down!’
‘No, hold on here now.’
Stava had already pulled out a chair and sat down. Anders snuck up with the blanket-wrapped rifle in his arms. He didn’t quite know where he was and what they were doing there, so he wanted to stay close to Stava. There was a pain behind one of his eyes and he had started shaking his head again. When he put his bundle down on the table, the barrel of the rifle peeked out, which elicited a strangled noise from the old lady. The man was still standing up. An older man in a tennis shirt.
‘Are you home alone?’ Stava said.
‘What do you want?’
‘Are you home alone?’
‘Yes, we are.’
‘Sit down.’
The man sat down just as Ransu stepped up onto the patio, hiding his hideous face like a leprous pilgrim. There were a lot of planters full of geraniums at the end of the patio; he squatted down next to them like a sentinel.
‘What’s your name?’ Stava said.
‘Torgny.’
‘And you?’
‘Yvonne.’
‘Are you home alone?’
‘Our daughter is upstairs,’ the woman said. ‘And her boyfriend.’
‘So there’s four of you in the house?’
She nodded.
‘And there’s no one else on the premises? Some Polish person shovelling shit and living in a shed?’
Torgny shook his head.
‘How many horses do you have?’
‘Do you mean in the stable or how many are ours?’
‘How many are yours.’
‘Fourteen.’
‘Are they pacers?’
‘Yes, we have pacers.’
‘Flat racers?’
‘Yes, some.’
‘Do they win?’
‘From time to time.’
He nodded.
‘So you must be pretty well off then?’
‘No, not particularly.’
‘I suppose it’s all relative.’
The man said nothing.
‘Isn’t it?’
He nodded.
‘How much money do you have in your safe?’
‘We don’t have a safe.’
‘Sure, but how much money is in it?’
The man was quiet for a while.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Ballpark.’
‘Maybe fifty.’
‘Fifty thousand?’
He nodded.
‘That’s not a lot.’
‘No.’
‘Maybe you could spare it?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s the code?’
It was buried deep, but in the end he reeled off six numbers.
‘That’s your daughter’s birthday, isn’t it?’
‘No. It’s the day after. The month after. The year after.’
Stava nodded.
‘Splendid.’
*
The girl’s name was Moa and the boy’s Lukas and they were lying on their backs in bed, their faces illuminated by a computer screen. Anders stood in the doorway with sweat trickling down his face. The laptop was closed. When they noticed the rifle in his hands, they crawled up against the wall.
‘You’re supposed to come downstairs,’ he said. ‘And bring a pillow.’
‘What?’
‘Bring a pillow.’
They walked ahead of him, half naked. Moa hugged the pillow. When they reached the patio, they sat down and Torgny said everything was going to be all right and reached out and squeezed his daughter’s arm, and Stava studied them with an enigmatic smile.
They sat there, around the table, for a long time. No one said anything and no one moved. The person who finally broke the silence was Moa. She had discovered the crouching figure over by the geraniums.
‘Oh my God, what is that!’ she sobbed.
‘Something horrible is going to happen here tonight,’ Stava said. ‘You see, your boyfriend is planning to rob your parents and if they don’t do exactly as he says, he’s going to kill them. And you too, if you’re not careful.’
‘No, I’m not,’ Lukas objected.
‘You’re going to go into the study and empty the safe.’
The boy looked at Torgny, who nodded.
‘Do as she says,’ he said.
‘Do you know your girlfriend’s
birthday?’
He was completely dazed, so she had to repeat the question, then he nodded and looked around with a stunned look on his face.
‘The code,’ Stava said, ‘is the year after, the month after, the day after. Six digits.’
‘Other way around,’ Torgny said. ‘It starts with the day.’
‘Naturally. It starts with the day. Is that clear?’
‘I think so,’ he said and looked down at his underwear. He had wet himself, and he pulled on the fabric and wiped his hand on his thigh.
‘What’s her birthday?’
‘The nineteenth. Isn’t it? Moa?’
Moa nodded.
‘So what are the first two digits?’
‘Twenty.’
‘Put anything valuable in the pillowcase. If there are binders or passports or papers in the safe, you will leave them there. The only thing you’re after is valuables. Cash and jewellery are the only things you care about. I don’t suppose you have a weapon in that safe, do you, Torgny?’
‘The stunner’s in there.’
‘The stunner?’
‘Well, I mean, it’s one of those bolt guns. With cartridges. And they’re in the safe. The gun and the cartridges.’
‘That sounds exciting. You’ll obviously take that. We’ll be here when you’re done. Can we trust you not to go looking for a phone or try to escape or some other foolishness?’
He nodded.
‘Good. Then you can go.’
‘Should I do it now?’
Stava nodded.
He got to his feet.
‘The pillow,’ she said.
The boy turned around, took the pillow from Moa and went inside. Torgny and Yvonne looked down at the table; Moa cried silently.
After a while, he came back.
‘I can’t find a gun, there’s just this black thing …’
‘That’s it,’ Torgny said.
‘Should I lock the safe when I’m done?’
‘Either way,’ Stava told him.
When he returned, Stava took the pillowcase from him and looked in it.
‘Lovely little goody bag,’ she said.
She took out the bolt gun and turned it over in her hands. A heavy cylinder of lacquered black steel surrounded by nuts and counter-nuts that lent it a curved shape. After putting it back in the bag, she pulled out a wallet and flipped through the notes.
