Trolls

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘How do you know?’

  Gudrun made no reply; she just looked at her, pleadingly. Diana did a lap around the shop, inspecting the items on the shelves.

  ‘What if he doesn’t want to come with me?’

  ‘Tell him you’re going to go get Susso. That’ll make him come, I guarantee it.’

  ‘What’s that smell?’ Diana said, sniffing the air.

  ‘There’s a smell?’

  ‘Something smells in here.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Gudrun said and wrapped the cardigan around her.

  *

  On her way home, Diana felt nausea rising. It was as though it was feeling its way, looking for a foothold. Her legs buckled but she didn’t allow herself to sit down and rest, not even for a minute, because she didn’t want anyone to see her. Even though her entire existence had been shaken to the core and everything around her seemed like a treacherous aspect of an enormous illusion, she clung to her reputation. Aside from Håkan’s colleague, she hadn’t run into anyone who knew her yet, which was a miracle in itself. She hurried home and when she passed along the back of the hospital, she hid her face in her hood like a conspirator.

  Håkan was still in bed. She stood in the doorway for a while, studying the dark shape. Who was that lying there? And why didn’t she care more about him? Something she didn’t understand was at work inside her. She had figured it was self-preservation that had made her reject him emotionally. As an emergency measure. A red button. Now she was leaning toward it being something else. The feelings were there but couldn’t get through. It was both eerie and pleasant.

  Kiruna was on the floor in the middle of her room, propped on her elbows, looking at a picture book. Diana sat down in front of her and palpated her aching cheek. Then she lay down on her back.

  ‘You’re going to be with Grandma and Grandpa tomorrow.’

  The little girl got up and when she stepped over her, Diana raised her hand to shield her tender face.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘I just need a quick lie-down. Give me one minute.’

  Anders closed his eyes. Before, he had been sobbing uncontrollably, now he could only mime his crying. Erasmus looked at him. The light streaming in through the window set half his face alight. A glowing cascade of beard merging with a grey one. He was holding a dog lead, a plaited leather lead that he thumbed as though the interwoven straps were beads on a rosary. The tall, broad-shouldered man they called Näcken* was blocking the door. He was bald and had large, staring eyes with a cold, blue centre.

  His ears were blocked; his own whimpering voice sounded like it was coming from another room. It was as though a frail, crying creature had been unleashed and was now speaking for him.

  ‘How am I supposed to live, how am I supposed to bear having done something so horrible, something so incredibly horrible? I will never be able to forgive myself.’

  ‘What you can’t forget, you have to bury.’

  ‘I can’t. It’s impossible.’

  ‘I promise you it’s possible.’

  ‘I can’t do it, I’m too tired.’

  ‘You feel that way now. But in time, it will fade.’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’ll never go away. I can’t do it. I can’t do it.’

  ‘Anders. What is it you can’t do?’

  ‘Live with this.’

  ‘So you want to die?’

  Erasmus gave him a thoughtful look.

  He said nothing. Strings of thick saliva hung from his mouth; he did nothing about it.

  ‘That is the kind of thing,’ Erasmus said and slapped the lead against the palm of his hand, ‘you want to be one hundred per cent sure about. Because you can’t change your mind afterwards.’

  He nodded.

  ‘So, how do you want it?’

  Erasmus bent down slowly, very slowly. There was something shiny between the floorboards. It was a screw; after examining it, he placed it on the window bench like a very small ornament.

  ‘You’ve developed a wonderful bond, you and Ransu. An unusually wonderful bond. Not all people are as open. So that is something valuable. Not to say enviable.’

  ‘I don’t understand why you’re all cross with me.’

  ‘Why would we be cross with you?’

  ‘Because I did what I did.’

  ‘Children,’ the old man said, ‘come and go. What will become of them? You never know what will become of them. But you, Anders, we know where you stand. We know what you’re made of. You’ve proved it to us.’

  The old man limped across the floor. A water tap was turned on. He returned with a glass and after giving it to Anders, he sat back down on the window bench.

  ‘You can never go back to your old life.’

  He nodded.

  ‘In the world outside our village, what are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. A biologist, technically …’

  ‘A murderer,’ said Näcken.

  Erasmus nodded agreement.

  ‘A child murderer.’

  Anders nodded.

  ‘Out there.’ The old man pointed. ‘But not here. Not with us, no. We never have to talk about it again.’

  ‘That guy Christer, her dad, he’s never going to forgive me.’

  ‘Never mind him,’ said Näcken.

  ‘Christer doesn’t know what happened,’ Erasmus said. ‘He thinks the girl was dragged into the woods by the same creature that ate her. And there’s no reason to tell him otherwise.’

  ‘I thought everybody knew.’

  ‘Everyone knows it was an accident. A tragic accident.’

  *

  Stava grabbed him the moment he stepped through the door. She wanted to know what her father had said and she had a nervous, intense look in her eyes he’d never seen before.

  Anders sighed.

  ‘We had a chat and I told them what I remember. But it’s like a blank and I’m not lying about that. I didn’t realise what I was doing until I saw her lying there in the woods and it wasn’t clear even then. It was more like a feeling. The girl’s father doesn’t know who did it, and he won’t find out either.’

  ‘But what did he say about Ransu?’

  ‘Nothing. It was an accident.’

  Stava walked over to the window and looked out. First to either side and then she put her forehead against the glass to try to see what was underneath the window.

  ‘An accident.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Was she there?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl. The one with the eyepatch.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Who is that?’

  ‘Who is she? She’s Dad’s favourite. I’m probably going to have to call her Mother soon.’

  ‘I actually feel better. After talking to him. He was very understanding. I was just doing what Ransu wanted, and he got that.’

  ‘Of course he did.’

  ‘I feel a lot better now.’

  * This nickname, which refers to a murderous water spirit from Nordic folklore, the Neck, is also derived from the character’s surname.

  Seeing Susso’s car parked outside her house was so unexpected that for a split second, Diana thought she’d returned. Having corrected her misperception, she felt a pang of sadness. She sat in the car looking at the house, the sun-drenched front with the mullioned old windows. The plastic table where they’d had their dinner. The little jetty and the dark band of the river. She had wondered if seeing the place would make her remember what had happened, but it didn’t. And she was grateful for it. During her drive out to Vittangi, she had felt a mounting sense of unease, and now she was afraid in a way she hadn’t been before. The engine was still running. She turned the car around, just like Susso had done when the sight of her own car had spooked her. But she didn’t drive off. She let go of the wheel and chided herself through gritted teeth. Pulled out her phone and stared at the screen, trying to remember the music from that crestfallen, cold summer. 1998. When everything was ov
er and there was nowhere to go. They had sat on the floor of the cabin in Kurravaara, singing at the top of their lungs. Drunk as skunks. Surrounded by melancholic music she hadn’t listened to since.

  When the forgotten, but oh so familiar notes of the acoustic guitar poured out of the speakers, transforming the car into a time machine, she put her thumb on the plus button on the wheel. She let it rest there. The music swelled and swelled.

  The tin of snus she’d bought at the Esso petrol station in Varangerbotn was still in the cupholder. A white medallion that proved she really had been to Norway. Proof it had all really happened. This tobacco product may seriously harm you and is addictive. She twisted the lid off, fished out a bag, put it in her mouth, pushed it into place with her tongue, turned off the music and opened the door.

  She wandered around the garden, keeping a close eye on the pine trees in particular. The wind set the branches swaying with slow, sweeping movements; she wondered if the squirrel was up there, watching. A little critter with black beads for eyes. It could be inside the house too. Gudrun had said it most likely had its own ways in and out so it could come and go as it pleased. It could be outside, it could be inside; you might as well predict where a swooping swallow would be at any given moment.

  She really didn’t want to have to enter the house. The thought of encountering the pint-sized creature in some unexpected place indoors scared her a lot more than the thought of spotting it in one of the pine trees.

  The kitchen door was ajar. She stood stock-still, listening, while her eyes moved from the counter to the table and up toward the podium of the fridge where it had first revealed itself.

  She carefully tapped her nails against the door jamb.

  Did the squirrel have a name it answered to? It almost must have. Why hadn’t Gudrun told her it? On the other hand, she didn’t think she would have had it in her to call out to an ancient creature hiding inside a squirrel. The mere thought of shouting in the empty house filled her with unease.

  She climbed the stairs and opened the door to a room with a sloped ceiling and walls covered in grey fibreglass cloth. There was a bed, which wasn’t made, a small table and a wardrobe. A small black tapestry hung above the bed. ‘Las Palmas de Gran Canaria’. The next room was just as bare. A bed, a couple of chairs. The same depressing fibreglass cloth. The ceiling light had an embroidered skirt; the canopy had slipped down the cord. The sheer curtains were closed.

  She couldn’t see any signs of the squirrel. What would a sign even look like, rat poop and half-eaten pine cones? What was weirder was that she couldn’t find anything to suggest that Susso used either of the bedrooms as her own; the more she thought about that, the more the eerie feeling inside her intensified.

  She peeked into a wardrobe. It contained a blouse and a shirt on hangers. A few jumpers on the shelf. In a wire bin lay a tangle of socks and three, four, five pairs of pants. She recognised the blouse. A peasant blouse of white crepe with three-quarter-length sleeves and gold embroidery on the yoke. In other words, it was over twenty years old.

  So this was the room she slept in. But how was it possible to sleep in a room for so long without leaving your own stamp on it? She hadn’t even bothered to remove the ugly tapestry hanging on the wall.

  She continued down to the living room. It was posh. Upholstered hardwood armchairs turned toward a big black TV on a media bench with glass doors. Doilies. A few gold-framed oil painting reproductions, a cross-stitch sampler depicting a red cottage. Long curtains with enormous umbels.

  She paused in the kitchen again. Looked down at the floor and started walking toward the door. Then she walked back and stared at the rug. It was a rag rug. She squatted down for a closer look. The knots on one side had been untied. Every last one. Was it supposed to look like that? She examined the knots on the other side of the rug. A complete row of tiny, white-haired Hottentots. She tried undoing one of the knots. It was tight. She dug her nails in and grimaced. She couldn’t loosen it and felt immediately that her nails would yield before the knot did. Someone with strangely strong fingers and a lot of patience must have worked on the knots. Who would do such a thing? And why? And why on just one side, if you felt the need to do it in the first place?

  *

  She sat on the front porch, studying the trees while waving one hand about to keep the mosquitoes drawn to her at bay. She picked up her phone and stared at the jumble of icons overlaying Kiruna’s face.

  The urge to put her thumb on the local news app passed through her body like a shudder. Whether anyone had found a dead man on the Varanger Peninsula was something she both wanted and didn’t want to know. She thought about what her dad had said, that she would be tainted by the incident, whether she had been involved or not. People would talk about what had really happened and draw their own conclusions and it would never be forgotten.

  What had really happened. She didn’t even know herself. Her fragmented recollections were floating out of reach, into a fog where everything seemed uncertain. Part of her wished the fog would persist, part of her didn’t. She worried about what it would be like when it cleared.

  *

  She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there when she realised the trees were moving in a way they hadn’t been before. A force that made their branches sway wildly was moving through the canopy along an unpredictable trajectory. She looked for the squirrel and soon spotted it. A reddish-brown streak. In mid-air, it turned into a hook that caught on a sprig of needles, setting it rocking.

  It’s here, she wrote to Gudrun. Then it struck her she might be mistaken. What if it was another squirrel, an ordinary one? It was certainly possible.

  But that was wishful thinking. Of course it was that squirrel. The way it was going at it. When it sat still, she could only guess at its location, and it often turned out she had been off by quite a bit. It had a baffling ability of popping up where she least expected and after a while, she started wondering if it had tricked her into a weird game of hide-and-seek it might be risky to pull out of. It never seemed to tire of it; in the end, she walked over to the pine trees, which immediately stopped moving. She couldn’t see the squirrel, but she knew it was watching her.

  ‘You’re coming with me!’

  Talking to it felt unpleasant; maybe that’s why she had sounded so brusque. She repeated her command, but in a gentler tone. Still fighting off the mosquitoes, she took a few steps to one side to try to catch a glimpse of the creature hiding up there.

  ‘We’re going to go get Susso.’

  She figured Susso’s name would serve as a watchword. But nothing happened. A gust of wind from the river hissed through the birch trees. The pine trees grew anxious; when shadows dappled their bark, a pattern of golden-red shards appeared on their trunks.

  She walked down toward the water. The chairs they had carried out onto the jetty were still there. One of them had toppled over. She righted it and after a moment’s hesitation, sat down on it. Having her back toward the house was unpleasant, but she forced herself to stay. A glass cylinder glinted in the gap between two of the jetty’s wooden boards. A mosquito repellent stick. She picked it up, undid the cap and drew lines across her forehead and neck. Closed one eye tight against the sinking ball of the sun and gazed out across the river with the other.

  *

  She found boiled new potatoes in a plastic bag in the fridge, wrapped in blackish-green strings of dill that looked like wet hair. She sat down at the kitchen table and ate the potatoes straight out of the bag.

  ‘I guess I have to stay then.’

  ‘Can you?’

  ‘Going home seems stupid.’

  ‘Are you going home?’

  She swallowed before replying.

  ‘No, I said going home seems stupid.’

  ‘Yes.’

  After the conversation with Gudrun, she wrote to her mother that she wouldn’t be back that night. The reply came in the form of a picture of Kiruna’s face, closed in sleep. Her round cheek wa
s sharply lit by the flash.

  The reproach contained in the picture was not lost on her. When she dropped the little girl off earlier that day, her mother had looked at her like she was drunk. She was worried but knew she was unable to stop her. Now she was trying to call her home by reminding her who would suffer the most if something happened to her. She had told them nothing about the state Håkan was in; just said he was ill.

  Diana looked at the picture for a long time and all of a sudden, she started to sob. Not because the picture triggered an avalanche of tender feelings, but because it didn’t. She sat with her hand over her mouth, feeling nothing. Except the starch from the potatoes on her fingers.

  *

  It was almost midnight. She stepped out onto the front porch and looked at the pine trees standing motionless against a sky that was filling with clouds.

  She hadn’t brought a toothbrush, so she borrowed Susso’s. She brushed with a pained look on her face and when she did the teeth on the left, she closed her eyes. Then she had a mental image of herself standing there, eyes squeezed shut, and her battered face was so detailed and clear she opened her eyes in surprise and stared at herself in the mirror. She had already seen the trickle of toothpaste running down her chin. She spat and put her mouth to the tap, rinsed her mouth out and spat again. After straightening up, she thought she saw a glimpse of something in the mirror. A shadow slinking about on the hat rack behind her. She stood stock-still with her eyes fixed on the mirror. Slowly reached out and turned off the tap.

  She waited for a few seconds before putting her toothbrush down on the edge of the sink. Then she wiped her mouth and left the bathroom. She didn’t turn around until she reached the stairs, but then she turned quickly. The hat rack. The clothes hanging underneath it. The shoes.

  She pulled the chequered cotton curtains closed and crawled into the bed. The room was very bright; how Susso could stand it was beyond her. But maybe she tolerated the light for the same reason she didn’t care what her bedroom looked like. She contemplated draping the bedspread over the window, but was too tired to get up.