by Stefan Spjut
‘You killed it?’ Harr said.
‘Yes.’
‘Wasn’t that risky?’
I shrugged.
Now Roland leaned forward.
‘The question is whether we shouldn’t give the squirrel the same treatment.’
‘If I thought it was possible,’ I said, ‘I would have done it a long time ago, obviously. This mouse, it was so naïve. I don’t even think it was aware of what it was doing to us, it was just dashing about, completely high on all the hatred and confusion emanating from us. The squirrel, on the other hand, is anything but naïve. I don’t even think it’s possible to trick it. I wouldn’t dare to try, anyway.’
‘It has to go,’ Roland said. ‘If Susso’s ever going to have a chance to be herself again, it has to go.’
‘How many times have I told you just that? But you haven’t believed me. But when your pals show up and tell you the squirrel is bad news, then you’re suddenly on board.’
‘If these two gentlemen tell me the squirrel is a troll, it’s a troll. They would never lie to me.’
‘I wouldn’t go so far as to claim the squirrel is a troll,’ Harr interjected, ‘but I suppose we can call it that, for the sake of simplicity.’
‘But I would?’
‘Not lie, exactly. But you’ve grown up with this—’
‘No I haven’t! My dad took that picture in eighty-seven. I was forty-three years old! Surely that must qualify as being a grown-up!’
‘It’s emotional for you, this thing, with your family’s reputation and all the terrible things that have happened to your girls, and I’m not above admitting that I’ve assumed you’re exaggerating sometimes, seeing trolls where there are no … trolls.’
‘You don’t trust me. You trust them, but not me.’
He opened his mouth to protest but changed his mind. The conversation going off on a combative tangent. So he sat quietly for a while, looking at his bottle of beer, before continuing.
‘If it is as you say,’ he said, ‘it has to die. The simplest way of removing it securely and permanently is to kill it.’
‘And how would you go about doing that?’ I said. ‘It knows what you’re thinking.’
‘I guess we’ll have to keep our distance,’ Harr said and raised his hands like he was grasping an imaginary rifle. ‘Nänne’s an excellent shot. He can put a bullet through that rat’s eye from half a mile away. So long as he can see it. Isn’t that right, Nänne? No problem.’
‘I think it might be a bad idea. Shooting it.’
‘How is slaying a monster a bad idea?’
‘It can be. If you need the monster’s help.’
He looked at me uncomprehendingly.
‘Is Susso back? No, she’s not, and I have a very strong feeling the police won’t be much help. They’re going to go up to that village and then they’re going to go home. And Susso is going to still be there. That squirrel gives me the creeps and I hate it for what it’s done to my daughter, but I also know it’s her protector. It’s her protector. I’ve seen it protect her against a bear troll with my own eyes. Because you should know that trolls come in all sizes and if you don’t believe me, you can head up to that village and see for yourselves. The internet says it’s a ghost town, but I’m fairly convinced it should say troll town. And if I have to go there to get Susso back, which I fear it will come to, even if it will probably be the last thing I ever do, I want the squirrel with me.’
‘I get that,’ Harr said.
I shook my finger at them.
‘So you can’t shoot it!’
Harr put his hat back on and then he stood up and I realised he was considerably taller than I’d thought. He wore a denim shirt and jeans, an overall of washed-out denim it looked like, and I almost expected him to have shiny crocodile-skin cowboy boots on his feet, but he didn’t, he wore trainers.
He left without a word; I assumed he was going to the bathroom. But after another minute or so, Ensimmäinen stood up too and left in silence as well, and when I turned around in my chair, I saw him head out the front door. A slender man with hair like a silver cape down his back.
‘They left?’ I said.
Roland nodded.
‘Seems that way.’
‘Are they staying in the hotel?’
‘I don’t think so.’
I made a puzzled face and he noticed.
‘I told you they’re not much good, in an everyday sense. They can be pretty difficult to be around. But when the going gets tough, there are no better friends on this planet, and nowhere else either for that matter. They’re solid, to the core.’
‘The one with the hair, is he mute or something?’
‘Nänne. Nah.’
‘But he didn’t say a word.’
Roland took a sip of his beer and put the bottle down carefully.
‘I guess he had nothing to say.’
‘I think they’re weird.’
‘Sure. They are weird, no two ways about it. But this whole situation is bloody weird. So they should fit right in.’
We sat in silence for a while. One group of diners was unusually raucous and both Roland and I glanced their way from time to time; it was just impossible not to.
‘So you believe me now?’
When Anders woke up, he was outside and it was night-time. The grass was damp with dew and made his feet chilly and the mosquitoes hung around his head like a veil. He had almost made it down to the lake. The dark water and the spruce-shaggy mountain beyond it scared him. He was cold. He only had jeans and a button-down shirt on. He peaked into his trousers. No underwear. The shirt was wildly misbuttoned.
He had a strong feeling of having been on his way somewhere. He no longer knew where to, but he could still sense the irresistible longing that had seized him in his sleep. This longing was now slowly dissipating and that made him desperately upset.
He continued down toward the lake at a trot. Could it be that Ransu had been calling him? Was he waiting on the other side of the lake like last time? It was impossible to tell; the spruce trees clumped together like a dark mass.
He knew he should go inside and wake Stava; he’d promised her he would if Ransu turned up again. But there was no time. What if he withdrew and disappeared again? She wouldn’t want that. He ran along the water’s edge until he reached the trees. At that point, he immediately began to proceed with more caution. The path winding around the lake was little more than an animal run, difficult enough to follow even in daylight; now it kept branching off, making him uncertain. It was as though the nocturnal light made trails appear where there were none during the day.
He thought the woods looked familiar. He scissor-jumped over a branchless log and skidded down a small slope and ducked under a spruce branch.
There was something on the ground.
A greyish-brown, moving mass.
Good God, what was it!
He crept a few steps closer to have a look.
A swarm of tiny rodents crawling over one another, faintly and elatedly squeaking. Mice, shrews, a lemming, two lemmings. He stared at it. Then he made a coughing noise and doubled over.
A shoe was sticking out of the heaving heap. A tiny trainer with flapping Velcro ties.
Anders’ mouth started moving.
‘No,’ he moaned. ‘No, no, no.’
His words triggered an irritated agitation among the little ones; when they shifted, the plastic bag that had been put over the child’s face became visible and a lemming slipped from the swarm, got up on its hind legs and hissed at him with a clown mouth of coagulated blood.
Horrified, he leapt aside. He staggered backward and fell into a spruce tree. He didn’t get back up.
*
When he finally crawled out from under the tree, he had cried himself empty and didn’t quite know where he was. He had been somewhere else. Far, far away, in a place where only he existed and no one could reach him.
Now he walked slowly through the trees, carrying
his hope like water in a cupped hand.
He stopped and stared at the abomination on the ground. Then he lunged forward, braying furiously, grabbed the plastic bag and started to pull it off; when the head appeared, he let go of the bag and ran away.
Diana sat with her phone in her hand, talking to her father. He was telling her the police had gone out to Rumajärvi but had found no sign of Lennart Brösth and when Diana put in that if that was true, they had done a poor job looking, he grumbled at her that the best thing would be for her to take some sick leave and leave the search for Susso to the authorities.
At first, she was furious. There was something about his tone that kicked her back in time twenty years, to the period when her grades were slipping and few weekends went by without her drinking her brain to bits. Back then, he had, on a handful of occasions, talked to her in a special voice, gravelly and low, vibrating with supressed rage, and that was the tone she thought she was hearing now. The fury that erupted inside her was, however, quelled when she realised he sounded like that because he was afraid.
‘Don’t get mixed up in this, Dana.’
‘What’s going on up there?’
‘They’re not going to tell me that. Denny just said she’s not there. Which means there’s not much we can do. At the moment. You’re going to have to try to forget about it.’
‘Forget?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did Denny say?’
‘He said they’d been up there. That they went up there yesterday. And that they didn’t find Lennart Brösth or Susso. That’s what he said. Verbatim.’
‘And what else did he say? I know there’s more.’
‘He said they’d got lost.’
‘Who?’
‘The officers. Who went up there.’
‘The police officers got lost?’
‘Yes, well, they didn’t go home in any case. They drove south. Until they ran out of petrol. On the bridge in Lappeasuando, you know, that arch. Some kids from the campsite down there found them. Under the bridge.’ He cleared his throat. ‘At the foot of the bridge. They were just sitting there in the grass and were kind of, what’s it called, catatonic. And with mosquito bites all over. And Denny said one of them was in a bizarre position, but I don’t know what he meant by that. I don’t know.’
Diana said nothing for a while.
‘And you think that was a coincidence? That something like that happened right after they had been to that village, of all places.’
‘No, I guess maybe I don’t.’
‘Then surely they have to go out there again. They must realise there’s something wrong.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. At least that’s not how Denny made it sound. He just doesn’t see the connection. He doesn’t think going to that place, to Rumajärvi, has anything to do with what they were like. He was talking about the police being understaffed and stress. Constant stress.’
‘This isn’t about stress.’
‘No.’
‘We have to do something, Dad.’
‘What you have to do is get some rest.’
*
After the call ended, she stayed seated with her phone in her hand. Kiruna’s untouched breakfast was on the kitchen table, a suspension of milk and dissolved cereal in a bowl decorated with fairy-tale creatures in light pastel colours. There was milk on the table, a small system of lakes. Through the window, she could see their neighbour’s kid standing out on the street with a floorball stick in his hands, shovelling water out of a puddle; it felt like the blade was scraping the inside of her skull every time it scraped against the crust of the asphalt. Against that torment, painkillers were powerless to help.
She dragged herself upstairs. The little girl was sitting on the floor in her silent room, playing with something small she was cradling close to her body.
The curtains in the bedroom were closed and Håkan was in bed, facing the wall. A small rectangle of light faded on the nightstand, a sign that he was awake.
‘I’m going out for a bit.’
He made no reply.
‘Håkan?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m going out for a bit.’
She pulled up the hood of her jacket and tramped up the steep incline of Adolf Hedinvägen. She passed the hospital without so much as a glance; it was like an anonymous rectangle at the edge of her vision.
Leaving Kiruna alone with him when he was in that state was perhaps not entirely appropriate, but she would be right back. Besides, she told herself the forced responsibility would do him good, make him pull himself together. She didn’t know how to approach his collapse yet. That her disappearance had made him fall completely to pieces was in a way pretty touching and in time, she might learn to appreciate the vulnerable side of him he hadn’t shown her before, but at the moment she was mostly angry. Angry he was lying there like a dissociative wreck but mostly angry because it was so unlike him. This was not the man she’d married, and she felt, to put it plainly, duped. At the same time, she was highly aware that it was unreasonable to walk around feeling duped. Especially now, given what they’d been through. She tried and for the most part succeeded in maintaining control by reminding herself that she had endured an extraordinary psychological ordeal. The medical terminology served as a warding spell against the panic that was constantly threatening to erupt inside her, but adopting a scientific perspective to understand what she had seen and what Gudrun had told her about also moved her toward a horizon from which the trolls could not be observed. That made them evaporate like swirls of mist. And so her brain had quarantined all thoughts on the topic until further notice.
Whenever she felt like screaming at the top of her lungs, she pictured Susso. Susso sitting on the jetty in her filthy fake-fur jacket with a bottle of beer in her hand, squinting at the ball of the sun lurking behind the screen of dark trees on the other side of the river. The picture was detailed and richly coloured, because she had filled it with all the longing that had accumulated over the years, which had never found expression outside of her dreams, in which she and Susso often ran into each other in both familiar and unknown places. Susso was always quiet and morose at first, but then they invariably found their way back to each other and when she woke up, she would feel sad because it hadn’t happened in real life. Now, she drew strength from that sadness. It propelled her forward.
Gudrun was poking at her phone, which was on the counter. She was wearing a black, mesh-knit cardigan over a blue, shiny tank top that matched the agates in her necklace; when Diana told her what had happened to the police officers who had been dispatched to Rumajärvi, her hand kept tugging nervously at the cardigan. When Diana said they should drive up to the village themselves and get Susso, she walked over to a basket full of stuffed moose and started pointlessly reorganising them.
‘The road to Rumajärvi,’ she said, ‘ends in Lappeasuando. If you get my meaning.’
‘Then you know where to look for me.’
Gudrun turned to her and mulled that for a long time, all the while fiddling with her cardigan.
‘I’ll go with you, Diana. But we can’t go alone.’
‘Susso’s dad might come. Don’t you think he’d step up? Does he even know she’s missing?’
The old woman wasn’t listening. She had taken a step closer.
‘When you were at Susso’s, did you see the squirrel?’
‘Yes, I did. It was in the kitchen.’
‘What was your impression of it?’
‘What was my impression of it?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know. I thought it was gross.’
‘Did it seem to like you, or was it hostile?’
‘I’d say it was fairly neutral.’
‘It didn’t make you feel anything in particular?’
‘Not really, no.’
‘Then you’d better go fetch it.’
‘You want me to fetch the squirrel?’
Gudrun had ta
ken off her glasses and was rubbing the lenses with a cleaning cloth. She was intently focused on what she was doing.
‘We have no choice.’
‘I thought it was creepy.’
‘Yes,’ Gudrun said and took another step closer. ‘Look at my hand, see how it’s shaking? See? Like an old drunk. It’s because I’m thinking about the squirrel.’
‘Susso claimed it understands Swedish.’
‘Yes,’ she said with a nod, ‘he’s very old.’
Diana turned away and shook her head, but Gudrun pressed on.
‘You remember what I said about the trolls, don’t you, that they hide in animal form? Underneath that fur, that lovely, brown fur, there’s someone lurking. A creature? Yes, a creature I’ve never seen. But I can feel it looking at me. He stares at me and has thoughts about me and that’s not all: he can affect how I feel and make me do things I would never do of my own accord.’
‘It was strange, actually, now that you mention it. When I was at Susso’s, I noticed I was saying things I didn’t really want to say. It was like I was drunk and blurting things out. The kind of things I was thinking but didn’t want to say.’
Gudrun nodded.
‘Then you know what he’s capable of. What he can do.’
‘I don’t think it likes me.’
‘I thought you said he was neutral.’
‘I don’t know. I teased it a little. Susso trapped it in the kitchen and I looked at it through the window and I don’t think it appreciated it.’
‘Trapped him?’
‘Yes. I think it was because it was ruining things for us when we were trying to talk. It butted in, in various ways.’
‘Yes, exactly.’
‘Wasn’t he in the kitchen when you were there, you and Håkan?’
Gudrun shook her head.
‘No, the house was empty.’
‘Isn’t that weird? Maybe they went into the kitchen then? And took him as well. He might not even be alive any more.’
‘He’s alive. And he’s there.’
